[2.22][Myron] Fortuitous Encounters

Myron,

The Little Kyrios

Alone at sea, there was little for Myron and his stowaways to do but fish and tell stories.

Once enough time had passed for Myron to separate his own emotions from the situation, he was able to acknowledge that meeting the Deceiver and his brother had been a moment of unbelievably good fortune. If they hadn’t been there to delay his passage through the breakwater with their would-be banditry, he would have ended up as just another corpse burning beneath the cold Ionian. And more than that, if it had been any other pair of unseemly thieves but them, he would still have no idea what had become of his cousin during his time in Olympia.

It was the sort of thing that Lio would have called a fortuitous encounter. Myron was man enough to admit that, no matter how much the Deceiver grated on his nerves.

And yet, for all that this was an opportunity he needed to grab with both hands, why was it that the more stories they swapped, the less they wanted to listen to each other?

“Stop, stop!” the Deceiver waved his hand in Myron’s face, heterochromic eyes scrunched shut as though he were in pain. “The more you try to clarify, the less that you explain. I can’t tell whether it’s you that makes no sense, or your whole island.”

Normally, this would be the part where his older and more reasonable brother chimed in to chastise him, but even Pyr was grinding his knuckles against his temples, a grimace on his face.

Myron slapped the Deceiver’s hand aside. “I haven’t even told you anything noteworthy yet. These are just the basics!”

“The basics, he says,” the Deceiver muttered. “It must be the island that’s mad. If you were trying to take us for a ride, you would have picked a more plausible story. Unless you knew we would think that…”

“Don’t start,” Pyre groaned.

“My island isn’t weird,” Myron insisted, feeling his ears burning as both of them looked searchingly up at him, visibly trying to decide whether or not he was joking. “It isn’t!”

“Of course it is!”

“How, then? How! If it’s so obvious, put it into words!”

“Where to begin, but with the young master himself?” The Deceiver threw his hands up to the storm-dark sky above. “You claim to be the nephew of Damon Aetos, the eagle that devours emperors, and yet you don’t know a single thing about him! You know less than the average cultivator should know about their kyrios, let alone what the average nephew should know about his uncle—I’m surprised you even know his name! At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t know he swept the Olympic Games.”

Myron focused all of his efforts on maintaining his Lio face, even as that latest uppercut of information struck him squarely in the jaw. Caught up in his own ranting, the Deceiver didn’t notice his reaction.

Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for his brother.

“Truly?” Pyre breathed.

Myron held on to his Lio face for dear life.

The Deceiver stared at him, then at his brother, then back at him.

“You didn’t know?” he said in rising disbelief. “Until this very moment, you didn’t know that Damon Aetos was the last man to sweep the Olympic Games? You didn’t know that your own uncle, the kyrios of your cult, the Tyrant that rules your city—is a Champion?”

“Of course I did,” Myron lied.

Now that the king’s eyes were on him, though, he was seen through all too easily.

“That right there is exactly what I mean. The idea that a Tyrant—any Tyrant, but especially a Tyrant like him—could be a ghost in his own city? It’s nonsensical. A Tyrant’s reputation is everything. It’s the source of their ethos—the basis of their authority!”

The Deceiver visibly struggled to find the right words for his outrage.

“A king needs a crown,” Pyre suggested.

The Deceiver snapped his fingers. “Precisely. Precisely! A king wears his accomplishments like a crown upon his head. His domain is an extension of that ethos—his kingdom. Even just walking down the streets of his city, breathing the air that he allowed you to breathe, you should have been able to feel it. The echo of his Epic.”

“Pyr and I lived in a cave on top of a mountain for—what, six months?” Pyr nodded. “Six months, before the Tyrant Riot died. In all that time we never once ventured outside that cave, yet by the end of it we knew more about the Indigo Throne than you know about your own uncle. It doesn’t make any sense!

“It doesn’t make any sense that the Rosy Dawn, a Cult of Greater Mystery, contains only five Heroic souls that you can name.”

Myron’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”

“Heroic cultivators are a mystery cult’s pride! Even if they never returned home to pay their respects to the kyrios in your lifetime, your seniors should have told you stories of them! Your mentors should have been teaching you the lessons that they were taught, holding them up as examples—glories for you to aspire to.

“I can’t decide what’s more absurd: a Greater Mystery Cult that treats its Heroes like ghosts, or one that has only five Heroes to its name!”

“We have more,” Myron quickly said. He had no idea if that was actually true—maybe if he counted Niko’s wife—and yet, how could they not? “Of course we do. I just… never thought about them.”

“You never thought about them. Of course. Naturally.”

The Deceiver was pacing atop the rail of the ship now, balancing with deceptive grace even as his tone grew more frenetic.

“You didn’t think anything of them, just as you didn’t think anything of the fact that you live on an island that receives no visitors from the West, and yet your eastern port has been empty for months.

“The same way you thought nothing of the fact that there are more holes in your education than a pearl-diving bumpkin’s. It’s understandable, really. After all, it all makes perfect sense when you explain it!

