The Son of Rome

Griffon and I made our rounds through the streets of Olympia, seeing what there was to see and balancing political intrigue with simple curiosity. The Half-Step City was a sharp contrast to Rome in almost every way. Especially when it came to the tongues spoken.

My mentor had taught me the Alikoan dialect well. I hadn’t had much use for it in the legions, but my time as a slave had seen my grasp on it perfected. But that was only one language. There were dozens of tongues being spoken in the Half-Step City, at least three at any given time on any given street. It was fascinating and disorienting in equal measure. I had grown used to hearing everything there was to be heard years ago, one of many skills that Gaius had hammered into me. That awareness worked against me now, made it hard to think straight.

It would’ve been hard to focus regardless. What conversation I could understand was conducted at blistering paces, about topics of politics and law that I had no frame of reference for as a foreigner. Children laughed and shrieked, running about naked or in simple genderless tunics. Figs, grapes, turnips, pears, apples, honeycombs, chickpeas, and myrtle berries abounded. Periodically, Griffon would snatch a handful of something with a pankration hand while the Metic selling it wasn’t looking. Occasionally, he even offered me some.

The fruits were all incredibly sweet, decadent beyond belief. In general, that was probably how I would describe this place. With its grand public buildings and massive, riotous agora.

And that was before taking into account Kaukoso Mons, the gemstone-lined mountain that served as a monument to all of man’s excesses.

I would give the Greeks one thing. In their virtues and their vices, they held nothing back.

“Well, this is my stop,” Griffon suddenly said, alighting on something that deserved his extended attention. I caught him by the arm before he could fully step away. The laurel leaf crown wrapped around his bicep was curiously warm to the touch.

“Not yet,” I told him, glancing meaningfully towards the greater mayhem of the agora. We’d been traveling side streets for the most part, just in case. Griffon raised an eyebrow.

“Ho, is that what last night was about?”

“What do you think?”

Griffon smirked and pulled his arm free. “Fine then, give me a moment.” That said, he turned and walked confidently into a residential building with no defining characteristics that I could see. It was a squat, almost ugly thing compared to the splendor of the public constructions.

I closed my eyes and focused on breathing while he did whatever it was he was doing. Counting today, it had been four days since I slept. Three days since Griffon and I had met at the eighth wonder of the world and consumed the starlight marrow of a crow.

Sleep was something that a cultivator of sufficient advancement didn’t really need, and it was something that a soldier of sufficient rank could rarely afford. I was out of practice, ironically, my days as a slave having been far more restful than my time in the legions, but some things were never truly forgotten. If anything, my advancement… at the end, had made it even easier to keep moving with the sun and the moon. The marrow helped as well, in a nebulous, unsettling way that I still hadn’t pinned down.

But even so, the mind needed a moment from time to time. I focused on breathing in the steady rhythm of a proper cadence, allowing my plans, my doubts, and my fears slip away for just a moment as I unwound.

Griffon wasted no time ruining my short peace, leaping out of the second story terrace of the unassuming home with pankration hands blazing around him.

I inhaled sharply, calling the captain’s virtue to my hand as I expanded my senses through the building in search of the threat.

I found it at the same moment that a wooden dining table came hurtling out of the building after Griffon. The former young aristocrat deflected the projectile furniture with his violent intent, sending it spiraling into another building where it exploded into shrapnel upon impact. He landed adroitly behind me, leaning back-to-back with his elbow propped up on my shoulder

“Give me a hand, will you?”

“You have enough,” I said flatly. He clicked his tongue, utterly unashamed of himself.

The scarred Heroine, Elissa, slammed open the door on the first floor, murder in her desert heat eyes. They went first to Griffon, seething annoyance in them that I fully empathized with, before settling on me. The Heroine sighed explosively.

“Solus. This lowly sophist would like to offer your student some guidance.”

A pankration hand dug its middle and index fingers into the small of my back, the heat of the Rosy Dawn’s flames growing steadily hotter.

“I can think of nothing better for his development,” I said, and was promptly jabbed by several more burning fingers. “Unfortunately, we have somewhere to be.”

