The Young Miss-tocrat

Time passed, but slower every day.

Niko had promised them, promised her, that he would find a way to get them a ship and their uncle’s permission to sail it east towards Olympia. He had promised to prepare them for the journey ahead, and in that regard he had tried. But the journey was what mattered most, and every day that passed it seemed just a bit further away.

Lydia knew she had to be patient. She knew that her chances of bringing Griffon home were far greater with Niko and his crew there to support her. More than that, she knew that if she wasn’t patient, if she let her frustration show through in just the slightest of degrees, it would push her youngest cousin over the edge. He was already so close as it was.

The last time she’d seen Myron had been the day he nearly killed their journey in the cradle before it could begin. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she’d most certainly known it when her siblings came pounding down her door later that night. Myron had told her siblings of their plan. He’d told Rena and Castor in the hopes that they would take his side, perhaps help him convince Niko to hurry things along. He had even told his brother, as if Heron could be trusted with such a secret in the first place.

He was just a boy, only ten years old. It was so easy to forget that when his cultivation was only a single step beneath hers. But he was still a boy, susceptible to impatience. He hadn’t found any other allies that day, but he also hadn’t sought her out since. She supposed locking himself in closed doors cultivation was better than the alternative. It kept him busy, at least.

Lydia had crept through her family's estate as if over eggshells the day after, just waiting for her father to come raging through her door. But somehow, miraculously, Heron did not immediately betray them to their parents. Perhaps he’d had a change of heart towards Griffon in his absence. Perhaps he’d simply been waiting for the right moment to sell them out.

If the latter was the case, he lost his chance soon after. The very next day, Uncle Damon had cracked open the heart of the eastern mountain range and ventured into its depths alongside the twin pillars of the Rosy Dawn, their wives, and Niko’s entire crew. They’d sealed the way shut behind them, locking themselves into their own closed doors cultivation. Even if Heron had wanted to give them up after that, there was no reaching them now.

It was undoubtedly a blessing. But every day that passed and her eldest cousin did not emerge from the mountain with their uncle’s blessing in hand, Lydia’s impression of it grew a bit more sour.

The longer this went on, the closer she was drawn to Myron’s state of mind. In those itchy, impatient moments, she turned to old habits and their familiar comforts. She honed her body. She honed her mind.

She forced herself to breathe.

Though recently, even that was not quite so tranquil as it used to be.

“I can’t do it,” the slave despaired. Again.

“You can,” Lydia told her without opening her eyes. She inhaled smoothly, and exhaled with equal ease. Her pneuma spun throughout her body in a perfect spiral. Ebbing and flowing predictably, ever in her control.

Athis tried again, drawing in a deep breath and attempting to guide it through her body. Lydia felt the girl's untrained pneuma rise around her, an immediate sign that she was off the mark, and a second later Athis’ breath hitched and she devolved into a coughing fit. Her pneuma scattered in the wind, dissipating without any greater purpose to guide it.

“I can’t!” Athis insisted. If nothing else, the bleak defeatism that had colored their early interactions was now giving way to a pure, burning frustration. A step in the right direction.

“You can,” Lydia repeated.

Athis made a helpless, infuriated sound that she smothered in the back of her throat before it could reach the open air. She shifted in place, skin scraping the stone of the hidden alcove, and stood.

“Even if I could, what would it matter? T-this won’t - it won’t make me stronger! It’s a waste of time!”

Lydia opened her eyes, pleasantly surprised. This was new.

“Your pneuma is your vital essence, the source of all your greater works,” she said simply. “The way you breathe, the focus behind it - that’s the foundation for everything else that I could teach you. Controlled breathing comes first.”

“At least…” The mousy girl's fists clenched as she fought her instinctive urge to shrink away from Lydia’s focus. “At least teach me how to use a spear. Teach me how to move like you do. Please. I can learn both at the same time, can’t I?”

“No.”

“Why not!?” It seemed the slave had reached the limits of her patience.

Lydia didn’t hold it against her. She knew the feeling.

“Strength does not spring forth from a void,” she informed the slave, and rose abruptly to her feet. Athis stepped back and promptly slipped. Her eyes flew open wide and her breath rushed out of her in a horrified gasp. The slave fell back, over the edge of the cliffside alcove overlooking the Scarlet City.

Lydia caught her by the plain white dress she’d gifted her and hauled the girl back inside.

