Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.132

The Son of Rome

The first instant nearly killed us.

Polyzalus was the Rein-Holder, and he had proven that epithet well-earned when Dymas confronted him. Unspoken, yet plainly implied, was the fact that a charioteer only needed one hand to hold his reins. The other hand carried his whip.

Stripped of half his dominion and challenged in his own throne of power, the Tyrant still moved faster than any of his peers. I didn’t need to look back to feel the dread heat of his rising hatred. I could feel it on my back and in my tripartite soul, a burning brand that marked us all for death.

I called upon Gravitas for the second time that day, slapping us out of the sky as the Rein-Holder’s first whip cracked. I heard Selene gasp behind us as the captain’s virtue knocked the wind out of her. For her, that was the extent of it. For Griffon and I, my virtue flung us at a diagonal as it had Selene, and then it slammed us straight down as the Fifth’s displeasure made itself known.

The burning whip struck the city of Olympia and cut deep, drawing a molten line through the city that carried on into the horizon further than my eyes could see. The proximity heat and the blow back alone would have turned our bones to shrapnel and pulped our insides if not for our refinement. I knew immediately that we were not the only ones marked by its passing. How many had been fragile citizens? How many hadn’t been cultivators at all?

In less than a second, the First Son to Burn had killed hundreds of Olympia’s denizens. Perhaps thousands. All for a parting shot that he hadn’t even made the effort to properly aim. The reason for that was obvious enough - we survived that first strike only because he was already turning from us as he cast it out. The rest of his focus and his strength had been reserved for his peers.

Griffon and I plummeted straight down into the outskirts of Olympia, Selene soared over our heads, and the elders of the Raging Heaven Cult attacked as one.

Or at least, attacked at the same time.

I had spoken to four Tyrants in their mountain kingdoms during my stint as the Raven. From those encounters, and from my subsequent visits, I had gleaned the surface level implications of their power. Surprisingly enough, those direct encounters hadn’t been the only opportunities I’d had to gather information on them. Day in and day out, I had been hounded by lesser initiates of the Raging Heaven Cult’s various factions, and I had discovered something that I should have known already from my time in the legions.

Whether it was a commanding officer or an ancient king, subordinates loved to gossip. They bragged to me about their own elders, seeking to gain my favor on their behalf, and they disparaged the elders of every other faction towards that same end. They talked and talked and kept on talking, as was the way of Greeks - and patricians, if I was being honest with myself. Similarly, most of their words amounted to nothing in the end. But not all.

Each of the eight Tyrants acted faster than I could ever hope to track, levying techniques whose origins were as incomprehensible to me as the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god. Despite that, when things went awry at the moment of their joining, I had some idea as to why.

Their own words and simple common sense would have led anyone to believe the first strike would be seven against one. In reality, the alliance broke down the moment it was formed.

Drakon of the Broken Tide was a monstrous man, ancient even by the standards of his peers, and the members of the Broken Tide Cult had boasted more than once that Tyrants cultivated in pursuit of standards that he had set over half a millennia ago. The man known to his citizens as both Judge and Jury had sworn to me on the River Styx that he would stand against Polyzalus, if and when the time came. His first act just barely stayed true to that vow.

The grim lawmaker immediately sought to expand his domain, casting out a framework of imposed rule that echoed Socrates’ gossamer web of rhetoric, but writ far larger. The act threatened Polyzalus, to be sure, but it threatened the other six just as much. Everything caught inside his framework suffered a portion of what every citizen suffered within a Tyrant’s domain - the loss of their own soul’s agency.

Somehow, by means I still didn’t understand, Drakon could do this without challenging another Tyrant’s domain directly. He could bind them without fear of retribution, because for some reason they had no voice in the discussion. It was obvious enough why any Tyrant would be named Judge, but this ability was why the Broken Tide’s elder was called the Jury.

I hadn’t received an offer to enter the domain of the Brazen Aegis’ elder, but I had heard enough to understand why Solon pivoted before the first whip had cracked and locked horns with the Coast’s old Judge and Jury. The specifics of their clash were entirely lost on me - you lack context - but the effect was clear enough. Drakon’s framework lurched in place, ebbing and flowing like the tides, but never quite managing to fully encompass the mountain.

