The Son of Rome

The day that we boarded the Eos and set sail for distant Thracia, Griffon and I had been of one mind. It was the Gadfly’s intent to keep us busy - to keep us safe from ourselves and the higher powers we had provoked with our unkind marauding. Mostly, it was to get us out of his sight. Griffon and I had understood that, and we had afforded that sentiment about as much respect as it deserved.

We’ll do it all at once. That had been our silent agreement, spoken through the ravens in our shadows. At first I’d disagreed with him, but the return of the Eos and her irreverent sea dogs had convinced me. Leveraging the experiences of our ship’s worldly crew, as well as our Heroic companions’ connections, we would travel the Free Mediterranean and the greater boundaries beyond as outlined in the Gadfly’s map. We’d walk in-step the same path that Bakkhos had walked before us, and we would discover as he had discovered the reagents to divine sustenance.

That had been the plan. And then, on our very first stop, we had been afforded a glimpse at the Tyrant Riot’s true nature - the company that he had kept, the foundation that he had established, and the virtue at his core. Griffon and I, and to an indirect degree Selene and Scythas, had each drank from the Mad Tyrant’s cup and suffered a portion of his mania.

We had been humbled, each in our own ways. The decision to turn back to Olympia after all had been grudgingly made, but there was too much we didn’t know. There were too many mysteries to solve them all in a bare handful of weeks, and Griffon was still as adamant as he’d ever been about being in the Half-Step City when the Olympic Games began.

So we had returned.

And the Gadfly had betrayed us.

Now here I stood, trapped beneath the immortal storm crown that hung over Kaukoso Mons. Entangled by the infernal web of the Raging Heaven Cult’s politics. An unwitting, unqualified participant in a great city’s conflict of succession.

Again.

Stranded though I was beneath the storm, I wasn’t entirely deafened. As surely as the breeze, Sorea carried the words I couldn’t say to the cultivators that needed to hear them and delivered each of their responses faithfully back to me.

Solus,

The road to Lacedaemon is long and treacherous with Spartans - I’ve never seen so many Infernal sons in my life, and I think I was a happier person for it. This morning alone I’ve seen three separate exchanges of “discourse” between scholars of this rusted mystery faith, and two of the three ended in death. The third would have as well, had I not stepped in to save the losing party’s life.

Would you believe that the miserable wretch had the audacity to spit on my silks and accuse me of obstructing his refinement? These dogs would rather die than be humbled even one single time. I swear to you, it took every drop of temperance within me not to stomp his fool head through the earth. These roads are bad enough, though, and he’d already been mauled so savagely that a kiss on the cheek might have killed him - let alone a kiss from my boot.

Anyway. Your eagle is giving me an ugly look, so I’ll get to the point.

I’ve searched these mountains and their valleys and paced up and down the city’s coasts. I’ve learned just shy of nothing and found even less. There are an endless number of merchants ready and willing to sell me wine along with its various reagents, and a disappointing proportion of them are just as willing to lie to my face and claim that they have the key to nectar itself hidden in their moth-bitten bags. But there are vanishingly few who actually knew of Bakkhos and his exploits here, and none at all who knew him personally as far as I’ve found.

I’m sorry, Solus. If it was Naxos I’d have found the damned reagent already. Maybe… if you sent Scythas south my way, along with Sorea, I could guide him through the Isles. Even if I can’t be on the ship myself-

At any rate, I’m just outside of Krokos now. I’ll wait here until the eagle comes back.

Might do some hunting in the meantime. I haven’t found any thousand year old grapes, but there are more virtuous beasts skulking around these roads than there are men with sense. Just yesterday a traveling metic swore to me on his father’s ashes that he’d seen a feral stallion break a brown bear’s back and eat its beating heart. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t interested in seeing a creature like that with my own two eyes.

Hope all is well on your end. Take care.

Jason

I skimmed it once, quickly, and then combed through the missive line-by-line a second time while Sorea tucked his head under his wings in the darkness of my cave dwelling and went to sleep. He deserved it, with the miles I was putting him through.

After my fourth pass through Jason’s letter, I sighed and stood.

