2.6 [Scythas]

Scythas,

The Hurricane Harvester

“Look at what they did to us.”

Jason sighed and turned back to his raft. Lefteris and Kyno stared at Scythas from across the beach, that same wariness to them as there had been in Elissa. Like he’d bleed liquid lead if they cut him. Elissa faced the waves that had claimed her blade, but he knew she was listening.

“Look at us,” Scythas repeated, lifting his head and spearing them with a glare. “The favored champions of the great and terrible Tyrant Riot. The prodigies among the prodigies. We were so great that the Elders clamored for our favor, offered us their wisdom as mentors and their daughters as brides. We were meant to be the exceptions. We were meant to be glorious. And look at what they did to us.”

They tried to avert their eyes in shame and stubborn rage. He wouldn’t let them. Scythas whistled sharply and the wind rose up from the sands and blew their hair back from their eyes, forcing them to lift their faces. He bared his teeth in disbelief and hate and rage, the bulwark of his denial finally crashing down. Giving way to all his sorrows.

“They were children, hardly twenty years of age. At the end they had nothing but their hearts to pit against ours. And they ruined us.”

It was agony to stand, and halfway up he nearly fell again, but Stone-Urania was there to steady him. She slipped into being beneath his arm and propped him up, sharing the stone-silk robes with him so that she wasn’t made fully nude. As blasphemous as the sensation of her stone flesh pressing against his side was, though, he hardly spared it a thought. His attention was drawn instead to her grimacing expression, and to the sound of rolling gravel that her body made when it shifted.

There was a crater in her back, a spiderweb lattice of fractured marble that emanated from a central point between her slender shoulder blades. Scythas stared down at it, aghast.

What happened?

Stone-Urania glanced up at him through bangs of chiseled stone, offering him only a pained smile. His own lingering wound, the ugly black bruise that had persisted despite the hardiness of a Hero’s constitution, throbbed in sympathetic pain. And he remembered.

He remembered the Son of Rome lowering his shoulder and striking him in the gut like a minotaur, a charging bull in the shape of a man, and knocking the wind out of him so that for a brief-but-terrible moment he couldn’t whistle. He remembered falling, twisting, trying to dodge, and seeing only the golden light of scouring flame in Solus’ eyes as he dropped an elbow on his chest.

He’d blacked out briefly at the impact, skewing the moments before and after in his mind, but looking down at the latticework cracks in the stone Muse’s back, he remembered the split second before the meteor hit.

Stone-Urania dove over top of him, her back to the Revenant, and Scythas saw the sculpted terror on her face. Terror for him. And yet, what could a member of heaven’s Chorus possibly have to fear-?

Then darkness.

“What is that?” Lefteris’ hushed question shook Scythas back to reality. He was peering at the stone Muse tucked inside his robes with furrowed brow and flickering flame. Absently, the Gold-String Guardian rubbed at his dented breastplate, directly over his heart.

“Not what,” Kyno said quietly. “Who.”

“I was beginning to wonder if I’d only been seeing things back then, but you did it, didn’t you?” Jason chuckled, stripping another log of its branches with smooth strokes of his hand and lashing it to his raft. “Here I thought Griffon was the mad one, taking sword monuments from the storm like they were his by right. But then you went and stole Urania.”

“Not quite,” Stone-Urania spoke, and Jason fumbled the knot he’d been in the middle of tying. “The truth is, I stole him.”

It was the first time Scythas had heard the Muse speak, out loud rather than directly to his heart. He hadn’t known the stone goddess was capable of it.

Stone-Urania smiled, one arm wrapped around his waist, and reached up with her other hand to pat him on his chest. It was no coincidence that the arm she’d kept tucked against her side was the one that Griffon’s blade had fractured. Still, despite her wounds, she was offering him her strength. It made him feel ashamed. He owed her more than this. Scythas forced himself to stand up straighter, to wrap his own arm around her and hold her steady as she held him. Her smile deepend, and her eyes crinkled at their corners.

The sight overthrew him. When Scythas finally managed to extricate himself from it, he found the sands had shifted, and three Heroic souls had appeared kneeling at his feet. Lefteris, Kyno, and Elissa knelt with their hands pressed flat against their thighs, their heads bowed in reverence. Idly, Scythas realized that Kyno wasn’t almost as tall as him while kneeling anymore. How much had he changed, really?

“Sacred goddess of stars and charters,” Lefteris began, gripping the flesh of his thighs tight enough to break mortal bones.

“Blessed patron of Heroic hearts,” Elissa spoke in turn, the words a hoarse whisper. Scythas had never once heard her speak with such supplication.

“Heavenly Muse Urania,” Kyno finished, looming largest in the center and as always the steadiest of the three. His eyes were ringed by dark shadows, his mountainous shoulders slumped in defeat, but his voice was like an anchor dropped at sea – deep and heavily set. “Though our hearts may be unworthy and our spirits yet infirm, we beg of you your majesty – please, lend us your aid.”

