Selene

It was a pitiful truth that a person’s demons resided within as often as they did without.

Selene had learned this truth early on, internalized it within herself and built the monument of her soul around it. Humanity was its own worst enemy. From the grandest scale of war between nations of thousands and millions, all the way down to the tragic conflict of a single tortured soul. She was only sixteen years old, a blink of an eye by the standards of people like her father, but already she had seen sights that would make any man sick to his stomach. She had suffered tribulation and unending despair, black resentment that made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up whenever she recalled its oily touch. Even if only by proxy, she had felt these feelings. She had seen for herself how ugly a human heart could be.

Burn down a man’s home, take from him his friends and family, steal away all that he’s ever loved. Do all of those things, do more, and it still wouldn’t be enough to make him hate you as viciously as Selene had seen cultivators hate themselves.

In her role as the Scarlet Oracle, she had offered counsel to Heroic cultivators that reviled themselves more than the Fates ever could. She had seen great men and women torn apart from the inside, ravaged from within as if they’d caged a feral animal in their chest rather than a beating heart. She’d seen Heroes that had stood on top of the world long before she was born scrape and grovel at her feet for some peace while blood poured out of their every orifice. She had cradled in her arms Heroines twice her size and many times stronger while they wept and choked on their own black bile.

Selene had done the best she could to ease their pain, but there was only so much an unanointed Oracle could do. She could take their troubles in and sleep on them, perhaps find an answer when the morning came, but by then it was often too late. By the time a troubled soul found its way to her, their pain was so dire that only an immediate solution could save them. Cultivators were stubborn in that way. They rarely sought salvation in another unless they were all but entirely submerged in the River Styx already.

Her father had done his best to comfort her, early on. He had promised her that whatever she could do for the people brought before her was more than enough - more than they deserved. He had rubbed soothing circles on her back and brushed the bitter tears from her eyes, and he had told her that some people were simply too far gone to save. No matter what you did, not even if you were perfect. Some people couldn’t be protected, even by a shield of peerless adamant.

Some people just wanted to die.

“It should be here,” the Hero of the Scything Squall muttered, voice muffled by his own hands. The breeze carried the words to her ear anyway. “It should be here, and it isn’t.”

“We don’t know that,” Selene disagreed, crawling on hands and knees to peer under the rows of benches that sat empty in the Orphic House. “Not yet. Not until we’ve scoured every corner. There could be a cup or a barrel tucked away in any of these shadows.”

Scythas dug his fingers into his scalp, hunching over further. His despair was palpable. At this point, he was hardly even trying to hide it. Since his confrontation with the Rosy Dawn’s scarlet son, his heart had withdrawn like a turtle into its shell. Hiding away, jealously guarding any signs of the effect that Griffon’s words had had on him. Now, those insecurities were bleeding out of the wounds he’d tried so hard to keep staunched. Even if Selene hadn’t been herself, she would have felt it in the air.

Nothing under the bench but cobwebs and wood rot. Her silks and stolen rags scraped and caught on the jagged seams of roughly joined planks. She was covered in dust and surrounded by the stale odor of abandoned architecture, but she refused to give in to her fellow Heroic cultivator’s despair. Not now. Not when there was finally hope - a light in the near distance. Within her reach at last.

If the circumstances weren’t what they were, she would have given Scythas’ grief the attention it deserved. Solus had done his best to pull the man back to his feet, but some wounds never healed unless they were directly treated. She could have tried. But that was a risk she couldn’t take now. She couldn’t afford to get lost in another cultivator’s heart anymore.

Not while her mother’s cure was on the line.

“I don’t understand it.” Scythas shook his head, his pneuma rising and fell tempestuously. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?” she asked, dousing her annoyance.

There were words and symbols carved into the benches and walls, even the pillars that held up the weight of the odeon’s roof. None of them were relevant to their purpose here, though. Names, brief messages, insults and compliments and etched drawings of people and their horses and the places that they had been. Mementos, carved by Thracian hands into the wooden wagons that had carried the weight of their entire lives for generations before the Conqueror came and tore them apart for building materials.

“I spoke it in his voice. His voice, and none other. Bakkhos told me that his voice alone would be enough to secure me a drink if I was ever in Thracia,” and here the Hero’s voice changed. Shifting, to mimic the late kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult as it had before, “after all, it isn’t as if they can see who’s talking, eh?”

