2.3

Griffon, the Risen Flame

The day I watched my cousin’s golden mother die, a question had taken root in my mind. No matter how completely I’d tried to suppress it, utterly uncaring of my efforts, that uncertainty had remained – festering somewhere in the shadow of the soul that every man feared to shine light upon. Years had passed, and I had met Sol. I’d allowed myself to forget.

Then I’d met Melpomene, the Tragic Poet of the Muses, and she had reached out through the Oracle of Broken Tides to remind me of the question that I had for so many years refused to ask.

A vow sworn with golden intention, yet in the end not upheld – was that a failure, or a lie?

As if you needed someone else to tell you the color of clear skies.

Decrepit old ghost. Get back into your tomb.

No.

I glared irritably at the shimmering ruby gem hanging from my neck. Not for the first time, I cursed my past self for stealing it from the Rosy Dawn’s ancestral pools. Priceless relic that it was, it was far from the only gem in this world that was pleasing to the eye. I could have draped myself head-to-toe in jewelry like a low-class reaver – or worse still, a Persian – and not suffered a single spoken word from the finery. Instead, I had chanced upon the one and only scarlet stone among thousands with a parasite attached.

This barking act demeans you. A lion of my line should roar.

Festering corpse.

Foam of my loins.

My thoughts were under siege, and the flickering remains of the Titan Flame’s golden ichor had yet to find the root of my so-called ancestor’s presence in my mind. Until that leading thread was found, I’d have no choice but to suffer him.

Fortunately, I had no shortage of interesting things to distract me in the meantime.

“Push.” Sol’s voice carried easily over the light crashing of waves, and eleven voices rose up in response to the captain’s command.

“THIRTY-EIGHT!”

Ten newly awoken cultivators and one exalted Heroine pressed against the ship’s deck, straining with all their might against an unseen pressure. Teeth gnashed and muscles bulged. Ever so slowly, they rose.

I pushed myself up in one smooth motion, basking in the familiar burn of overburdened muscles like an old friend’s embrace. How long had it been since I’d enjoyed this simple pleasure? Years and years, and far too long.

“Drop,” Sol demanded, and I lowered myself alongside him until our noses brushed against the wood. The muffled grunts and groans from the crew and my sister were a nostalgic sound, one I had never forgotten but for so long been unable to take part in for myself. We held ourselves there, half a hand from kissing the Eos’ deck, and I relished every breath.

“Push.”

“THIRTY-NINE!”

Past a certain point of physical refinement, a cultivator ceased to feel the burden of their own weight. In many ways this was a boon, allowing for the deft alacrity and thoughtless acrobatics that so dazzled mortals who had yet to start their climb. However, the drawbacks to this weightlessness were keenly felt in the gymnasium. Beyond a certain point, one that I had surpassed early in my life, calisthenics weren’t worth the time.

It was possible to add on to the body’s natural weight, of course, and many did – but it was an imperfect solution at best. It was all too easy to lose track of your body’s ideal balance and overburden one portion of your musculature at the expense of others. Even beyond that concern, there came a point where it simply wasn’t practical to strap a boulder to your back and push.

“Drop.”

I lowered myself once more to the deck, and it was an effort to hold myself steady. The sensation of the Greek captain’s virtue was not like a boulder balanced on my back – it was like a second skin, a coating of oil that pressed down upon every muscle at once and burdened them in perfect proportion to one another. My breaths were steady, my arms flexing without tremors, but I felt sweat beading on my brow.

“Push.”

“FORTY!”

I pushed myself up off the deck, and it felt like I was a child again. I felt my body refine itself in real time, and it was the simplest sort of wonder.

I glanced at Sol through the curtain of hair hanging over my eyes. He’d discarded his breastplate and shrugged the white chiton off his shoulders while he went to work on his new soldiers, and his back glistened with sweat as he pushed himself up beside me. Muscles like coiling iron flexed beneath the Roman’s tan skin, struggling against a weight far heavier than the fraction he’d allowed his men to shoulder while they trained. He’d given Selene and I more, of course, but not the full amount – he’d promised I could try it when we had firm land beneath our feet, and I intended to hold him to that.

Still, though his burden was greater than the rest of ours combined, he watched his soldiers like a hawk. That distant look I’d grown so used to seeing in his eyes was gone as though it had never been, replaced with a focus sharp enough to cut clean through iron. His eyes flickered from man to man, and through the lense of my pneumatic senses I observed his continuous adjustment of their burdens. The instant before a man began to falter, he’d find his burden lightened just enough to keep going. Every time a man grew too comfortable with the pace, he’d blink and find the weight had become just a bit heavier.

