The Son of Rome

The Oracle’s blade was adamant-wrought. It plunged through her throat without any resistance, parting flesh and cartilage as if it wasn’t there at all. Calliope’s breath hitched as she weakly twisted the knife-

I caught her wrist and pressed my thumb against the flat face of the dagger’s hilt, locking it in place. The Oracle choked on a sob and jerked her head sideways, seeking to tear the knife out sideways one way or another. I palmed the golden crown of her head and held her fast. Her eyes quivered as she stared up at me in despair. She looked like she was a thousand worlds away.

A fraction of a second. The woman was weak and delirious, not even a Heroine like her daughter. If I’d seen it a fraction of a second sooner, if I hadn’t been weighed down by the weight of thirty men - it didn’t matter. I’d been too slow, and her children had never had a chance to stop her. They’d both been too busy fighting for air, drowning in her presence, to notice the tightening of her fingers around the knife.

The moment Calliope had choked out her final word I’d seen the blood drain from Griffon’s face. At that moment, she could have stabbed him instead of herself and he wouldn’t have noticed until he came to in the underworld.

For an excruciating moment, they traded one haze for another. Two sets of scarlet eyes stared without comprehension at the knife lodged in the Oracle’s throat.

Thin rivers of blood spilled out from the seams around the wound. Selene cried out. The spell broke.

Griffon’s pneuma flooded the room, projections of the Rosy-Fingered Dawn surging across the Oracle’s body and converging on the knife. The first pankration hand to brush against the sliver of exposed adamant was cut open as easily as the Oracle’s throat had been, spilling golden essence like blood from its sudden wound. The same thing happened to three more before Griffon snarled and seized upon the knife with his own flesh and blood hands.

The Oracle thrashed with all her might, but for all that this unnatural place had preserved her, she had still been languishing in a bed for sixteen years. The full force of her Majesty put up a far greater fight, dragging me back across time and vast distance to Egypt’s cruel deserts. It burned, and it blinded. It was not enough. I held her head and her hand still while Griffon’s pankration limbs swarmed like locusts over her body and pressed her down into the bed.

“Amma!” Selene wailed. The girl that rushed into the space between Griffon and I was neither the solemn guardian of the Scarlet Oracle’s absent temple, nor the mischievous Heroine that yearned for wider worlds. Selene grasped desperately for her mother, and in that moment she was every bit her age.

A stiff palm wreathed in lightning struck Selene in the chest and viciously shoved her back, followed swiftly by eight more.

“Back!” Griffon snapped.

“She’s dying!”

“She’s not. I won’t allow it.”

The scarlet flames behind Selene’s eyes flared up as she burned her heart's blood, fighting through the muscle spasms and peeling lightning leeches off her body one by one. Her chest heaved like she was running a marathon. The glory of a Heroic cultivators pneuma poured out of her and clashed against Griffon’s, pressing it back.

“The knife,” she gasped, reaching for it, “take out the knife-!”

We were clustered so closely together that when I raised my leg and struck out sideways, it was more of a stomp than a kick. I caught her unprepared in the side of her knee with all my strength and weight behind my foot, and it was just enough to send her stumbling.

“You’ll kill her if you do,” I said firmly when she turned to me in betrayal. “The blade is plugging the wound.”

I was far from a medico, let alone a physician - that had never been my role in Gaius’ legions. Odds were good that even just a few weeks of Anastasia’s guidance and his prior understanding of anatomy had made Griffon my better in medical pursuits. Still, I’d seen enough men bleed out to know that a blade like this was best left sheathed.

“Not enough.” Selene dragged herself up by a bed post with a topper carved like a pine cone. “She’s still bleeding out!”

“I know.” I could almost visibly see the outpouring of Griffon’s pneuma into the Oracle's body. His influence wrestled Selene’s - no, that was too kind a word. It mauled the Heroine’s frantic glory like a cornered animal. If I had possessed Selene’s vision or Anastasia’s surgical perception, I had no doubt I’d have seen him attacking Calliope’s wound with the exact same ferocity.

Griffon’s eyes were wide open, his golden hair rising up on lightning currents and giving him an underwater appearance. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen such a look on his face.