Midas and Ptolemy moved in accordance to their word, and each of them warped the world around them in their passing. The king of Alabaster Isles turned everything he touched to gold, including the dread essence of his rivals. Polyzalus met him with dozens of the same whips that had carved a trench in the world from horizon-to-horizon, and each of them turned to molten gold as they struck the king, melting to his skin in accordance with his will and forming armor that thrummed with Polyzalus’ stolen strength.

Ptolemy’s domain was something I still couldn’t intuitively grasp. Ptolemy the Savior was a Macedonian born and raised, and had ruled in Egypt when the Conqueror cast him off. He was as foreign to the Greeks as the Greeks were to me, and so all that I could understand of the glimpse my senses gave me was the fact that his hollow domain consumed everything it touched. Polyzalus cast hundreds of whips into his face, and in their hundreds they vanished without a trace.

Had that been the extent of it, the clash may have been decided then and there. Unfortunately, the moment the two kings had turned their backs, the king of the Spartans and the queen of the Amazons attacked their supposed allies without hesitation.

The Savior’s hollow domain unmade the Spartan king’s spear the moment it touched his skin, but Leonidas of Infernal Frenzies only roared and willed three hundred rust-bitten spears into that same empty space. Ptolemy’s bizarre domain ate those too, but it couldn’t get through them all before Leonidas ran him through.

Simultaneously, Thalestris of the Blind Maiden Cult loomed large in her domain and levied a bow the size of a ship at Midas’ back. She closed her eyes as she drew its colossal string back, and from her living flesh a near perfect copy of the queen rose, shining silver-bright and carrying a bow of her own. The copy aimed an arrow of pure onyx straight up.

Both visions of the Amazon queen loosed their arrows simultaneously. One struck Midas in the back and erupted as a golden arrowhead out through his chest. The other flew with no apparent target into the skies above.

The silver-bright queen’s arrow found its mark and the setting sun vanished, plunging the city of Olympia into starry night.

Distracted by treachery and forced aside, the task of Polyzalus’ execution fell to the first bitter king to join my alliance. The king of seers leapt entirely from his domain and dropped a screaming hurricane on Polyzalus’ head. Alone thought he was against the First Son to Burn, it still would have ended there. Selene’s father was weakened, his attention had been split between his enemies, and Aleuas Pyrrhos struck him with the full might of his concentrated rage at my betrayal and his hatred for his rivals. It was enough, just barely.

“Why?”

Or it would have been, had the Gadfly not tripped him up.

I crashed through the sloped stone roof of an art house, and the rest of the opening exchange was lost to me while I tumbled.

I tore myself free of a weaver's half-made tapestry while shockwaves rocked Kaukoso Mons above, casting around for Griffon and finding him in a similar state of entanglement. I ripped away threads that he could have burnt to ashes with casual effort, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him roughly.

“Griffon. Griffon! You have to move.” If he heard me at all, I couldn’t see it in his eyes. They were glassy and unfocused. He stared at his bloody hands and the knife they were holding like they belonged to someone else entirely. I slapped him hard across the cheek and it did nothing but make his right ear bleed.

Seconds after our landing, Selene descended a stone’s throw further down the street. She was calling out for us as she fell, desperate and at her limit in more ways than one. I caught her in the middle of my stride, tucking her under my left arm while she choked and caught her breath.

I spoke before she could demand an answer I didn’t have to give her. Where are we going?What are we going to do?How can this be salvaged? There was nothing I could say to those.

No answers, and not a single moment to find one.

“Take him,” I told her. She reeled, and I cursed every second lost while she gathered herself.

“Take-?” Her eyes flickered, and her expression twisted when she caught sight of Griffon on my other side. Given hours and Orpheus’ own guidance, I couldn’t have identified half the emotions in her heart then, let alone untangled them from one another.

“Why?” She finally asked after entirely too long. “Did he break something?”

“He’s in shock.” The arm that Selene was not tucked under held Griffon up as best as I could while running at full speed through an erupting warzone. I wasn’t dragging his full weight, but I wasn’t far from it either. His legs worked listlessly, moving on pure physical instinct and stumbling as often as not.

