The Son of Rome

Anastasia‘s shadow pulled away deliberately from mine beneath the wood-carved table, an active separation that was impossible to see and nearly impossible to feel. I almost hadn’t noticed it at all, the sensation for some reason so much deeper now than the last time I remembered feeling it that I’d almost mistaken it for something else entirely. If Anastasia’s eyes hadn’t given her away, smoldering flames flickering in response to Griffon‘s silent message, I might have dismissed it as a remnant from the Aetos’ story.

Griffon hadn’t caught it. The state he was in right now, he might not have even if he knew what to look for. But shaken or calm, I could never forget the feeling of a scavenger creeping into my shadow.

As long as I lived, I would never forget the rats.

The raven that lurked inside of Griffon’s shadow roiled beneath the table, raising a bronze hilt up in offering. Anastasia‘s smile deepened to match the schemes in her eyes, and in response to her challenge the raven brandished twenty iron hilts alongside the bronze.

“I didn’t meet Damon Aetos until a year ago, when he was already the man he is today,” I answered the question the Heroes around the table had posed, the silence having stretched long enough. Through my shadow, as sharply as I dared, I added, We’re not fighting here. Stop posturing before they notice - and where did you even get that many swords?

The scavenger edged back in, listening curiously while the woman controlling it continued perusing Socrates’ map.

“So that story took place after he’d already been to Rome,” Scythas said, before frowning. “Unless, no. He could have gone after, but that would mean…”

Souvenirs from our lesson with the Gadfly, Griffon's shadow answered mine, withdrawing the hilts of his celestial axe and twenty iron swords.

“That would mean he taught Sol just a decade or two ago,” Jason said doubtfully. “Taught. Even the Gadfly only advised Bakkhos, as he’s advising Sol now. How can a Philosopher be master to a Tyrant?”

“What is it about him that makes you want to kiss his feet?” Elissa asked him scathingly, jabbing a finger at me while she pinned Jason with a glare. “Who says he’s a Tyrant at all?”

You’re a terrible actress, Griffon‘s raven taunted Anastasia‘s crow, while he laid his cheek in his hand to stop its furious clenching. Shoving your face into a map like it will save you from being found out.

It worked on you, her crow replied laughingly.

“Who says? You were there when we went out posing as crows! Have you not been paying attention?” Jason demanded.

“A question I could ask a few people,” Griffon mused. He went ignored. Beneath the table, he added, It never will again.

No, nothing ever works twice on you, does it?

“Whatever he is,” Kyno interjected, pulling down the Sword Song’s pointing hand. “He can tell us himself.”

“He already has,” Scythas declared.

Though the term Legate won’t mean much to them, Anastasia’s shadow mused, wings fluttering as it mingled between mine and Griffon’s.

“Well?” Lefteris asked, leaning forward on the table.

“It’s rude to ask a man his standing among heaven and earth without first offering your own,” Griffon chided him.

“You’ve been to our cult and climbed the stairway to heaven - our ranks are plain to see. Yours aren’t.”

“Mine is.” His smile was just the wrong side of sharp, his affected levity noticeable even to the boys sitting by Lefteris. “In fact, I just saw it earlier today.”

“Liar,” Lefteris accused him, rising from the table. His fuchsia cult attire, negligently wrapped as it was, spilled nearly entirely off his shoulders and exposed his bronze breastplate. “I checked them, every step from the twenty-first to the thirtieth. Not one of those names was yours!”

“You checked the wrong steps,” Griffon said, eyes narrowing. “The twelfth step is where you’ll find me”

“More lies.” Elissa pinched the bridge of her nose. “The same now as before. And you wonder why we don’t want to go chasing after myths with you.”

Perhaps the truth this time, Anastasia advised him through her shadow, throwing his words back in his face.

A single pankration fist formed in the air above the table. It raised its index finger, its glow casting a shadow across Griffon’s features.

“Call me a liar one more time,” he invited the room, and I knew what was coming next.

“Stop.”

Kyno pushed Lefteris’ chin up, closing his mouth with a click of teeth against teeth. Elissa crossed her arms mutinously, still leaning against him, but didn’t speak further. Anastasia‘s scavenging shadow withdrew from my own, the woman herself finally looking up from the map on the table to regard me curiously. Jason silently reached back and dunked his empty cup into the clay jar of spirit wine.

“Solus?” Scythas asked me quietly. I closed my eyes, falling back into a state of mind that felt too familiar. More comfortable than I deserved it to be.

Get to the point, the first spear had advised me in my last private moment before assuming control of the fifth legion. Truth or dishonesty, bright news or bleak, whatever it is you have to say - be direct, or don’t say anything at all.