The cave that Socrates called his own was only a stone’s throw away from the dwelling I’d claimed in Lefteris’ absence. Close enough to see the whites of his eyes if he was standing at the mouth of his cave and I at mine. In any other case but this one, I would have struggled to believe that the Heroic archer could have lived this close to another cultivator for so many months without having even the faintest inkling of his presence. But the Gadfly had mentored the Broad, who had in turn mentored Aristotle - and I had more than enough experience with my old master’s anonymous wanderings to know that it was all too easy to overlook a real philosopher when they had no intention of being known.

Trodding heavily up the mountain path to the Gadfly’s hidden cavern home, I considered my options once again. Each letter returned by the Heroic souls Griffon and I had entangled ourselves with had been another option crossed off my list. Each letter returned was another dead end, every journey a marker on the map wasted.

With Scythas and Bakhur, we had been able to find our mark even in the vast borderless lands of savage Thracia. It had been my hope that given a bit more time to make up for the lack of extra hands, Jason and Anastasia could have managed the same success in the other parts of the free Mediterranean that the Gadfly intended to banish us to. It had been a naive hope, but I had hoped for it nonetheless. And when two of Griffon’s three had returned my letters with their reluctant support etched into the papyrus, that hope had doubled and redoubled again.

But a passing familiarity with the late kyrios could only take them so far. Each of our Heroic companions had known Bakkhos just as well as Scythas, all of them in their own ways, but unlike Scythas they hadn’t had any idea what they were looking for. They’d traveled far and wide, burned days and weeks they’d all have rather spent training for the Games, and they’d found nothing for it in the end.

There were four golden markers on the central landmass of the free Mediterranean, and so I had sent four Heroic cultivators to scour them for the components of divine nectar.

Jason had gone to the marker furthest south - the free-city of Krokos in the land of Lacedaemon, home to the Infernal Frenzy Cult. He had found nothing there but a cult full of restless soldiers with no one but themselves to cut their teeth on, and a countryside crawling with virtuous beasts.

Elissa had gone east over mountains Boeon to the closest marker relative to Olympia, the city-state of Levanta. A fruitless trip. Kyno had ventured further south and close to home, combing through the city of Paleta just north of The Coast. A wasted endeavor. And finally, Anastasia had gone north along the western coast as far as one could go without crossing into Macedonian soil, traversing the uninhabited breakers in search of that vaguely labeled Aornum. And what had she found?

Nothing. All of them, nothing.

Because of who?

“You,” I spoke, and the word rebounded with heat off the cavern walls.

The man known as the Scholar exhaled slowly and opened one eye, staring at me upside down like a bat. Balancing on the bald portion of his skull with his legs crossed above him like he were sitting on air, he looked about as ridiculous as an old man could look. But he was as heavily muscled as he’d ever been, and he was mended enough from his encounter with Polyzalus that he’d been able to remove his linen bandages without bleeding out on the cave floor.

“The boy speaks.” Socrates snorted and rolled forward, smoothly coming to his feet and brushing the dust from his head. “After three weeks and a meeting with nearly every dangerous authority on this mountain, the raven finally graces my humble estate with his presence. Can I offer you a drink? A glass of wine, perhaps?”

“I brought my own,” I snapped, and pulled a golden cup of spirit wine from the shadows of the raven mantle I wore over my left shoulder like a cloak.

I watched the Gadfly’s eyes trace over the cup, watched the shock set in as the fingers of his influence brushed over the cup and its contents and recognized it for what it was. Then, in disgust, I threw it to the cavern floor.

The old philosopher moved with speed and grace at odds with his old and muscled frame, crossing the distance between us in a split second and stooping low to catch the cup just a bare moment after it left my hand. He spun around and up, following the arc of wine as it flew from the cup and collecting it back into its golden bowl before a single drop could hit the stone.

Socrates looked at me in disbelief. “Is this-?”

He paused and took a deep breath of it, inhaling an aroma that I still couldn’t properly describe a month after my meeting with the faceless presence at the center of the Orphic faith’s initiation rites. He looked at me like I’d grown two more heads.

“You found it?” he demanded. “All these weeks you’ve had it, and you haven’t told me?”

