The Young Griffon

Olympia‘s western dock town was as I remembered it, though it felt downright decrepit after weeks spent in the grandest city in the free Mediterranean. Stout wooden constructions were the standard out here, no amethyst-veined marble or towering bronze doors. It was refreshing, in a way. The beaches were teaming with fishmongers and their patrons, a cool breeze of waning winter offset by the cheerful warmth of unclouded sun.

The port’s rubble mound breakwater could be seen from a respectable distance, jutting up from the Ionian several spans out. It hugged the coast up and down as far as mortal eyes could see, and if the maps were to be believed, a bird or a god looking down on it from above would see the winding lines of rubble as a gorgon’s snarling face - each of the tangled serpents that served as her hair a point of entry for enterprising ships. It was a sight that Nikolas had boasted of seeing for himself after returning home for his wedding, all the while smugly refusing to explain how he’d done it.

I had a few ideas, myself. Someday soon I’d bring one of them to life and have a look for myself. See the ugly leer that the free Mediterranean cast across the Ionian at her lowly scarlet colony. Later, of course, when there weren’t more compelling things to do.

I cast a lingering glance at the Roman walking down the beach beside me.

“You were confident about that one, weren’t you?”

Sol’s lip curled in silent contempt.

“There was weight behind those words, I could tell,” I said, considering the crowded shacks and broad and oak tables buried in the sand for the day’s catch to be displayed. “It wasn’t difficult at all to imagine you in your armor, cape and all. Was that how you spoke to your legionnaires? I’m sure It inspired them on their way to the underworld.”

Strong hands grabbed up my shoulders and spun me around. Scythas pulled me down to his eye level, his influence clashing with my own. Hands of my violent intent clamped down on his own shoulders along with his arms and neck, fisted themselves in his faded green robes and glowed with building heat.

“What is the matter with you?” Scythas demanded, golden coals burning.

“The Oracle wasn’t wrong,” I mused, leaning further in. This close, it was impossible to deny. “You are a pretty thing. Thicker eyelashes than most marble beauties, and lips well suited to pouting. If you shaved that stubble you’d be a hot commodity in any bathhouse.”

I added my flesh and blood hand to the mess of pankration intent, pressing my palm flat against his forehead and pushing him down. The Hero’s pneuma rose. His lips pursed for a whistle.

“Leave him be, Scythas.”

The Hero of the Scything Squall scowled. “He had no right.”

“No,” Sol agreed. “He didn’t. I apologize on his behalf.”

“I wasn’t talking about what he said to me.” The fair Hero shoved me off and whistled a sharp note, blasting my pankration hands off his body with gale winds. “I’m going to find us a ship.”

He stalked off, muttering ugly oaths under his breath.

“Farewell to the brave Hero,” I said, waving a solemn goodbye. “We can only hope to meet again one day when the stars align above. Remind me why you brought him instead of the reaver?”

“Jason won’t set foot on a ship as he is,” Sol answered, sitting down right where he was and burying his feet in the white sands.

“Of course he won’t,” I said, collapsing beside him and leaning back on my elbows to watch the sea. The waters were gentle this close to shore - it was a calm day, and the breakwater stifled what waves there were. “Naturally the Heroic sailor is afraid of sailing. I’d expect nothing less of your companions. A shame mine weren’t quite so useless, really - your speech might have swayed them if they were.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, without any particular expectation.

“A broad question. Where to begin-”

“Griffon.” He struck me with a look. As if there were a discerning mind behind that heavy Roman brow. “The others might think you’re just being more of yourself, but this isn’t like you. Cruelty of this kind isn’t your style.”

“Ho?” I raised a challenging eyebrow, dismissing a pair of errant pankration hands when they formed and reached for his throat without my permission.

“Your father‘s story shook you,” Sol said, irritatingly certain. “It’s the only reason I didn’t break your jaw when you said what you said just now.”

“I thank the Legate for his compassion.” I bowed my head, which in my lounging position was more a tucking of my chin. Perhaps I’d take this time to replenish my body. Scythas wasn’t liable to find us a worthwhile vessel any time soon, and the sand was as comfortable as anything else.

“Was it your uncle?”

I dismissed another formless hand, scowling. “Which one?”

“The dead one.”

“No.” Idly, I fingered the pommel of the blade I had stolen off my father’s wall. It was a different blade than either of the blades that Anargyros had carried in the vision of his ascension. Even the sliver I had pulled from its sheath was enough to tell. It was bronze, where the first had been iron and the Talon had been ship wood. But It still thrummed like lightning when I touched it.

And the hilt was still the same.

“Your father, then?” he guessed, because that was all that he could do. I spat a vile taste out of my mouth. Onto the sand between us.

“No. It wasn’t any one of them alone.”