“Wait- wait! The nectar!” Selene reached for my arm but stopped herself just short of jostling it. Instead, she gripped me with a look. “If we pull it out, the nectar will-“

“Seal the wound,” I realized. A drop of the elixir had fixed a broken spine. Calliope, on the other hand, had received a full cup. “Griffon, we can-“

“Be silent,” Griffon seethed. I finally placed his expression.

He was terrified.

“The nectar isn’t working,” he went on furiously. “It isn’t even trying to close the wound. Worthless fucking piss wine, it might as well be running from the blade!”

A memory that wasn’t mine speared up through the crashing waves of panic. Words from my boyhood mentor, though he hadn’t spoken them to me.

Mortal means can’t kill what divinity cursed to live forever.

But adamant could.

“It’s the metal,” I told him urgently. It was little more than mad intuition, and if I was wrong her death would fall entirely on my head. But it felt right. “Adamant stifles ichor. We have to take it out.”

“She’ll bleed out.”

“Only if the wound itself has the same properties. If not, the nectar will close it.”

“Her life isn’t yours to roll bones for.”

“We have to do something!” Selene insisted.

Griffon bared his teeth and turned his violent intent on the room around us. Two of his pankration hands tore the sheets from the bed and ripped them apart, burning the strips that were soaked through with blood and pressing the clean ones to the edges of the wound. The rest of his manifested hands took to the sparse furniture in the room, smashing lounges and tables apart then seizing upon their broken pieces.

Half a dozen blindingly bright hands dove down into his shadow and emerged holding the swords he’d stolen from the storm crown. They took to the broken furniture with their blades like they were oversized carving knives, shaving away strips of wood at blistering speeds. He carved over a dozen wooden daggers, imitating the shape of the Oracle’s knife, and discarded every one of them before turning his violent intent on the swords themselves.

Terrible seconds passed while Griffon tried and failed to break a suitable imitation of the knife out of whatever was at hand. Wood. Iron. He even clawed up the marble from the floor and tried to break it into shape. His intent was clear enough - if we pulled the knife out, and the nectar took too long to regain its potency or else never regained it at all, we could staunch the blood flow with a blade of the same shape and a less poisonous material.

It wasn’t going to work. Griffon knew it, too - he admitted it by flinging the last of his marble attempts against the far wall so hard they exploded into powder.

“We need a surgeon,” he said, and when Selene didn’t immediately respond, he hauled her towards the door with twenty hands of his intent. “Now! Every surgeon you can find!”

Selene struggled out of it, slipping out of the scarlet silks the hands were dragging her by and planting her feet in a wide stance. She would have looked fierce, standing there in her ornate armor, if not for her clear panic.

Griffon struck her with pankration fists and furious influence, and she screamed right back in his face.

“There are none! My father sent them all away!”

“Search the mountain, then! Search the city! Swim to Egypt if that’s what it takes!”

“There’s no time!”

Griffon strangled a sound of wrath and looked to me. “We need Anastasia.”

“We left her in the storm.” I watched the pupils of his eyes shake, and saw the golden path go up in flames.

Griffon and I pulled the blade out together while Selene guided us. Griffon’s pankration hands blurred forward the moment it came free, three fingers jamming into the wound to fill the sudden gap. The rest pressed fresh scraps of cloth around its edges.

I stepped back from the bed physically as well as mentally, and I watched them struggle. Griffon tried cauterizing the wound, tried every internal trick Anastasia had taught him, and fell back on his own instincts when all of those failed. Selene whispered tearful prayers to her faceless bisected corpse god, to the late kyrios, and to the Scarlet Oracle’s patron muse - or perhaps to her mother - while she scraped every last bead of moisture from the discarded cup and dabbed it to her mother’s tongue.

It was all of it in vain. Calliope lay in a shallow pool of her own life blood, no longer resisting through force or Majesty. The mark of a sunkissed physique was tan skin, scarlet eyes, and hair like spun gold. The Scarlet Oracle only matched two of those descriptors now. Her face had grown ghostly pale. Her scarlet eyes were glassy and unfocused.

In the end, she died looking up at her children with tears in her eyes.

Her final breath was simultaneously far less and infinitely more devastating than the cyclone we’d weathered at the gates.

