The Son of Rome

We gathered in the home of the Sword Song, the first Heroine to respond to my unintended call on the night of the kyrios’ funeral.

She stood while the rest of us sat around a low table of carved mahogany. There were dining couches as well, enough scattered throughout the house for us all to sit if a few of us shared, but I hadn’t bothered dragging one over. The rest had followed my example and sat on the bare floor with varying degrees of propriety.

Elissa alone stood - silently glowering at the far wall. The first thing I’d noticed about her that first night had been the scars marring an otherwise flawless physique. The second thing had been the anger. Not at me for calling her out, though that had been present. Not at Griffon for slapping her in the face, though that had of course been there as well. Not even at the Tyrants and their games.

It was a deeper fury than that. Something I had no name for, but could pick out of a crowd of any size. It was a special sort of torment, the kind that made a man a horrible citizen and a valuable soldier. Gaius had trained me to notice broken souls. He’d trained me to sort those for whom war was the only salvation from those who would break beneath the weight of their sins.

You came here to seek your master, is that it? Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that was your only intent? These people aren’t your soldiers. They don’t owe you their lives. Not yet.

That night, while the elders of the Raging Heaven beat their drums and the pyre smoke reached fruitlessly for the stars, I’d tasted salt and ash on the wind. I’d noticed the attention of a higher power whirling around Scythas, and I’d followed its path through the crowd with my burgeoning Sophic sense. That I’d found the rest of Griffon’s three was pure coincidence. That was all. None of what followed had been my intent at the time.

I looked around the table, at Heroic cultivators far stronger than myself. I looked at slumped shoulders and wary eyes - heart flames that flickered when they met my gaze.

Any man will go to war for you if given the proper cause, nephew. To fight is the legionnaire’s purpose. To find the legionnaire, to convince him of the necessity - that is ours.

I scowled and clenched my fist on the table. I hadn’t come to Olympia for that. Not here, not now. Nowhere and never again.

I’d seen the end of my path in meditation with Socrates. Burning the city of Carthage to ash and pouring salt into the last demon’s gaping chest. Alone. Living just long enough to swallow the final dog’s beating heart, and then returning to the Fifth where I belonged. Alone.

Griffon hadn’t been wrong. I wanted to know what was lurking behind each of these people. I wanted to know why they had chained themselves to the Raging Heaven despite once standing in defiance of tribulation lightning. I wanted to see it undone. But I had no illusions as to where that road led. Griffon had an ideal in his mind’s eye, a world that was poetry as much as it was reality, and he expected everyone else to fall in step with that vision.

Even if these fortuitous encounters yielded true companions, the union could only last so long. Every man stands alone against the heavens. They’d all stray eventually, lost again on their own paths.

And if they didn’t, I would. They were Greeks. No matter the route, no matter the tribulation, Olympus Mons was their final destination. It was inevitable that I’d leave them all behind. All of them. Even Griffon. For me, the end had been set in stone long ago. It didn’t matter which path I chose now.

All roads led to Rome.

Elissa’s pneuma flickered around her, tension coiling in the squaring of her shoulders as she laid a hand on her sword. Across the room, the only other cultivator that had not followed my example raised his head from the lounging couch where he’d been napping. Griffon blinked, smiling languidly.

“Just in time,” he said. A ferocious pounding on the door down the hall followed soon after.

“‘Left!” Elissa snapped, rushing down the hall. “If you break that door-!” The door slammed open.

“I’ll kill him!”

“Theri, You can’t!”

“He needs to teach us first!”

“Ho, so it’s fine after that?” Griffon asked, amused. Rolling onto his side, he propped his head up with one hand and raised the other in a greeting as Lefteris came storming into the room.

“You!” the bowman seethed. The two boys from before struggled futilely to hold him back, the smaller of them hanging off his neck while the larger of them attempted to yank him back by the waist. Elissa followed close behind, irritated but not quite willing to stop him. “Just who do you think you are!?”

“I’m glad you asked-”

“Don’t,” I said wearily. Griffon smirked.

“This isn’t funny! None of this is funny!” Lefteris raged, his pneuma rising precipitously.

“Easy.” Elissa gripped his shoulder. Where two Civic boys combined had failed to slow him down, that hand stopped him short. Lefteris heaved a helpless growl.

“You know this isn’t funny,” he said to her.

“It’s not,” Kyno rumbled. “But that’s how he is. We won’t get anywhere if we let him set the pace.”

