The Son of Rome

As a melting pot of Greek culture, the city of Olympia celebrated more holidays and religious festivals than even the twice-lauded Coast - it was said that a citizen of the Half-Step City worked about as rarely as a slave enjoyed a day off, and that statement wasn’t all too distant from the truth.

Over the course of my year as a servant in the Rosy Dawn’s estates, I was offered two holidays of rest. Naturally, Griffon stole the first of them from me by sponsoring me through the cult’s initiation rites. The second, the Kronia that he’d named his starlight mare after, was the celebration of successful harvest and unity wherein slaves sat at the same tables as their masters. The day that slaves were served instead of serving had been my one and only day of true rest.

The more I interacted with the various factions present on Kaukoso Mons, the more I became convinced that the saying was true after all. It seemed like nearly every morning brought with it another celebration, every night a religious ceremony. As always, it was a mystery to me that the city-states could function at all. Their citizens, it seemed, did nothing but revel.

Though there could have admittedly been other motives at play.

“Sir,” a mystiko greeted me as I stepped out of my cave, his vibrant cult cloth of white-gold and canary yellow brushing the stone as he bowed respectfully to me. Deference to the man living in a cave and clothing himself in scraps of ragged cloth. I wondered if his ancestors were spitting blood at the sight of him. “Good morning, and well wishes from-”

“Why are you here?” I asked the initiate of the Waning Wax Cult. The man blinked, looking up at me in faint apprehension.

“I’m sorry?”

He was a product of the Alabaster Isles, though which of the scattered islands he’d come from was as much a mystery to me as the location of his cult. He looked like most of his ilk here on Kaukoso Mons - fine features and an aesthetic build free of scars, with well-kept silks to accentuate the body and make their sophic nature plain as day to anyone who cared to look. He wasn’t a fighter, despite what the man himself might have thought in the privacy of his own ego.

I stepped up closer, staring flatly down into his eyes. The senior sophist went very still.

“Why are you here?” I asked him again, quietly. “When you know that the others have never come this close before?”

The mystiko from Jason’s Alabaster Isles summoned up his bravado and stood up straight, putting our eyes nearly on the same level. He tilted his chin up so we’d be looking straight on at one another, masking it as a haughty gesture.

“I’m here because the others aren’t,” he asserted. He offered up a smirk. “Why fight the other suitors for a moment when I can walk another stade and have you to myself?”

“Have me to yourself,” I mused. “Do you know why no other mystiko has ventured this far up the mountain before you, philosopher?”

“The storm crown,” he said at once. “Most can’t stand the sight of it after going through the rites - it’s one of the better passive motivators that drives junior initiates to advance through the Raging Heaven’s hierarchy. The further you progress, the further down the mountain you’re allowed to go.”

He seemed pleased with his answer. Doubtlessly, he’d been sent here this morning to invite me to his cult’s portion of the mountain for some holiday or another, and here he’d found the perfect method to secure my time before anyone else. All he had to do was suffer the storm crown for a few moments. It was noble, really.

“No,” I said, dashing his hopes, and laid my hand on the crown of his head without applying any particular pressure. The philosopher’s head slammed back down into a bow like I’d dropped a boulder on his head. His eyes flew open wide, his knees bending beneath the weight of a hand that had no business being as heavy as it was.

“Hngh-!”

“It’s disrespectful to harass a man before his morning piss,” I informed the wisened scholar of Greek virtue. “And it’s foolish to tempt him, when the perceptions of your Elder stop at the line that you’ve so brazenly crossed.”

“What?” he breathed. I nodded gravely.

“That final stade you chose to walk is a stade your Elder will not trespass.” I tightened my grip on the crown of his head. His hair was soft and slick with olive oil, like he’d just taken a bath. “Do you think he’d send anyone up here to get you, should you not come back down? Do you think he cares more for you than he does his own image?”

We both knew the answer to that particular question.

