Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.138

The Young Griffon

Violence told a story. This I’d known for my entire life. My time outside the Rosy Dawn had challenged countless other preconceptions, but this one it had only reinforced. It was only in the heat of our most violent moments that we bared our hearts to one another in full. Not because we desired it, necessarily, but because we had no other choice. Every day of my life had hammered that point deeper home. Even this day. Especially this day.

We exchanged discourse with our broken Heroes while the Sanctuary City fell, and that violence told their stories.

Sol seized the opening initiative while I was grandstanding, waving a dismissive hand when all five rose up to oppose us. The golden flames spilling out of his eyes, a perfect match to my own, flared in response to his sacrifice of empowering blood. Gravitas flung them all back, tearing up the earth beneath their feet and shifting the clouds above their heads.

They recovered quickly, each by their own means, but the pace was ours to set. We pursued them and were there the instant they escaped the current.

Elissa separated her spirit from her body again, and now with the King's Curse in my hand I could see the shimmer of her muse plucking the resonant cord. I pivoted in the middle of a full sprint the moment that I felt it, burning my heart's blood to give my body the alacrity needed to catch her. My blade swept sideways through her path, forcing her to raise her own bronze sword in a frantic block.

When the bronze edge of her weapon passed through the burning sheathe of heart flame I’d forged around my own, clashing fully edge-against-edge, the King’s Curse seized upon her and delivered a portion of her soul to me in even greater clarity than its blanket perceptions could provide.

[-the guqin has seven strings-]

The Sword Song had moved to parry this time, diverting as much force as she could away from her blade - she only lost a sliver of its edge this time. Her muse plucked another string while I was processing that crystalline moment, and Elissa’s spirit vanished. It appeared ten paces to my right rather than returning to her body. I shifted to meet another opponent.

Sol slammed straight through Anastasia’s hunting hounds while he closed the gap between them, nearly skewering her out of the air as they engaged in a battle of arms. Her javelin burnt and corroded everything it touched, but Sol’s spear had the better reach. Their clash was a blur of whirling polearms and ferocious pressure. Every exchange flung the Caustic Queen further back, regardless of how neatly she responded. Overburdened as he had been since Thracia, and now magnified by his burning heart, Sol simply packed too great a punch for her to trade even blows with him.

Selene was pursuing Lefteris while the Gold-String Guardian tried to make space for his bow, so I rounded on the Heroic Huntsman and his prized predator.

The enormous crocodile, Sah-Bakari, could swim through the sky like it was still water under normal conditions. While Sol’s virtue was in the air, it was more like swimming upstream. A greater challenge, to be sure, but one the beast was more than capable of meeting. It contorted sinuously, pressing through Sol’s gravitas, and when its colossal maw yawned open I saw its teeth were solid gold.

I fed another year to the flames and struck the beast back down the skyfall river with a hundred hands of my pankration intent. Each clenched fist attacked with the force of the full year I’d given up. I understood intuitively that if I had thrown each of those punches over and over again for all of spring, summer, fall, and winter, the force of the attack would have been exactly the same.

Kyno didn’t even bother testing his skinning knife against the King’s Curse when I leapt up underneath him. He twisted away with shocking alacrity for his size, feeding that momentum into a roundhouse kick. I tucked my left arm and caught it on the crook of my elbow, the clap of flesh against flesh more than just loud - the shock was so intense it ruffled my hair.

Four crackling fists hammered into his thigh, drawing a tight sound of agony from his throat, and sixteen more stabbed and slapped and gouged at whatever they could reach. The lightning wasn’t enough to paralyze him, but it served as a distraction long enough to bring the King’s Curse back around.

Kyno leaned back in midair, artful even in his panic, and the King’s Curse cut the shallowest line across his jaw. Another electric flash of insight jolted me from the moment.

[-the hunt defines the huntsman-]

A crocodile’s tail formed entirely from the Huntsman’s intent - no, from Sah-Bakari’s pneuma - whipped into existence behind the Hero and slapped my sword arm aside. Kyno pushed off with the motion, flinging himself back and rolling across the earth.

