1.67 [Stavros Aetos – END]

Youngest of the Convocation

Tribulation lightning.

There were as many explanations for it as there were thinking cultures on the earth. From the truly ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and golden Egypt, to the lowest barbarian hovels in the east and west, every cultivator knew a singular truth. Regardless of what we cultivated, how we cultivated, where we did it or why. One thing remained the same.

We were all reaching madly up to heaven. No matter what that meant to a man, the result was what mattered. Reach high enough, and Heaven will take notice.

Of course, Heaven’s response was always the same.

The bolt from Raging Heaven struck the Hero Anargyros and seared my vision white. Elena’s adamant shield rang like a bell, a sound altogether different from the unsettling reverberations that followed when she used it to block the monster. Not close enough to benefit from its protection, I was flung back by the force of my brother’s tribulation.

I scrubbed frantically at my eyes and spat a taste I had never experienced before out of my mouth, the faint echoes of what my brother had taken on his chin coursing through my body and wreaking havoc on my limbs.

When I managed to clear my eyes and rise again, my heart in my throat, I saw that my worry had been wasted. He stood in the same place, unchanged despite the fact that the sands around him had been turned to molten glass and the monster’s corpse beneath his feet had been charred from silver to black.

Urania was gone, if she had been there to begin with. Yet the Hero Anagyros still kept his silence, his head tilted thoughtfully as if listening to a voice only he could hear.

“The drakaina,” an old man spoke when the Hero did not. My brother blinked and looked down at the Father of Rhetoric, kneeling before the corpse of the serpent. “A female dragon spirit, a cursed spawn of Echidna and Typhon. Its scales are harder than iron, and its veins are filled with molten lead. It does not age. It can not starve. Any wound inflicted by mortal man will heal in moments, mended by its ichor.”

The Hero Anargyros said nothing still. Elena crept forward, peering over the rim of her shield with scarlet wonder.

“Only the divine can unmake what the divine have cursed to live forever,” Aristotle continued, raising a frail and wrinkled hand. His pneuma gathered between his fingers, taking shape as he manifested his intent – and I flinched and drew back my Sophic sense at the same time that Elena did. I swallowed, and tasted blood that had not been in my mouth moments before. Whatever intent the old philosopher had called upon, it was so sharp that it had cut my Sophic sense itself.

“With golden ichor running through your veins, or with arms and armor of incorruptible adamant. Those are the only ways I have ever seen a monster die.” Aristotle reached for one of the many gouges my brother had carved into the serpent, cauterized by the bolt of tribulation lightning. He drew his intent across its flesh, and his hand abruptly jerked as his intent broke against the serpent’s corpse. “Even in death they are impervious. Or so I thought.”

My brother hummed and pinched the unsharpened edge of the talon. With a twist and a sharp crack, he broke a splinter off the sword that had just slain an undying drakaina. Shaving an edge into it with his driftwood blade, the Hero Anargyros flipped the wooden scalpel so he was holding its edge and offered Aristotle the handle.

We watched the old man drag a wooden scalpel across flesh that had rebuffed bronze and tempered iron. Scorched scales and sinewy muscle parted like blooming roses, with no resistance at all. Aristotle‘s hand shook.

But his voice and his bearing were unchanged when he spoke. “I’ve seen you bleed before, Anargyros Aetos. It was blood, not molten gold that sprung from your wounds. You are no son of heaven.”

“No, elder,” the newly risen hero agreed. “Only the son of a good man, and a loving mother.”

“I’ve seen ships built,” the old philosopher carried on as if he didn’t hear him. “I recognize the timber that made the Talon, and I’ve seen wood of the same kind used in practice blades. That sword and the scalpel. Neither one is peerless adamant.”

“They are not.”

“I know what such a blade is capable of against a creature like this.” He scowled. “No. I thought I knew. This and a thousand-thousand smaller truths. I thought I knew.”