It was more than a mimicry, in truth. When Selene closed her eyes and listened to him speak in that voice, it wasn’t Scythas she saw in her mind’s eye. It was the kyrios, grand as he’d ever been, lounging with his cup in hand and that distant amusement in his eyes as he regarded her. When Scythas spoke with Bakkhos’ voice, it wasn’t his breath that formed the words. It was the breeze that did it. A perfect echo, carried by the wind at his request. It was an ability that Selene had never encountered before, one that had shocked her when he first revealed it their first night in Thracia, in that moonlit vineyard.

A unique excellence, as the scarlet son had put it.

“Did he specify what kind of drink you’d receive?” Selene asked him, running her hands along the bottom ridge of a wall-mounted viewing balconies before gripping it and pulling herself up to peer through its rails. Nothing but dust. Not even a scurrying insect. “Socrates sent us here for wine, but that isn’t necessarily what the kyrios meant, is it?”

And in the end, two of their party had been given drinks.

“No.”

“No to which question?”

“No to both. He didn’t specify, but he couldn’t have meant anything else. I refuse to believe it. He wouldn’t have sent me all this way just for milk and honey. He wasn’t that cruel.”

“Are you sure?” Selene asked him quietly. The Hero didn’t respond.

Finally, when she had looked under every bench and peered through every rail, climbed along the rafters and checked every corner of the odeon, Selene allowed herself to admit that there was nothing to be found. There was only one place she had yet to look, one place she had yet to look inside, and it was resting center stage. Sacrilege was an accursed act no matter which corpse was being defiled. To tear away the ivy and crack open the tomb where a Hero lay at rest… that was hubris, even by her standards.

She bit her lip. Still…

“Solus,” she called, looking back up the stands. “What should we-?”

Selene gasped. Scythas pulled his hands away from his face, eyes going wide.

They were gone.

“What?” Scythas breathed, rising to his feet. The hazel torch light of his eyes swept over the Orphic House, a breeze kicking up and throwing the dust coating every surface up into the air. Selene squinted through it, but still she couldn’t find them. “Where did they-?”

“I don’t know.” She rushed up the benched stands, two tiers at a time, and stood in the place that Solus had been standing. There was nothing. No trace of either of them. She turned back to Scythas, her heart beginning to hammer in her chest. He looked as stricken as she felt.

“You’re certain you didn’t see them go?” he pressed her.

“You didn’t hear them?” she asked him in return. He shook his head, eyes darting to every corner of the singing house.

“Solus?” he tried, and when no answer was forthcoming he grit his teeth and tried the other. “Griffon?”

Nothing.

They couldn’t have left the way they’d entered, not through that heavy gate of ivory. Scythas would have heard them. Anyone would have heard them. Yet there was no sign of them here. Where could they have gone? What could they have done?

Selene considered the shadows lurking on the edges of the light case by their hearts’ flames.

“Maybe-“

There came a sound from outside of the odeon, back the way they’d come. The dull sound of iron cutting through flesh, and the impact of something heavy hitting the snow that covered the earth. Two of the three horses they’d given as payment screamed, Griffon’s white mare in fear and Solus’ black charger in fury. She heard, distantly through the wooden slats, the sound of the Thracian man and woman grunting as the horses fought them.

The dull sound of iron biting into flesh rang out again.

Griffon cried out in agony.

Selene’s heart flew up into her throat and she lunged at the entrance. Scythas made it there before her, despite the fact that he’d been twice as far away a moment ago. He wrenched at the ivory gates, snarling in frustration when they refused to budge. Locked.

Through the scant barrier of the gate, she heard Solus shout a furious challenge. The sound of struggle and shattering wood followed.

“Solus!” Scythas yelled, panicked, and disdained the gates in favor of attacking the decrepit walls of wagon wood. Somehow, impossibly, those rotten planks rebuffed his fists and the shrieking gale winds he leveled against him both.

“Together!” Selene hissed, planting one foot against the wall beside the gates and pulling with all her might. Scythas mirrored her, veins bulging in his neck and the sinew of his arms as he heaved. She gave it everything she had, until her vision blurred white and it felt like her arms would tear away. Scythas screamed in tortured effort.

The ivory gates cracked and groaned open. Scythas dove and Selene lunged underneath, both of them slipping through the gates as they immediately swung shut again. The sound of their closing was monstrous, like they weighed a thousand-thousand times more than they should have.

But when they landed, it wasn’t outside. It wasn’t anywhere at all.

Selene stared at sloping walls of shadowed brick, rising up all around her like the inside of a beehive.

“Where are we?” Scythas asked, crouching warily and casting around with every sense available to him. “Where are the others? The horses-?”

She realized what they had done.

In the center of the beehive tomb was another ivy-shrouded coffin. As the torch light of their hearts’ flames fell upon it, the vibrant green leaves rustled and swayed.

Behind them, the ivory gates loomed.