“Help me,” I entreated the daughter of the late Scarlet Oracle - the girl whose mother I had just helped take away. The taste of bile and the Fifth’s phantom scorn momentarily overwhelmed the oppressive smoke in the air. I forced it back down into its depths. “Please.”

Selene’s heart flames flickered between Griffon and I, steam from vaporized tears trailing in her wake. She clenched her eyes shut, shuttering the light, and inhaled a trembling breath. What came over her then was as profound as any oracle’s majesty. For a girl of only sixteen years, maybe more so.

“Very well,” she whispered. Her eyes opened, and her scarlet glare burned with her heart’s resolve.

I heaved both of them forward as hard as I could. Selene twisted with a dancer’s grace and slipped underneath Griffon’s arm, slinging it across her shoulders like a yoke and steadying him with one hand on his wrist and the other around his waist. When their feet touched the road she took off without missing a beat, carrying forward the momentum of my toss into a swift run.

Thus unburdened, I surged past them and pulled my celestial spear from my shadow. There was no time to convey my gratitude properly. No time to do anything at all but seek safer shores.

“Follow me,” I told her, Prometheus’ golden ichor pounding a steady drum beat against my channels. “I’ll clear a path forward.”

Some things were easier said than done. Others couldn’t be done at all. I gripped my bronze armament tight and forced that thought aside. I had no room for it.

The Sanctuary City of Olympia had been battered and bruised the night Griffon and I fled the Rosy Dawn, wounded on the surface and also deep within its heart by the passing of the Tyrant Riot. Mastercraft architects and the tireless efforts of thousands had mended the surface level damage in the months that followed, rebuilding homes and repairing broken roads at close to a legion’s pace. Unfortunately, their restoration had only ever been skin deep. The rot within the heart had been left to fester and spread, more disastrous by far, and now it unmade all their efforts.

We fled as fast as we could, but it wasn’t nearly fast enough to outpace the cataclysm of eight Tyrants clashing. Towering architectural monuments flew apart like they’d been struck by a giant’s hammer, man-made rivers and fountain pools boiled over like neglected cooking pots, and the very earth heaved and lurched like some horrible serpent was writhing just underneath the city. Every construct of flesh and blood that wasn’t already a corpse screamed and begged for salvation not forthcoming - men, women, children, and even the livestock and pets. None were spared.

I struck the flying shrapnel from the air with my spear and rushed through heaving streets like a sailor lost at sea. All the while, my mind raced out ahead of me.

Each option was bleaker than the one that came before it. Turn back, fight to topple them all, and die. Turn back, fight to preserve my alliance, and die. Turn back to save Socrates. Turn back to save our companions. Turn back to save the innocents on the mountain. Fight. Die.

With the setting sun shot out of the sky, and the city’s hearths scattered or buried beneath the rubble of blasted out homes, the greatest sources of light besides the stars were the echoes of warring Tyrants. Lights of myriad color and intensity flared behind us without end, byproducts of elders sinking fang and claw into one another with an intensity not meant for mortal frames. The molten scar left behind by Polyzalus’ first whip crack glowed a sullen blood-orange, throwing off light and sulfurous heat while it grew steadily wider, steadily consuming everything in its close proximity. The last and greatest source of light, of course, came from the Heroes.

I heard Selene gasp behind me as lightning briefly lit up the night sky. It fell without warning, thunder, or passing clouds, descending not from the mountain’s storm crown but from the clear skies over the Olympic stadium. Lights like hundreds of blazing torches shone through the gaps in the spiraling tiers of statue columns that made up the Olympic Stadium’s outer walls. Those lights were soon joined by the physical sensation of glory and the rising volume of a heavenly chorus.

Lightning struck again, three times in quick succession. Then, only moments later, five more times in a tighter grouping. The light reached higher with every bleak bolt, and each time the heavenly chorus gained more voices. Heroic cultivators that had gathered in the hundreds to compete for the title of Champion ascended one by one in response to the madness, and for a moment I felt hope.

But only for a moment. The Olympic stadium loomed large ahead of us, growing larger as we sprinted towards it. The closer we got the more confused I became. The lightning didn’t lie, and neither did the chorus - the athletes in the stadium were advancing, just as the Butcher had advanced. Yet I saw no Heroes flinging themselves up to Kaukoso Mons in opposition to cruel reality. Through the gaps in the stadium walls, I only saw…

Each other? Selene mouthed in silent disbelief as I pivoted on my heel and sprinted away from the stadium.

