The Son of Rome

I woke up and immediately regretted it.

Remnants of the funeral drums echoed behind my eyes, an unbearable throbbing that turned my stomach. My body ached down to the marrow of my bones, and my mouth was drier than a day at the Senate. I shifted, grunting. Even the soft brush of silk sheets was intolerable. I cracked an eye open.

Luxury. It was a sparsely decorated room, but what was there was of an undeniable quality. The floor was smooth stone that reflected the light of the sun, shot through with an electric blue lapis. The walls were covered in hanging tapestries of Olympic scenes painted with the painstaking detail of an artist’s life piece. A single ivory column, waist-high, stood central in the room, with a golden cradle for torch flame perched atop it.

A dining table cut from a fine, dark wood sat off in a corner. Each of its legs had been carved in the Corinthian style, with faux vines winding up their length. Large papyrus charts blanketed the table in place of food, gleaming with recently applied ink.

Upholstered dining couches and bronze-backed chairs were scattered throughout the room, and while those that remained intact were of the utmost quality, most of them had been smashed to pieces.

There were other things, personal items and keep-sakes that I couldn’t be bothered to keep my eyes open for. Satisfied that I wasn’t dead or imprisoned, I rolled over on the blessedly comfortable bed.

Into Griffon’s foot.

I shoved the filthy limb out of my face. He jerked awake, scarlet eyes snapping open.

“What-”

“Get out of my bed,” I said hoarsely. Everything, including my own voice, felt unpleasant. I needed another three days of sleep at least.

“Your bed?” Griffon repeated, incredulous. “Neither of us owns anything. It’s as much mine as it is yours.”

“I don’t care. Get out.”

“Denied.” He rolled over, using the crook of his elbow as a pillow. “Be quiet, will you? I had a long night.” I knew he was smirking as he said it. It was why he’d turned away. It was purely an attempt to get under my skin.

It worked.

Gravitas threw him from the bed, and twenty arms of pankration intent tossed me off the other side in turn. I came to my feet spitting mad, my head pounding and the taste of blood in my mouth. He rose up across the bed, looking far better rested and entirely too smug.

“I’m going to kill you,” I told him.

“You’re welcome to try.”

We both lunged for the bed.

It was Scythas’ room, as it turned out. The Hero in question returned to his room with food and drink in hand, just in time to see us shatter his bed with our wrestling. We both froze, Griffon’s hands wrapped around my throat and my own pressing a pillow down on his face. Hazel-flame eyes, flecked with golden embers, met mine. More than angry, he looked exasperated.

“We have halls for that,” he said, shaking his head and sweeping the papyrus off his dining table with one foot. He laid out three loaves of dark brown bread alongside a long, narrow slab of stone covered with seared fish. A pitcher of water and another of sparkling white wine. “At least eat something first. The two of you necked more kykeon in a day than most senior initiates drink in a week.”

That explained a few things. I cursed my hubris. What sort of fool went binge drinking immediately after a night of brutal fighting? After multiple brushes with death? Men like me were why officers hated the infantry.

“Light work,” Griffon boasted through the pillow, smacking my shoulders in a tap. It was no coincidence that he found the lingering cuts the Crow had left me. A night of work had purged the worst of the cultivator’s poisonous pneuma from my system - but it still stung like a bastard.

I pressed down harder on the pillow. Pankration hands slapped insistently at my shoulders.

The bread was still warm, and the fish was coated in olive oil and richly seasoned with pepper and ginger. After I had forced down a cup of the sweet white wine and several cups of water, I even began to enjoy it. Griffon and Scythas made small talk while we ate, trading stories of the day before. Apparently I had lost an entire day to exhaustion and spirit wine. The sun was just now rising again, a full day after the kyrios’ funeral.

“So this is the Raging Heaven Cult,” Griffon mused, licking a trickle of olive oil off his thumb and surveying the room with a critical eye. “Are all of the initiates given private rooms?”

