The Stark Blade, Nikolas Aetos

Somehow, even now, the image that appeared when Niko called to mind his cousins was a single night from years ago. The night they’d carved their refuge out of the eastern mountain range had been a warm one, the full moon and its chorus of stars burning bright over their heads.

It was Niko that did the bulk of the work, though Lio carved out more than his fair share and the rest of them chipped away as much as they could. When all was said and done they had a cavern of their own making, just large enough to fit the seven of them and a low burning fire. He remembered the exhausted satisfaction on each of their faces, their expressions glowing in that first fire’s light.

They had told each other stories - grand tragicomedies that they’d all heard before but never tired of retelling, stories of lessons they’d learned from their mentors within the Rosy Dawn Cult, and eventually, mundane stories of their time apart from each other.

He remembered Lio’s excitement that night, carefully controlled to the point that Niko was the only one that noticed it, and he remembered how his cousin’s scarlet eyes had shone when it was his time to speak. He hadn’t wasted a moment on preamble.

“Today, I did this.”

And to the astonishment of all of his cousins, the Young Aristocrat had drawn upon his pneuma and in an instant shaped it to his will. Six rosy hands had appeared in the smoke above the night fire, each one distinct from his own flesh and blood limbs.

Niko had been approaching the peak of the Sophic Realm at that point, but he’d been every bit as shocked as their younger cousins. More so, perhaps, because he’d been learned enough to fully appreciate the Young Aristocrat’s feat.

It was impressive enough that he’d been able to manifest anything at his age and level of refinement, but then Niko had achieved much the same in his own time as a Civic cultivator. No, what made it exceptional was what he had manifested. Not a sword of his intent, as Niko and so many others favored. Not a hammer or an axe or even a spear. He’d manifested hands.

Their younger cousins hadn’t understood how incredible that was then. Niko wouldn’t be surprised if they still didn’t fully grasp it today. The issue with manifesting intent, and the reason why every cultivator under the sun didn’t go around plucking whatever tool or weapon they happened to need from thin air, was because it required more than just control. For a cultivator to project Sword Intent, to shape their vital breath and condense it into a corporeal blade, they had to understand just what it was they were creating - and to what end.

Swordsmithing was an art as much as it was a craft, and Niko had seen for himself the wondrous little complexities that went into the creation of a quality blade. That being said, a sword was simple. A blade was even more so. Swords, daggers, hammers and axes and spears, the most commonly seen manifestations of refined intent, were common because of their simplicity. The more complex the working, the more difficult it was to manifest. Adding a hilt to a naked blade and making a sword of it, for example, made the venture twice as difficult.

There were twenty-seven bones in a human hand alone. Each one connected by joints and ligaments, strips of muscles and flesh functioning in staggering synchronicity. Manifesting just one would have been an outrageous feat.

Watching little Lio manipulate six hands of his intent as naturally as he would his own, striking at the rising smoke with clenched fists and snatching grapple motions, Niko hadn’t said a word. Yet despite that, regardless of the fact that he was silent while Myron and Heron whooped and tried to catch the floating hands, while Castor clapped and Rena cried out in wonder, and while little Lydia laughed in pure joy for her favorite cousin - in spite of all that, Niko knew he was by far the one most impressed by the accomplishment.

Lio had known it, too. He’d tried to smirk when they locked eyes across the fire, but a child prodigy was still a child in the end. When he’d seen Niko’s honest wonder, the smirk had given way to a toothy smile. His eyes had burned with satisfaction, with pride, and with renewed determination.

That was the image of his cousins that Niko kept closest in his heart. When he told stories of them it was the rosy glow of that night fire lighting up his mind’s eye. When he missed them it was their laughter and their joy that he recalled. When he thought of the Young Aristocrat, it was Lio’s smile winning out. Satisfaction overturning arrogance.

Nikolas Aetos had spent his years abroad flourishing and changing as a man, growing into his own and making his mark on the world outside his uncle’s island. Fool that he was, he’d decided somewhere along the way that he was the only one changing. He’d come home expecting to see those very same faces gathered around the fire. Older, to be sure, some of them closer to adults than children, but unchanged in all the ways that mattered.

Prodigy of prodigies they called him. Yet no matter how many times he was proven wrong, he just couldn’t make this lesson stick. What kind of prodigy couldn’t recognize what was right in front of his face? What sort of man didn’t take the time to know his own family?

No man at all.

Niko stood in the knee-high water of a pavilion fountain that had been scattered rubble just a few moments before, as distantly aware of his wife’s grip on his arm as he was the mayhem on the mountain, and stared blankly at a stranger wearing his little cousin’s face.

