The Son of Rome

The storm-crowned mountain was divided nine ways - eight grand estates acting as envoys for the greater mystery cults, each with its own Tyrant ruling in their consolation domain, and the rest of the mountain serving as the truly neutral ground that the Raging Heaven Cult’s otherwise unaffiliated initiates called their own.

When night fell and the Elders sent out their scavengers, there were few truly safe places for the independent cultivators of the Raging Heaven. An ambassador from the Howling Wind Cult, for example, could rest easy at night within Aleuas domain so long as the Tyrant accepted their presence there. An initiate of the Burning Dusk knew that the First Son to Burn would turn to ash any that reached into his domain for the things he considered to be his own.

Of course, that meant you had to spend your nights in a Tyrant’s domain. It was something most avoided - when they had the luxury of avoiding it, at any rate. Jason, Scythas, and Kyno had chosen to remain in their Raging Heaven quarters, risking midnight scavengers every night when the alternative was suffering the suffocating pressure of their Tyrants’ domains. Elissa, for her part, had secured lodging in the city of Olympia, separated entirely from the mountain cult. Anastasia did whatever it was Anastasia did.

And Lefteris hid in a cave.

There were only so many places a man could go once he’d caught the eye of the Raging Heaven’s Tyrant Elders. The city of Olympia was an option, but it had no inherent protections - Elissa was gambling each and every day as much as the Raging Heaven’s neutral cultivators were. Gambling on anonymity in the masses, and the hopeful presumption that the Elders wouldn’t care enough to comb through the city’s streets looking for her.

Outside of the city? No. Not as things were. On the mountain itself, on Kaukoso Mons, there were only three places that an Elder wouldn’t dare tread. First, and most obvious, was another Elder’s domain. Second was the Oracles’ den, deep within the mountain’s heart.

The first wasn’t an option for me, no matter what Aleuas offered. I wouldn’t step into his hurricane suite ever again if I could avoid it. The second had been possible before, when I was recovering from my first encounter with the Gadfly, but that had been before - back when I was a neutral party. That left the third option as my only option, the last place on Kaukoso Mons that an Elder would dare approach.

The Storm That Never Ceased.

There was a reason that the junior initiates slept in the estates nearest to the peak of the mountain, while the Elders had built their estates almost at the foot of it. The immortal storm crown was like a ward against their presence. Even, somehow, against their perceptions. The wandering eyes of Tyrants tasted like salt and ash on my tongue, something I had noticed the night of Bakkhos’ funeral and fully understood the night I stepped into Aleuas’ domain.

That chestnut smoke had followed me into and out of his personal quarters, up the winding mountain path nearly to its highest visible plateau - and then, when I finally reached the point where Socrates had carved out his hidden cave, close enough to the storm crown to feel its cool condensation in the air, the Hierophant’s eye turned away from me. Though it was less from me, and more from the storm.

For one reason or another, the peak was a safe haven. The only safe haven available to me after I barged into the one place I had no business being and made a mess of everything. So I followed in the footsteps of the Gadfly and sequestered myself beneath the crown where no one bothered to look. For the moment, I needed a place to fully recover from the wounds I’d suffered in Thracia. I needed a place to train my body, to contemplate the new weight that I carried in a far more literal sense now than I had before.

I needed a place to think.

When I left the Hurricane Hierophant’s domain and began my slow, painful climb through the shadows up the mountain, Socrates came to me in a rage. Wrapped up in bloodied linens like an Egyptian, and far more lively than he’d been the last time I saw him cradled in Griffon’s pankration palms.

I’d been so relieved by the surgery’s success that I’d hardly registered the actual words he was saying. But I had. And they’d hit me harder than a ballista bolt.

Aleuas had invited me to his estate the day after Bakkhos’ funeral, ostensibly to thank me for ‘helping’ Scythas in his pursuit of hunting crows, and I had ignored him for a reason. As things stood on this mountain, neutrality was a precious state of being. And while it could be said that our actions as ravens were as far from neutral as one could get, the fact was that we had attacked all of them equally. We weren’t affiliated with any of them. We weren’t beholden to anyone but ourselves, for better and for worse.

I’d changed that the night I walked into the Hierophant’s estate. But it had been a necessary evil. With Polyzalus on the loose, maddened by the loss of his daughter, none of us were safe, no matter where we went. If we were fortunate, Selene might find him before he found us. If we were beloved by the Fates, he might even accept what had happened without ripping our throats out anyway for the risk we’d taken with his daughter’s life.

I was wise enough to know the Fates despised me, and luck was rarely on my side. So I did the only thing I could think to do, and I committed. I reached for the only suitably powerful ally available to me. Because this was my fault, and because it was all that I could do.

Then, afterwards, Socrates explained to me that Polyzalus was still in his domain after all. He explained that it had been a ploy, a scheme to frighten us unruly children into doing the right thing, because he didn’t trust us to do it at his word.

He told me it had all been for nothing after all. For no one.

He’d lied.

“You want this king’s support? Those are my terms.”

“Deal.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear.”

“No. Properly. You’re a son of Raging Heaven, aren’t you?”

“I swear it. All of it, heart and soul, these terms upon the River Styx.”