I hadn’t seen any Heroes leaving the stadium because I had been looking up. There were plenty leaving, sure enough, but they weren’t taking the fight to the Tyrants above. They spilled out of the stadium like bees from a kicked hive, powerful pneuma radiating from their souls as they took off in every direction. Some rode on the backs of virtuous beasts, some tapped into movement techniques or camouflage and vanished from my senses, and more still simply ran at breakneck speed. As they left, lightning continued to strike inside of the stadium.

For reasons that I suspected but hoped I was wrong about, the chain-breakers and monster-slayers remaining in the Olympic Stadium had turned on one another. They were tearing each other apart, and the victors were advancing in their multitudes - only to then be torn down by the next competitor in line.

Some of the cultivators running away may have been taking the fight to the Tyrants on Kaukoso Mons. Some of the cultivators fighting in the pit may have stayed behind to protect their peers from the predation of would-be gladiators. I didn’t wait to find out.

Turn back to the mountain, fight, and die. Carry on to the stadium, fight, and die. Flee east, flee north, flee south. Fight. Fight. Fight.

Die.

Die.

“Die a captain’s death!”

There was no path forward. My mind raced in search of something, anything that could light our way, but all it found was salt and ash. In place of paths forward, I found a thousand-thousand golden roads fanning out behind me.

Every hollowed out home, every crumpled up corpse, every shining light of a Hero’s misused glory - each of them was a path I could have taken. Each miserable tragedy and all of the city’s most contemptible cowards were elements that I could have taken into account. They were strengths that I could have made my own, or weaknesses that I could have cut away before the final hour. My treacherous mind seized upon everything I saw and thought back instead of forward, building brick by golden brick a thousand-thousand ways that I could have done this right. Paths that a greater man - Caesar - would have marched down without hesitation, paths that a wiser man - Aristotle - would have navigated around to avert this calamity entirely. It did me no good at all. All of it useless, wasted effort.

A grand stoa buckled just up ahead, like an overburdened spine, and caved in on itself entirely as another Tyrant’s strike rocked the earth beneath us. The stone statuary decorating its roof tumbled and fell away like so many stone soldiers. One of them, a man in hoplite armor with a helmet but no face, was in pieces before it hit the ground. The rod it had been holding spun through the air and sank tip-first into the garden lawn surrounding the building.

I blinked and stared through smoke and miasma heat at the standard perched proudly atop it. The iron eagle’s wings were spread wide, as if it was about to take flight. Its head was turned to the side, its talons curled tight around a laurel wreath. The eagle standard of Rome stared balefully back at me while the city fell to ruin all around it. While my city fell. While Rome…

I ripped the rod out of the dirt as I passed it by, smashing it against the fractured steps leading up to the stoa. The standard at the end of the rod, not an eagle forged from iron but a raven chiseled from marble, shattered to pieces.

I scoured my mind clean. There was no path forward, fine. What then?

Turn back. Fight. Die-

I took the second impulse in hand, tracing its startling intensity back to the source. Of course I wanted to turn back. Of course I wanted to atone. But both of those impulses were easily overruled by my duty to Rome’s lost legions. Why, then, when I knew I couldn’t turn back and die, was I still itching for the fight?

I found the answer and the way forward both in the same place, deep within. Pushed to the back of my awareness this entire time while I focused on more important things, Prometheus’ ichor hadn’t dwindled away. It hadn’t even stagnated. Not content to sit idly by, it had grown, cycling through my body alongside my blood and filling every spoke of the wheel carved into my body by starlight marrow and Orphic rites. It had grown hotter, and it hadn’t stopped. Now that I gave it my full attention, I felt it calling out for blood.

Fight. Fight. FIGHT.

I knew what was waiting for me on Kaukoso Mons. I knew that I couldn’t turn back now, I knew that I couldn’t afford to die today, and it didn’t matter.I wanted to turn back anyway, to fight anyway - because despite everything I had seen, I knew that I could win. Reason told me otherwise. It didn’t matter. My gut, the animal instinct that informed every creature, told me I was prey to the predators warring on the mountain. It didn’t matter. Lived experience and the words of every mentor I’d ever had told me I would surely die if I turned back now, and it did not matter.

