An Unkindness

Horn is fulfilled. Ivory deceives.

Two ravens and two Heroic souls had entered the Orphic house through gates of ivory - or perhaps it was horn. In the empty stands and shadowed rafters, the ravens had heard the echo of a lyre where the Hero of the Scything Squall had heard nothing at all. And thus they had ventured into the true singing house, immersing themselves in chthonic shadow that a crow could only briefly traverse.

Prior to that, two initiates of the Thracian Orphic mystery had seen the stirring of once awoken shadows. and so they had offered each raven a drink that they would need to make it through their second anointment. A gift from Senior to Junior, each of them a cup of hollowed out horn - or perhaps it was ivory.

Their drinks were simple milk and honey, same as every intoxicated soul in the singing house. It wasn’t the alcohol that intoxicated a man of Orphic faith, after all. It was enthusiasm. The inspiration of divine essence.

To be anointed once, a man had to be made aware of the truth that lurked beneath the shadowed earth. From horn, the truth. From ivory, only lies. To be anointed twice, and stand proud as a full initiate of chthonic mystery faith, a man had to see that truth for himself. To experience it, as the first and most reviled son of scarlet sin had, and thus be reborn.

If their cups were of horn and the rest of the spectators cups of ivory, then that would mean these rites were true. If the opposite, then everything the ravens had seen would have to be lies.

The raven who was Lio “Griffon” Aetos knew his cup was made of horn. He knew it.

But he was beginning to doubt.

“I didn’t know it was possible for you to look this pitiful,” Lydia Aetos spoke, seated beside the raven in the shadowed forest grove. “To think I’d live to see you make such a face. The world must be ending after all.”

The raven did not respond to the playful jab. Neither did he turn his head. But he couldn’t stop himself from looking at her out of the corner of his eye.

Lydia Aetos regarded him fondly, her features lit by a warm fire light that was entirely out of place in the otherwise shadowed grove. She sat on the ground - sprawled, really - with one leg folder over the other in leisure and one elbow to prop her up. She was dressed not in her usual cult silks, but in midnight cloth and leather dyed white. Where the black cloth shifted on her shoulders and parted, It revealed the bronze breastplate she wore like a second skin. Her actual skin was still marble smooth and just as pale, but marred now by the faint silver of lasting scars

She was taller than she had been in his last memory of her. The lines of muscle in her legs and arms were more pronounced than before, and if the breastplate was as skintight as it looked then the muscles of her core had been further refined as well. She was further refined. A woman now, more than a girl. A warrior.

And a Heroine. Her eyes burned with the light of her heart’s flame as she regarded him.

She wasn’t real. Every word she spoke only made him more certain of it. Every moment he suffered her delusion, he grew less sure that the cup he had drank from was horn and not ivory.

“What’s wrong, Lio?” Myron Aetos asked him, seated at his other side. Lit by the same nebulous fire light, his appearance was an even more startling contrast than the Young Miss’. “You haven’t spoken a word since you got here. This isn’t like you.”

The boy, now nearly a man, sat with his legs crossed and an elbow resting on each knee. Many people, most people in fact, were unsightly until they refined themselves. Myron though, had been born cherubic. An adorable infant, later a precocious young boy with the promise of a handsome man in the shape of his jaw and the noble bridge of his nose. The young man the raven now spied from the corner of his eye was that promise delivered.

The delusion of Myron Aetos frowned, his brow furrowing. a familiar expression now entirely changed. He had retained the fairest of his features and grown into the ones that always gave his youth away when he tried emulating his elders as a boy. His unconscious, concerned scowl was no longer amusing and cute. His narrow eyes were fierce, now.

Made all the more so by the vibrant blue flames burning behind them. The little kyrios was older but not yet grown, not like the delusion of Lydia, but he was a Hero nonetheless. An unprecedented standing for a cultivator that was still as close to boyhood as he was the prime of his maturation. He wore a breastplate and greaves, with a helmet topped by scarlet feathers resting on the ground by his hip. He wore leather boots. In place of Lydia’s scars, he had a scarf wrapped around his neck that was soaked through with blood.

He wasn’t real either. The raven ignored him just the same, though it made him doubt a little more.

“What am I meant to do with you if you won’t even look my way?” Castor Aetos murmured up above.

Perched languidly in the overhanging branch of a tree, illuminated by fire’s light, the foot that he let dangle flexed rhythmically while his head bobbed. He had a sword laying across his lap and a whetstone in his hand. Each swipe of the stone across his blade’s edge was a punctuation of a beat only he could hear.

His features were as fair as the raven remembered, his long dirty blonde hair braided and bound by rings of gold in a ponytail that dangled nearly as far down as his foot. His face was cleanly shaven, and in place of armor he wore only unadorned white cloth riddled with tears and cuts. He was larger, as well. Larger than the raven, even.