I moved to follow him, enraptured by that brief glimpse at perfect clarity, but Elissa’s muse plucked another string and her spirit appeared thirty paces to my left, stabbing at Selene’s unguarded side. Invisible hands of my violent intent punched through the sound of her, rosy hands of scarlet dawn chopped down on her sword-bearing wrist, lightning hands strangled, and blood-stained fingers gouged. She passed through all of them without slowing down.

Another year went up in flames. Prometheus’ burning ichor singed the edges of my senses with its alarm. I had precious little of my heart’s blood left to lose. I couldn’t afford to spend it so frivolously.

I surged across the gap and struck her blade aside with mine. Her frustration and her fear were clearly visible to my heart sense, and that was before the King’s Curse laid her bare.

[-seven strings to dance along-]

The Sword Song’s muse plucked another string, a different string, and the sound of her spirit vanished again. It reappeared to my right, twenty paces from where she had been. Finally I understood what the Conqueror’s blade had been telling me.

Pankration hands drew the broad celestial axe I had stolen from the Temple of the Father out of my shadow and heaved it through the air. It spun end-over-end, deflecting an arrow Lefteris had shot at Selene’s heart and carrying on to sink into the archer’s shoulder. While Selene moved to capitalize on the opening, I spun back around and dropped an executioner’s heel down onto Kyno’s head. I swung my sword, the King’s Curse cut through his crocodile tail-

[-every predator shaped by their prey-]

-and I understood the nature of that skill too. Sah-Bakari was surging back into the fight, bowled over but unburdened by the attack I had spent a year of my future empowering. I swiped my blade negligently down, not truly attacking but instead guiding Kyno into my pankration hands when he flinched away from the burning blade.

Rosy-fingered dawn seized him by his tattered blue silks and his coarse black hair, flinging him up into the crocodile’s open mouth. To my surprise, Sah-Bakari didn’t even try to shift its course. Its golden maw snapped shut, swallowing Kyno whole, and the virtuous beast began to roll.

In an instant, a creature larger than a bull elephant vanished out of the open air. Unlike Elissa’s technique, however, it did not immediately resurface. Even the King’s Curse lost sight of it. For all intents and purposes, the two were simply gone.

Elissa’s muse plucked another string, and I cut a burning line through the air on my right. She appeared to my left instead. I burned yet more of my heart’s blood and struck myself with my own intent, slapping a hand over each of my ears, and shoved myself back with four open palms to avoid the thrust of her bronze sword.

Her muse wasn’t playing a guqin. That much had been obvious, but now I knew that it mattered. I restrung my mental image of the muse’s instrument, sorting the sounds in an instant, and when she plucked the next string I saw it bright as day.

The guqin was a Silk Road curiosity, seven-stringed like a Greek lyre, but Elissa’s muse wasn’t playing either of those things. She was playing a zither, an instrument that could have as many as forty strings, and as few as twenty. Trying to determine which of those strings was being plucked, and where they’d been strung relative to the others by the sound they made alone? That was something only a dedicated student of the arts could have possibly accomplished.

Elissa appeared amidst the vibration of the twenty-third string, and I nailed her right foot to the earth with my blade. She screamed, the King’s Curse fed, and I saw the greater picture.

It was there in her name - the Sword Song. While she danced outside herself, she could go wherever sound could travel, bypassing all but the most daunting obstacles. The only catch was that she needed the strings to guide her. It had been a guqin when her master taught her, and now it was a zither, but the mechanism was the same. Once I knew the distance between each string, and could match at least one of them to a location by tracking her movements, I could map out the rest of them in my mind. I could listen.

The zither twanged.

I could hear it.

Our blades clashed the moment Elissa reappeared fifty paces to my right, and this time she didn’t have the luxury of preserving her sword with a parry. I lopped off another corner of her bronze blade, and her panic was a keening sound.

Her muse loomed behind her shoulder, pulling back on another string.

The King’s Curse cut through the zither, snapping its strings with an ugly sound that tried to pull Elissa in twenty different directions at once and succeeded in moving her none. The Conqueror’s blade kept cutting, snapping hungrily for that faint finger.

The apparition of a muse flinched back and vanished from Elissa’s side. Her panic turned to horror.

“Look how they run!” I forced her back with wild sword swipes while the invisible hands of my intent swarmed over her abandoned body - still flying back through the current of Sol’s gravitas - and swung it like a hammer into her blindspot. Body and soul crashed back together, and my empty hand of flesh and blood slammed into her stomach. She flew back, gagging for air, and I pursued her.

