The Young Griffon

Violence told a story.

The Young Aristocrat of the Raging Heaven Cult stepped into my octagon of swords and immediately moved to end the fight. He didn’t bother shedding his twice-bronzed silks - naturally, he didn’t need a naked fighter’s mobility to beat me. He didn’t wait for my word or the word of a third party to start the match - of course, I’d forfeited all courtesies when I treated him as my lesser. And most importantly, he didn’t present his wrists to be clapped in iron chains, as was the standard for Heroes playing in the pit - it went without saying that I wouldn’t be able to push him to the point that he’d draw upon his pneuma, even out of reflex.

The Hero struck first and with finality, making a statement through action alone that everyone in the pit could understand. It was a gesture I was more than happy to match, especially with regards to the chains.

Not for all the treasures of Heaven and Earth, not for a single frozen moment, would I ever be a willing slave again.

Alazon was from the brazen Coast, a city lauded in times of war for the valor of its fighting sons. He was a legendary Hero on top of that, grander than any mortal man could be. But that did not mean he was grand in all things. It should have. It should have meant that he was larger than life, glorious in every sense of the word, in every aspect of himself.

But here we were.

My fellow Young Aristocrat lunged straight for me with his right hand outstretched, faster than mortal eyes could track, and grasped nothing but the open air.

“Wrong!” I admonished him sharply, finishing my pivot right and laying a vicious kick into the side of his leading knee. The Hero’s breath hitched, caught just before he could call upon his pneuma, and his leg went out from under him without that bracing strength.

In an instant, the dull curiosity of the athletes in the pit was sharpened to a cutting edge. Alazon turned his fall forward into a graceful roll and came back to his feet as if we’d choreographed the exchange together, but his alacrity alone was not enough to change the truth of it. He’d tried to end this before it was begun and save himself the shameful hassle, but he’d failed.

Now his peers were moving from their spots. Gathering around in naked interest to see the spectacle unfold. To see the story told.

The upstart cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders, while the Olympic athlete across from him slapped sand out of his silk robes.

“You’re not fast enough for that,” I informed him, and moved a bare moment before he did. Ducking low and to the right, I avoided the blur of a leaping roundhouse kick that would have shattered my skull and seized him by the back of his bronzed attire. I planted my feet and pulled him out of his trajectory. “You’re not fast enough to be fast alone!”

He thrashed free just before I could bury him, spinning sideways in the air and landing in a crouch just within the octagon’s northernmost boundary. His eyes were wide, his heart incredulous.

There came an appreciative whistle. Alazon twitched and glanced back at a lithe and ruggedly built man with umber flames in his eyes, leaning with both hands on the pommel of one of my boundary blades and watching us with naked interest. Our first Heroic spectator, though assuredly not our last.

Only then did Alazon accept my challenge in full. His eyes hardened, and in their cold light I saw more than just the promise of a broken ego. I saw my death, and the death of the humble orator as well.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t a story I had any interest in being told.

The Hero took two bounding steps across the octagon and into my reach, lashing out with a straight right jab and feinting a left hook when I leaned away from it. I stepped into it, caught it on my forearm and struck him once in his kidney. It was like striking a brick with my bare fist. He exhaled sharply, forced himself not to bring to bear his pneuma when he sucked a new breath in, and in that moment of conscious restraint I struck him twice again in the liver and then the gut.

Alazon lurched back to make space and I planted a foot on the trailing hem of his cult attire. It didn’t make him stumble, but the sound of ripping silk and the sight of his attire unraveling halfway from his frame may have been worse. A Heroine off to our right guffawed, and another three competitors traded amused grins as they crowded in around the octagon.

“The Fleet Foot, Alazon.”

I addressed him by his title carved in stone. I knew it not because I’d asked around, but because I’d memorized every name worth knowing on the cult’s stairway to heaven. I’d found him there on the twenty-second step.

“Young Aristocrat of the Brazen Aegis - or at least, Young Aristocrat of her humble colony faction here in Olympia. I’m curious. Who taught you how to fight?”