A sound like breaking glass assaulted my Sophic sense and my Sophic sense alone. I saw alarm steel across my brother’s face for the first time since our shipwreck. The flames behind his eyes flared and his pneuma, still pouring out of him in torrential waves, converged on Damon’s mentor.

“Wait-”

“I was wrong,” Aristotle admitted, and the three of us watched in horror as his cultivation broke apart.

“Stop!” Elena cried, lurching for him with her arm outstretched, as if she could pull him behind her shield and protect him from what was happening inside his soul.

The Hero Anargyros leapt down from the monster’s corpse, the stifling heat and wonder in the air around him growing thicker as he knelt in front of the Father of Rhetoric. The wings of his influence, vast enough to cast their formless shadow over the entire island, folded protectively around the old man’s hunched body. It did about as much good as Elena’s shield. This wasn’t something that could be defended against.

As cultivators of virtue, we refined ourselves with every step we took up the divine mountain. Through every advancement and every grand ascension, we built upon what we had built before. As Citizens, we gathered the materials and searched for the proper place within our souls to lay the foundation for what was to come.

In order to ascend to the realm of Philosophers, a cultivator needed to first lay the foundation inside their soul. Then came a man’s first principle. His first thought worth having. The culmination of all his efforts as a citizen. It was upon this foundation that a philosopher built a monument inside their soul. Every truth learned was a brick laid, and each principle internalized was another pillar that would bear the weight of all that was to come.

In a confrontation between cultivators of virtue, whether it be an exchanging of discourse in the agora or a round inside the marble octagon, that monument could be broken down like any other man made wonder. Done properly, with the right intent, a man could attack his opponent’s soul at the same time that he picked apart their arguments and assaulted their bodies. He could force his opponent to doubt themselves, could make a demon of their heart.

In the most extreme cases, you could even tear down the edifice that every cultivator builds inside their soul. Their monument to Ego – the culmination of all their efforts as cultivators of virtue.

Apparently, you could even do it to yourself.

Aristotle‘s Ego shattered and flew apart, and we all felt it in the deepest of our senses. The bricks of polished marble truth that he had used to build the walls of the monument crumbled and fell away, each one a disdainful whisper as it tumbled away. Then, one by one, the towering columns of his principles and ideals groaned, fractured, and fell apart in chunks, the impact of each as they hit the floor echoing in my Sophic sense.

The old philosopher’s soul shed more internalized truths in those paltry moments than most thinking men would ever learn. Nine times he discarded principles that had made him the most feared man in any agora for decades before I was born. He shed his pneuma too, a tired exhalation that filled the air with nearly as much vitality as my brother had been emitting since his ascension.

The difference was that my brother’s strength was still growing, outpacing everything he was throwing off. What Aristotle lost was not returned or replaced. In seconds, his influence fell from that of a Sophic captain all the way down to the very first rank of the Sophic realm.

When the stones stopped falling and the dust had settled in his soul, only one column of principle remained. The Father of Rhetoric inhaled slowly, tattered rags stretching tight across a rugged chest. Calloused hands rose and brushed thick dark curls out of weary eyes. The irritated scowl was the same as it had always been, even on a young man’s face.

“What have you done?” I asked, aghast. The man that had just shattered his own Ego and shed his wisened years alongside his principles and strength, pinned me with a glance.

“Humbled myself,” he said, as if that was any explanation at all.

“Elder,” the Hero Anargyros breathed, though Aristotle hardly looked older than him at all now. “Why? It’s all gone. Everything that you’ve built- our mentors told us stories about the Father of Rhetoric, about the wonders you unearthed from uncharted mist. And you just-”

“Threw it away,” Elena whispered, looking for all the world like she had just witnessed a murder.

Aristotle made a dismissive motion with his hand. Brushing off our concern, or maybe brushing the rubble of his Ego’s monument from the foundations.

“It wasn’t the first time. Odds are it won’t be the last,” he said, resigned. “A philosopher is a man seeking order in a chaotic world. We build walls inside ourselves, set boundaries – whatever we can fit inside those boundaries as possible, and everything outside of them is not.