“Look how they hide!” I shouted mockingly. “Ask them who they’re running from! Ask them where they’ve gone now that you need them!”

There came the twang of a rebounding bow string, followed by the whistling shriek of an approaching arrow. I spun in mid air and split the arrowhead down its center, the King’s Curse reaching through it as it cut.

-it was an arrow that slew Great-Heart Achilles-

The bisected halves of Lefteris’ arrow spun off behind me. The Gold-String Guardian shouted in pain, reeling back with Selene’s spear lodged in his thigh. She tried to wrench it out, but he grabbed her by the hair and kneed her in the face with his other leg. I moved to help her, my violent intent reaching out.

Elissa’s spirit rose out of her body once again. This time the string her muse plucked didn’t match any sound a zither could produce. It was close, and because of that I wrongly turned right to preempt an attack that wasn’t there. By the time I had identified its true source - a lyre - the Sword Song had already appeared behind the daughter of the Oracle and run her right hand through with the disjointed noise of her broken blade. Selene cried out, letting go her spear.

The King’s Curse cut through the noise, but Elissa was already gone, pulled away by the string of another instrument - a harp, I realized an instant too late.

The King’s Curse could tell me what their techniques did, could even give me a glimpse into the underlying acts and teachings that had made them this way, but it couldn’t tell me how they’d use them before it happened. It could only observe it after the fact. It wasn’t nearly good enough. I still couldn’t see it.

Lefteris hammered his mangled fist into Selene’s side, breaking three ribs, and in response I kicked him in the chest. His breastplate cratered, his back hit the earth, and the King‘s Curse came down. He raised his empty bow up like a shield, desperately blocking. The edge of the Conqueror’ blade met the golden string of his bow-

-it was a golden string that led Theseus to the stars-

Outrageously, the King’s Curse slid away from the delicate string of gold instead of cutting neatly through it, guided away from the Heroic archer by an unseen hand. Elissa’s muse plucked another cord. The cold, prickling sensation of being hunted re-emerged from nothing along with Kyno and Sah-Bakari as their rolling plunge pierced through the air behind me. Lefteris bared his teeth hatefully at me and spun his bow around while the static silhouette of his Muse nocked an arrow to it and drew.

I still lacked context.

Gravitas drove Kyno and his crocodile down into the dirt, and a spear that was more fist of god than flung projectile slammed through Lefteris’ bicep and dragged him off across the dirt, carrying him far from Selene and I both. The Sword Song’s muse sounded a retreat before I could even turn to meet her spirit.

Sol landed heavily beside me, covered in small lacerations that wept vile black poison. He lifted Selene up into his arms, glancing at me as he did. With a single burning look he saw the root of my frustration.

“I’m fine,” Selene protested, the words slurred by her broken nose. “I can fight, I swear I can-!” An invisible hand of my intent straightened her nose with a brutal crack. She yelped.

“Take the ichor in hand,” Sol told me. He sat the daughter of the Oracle back on her feet and beckoned with his empty hand, halting the momentum of his spear and ripping it out of Lefteris’ arm to return it to his hand. The tumbling archer dug bloody fingers into the earth to stop his own momentum. “Whatever it is you’ve found lacking - whether it’s motion, magnitude, or time - you have what’s needed to refine it. Just keep the blood in line.”

A wave of caustic heat surged up from every shadow, and my brother continued on with Selene close by his side.

We pressed the Heroes back, weathering their miracle techniques and burning all we had to give just to maintain the pace. The difference between an iron age Hero and Philosophers of our kind wasn’t as stark as it should have been, but there was a difference. Despite their animal panic they were stronger than any mortal soul could hope to be. Though their hearts were shaken and their hope was fading fast, they still burned bright enough to blind. Even with the King’s Curse in my hand, they’d kill me the moment I made a mistake. Their muses would make certain of it.

So why, when they were finally giving all that they had to give, why did it still feel not enough?

Once Sol had pointed it out to me, I felt the slithering suggestion of the Titan’s burning ichor in my veins. I crushed it in my hand, heedless of the flame, and as I clashed against my seniors in ascension over and over again, a distant part of me looked upon the ichor’s works. It had refined me in body, heart, and mind. It had stoked my every passion.

