[2.12] From the Vine

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

It was a nostalgic feeling, marching outside myself again.

Selene had been right to assume that gravitas would allow me to function within the boundaries of her soul. She had been right, right enough that it made me wonder. What else did she suspect about the captain’s virtue? It wasn’t a connection the average cultivator would make. It wasn’t even a connection the average heroine could be expected to draw between the flashier applications of gravitas and its underlying mechanisms.

It was a nostalgic feeling because I hadn’t shown myself to be capable of it in all the time I had known Selene, or Griffon for that matter. It had been more than three years since my soul last walked outside the boundaries of my body. Three years since Gaius died.

On the surface of it, it was nothing more than a platitude to say that a Captain carried the weight of all the men that served beneath him. Of course the captain didn’t physically march with three thousand men piled up on his shoulders in a mountain of arms, armor, muscle and meat – as much as Griffon might have found that an amusing picture. Yet even so, it was the case that the Captain carried his men with him wherever he went.

I had never been the sort of scholar that would try to break it down to actual ratios, but I knew what I needed to—for every man, every true Roman that served beneath me and swore the sacrament to me as their Captain, I took a portion of their soul with me wherever I went.

It was not a painful schism. In fact, most legionaries never noticed the separation at all—at least, that’s how my adopted father had explained it to me. In hindsight, I wondered if the men of the Fifth Legion had felt it from the very beginning, when they swore themselves to me. Felt that portion of their souls trapped outside of themselves—tethered to an incompetent child, forced to buoy him up, when the opposite should have been the case.

Done right, I knew the process was painless. I had observed it from the soldier’s side of things. At fourteen, Gaius had brought me into the fold of his legions, and until the day he died three years later, a portion of my soul had marched alongside the Tyrant of the West, no matter how far my body strayed from his in the theater of war.

It was one of the most understated uses of the Captain’s virtue, and not by mistake. Gaius had warned me never to speak of it, not even to my fellow officers. I had never truly understood why, until the moment I recruited the new men of the Fifth Legion and held their hearts’ blood in my hands.

In my time as a soldier in his legions, Gaius had been a pillar, an unshakable support for the portion of my soul that marched in his wake. He had been a beacon of light and an impenetrable shroud both, a shield against all but the most devastating spiritual attacks.

It was impractical to the point of foolishness for a captain to carry his troops with him physically every second of every day. But with gravitas, the same didn’t hold true for their souls.

Flexing that old, forgotten muscle and forcing my soul to march while my body hung back took only a moment’s effort. It was strange, doing this without any captain or general to anchor my soul. It felt aimless—dangerous, in a way I couldn’t quite explain. But it was a familiar motion all the same.

“What do you make of it?” Griffon asked in a low voice, kneeling beside me to observe the first of Selene’s pillars. Carefully, he traced a line of chiseled artistry with the tips of his fingers—more carefully than he would have prodded at a lion’s teeth. He frowned.

“Make of what?”

“The pillar. The engraving. The material. All of it. This place makes no sense at all.” His scarlet eyes flickered my way. “Why are you glaring at me?”

I stared flatly, my spirit to his, while my body massaged its temples and tried to block out the boisterous shanty that Griffon’s drunken body was belting out for all the Nile to hear.

Selene had been right about my virtue. She had been right about the Tyrant Riot’s method, too. Unfortunately, intoxication had worked too well. The mermaid ichor hadn’t loosened up the tether that connected Griffon’s soul to his body–it had severed it entirely.

Unless the smug cock was only pretending not to notice the things his body was getting up to while he calmly investigated the Total Eclipse of the Heart. Which was possible. But assuming that wasn’t the case, he had been all but fully severed. The soul was blind to the body, for as long as we resided here within the confines of his sister’s soul.

I sighed and turned back to the pillar.

“It’s nothing. As for this… I haven’t seen anything like it, but that doesn’t mean much. There has to be some thread that connects it all. She didn’t bring us here just to tell us that Greek cultivation makes no sense. There’s a lesson to be learned.”

Griffon muttered some grudging agreement, moving on to the next column. I hung back, observing the first pillar for a few moments longer.

It was chiseled from limestone, tattooed top-to-bottom by carved iconography and what looked for all intents and purposes to be the daily life of a young woman. Mundane little murals covered every handspan of the column’s surface, senseless in their composition, underwhelming in their scenes. The moments depicted were so varied that I struggled, at first, to draw any clear connection between them all.

Here, a young woman picking apples from a tree.There, the same woman running naked across a stadium’s sand pit. Over that way, sitting with an open scroll of papyrus on her lap and a stack of several more beside her. Simple moments, drawn from a simple life. Varied and scattered as they were, they were all roughly the same size, as though the owner had known from the start exactly how many moments she planned to carve into the column. Or, as though they had shrunk to make room each time a new one was added.

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The only portion of the myriad scenes that stood out from the rest was a small string of iconography cutting through the middle of the pillar, wrapping around the full circumference in an unbroken ring. The frame outlining it was a sculptor’s approximation of creeping grapevines.

A circular moment wound its way infinitely around the column.

A young woman tended to a withered vine in the earth.

The wretched little plant was hardly strong enough to breach the surface of the loam. Its leaves were all shriveled, split from its stem—dead before they could truly live—forming a carpet of decay on the earth around it.

A continuation of that scene presented itself further along the ring.

The young woman was on her hands and knees, toiling at the earth. Jugs, pouches, and baskets surrounded her, filled with fertilizing bounties. There were enough agricultural treasures there to nurture an entire field of crops, but she was spending them all on that pitiful little plant.

It looked stronger now than it had in the first frame. Not quite healthy, but visibly recovering. It had grown a bit taller, sprouted a few new leaves, and the bud of a single flower at the end of the vine tickled the young woman’s nose while she worked. Almost like it was reaching out to thank her.

Further along, far enough now that I had to lean right to see it, the young woman swung a heavy axe at the base of a tree. She was surrounded by fallen logs, in the middle of clearing a wide circle in the woods. In the center of that circle was the vine.

The hands that chiseled the column had managed to suggest sunbeams with the finest little lines. The vine was proud and upright now, basking in the light the young woman had cleared for it. Nestled amongst its blooming flowers was a single fruitful nub. Nothing but a promise for now.

I had to move now, circling around the column to observe the next scene in the cycle.