“It’s the opposite,” Griffon corrected the hulking cultivator in the crocodile skin. Scarlet eyes glittered in the low light of the home’s hearth flame. “If you’d only follow my lead, you’d be at the end of the road before you knew it.”

“In pieces, maybe,” Scythas muttered, resting his chin in crossed arms on the table beside me.

“You had no right,” Lefteris accused the former Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn. “No right to spirit them away after I told them to stay here!”

“I didn’t,” Griffon agreed.

“As if it wasn’t enough to take them out of the house, you took them out of the city entirely! Into the wilds!”

“It wasn’t like that, Theri,” the older of the two boys protested. The younger scowled and tightened his arms around the Hero’s neck, doing his level best to throttle him.

“We can take care of ourselves.”

“What would you have done if they came to harm?” Lefteris asked, shrugging off Elissa’s hand and advancing forward. Kyno rose from the table only for Griffon to wave him off. Jason leaned back on his elbows, crossed legs tucked under the table. Across from me, Anastasia watched with calm interest. “Would you have done anything? If a beast had taken them while you were looking the other way, swept up in whatever curiosity caught your eye - would you have noticed it at all?”

“Such suspicion,” Griffon replied without concern. “How cruel. Is that any way to treat a friend?” The Heroic bowman grit his teeth.

“We aren’t friends. We will never be friends.”

“I told you, boys,” Griffon said without breaking eye contact. The young redheads both perked up attentively. “Your guardian’s heart is in the right place. Unfortunately, the rest is often wrong.”

“Don’t talk to them,” Lefteris snapped. The flames behind his eyes flared. “Don’t even look at them!”

“Or what?”

“Enough.”

The attention of two boys and six Heroic cultivators fell heavily upon my shoulders. The captain’s virtue reached out through my voice and drew their eyes unfailingly to me. All of them except Griffon.

Gravitas is a Roman conceit, boy. You never bothered to consider the impact it could have on a Greek soul because it never mattered back then. But you’ve lost that luxury. If you want to accomplish anything at all before you return to the elements, you’ll have to find your place in this world once again. Whatever the rules were in the legions, whatever your limits were there, understand that they won’t necessarily be the same underneath a Greek sky.

Six Heroes were drawn in by the captain’s word, while a Philosopher of the second rank ignored it. I didn’t know why. I would have to find out.

For now, business.

“I apologize for Griffon,” I told the Gold-String Guardian, meeting his burning glare as forthrightly as I could. Finally, he exhaled and broke the captain’s gaze, looking away.

“He should apologize for himself.”

“It’s impossible for him,” I said. “His vital breath would flow backwards on the spot - he’d explode.”

Jason snorted a laugh, surprised more than anything. Scythas tucked his face further into his crossed arms to hide a sudden smirk while Anastasia’s lips curled. A sliver of tension eased out of the room, the Heroes letting down their hackles just a bit.

“My master is abusing me,” Griffon lamented. “And after everything I did to rescue him from that old man’s groping hands.”

“That was true, then?” Elissa asked, finally taking a seat at the table once she had forced Lefteris and his boys to sit first. “The message you sent with that eagle - the Gadfly really took you on as a student?”

“Student… isn’t quite the right word.” More accurately, the Gadfly had taken me on out of obligation, as a distant mentor to my own master. Even then, he’d taken me on the same way a man took on a feral dog. Keeping me away from polite company and vowing to beat the wolf out of me until I was civilized - whatever that meant to a Greek. “But yes, he’s offered me his wisdom for the moment.”

Lefteris and Kyno exchanged a look. Anastasia hummed, leaning across the table towards me.

“That’s quite an honor,” she said, significance in every intonation. “The Gadfly doesn’t offer his wisdom to just anyone these days.” She had foregone her cult attire since being stolen away by a pair of hungry ravens, and now black cloth spilled down slender marble arms as she leaned, emerald gems shimmering as they dangled from each of her ears. She’d tied her hair back into something more artful since the last time I had seen her, thickly interwoven braids the same color as her dress that spilled over one shoulder. Somehow, like this, she looked more menacing than she had with a bloody javelin in her hand.

“I’ll take what I’m given,” I said simply.

“Of course you will.”

A pankration hand slapped the table in between us, planting a worn papyrus map in the center. Anastasia leaned back while the rest of the Heroes and children around the table moved in around it.

“As much as I love to see your smiling faces gathered here together -” Griffon drawled from across the room.

