1.91 [An Unkindness]

An Unkindness

“You don’t know,” the raven known as Solus said dully. He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Socrates, the Scholar himself, hadn’t had an immediate answer for him. Why should this faceless man? There were even odds that there was no man at all, just a figment of his deceptive imagination, but even if there was a man in the business of handing out golden cups of wine, who was to say he’d also be handing out the secrets to Greek cultivation?

The raven had used up all his good fortune early in life. From here on, it would be struggle. Going forward, he knew he couldn’t hope to be given what he desired – what he needed. He would have to take it.

“Are you a Greek at all?” he asked. The raven had assumed that whatever he encountered in this place would be cut from the same cloth as the cult whose rites sent him here, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Aristotle had warned him that true answers to ill-formed questions were at times more detrimental than lies. The Gadfly had hammered into him the practice of asking until the proper question was found.

“I am a son of raging heaven.”

Thunder rumbled in the shadowed grove.

“How did you come to be the man you are today?”

Try, and try again. Until the proper question was found.

“I was born. I’ve lived. Soon enough, I’ll die.”

Another. Substance could be found even in the vagueries of Greek thinkers. As a young man, the raven had scoffed and turned his nose up at the barbarians accepted into his father’s legion when they had leveled that sentiment towards Rome. These days, he empathized with them just a bit. To a Gaul, a Roman’s diction might have seemed nearly as frivolous as a Greek’s was to a Roman. That did not mean they had nothing to say that was worth hearing, though.

“You inherited your strength?”

“What strength?” the man asked, amused. “What have I done that seems strong to you? Offered you a drink and called you greedy?”

The raven considered the words carefully before he spoke them. “The further a man advances, the more he becomes.”

“More of what?”

“Himself. Everything. He becomes greater and more terrible, in a way that can be felt by the world around him. By the Greek standard, a Civic cultivator could stand out in a crowd of a hundred crude souls. A Sophic cultivator could bend the minds of a hundred Citizens. A Heroic cultivator could blind a hundred Philosophers. And a Tyrant could take a hundred Heroes into their hand.”

“And? What comes next?” the man behind pressed him, expectant in the way a parent was expectant of their adolescent child. Amused, knowing they wouldn’t get a proper answer, but willing to be pleasantly surprised. “Who stands above a hundred Tyrants?”

“I don’t know,” the raven named Solus murmured. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

The man laughed delightedly. The heat on the raven’s back grew hotter.

“You’re making an outrageous assumption, greedy raven. Can you justify it?”

“To a Citizen, a Philosopher is a profound existence,” the raven explained himself, cognizant of the unspoken threat and the fact that his fellow scavenger still hadn’t moved or contributed a word to the conversation. “To a Philosopher, a Hero’s presence is an overwhelming glory. To a Hero, a Tyrant’s focus is an unspeakably heavy burden. The gap between a single realm is substantial enough. If the contrast is greater than that?”

The divide between an unrefined Greek and a newly ascended Philosopher was stark enough for a crude fisherman to offer the bounty of his full day’s work in exchange for a pithy word of advice from a Sophic cultivator. I had experienced for myself the overwhelming pressure of a Tyrant’s unrestrained focus when Damon Aetos had rendered judgment on me the day I arrived in his city. Even shackled and chained, deaf and blind to pneuma, I had felt that weight as a physical thing.

“I am a Philosopher of the first rank,” the raven continued. “I have weathered the ire of barbarian kings and cruel kyrioi, met their disdainful glares with my own and shrugged their notice off my shoulders. But I can’t bring myself to look back while you’re sitting there behind me. Being this close to you burns.”

Whatever it was that sat behind the raven from Rome, it wasn’t a Tyrant.

“True statements,” the man admitted, “But not one of them is proof. If you’re going to make that sort of assumption, you need to prove it. You still haven’t done it.”

He still wasn’t asking the right question.

The raven closed his eyes.

“What is the first virtue?”

The man hummed. In amusement, he answered.

“Fortitude.”

Searing light washed away the shadows of the forest grove, golden rays piercing through the raven’s veil like spearheads and prying into the seams of his eyelids. The raven’s midnight mantle went up in flames, the smell of his own burning hair filling his nostrils. He couldn’t breathe, so he held his breath and throttled the instinctive urge to choke and gag. The raven from Rome burned. He forced himself to bear it.

Forced himself to ask the proper question.

“And what,” he rasped, “is fortitude?”

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“Courage, always. Courage then, courage now, and courage every day thereafter.” With every word, the heat burned more unbearably and the light grew ever brighter. The man didn’t raise his voice because he didn’t have to. Baring the virtue of his soul was enough. Pulling back the veil was already more than the raven’s mortal frame could take. “When all the stars have fallen from the sky, when every father has been buried by their daughter and every son has returned to their mother, fortitude is the virtue of that which remains. Fortitude is that which endures, even when the world is bleak and cold.

“I am that which endures,” he clarified, and the raven hunched in on himself as the fire rose again. He wrapped his burning cloak around himself and tucked his face into his crossed arms. It wasn’t enough to escape the heat. “I am courage in the face of future tragedy. I am the timeless acknowledgement of life’s cruelty and the enjoyment of it in spite. I am fortitude. I am a promise.”

“A promise of what?” The raven couldn’t hear his own voice over the roaring of his own blood in his ears. Fortunately, the man behind him could.

“That no matter how many times I fall, I will rise again tomorrow.”

The sensation of flesh burning and blood boiling in its veins flickered and vanished like a snuffed candle. The raven tensed as the man behind laid a bracing hand on his back. Cool serenity flooded his body from that point of contact, scorched flesh and half-cooked organs mending themselves as quickly as they’d been harmed. The taste of burnt blood faded from his tongue. The stench of his own burning body cleared out of his nostrils. Even still, the raven did not relax until the hand withdrew.

“Some things can’t be inherited,” the man informed him, not unkindly. “Some things can only be taken.”

“How?” the raven asked, though he knew it was the wrong question. He shook his head, frustrated with himself more than any Greek. Beside him, the raven known as Griffon continued to stare sightlessly ahead. His lips were moving, murmuring in a low voice, but the raven couldn’t hear the words. He was uninjured and unphased.

Was it proof that the raven from Rome was the one that had received the ivory cup of lies? Maybe. Was it a quirk of nature, a scarlet son’s immunity to grasping hands of flame? How was he to tell? He had no idea. He had nothing at all. Only his intuition, and a lyre made of ivory lies.