“You were clumsy your entire life before you stepped into the Civic Realm, and you’re still clumsy now,” Lydia said, letting go and watching her sink down to her knees. “Cultivation is a process. It is refinement of your body and soul, and you’ve only just begun.

“When I first awoke and became aware of my own pneuma, I did not immediately take to the spear. You have to walk before you start running.”

“It looks so simple when you do it,” Athis whispered. “In the yards, with the other women of the cult. It looks so simple. Powerful, but effortlessly so.”

“It is,” Lydia confirmed. “But in the same way that walking is effortless - none of us were born on our feet. We were all clumsy children once, struggling to carry our own weight and stand without the help of others. Understand that you are still that child.”

The slave’s head dipped, her momentary ire giving way to morose acceptance.

“I thought…” Athis bunched up the fabric of her dress, gripping it like a lifeline. “I thought it would change me. I thought being a cultivator would make things simple.”

“Cultivation doesn’t raise the ground beneath your feet,” Lydia explained, not unkindly. “It only clears the skies above your head.”

It was a lesson she’d learned herself the hard way, as every cultivator did. Refinement was an endless grueling journey. Cultivation did not remove the competitor’s need to train; it only removed the upper limits on what they could achieve. A crude soul had limits. A cultivator could refine themselves endlessly, so long as they did what it took to grow beyond themselves.

For some, that knowledge was the only encouragement they’d ever need. Athis was not one of those people.

Lydia sighed and made a decision.

“Come with me. We’re going to the city.”

“Wha-? Why?”

Lydia turned and left the cave. Athis scrambled out after her.

“I don’t know how to teach you in a way you’ll understand, and we’ll be leaving this place soon.” Soon, Myron’s voice echoed disdainfully in her mind. Lydia grimaced. No, Athis wasn’t the only one tired of sitting around and waiting. “Fortunately for you, I know someone who does.”

“Who?” Athis asked, hopeful and apprehensive in equal measure. It was no secret that the men of the cult terrified her.

Lydia gave the slave an arch look over her shoulder.

“Rejoice, slave. This Young Miss is offering you an opportunity that her fellow mystikos would leap into an open flame for. The chance to learn from my master - the Sand Reckoner himself.”

And if she happened to bring a request of her own before the wise man? If that request just happened to be nautical in its nature? Well, what was the harm? She would be patient. Niko would come through for them soon, she knew that.

Soon.

“Tread lightly,” she advised the slave when they reached their destination. It was an unassuming home built in the city’s outer limits, nearly brushing up against the eastern mountain range. The building itself was rundown, just short of dilapidated, and the door was unbarred when she pressed on it.

Athis hesitated, glancing warily around. They were far from the city center, but that didn’t mean there was no one on the streets. She didn’t want to go in, but she didn’t want to be left out alone either.

“Is he… cruel?”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t have brought you here if he was.”

“Then, why-?”

“I was speaking literally,” she said, stepping through the open door. “Tread lightly.”

Her mentor’s workshop was exactly as she remembered it.

An utter mess.

Everywhere Lydia looked, she saw disaster. The chaos was familiar, but the details of it had changed in the months since she’d last paid her mentor a visit. This place had once been a home, long before she was born, but her mentor had gutted it of its creature comforts soon after his arrival. Furniture was wasted space, so far as he was concerned.

What furniture did remain, tables of varying styles and materials that she knew had been chosen for their varying heights rather than aesthetic belonging, were covered corner-to-corner by the tools of her mentor’s trade and notes scrawled in his spidery handwriting. His reference shapes abounded - cylinders, spheres, and other geometric shapes all carved from wood or chiseled out of marble, piling up on the floor or weighing down sheets of papyrus so they wouldn’t fly away when the winds came in.

Lydia stepped carefully through the chaos, making sure not to disturb a single bauble or tool, no matter how frivolously it seemed they’d been cast about the workshop. Controlled chaos, her mentor called it, and heaven help anyone that threatened his control over it.

“Oh,” Athis breathed, standing in the open doorway behind her and looking in on the madness. “Now I see.”

“It gets worse,” Lydia assured her, creeping through a small maze of copper mirrors on adjustable iron stands. “Close the door behind you and watch every step you take. He’s usually in the courtyard, but he could also be under one of these piles.”

“He could be what?”

“Close the door,” Lydia said sharply. Athis pulled it shut and pressed her back against it.