“I am a Legate,” I told the Heroic cultivators arrayed against me. Lefteris’ eyes widened. “In Rome, a man’s standing is measured by his place within the city. Our realms are different than yours, eight instead of four. We have our own paths, as you have yours.”

The Soldier. The Senator.

And of course.

The Captain.

“Whichever path a man takes, the outcome is the same. It’s called the Cursus Honorum, and it is the progression of a Roman soul.”

“And how far down that road are you?” the man in the crocodile skin asked me. Lefteris mumbled something undistinguishable, unable to open his mouth with Kyno’s hand still pressing up on his chin. He smacked the hulking cultivator’s hand away and tried again.

“A legate is a commander,” he said, staring hard at me. Searching my face for falsehood. “A man that leads thousands of soldiers directly.”

How interesting, Anastasia‘s crow softly cawed. Lefteris, for his part, grit his teeth and ignored her caustic gaze.

“He does,” I said, nodding once. “A full legion. I commanded men that together could sweep a hundred drakaina screaming back into the sea.”

I said to tell the truth, Griffon commented, no less irritating for the fact that I didn’t have to hear him say it aloud.

Hush, Anastasia scolded him. He snorted.

Scythas nodded slowly. “So you are, then.”

“A Tyrant,” Jason said with quiet conviction.

I grimaced.

At a certain point, the lies would have to end, or else be found out. If Griffon and I managed to convince any of these Heroes to journey across the map with us in search of the component pieces that made up a god’s sustenance, we would almost certainly run into conflict. Real conflict, the kind that required force on the level of what Griffon’s roll of papyrus had shown us.

If that sort of crisis found us out in the valleys and the mountains, or on the open waves, or any wild place apart from the free cities, the Heroes and Heroines among us wouldn’t have to restrain themselves. They would fight freely and their hearts’ flames would burn triumphantly. Griffon and I would be found out the moment we failed to keep up.

If we failed to keep up.

“The Republic despises Tyrants,” I said, apologizing silently to the first spear and my father and everyone else that would have throttled me for what I was considering. “No citizen of Rome would ever accept such a title.”

“Call it what you like,” Elissa said impatiently, shifting her weight. Anxious at what I was saying, and at what I was not saying. “Every barbarian nation has a different word for what the free cities know is true. Where do you stand?”

“Elissa,” Kyno said sharply.

“It’s fine.” I exhaled a long breath. This would work, or it wouldn’t. At this point, all I could do was try to reach them. Griffon was too rattled by the story of the brothers Aetos to be anything but vicious right now. That wasn’t what they needed.

“We despise Tyrants,” I said again, “but that does not mean we can avoid them. There are those among us with power and influence comparable to what you consider the Tyrannic Realm. The laws of the Republic exist to balance these men, to temper them so that they can never be to Rome what Damon Aetos is to the Scarlet City.” I met Scythas’ eyes, and stifled my desire to soften the words that came next. “What Bakkhos was to Olympia.”

I watched him wilt, as I had done in Selene’s quarters when I forced him to admit to the true nature of those that led the Greek mystery cults. He was the Hero that had protested the loudest at the desecration of the kyrios’ funeral, and he had just borne witness to that same great man’s casual cruelty through the lens of lived experience. He had looked up to Bakkhos, I knew. But that didn’t change a Tyrant’s nature.

“Alas,” Griffon murmured. “No law is absolute.” I inclined my head, acknowledging it.

“I have seen men that were Tyrants in everything but name,” I admitted, even though the words tasted like ash in my mouth. “Men that commanded legions enough to fill three Greek cities. I’ve met men that have taken entire civilizations into their hands, and crushed them when they struggled. I would put my money on any of those men before I would put it on a Greek. Tyrant or not.

“I served under the greatest of those men,” I told the Heroes all around me. “I fought in his legions, was there when he broke the Gauls and the Britons and the Celts over his knee, every barbarian king one by one. Those of us following him knew him as the General of the West. But there were those that called him something else.”

“Tyrant of the West,” Anastasia murmured, and Griffon sat up from his slouch. “Imperator Gaius Julius Caesar.”

The weight of every word hammered down on my shoulders, pressed down by three thousand dead men. I grit my teeth and set myself against it.

“Gaius was a Tyrant,” I said, words that would have made any man in the fifth legion spit blood - including my own father. But I had seen too much, and known him too well, to think anything else.

If you must break the law, do it to seize power.

“But he was the best a Tyrant could be,” I promised them, infusing every word with the captain’s conviction. “The least of a necessary evil. There was no one among the patricians more generous to the plebes than he was, no triumphant commander as merciful to their fallen enemies. He was what he was for the betterment of Rome, and he was beloved by the people because of it.