“My fault? My fault!?” Heron raged, still breathless and soaking wet from his dash into the Ionian. “You gave him free reign for months! You let him skip his lessons, turned away while he ran wild in the gymnasium, indulged him while he did anything and everything he wanted, and yet it’s my fault-”

“He’s your brother!” Stavros Aetos shouted, blue eyes blazing as he strained against the courtyard’s stone guardians that were holding him in place. The stone statues of past Heroes were unmoved, bolstered by a far greater force standing silent nearby. “Your younger brother. You should have taken action!”

“Months.” Heron stalked up and down the perimeter of the fountain, fists clenching and unclenching impotently. “You let him retrace all of Lio’s steps for months, and now you act like he’s been stolen. As if this could have gone any other way.”

He was nearly a man himself now, sixteen years old, and had grown half a hand taller just in the months that Niko had been home. He took after his father - and Uncle Fotios by proxy - more visibly every day. He’d grown into his frame, his Rosy Dawn silks clinging to him where they’d hung free before. He’d shed the boyhood fat in his cheeks to reveal a strong jaw that changed his demeanor entirely. His brow, too. He’d always had a heavy brow, but it was more pronounced these days. Or perhaps he simply glowered more.

Niko looked closer, searching for that boy who had regarded Lio’s rosy hands of dawn with such wonder. The young Heron that had looked up to Niko and Lio with unmarred admiration throughout their upbringing.

Niko’s eyes were sharper now than they’d ever been before. How was it, then, that he couldn’t see the faintest hint of that boy in his cousin’s face?

“He’s only ten years old, Heron.” Aunt Raisa’s burning eyes were pinched, her voice shaky with fear for her younger son and rage against the stone statues that held her back from sprinting into the sea. Still, she mastered herself as best she could. “If your eyes saw what ours couldn’t, why didn’t you say something?”

Heron gnashed his teeth and looked away, and for the first time since they’d emerged from the heart of the mountain, Niko locked eyes with his younger cousin. The accusation in his eyes made Niko’s stomach clench.

“What was I supposed to say?” Heron finally said, turning back to his parents. “My younger brother by six years has surpassed me in cultivation, flown by as if he had wings, and you haven’t looked at me the same way since.”

“That’s not-” Raisa began. Stavros didn’t let her finish.

“This isn’t about you.”

“What could I have said?” Heron snapped. “Tell me the words that would have convinced you I was concerned for my brother and not resentful of his climb! Show me the action I should have taken against a child two ranks above me - too stubborn to listen and too quick for me to catch. Should I have wrapped him up in his sheets while he was sleeping? Beaten him ‘til he saw sense?”

“Heron!”

“What? That’s the way, isn’t it-”

“Enough,” spoke the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn, and it was like a spell had been broken. Niko blinked, perplexed, and tore his eyes away from his cousin to take in the state of the pavilion.

He saw that Uncle Fotios and Aunt Chryse hadn’t moved from the spot they’d been in when they received the news about Lydia. Uncle Damon had stopped them himself, gripping them each by the shoulder and forcing them to their knees in the ruined pool. Though the water bubbled and steamed beneath them, nothing else came of their wrath. The kyrios had smothered the worst of it at once.

Niko carefully pried Iphys’ fingers away from his arm, one at a time, and clasped their hands together instead. Glancing back, he saw that the rest of their companions were still with them, though they all looked like they’d rather have been anywhere else.

Iphys and their companions were proud Heroic souls in their own rights, but the twin eagles and their wives were Captains of the Heroic Realm. They’d spent weeks down in the mountain training and breaking bread together, sharing stories in the quiet moments that lingered between cultivation. Niko’s companions had grown comfortable with them, as he’d hoped they would, but perhaps too much so in the end. His wife and his friends had forgotten what his family was.

Their anger had reminded them.

“You knew,” Fotios spoke, glaring up at his eldest brother. Damon stared down at him, expression level. “You knew that this would happen-”

“Could happen.”

“You knew,” Lydia’s father spat just past the kyrio’s scarlet robes. The spittle hissed and turned to steam as soon as it touched the fountain pool. “And you did nothing to stop it. You didn’t leave a single worthy eye to watch over them. Our children, Damon.”

The kyrios’ hands were full, so he gestured with his gaze instead. His blue eyes speared through a man dressed in charred silks, one of over a dozen sophic cultivators that were kneeling in the boiling waters at the edge of the fountain. The man in question was already pale faced with pain and trepidation. When Damon Aetos’ attention fell upon him, the sophist thrust his hands down into the boiling water to hide their sudden trembling.

“I left behind wise men to mind things in our absence, as I’ve always done.”

