The Son of Rome

Griffon’s trio of Heroic cultivators stared at me without comprehension. The boys on either side of Lefteris leaned around their guardian to whisper to one another, confused. Anastasia, for her part, hummed and nodded once, as if I’d just confirmed a long held suspicion.

“Old ‘Zalus has been keeping quite a secret.”

“Fuck,” Elissa whispered.

“… fuck,” Kyno agreed.

“Fuck!” Lefteris slammed his hands to the table with force enough to crack it and make his boys flinch. Elissa smacked his shoulder so hard it nearly knocked him on his back, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. “Just what I needed! Just what we all needed!”

“I didn’t realize you felt that strongly about the Oracle,” I said, bemused. On his lounging couch at the far side of the room, Griffon watched Lefteris intently.

“I don’t,” Lefteris snapped. “I feel strongly about being passed a Tyrant’s secrets like a flask around a night fire. This isn’t bathhouse gossip, and ‘Zalus isn’t the kind of man to take an insult on the chin. Tyrants have burnt out entire family trees for less; don’t you understand?”

“Doubtful,” Jason said sarcastically. “How could Solus possibly understand the whims of Tyrants?” Scythas snorted.

I closed my eyes and prayed for patience.

“Whether or not Old Zalus takes offense to the airing of his dirty laundry has no bearing on us,” Griffon said, rising from his lounge. He ignored the myriad sounds of doubt and incredulity sent his way, approaching the table and taking a seat at its one remaining side. He reached for the map with a hand of flesh and blood, pressing a finger to our first destination.

“A Tyrant’s ire won’t deviate my cultivation or my digestion,” he said, smirking faintly at my sharp exhale. “Besides, once we’re finished with this, he’ll owe us all a greater debt than any insult could outweigh.”

“Oh my,” Anastasia whispered, eyes widening as she looked the map over again. Realization dawned in caustic green flame.

“The true Scarlet Oracle isn’t dead,” I explained to the rest of them. “She’s been asleep for sixteen years, suffering from an illness that no one could identify and none could hope to cure.”

“None could care to cure,” Griffon said with special emphasis.

“The kyrios.” Kyno put it together next.

“The kyrios,” I confirmed. “Socrates believes that nectar and ambrosia could cure whatever it is that ails the Oracle, but the kyrios refused to offer his personal stores and he wouldn’t allow anyone else the knowledge of how to synthesize it.”

“And he took it all with him when he challenged the fates,” Elissa said with mounting dread. I nodded.

“Even Socrates doesn’t know the exact recipe. But he knows the kyrios accumulated this knowledge as a hero, and he knows where the kyrios has been. Whatever the materials are, we’ll find them if we retrace those steps.”

“This is the kyrios’ epic,” Lefteris said with a dull sort of shock. Lean as he was, the lines of his jaw and cheeks had been prominent the moment I first saw him. The weeks since the funeral had only weathered him further - he looked nearly gaunt as he regarded the map now.

“We have to find whatever there is to be found at each of these locations,” I explained, keeping it short. Simple. They wouldn’t be able to process much more than that at the moment. “Which means securing passage through any cities we might encounter, charting courses and securing a ship for the locations that we can’t reach on foot. We’ll need provisions as well as a plan - several. Best if we split our efforts, focus part of our efforts on scouting the distant locations while the rest of us handle the nearby marks.

Kyno raised a hand, the other kneading at his forehead. “Slow down.”

“No, stop,” Elissa said, that fury rising in her voice. “And tell me that you don’t expect us to join you on this- this-”

“Thrilling adventure,” Griffon offered.

“Nonsense,” she spat. She slapped the map. “The full Mediterranean, from corner to corner! A journey across the civilized world while the Olympic Games are just four months away. Have you forgotten why we all came to Olympia in the first place, or-” and here the Sword Song glared at me and me alone. “Do you simply not care?”

“Where are the other competitors?”

Burning desert heat eyes swiveled and settled on the former Young Aristocrat.

“What?”

“Where are the other competitors?” he asked again, the scarlet gem of his necklace swaying as he leaned forward. “Hundreds of Heroes compete in the Olympic Games, is that not so? And yet, aside from the people in this room, I can count the number of other Heroic cultivators I’ve met in this city using only my hands.”

“How many?” I asked wryly, and he flicked the side of my head with fingers of violent intent.

“Well?” he pressed. “Where are they, Elissa?” She sneered at him. “Anastasia!”

“Yes, Griffon?” the caustic Heroine asked, amused.

“I am young and unrefined, brought up in a distant land with barbarians as my neighbors,” he said, glancing meaningfully my way. “Enlighten me - where are all the rest of the competitors?”

“Wherever it is that Heroes go, I imagine.”

“Ho? And why aren’t they here, preparing for the Games? They’re only four months away, after all.”

Anastasia considered Griffon, and then the fuming Heroine across the table. Her smile deepened. “Technically speaking, competitors aren’t required to be in the city of Olympia until a month before the Games. Most choose to spend their time abroad prior to that.”

“With their families and their cults?” Griffon asked. Anastasia laid a finger to her chin, making a show of thinking deeply. Slowly, Kyno began to inch himself closer to Elissa.

“Pursuing advancement, whatever that means for them. Every rank is an advantage over the competition, another door opened to them.”

“How so?”

“A Hero of the first rank can only compete in a single event, no matter how skilled they might be in others,” Anastasia explained earnestly, without any apparent satisfaction at Elissa’s rising pneuma. “A Hero of the second rank can compete in two, the third rank in three, and on it goes. Only a captain of the Heroic Realm can hope to win glory in every single event. Only a captain can hope to seize the Olympic flame.”