Like this, Sol kept each of his men toeing the line of failure without letting them tumble fully over into it. It was a deceptively complex working of his virtue, artful in its way, and I’d praised him for it when I first noticed what exactly it was that he was doing. The Roman had rolled his eyes and otherwise ignored me, but he’d been unable to hide the hint of thrumming pride in his heart.

“Drop.”

“Give me a bit more,” I urged him under my breath. He ignored me. “The ship can take it. She was built to last.” He ignored me still. I blew a lock of hair away from my eye, cocking an eyebrow at him. “Perhaps that isn’t it. Could it be the captain’s worried his good brother will show him up in front of the men? How embarrassing would it be to pass that weight off onto me and see it makes no difference? Perhaps it’s for the best this way-“

Sol snorted, and the weight of another twenty men nearly slammed me through the deck. I braced myself with the limbs of my own pankration intent, hands of rosy pneuma vanishing from the oars of the Eos and appearing beneath my own to act as stable ground. I grunted, teeth gnashing, and matched myself against it.

“Push,” the captain called, the men of the Fifth roaring their effort in turn.

Grinning ferociously, I rose.

———

The men ate ravenously, and they ate well. A common misconception of the crude masses was that cultivators needed less nourishment than an unrefined man, owed to their ability to go days, weeks, and months ascending without eating a meal, depending on their level of advancement. In reality, a Civic cultivator required far more to sustain them than a crude soul. A Philosopher required yet more than that to nourish their ceaselessly wondering mind. A Hero needed more still to nourish their passionately burning heart. And a Tyrant…

A Tyrant’s hunger was never truly satiated.

Why was it, then, that cultivators were not seen gorging themselves at every opportunity? The short answer was that we were. Just not in a way that an unrefined soul – or even a newly awoken cultivator – could understand. We feasted every moment of our lives, endlessly hungering for more even in the moments that our souls were so overfull we wanted to retch. It was our lowest nature, the one we shared with every beast on this earth.

Naturally, we ate food as well. When the demands of our hunger outstripped our means, we had only two choices. Devour, or starve.

The Eos’ crew, the ragged sea dogs that Sol had commandeered as men of his Fifth Legion, tore through their stores of salted meats and wine in a single day. They had each worked hard, as diligent as they were clumsy, to meet their new captain’s demands. Sol was being gentle with them to start – too gentle, a searing voice inside my soul insisted – but it was still worse than any of the work they’d done as slaves. They ate desperately when they could, and slept like the dead when Sol eventually called an end to the first day of their training. When they overturned the last of their jugs the next morning and found them empty, I saw the men of the Fifth fall fully into panic.

Sol waited patiently in the middle of the ship’s deck, back straight and arms crossed while he stared up at the cloud-darkened skies. I sat behind him, on the opposite side of the ship’s mast, my legs crossed and the lead-stained silks of my station pooling around me as I went about my steady work. Neither of us had slept the night before, of course. After what we’d seen and done, I wasn’t sure we’d ever sleep again.

So dramatic.

On the other hand, a night’s rest might be exactly what I needed. Perhaps my mind would be free of buzzing flies when I awoke.

Or perhaps I’ll make use of your body in your mind’s absence.

I paused in my work and looked narrowly at the man looming behind me, his body shifting like smoke where it overlapped with the wooden beam of the ship’s mast. Throughout all his heckling and all my movement around the ship since he’d first announced himself, I’d still yet to see his face. No matter which way I moved or how swiftly, he was always there just behind me when I turned to look, his back to mine and his arm propped indolently upon my head.

My so-called ancestor chuckled. It was a low and ominous sound.

Forgive me, child, at times I forget my age. I’ll explain. In my time, this process was known as gag-šu.

The last word was utterly foreign to my ear, and that was enough to warrant my full attention.

Gag-šu. What could such a word mean in this context? I’ll make use of your body in your mind’s absence. I turned the linguistics of it over in my mind, gnawing at it while I scoured my memories of past lessons for derivative words from younger languages. Possession? Usurpation? A curse, some nascent corruption? Or-

A joke.

I spat on the ghost’s ephemeral golden sandals and banished his laughter from my thoughts.

Sol was looking back at me, an eyebrow raised. I waved him off and returned to my work. Before he could comment on my behavior, the first of his men made their hunger known.

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“Captain! We’re out of-”

“Kall,” Sol sharply interrupted the man, and Kall froze. A beat passed as the new man of the Fifth visibly forced aside his panic and searched his memories for what he’d done wrong. Then his hunched back straightened, his filthy bare feet came together, and he thumped a fist to his chest.

“Captain!”

Sol nodded. “Go on.”

“We’re out of food, sir!”

“By whose measure?”