“Why wouldn’t the old failures of your cult be responsible for your education, while your mother and father watch you struggle from the peak of the Heroic Realm? Why wouldn’t the Sand Reckoner build his workshop in the shadow of a mystery cult and refuse to teach its mystikos? Much more sensible that he would ignore you all entirely! Even more understandable that such a man would let you stroll into his workshop unannounced and uninvited! And only to be expected that you’d walk back out with the schematics to a boat you had to build yourself—because your free-city’s primary dock had no fucking ships!”

“What next, Aetos?” the Deceiver rounded on him, wild-eyed. “Next you tell us that Griffon really is just a Philosopher? And perhaps after that—”

Again, it was Pyr that caught him out.

“He is?”

Thus exposed, Myron let his confusion show.

“Of course. What did you think he was?”

His stomach sank when even the Deceiver couldn’t find the words to respond to that.

“What? Are you telling me he pretended he wasn’t? Did he tell you that he was still a Citizen?”

Lio didn’t lie, but Myron had heard more than one story of cultivators hiding the full extent of their refinement while traveling—for their own safety, in a world where violence was ever close at hand, and every advantage mattered.

The Deceiver wavered on the edge of the rail, running a hand through the bright red curls of his hair. Eventually, he began to chuckle.

Myron bristled. “Do I amuse you, little king?”

Rather than take offense, the other boy only dissolved further.

“You do. You really do! Every time I think I have your measure, you say something even more ludicrous than before!”

He resumed his pacing, mismatched eyes distant, and beckoned Myron without looking as he did.

“In fact, go on! Let’s hear the next one. Let’s hear about how the Revenant came to know your cousin, I’m sure that will be an unremarkable story. Tell us how he spent his days in the Rosy Dawn. Was he a ghost just like your uncle? Or maybe he composed poems for the marble beauties of the island.”

“Maybe he spent his days gambling at the docks,” Pyre suggested, with his usual dry humor.

The Deceiver barked a laugh, which soon broke and crumbled into hysterical giggles.

“Of course! Gambling at the empty docks, that sounds about right. And I suppose that’s how Griffon found him! He must have tripped over the Revenant while looking for a ship!”

“It would only make sense,” Pyr agreed. The Deceiver snorted, before rounding on Myron.

“Well? Tell us, Aetos—how close are we?”

They both looked so expectant that, for a moment, Myron hesitated to say anything at all.

“Go on! We must have been on the mark if you’re this reluctant. Let’s hear it!”

“Who is the Revenant?” Myron asked.

Just like that, their mirth vanished like it had never been.

“…The Revenant, Myron,” Pyr said after a long, silent beat. “Griffon’s mentor.”

His mentor?

“The Roman,” Leo said.

Myron blinked. Suddenly everything made sense. And nothing did at all.

“You mean the slave?”

The Deceiver slipped and fell into the sea.

Days passed.

They had no supplies, nothing but the open sea to sustain them, but the fish were plentiful enough and the heavens were kind even in their cruelty. The storms that rocked their—his—ship also wet their throats with an endless supply of crisp rainwater. The waves would kill them long before the thirst did.

Assuming they didn’t kill each other first.

“Enough of barking dogs!” Myron shouted through the storm, angry enough to spit blood.

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His fingers flew across the myriad levers, dials, and switches that the Sand Reckoner’s blueprints had called for but never truly explained. Through manic trial and error, carried out in the midst of crashing waves that rivaled the Scarlet Stadium at their zeniths, Myron had slowly begun to understand their auxiliary purposes. He was still not entirely familiar with them all, and he still had that gnawing feeling there was an element to their design that he was missing entirely—but he would have to make do.

“I don’t want to hear that from you!” the Deceiver screamed right back at him, red-bright hair plastered to his face by the sheeting rain. He was crouched at the front of the ship, gripping the rail for dear life even as he leaned precariously over its edge—jutting out over the waves like the maidenhead that Myron hadn’t had time to carve.

“Dogs! Idiot fucking mongrels, the both of you!”

“Watch your filthy mouth in the presence of royalty!”

“Try to steal my ship. Mock my upbringing. Waste my time,” Myron raged. “And here you are, about as valuable to me in this moment as a sundial and a bucket full of piss.” Lightning flashed overhead, thunder roaring across a curtain of ashen clouds. “No, less! I’d still rather have the sundial!”

“You asked a question and I answered it, you ungrateful little peasant! Thirty degrees starboard!”

Myron spat an oath that would have gotten both his ears boxed if Lydia had been around to hear him say it. Latching three mechanisms into temporary stasis with his left hand, thus freeing up his right, he gripped a lever by his knee with both hands and yanked it sharply back. The ship groaned and lurched right, carving a wide arc across the rising surface of another wave.

“You can’t even keep your own stories straight! To hear you two tell it, Lio and Sol were here and there and nowhere at all, or else they were everywhere at once! Unseen and unknown, yet felt and feared by all! Depending on the night, of course!”