1.63 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

Bursting from the sea and wailing in a woman’s voice, a monster took the stage. We watched without comprehension as it exploded upward and cast its shadow over the Eos.

Silver scales and coiling flesh that undulated and flexed like nothing I had ever seen in my life. The monster continued to rise, pulling more and more of itself from the comforting veil of opaque waves, and in the light of stars above I saw the scars left by those who came before. Pockmarks and craters in the creature’s hide, each a blow that had marked it – for some of them, even broke scales – but never pierced through. None but Damon’s arrow, lodged so deep in a gap between two cratered scales that only its fletching was still visible.

“Give me all your Heroes,” the kyrios of the Raging Heaven had commanded our uncle, provoking a fellow Tyrant and risking greater conflict. And here before me was the reason why.

The creature’s narrow, sloping head cracked open, it’s grotesque maw yawning wide. Its eyes, a shimmering liquid black, disappeared entirely behind its gaping mouth. It breathed in and the freedmen among us stumbled and shouted in alarm as the force of its inhalation dragged the Eos towards it. I felt the ship’s frame strain like it was my own ribs cracking.

Hundreds of sickle-shaped teeth moved inside the monster’s throat, rows of them spiraling down into the black depths of its stomach. They almost seemed to spin, in great, lurching motions, as the monster swallowed down the winds.

Finally it had its fill. The winding silver monster lurched down and closed the final span between us, releasing the breath it had taken as it did. I felt the drums inside my ears burst, a woman’s voice scrambling my senses.

“I WANT-!”

Fotios fell upon it from the top of the mast, howling in terror and defiance, and drove his burning trident down on top of its head. My twin wound over a dozen truths through the spokes of the trident as he fell, focused every ounce of a tenth rank Philosopher’s strength into the blow. The monster’s jaws slammed shut, silencing it.

And my brother’s trident shattered against its scales.

I lurched forward, leaping up while Fotios bounced off the monster’s head and flailed for balance in the air. It rolled, the motion eerily sinuous and faster than a creature that size had any right to be. Its mouth opened wide again, poised beneath my brother.

I exhaled sharply.

The hunting bird’s breath was a breathing technique passed down through the Aetos family for as long as we’d had our name. A mimicry of the eponymous animal, it required a cultivator to hollow out a portion of their body in the style of an eagle – a chamber that they could store their vital breath within. A mortal man inhaled and exhaled only once each time, but the hunting bird did it twice. Once through its lungs, and a second time through hollow sacks of flesh feeding to the pneumatic channels in its hollow bones.

An eagle had nine such chambers stored within itself, each one a buoying force against the currents of heaven. My mother had told me once that it was the ninth chamber that allowed them to fly. It was why every practitioner of the hunting bird’s breath strove to create those nine chambers within themselves. So that one day we could join them up above. So that one day we could fly.

I had only ever heard stories of distant ancestors managing eight. Maintaining a pneumatic chamber at all as a civic cultivator was a feat worth praising. Maintaining two as a philosopher was similarly impressive. Three for a hero, four to a tyrant. Anything beyond that was prodigious, so said the elders.

I drained all four of my pneumatic chambers and shot up from the ship’s deck with my spear in hand. The first exhale emptied the pneuma from those chambers into the channels I’d painstakingly carved through my bones. Each chamber contained a breath, each breath the culmination of hours and days of dogged exertion. Every pain that I had dispersed evenly throughout them, every ounce of my conviction built upon a thousand everyday actions. The second exhale passed through my lungs, steaming as it shot through my grit teeth.

The hunting bird’s breath allowed a man to break apart the trials of his life, to disperse them within himself and minimize their impact. In doing so, it allowed him to make those pains his own. To buoy himself with them as an eagle in flight. And when the time was right, it allowed him to let those pains go all at once, releasing more than any mortal man could hope to take in with a single breath – and it allowed him to fall.

To dive out of the sky with talons spread wide.

That was how an Aetos hunted.

I dove up, exerting the strength of four talons with one thrust of my spear into the monster’s liquid black eye. The impact slammed the creature up and away from my airborne brother, its entire body flinching away from the blow in a cascade of moving coils.

It rounded it on me while I fell back to the deck, holding onto what remained of my spear. I had rocked it, but I’d broken my weapon in the process just like Fotios.

My twin and I hit the deck at the same time, and Gyro was suddenly above us. His blade burned bright for a split second as he leapt, and then it was quenched. Gyro buried it to the hilt in the gap between pockmarked scales

The monster screamed again. I gasped, dispersing the wrenching pain in my ears through four pneumatic chambers. Sprawled out on the deck beside one another, Fotios and I watched, dazed, as the enormous serpent writhed and drew away from the Eos. It dove back into the whirlpool and was gone in an instant.