Stone-Urania tilted her head, observing each of them curiously. He couldn’t begin to guess what those stone eyes of hers saw. Distantly, so long ago that it felt like another life entirely, he vaguely recalled a lecture given by one of the Howling Wind Cult’s natural philosophers on the nature of the eye, and how it achieved its vision. Was it some mystical wonder that made it possible for an orb of stone to capture the light like a living eye, some echo of the Muse’s majesty? Or was she observing the world around her through a different sense entirely, and simply mimicking the mannerisms of man to set their minds at ease? Maybe both. Maybe neither. It hardly mattered – a mortal had no business questioning the mechanisms of divinity.

And yet.

Scythas realized… he wanted to know the answer anyway.

A flash of some half-remembered moment, of hungry scarlet eyes and a knowing smirk, made his stomach churn and his heart flame burn brighter in his chest. He banished it and his curiosity both from his thoughts, irritated at himself.

“I’ve seen you three before,” Stone-Urania mused. “My sisters know you well. They brag about you, at times.” When the three Heroes perked up, she smiled apologetically. “Mostly, though, they worry.”

“We will strive to ease the burden of their care in the future, that much to you I swear,” Kyno said, while Lefteris and Elissa nodded shallowly on either side of him. “But if ever there was a time that they worried for our souls, it would be now. Heavenly Urania, sworn sister of saints, we beg you for salvation. Our hearts are not our own.”

The giant huntsman bowed until his forehead brushed the sands. He looked smaller, somehow, without the mantle of his crocodile cloak. Bare.

The statue of Urania hummed. It was an odd sound, melodic and yet grounded.

“We don’t presume to ask you for your favor,” Lefteris spoke up hastily. He started to raise his head but caught himself before he could lock eyes with the goddess, jerking back down to stare at the sands. “We only want our patrons back. We want to feel our hearts beat freely, not…”

“Not what?” Stone Urania gently prompted. Rather than Lefteris, it was Elissa that answered.

“The faker,” the Sword Song hissed, her rage warring with her reverence. “The one that dared to strike your sister, Tragic Melpomene – Damon Aetos’ bastard son. He put his filthy hands on our hearts. He violated us, and even after he fled like a rat across the sea, his touch lingers there still. I can feel it with every beat. Our hearts are trapped inside a cage of his creation. Our Muses are gone. He took them!” Her pneuma lashed out, but only at herself, cutting thin lines across her pale skin that slowly beaded blood.

“I understand your anguish,” Stone Urania said, and Scythas saw the hope built in them like the rising tide. “What would you have me do?”

“Rip his hand away!” Lefteris hurriedly suggested.

“Break every knuckle and bone,” Elissa added with vicious heat.

Kyno clasped his hands together, a quiet plea. “Break our chains and set us free.”

Stone Urania leaned against his side, frowning down at them. As the moments crawled by, their frantic hope gave way to an electric tension, and then a thick and creeping dread. Scythas saw their tight fists tremble in their laps. He saw their jaws clench and the shuttered flames behind their eyes dim.

“I can not.”

“Why!?”

Naturally, Elissa was the first of them to snap.

The Sword Song’s head whipped up, supplication forgotten as she stared up at the statue of the Muse in disbelief.

“Name a price and we’ll pay it! Name a labor and we’ll see it done!” Lefteris blurted, raising his own head as well in desperation. His face twisted, and the next words were horribly strained. “Please. I’ve lost my children. I can’t find them on my own.”

“Why not?” Urania asked him.

For a moment, the Gold-String Guardian could only stare up at her, entirely lost for words.

“Why?” Elissa asked again. And there it was, that heat that Scythas knew all too well. She was furious, and swiftly losing the battle against her wrath. “You know what that man did. You know what his father did before him. If you won’t act for our sakes, then fine, but this man and his maker struck your sisters down. Because of Damon Aetos, Calliope is lost. A ninth of the world’s Heroes left without a patron, the heavens deprived of the leader of their Chorus! And now the son has come and razed Olympia to the ground. Now Lio Aetos has put Melpomene to the sword, and still you won’t lift your hand against his!?”

Stone Urania listened patiently, hearing the Heroine out in her grief and taking no offense to her accusatory tone. However, once the rant had run its course, the Muse said nothing more. Elissa’s expression turned ugly. The scar that cut across the corner of her mouth twisted and warped as she began to say something she would assuredly regret. If not because of Stone Urania’s direct reprisal, then because of Scythas’. He felt his eyes narrow and his pneuma build, greater and more focused than it had ever been before.

Kyno placed a hand over Elissa’s mouth, silencing her. Of the three, he was the only one that hadn’t raised his head when the Heavenly Muse denied them.

“May we ask why you won’t do it?” he asked quietly.

Stone Urania sighed softly. “You’ve misunderstood me. It isn’t that I won’t. I can not.” She shifted the stone silks and removed her hand from Scythas’ chest, reaching out instead for the huntsman’s. “Perhaps it’s better that I show you. Brace yourself, child. This will sting.”