As it had stoked my every grief.

All that it had done, it had done before my advancement to the third rank set it ablaze. Now what could it do? It had been liquid refinement before, golden-bright and eager to please. Now it was a refining flame. Now it hurt to hold.

Did you think it would be painless?

I didn’t let it go, not even for a moment. It cried out to me, urging me to make use of it. All of it.

When the ichor that the King’s Curse had consumed went up in flames and turned itself upon the blade, the hungry weapon nearly vibrated out of my hand. Yet the Conqueror had said his piece, and its ownership was clear. The wanton blade raged, but it didn’t turn against me while I shaped it to my will.

I leapt over a molten river of magma, my pneuma spreading like open wings behind me. The refining flame melted down the blade’s hungry gaze, rendering it down to its base components and materials, and my borrowed awareness of the city melted away in turn. I reforged that wanton glare to better suit me, rebalancing it as Prometheus had rebalanced my humors, and when my feet touched the ground on the other side of the river my blade’s awareness expanded back out.

It didn’t reach across the city of Olympia and beyond it this time. When the sphere of my borrowed awareness ceased expanding, it was hardly a fraction of the range it had been before. That was more than fine. Keeping an eye on the Tyrants and false Heroes spread throughout the city was convenient, but it wasn’t what I needed. My target was far closer at hand. I needed a more discerning eye.

What was even left in this world that the King’s Curse had yet to show me? The answer was self-evident.

Like the cleansing of a cancer, the King’s Curse swept aside the veils of wonder and mystique that obscured the muses. My eyes that had until now slid off of them without finding purchase now shifted and settled surely onto the specter of a woman looming over Elissa’s limp body. Our eyes met.

Terpsichore stared back at me in perfect shock, her divine lips parting. She wore a dress of flowing gold that hung from only one shoulder, exposing her left breast and her two highest ribs. Her hair was kept shorter than her sisters’, a loose nest of braids that looked like they’d spill over at the slightest motion but never quite did. She wore a crown of falling leaves. Her right hand was frozen in the motion of plucking at her next string. It was a kithara this time.

“There you are,” I breathed. The muse’s finger slipped, and Elissa choked on a scream as she reappeared in the path of my blade. Blood sprayed from her abandoned body’s right thigh, the skin parting to match the wound I had inflicted on her soul.

The Dancing Muse abandoned the Heroine’s body, retreating far from me, but the King’s Curse could still see the imprints of her fingers on Elissa’s heart. Only the imprints, however. I couldn’t see the hand attached. I still lacked context.

Melt down. Reforge. Rebalance. Refine.

I added my own heart’s blood to the ichor’s efforts, sacrificing half of all that remained. When the King’s Curse cast out its senses again, they went no further than what my own eyes could see.

Blood-stained hands of my intent whirled the blade around and thrust it straight down. The Heroic Huntsman and the Gold-String Guardian cried out in dismay. Elissa arched up, returning to her body a bare moment too late. My burning blade plunged straight through her chest.

Time stood still.

The Dancing Muse shrieked in pain and horrible fury, and the hand I had cut through, the one holding the Sword Song’s heart, drew back and vanished. Elissa’s heart beat freely for the first time since her ascension to the Heroic Realm. I ripped the King’s Curse from her chest before the beating organ could brush against it.

“Why?” Elissa gagged, dragging herself back. She clutched her broken sword to her bleeding breast. “Why?!”

“You don’t need her,” I said, burning and burning. “Even if you did, she wouldn’t risk her life for yours.”

“Who are you to decide!?” she screamed. Who was I, really?

“I am Justice,” I decided. “The risen flame.”

It was that mosaic, the Sword Song sprawled out at my feet while her companions and my own converged upon us both. That was the moment that the Tyrant chose to die.

The distant silhouette of Kaukoso Mons flashed indigo-bright as every one of its amethyst veins reacted to a force unlike any other it had seen today. With the King’s Curse narrowed down to such a concentrated edge, that flash of light was the only warning I had before the Tyrant’s last gasp swept over the city.