My opponent spat at my feet and rushed in with bright eyes blazing.

His next three blows were cautious, his footwork lighter as he moved. The jabs were weak enough because of it that I could catch them on my raised arms and only suffer the pain of future bruises. I raised my knee at the same time that he raised his and smiled through the lightning-white lance of pain when they collided. Alazon snarled a curse and hopped sideways, flexing the offended limb.

“This brazen inexperience.” Off to my left, a Hero in a golden loincloth groaned at the pun. “Tell me who’s to blame for it!”

“Enough of barking dogs!” The Fleet Foot Hero snapped.

He closed the gap again and again he was rebuffed. He swung each clenched fist with more punishing force than the mightiest unawoken man could produce with a hammer and two hands. His legs moved him faster than a mundane horse could run without any active pneuma to bolster him, nearly as fast as I could move with all the swiftness granted by my vital breath. And neither fact mattered, because he didn’t know how to fight.

Oh, he thought he did. And perhaps by the standards of the common man it was so. His form was clean enough, and a swift body with strength behind it made up for much in most situations. If this had been a fight at our fullest strengths I would have been at a ruinous disadvantage. Yet here in my octagon, what was any of it worth?

“A family from the Coast and a place of prominence in the Raging Heaven Cult. The question isn’t if you were taught, but by who,” I reasoned, striding around the perimeter of the octagon and accepting the jibes and nudges of the athletes gathering in to watch. Alazon’s eyes followed me calculatingly. “Who did you the disservice-?”

He exploded across the octagon just as I was passing Chilon. By the time the Obol Orator had begun to cry out a warning, I had already begun shifting my feet in the sand. I ducked his haymaker and lunged up into him, wrapping my arms in a bear hug around his torso and taking his momentum for myself. He kneed me frantically while he tried to escape the hold, but it was too late.

Spinning on my heel, I fell back and slammed him into the sand. The Hero’s breath exploded out of him. Our little crowd hollered and rained insults down upon the fallen aristocrat. In the distance, yet more Olympic athletes turned curiously our way.

I rolled sideways and away from Alazon while he gagged. Three times he’d kneed me while I was pulling him from the air to plant him in the earth, and three times he’d broken bone. Pacing again with my back straight, I ignored the urge to hunch over my battered ribs and instead filled the wheeling channels inside me with air. Not that I’d do anything with it. Not yet.

“Tell me who failed you,” I demanded. “Give me their name!”

“Stop talking!” Alazon seethed, pressing himself up with one arm. “Be silent forever! For even a moment!”

I refused.

“Who let you strut through this city with that fire in your eyes? Who led you to believe your heart flame made you something else, when it only ever made you more of what you are?”

We existed body and soul, each in three parts. From the earth was the first man’s body sculpted, and from the heavens came his soul. We cultivated reason, spirit, and hunger with both halves in mind. Though we were children of the earth, we refined our heavenly souls every day in the hopes that one day they would match the starry skies above. Though we were reaching ever for the heights, we remembered our earthly bodies and tempered them in the pursuit of an aesthetic matched only by masterwork marble.

Alazon was faster than me, that was evident to anyone with eyes, but it was a runner’s speed. He’d beat me in a sprint every time he chose to run it, but that meant little enough in the octagon. This wasn’t a race of that kind. He could race around the pit as long as he desired, but he had to come to me eventually.

The Fleet Foot moved and put that thought to practice, rushing in low at a speed I’d have been hard-pressed to react to if I hadn’t read his intent a moment before he did it. His eyes had lingered too long on his target, and the shifting of his hips had betrayed him. He only rose halfway to his feet before exploding forward into that low sprint, but how could it surprise me when his body had already warned me he’d do it?

I pivoted and brought my right leg up, avoiding his knifing jab and hammering my knee into his chin. He staggered past me, assaulted by the siren song of his peers’ disdain.

Diving after him, I put my shoulder into the small of his back and took him to the ground. Pushing him off balance felt like pressing a tree out from its roots. It felt like toppling a marble arch. But when we hit the sands, the weight of his body kicked up no more sand than mine.