I could fight. I could win.

If I could live through this, I could do anything.

I crushed that voice to death and banished it from my mind. A veil I hadn’t noticed until it was too obvious to miss, like stage curtains catching flame, was lifted from my thoughts. I formed a shield wall at once around my senses and turned my focus inward as the Titan’s golden lifeblood pounded at the barrier.

In the distance far behind us, the despoiled queen of the Amazons shouted a word of wrath and dread power, followed by a sound that I imagined a loosed bow string might have made if it was composed of metal cords and drawn back by a giant. The Gadfly’s gossamer web of whisper-thin rhetoric bulged, the Rein-Holder cracked his ten thousand whips, and the attack was deflected. The arrow implied by the noise struck the eastern market district closest to Olympia’s agora and exploded.

Selene’s alarmed cry and the sensation of being flung off my feet by the shockwave were distant things. My body rolled and surged back into a sprint without pause, while my mind focused on the immediate threat.

Golden ichor raged inside my body, so hot now that my breath steamed like I was back in Thracia’s winter countryside rather than a burning city. It clawed at the shield wall I had formed around my sanity, and when it couldn’t get through the soldiers it shouted over their heads. It promised me I could win. It promised me I could do anything, so long as I committed everything to the act.

It told me I was invincible.

“Even their gifts are a pox upon your souls.”

The Thief of Flame was humanity’s oldest and most stalwart defender. Even so, he was a Titan. His actions didn’t make him less of what he was - only more. Traitor or not, he remained an agent of the heavens.

“Heaven is cruel even to those that it wishes well.”

He had warned us.

I couldn’t afford to be this ignorant. All the gold in Egypt’s coffers wouldn’t be enough to afford me such a luxury. I lacked context for everything that mattered, and I’d let another city burn because of it. Rome was already a debt I could have worked a thousand lifetimes and never been able to repay. Olympia would bury me.

“It ends,” I growled, echoed by three thousand.

I took the Titan’s ichor in hand again, holding it tight when it tried to overtake me, and ordered it to go elsewhere. It did more than acquiesce. It leapt to my command, obeying me like an eager hound, and thus revealed the first and most obvious of its qualities.

It wasn’t that it wanted to subvert me - in fact, it wanted to serve my purposes, to meld itself to the shape of my will as Prometheus’ influence had when he’d rebalanced us. The issue lay with me. Something I had done, or more likely something I had not done. The golden ichor had been left to its own devices while Griffon and I raced down the mountain to deliver our nectar, and it had taken steps to rectify that.

The finer mechanisms of cultivation had always been a secondary concern to me, even from a young age. As an arrogant young patrician, later as a boy playing soldier in the legion camps, and finally as a captain of the Fifth - I had always been of the mind that strength would follow if I simply acted as I should. Even after the destruction of my world, as a foreigner in a land full of Greek oddities, I had fallen back into that state of mind without conscious thought.

I’d been reassured I had the right of it by the apparent frivolities of Greek ascension, the neverending confluence of rise and fall based entirely upon aesthetic and heaven’s whimsy. My half-hearted lessons with the Gadfly hadn’t been enough to outweigh that, not even close. Then, in Thracia, I’d had my way of thinking confirmed by divinity itself.

“Live your life, brother. That’s all any of us have to do.”

Would that I had remembered I was talking to a corpse.

I bid the ichor to show me what it had done to my body, and it presented its work with relish. I left no stone unturned and nothing implied. I sifted through the muck in search of golden insight, noting every change along the way.

All of my senses had been sharpened, up to and including the perceptions of a Civic and Sophic cultivator. The distance at which I could discern a third rank Philosopher from a fourth rank Philosopher had more than tripled. Even now I could feel its range expanding. As I was at this moment, I might have even been able to perceive the Heroic cultivators that had been watching Griffon and I from afar while we raced down the mountain. Maybe.

I looked to my right, focusing on a distant tree burning wanly as the Rein-Holder’s molten scar rolled over its roots. It was far enough away that I could only just make out the tree’s individual branches. I counted the seconds as I ran parallel to it. One. Two. Three.