“We’ve called you for a greater purpose today,” I finished, accepting the cue for what it was. Smoothing out the old map, I allowed each of them to drink it in. Jason and Scythas had already seen it back in the kyrios’ estate, but they pored over it again with full focus.

“We’re really doing this,” Jason murmured. Scythas nodded absently, eyes flickering across the various markers.

“Looks that way.”

“Doing what?” Lefteris demanded.

“What is this?” Kyno asked quietly.

“I’ve learned a few things since we last spoke,” I explained. “The nature of a wise man’s rhetoric, the greater scope of the late kyrios’ hunger, and more besides.”

The inexplicable influence of the shard from Babylon wavered on my tongue. That eerie stone tablet with every founding myth scrawled across its shifting surface - in every language of man - had left its mark on me, burrowed in through my eyes as I read it and settled along the surface of my tongue. Ready and willing to serve my needs. After I had gone back following that initial reading and finished the Theogeny as well as the Aeneid, my grasp of the myriad tongues of the Mediterranean had solidified in my mind.

It was a convenience that I could hardly believe any man would be afforded. But if my gut was right, this phenomenon explained Griffon’s eerie ability to translate his words to nearly a dozen different tongues while speaking only a single set of words. It also explained why none of the Heroic cultivators we’d encountered thus far had struggled to understand the Latin I spoke out of habit. Perfect translation. Effortless understanding, driven by an ancient relic.

At times, the Greek cities seemed as barbaric to me as the tent kingdoms and marsh empires of the western front. And then there were moments like that, when they so casually flourished ancient treasures that the Senate would wage war for. And I was reminded once again just how young my city was in the grand scheme of things.

How young it had been.

My fist clenched and unclenched on the table. Regardless. I wouldn’t mention that particular linguistic revelation just yet. I had spoken to the Heroic cultivators in Latin up until now without issue, and I had no reason to change that. Let them think it was a deliberate choice on my part. The alternative would be a blow to an image I had no choice but to maintain.

“I also discovered something about the Oracle of the Scarlet City,” I said neutrally. Kyno and Elissa glanced warily at Griffon across the room. Too late for that now.

“We discovered that the girl who calls herself a seer is no seer at all,” Griffon said, his influence an odd thing as it clenched and unclenched around him. The mood he’d been in back in that courtyard was something I hadn’t seen from him in months. Agitated down to his bones.

“Not yet,” I said, and he scoffed.

Anastasia raised an eyebrow, something curious in her bearing. Off to the left, Elissa drummed her fingers on the polished wood of the table top.

“Everyone knows that,” the Sword Song said, unable to contain herself. “You’re telling me the great Solus and Griffon only just now figured it out?”

“Elissa,” Kyno warned her.

“What? They pulled us into all this, he went and roped the Oracle in under her father’s own nose, and now he tells us he had no idea what the girl really was?”

Damn it. I forced my teeth not to clench, my breath not to catch. Damn it. I should have known they’d know. I should have known-

“Just a moment,” Anastasia murmured. “Somehow, I get the feeling they’re not saying what you think they’re saying.”

Elissa frowned. “What do you mean?”

“It’s known that the previous Scarlet Oracle retired from her duties after giving birth, yes,” Anastasia said, glancing obliquely at the scarred Heroine, “though to say it’s common knowledge is rather disingenuous. Further, it’s known that the current Scarlet Oracle could not have possibly made the necessary journey to be crowned in her patron’s domain.”

“Because the Scarlet City is an island in the sun,” Griffon mused.

Because Damon Aetos was Damon Aetos.

“The last Oracle died in childbirth and the new one is unordained. What’s your point?” Lefteris asked. Caustic green eyes considered him, and then the children sitting on either side of him. The boys flushed at the Heroine’s smoldering attention.

“My point,” Anastasia decided, “is that they didn’t say she was an unordained seer. They said that she was no seer at all.”

“Meaning…” Elissa frowned, twisting a scar along her jaw. “Impossible.”

“Improbable,” Anastasia corrected her. The two Heroines stared hard at one another. Then, as one, they turned to me.

“What is it you’re trying to tell us, Solus?” Kyno asked me, the dull eyes of his crocodile cloak seeming to flicker and sharpen in the hearth’s low light. Well. I had little choice now.

“Selene lacks an oracle’s majesty,” I informed them. Then, as an afterthought, “And her mother is still alive.”