“What you just did had no place inside the walls that I had built. But you did it anyway, and I saw it with my own eyes.” Aristotle shrugged. “When Ego obstructs possibility, a philosopher loses his curiosity. At that point, it doesn’t matter how appealing those truths and convictions are. They’re wrong. That makes them worthless.”

“That’s the opposite of what you should be taking away from this,” my brother said in exasperation. He laid a hand on Aristotle’s shoulder, sky blue flames burning earnestly behind his eyes. “There will always be an unknown, a contradiction or a truth we can’t explain. The Father of Rhetoric should know better than anyone that any truth can be made a lie with the right persuasion.”

“In these moments more than any other,” Elena said emphatically, “conviction is the way forward. Every path has its obstructions. If you discard your progress every time you reach one, double back and search for a different, perfect path every time, you’ll never reach your destination.”

“Sometimes we have to step off the path and walk uncharted steps,” the Hero Anargyros advised the wise man, glory rolling off him all the while. “The world of Heroes and Tyrants is different from the world of Citizens and Philosophers, but that doesn’t make your knowledge worthless. There are just some things that reason can’t explain.”

“No.”

Aristotle was a newly minted philosopher again. His pneuma was unmistakably that of a first rank Sophic cultivator. Far lesser than Elena’s, laughable compared to mine, and an entire realm apart from my newly risen brother. In nearly every way that mattered, his cultivation was crippled.

And yet.

All three of us could not help but attend when the father of rhetoric invoked the only principle he had retained. The one marble column left standing inside his soul.

“There is nothing in this life that cannot be explained.”

I fought the urge to bow my head, and as a result saw the exact moment that my brother’s disbelief gave way to mirth. The Hero Anargyros laughed and stood, whirling his driftwood blade.

“Urania says that this is why her sisters despise you,” he said, eyes crinkling. “Trying to tear down all the world’s mystique and wonder. Even if you could, how do you know you’d be satisfied at the end of it?”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“I don’t,” the philosopher admitted freely. He laid his hand on the corpse of the drakaina. “The only thing I know is that I know nothing at all.”

The drakaina vanished.

If I was careful about it, I could fit three jugs of wine and enough food to satisfy me for a week in the pocket of folded logic within my cult attire. Anything more and I risked losing all of it. Aristotle had just tucked a serpent large enough to devour an elephant whole into his rags.

“I’m keeping the scalpel as well,” he declared, and this time even I had to snort at his priorities. “I’ll need it for the dissection. Later. When I’m not surrounded by mouthy children and sanctimonious muses.”

“And if it doesn’t cut when I’m not there?” my brother asked, amused.

“Then I’ll have learned something regardless.”

“Gyro,” I said, wincing as I reached for what was left of my strength. Across the beach, distant enough that the silent monster’s rampaging could hardly be heard over the roar of the whirlpool, Fotios and Dymas along with Damon’s freedman were doing their best to draw the serpent with a woman’s torso to us. Damon was nowhere to be seen. “The work’s not done yet.”

“Take heart, brother,” he told me, gazing knowingly up. “We’re nearly there.”

For the second time that night, lightning lit up a cloudless sky. Elena crouched and raised her shield above her head, and I readied the hunting bird’s breath to disperse what came, but it didn’t hit any of us. It struck the Ionian, piercing through the whirlpool and lancing down through opaque waters.

The roaring inhalation of the monster Charybdis stopped. The island, the entire thing, shook once, twice, three and then four times as something too vast to be described choked beneath the sea. And then it was done.

I followed my brother’s line of sight. “Ah.”

“How spiteful,” Elena whispered.

The whirlpool created by Charybdis’ grand inhalation was wide enough to fit the entirety of Alikos inside of it, and deeper than our eastern mountain range was tall. Without the monster’s grotesque suction to maintain the currents that had drawn the Eos and so many other unfortunate ships in, the Ionian sought to rebalance itself.