“So you’re saying glory goes to those with strength to seek it,” Griffon mused. Anastasia nodded, glancing slyly my way. Patience. Patience, until it’s done. “And rather than pursue her own strength to this end, rather than add to the epic inside her soul, the Sword Song would rather sit in this house and polish her blade for four months. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“No,” Anastasia said merrily. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Poisonous bitch,” Elissa snarled, and lunged across the table. The room exploded into motion, Kyno diving in between the two Heroic women while Lefteris threw his boys back against a cushioned lounge on the other side of the room. Scythas whistled sharply, gale winds rising around myself and him, while Jason palmed the daggers at his belt and rose.

Griffon raised an eyebrow at me from across the table.

Gravitas.

Half a dozen Heroic cultivators grunted and gasped as they were thrown back to the furthest edges of the room, each falling onto a cushioned lounge with varying degrees of composure.

Jason, off to my left, shot me a betrayed look while hanging over the headrest with his hair brushing the hearth’s coals. What did I do? he mouthed.

I rolled my shoulders, stifling a wince at the stabbing pain that followed. I was playing with fire here. More so than usual, given the company I kept.

“You were willing to stand with us against the Crows,” I said to Elissa. She stared mutinously back at me. “What’s changed since then?”

“We came together for our juniors that were suffering,” Kyno answered in her stead. “And we committed less then, compared to what you’re asking now.”

“Are you certain?” Griffon asked. He had anchored himself with all thirty of his pankration hands, resisted the captain’s virtue and remained at the table with me. “You allowed yourselves to be kidnapped from your rooms. You risked retribution from your elders, struck down the instruments of their influence with your own hands. You mean to tell me that defying eight took less from you than following the footsteps of one?”

“Not just any one,” Lefteris muttered.

“Granted. But think of what’s to be gained. Think of what we can see, what we could experience! Leave aside the question of nectar and ambrosia, resources that any cultivator would rip themselves apart to get a taste of. Think of what we could gain as men and women of principle, of passion, of purpose.

“And if you must be cynical, all of you that have come to the city of Olympia seeking the benefits that a champion’s glory can afford, imagine the gratitude of a Tyrant that’s just been given back his wife.”

“Why would you want to help him?” Elissa asked from her cushioned lounge, scarred legs tucked up underneath her.

“I just said-”

“No. Why would you want to help Old ‘Zalus? Either of you?” Desert heat swept over Griffon and I each in turn. “The last time we spoke of it, you said you had no allegiance to him or his faction here.”

“I don’t,” Griffon agreed.

“Then why?”

“I came to Olympia to see the Oracle.”

“You’ve seen them all!” she shouted. “All but one, and even then you saw her daughter! Was that not enough!?”

Griffon answered without hesitation.

“It wasn’t.”

“I told you already, Griffon,” Kyno said quietly, rising from the lounging couch he’d broken in half when he landed on it. “You’ll have to give us more than that if you want us to work with you. Now more than ever. Regardless of what you think of us, and regardless of your pride.”

“What are you here for, really?” Elissa pressed. “The Olympic Games, the company of the Oracles, the succession of the kyrios? Which is it?”

“All of those things, and more besides.”

“You’re both here on the Rosy Dawn‘s behalf,” Lefteris accused. “Don’t dress it up.” Griffon smiled and said nothing.

“At the bathhouse,” Kyno said, “you told us that Old Zalus doesn’t speak for the Scarlet City. What purpose could this quest possibly serve for Damon Aetos?”

I fully released my hold on the reins of the conversation, resigning myself to whatever absurdity Griffon had planned.

“What could the Tyrant of the Rosy Dawn possibly want with the recipe for nectar and ambrosia? The food and drink of divinity?” Griffon repeated for the benefit of all those in the room. “Is that what you’re asking me?”

There it was.

In the silence and dread that followed his words, Griffon pulled a scroll of rolled papyrus from the golden shawl wrapped around his waist. He laid it on the table beside the map, so that everyone could see the illustration on its worn outer surface. Four young men standing beneath a ring of dried blood - what had once been a scarlet sun, I realized.

“You want to know why Sol and I have accepted this quest? I’ve already told you. You want to know why we’re bringing you along with us? It’s just as simple - I believe there’s a thread that connects all of us here together,” he said, undoing the twine around the scroll. “Beyond our virtues, beyond our clashing temperaments, beyond our dreams and our tribulations - each of us has a Tyrant we’ve languished underneath for far too long. Each of us is looking for an escape from subjugation. Speak now or never again if I’m wrong.”

I opened my mouth.

“Be silent, worthless Roman.”

I snorted, but obliged him. No one else in the room tried to speak - not even the boys, interestingly enough. Though they may have just figured the question wasn’t for them.

“Right,” Griffon said sharply, casting aside the twine and sliding his thumb under the leading corner of the scroll. “I believe we can help one another, just as I believe there are still Heroes worth telling stories of buried somewhere in your souls. So, as a gesture of good will, allow me to be the first to share.”

He cracked the scroll open in one sharp motion, papyrus spilling off the table as it rolled across the room - all the way into the open hearth. The furthest edge of the old papyrus caught fire in an instant, and the light of the flames swiftly rushed up the rest of the scroll. Illuminating every word.

“Allow me tell you a story of the man I’ve vowed to defy,” Griffon said, as the flames rose from the papyrus and pneuma spilled out of the scroll. He bared his teeth in a wicked grin as whispering rhetoric pressed against our senses and pulled us into the rosy glow.

“Listen closely. This is a story about Damon Aetos.”