“Who failed you?” I whispered in the Hero’s ear, riding him like an unruly horse while he thrashed and bucked. “Who let you walk out from under their wing in ignorance? Who sent you here to languish in the shadows of greater men?”

“Are you out of your mind?” Alazon hissed, and it was a genuine question as much as it was an insult. He threw his head back, searching for my nose with the crown of his head. I had already drawn back, kicked my legs out to the side and dug my toes into the sand while I wrenched my arm around his neck.

The Hero’s next words were choked, but audible: “I’m a hero. Men tell stories about me. I have the adoration of the Muses-”

“Had,” I interjected, and leaned back. Alazon’s face darkened as my choke hold tightened well beyond the point where a mortal man would have fainted. “You had their adoration. You were a soul worth speaking of. But you erred somewhere along the way from that moment to this one - you lost your golden glory. Tell me something, Alazon. When was the last time the Muses spoke to you?”

“Fuck you,” he snarled, slamming clenched fists into my sides and clawing at my skin when that didn’t put me off him. “Fuck you, scavenger!”

“Who condemned you to the Fates? Who brought you here and made you less?”

He twisted and flopped around in the sand like a fish, for all the good it did him.

Body and soul. Heaven and earth. In a righteous world, those scales would be balanced. In a just world, Alazon would be my better in all things - in all three portions of his tripartite soul, and in every martial prowess. But he wasn’t. He was wildly far beyond me in the fields in which he specialized, but that is all he was.

The golden age heroes I’d grown up on stories of were larger than life, grand in all ways. Even the least martially inclined were terrors in a fight. Even the Augur, gentle Orpheus, had been a towering presence the night I met him in his tomb. He was a man of the lyre, a man of poetry and heartfelt song, and there hadn’t been a single doubt in my mind when we spoke that he could tear any man apart with his bare hands if he so chose.

Orpheus was a gentle man, yes, but capable of unspeakable violence.

That’s what a hero was meant to be.

Twisting and rolling in the center of the pit amidst a crowd of rowdy men and women further along the path to heaven than the average soul could ever dream of being, I found myself locking eyes with the solitary Philosopher among their number. I remembered the story he’d given me as a gift, more valuable than any precious weapons or relics.

I remembered how it had ended. In glory.

In gold.

“This is Justice,” spoke Calliope the Muse. The Goddess with the Heavenly Voice cradled Damon Aetos’ jaw in her ethereal hand and laid her golden crown upon his head. “Remember his face.”

“Glory begets a crown,” I told the Hero Alazon. “Not the reverse. It isn’t the laurel leaf that makes you a champion. It’s everything else!”

“You don’t know anything,” he forced out through grit teeth. The fires behind his eyes flickered ominously. “Junior Philosopher sitting smug inside your well, lecturing your betters when they appear above your head. When they step into your little ring to humor you! I’ve overcome trials you couldn’t imagine. I’ve done it twice. I’m a Hero. What are you, to me?”

What other answer could there be?

“I’m free.”

The Young Aristocrat snapped. I released my choke and flung myself away as malice exploded from his soul. The flames behind his eyes surged, his Heroic pneuma rose, and he turned on me with murder pounding in his heart.

He took one step toward me and was struck down by a flash of tanned skin and a golden loincloth. Another Hero’s vibrant pneuma rose as Alazon struggled against one of the men that had been spectating our fight, and any question as to the outcome was quickly put to rest as the struggle was joined by two more against the Young Aristocrat. I supposed that even these sorry souls had a sense of sportsmanship at the end of the day. I snorted and withdrew my tribulation blades back into my shadow, while the rest of the crowd wandered off and returned to their training.

“Apologies, senior brother,” I said, turning back to Chilon. “Where were we-?”

I blinked.

Had I missed them in the crowd, or had they only arrived as the fight was ending?

Standing outside the now invisible boundary of my octagon, Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris regarded me as if for the first time. I stood up straight and offered them each a smile, setting aside the pain of my broken ribs and battered flesh.

“Hello, friends,” I greeted the three of them happily. “What brings you in to my domain?”