My vision sharpened incrementally with every beat of my heart. Each beat took in gold ichor, refined it, and circulated it through my body hotter and brighter than before. After seven seconds, I could count every curling leaf on that distant burning tree. Five seconds after that, I could count the veins in one of its leaves as it fell.

I felt sturdier, less liable to buckle beneath the weight heaped upon my shoulders. That was as far as I had taken the observation before. Now I dove deeper. I observed the contraction of my muscles and the strength of their fibers as I sprinted and struck out with my spear to clear the way. My load-bearing strength had increased to the point where my every waking motion no longer felt like I had someone at the other end applying twice my force against me. As the seconds passed, I was starting to feel light.

There was more to it than that, I realized. My slow, enduring strength had risen, but so too had my snap reactions. I had missed it before, attributing the sharper reflexes to the comparatively lighter load I was carrying, but the difference was four fold. I had just regained my prior agility from before our trip to Thracia. I had outstripped it entirely while maintaining the new burden of my weight. When I threw a punch, it hit four times harder than it would have yesterday. If this growth continued, it wouldn’t be long before I could throw a punch another four times stronger than that.

From the pallor of my skin to the rigidity of the nails on my fingers and toes, I took nothing for granted. I brought all of it to the forefront of my awareness, then went a step further and separated out the improvements that had come from the titan’s direct rebalancing. Only then, once I had assembled the full mosaic, did I act upon it.

I called upon the ichor, all of the ichor, and it rushed to fulfill my desire. Peripherally, I watched all the portions of my body and soul affected by the Titan’s lifeblood suddenly stagnate in their growth. All of them stopped and settled into equilibrium except for the one that I had funneled the ichor entirely towards.

My heart beat once. My cultivator sense exploded outward, doubling its range instantaneously. My heart beat twice. The range of my perception grew by the same amount again - no, it should have, but for some reason… No, it had. I tracked a cultivator tunneling deep beneath the earth and away from the Raging Heaven Cult, someone that I hadn’t been able to sense a heartbeat prior. It wasn’t that the range had increased by a smaller margin. My cultivator sense wasn’t a circle on a flat plane. It was a sphere.

I fed the entirety of the ichor’s refining efforts into my ability to sense pneuma, and it grew at an unbelievable pace until the sphere of my pneumatic sense had all but encompassed the Half-Step City. I swept my awareness up and down the ruined streets, bypassing rubble and flame to find those still living in the wreckage. My eyes narrowed, and the golden ichor boiled in response to my dissatisfaction.

The sixth sense that a cultivator had for pneuma was something they refined over time. A first rank Citizen, for example, might be able to enter a room and know there was another cultivator in it but little else. If they got closer and the other cultivator was the same rank, they’d likely be able to tell. They might even be able to guess the difference if the other cultivator was a couple steps above them. Beyond that, it would become a worthless blur of more. As a second rank Philosopher, I could identify the relative strength of any cultivator within my range down to the exact rank so long as they were in my realm or below. Past the tenth rank of the Sophic realm, all I could tell was that they were beyond me.

I cut the flow from my pneumatic sense. It was reaching its practical limits regardless - the rate of its growth hadn’t faltered once, but that did precious little for me when the sphere’s lateral growth had been reduced to finger lengths.

I felt a vibrant star of pneuma diverge from its path and move to intercept us. Too high above me on the ladder to tell by how much. It could have been a freshly risen Hero. It could have been a captain of the Heroic realm. For all I knew, it could have even been a Tyrant.

I raised my celestial spare like a javelin and hurled it with all my might. It vanished through clouds of smoke, but I felt the reaction to its impact. The starbright presence stopped short, sliding back about the length of a city block, and then it turned away and fled northeast. Weak enough to balk at my bluff, then.

It wasn’t good enough. It was still far and away too crude. I flooded my pneumatic sense with the ichor’s golden refinement again. My heart beat once. I drew the ichor back. Wrong. I urged it forward again. My heart beat twice. Wrong. The golden life blood writhed in my channels. I cast it forward again. My heart beat thrice.