“Definitely not,” Scythas said, shaking his head. “Junior initiates share rooms, four to a dorm for Philosophers and eight for Citizens. Heroic cultivators and those with seniority are given rooms like these. The elders each have their own estates scattered around the mountain, where their city’s representative initiates tend to congregate.”

He seemed to think of something and said to me, “Naturally, there are more spacious accommodations for honored guests. Elder Aleuas asked me to extend you an invitation to his estate, I’m sure he’ll be happy to accommodate you during your stay.”

“Naturally,” Griffon echoed. I raised an eyebrow at him, but he only smirked faintly. Most young lords, whether they be aristocrats or patricians, would have chafed fiercely at the sudden reversal of our dynamic. Griffon, though, seemed amused by the novelty of it.

“See to it that he treats my master well,” he said imperiously. “He went through much to get here.”

“You mentioned that before,” Scythas said, with sudden intensity. I had a blurred impression of an exchange from the morning before, like something out of a fever dream. The contents of it had been washed out by the alcohol and the exhaustion, but I remembered enough. Demons on the western front.

“What does your elder want with me?” I asked him, rather than answer the unspoken question. The food and the wine and the bed had improved my mood substantially, but not nearly enough to delve into that particular topic. Fortunately, the night before last had given Scythas an overinflated view of me. He accepted the deflection for what it was and didn’t pry further.

“Jason and I brought the Crow in yesterday while you were playing Ascension,” he explained. I nodded, distantly remembering a game of dice, and… a cheater? A cheater. “Cyril we turned over to Elder Gelon, as we couldn’t prove that he was involved in the same way Alazon was. But it was enough that we had the Crow and testimony from Alazon’s lackeys. Elder Aleuas wants to thank you for assisting an initiate from his city and discuss the events of the night in person.”

Somehow, I doubted that was all the good elder wanted from me. More importantly, though, what had been that cheater’s name?

“What are these?” Griffon asked, picking up one of the papyrus sheets that Scythas had slid off the table. It was a star chart covered in fresh ink, a map of the night sky in winter.

“You don’t remember?” Scythas’ eyes widened in outrage. “They’re for my cultivation - you said you knew what you were talking about when you offered to help!”

“If I said that I knew, then I did,” Griffon assured him, scanning it with interest. “I just don’t remember it.”

For a moment, Scythas was lost for words. He looked at me. “Is he always like this?”

“He is.”

“How can you not remember?” he asked, nearly desperate. “We spoke about this for hours.”

“His tolerance for wine has always been pitiful.” I didn’t hesitate to condemn my student for forgetting such an important conversation. What that conversation had been about, I couldn’t say, but it was surely outrageous that Griffon had forgotten it.

The man in question shrugged one shoulder, shooting me an amused look, and spread another chart across his lap. He hummed.

“Ah.” It only took him a few moments to find what he’d been looking for. “You’re on the hunt.”

“He remembers,” Scythas said, raising both hands in wonder.

Griffon shook his head absently, wild blond mane spilling over his shoulder. “No, I don’t recall anything past the bathhouse.”

Bathhouse?

“Oh, of course. You just took one look at the night sky in spring and realized what ails my soul,” Scythas said scathingly. Griffon didn’t respond, grabbing another chart from the pile. “... You’re serious?”

“I always am,” Griffon said. I snorted. “Be silent, master.”

Astronomy had never been my primary focus, even as a boy. It was something my mentor had alluded to in the early days of my instruction but never delved fully into. I knew all of the constellations worth knowing, of course, and I knew how to navigate by them, but after I’d left home to join the legions my education had become far more practical.

I had learned to read omens from the night sky before a battle, and I was distantly aware of how to divine the seasons from their formations. But by and large, cosmology was not a field I’d had the luxury of exploring.

Which meant those feverish lashes of ink were Griffon’s doing. I observed what looked to be a spear traced through the stars, a fist, and a hound with a snake in its mouth. The more I looked, the less it made sense. What could I have possibly contributed to this conversation, drunk and half dead?

“I can see where I was going with this now,” Griffon said, faintly amused. “You want to cheat.”