His eyes could not be seen behind the strip of linen he tied over them, but the light of his Heroic soul could be seen bleeding through the fabric.

He wasn’t real. But even so.

“You can talk to me, you know,” Rena Aetos assured the raven. Above and to the right, she hung upside down from a different tree branch, her arms dangling freely along with her hair while her legs kept her steady. She smiled and winked at the raven, knowing he could see her at the edge of his vision. “Just this once, I don’t mind being the one that listens.”

Her arms swayed, and the iron manacles afixed to each of them clanked and rattled audibly against one another as they did. Four of them on each arm, severed chains dangled from each one. The same was true of her legs - four bands of iron for each calf, stacked one atop the other in a line. She wore them like bangles and bracelets.

She even had a collar of cruel iron sealed around her throat. Yet it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. In fact, she had inscribed it. A serpent had been carved into the surface of the slave’s choker, the head meeting the tail at the center of her throat and devouring it. Somehow, she didn’t mind.

Somehow, despite the fact that she was bonded in iron nearly twenty times over, the flames of her Heroic spirit still burned warmly behind her eyes.

She wasn’t real. He doubted.

“You’ll break this silence,” Nikolas Aetos said with unshaken conviction. “It’s what you do.”

Of the raven’s myriad delusions, this one alone was nearly unchanged from his most recent memory of the cultivator in question. Nikolas was larger than he had been before, nearly as large as the chthonic Hero Orpheus, but Heroes grew fast and the young prodigy of the Rosy Dawn grew faster still. His skin was still ruggedly tanned, his eyes the same burning blue, black hair cropped nearly as short as Sol’s, and he still wore the same armor and sailing leathers.

Aside from his increased stature, there were only two real differences. His wedding ring was gone, and the hilt of the sword sheath at his side was changed.

He was by far the closest to reality, but he was the fakest of them all. The raven knew it, because he knew that hilt. It was attached to the blade that the raven carried at his side, in that very moment.

The raven knew without question his cousins were not there in that shadowed grove with him, like he knew there was no fire to illuminate them and no way for Nikolas’ blade to have a hilt that he was himself carrying.

But he had also known that his cup was horn and not ivory. Just as he had known that the world outside of the scarlet city, beyond the reach of Damon Aetos, was a vast and vibrant thing filled with people worth telling stories of. The raven known as Griffon had known many things.

He had thought that, anyway.

“After all this time, I finally get to see you somber,” the delusion that could not be Castor mused, the rag that covered his eyes glowing faintly. “I thought it would be peaceful. Now I realize it just makes me feel uneasy.” The light did not shift, not even once. His eyes weren’t moving - but his dangling foot still tapped away at the beat of an unsung song.

“Something happened,” the delusion that could not be Myron Aetos guessed. The young man massaged his temples, burning blue eyes flickering fitfully as he thought hard. “Something’s wrong, I can tell. Hold on, just let me think-“ in the sourceless fire light, the drops of blood that fell from his soaked scarf glimmered nearly gold.

“You’ll feel better if you speak it, no matter how bad it may be. That’s what you’ve always told me, isn’t it?” Hanging upside down from her tree, the delusion that could not be Rena reached precariously for the raven. the tips of her fingers were adorned with wicked golden claws. The severed chains of her myriad shackles rattled and glinted in the light. “Manifest it, Lio. Speak the words so I can help.”

The delusion that could not be Nikolas waited patiently. Content to let the raven have the next word, however long it took. He stroked the hilt of his sword with an idle thumb as he basked in the fire’s warmth.

“Son of sullen silence,” the delusion that could not possibly be Lydia murmured, tilting her head while she regarded the raven. “What could possibly be terrible enough to seal your lips?” She looked at him like she was seeing a mirage, or a half-forgotten dream. Something nearly there, but not quite.

Ivory deceives. Horn is thus fulfilled.

The most potent deception was the one that convinced. Convincing a skeptical man of a lie was nearly impossible, if he knew enough to look for it. Such a man would have to convince himself. But what could possibly motivate a skeptical man to turn away from truth in order to embrace a lie?

He had to want it to be true.

In the end, the difference between ivory and horn was nearly impossible to tell from the outside looking in. You had to crack them open. You had to see what was inside. If you found marrow, it was horn. Otherwise, a lie.

The raven known as Griffon remembered the Orphic house they had entered. Traversing shadows to converse with echoes of what had once been great souls. Imbibing milk and honey and falling under its psychedelic sway. This forest was a continuation of that intoxication. These facsimiles of his cousins were not real.

But he wanted them to be.

“The Fates are truly cruel,” the raven finally spoke. Each of his ivory cousins - or were they horn? - perked up at the sound of his voice, focusing intently on him. The raven lamented. “As if it wasn’t enough already. My own elder cousin, whom I have long admired, gone away to find what could not be found at home. As if it wasn’t enough. The older generation, bound by brotherhood and greater than their greatest children.”

