1.5

The Young Griffon

Olympia. The holy city, where heroes became champions and oracles came to die.

The oarsmen eased the Eos into the city’s dock town with careful precision. My cousin’s vessel was sleek and agile, well-suited to just about any maneuvering, and coasted through bobbing forests of merchant vessels without issue. She slid smoothly up onto the beach sands and the oarsmen scrambled off the ship to start pushing her the rest of the way.

I vaulted the rail and landed in knee-deep sea water at the stern of the Eos. I laid both hands upon her rear, and twenty hands of pankration intent joined me to heave the Eos fully onto the beach. The oarsmen whooped and hollered at the display.

“What do we do about the ship?” Sol asked, landing adroitly in the warm white sands. He still had a conflicted air about him, but he’d stopped brooding for the moment.

“Do?” I asked. “We don’t do anything.”

The winter waters of the Ionian were deliciously cool, so I gathered them up in twenty pankration palms and flicked droplets at my body from every angle. Sol watched with furrowed brows as I basked in the refreshing shower. Envious, no doubt.

“It’ll be gone in a day,” he finally said, glancing up at the Eos. She was a beautiful vessel, I’d give her that much. From her scarlet sails to the sleek curve of her keel, she was a vessel fit for a heroic crew. A shame that we’d stolen her. “Surely we could pay to have her kept.”

“We could,” I agreed. “If we had the funds. Tell me, Sol, did you bring your drachma with you? Any denarii from your final legion remittance? Myself, I didn’t bring anything but the cloth around my waist.” I had a thought and called out to our crew. “Dogs! Your father needs coin. Who among you is the richest?”

Ten hands pointed up at the ship’s deck. Ah, right. The child. Sol and I leapt back onto the deck, and while I wrestled the boy down the Roman went questing through the ship itself.

The pirate boy spat in my face. Pankration arms spiked him into the shallows of the beach and I dove in after, dunking him mercilessly.

“Nothing,” Sol said, landing beside us. “You said your cousin and his companions were all in the Heroic Realm, yet the ship might as well be empty.”

“Of course it is.” The vile little red-head reared up out of the water, gasping. I dunked him back down. “Cultivators at that level have other ways of storing their possessions. We’re lucky one of them didn’t store the Eos whole into a fold of their tunic.”

“What about the boy? What does he have on him?”

I pulled the little pirate out of the water. He choked and gasped for breath, unable to put up more than a token resistance as I slapped him down for coin. Predictably, the vagrant child didn’t have a fleck of gold on him. I shook my head, tossing him up onto the beach.

“So we’re utterly without funds.”

“We have a ship we could sell,” I pointed out.

“You told me your father and his brothers built this ship,” Sol said, incredulous. “And you want to sell it?”

I considered the Eos. She really was a pretty thing.

“Selling her would be cruel,” I mused. “I suppose there’s no choice. We’ll have to return her to Alikos and find another way.”

Sol sighed.

Olympia was a gathering place. It was the home of the Olympic Games, the cradle where champions of the Mediterranean were born and nurtured, and had been so for nearly eight hundred years. Throughout our most tumultuous eras it had stood as a beacon, untouched by war and universally coveted. It was where living legends came to test their might against one another. It was where epics began, and were mercilessly concluded.

It was also home to the most powerful cult in the free Mediterranean.

The Cult of Raging Heaven was an institution that every man and woman with even the faintest spark inside their soul dreamt of one day joining. Vastly influential and boasting heroic and even tyrannic cultivators in absurd numbers, the Cult of Raging Heaven was as much a place of elite congregation as the city itself.

The cult’s influence over its host city, from what I had been taught, was nearly as complete as my father’s own control over Alikos. There was a suggestion of separation, of course, a citizen class that had nominal control through democratic rule. But the masses were easily swayed, and it was only natural that the best orators would come from the strongest grouping of cultivators in the city.

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On the surface, Olympia and Alikos were vastly different entities. The former was the heart of the free Mediterranean, the place that all Greek citizens with the means to do so flocked to during Olympic years. The latter was a simple colony nation, isolated from the rest of the enlightened world by the Ionian Sea and pressed up against the barbarian state of Rome.

It was perhaps only natural that a cultivator of sufficient renown would take the Scarlet City in their hand to ensure its prosperity, with only the heartless sea and a horde of barbarians as their neighbors. That my father was one of only two Tyrants in the Scarlet City said enough about its strength relative to Olympia, or even most of the other eight city-states.

Still, something told me it wasn’t quite so simple. That beneath the surface of the skin, the bones were all the same. That in the end, their offal smelled no better than ours.

Perhaps I’d been listening to my father for too long. Cynical old bastard. Regardless of any alleged political influence, though, the Cult of Raging Heaven had left an undeniable mark on the city. On the world entire.