Elissa scowled fully, resting a hand on the bronze blade at her hip. She wasn’t wearing her usual cult attire, I realized. She wasn’t even wearing the finery of a normal citizen of Olympia. She was dressed like a Metic, in drab white cloth with only a sash around her waist that held her sword, and a necklace of simple iron thread around her neck. She looked about as unassuming as a cultivator of her standing possibly could.

“So you came into my home, drank my wine, for what? Just to ruin my day?”

I glanced back at Griffon. He shrugged.

“I thought you might like to join us”

“Why would I-” Elissa stopped short, looking at me closer. Warily. Her eyes flickered up and down the street and all its people. “Now?”

Griffon smiled pleasantly at her over his shoulder. “Would you rather wait until dinner?”

The Heroine snarled a curse.

S

We found Jason sitting on the lip of a fountain that was as wide around as the entire bathhouse that Griffon and I had made use of earlier that morning. It wasn’t a fountain in the same sense that Rome had fountains. It was not acts of engineering that made this water flow.

The water within the fountain simply fell up. It streamed into the air as if the whole world was upside down, and the sky above was as the ground beneath our feet. Past a certain point, some thirty or forty feet in the air, those streams spiraled out in every direction and suddenly returned to normalcy, falling back into the pool below. It made for a dazzling sight.

And it also obscured everyone on the other side of the fountain from view. The sound of rushing water obscured most small sounds. For all that Jason was lounging with a young woman at his side, exchanging pleasant conversation without a care in the world, he had chosen his spot with care.

He noticed me shortly after I noticed him, his expression lighting up in a more genuine sense. Without looking, he placed a hand on the face of the woman beside him and pushed her back into the fountain. She shrieked as the odd currents of the structure carried her away.

“Solus,” he called, raising that same hand and greeting. Then his eyes slipped past me and noticed who I had brought with me and all that excitement fell away.

“You.”

“Him?” I asked, glancing back at Griffon.

“Me,” he agreed.

“Not him,” Jason said, waving impatiently. “Her. What is she doing here?”

Elissa stepped past us both, eyes burning with contempt as she looked down on her fellow Hero. “I was invited. What are you doing here, craven?”

Jason didn’t react physically, but his pneuma blazed around him, nearly a visible thing. He’d chosen a nice, secluded area of the agora, hiding in plain sight, but I supposed it was inevitable that no Greek could keep quiet for long.

“He’s meeting me,” I said. Somehow, maddeningly, that was enough for them to break eye contact and subside. Elissa stepped back and crossed her arms.

Jason grimaced. “Did you have to bring her?” I glanced back at Griffon, and saw the certainty in the quirk of his lips.

“She’s involved.” I chose to stand while Griffon sprawled across the stone lip of the fountain and dipped his hand into it, watching with interest the rivulets of water that streamed in odd ways through his fingers. “Would you have preferred Anastasia?”

Jason’s grimace deepened.

“Fine,” he said at length. “As long as she pulls her weight.” Elissa scoffed, but made no comment.

“So, we have our merry band of insurrectionists,” Griffon mused, visibly relishing in the discomfort those words caused the Heroine. “All we’re missing now is a king to kill. Which one first, you think?”

“Are you out of your mind?” Jason snarled.

“Likely,” he said easily

“Acting is one thing,” Elissa said, just as tense as her fellow Hero but less shocked by Griffon's words. “But there’s audacity, and then there’s stupidity. I know you know the difference.”

Griffon inclined his head, raising a cupped palm of water out of the fountain and overturning it. The water fell up through his fingers and around the sides of his palm. He smiled as he considered it.

“There are several deaths a cultivator can suffer,” he said, twisting his fingers around the rising strands of water. “A Tyrant especially. The body may die, yes, and so may the soul. But the death of a man’s ego is no less severe, nor the death of his curiosity, his spirit, his hunger.”

“His influence,” I finished, and Griffon’s smile turned to a vicious smirk.

Elissa frowned. “How could you possibly undermine… one of them? They’ve had decades, centuries to establish their domains. Each and everyone has a city’s full backing.”