“I do not!” Griffon could have slapped him across the face, and I don’t think Scythas would have been as offended as he was right then.

“And yet here you are, setting your sights on the Conqueror’s Path,” Griffon said with no particular judgement. There was scarlet laughter in his eyes as Scythas jerked the charts from his hands.

“Forget it,” Scythas muttered sourly. His eyes flickered to me, chagrined, as if my opinion somehow mattered to him. How absurd.

I reached over and clapped him on the shoulder. I had to reach for it. The two of them were laid out on their dining couches in the indolent Greek style, an unpleasant reminder of younger days in Rome. I sat on my own couch like it was a bench. Old habits.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I told him truthfully. Griffon had a way of getting under the skin. It was as much a skill of his as his pankration intent and his rosy fingers of dawn. But whatever it was that Scythas had asked our help for last night, I could tell that it was a difficult subject for him. It wasn’t something he’d shared lightly, even with the addition of alcohol.

He relaxed at the small gesture, nodding once. “Thank you again,” he said quietly. “I didn’t stop to think when you pointed out those Crows. You probably could have handled it yourself, but I would have been in over my head if you hadn’t come with me. So thank you.”

“You handled yourself well. You all did.” It was a gross understatement. My recollections of that night were a blur of pain and single-minded focus, further muddled by potent spirit wine, but what I did remember of Scythas and the other two evoked memories of the best days in Gaius’ legions.

Heroic cultivators were impossible legends, myths made reality. I was reminded of that fact over and over again, in the aftermath of the kyrios’ funeral, while we stalked the stalkers and chased them from their shadows.

My contribution to the list of miracles performed that night was to somehow not die, not even once, and to come out of it with my reputation intact. Admittedly, that might have been the unlikeliest occurrence of the night.

Speaking of. “Where are Jason and Anastasia?” I asked him. I remembered them surviving the night, but not much more than that.

“Jason’s sleeping yesterday off, along with the other three if I had to guess.” He shifted on his couch. His faint green cult attire, a marked difference from the royal indigos of the sanctuary city, shifted with the motion. It fell away from tanned muscle and sinew. He had no scars.

“And Anastasia?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care to, either.” His lip twitched towards a sneer, but he seemed to think better of it. “She is… not a woman I would associate with freely.”

“Ho?” Griffon leaned forward on his dining couch, suddenly invested. “And why is that?” I vaguely remembered him grilling me in a private moment, while we’d walked the streets of Olympia surrounded by rowdy Heroes, about the new additions Scythas and I had returned with.

“Where that one goes, disaster surely follows,” Scythas said darkly. “She’s an ill omen in silk robes and a widow's veil.”

The investment grew. “Go on.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Scythas snapped. Then, to me, “Just keep an eye on her. You may be able to take care of yourself, but with her that isn’t always enough. She has a way of… tempting.”

Ah. I smiled, in the distant way of my adopted father.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Right,” he said, averting his eyes.

“I think I’ll pay her a visit anyway,” Griffon said, winking when Scythas glared at him. “My master often tells me I’m a foolish man.”

“For all the good it does,” I returned wryly.

“I warned you,” Scythas said. “What follows is on your head.”

There came a crack, a mechanical crunch of sliding bolt locks being forced out of place. Light flared along the surface of Scythas’ door, bronze script burning with a visible light that seared the senses, alerting anyone within view of an imminent breach. Then, as quickly as it had come, it flickered and went out as the door was forced open.

Anastasia leaned against the mangled door frame, a vicious smile in her eyes. A massive Roman messenger eagle was perched on her right shoulder, which beat its wings and swept across the room to land on the curve of my dining couch, looking expectantly up at me. In lieu of a message, I offered it a scrap of fish.

Scythas came to his feet, fists clenched.

“My, my,” the Heroine said. “You three have certainly been busy.” Smoldering green eyes surveyed the mangled room, drifting past Scythas without truly seeing him. They lingered for a moment on Griffon, and the charming grin he reserved for strangers that didn’t know him yet.

But they settled, inevitably, on me.