1.51

The Son of Rome

Jason fell to one knee, staring down at the mess I’d made of Selene’s floor. For her part, the Scarlet Oracle only slapped me lightly on the shoulder for the damage I’d done and rolled her eyes when I mouthed an apology.

“Solus,” Jason said hoarsely. “I’m sorry, I – there’s no excuse for my cowardice. Nothing I can say-”

“What cowardice?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, his eyes still wide. The ocean-blue flames behind them were almost fully eclipsed by his pupils.

“What?”

“They can’t read our minds,” Scythas said tiredly, slumped against the wall across from us. “Even if it feels like it at times. You have to be more specific.”

“Are you apologizing,” I asked, “For creeping in under Scythas’ cloak like a stray? Or are you apologizing for staying under it, out of sight, while we spoke to him? For observing us when you knew you could not be observed in kind?”

“I wasn’t apologizing for any of those things,” he admitted, forcing the words out. “But I should have been, and now I am. I should have done this first, before anything else was said here. I’m sorry for that too.” When he clenched his teeth together as if in physical pain, I noticed his right canine was subtly different from the rest. Not a natural tooth at all, but a carved fang of pure white-gold.

I let him work through it alone. Every officer in the legions, from the lowest Tribune to the highest Legate, knew that silence and guilt would draw the words out of a soldier faster than anything an officer could do. You only had to be there, deafeningly loud in your silence, and wait for them to break themselves.

Admittedly, the sight of me sitting on a sixteen year old girl’s lovingly adorned couch while she massaged my shoulders likely took something from the captain’s glare. Fortunately, Jason had risked the ire of every Tyrant on this mountain to sneak down here with Scythas, all so he could confess. It didn’t take much.

“For before,” he said. “For the Gadfly.”

I waited patiently.

“What about the Gadfly?” Selene’s prompted him, not unkindly. The captain of the Alabaster Isles exhaled shakily.

“For not stepping in to help when he grabbed you,” Jason elaborated, striking the knuckles of his left fist against the floor. Every amethyst vein embedded in the marble flashed, for a moment illuminating all four corners of the room. “I should have done something. Not even a full day before, I promised that I would stand by your side, and I did nothing.

“While the Gadfly was on you, I did nothing. While Griffon was heaving himself into danger, I did nothing!” He gripped his head with the other hand, striking the floor again. He seethed. “Against the Scholar himself, shackled to a Philosopher’s strength, Griffon still acted without hesitation. When the Gadfly took you to the mountain, he sprinted after you like Cerberus itself was on his heels!

“And I did NOTHING!”

The flames in Jason‘s eyes blazed like bonfires, spilling out from the confines of his irises. His heroic pneuma roared through the room. Rage and self-loathing overcame control, and I was treated to a glimpse of the pirate’s true strength.

The lights in the room, torches and a lit brazier in the corner, dimmed and faded to bare pinpricks of light. The sound of Scythas cursing and coming to his feet was lost to my ears entirely, registering instead as faint vibrations on my skin. And I watched, with the eyes of my Sophic sense, as his furious influence reached out and crushed a beautifully chiseled bust of a woman’s head to rubble.

I felt more than heard Selene cry out behind me as the bust was crushed. I saw Jason‘s influence lash out again in the time it took my heart to beat once, saw a codex filled with sheets of fine gold in place of papyrus jerk as it was seized by his influence. I saw the bundle of leather and gold cave in on itself a dozen times in a fraction of a second.

Before my heart could beat a second time, hazel-gold light in front of me and scarlet light behind me cut through the darkness. Scythas dove across the room and Selene vaulted over the lounging couch, both of their Heroic souls flaring blindingly bright.

Still, my heart would beat a second time before either of them reached Jason. By then, the strand of the pirate’s influence reaching for me would have found its mark. Two beats and never again.

In that space between the first beat and the second, as a Hero and an Oracle reached out desperately, and as the dread pirate began to rear back in horrified understanding of what he’d done, I finally recognized what it was his influence was doing. An effect I’d only ever heard of secondhand, from my father.

When Gaius was a young man, just twenty-five years old, he was captured by pirates in the Adriatic. This was before he became the man we know him as today, before he was the general of the west. But that man was within him even then. So when the pirates set a young patrician’s ransom for him rather than a general’s, Gaius demanded they raise their price – even went so far as to promise them that he’d see it paid.

While they laughed and obliged him, he promised them another thing too. That he would return some day with a legion at his back, and he would crucify every single one of them for their crimes.

They hardly believed him, of course. But the general of the west always makes good on his promises, doesn’t he? Gaius returned with his legion, just as he promised, and he nailed each and every one of those pirates to a cross.

Ordinarily, there are men within the ranks tasked with concluding a crucifixion. Some use knives, others use swords or barbed whips. The proper way is a spear, I’ve already told you that. One thrust through the heart and justice is rendered. Most days, Gaius is of a similar mind. But these pirates were guilty of crimes of a different magnitude, against more men than Gaius alone. The entire Republic had suffered the burden of their presence in the Adriatic.

So after they had suffered the cross for thirty-eight days, to match the thirty-eight days that Gaius had been in their care, he declared that he would bring them to their victims’ graves – so they could properly atone before they died.

That’s exactly right, Solus. They were pirates – their victims were buried at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. And so Gaius took them there himself, dragging them down into the depths while we watched from the shore.

When he brought them back up their crosses were all shattered, and their bodies had caved in on themselves. As if the gods had taken each of them in hand – and crushed them like rotten figs.

Jason’s influence brushed the tip of my nose, and the dread pirate’s influence dragged me to the bottom of the sea.

Scythas reached him first, tackling him into the far wall and illuminating the room in another flash of amethyst light as the stone absorbed the impact. Selene was next, striking his chest over his heart with the tips of her index and middle fingers – and though the Oracle’s strike was far less explosive, not even strong enough to cause a flicker in the room’s amethyst veins, Jason’s pneuma recoiled like a kicked dog. Finally, the man himself reasserted control over the vital essence of his soul, the roaring blue flames in his eyes dimming in a split second.

Stolen story; please report.

“Solus!” three heroic cultivators cried out, each of them in fear.

My heart beat a third time. I sucked in a breath and each of them froze, already halfway back across the room. I held it for a moment.

“Jason,” I exhaled.

Gravitas.

The Hero of the Alabaster Isles slammed flat against the floor, pressed down by the captain’s virtue. I put everything I had behind it, like I hadn’t done since the days before I was a slave. It had been a year and a half since Tartarus had taken me in its hand like that, since death had whispered its name directly in my ear. My spirit raged in response.

“Control yourself,” I commanded. The words were for myself as much as for him. I hardly heard them over the ringing of my ears.

Jason’s pneuma rushed abruptly back into him. His influence vanished from the room.

“Sol,” Scythas gasped, halfway risen from a sprinter’s crouch.

Selene crossed the remaining distance between us in the blink of an eye, laying one hand flat over my heart while the other gripped my chin and tilted my head back. Her golden veil had been torn from her face at some point, her hair pulled free of its braids by the unreasonable speed of a Heroic cultivator. It spilled over her shoulders and down her back, the sight familiar for reasons I couldn’t describe.

Burning scarlet eyes met mine searchingly. Of all the Heroic cultivators that Griffon and I had encountered in Olympia, she was the only one who knew that I was exactly what I appeared to be. A Sophic cultivator, as the Greeks understood it.