He was right to be irritated with me. He was right to be outraged, even. Following my meeting with Aleuas, I’d been so furious with the Gadfly that I hadn’t even wanted to see his face. I’d kept the golden cup of wine hidden in my shadow out of spite and spite alone, because in showing me he had no trust in my judgment he had made it clear that I couldn’t afford to put all of my trust in his.

I had kept it to myself because a part of me had still held out hope that we could do this ourselves. I had held on stubbornly to that hope, refined my body day and night and broken bread with the various feuding factions within the Raging Heaven Cult, all the while waiting for just a single letter to come back as a success.

It had been in vain.

So here I was, in the Gadfly’s cave. Appealing once again to a higher power.

Reaching into my shadow cloak a second time, I pulled Socrates’ map out and crumpled it into a ball in my fist. He watched me silently as I tossed it down between us and spat on it.

“‘Go here and find me a golden cup filled with spirit wine,’” I echoed his words from a month before, the orders he gave us the day he banished Griffon and I from the Half-Step City. “‘Return it to me without spilling a drop. I, your grandfather, will handle the rest.’”

“You were listening after all,” Socrates said, his irritation rising along with his pneuma. “Tell me, then, boy. Why did you wait three weeks to give me this? Why waste the time?”

We had failed to find a single other ingredient we were confident enough in to risk ruining the wine we had with incorrect reagents. We had been too naive, hadn’t given ourselves enough time to see it through. Each of our Heroic companions had known Bakkhos, but none of them had known him like the Gadfly had known him. Jason’s letter, the last of the bad news carried by Sorea back to me, had been the point proven.

I couldn’t justify abandoning this quest in full, no matter how much I wanted to. Not when Selene hadn’t emerged from the Rein-Holder’s sunset domain even once since our return. Not when her mother still lay comatose.

Not when I could see it through.

“All that a liar gains by falsehood is suspicion when they tell the truth.” It was another quote. This time, a quote from my true mentor - Aristotle. One of the lessons he’d hammered into my skull as a boy, though with mixed results.

Socrates scowled. “Make your point.”

I drew the raven’s midnight veil up from my face and met his glare with mine.

“You call us fools at every opportunity and handle us accordingly,” I said flatly. “You build a maze around us with nectar at the end of it, because you don’t trust us to do the right thing unless a higher hand has guided us to it. And you wonder why, when I return with a treasure you didn’t actually believe I’d be able to find, I don’t immediately offer it up to you?

“You treat us like children - you treat me like a child. When I was ten years younger and far more deserving of it, Aristotle never treated me that way - he was wise enough to know that if he did, I’d treat him like a minder more than a mentor worthy of my confidence.”

I sat down heavily, the weight of thirty men pressing ceaselessly down. Looking up at the Gadfly, I spread my hands in supplication.

“You’ve made it clear I’m no student of yours,” I said, lifting my lip. “Nothing to you, and no one at all but a nuisance to be led away from trouble. Fine. But just this once - one time, here and now if never again, spare me the noble lies and tell me the truth.”

With every word I spoke, the Gadfly’s expression grew colder and harder. Like stone.

His voice was like a falling blade. “Ask a proper question if you want to hear the truth.”

I obliged him.

“You gave us a map with ten markers on it yet only one ingredient to find. You didn’t withhold the other nine from us because you were unsure of what they were - if your ‘conjecture’ was really that weak, you wouldn’t have given Selene that false hope to begin with. You knew what we’d need, and you knew where we’d have to go to find it.”

The Gadfly waited silently for the full thrust of my question.

I folded a single finger of my supplicating hands.

“We’ve given you one of ten. Of the nine ingredients remaining for the synthesis of divine nectar, how many are stowed away in your folded logic cloth?”

No one believed a liar, even when they told the truth. I wouldn’t believe him, no matter what he said. He’d broken that trust. So he answered me with action instead of words. The Gadfly reached into a fold within his filthy rags and twisted it, pulled as if it was a bag he was turning inside out-

And poured a river of precious metals, vibrant herbs, and coal-black salt onto the cave floor.

With slow deliberation, Socrates placed the golden cup of wine down in the center of the pile.

“Ten.”