It was worse than a hurricane, more violent than a storm. It blasted everything apart, all the world and every cloud above. Magma from the uprooted river flew through the air along with every broken building, illuminating the far off face of the Olympic Stadium. Before my eyes, the statues of previous champions acting as its walls, the sentinels that had so easily contained the bloodbath in the pit, began to crack.

The last of the Tyrant’s vitality washed over us, swept us away in its current, and the moment it touched my blade I knew which of them had died.

Ptolemy the Great blew the Half-Step City down with his final breath, and there wasn’t a stone left in the earth sturdy enough for my pankration hands to anchor me through it.

“Gravitas,” Sol snarled, and through the King’s Curse I saw him invoke both halves of his foundation.

The earth collapsed beneath our feet, unable to withstand the outrageous pressure, and I understood immediately what had happened. All his life he’d been invoking both halves of his foundations, treating them as a unified whole because that’s what they should have been. After Thracia his Roman heart had turned against him, punishing him with an overwhelming weight every time he called upon his virtue. Today, he had found a way to subvert that, calling upon only half of the greater whole - a fact that made the King’s Curse eager like a starving dog - and leveraged his Greek heart against our opponents. With his heart’s blood burning, he had even been able to empower it to something greater than ever before.

When he had burned his heart’s blood, he hadn’t been able to distinguish between Roman or Greek. And now, when he called upon both halves of his foundation, he suffered retribution as he had before. Perhaps he’d expected it to be a lighter load, empowered as he was.

Unfortunately, in his burning he had empowered his heart demons just the same.

The earth sank with Sol at the center of the crater while the heavens screamed above our heads. The Captain’s virtue dragged us all down along with him, though not with nearly as much force. It was just barely enough to anchor us. One hundred and fifty hands of my intent latched onto Sol, the remaining ten gripping Selene tight. The rest of the Heroes arrayed against us scrabbled for hand holds and stability, held down by the Greek captain’s order but called up by the winds of the Macedonian Tyrant’s last gasp.

They spoke silently, their voices buried by the wind. I read their lips instead. Pushed to the brink and flung clear over the edge of it, they called out for the help of higher powers. They called out for their muses. They called out for their Tyrants. They even called out for the mentors they had left or been left by so many years ago.

In the chaos, I saw their muses answer the call. I saw them whisper words of urgent warning. I saw them guide the Heroes I’d admired like they were puppets on strings. I saw the slender hand of the Dancing Muse darting in to reclaim the heart I’d pried her off of. And in that moment, I finally grasped what it was that had cut me to my core all this time.

I rode the push and pull of Sol-against-the-Savior, landing overtop the Sword Song. Terpsichore snatched her hand back like she’d been burned, glaring daggers up at me.

“You know nothing of our blessing,”the Dancing Muse hissed. Her wrath was clear as day, but the King’s Curse wasn’t yet focused enough to pierce through to her inner workings. It might not ever be. Not as we were. “You know nothing of our design! You’ve yet to pull the curtain back and yet you strike at what’s behind it. Wretched son of scarlet sin, you know not what you do.”

They’re all slaves, every single one of them, and so am I - this city is the chain.

What sort of king lets scavengers loose in his city? What sort of queen turns her citizens against themselves?

These cowards aren’t worth the crowns that they covet.

These heroes aren’t worth telling stories of.

These people are shadows on the wall.

This world is tarnished iron.

Every answer I had found, all my grim conclusions, they were all born of the same unspoken sentiment. They were all incomplete.

A wise man was not marked by his ability to entangle others with his words. If a thing was truly understood, it could be conveyed even to a fool.

This world is iron. What did such a sentiment convey? How could it be seen or felt? What did this ever present ache inside my soul mean to the people that had never felt it once?

You lack context.

That much was surely true. But I no longer lacked the words.

“I know this world is upside down,” I declared, casting months into the flame to make the words boom over the gale. They would all hear this, or none of them would. “I know it isn’t a child’s fault that they were born. I know that the slave is not responsible for the slaver’s whip. I know the citizens are not to blame for the tyranny of kings.”

My burning heart allowed every word to pass without complaint. It still wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t enough to condemn a naked lie. It wasn’t enough to protest a truth half told. Iron truths, golden lies, the difference was semantic, and all of it besides the point. Even now, the words I spoke lacked clarity. It wasn’t good enough.