“It’s why they lauded him in the streets even as his rivals spread the word tyrant through their homes. It’s why they raised him exalted above all others in the city, even as the provinces shut themselves away. And it’s why time and again, against overwhelming numbers, he kept marching on - even as rats ate at his unguarded heels.”

The Heroes and Heroines in the room tensed and readied themselves for a fight, the young brothers huddled behind their guardian, but I didn’t pay it any mind. I felt my expression twisting, ire rising in the thunder of marching feet.

“I owe a portion of everything that I am to the General of the West, as I owe a portion to Aristotle, and to every other mentor that has tried to make me more than what I am. Gaius was the ideal Tyrant, the only one deserving of the influence afforded. And even so, his rivals tore everything they could from him. Even so, they shamed him in the forum while he was on the furthest edge of the western frontier, shedding blood so that they could live their lavish lives. I served with that man, learned from him directly, and came to understand what a guiding hand could be.

“And then I came to Olympia.” My clenched fist finished what Lefteris had started before, breaking the wood-carved table down the middle. “And I was reminded why the Republic swore to never suffer another king.

“Caesar despaired the day he found his greatest rival dead,” I said furiously. “And your elders started groping for the kyrios’ power before his funeral was over. They sent scavengers after their cult’s own initiates, heedless of anything but their own hunger! Heedless of those that depended on them!

“Heedless of their citizens.”

I remembered a family curled up screaming on the streets of Olympia as Tyrants hammered away at funeral drums. They had known that the citizens of the city were in attendance, that the volume they were using to distract and disorient their greater targets would debilitate the smaller souls. They had done it anyway. They had used them as obstacles.

That family of citizens had looked at me like I was a monster when they saw the mystery cult attire I was wearing. And they’d had good reason to.

“I came to this city in search of my Greek mentor because my Roman mentor is dead. I came in search of Aristotle’s guidance, and instead I found this. Instead I found all of you.”

Sorea slammed into the door to Elissa’s home, an audible thunk of his talons sinking into the wood followed by a piercing shriek. The sound of the door breaking out of its frame echoed down the hall.

The virtuous beast that was all I had left of my home came gliding into the room a moment later, landing on my shoulders and spreading his wings wide.

“I am no Tyrant,” I told the wide eyed cultivators of virtue. “I refuse to be associated in such a way with your elders. But I am heir to the man that was greater than them in every way, and I am a Roman before that.

“All of you saw something in that memory, in the deeds of triumphant Heroes, that you wanted for yourselves. Each one of you is fighting a Tyrant that has you in their grasp. And you’ve decided that the Olympics are your best chance at salvation. Each of you is hoping that an Olympic champion’s cry for help will suffice where your own did not.”

I took the unrolled papyrus in my hand, dragging it up out of the dead hearth. It cracked and crumpled in my clenched fist.

“You are, all of you, appealing to higher power,” I condemned them.

“You’re wrong,” Lefteris seethed. “You’re wrong, and you’re out of line! You have no place lecturing us- you have no place here at all! You should be dead.”

Scythas’ head snapped to him. “What?”

“What are you saying?” Jason demanded.

“He’s saying,” Anastasia said, caustic green eyes flickering, “that the Republic has fallen, and her people were slaughtered to a man. Solus has come walking into this city from out of a grave. A revenant from Rome.”

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised at all that she knew. Griffon had called her a terrible actress, but she had fooled me twice the day we shared a bath.

“The city of Rome is salted ash,” I said, acknowledging the truth and moving forward. Marching on. “The half of my soul that lives in Rome wasn’t enough to bring down the demons of risen Carthage. The half of my soul that is Greek will have to do the rest.”

“The half that is what?” Elissa asked.

“I came to Olympia looking for Aristotle, but I found a rat’s nest instead. I chose to hunt your elder’s crows because they make me sick to look at, and I hate them to my core. I will tear your free cities apart, drink whatever divine elixir your gods fill their cups with, and topple all of your Tyrants if that is what it takes to gain the strength that I need.”

It was the only way I could possibly convince them all, the wildest gambit I could think to take.

I told them the truth.

“I am a stranger in a foreign land, and all that I desire is the death of accursed Carthage,” I promised them. “I will stop at nothing in this life until I am strong enough to see it done. Come with us on this journey and every journey to follow, or don’t - neither choice will change that.

“All that will change is you. Either you’ll stay here in this poisonous city, hoping and praying that the accolades you win in a game will be enough to win you favor from higher powers. You’ll cling to that proxy strength and hope it’s enough to get you out from under Tyrant’s thumb. You’ll wait here as long as it takes, breathlessly, for your freedom to be delivered to you.

“Or you’ll join us,” I said, clapping my hand on Griffon’s shoulder. “And you’ll take it.”