As if it wasn’t enough that the raven had fled the nest in search of glory, and found the world nothing but grim.

“Treacherous heart.” The raven gripped his chest. His nails carved bloody furrows in his flesh. A delusion or a real and present injury? He wouldn’t know until he woke up. “Unsightly hunger. What use is spirit if the only flame that burns is hateful? What use is desire if the only thing I want is the one thing I’ll never, ever have?”

“You’re not making any sense, Lio,” the false Hero Myron Aetos said, concerned. The young man that should have been a boy leaned further towards the raven, illuminating further the design threaded through his blood-soaked scarf - an elephant run through by a spear head.

“Nothing makes sense. The world is not what it should be.”

“Then we’ll change it,” the false Heroine Rena insisted, twisting at the waist and lifting her chin so she could look at him properly rather than upside down as she hung. “That’s what a Hero does, isn’t it? When something is wrong, they make it right. That’s what you do.” In the sourceless illumination, the self-consuming serpent engraved in her slave collar shimmered and seemed to writhe.

“‘When something is wrong, a Hero makes it right’. I thought that’s what a Hero was. That’s what a Hero should be. But these days, a Hero can be anything at all - so long as they burn.”

“Can be. Should be. What does any of that matter?” the false Hero Castor asked the raven impatiently, dashing his whetstone against the earth below and pulling the linen bindfold down from his eyes. The hollow sockets settled unerringly on the raven, the flames within crackling. “The world is. We are. Since when has the Young Aristocrat cared enough about reality to lament its cruelty?”

“I’ve always cared. About all of it. Everything. That’s why this world infuriates me.”

“Because it’s less than what you thought it would be,” the false Hero Nikolas said knowingly. He caressed the Talon’s hilt, the relic of his late father, with a hand unadorned by any ring. A hilt that in truth hung at the raven’s hip. A hilt he could have had if he had stayed in the Scarlet City, if he had broken free alongside his cousins and taken what should have been his to inherit. “Because you want it to be more.”

“Because I know that it was more. Because I’ve seen the world in every shade, because I know it could be golden bright, but the life I was given is iron. No more kings and queens of glory. No everlasting providence. Only Tyrants, and the faceless corpses the pantheon left behind in its passing.”

What was the point of scaling the mountain when the view from the top was so grim? What pleasure was there in triumph when all of your opponents were weaker than they should have been? Weaker than their ancestors that came before them?

“When I won the Daylight Games, it stung worse than if I’d lost. I thought that bitterness would remain behind when I left the Scarlet City, but it followed me instead. Everywhere I go. No matter what I do. The best of what I find is what’s already dead and gone. The dregs are all that remain. That hollow victory is all that remains.”

Surrounded by beautiful delusions, the raven despaired. The Hero Nikolas had shown him that there were still things worth experiencing in this life, when he returned home for his marriage burning brighter than he ever had before. The brothers Aetos had proven to him that family could reach for the heights together, side by side as equals. Now here, in the shadowed grove of the Orphic mystery, the Fates had chosen to taunt him with what he might have had.

His cousins sat at the edges of his vision as they could have been, if they had been born earlier or he had been born later. If they had been courageous instead of cowardly. If they had been tempered rather than pretentious. Wise, and not foolish. Righteous, instead of petty.

They each bore scars of lasting tragedies, but the marks had not made them less like they had Scythas and the rest of Olympia’s Heroic cultivators. They had only refined them. They had only made them more.

The raven known as Griffon refused to look at any one of the false Heroes that could have been his cousins, because he knew that if he did he’d never look away.

“I could have had this. I could have had you. Instead, I burn alone.”

The chthonic Hero Orpheus had sung his song through Griffon’s heart, placed the words on his tongue with a form of communication unique to him - but in so doing, he had opened the raven’s senses to something only a Hero was meant to perceive.

The delusions that wore his cousins’ faces were fake, everything about them. That included the words they spoke with their hearts.

Every day since Nikolas had left, the raven had wondered why he hadn’t taken him along too. Every day that followed, he had wondered why his younger cousins weren’t as vibrant as the elder prodigy. After experiencing Chilon’s story, he had wondered why his father had enjoyed the company of brothers that hungered like he hungered, while his cousins had contented themselves with the petty business of cult politics and the aristois. What had Damon done to deserve his companions? What had Griffon not?

His answer came from all sides, spoken from the hearts of the cousins that he had always wanted but never had. From the Heroic souls that the raven had always known he belonged amongst.

His equals.

Every one of them was disgusted by him.

The false Heroine Lydia Aetos looked upon him sadly.

“You are a shadow, aren’t you?”

Was the cup ivory, or was it horn?

Either way, the pain was real.