1.47

The Son of Rome

“You were right to seek out Aristotle first.”

I watched death lance towards my heart, a spear with a dull wooden tip that was better suited for a stage play than combat. And yet the rules of nature clung to its tip, and I perceived its simple truth through the lense of my Sophic sense.

A man dies from a spear through the heart.

I knew, like I knew that the skies above were blue on a cloudless day, that his spear of dull oak would skewer me as sure as any bronze or iron. That it would kill me where Gaius’ campaigns and howling wolves had failed.

As if I’d allow such a thing.

Dull wood can’t pierce bronze plate, I declared in the voice of my soul, and the rhetoric clinging to the practice weapon dispersed just as Socrates drove it into my chest. The haft cracked in his hands, the head of the spear crumpling against my breastplate.

“The foundation of a man is built over the course of years, and to tear that foundation apart after it’s settled takes twice the effort. Far easier to find a mentor that knows that foundation, who has built upon it before – either in his own lifetime, or through his students.”

Socrates pressed me with his broken spear, parrying the one I had stolen from the temple of the father with infuriating ease. Oracles heckled and cheered all around us, reaching out to shove at my mentor or pull at me when we passed too close to their tripods. I grit my teeth as he wound another rule of nature around his broken spearhead and fractured shaft, mending them both in the blink of an eye.

“Any man can teach fundamentals, assuming he’s familiar with them himself,” the Gadfly continued, without a hitch in his voice. “But you’re past that. You’ve established your virtue, your foundations have been set, and now you’re faced with a choice.”

Dull wood can pierce bronze plates at times, Socrates declared, and in the span of an instant, faster than the blink of an eye, he assaulted me with the truth of his own experience.

In that brief instant, Socrates’ pneuma, his rhetoric, clashed with mine and showed me a memory.

Broken men in the earth, screaming horses and calls to retreat. Beneath me, a son of Helen, a brother set against me by war. He reached desperately for the short blade on his belt. I raised the shaft of my broken spear and drove it through the crack in his breastplate.

I inhaled sharply and dodged right, watching the practice spear lurch through the space where my heart had just been. I knew that if I had still been standing there, it would have broken through my breastplate just the same as it had in his memory. Exhaling, I twisted at the hips and swung the shaft of my spear as hard as I could at his knees. He hopped over it obligingly, and I tackled him out of the air.

“That’s it!” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles cheered. “Take it to the ground!”

“Between his legs, boy!” heckled the Oracle of the Broken Tide. “It’s a small target, but it’ll make him sing!”

“You’re a troubled case,” Socrates continued, as we grappled. “Aristotle left you half-finished and the legions filled in the rest. Why is it, you think, that we call a cultivator’s formative years their foundation? What purpose does it serve to evoke such an image? The barbarians of the world call it by countless other names- what does a Roman call it?”

Foundation establishment. The Greeks used it to describe the refinement of a Citizen, a cultivator in the first realm. Once a cultivator ascended to the realm of Philosophers, no matter how long it took them, their foundations were considered established. In Rome, in the legions, we’d known a similar concept. A point of no return where a man became what it was that he’d be for the rest of his days. The first blow struck.

And then in his actions, Gaius had given us a name for it.

“Crossing the Rubicon,” I said, and the mystery of the Babel shard translated it to another word as it hit the air. A concept Aristotle had taught me in a distant memory. The first philosophy. Metaphysika.

I snarled as Socrates pinned my legs with his own and shoved his palm up under my chin. Leveraging all my strength to the right, I rolled us.

“And why call it that?” he asked. “What does it represent?”

Sea water struck us before I could answer, a wave appearing from nowhere, and as I coughed and spat I heard the crone of the Broken Tide cackle. Socrates growled in annoyance and ripped the sandal off my foot before I could stop him, twisting and heaving it with all his might. Dona’s laughter turned to an indignant shriek, and stone shattered.

“Advance and consign yourself to never-ending ascension,” I coughed out. Exploiting the crone’s distraction for everything I could, I slammed my forehead into Socrates’ nose and wrenched my arm up under his knee, prying it out of its lock. “When Gaius crossed the Rubicon in defiance of the senate, he condemned himself to eternity. An endless expansion of Rome as he saw it.”

I will step down when the enemies of Rome are dead and gone.

Since the birth of the republic, Dictator had stood unchallenged as the highest realm a cultivator could touch. For Gaius, it hadn’t been enough. And so he’d pressed on further and found what lay beyond.

Dictator Perpetuo.

“Then, to establish your foundations is to take the first step towards building something greater, endless in its expanse,” Socrates said, hammering my right side until I was forced to let go and defend it. “Is that fair to say?”

“Yes,” I growled, wedging my forearm under his chin when he tried to bring it down, pressing with everything I had against him.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“And what does the other half of you call it? What does the Greek in you say?”

“Metaphysics,” I answered, straining, but Socrates was too strong. He tossed me off and we rose with our spears in hand again. “The study of abstractions. The contemplation of things that can’t be directly observed.”

“The first principle,” Socrates concluded, and threw his spear at me like it was a toy javelin.

A dozen whispering truths propelled it through the air faster than any spear had a right to move. They clung sharply to its tip, his rhetoric imbuing it with piercing truths. It was too fast for me to dodge, too fast for me to unravel every portion of the rhetoric surrounding it, and far too fast for me to even think of countering them.

What else could I do but meet it head on?

The captain leads from the front.