“Wrong,” I snarled. The golden ichor boiled furiously. It lurched for control of me again, the message clear - if I couldn’t provide it with a purpose, it would act on my behalf. I wrestled it down, thinking back through countless boyhood lectures. I was focused on the correct thing, but not the correct aspect.

I needed to isolate one portion of a cultivator’s sight from the others, to guide it with direct purpose, having spent the entirety of my life prior to this point allowing instinct to guide me in its use. It was like I was consciously forcing my eyes to adjust for darkness while standing in broad daylight. It felt unnatural. It was what I should have been doing from the very start.

Finally, after long seconds of struggle, I struck gold in the form of an old adage that Aristotle had been forced to teach me more than once.

“Magnitude. Motion. Time. Every natural phenomenon can be measured by these metrics. And with experience, through ingenuity, a man can leverage his understanding of natural law to adjust these aspects in his favor.”

The ichor converged on that memory and savaged it like a starving wolf. We reached an understanding, the ichor and I, and I cast it forward once more.

As was the case for all things, I could split my pneumatic sense three ways. I urged every portion of Prometheus’ essence into my pneumatic sense, but once it was there I diverted it away from magnitude and away from motion, funneling it entirely towards time. It was a guess, but I’d learn something even from failure here.

My heart beat once, and every first rank Hero within my range burst forth from their featureless cloud of more and stood out from the rest in perfect clarity. I dipped down and recovered my spear as I passed it by, tracking the first rank Hero I had deterred with it as well as Selene running close behind me.

I fed that aspect of my perception until it ran up against the same wall of diminishing returns as my range, guttering out just a few steps shy of parsing Heroic souls from Tyrants. I surveyed the bloodbath in the Olympic stadium with new eyes, tracking for myself the progression of the victors in the bare instants before the lightning struck them and made their ascension obvious.

Almost. It was almost good enough. The ichor raced ahead of me now, taking my discontent as a challenge and seeking to fill the gap before I could order it done. This time I allowed it, and the ichor poured its full efforts into the last of the three cups.

Motion.

My heart beat once, and finally, finally, I could see it.

“Gravitas,” I intoned, slamming through stone and earth up to my waist as the captain’s virtue hammered me down. Selene called out to me, seeking answers that I owed her more than anyone, but my focus was split too many ways as it was.

I dragged myself out of the ground and rushed ahead, heart hammering away.

Gravitas.

The same result. I clawed my way out of the earth, and tried again. And again. And again.

Finally, I cast that path aside. My pneumatic sense was a portion of the solution, but it wasn’t enough. The golden ichor reared back as if it had a face and I had just slapped it. It thundered and raged, thrashing for control. Each time I bestowed upon it a purpose, it sprang to oblige me - but it was more abrasive every time I pulled that purpose away.

What was missing? What did I lack that the ichor could give me? It wasn’t an issue of clarity now. I could see it, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t put proof to my intent. What then? Strength? I couldn’t afford the time that it would take to refine that. It wasn’t enough to improve my muscle fibers alone - I needed more durable bones to match. I’d have to split the ichor’s focus, hope it made me strong enough before I ran into the barrier of its diminishing returns. Then I’d have to contend with the greater limitations that followed, like my heart’s ability to pump enough blood for such a physique…

My heart.

I coughed, spitting blood out onto the street.

I was a fool.

My pneumatic sense warned me of approaching ruin. A first rank hero that had been hurtling through the air above the city’s quaking agora with no apparent direction abruptly diverged, surging forward as if it had been waiting for my mind to drift. I planted my feet, kicking up a shower of broken stones and earth. Selene’s pneuma rippled in alarm.

“Stop!”

Gale winds blasted me in the back, seeking to bowl me over mid-stride. Only my instant of forewarning and the weight of thirty worlds kept my feet planted. It caught Selene in midair. She tumbled past me, losing her grip on Griffon and skipping like a stone across the ravaged city center.

Griffon avoided the worst of the fall on reflex alone, hitting the ground in a partial crouch. A jagged piece of broken stone caught the delicate fabric of his golden sash, tearing it open as he fell, and a wood-carved theater mask came tumbling out.

The cypress mask rolled, clattering across the ground and drawing all of Griffon’s absent focus to it. Just before it settled, I saw a single word carved into its inner face.

Liar.