“The crows,” Jason said, with quiet anticipation. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

I considered the question. What he was suggesting, what Griffon had led him into thinking was my plan, was a line that could not be uncrossed. Spitting in a Tyrant's face like that, undermining their reach no matter how indirectly, that was the sort of thing that we had crucified men for in Gaius’ legions. It was a mad, unnecessary thing

And yet. I took a breath, as I had taken a breath before while Griffon was antagonizing Elissa. As I had taken many breaths since consuming that starlight marrow, and I traced my pneuma as it flowed through entirely new paths in my body. I felt stronger today than I had ever before in my life. I had felt the same way yesterday, and the day before. Each night since that assault in the Father’s temple, Griffon and I had hunted crows and sucked the marrow from their bones. And each time, it had made us stronger than before.

I still hadn’t found a trace of my mentor, or anyone that could speak of him with any knowledge or authority. Anastasia, if she had found anything, had yet to seek me out and tell me. The Greek ways of cultivation were as opaque as ever, the Roman ways closed off to me.

As things stood…

“It is,” I answered Jason’s breathless question. I would continue to live this lie, the same lie that I had forced to be true the night of the kyrios’ funeral. “The Raging Heaven is in no rush to answer the question of succession, that much seems clear. In the meantime the mystikos are suffering. Children are being coaxed into opposing factions. Men and women huddle together in the light of day, too afraid of the dark to leave their rooms at night.”

“Sol isn’t a fan of politics,” Griffon confided to the two Heroic cultivators. I sighed and forced my fists to unclench.

“Men worry more about what they can’t see than what they can,” I said tiredly. “If they want to posture, fine. But I have no patience for scavengers.”

Jason and Elissa both considered me silently. The dull roar of the fountain and general tumult of thousands of people streaming through the agora was all that could be heard for a long minute.

“Who are you, really?” Elissa asked, finally. “Who are you that you think this is something you have to do?”

“That night, at the club,” Jason said, nearly inaudible beneath the surrounding noise. He tilted his head at Griffon beside him. “He said you came here from the west for a bit of culture. Where are you from, Solus?”

And why are you here, he didn’t ask. But I heard it nonetheless.

I considered them both, and Griffon besides. There was a part of me, a large part, that wanted to take it all back, to cut my losses and make good on what I had said on the Eos. Leave Griffon to his mad adventures and find my mentor, gather what strength I could and return to the ashes of Rome. Take down as many of those godforsaken dogs as I could before my body succumbed.

There was another part of me - smaller, but far more insistent - that said some things just weren’t worth tolerating. No matter whose country this was. No matter how long I had been here.

For all of the lives the legions of the Republic had taken, for all the atrocities her soldiers had committed, that part of me still believed in the core conceit of the Republic. That where all sons of Rome went, they spread the light of righteous civilization. The ideal of the soldier within me had long lost its patience for traitors and back stabbers.

The Raging Heaven Cult wasn’t my place. But I had doomed myself to it by extending a hand to Scythas. By saving Jason. By sharing a bath with Anastasia. By drinking with all of them, playing dice and trading discourse. I couldn’t think of them as faceless Greeks anymore. And if I had to acknowledge them, I had to acknowledge the rest. The children that Jason was doing his best to save in the small moments. The innocents in the cult, suffering the consequences of their elders’ greed.

I knew all too well what happened when Tyrants clashed.

“I’ve lived this conflict before,” I said, resigning myself to what inevitably came next. Griffon hummed in satisfaction. “When men like these cross swords, there’s only one way it can end. Succession through a proxy victory in the Olympic Games is a fantasy. Men like these are who they are because when they want something, they take it.”

Jason and Elissa shared a look, without malice for one another. With mutual unease.

“You’ve lived it,” Jason repeated. “Where? With who?”

“I don’t know anything about either of you. Not really,” Elissa said, but her suspicion was tempered by a careful consideration as she spoke to me. “And you don’t know me.”

“Or me,” Jason said reluctantly.

“A fair concern,” Griffon allowed, propping his head up on one hand. His scarlet eyes glittered. “What do you want to know?”