2.5 [Scythas]

Scythas,

The Hurricane Harvester

When Scythas woke, the sun had risen behind a curtain of ash. The Sanctuary City of Olympia had been reduced to an airborne miasma, a sickly yellow film that tainted the morning skies. It reminded him of the extra set of eyelids that some beasts had, thin enough to see through yet thick enough to smear. The film was thin enough to see the sun’s glow through, yet thick enough that he couldn’t feel its heat.

The sand beneath his cheek was still hot, as if it had been baking all day long.

He heard voices on the wind.

Who do you think you are?

Let me go. Let me go! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill your mother, I’ll slaughter your sons! Let me go!

Please. Please. Please.

Three lines for the same act, but each was delivered by a different voice. There were more, every pleading word drilling into his head just a bit deeper. He heard the voices of grizzled men and hard-hearted women, grown adults who had made their choices with open eyes. He heard the wary words of crones and old wise men. He heard children.

For a moment, Scythas was sure he heard his brother.

Not there! Don’t! Please, please! Stop!

Urania, he reached out for the goddess of stars. What is this? Why won’t it stop? For a moment he feared that she’d left him once again, but then he heard her quiet voice.

“These are the final words of the fallen. A burden that the wind chose you to bear.”

I don’t want it. Make it stop, close my ears to it. Please.

The Heavenly Muse had done it before, sparing him his sanity when a line of fire had broken Olympia. This time, though, her mercy never came.

“A hero shouldn’t be so cruel,” said Urania, laying only a comforting hand on the back of his neck. It was colder than ice. “The wind won’t tell any other. Without you, they’ll only waste away.”

Scythas wrestled with their death throes until the breeze waned and ceased, taking their voices with it. He had no idea how much time had passed when he opened his eyes again. The sun was still there, lurking behind the curtain of ash. For all that he knew, it could have been a full day. Belatedly, he took stock of his surroundings.

Olympia’s dock town was gone, claimed by the waves. There was nothing left of it other than that tainted film in the air. Fire wouldn’t have been enough for such a scouring, he knew. There should have been evidence of the cataclysm, burned remains of broken homes at least. But the burning heat of dusk was no mundane fire, and the tyrant Polyzalus was no mundane man. Everything the whip had touched, whether wood or stone or living flesh, had burned until there was nothing left but ash.

All that remained was sand and molten earth, steaming where it met the sea, and mingling with the smoking miasma in the air. If any of the wild beasts had survived, they had long since fled the wreckage.

But that didn’t mean he was alone.

There were four sorry souls trapped there with him, straddling the line between the blue Ionian Sea and Olympia’s smoking corpse. He watched them with dull eyes.

Elissa stalked up and down the beach, lashing out at the air with a jagged little shank that had once been a Heroine’s proud sword, striking out over and over again at an opponent no one but she herself could see. Every few seconds she would jerk away from an invisible blow, only to stumble and flinch away as she took a blow that only she could feel. Every time, her lips would move silently, her hand would tremble and clench around her worthless shank, and she would turn and move back the other way, beginning it all again. Steam rose in thin, steady streams from the corners of her burning eyes.

Kyno sat motionless in the Ionian’s shallow waters, hunched over with his head cradled in both hands while the waves lapped at his bare chest. His crocodile cloak was nowhere to be seen.

Lefteris, surprisingly, wasn’t the worst off of the three. What Scythas could see of him without moving his head was a man possessed by manic purpose. He had eschewed them both to seek out another hero, which struck Scythas as being even odder. Then Scythas realized he didn’t recognize the larger hero that Lefteris was exchanging frantic words with, and lurched up from the sand in alarm.

“Who-?”

The three that he knew froze at the sound of his voice, each of them looking at Scythas with foreign expressions. Not disdainful, as he had grown so used to. Why were they looking at him like that? Who was that man?

The man pulled tight a knot of rope around two fallen tree trunks, looking back from his work and offering Scythas a tired smile.

“How’d you sleep?” Jason asked, taller than he had ever been before. Just a bit larger than life.

Scythas went to push himself to his feet, a thousand questions on his tongue, and promptly fell back on his face.

His limbs were longer than they should have been.

“You…” He grimaced and spat sand.

“Advanced?” Jason asked wryly. “I’m not the only one.”

“You saved us?” Scythas asked instead, and Jason’s faint good humor faded.

Jason scratched his cheek. He had shaved at some point while Scythas was unconscious. Combined with his longer limbs and the new depth of passion carved into his soul, he looked like he had stepped forward through time. Finally, he nodded.

“Then, that means he couldn’t keep you down,” Scythas said, pushing himself carefully back up. He felt like he had been crushed into a ball, compressed and trampled by a herd of wild horses. His silks were gone, replaced by robes of cold liquid stone that could only belong to Urania. They shifted as he rose, revealing an ugly black bruise that emanated from a central point on his collarbone, as though the valley of his throat had been struck by a meteor.

Though he had been to the Underworld once, Scythas had never actually died. He imagined that when the day came that he did, it would feel something like Solus dropping an elbow on his throat.

“You saved us from him,” Scythas clarified. Even though he knew it was hopeless, he allowed himself a moment of blind optimism. “You matched yourself against his-“

High on rising currents and stronger than he’d ever been. Soaring heaven and harvested storms. No burning sea can save you from me.

The lying raven held out an empty hand of broken promises and made of it a bloody fist. He cocked his thumb out.

He turned it down.

[Judgment.]

Heaven and earth, and sea and stars. Everything that he could see. Everything the captain led. Goddesses and heroes alike. All of it, none of it, no one.

They fell.

“-him. You matched yourself against him,” Scythas pressed. “And you won. You must have.”

He had seen the look in Solus’ eyes that final moment before the captain took him to the bottom of the Ionian. There had been no mercy there. The golden light of burning dread, and lightning behind it. Solus would have dragged him down to Tartarus if he hadn’t been interrupted. Scythas was certain of it.

“You beat him,” Scythas said. He can be beaten, he meant.