“Shouldn’t we wait for him to invite us in?” the slave asked helplessly. Her pneuma rose and fell around her, flickering fitfully. “You can call out to him, surely-”

“He wouldn’t answer if I did.” Lydia shook her head. She’d learned that lesson long ago. “We have to go to him. We’ll check the courtyard first, and if he’s not there-”

Athis gasped, and a loud thump sounded from behind Lydia as the slave girl slipped and tried to catch herself on a nearby table for balance. She closed her eyes at the cascade of noise that followed as the girl brought down the table and all its contents with her to the floor.

She supposed it was her fault for trying.

“Who dares!?”

He’d been in the courtyard after all.

Athis scrambled to her feet like a wild hare, the white of her eyes showing as she turned back and lunged for the door. She rebounded off it with an ugly sound, and no matter how many times she beat herself against it, despite the fact that it had been open for anyone to trespass just moments before, it would not budge.

Lydia mouthed a silent prayer for patience, and then cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted back in the direction of the courtyard.

“Your student, Lydia Aetos! I’ve come to seek your wisdom!”

“Impossible!”

Lydia’s brow furrowed. “And why is that?”

“My student may be worthless in most ways that matter, but she knows better than to disrupt her master’s work!”

“Haa?” Lydia scowled and lifted her leg to place the heel of her foot against the side of another table. The sand reckoner howled in frustration as another small avalanche of his work went tumbling to the floor.

“You’re making a mess!”

“This mess predates me!” She shouted back, wading through the remaining clutter out into the courtyard.

Hunched over a dioptra he used to watch the stars at night and measure angles by day, Archimedes looked up from his work only just long enough to glare at her as she appeared in his line of sight.

The old philosopher was exactly as she remembered him, ragged and unkempt. He wore the same washed-out reds he always had, silks that had once been as fine a scarlet as her own Rosy Dawn attire. His hair was long and wild, as was his beard, and the bone-white color of both gave away his ancient nature as surely as the lines around his squinting eyes. Not laugh lines, of course. Her mentor had never been one for comedy.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” Archimedes demanded crossly, his hands continuing to work blindly with an iron drawing compass and a stick of charcoal even as he glared at her.

“You’re always busy.”

“Exactly right. Exactly right. And yet my peace is ever disturbed by yapping children.”

“The price of wisdom,” Lydia said blithely, stepping out into the courtyard. It was no less a mess, but there was at least a path through the chaos out here - a spiral path of stepping stones that funneled from the furthest edges of the courtyard into the central point where the philosopher did his stargazing and deepest thinking. “This one has a favor to ask of you.”

There came another crash from back inside the workshop. “Two favors,” she amended.

“No.”

“I beg the master-”

“Beg the ocean waves for all that I care! I am busy.”

Patience. Patience. Lydia counted to ten. “I see that-”

“You see nothing.” The old bastard waved her off with his stick of charcoal, turning back to the masterfully crafted dioptra he was currently using as a work bench. “Would that you had eyes to see - you might actually learn something of what I do here.”

“You’re drawing circles!” Lydia snapped, unable to take it any longer. She reached up to one of the courtyard’s olive trees and pulled off a sheet of papyrus that Archimedes had skewered on the branch for safekeeping. “Here’s one!” She grabbed a second, then a third, plucking them like leaves. “Another circle, more circles - oh! My, a cylinder, how exciting. And yet again more circles!”

“Idiot!” he roared. “I am mapping out the future! I am unraveling the scarlet threads of Fate, doing what the Oracles only wish that they could do!”

“You are drawing circles!”

“Excuse me-!”

“WHAT!?” Mentor and student shouted at once, and shy Athis cowered in the space between the courtyard’s pillars.

“Never mind,” the slave whispered.

Archimedes snorted and returned to his work.

“What do you want?” he asked Lydia impatiently. “Make it quick.”

Lydia held a hand out towards the slave. “This girl’s name is Athis. She’s just awoken to her place in this world, and I’ve been trying to teach her your breathing technique-” Before she could say another word, the sand reckoner drew a scroll of papyrus from a fold in his faded red rags and threw it at the slave’s head. Athis flinched away, banged her head against one of the courtyard pillars, and somehow got hit by the scroll anyway.

“There. Go.”

“I thought a more direct lesson might-”

“No. I have more than enough students already. Go.”