“Apologies,” the scholar of Waning Wax rasped. “This lowly sophist begs the raven-”

The raven. It was what they all called me, when they called me anything besides ‘sir’. For all of our better intentions, Griffon and I had thoroughly failed in our attempt to maintain a plausible separation between our day and night personas. I was better known as the raven on this mountain than I was as Solus.

“Enough.” I let the man go and gently pressed an open palm to his chest. He staggered back three steps before regaining his balance. For a long beat of a moment, neither of us moved. I sighed. “I’m going to take that piss now. Leave.”

“Ah- yes, sir! Apologies, again, I’ll just-”

I stared flatly at him until he shut his mouth and rushed back down the mountain from whence he’d come.

When I finally made my way down the mountain to the line that the Elders’ wandering eyes would not cross, I found a delegation from the Coast’s Broken Tide, one from the Howling Wind, one from the Scattered Foam, and of course, the man with the oiled curls that had come to speak for the Waning Wax. They offered me food, water, and wine, in different styles and delicacies according to the bounties of their respective cities. Each of them offered me a place at their tables later that day, for some fabricated celebration or another.

The man in silks of white-gold and canary yellow was the last to step forward and make his case. The knowing looks from the other mystikos made it clear that they’d been waiting here when he went strutting past the unspoken boundary that separated the storm crown’s domain from the rest of the mountain. And they’d been waiting here still, when he came slinking back down to wait like the rest of them.

“Well?” I asked him, arms laden with gifts that reminded me all too clearly of the iron manacles I’d worn clapped around my wrists for the better part of a year. “What did you come here to say?”

Reluctantly, the man from the Alabaster Isles made his pitch.

“Today is the Adonia, you see, and the marble sisters of the cult were hoping you’d assume the role of Adonis-”

“Get out of my sight.”

His rivals watched him go with vindictive amusement, some more politely than others. The delegate from the Coast, a man with teeth like a shark’s and fishbone studs in his eyebrows, didn’t bother hiding his satisfaction at all. He chuckled openly, the flames behind his eyes dancing.

“The audacity of these juniors,” he said ruefully, shaking his head. The long braid of his dark hair swung to-and-fro with the motion, each glimpse revealing the razor sharp tooth of carved bronze hanging from it like a flail. “They’ll say anything to get what they want these days. Not a drop of shame in them.”

I eyed the Hero from the Broken Tide. “And you’re above that, are you?”

“Of course,” he said, grinning sharply. “I wouldn’t dare insult the raven by calling him a swan. Beyond a certain point, a flattering lie is more of a cruelty than a kindness, you know?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you calling me ugly?”

“I’m calling you to dinner.”

I inhaled slowly.

Diplomacy.

Exhaled.

“Fine.”

In the course of my years as a legionary, I had learned more from Gaius Julius Caesar than most men would ever know in their entire lives, and in the end it had only been enough to give me a proper frame of reference for all of the things I still did not understand - might not ever understand.

Still, a modest education in diplomacy was worth its weight in gold, and a lesson taught by the General of the West was worth far more than that. I didn’t have the breadth and depth of Gaius’ experience, it didn’t come nearly as easily to me as it did Aristotle, and I’d never have my father’s flair, but those were Roman standards. For this place? These people?

It was enough.

“Wicked, presumptuous raven-”

“Arrogant, thieving shade-”

“Foolish, starving child-”

Three Tyrants called upon him each in their domains, postured and insulted him each in their own special ways, and in the end made the same demands all three times.

“““Solus, son of Rome-”””

“““Let my Hero go.”””

Gaius had taught the raven diplomacy, but that wasn’t all. He’d taught the raven strategy as well. The raven knew that he was nothing to these Elders, no one at all. The only reason they courted him and haggled with him, like fishmongers instead of kings, was because he possessed a resource they could not live without.