The Muse’s stone fingers pressed briefly against the tan skin of Kyno’s chest, and then slipped inexplicably past the barrier like it was made of water rather than flesh. Kyno shivered, but otherwise remained still as Stone Urania reached deeper into his chest, delicate marble fingers questing for his heart-

There came a sound, like rushing wind and the beating of some great bird’s wings, and Kyno gagged like he’d been stabbed. His eyes flew open wide, and when his lips parted, smoke billowed out of his mouth like it was a forge. Lefteris and Elissa lunged for him, gripping him by the shoulders and heaving him back. The solemn huntsman spasmed and ripped himself away from Stone Urania’s hand with their help, flinching in agony and fear. Thankfully, the marble hand slipped out of his chest as easily as it had slipped in, and the hulking Hero collapsed on his back in the sand, retching and clutching at his broad chest.

Lefteris and Elissa hovered over him, reaching out but hesitating to touch as they searched frantically for a wound. There was nothing, though. Nothing on the outside, at least.

“What was that?” Lefteris breathed.

“What did you do?” Elissa snapped.

Stone Urania held out her hand for all of them to see. The tips of her marble fingers were scorched and blackened.

“He won’t let you go,” she explained somberly. Scythas took her hand in his, brushing carefully at the marks on her fingers. She spared him an affectionate glance before turning back to them.

“I could remove the hand, that much is true, but not without harming the heart. He’d sooner crush it than let it beat unguarded. He’d rather burn it to ash than let it fall into another’s hands.”

Watching that wash over them, Scythas felt his own heart clench in sympathetic pain. First came the disbelief, then denial, and finally despair. It devastated them. Even now, separated from them by the full breadth of the sea, Griffon had laid them low again.

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“This is madness,” Lefteris muttered, clutching his head in his hands. “It makes no sense. It’s absurd.”

“Third rank.” Elissa said. The heat drained out of her, leaving her empty and cold. “A third rank Sophist, and there’s nothing we can do. An arrogant, lying child.”

“You know better than that.”

Stone Urania stared each of them down, her disapproval heavy as a stone.

“Hate them if that is what your hearts desire, but do not turn your eyes away from the truth they plainly see. Be honest with yourselves, acknowledge your failings, but do not sell yourselves short. The forces you contested were not anything so trivial. They were present. They were real. They were a threat then, and they are even more a threat now. If you struggle to understand the nature of their existence, remedy your lack – you mustn’t bury your heads in prayer. It won’t be me or mine that sweeps those two into stark Tartarus.”

“Help us learn from our mistakes,” Scythas entreated her. The stone Muse hummed, considering, and he elaborated. “Everything I’ve ever been taught by a senior or a peer tells me that those two should not exist. It’s not… there is talent, and then there is this. We were wrong about them. We were wrong about them twice. Help us understand it.”

They held their breath while the Heavenly Muse deliberated. Even Jason paused in his work, not looking back but dedicating every bit of his focus to what she would say next.

“It has been so very long since I’ve seen the sun,” she finally said, lifting her chin to regard it. Veiled as it was by the smog and the soot in the air, it wasn’t much to look at. But even so, Stone Urania regarded it with joyful wonder. “Long enough that I don’t have the words to properly describe it. I stopped counting the days so very long ago. It could have been a thousand years. It could have been a million. I suspect I’ll never know for certain.

“In spite of that, humanity remains the same.”

Stone Urania twisted her scorched fingers, tugging at the sky above, and the veil of ash and smog parted like a curtain overhead. Warm, untainted sunlight rained down upon the glassed beaches that had once been home to Olympia’s dock city, bathing them in its comforting glow. Scythas marveled at the simple act along with the rest of his peers, admiring the scope of a goddess’ strength – and then, for the smallest fraction of a moment, he wondered if such an act was truly beyond him. If the Queen of the Amazons could fire an arrow from her bow and turn the evening to night, what was he capable of?

Could he clear the skies too?

“You could,” Stone Urania answered. Scythas flushed, embarrassed and yet strangely pleased. “The acts you see as wonders are well within your reach – now, as then, it has only ever been a question of your own desires. All of you, all of you, are capable of outrageous things. That is your right as human beings.

“But along with that blessing comes a terrible curse. Man’s virtue is limitless in its scope, and the same is true of his vice. You think less of yourselves because you have no idea what is possible, and you have no idea what is possible because you have no proof before your eyes.” The statue leaned in, with the mischievous air of someone telling a secret they had no business sharing, and whispered, “This is why we tell your stories. Not because they please us, though they do, but because your sons and daughters will need to hear them long after you’re gone.”

“You…” Lefteris bit down on the question and forced himself to wait, hanging on her words.

“I,” Stone Urania confirmed, “and my sisters, too. We do what we can to aid the children of man, to help the hallowed Hearth keep their flame alive. Unfortunately, we are not without our limits. Even worse, given time and a lack of new examples to inspire, even the greatest of our stories start to lose their sheen. At some point, the great acts cease to inspire, and instead invite despair. Why was I born in this era, and not the one that came before? Why is the light in the sky so bleak for me, where for them it shone so bright?”