Interlude 1 [Selene]

“Take care, cultivator. Your heart is not your own.”

Selene cast off her golden veil, rising before a broken man. The whisper of shifting cloth and his own ragged breaths were the only sounds to be heard in the temple. Her shawl fell away from her shoulders, revealing an armored breastplate of purest gold. An ornately crafted spear came to her hand, its shaft a bone-white wood inlaid with carved prophecies, and its head a glimmering bronze.

The cultivator’s fine tunic was drenched in sweat, his traveling cloak draped over his hunched body like a funeral shroud. He had attractive features, as most powerful cultivators did, but they were made grotesque by his anguish. His gold was scattered across the floor between them- he’d barely had the strength to dump it out of his purse.

“I beg the Oracle,” he gasped, pupils quivering. “I will pay any price. Just make me whole again.”

In the beginning, when the first man was molded from clay by a titan with no face or name that could be remembered, order was made of chaos. The titans and their children, the gods of Olympus, were the first ordered existence to emerge from the primordial sea. Humanity, then, was made in their image. An imposition of order on the earth mother’s materials.

To cultivate virtue was to make order of a chaotic soul. It was humanity’s long march towards the light of enlightened civilization reflected in a single man’s journey. Cultivators rose on the principles that had built the strongest empires of history, and they fell in just the same way.

Internal strife had toppled more than one great empire. If she did not step in here, it would soon topple another.

“Have hope,” Selene told the cultivator, smiling softly. “You’re not alone anymore.”

She drove her spear through his chest and dove into the sea of his soul.

Virtue was a winding mountain path. A man could walk it in the light of day or the darkest night and never stray from it, and he could just as easily be lost. Or, if he was truly unfortunate, driven off of it. By wind, by rain, or by virtuous beasts. It was an easy thing to lose course in the slightest of degrees. Over time, those minute diversions might not amount to more than a few grains of sand slipping through cupped palms.

But it was a cultivator’s nature to seek greater heights and ascend Olympus Mons. With every ascending step, a cultivator became more of what they were. Their every essence grew exponentially. Those grains of sand became stones, and those stones became boulders. Even the greatest cultivator could only carry so much weight up the divine mountain.

Souls deviated in those small moments. That is how heart demons were born.

The souls of cultivators were said to be grand things, marble cities built by their unwavering souls. A soul plagued by a heart demon, though, was a ruin. Selene stepped into the cultivator’s soul and looked upon a devastated landscape. Broken pillars and crushed marble were all her eyes could see. The parthenon of the cultivator’s heart, the central edifice of his cultivation, had been torn down to its foundation and set aflame. The demon of the cultivator’s heart watched with satisfaction as it burned.

“You,” The cultivator said, suddenly at her side. Here, within the sea of his soul, he stood unhindered by the agonies that had incapacitated him in the waking world. Not for much longer, though. Even now sweat beaded on his brow. His hands faintly tremored.

“Me?” The heart demon echoed, turning away from the vast conflagration. He was a mirror image of the cultivator, save for a scar that ran from the bottom of his square chin to the corner of his right eye. It was a wound that his cultivation had long ago healed externally. Superficially.

“Demon of my heart,” the cultivator seethed. “I’ve come to kill you.”

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“Of course you have.” The heart demon sneered, strolling down the parthenon’s broken steps on light feet. The smoke and miasma of the burning wreckage whirled and coiled into his palm, forming a blade that matched the one in the cultivator’s white-knuckled grip. “It’s what you do, after all. Man, woman, or child. The old men snap their fingers and you go hunting like a dog.”

The cultivator bared blood-stained teeth. “Vile imposter. A man of the cult does what he must. I refuse to accept that any part of me could be as cowardly as you.”

“And we are brave, aren’t we?” the heart demon mused, whirling his dark blade in hand. “These hands of ours built such a fine monument. Any of the free cities would have been proud to lay claim to such a monolith. What a tragedy that it fell so quickly.” He smiled faintly. “The foundations always were weak.”

The cultivator shouted and leapt forward, locking blades with the demon of his heart in the ruin of his soul. Before his deviation he had been a man of wide renown for his martial prowess. It showed in the ferocity of his bladework, the intensity of his pneuma.

But to call it an even fight would have been far too charitable.