A Tyrant, even a crippled existence like the Elders of the Raging Heaven, was above mortal concerns. The Civic and Sophic cultivators that languished beneath them weren’t worth much to them in the end, certainly not a moment’s inconvenience. There wasn’t a single one among them that would risk their reputation for a lowly mortal cultivator, regardless of their allegiance.

A Hero, though? That was a different existence altogether. That was a significant existence.

Before the raven’s father passed, in the early days of Gaius’ campaigns, he’d offered the raven a kernel of profound military wisdom. It went something like this:

In the forum, where food and drink was plentiful and no one truly wanted for anything, a loaf of bread and a jug of good wine cost just one brass coin - a single sestersius. But that same loaf of bread, and that same jug of good wine, when presented to a starving man on the furthest western waste of the uncivilized frontier? That bread and wine was priceless. The exact amount was immaterial in the end, because that starving man would pay any price to have his hunger fed.

Or he’d kill the merchant, and feast over his corpse.

The raven met with three Tyrants after the Hurricane Hierophant, and each time he knew that they wanted nothing more than to kill him where he stood and devour everything of worth he had. But they couldn’t, because he never brought the bread and wine with him. He kept it out of sight. Out of reach. Available to them, but only in the event that they settled to his terms.

At least, that was what he led them to believe.

In actuality, the raven known as Solus had no control at all over the Heroic cultivators that he had seemingly snatched from their sleeping beds. But that ivory lie was as good as horn when it suited Scythas, Jason, Kyno, and Elissa just as well to play along as it suited him.

And once the terms were set and properly sworn, that ivory became horn after all.

“They’re getting bolder every day,” Socrates observed, sitting cross-legged beside me while I forced myself through another set of push-ups. He was still covered head-to-toe in linen bandages, but he’d swapped the blood-stained ones out and had yet to stain the fresh ones. “The more you humor them, the worse it’ll get.”

I silently counted out my repetitions, focusing on the beat of my heart and the sweat dripping off the tip of my nose. The worst of my injuries from Thracia had been lessened to manageable hurts with time, good food, and dogged exercise. It was still an effort to move in even the simplest ways, little actions like blinking and opening my mouth to speak that I had never considered a luxury before what felt like lead weights were attached to every portion of me.

Every day the burden became just a bit less. Every day it became just a bit easier to rise. But the road ahead was long and grimly lit.

Once, and only once, I had attempted to invoke Gravitas as I had so many times before my advancement to the second rank of the Sophic Realm. It had slammed me flat, face-first through the mountain stone, and it was at that moment that I’d realized what I had only bleakly suspected before.

It may have felt as if I was carrying the weight of three thousand men since leaving the Orphic House, but the reality of things was far less impressive than that. As I was now, doing my daily calisthenics, I was only suffering a fraction of that weight. Not even a tenth. A hundredth, maybe. Thirty men and no more than that.

I still had a long way to go. A thousand miles left to march, and hardly any time at all to see it done.

The Elders of the Raging Heaven Cult were consolidating their forces and reaching for every weapon available to them. Among those weapons, their Heroic cultivators stood proudly above the rest. Griffon and I had disrupted them with our interference, more in the seizing of their Heroes than in the actual hunting of their crows, because the truth of things was simple.

A crow could be made to seem like more than they were, could even be given a shadowed sliver of their Tyrant’s strength, but that was all it was. A shadow. In the light of day it would be banished to the furthest corner of their soul, and they would be themselves again. A Hero, though? A Hero was himself regardless of imposition. Glorious. Defiant.

Triumphant.

A conflict was brewing in the sanctuary city of Olympia. In the coming weeks before the kyrioi came to see the Games, there would either be a peaceful consensus on the question of indigo succession, or there would be bloodshed. In our irreverent meddling, Griffon and I had placed our fingers on that precarious scale.

And then Socrates had lied to me, and I’d leapt up onto that scale without a second thought. Whatever came of this conflict now, a portion of that blame would be mine to take.

“You’re going to carry that weight.”

I grit my teeth and pressed against the stone.