Fotios’ head lolled sideways, his lips moving silently. As if I could hear him over the whirlpool and the shrill ringing in my ears. I dug a finger into my ear and flicked the blood at his face.

“Did you bring another weapon?” he asked me in the voice of his soul, like a proper Sophic cultivator.

“No,” I responded in kind. He grimaced.

“Gyro is going to be insufferable.”

“And why would that be?” Asked the man himself. He leaned over us, one hand on his hip while the other held a sword covered in molten lead. “What cause would a man carrying four spare swords have to be insufferable to the boys refusing to carry even one?”

“I would have made room for a spare if I knew we’d be fighting monsters.” The voice of my soul seethed.

Gyro scoffed. He offered me a hand. “A man can’t always know when a fight is coming. That’s why you carry it everywhere you go.”

“Consider us humbled,” Fotios said while Gyro yanked me to my feet. “Now will you loan us some arms?”

“I cannot.” Gyro pulled Fotios up and slapped droplets of molten lead off his shoulder, spattered on him by the creature’s wound. ”I gave the last one to Thon.”

“Well enough. I’ll take Dymas-“

“No.” Gyro shook his head with finality. “The freedmen need weapons more than you two.”

“Son of a bitch,” my twin conveyed in a Philosopher’s voice, vitriol behind every word. My own mood wasn’t far behind. “Fine, fine! What’s next, then? The snake’s not dead yet – how do we kill it?”

“You can’t.”

I snarled a curse and jerked away from the old man in rags suddenly standing between Fotios and me. The Eos rocked as the whirlpool currents slammed her starboard side, nearly knocking me right back on my ass.

“No! I refuse!” I shouted. “I refuse to believe it! How could you have possibly been here the whole time!?”

Aristotle rolled his eyes, looking for all the world like a man with two feet in the Styx, yet balancing on the roiling deck without any apparent effort. “If you had looked, you might have seen me.”

“What do you mean we can’t kill it?” Fotios demanded. “Stavros and I beat it like a mouthy slave. Damon skewered it and Gyro made it bleed! If it can bleed then it can die-”

“It did not bleed,” Aristotle cut him off, snatching Gyro’s sword arm before any of us could react and dragging it up, forcing him to brandish the blade. “To bleed is to shed blood. What sort of blood looks like this? What sort of blood clings like molten lead to a blade?”

“Ichor,” Gyro answered, watching Aristotle unwrap one of the gray rags from his body and run it down each side of the blade, soaking up the shimmering metallic liquid. He tucked the soiled rag into a fold within his attire when he was done. “It’s a monster after all.”

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“I could have told you that,” Fotios said.

“Could you?” Aristotle asked, rounding on him. My twin flinched, taking a step back and nearly falling over Dymas – the man was still flat on the deck, lying prone with his hands over his bleeding ears. “Because it seems to me that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this creature is. If I were an unkind man, prone to unkind assumptions, I might even say you had mistaken it for a virtuous beast. That you ascribed the same rules to one as you did the other.”

Another wail bubbled up from the whirling currents. Behind us and away now that the riptide had dragged us further in, but not nearly far enough.

“And if I did?” Fotios demanded. “They are the same, aren’t they? Beasts that grew beyond the natural order. It’s only a question of magnitude that separates them.”

“Wrong!” Aristotle’s rhetoric thundered, threatening to rupture drums that didn’t exist within ears that weren’t corporeal. “They don’t bleed the same blood. They don’t conform to the same rules. A virtuous beast is to an animal what a cultivator is to a man. A monster is something else entirely!”

“We can still kill it,” I said, stubbornly matching him when he rounded on me. “Men have killed monsters before. Why shouldn’t we be able to now?”

“Men have claimed to have killed monsters,” Aristotle stressed, “and then crowned themselves heroes for it. Ancestral warriors and demigods with the ichor of faceless divinity flowing through their veins are said to have killed monsters. I have heard these things, and I have also heard an old man claim to be able to show me a king if I gave him a crown while he defecated in the agora. Would you care to guess how many of these things I have actually seen done?”

“None,” Gyro answered when I refused to.

“None at all. I’ve seen things in the course of my life that would seem stranger and more profound to you than even your bisected corpse god; I have even seen monsters before. But I have never, ever seen a creature that sheds ichor in place of blood die. Have any of you?”