It had been too long since she’d been here. She’d forgotten how the man was when he was truly absorbed in his work - which was almost always.

“Just one more thing,” she said. The old philosopher grunted. “I’ve had a powerful urge to sail as of late, but I lack a ship and the Rosy Dawn has none to spare. Do you have any…?”

“Ships?” Archimedes said flatly. “Do I have any ships lying around my workshop? Perhaps tucked away in my-”

“Schematics!” she said quickly. “Do you have any schematics for a ship? Something an amateur could build, perhaps?”

The design and manufacturing of ships was only one of her mentor’s many accolades, and one of the trades he spent the least of his time honing, but that made him no less a master of the craft. It was perhaps a touch presumptuous of her to start this process on her own, but surely Niko would understand. He might even appreciate her initiative-

“Ask the boy.”

Lydia blinked. “What?”

“The boy.” He waved his charcoal stick in a circular motion, as if to conjure up the memory of him. He gave it up a moment later. “He came in a few… hours? Days? However long ago it was. He came in and nagged me endlessly for measurements on a sailing skiff. Go ask him for a turn - I won’t waste time drawing another set.”

“What boy?” Lydia stepped towards the center of the spiral, feeling a cold dread sink its talons in her spine. “Master, what was his name?”

Archimedes scoffed. “As if I asked.”

“What did he look like?”

“What does every boy look like?”

“This tall- look!” Lydia hissed, and he grudgingly looked up from his work. She held her hand above the ground, at roughly her stomach’s height. “This tall?”

“Near enough.”

Her heart was hammering, she realized.

“Blond hair that curls around his ears? Rosy dawn attire, and a belt with two daggers?” Lydia pressed him, her panic rising every time he nodded. “Where did he stand? Where did he stand!?”

“Ninth rank.”

Lydia sagged against the olive tree beside her in relief. Her youngest cousin was only in the eighth rank of the Civic Realm, and he was new to it at that. For a moment, she’d thought… no, he was only ten years old, but he wasn’t a fool. He’d have told her.

Archimedes, for his part, was tapping the points of his drawing compass to his forehead as he dug through his scattered memories.

“Little wretch never told me his name. Spent half his time posturing and the other half trying to pluck at my heartstrings. My cousin needs my help, but I can’t get there without a ship! As if he didn’t plan on using it to fish-”

The old philosopher went on grumbling, but Lydia didn’t hear another word of it. She’d already bounded back into the courtyard and burst through the front door’s locks, sprinting back towards the eastern mountain range while Athis cried out and begged for her to slow down.

He came in a few… Hours? Days? However long ago it was.

She hadn’t seen Myron since the day he’d nearly given them away in his frustration. It had been weeks since then.

“No, no, no,” she whispered in between spiraling breaths, surging up the mountainside in great bounding leaps. Cresting the mountain, she promptly slammed through a pair of young mystikos jogging along the mountain trail and sent them both tumbling. She kept running, rushing through the Rosy Dawn estates and down the other side of the eastern mountain range.

“You only had to wait!”

In the distance, past the wheat fields and rocky beaches, the Ionian shimmered clear blue in the sun’s light.

Lydia fell from the mountain as much as she descended it, leaping off entirely as soon as she was close enough to make the jump without breaking a limb, and rolled through the impact into a dead sprint towards the beach. Birds and slaves alike were scattered from the fields as she shot past. Behind her, so distant she could hardly hear it over the pounding of her heart, her fellow mystikos were following her in alarmed pursuit.

When she finally planted her feet and halted her momentum in an explosion of flying sand, she was at the foot of the Scarlet City’s eastern docks. The same docks where she’d stood less than a year ago awaiting her oldest cousin’s arrival, arm-in-arm with her fiance. She’d come here first, fully expecting she’d have to comb through every stade of these beaches in search of a sign.

And she saw that there was no need. The sign was right there in the center of the docks, buried in the planks. Plain as day, just waiting to be found.

A jagged strip of sloppily-carved hardwood. An amateur’s first attempt at a deck plank, worthless for a ship. But it served just fine as a message post. The message was short, carved into the post by a child’s careful hand.

I’ll do it myself.

“Senior sister!” someone shouted. Several people.

She could see it.

“Young Miss!”

There, nearly over the line of the horizon. That distant bobbing speck.

“Lydia-!”

Lydia took two bounding steps across the deck and dove into the sea.