Sol pondered that, dragging a hand through jet black hair. It was getting longer, just a bit wild - only on the top, though. He shaved the sides down every day with a knife.

“Paradox logic,” he said contemplatively. “Truths and convictions. Manipulation of natural law. Those concepts were as novel to you as they were to me when we first arrived here.”

“They weren’t novel. The greater mechanisms of cultivation were known to me long before I ever met you. All that I was missing was the practical example. I just had to see it done.”

For each application of rhetoric, all I had needed was to see it.

“And yet you never did,” Sol said. “I’m the same, I think - the lessons Aristotle taught me always felt purely academic, but when Socrates was showing the practical side of rhetoric to me, it felt like a natural continuation. I just hadn’t made the connection. But I have the excuse of spending half my life in legion camps and barbarian kingdoms far from any Greek philosopher. How did you never once encounter a philosopher’s rhetoric during your time in the Rosy Dawn?”

My eyes rolled. “I’m sure I did. But I didn’t have a Sophist’s sense to recognize it for what it was at the time. A Philosopher’s rhetoric is as grand and unfathomable to a Citizen as a Hero’s glory is to a Philosopher.”

And as unfathomable as a Tyrant’s greed was to all that languished beneath them.

“It wouldn’t have been as clear to you then as it is now, but you would have known it if you were told what to look for. If someone had taught you, you could’ve distinguished it, as you would any application of pneuma.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” I asked.

“You were angry in the Temple of the Father, when you first identified what the crows were doing and realized it had been left deliberately out of your education.” He reached over and pressed two fingers to my forehead, tapping it sharply. “Now we’ve seen what your father and your uncles were doing at the same age that you were studying supply chain logistics and competing in games rigged for your benefit. And you’re furious.”

“That isn’t it either. Not entirely.”

He hummed knowingly. “Calliope.”

The skies above were clear, blue, and bright. What would they look like when I took my first step into the realm of Heroes, I wondered. Clear, blue, and bright, or thick with shining stars? Would lightning strike me from cloudless heaven, unmistakably meant for me? Or would it be like it had been up in the storm crown at Kaukoso mons? A negligent bolt, tossed down alongside a hundred others. Perhaps a tribulation. Perhaps nothing more profound than mortal misfortune.

“Appealing to higher power,” I murmured, and felt my blood begin to boil.

“Ah. That.”

“Yes. That.” Distantly, far enough that I couldn’t make out the words, Scythas’ voice rose up over the ambient clattering of the dock town. Sol didn’t turn towards it. He kept watching me. “What is the first virtue, Sol?”

“Gravitas.”

“No,” I snapped. “Not the cultivator’s answer. Give me your answer. The one you gave me at the rites.”

“… freedom.”

Freedom. In every story worth telling, the cardinal virtues were present in one form or another. But none of those were possible if a man couldn’t control his own destiny. That was what an audacious slave had said to me in the midst of my cult’s holiest procession. He had rounded it off by calling me a slave just the same as him.

I had hated him for it then. But I had agreed.

“We agreed back then that virtue was performative excellence, and that for a man that meant climbing the divine mountain and throwing off his destined threads. Standing in defiance of the Fates. Standing proud. Free.”

“We agreed,” he admitted. He began to understand.

“But my father didn’t.”

‘Appealing to higher power’, they had called it. My late uncle, the Talon Anargyros, and my father in the eddies of his Heroic ascension. They had used it to explain the actions of the mad Tyrant that ruled the Raging Heaven, as well as justification in the fight that would become the first. And I had been forced to watch through my uncle’s eyes as he came to that realization himself. I had been forced to feel the same awe that he felt as if it was my own. As if this was something worth celebrating. As if it was something profound.

We’re all reaching up hopelessly. Foolishly. Courageously. Hoping someone will reach down and take our hand, though we’ll never admit it. Hoping they’ll pull us up to heaven with them.

What was the point of making it to the top and casting off your chains if you spent every step up groveling at the feet of those above? How could I take any pride at all and being a freeman, if I had spent my life a willing slave?

“I’m irritated that my education was stunted,” I said, shrugging off the doubtful look my brother gave me. It was the truth, and nothing more than that. “I’m disappointed that Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris chose against us in the end. And I’m angry, yes, that my father and my uncles decided that the righteous path was to charm their way into the Ivory Heights. As if we need the whispers of Muses to accomplish incredible things.

“But I am furious,” I said, heat and clenching fists of pankration intent spawning around me as fast as I could dismiss them, “because the Stavros and Fotios that I know as my uncles are nothing at all like the men we saw in that story. I am furious because Anargyros Aetos died before I was born, and he took the spark that those four brothers had with him.

“I am livid,” I explained to the last son of Rome, the only spark that I had found in a city that should have been teeming with vitality. “Because the Aetos family that I saw in that vision was one I wanted to be a part of. And I missed it.”