“Upon the River Styx. And if either of us should waver, should either man break his word-”

“May Raging Heaven strike him down.”

Days passed.

My wounds were many and severe, but they were less debilitating every morning. The starlight marrow within me was somehow a more potent healing force now than it had been before, and after my first few hours of heavy exertion I realized the channels it had burnt through me were changed as well. They’d expanded and joined together, forming a cohesive spiraling network within my body.

While I waited out the days in Lefteris’ abandoned cave home, secluded beneath the light of the immortal storm crown, I passed the time by honing my body.

Socrates had told me in one of our first lessons that my split foundations had led to an imbalance in my cultivation. The portion of me that was Greek wasn’t strong enough to handle the portion of me that was Roman - that was his theory as to why I couldn’t perform even a single pushup while pressing down on myself with Gravitas.

My experience in Thracia had muddied the water on that theory, made things even more complicated than they had been before, but they had also made things simpler for me going forward. The why was a mess of possibilities, but right now the why of it didn’t matter. What mattered was that there was a weight that I was struggling to carry. And there was only one thing to do if I wanted to more easily carry it.

The sun rose and fell and rose again, and I honed my body beneath the curtain of raging heaven. Push-ups, sit-ups, sprints and long jumps and boot crawls across the stone. I worked myself to the brink of exhaustion, and then I worked myself beyond that. Over and over, until my body gave out on me and I collapsed. Unable to move, let alone scrounge for food and water.

Each time I did, an old man covered head to toe in bandages would sit down beside me and set a cup of water and a plate of food within my reach.

Each time, I ignored him.

“Boy.”

I forced myself to rise, to reach for strength that I had already depleted hours ago.

“Boy. I told you, this wasn’t what I intended.”

Though it felt like dying, I forced myself to stand.

“You can’t ignore me forever.”

And I made use of the alliance I’d wagered my soul to secure for no reason at all.

Every day, the Howling Wind Cult’s mystikos brought me clay jugs of water and an odd sparkling kykeon, along with baskets overflowing with produce and fish of every type. They never delivered it to me directly, of course.

They left it all just far enough from the storm crown that when I limped down the mountain to retrieve it, I would feel the brush of Aleuas’ wandering eye and taste the chestnut smoke in the air. It was a statement to his rivals as much as it was one to me.

Griffon and I had taken a piece of several of the Elders, maybe even all of them, and then we had aligned ourselves with the Gadfly. And now Aleuas had claimed a portion of that alliance through his connection to me. Every time he sent his cultivators up the mountain with jugs of wine and baskets of food in plain view of anyone that cared to look, he made a statement.

The raven and I are of one mind.

It shouldn’t have mattered. In a sane world, it wouldn’t have.

Days passed, then a week. One day, when I staggered down the mountain in search of food and water, I found the cultivators sent to deliver it still there in their viridian silks. And opposing them, I found three more in cerulean silks.

They were so absorbed in their vicious argument that they didn’t notice me until I was nearly upon them, the rumbling of the nearby storm and the uneven terrain masking my approach. When they did notice me, the man and woman from the Howling Wind went abruptly silent and stood up straight while their heads bowed.

“Good morning, sir,” they both said at the same time. Like I was someone worth greeting with respect. I frowned and dragged a hand through my hair, slick with sweat and long enough now that it fell into my eyes when it was wet.

“What is this?” I asked, and they both winced. They were the first words I’d spoken in days, and my voice had come out harsher than I’d intended it to.

“Apologies,” the man said, glaring out of the corner of his eye at the three from the Broken Tide who in turn were warily looking me up and down. I couldn’t imagine I was much to look at. “We were just making sure these three didn’t disturb you.”

“The Coast has a grand reputation,” the woman from the Howling Wind explained, her tone as ugly as his glare, “And its junior cultivators have a bad habit of mistaking their city’s renown for their own. They tend to forget they’re not the center of the world if they don’t have someone with sense around to remind them.”

One of the men from the broken tide snorted. “Be silent, little bird. The adults are going to speak for a moment.” The man and woman flanking him on either side whistled mockingly at the duo from the Hurricane Heights.

The messenger from the Broken Tide eyed me appraisingly. He was tall, sculpted beneath his cerulean silks and heavily tanned. His dark hair hung in a thick braid down his back, and his eyebrows were studded with what looked to be thin rods of bronze. He smiled, and his teeth were serrated like a shark’s.

His eyes burned with the low light of a Heroic flame.

It spoke to the courage of the man and woman bringing me my food and drink that they’d stayed to argue with a Heroic cultivator for as long as they had. Or perhaps it simply spoke to their confidence in my association with their faction.

“What do you want?” I asked the Hero with the shark-tooth smile.

“I want to know what it is exactly that the Hierophant sees in you,” he said, and extended a folded slip of papyrus towards me. When I reached out to take it, the acrid taste of pine smoke coated my tongue. “As does my honored Elder. He’d like to break bread with you tonight. Assuming, of course, you’re not otherwise indisposed?”

In a sane world, the allegiance of one battered Philosopher shouldn’t have meant a thing to a stalemate between kings and queens of virtue.

“Tonight,” I acquiesced.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a sane place.

This was the Raging Heaven Cult.