“This woman’s failings are her own,” I told the Dancing Muse and all her seething sisters instead, pointing my burning blade down at Elissa. “Her anguish and her struggle are hers alone to bear. They mark her body and her soul with scars.

“Yet you have the audacity to stand proud for her triumphs.” I cut the air between them. Elissa choked out a curse as I split her shoulder to the bone. Terpsichore danced back, avoiding the King’s Curse entirely. “You won’t suffer with her, yet you’ll be there when she gains!”

I remembered the titan flame’s tortured conviction. I remembered the fire of his eyes.

My children are freezing. My children are blind. What else was I to do?

I remembered the golden mother’s weeping face. I remembered the sorrow in her smile.

Oh, Lio. You can’t afford to care this much.

“If you won’t suffer with us, then you’re all worse than a corpse!” I shouted. My heart thrummed in fierce approval. “If you won’t step out from behind your curtain, then what use are your designs? If you won’t join us on the stage, then begone to the stands!”

The heavenly chorus rained invectives down upon me, hurling insults like stones and rotten fruit. Behind me, Sol was forcing himself slowly but surely to his feet, eyes burning as his bloodstained lips whispered a recursive oath. I’ll rise. I’ll rise. I’ll rise. I burnt my future away and added the strength of my pankration hands to his efforts.

This world is iron now. What was the plain truth behind the poetry? My virtuous heart demanded that I bring it forth into the light. It wouldn’t wait another moment.

“They’ve lied to us,” I told them all. Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, and Anastasia. The companions I’d burnt and blamed. Sol and Selene - my brother and my sister. My heart throbbed with vibrant satisfaction.

“Our higher powers lied. They told us all to take their hand, they promised that they’d pull us up to heaven, that they’d show us the way, and it was all of it a lie.”

We exist in three parts, and each of them is king inside our soul.

All this time, I had been dancing blindly around the simple truth.

There was no path to heaven without a beating heart.

The burning ichor swept over the first of all my pillars, the conviction I had built upon my soul. My virtuous heart won’t tolerate a lie. It scoured the cracked and fractured stone away, consuming it in an instant. When it passed, the pillar still stood. Free of imperfections, now stronger than before.

“Your reasons are irrelevant,” I informed the muses. “Your intentions are the same. From myself, as from my brother, from my heroes and my foes, and especially from the chorus, my conviction is the same.”

[My virtuous heart won’t tolerate anything but the truth.]

Sol rose up with a shout of effort and flung them all out of the bowl. We pursued them, driving them out of the city and towards the distant sea.

We burned and kept burning. If I stopped now and cast aside all cultivation for a life of peaceful duty, I wouldn’t live long enough to be my father’s current age. Then again, I wouldn’t live another instant if I betrayed my beating heart here. I might survive, but only in a Tyrant’s wretched way. I wouldn’t allow it. I’d die before I did.

We clashed. We bled. We saw ourselves in truth.

When the winds abruptly buckled overhead, I was sure another Tyrant had died. Then I heard the whistle. It was too familiar to forget - I’d heard it up close too many times.

When the one note shifted, rising to a pitch I’d never heard before, I spun out of my half-done strike and turned my eyes to heaven. Through the lens of scarlet and golden flame, I only saw the breaking of the storm.

Through the concentrated edge of the King’s Curse, I saw the warping of creation.

The Hero Scythas erupted from the storm above our heads with a pewter crown upon his head, spinning a scythe of glossy obsidian around him like a thresher. And impossibly, miraculously, he cut straight through the storm. Gathered it and coated his scythe with its purpose.

The defiant miracle imprinted itself upon the world, assembled from the shards of fallen stars to form a cosmic mosaic - a living constellation. The light spelled out his deed. Through the King’s Curse, I could see it.

The second act of his epic.

********************************

** Scythas Reaps The Whirlwind **

********************************

Lightning fell from starry heaven and struck the Hero twice. The first bolt Scythas weathered, his hazel-burning heart flaring to its limits. The second bolt was caught by an upraised hand of master-crafted stone. Untouched, the Hero of the Scything Squall advanced to the second rank of the Heroic Realm.

I laughed in pure and honest admiration while he brought the storm down on our heads.