1.66 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Move, boy,” Aristotle said, grabbing a fist full of my hair and dragging me bodily across the beach. “You’re no use gawking.”

“Old bastard, you’re no use at all!” I slapped his hand away and staggered to my feet.

“Old bastard am I? What happened to honored elder?”

“What happened to you?” I snapped. “Where did you go while we could have used you?”

“Somewhere I was needed more,” he said, and had the audacity to sound exasperated. “Selfish child, you’re not even my student. Be thankful I’m here at all.”

“Who is that?” Elena called, eyes flitting from me to the old philosopher. Trying to decide which of us was the greater threat. “Where did he come from?”

“One of life’s greater mysteries,” I answered sourly.

A tremor in the earth rocked my feet out from under me a few steps away from the woman and her ship. Impossibly, absurdly, I saw the drakaina roll away from my brother with what looked to be an oversized splinter buried in one of its weak spots.

“Another!” Gyro called, hitting the beach and rolling backwards to bleed off momentum and avoid the serpent’s retaliation.

“You can’t be-“ serious, I tried to say, but stabbing pain in my chest cut the word off. I hacked and spat a mouthful of blood, sucking air through my mouth and feeling precious little of it fill my lungs.

Another shard of broken wood sailed through the air, tossed by Menoeces. This one was hardly fit for a practice bout compared to the one Gyro had carved, but he joined it to his iron hilt nonetheless. He shrugged tattered cult cloth from his shoulders and let it hang around his waist. He swiped the ‘sword’ back and forth to get a feel for its weight and then went charging in again.

Warmth like afternoon sun bathed my left side. Elena knelt beside me, keeping her shield just out of reach and laying a hand on my chest.

“Breathe deep,” she told me. I tried, and cut it off half way before another coughing fit took me. When I exhaled, it was equal parts wheeze and whistle. Her eyes widened in dismay. “Your ribs are broken. They’ve punctured your lungs.”

“Tartarus it is, then,” I rasped, forcing myself to one knee and then my feet. There were many wounds that a Cultivator of virtue could shrug off where a mortal man would surely die, and the list only grew the higher up the mountain one climbed. Past a certain point, ailments ceased to matter at all. But no matter your standing among heaven and earth, there was one thing that could kill any cultivator if the worst came to pass.

Citizens and Philosophers could walk away from injuries that would cripple or kill a man with no standing. The Epics claimed a Hero could carry on even if they lost their limbs or lesser organs. Our uncle had told us, only once, in one of his sentimental moods, that a Tyrant could survive with no heart at all – so long as he could eat.

But beneath the light of raging heaven, every man needed to breathe.

“Conserve your strength,” Elena urged me, trying to force me back down with a hand on my shoulder. Without her shield, though, she was only a low Philosopher. And while she had evidently trained her body as well as her mind, I’d worked mine harder. I rose anyway.

Gyro hit the beach again, the serpent pursuing him with another stake in its side. Menoeces threw him another crudely carved blade of wood, covered in his own blood. He immediately went to work on the next piece of wooden shrapnel, scraping it to shape with his fingernails for lack of a proper tool.

“That shield is adamant, isn’t it?” I demanded, the words scraping painfully as they left my throat. “It’s more than just a shield. You know it’s more than just a shield, don’t you?”

Elena eased back a step. “It’s…”

“Divine metal,” Damon‘s mentor said, suddenly leaning down beside her to observe it. She inhaled sharply and thrust the shield forward in a bash. He sidestepped it, tracing a finger over the scarlet sun embossed on its surface. “Something like diamond, and something like iron – bronze if it were better. A fantasy material, forged through any number of means depending on who you ask.”

“A monster killer,” I concluded, readying myself as best I could. The old man sighed.

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “Or perhaps just wishful thinking. Either way-”

Without looking at me, Aristotle pulled a clay jug from his rags and tossed it at my face. It had no cover but it didn’t spill over when I caught it. The contents were too thick.

“Drink,” he said. I swallowed it down laboriously, spooning it out with my fingers when waiting for it to creep down the sides of the jug took too long. It was almost unbearably sweet, with an underlying bite that I couldn’t identify. I muscled down one mouthful and took a breath to ask him what the point of it was.

Then when I realized how much easier that breath had come than the one before it, I dug my entire hand into the jar and shoveled as much of the amber elixir into my mouth as I could fit.