“You left behind the dregs,” Stavros bit out in a dark voice that promised violence. “You left nothing but the scraps that weren’t worth casting out. You left our children unattended, and my son is gone because of it!”

“Let us go, brother,” Chryse urged him, wrenching her arms against the stone sentinels holding her back. Her vibrant blonde hair hung down over her eyes, her heart’s flame shining through the curtain. “Whatever this is, they’ve no part in it. Let us bring them home.”

“Be reasonable, Damon,” Raisa murmured. She didn’t raise her head, staring down at her own reflection in the pool where she knelt. “They’re just children.”

The kyrios considered them both.

“So were we.”

The twin eagles sagged, Stavros hanging limp in the sentinels’ stone arms while Fotios’ shoulders bowed beneath an unseen weight. Their wives turned to them, helpless, but Niko’s uncles had nothing more to say. Chryse whispered a curse. Raisa began to sob.

“Nephew,” the kyrios spoke, and though Heron snapped to attention Niko knew their uncle was talking to him. “Go and fetch your cousins for me.”

Ah, right. Rena was down at the docks, in tears just like her mother, and Castor was hounding the sophists that had watched his sister go. Rena and Castor. He’d seen them both countless times since his return. How strange that the only image in his mind was their delighted applause, the night fire glow and the light of Lio’s hands dancing in their eyes.

“Niko.”

The voices of four of his companions hissed his name, and Iphys gripped his hand tight enough to snap an iron bar. Urgent.

“We don’t have time,” she whispered in his ear. She was right, of course. They’d waited long enough, and all on his behalf. He’d taken months from them - he wouldn’t take another. Especially not this one.

“The Games are in a month, uncle,” he said firmly. He stepped forward, away from his wife and his companions and over the lip of the fountain. The boiling water would have been an agony to the philosophers currently kneeling in wait for his uncle’s judgment, but to Niko it was as bath water.

“If we’re not in Olympia by sundown tonight we won’t be able to compete.” He squared his shoulders and faced the kyrios squarely. “My friends came here to see me wed. They came because I asked them - because I wanted them to meet the man that raised me.” Niko inclined his head in deference to his uncle, and then he threw everything to the wind.

“I didn’t bring them here in chains, uncle. These people aren’t yours to keep.”

There came gasps, along with a flurry of half-spoken warnings and exclamations from all around the pavilion. Uncle Fotios and Aunt Raisa both twisted to look up at him in alarm, still trapped by the kyrios’ hand on each of their shoulders. Niko ignored it all and forced himself to match Damon Aetos piercing stare. To stand tall and unshaken.

Like his father would have done.

“Your friends are guests in my domain,” the kyrios finally said. “They’re free to leave at any time.”

Niko stared at him steadily. Unspoken went his response: Not without me.

Damon’s lips curled.

“Fetch your cousins for me, Nikolas,” he told him again, sky blue eyes just a bit more fond. “After that you’re free to go.”

Ah.

The Sand Reckoner’s workshop was the same as it always was.

“I need a ship,” Niko declared, catching a hysterical young woman as she stumbled away from a lancing beam of concentrated sunlight. Her eyes were wild and red with terrified tears, her arms and legs peppered by light burns. He eased her back from another beam and handed her off to his wife. “Archimedes! I need-”

“Please!” the young woman cried out, and to Niko’s surprise she squirmed out of Iphys’ arms. Skittishly, like a deer with a broken leg, she advanced forward towards the maze of bronze mirrors and the burning lances of sunlight they cast. “The Young Miss needs help! Please-!”

An old man’s frustrated shout came drifting in from the humble estate’s courtyard.

“Leave me ALONE!”

The Sand Reckoner, too, was the same as he always was.

“I’m not leaving without a ship,” Niko declared, and walked straight through the maze of burning lances. Most parted inexplicably to let him pass, and those that did graze him did little more than singe his silks. A pitiful show - the old man could have done better if he’d wanted.

Archimedes glared balefully at him when he entered. He was still white-haired and rail thin, his bloodshot eyes as manic as ever. He looked like every true philosopher that Niko had ever met.

“Master,” he greeted his old mentor. “I need a ship.”

“You and everyone else in this city,” the Sand Reckoner snapped. “Take a look around you at the ships I have to give! See any you like, boy?”

“No.” Just piles and piles of garbage.

“A shame, truly. Take the girl with you on your way out-”

“I’ll take that one.”

Niko pointed a finger at the man’s midsection - specifically, his ragged red attire. Archimedes’ eyes narrowed.

“You’re pointing at skin and bones, boy.”

“No.” Niko smiled pleasantly, coaxing the flames behind his eyes to burn bright hot. “I’m pointing at the ship you keep tucked in your cloak.”