Elena’s brow furrowed. “Is that-?”

“Oxymel. The boy’s lungs are punctured, not torn out of his chest. He’s young and fit enough for time to mend it.”

The philosopher had influenced that time, somehow through his medicine. Whether it was the ingredients involved or how it had been prepared, he had imbued it with the essence of natural recovery. I felt my body heal itself of its many aches and pains, my ribs and lungs captain among them. It was a process I had experienced many times in my life, but now I felt it happen over the course of seconds rather than days and weeks.

A month of focused recovery, distilled and stored inside a chipped clay jug.

I forced myself to stop as soon as the tight pain in my chest receded to the point where I could properly move again. I thrust what remained at the old philosopher and nodded towards the broken ship.

“Take this to Thon, help him drink it if he can’t do it himself-“

“Were you listening to me, boy? You were fit enough to walk away from what it gave you with broken ribs and punctured lungs, wounds that heal with time. Oxymel can’t remake bone from dust – time won’t compel a pulverized heart to beat again.”

The jug fractured in my hand. “What will?”

“Nothing that we have here.”

“Nectar,” Gyro answered, landing in the middle of us. He caught another wooden blade when Menoeces threw it, panting heavily and gleaming with sweat. He glanced wryly at Elena while he assembled his next absurd blade. “Didn’t take you this long to explain things to me.”

Elena flushed. “We got a bit sidetracked. Stavros was injured, and this old man appeared out of thin air.”

“Aristotle does that,” Gyro confirmed. Scarlet eyes widened.

“Oh my,” she breathed.

“Don’t worry about Thon just yet,” Gyro said to me, rolling his shoulders and dragging his blade through the air experimentally. “In all the world, there are only a few places he’d be better off at than where he is right now.”

“In the wrecked ship?” I asked incredulously.

The drakaina struck before I could get an answer, forcing us all to scatter. The monster bristled with all of the wooden blades Gyro had left behind in its flesh, a hazard all their own as the serpent spun and whipped its coils across the beach. With furious zeal, my brother kept adding more. As fast as Menoeces could make them, first with the Citizen’s nails and then with his teeth once all the fingernails had torn away, Gyro would fasten them to his iron hilt and bury them in the beast.

“Pointless,” Aristotle observed, ducking the serpent’s tail while I dove over it.

“Perhaps,” I echoed him, twisting and cracking my whip. I caught the serpent by the tail and invoked conviction, planting myself in the sand and refusing to be moved. I stopped its motion long enough for Gyro to give it another kiss. The monster screamed in building frustration and whipped its tail into me rather than away from me.

Elena appeared between us and took it on her shield. A ruinous crack rang out alongside the reverberating hum. My heart stuttered in my chest.

“The shield-”

But when the woman from Olympia turned, her shield remained diamond pristine. It was the recoiling tail that was broken, a new crater in the scales leaking ichor where it had struck the scarlet sun.

Elena offered me a hand up. I took it.

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“The shield is our best chance,” I told her. “If you won’t lend it to us, then it has to be you that kills these things.”

I rushed back in, invoking principle – a lord may lead that men may follow, but brothers stand side-by-side – to appear at Gyro’s side in the space between breaths. He flashed me a quick grin and dove through the coils, trusting me to cover him. I did, and I called fire to my rope whip to light the way while he planted another thorn in its side.

“I can’t!” Elena called, leaping in and bashing its head away with her shield when it snapped at him. “I was given this to protect, not to kill!”

“Father in Raging fucking Heaven,” I seethed, dashing and diverting what I could from my brother. “What does it matter?!”

“I made a promise!”

“You made a promise,” I repeated, scrambling and kicking up sand as the drakaina rolled nearly overtop of me. “You made a promise. Look at where we are! What is a promise worth right now!?”

“It’s worth a shield,” Elena responded with conviction, raising it against the serpent’s maw.

The monster bit down on peerless adamant and four of its teeth audibly fractured.

“Lord Aetos! I found it!” Menoeces hollered, running full tilt out of the graveyard of ships with a thick beam of wood balanced over one shoulder.

“I knew you would!” Gyro landed beside me, Elena bracing in front of us. Wild blue eyes met mine in the dark, aglow with sourceless light. “It’s time for your final lesson, brother.”