Griffon staggered back from the bed as it rolled over us, slipping on a trail of blood and falling to his knees. He reached for one of the pinecone posts to pull himself up, but abruptly froze. He stared at his blood-soaked hand, transfixed. Selene, for her part, slumped across her mothers corpse and buried her face in her hands. The sobs that followed shook her whole body.

Calliope’s final breath swept over us like the kindest expression of her Majesty. It passed as a wave of warmth and soft illumination, chasing every shadow from the room and spreading out beyond it in a soothing flurry. It went beyond the terrace, out towards the false horizon with its painted sunset, and then further beyond that. For a brief moment, all the world knew warmth and rosy light.

The moment passed. In the aftermath, the only sound to be heard in the sovereign suite was Selene’s wracking sobs. In my mind’s eye, the golden path burnt away entirely. Ash on the wind. Its smoke filled my lungs and made my eyes burn.

Without warning, the false sunset went out like a snuffed candle, plunging the suite into darkness. The light of false stars shimmered weakly, casting faint shadows, and then one by one they all went out too. In seconds we were immersed in true darkness. The only light remaining came from the flames behind Selene’s eyes, and even then it was only the slightest glow seeping out from between her fingers.

There was a man standing in the doorway.

Prometheus’ ichor roared inside my chest, drowning out everything else. My spear was still in my shadow. In this darkness, I only had to flex my fingers and it would be there in my hand. I didn’t dare try.

The silhouette standing in the empty frame didn’t move either. It was too dark to make out any of its features, even its outline. All I could tell was that it was far too large to be a mortal man. Maybe too large to be a man at all.

A rattling cough broke the stillness, and a sliver of torch light shone forth as a Hero’s eye cracked open.

The light was weak, little more than flickering sparks, but it was enough to illuminate the towering figure of the Tyrant Polyzalus. I saw immediately in his face all the features that didn’t match up between Selene and Griffon. He stood taller than all of the other Tyrants I had convened with on the mountain, broad-shouldered and lean. The shadows clung to his face, shrinking only from his eyes. They were scarlet. They were dread.

Dymas hung limp and broken in his grip. Every bone in the Hero’s body had been broken, his sword arm had been ripped off at the shoulder, and the skin that wasn’t covered by bloody cloth and melting bronze was burnt black. In some places his body was still smoking. He’d only cracked one eye open because the other had been gouged out and cauterized. For all intents and purposes, the Hero that the Raging Heaven Cult had called the Butcher and the Aetos brothers had called companion, was already long dead. His spirit simply hadn’t admitted it yet.

Somehow, in spite of all his injuries, Dymas managed a smile. That torch light bore into me. Searing to my soul.

“Rise-“ the Hero rasped.

Polyzalus crushed the man’s skull in his fist.

The Butcher’s last gasp howled loud enough I was certain it would tear the entire suite apart, but not even a breeze passed through the doorway. Full dark fell once more, but I could see it now. Polyzalus stared blankly at the corpse of his wife, and their daughter sobbing over her. The stench of cypris smoke filled the place. If I had been breathing, it would have sent me into a coughing fit.

Years passed. Or maybe just a second. The Tyrant’s dread gaze slid away from his wife and daughter, to me. Then further, dipping down to the scarlet son, kneeling motionless and staring at his own bloodied hands and the adamant knife that one of them still held tight. He took in his Rosy Dawn silks. He took in his stolen sword. He gazed upon Lio Aetos.

And he rendered judgment.

“Die.”

The word of a Tyrant in his domain was absolute. What Socrates and Dymas had called ethos, the crushing pressure I had always known as authority, seized both of us and crushed our hearts to pulp.

There was no resisting it. This was nothing at all like the deep sea pressure Jason’s pneuma had imposed upon me. It wasn’t a power-play from a Tyrant too wary of a stranger to fully commit. No intimidation. No restraint.

Selene jerked up, hands flying away from her face as she finally registered her father’s arrival. “Appa, no!” Far and away too late.

The First Son to Burn attacked Griffon and I with every ounce of his hatred and his strength. We had no choice but to perish.

As the darkness of grim Tartarus crept in and my body shut down alongside my mind, the titan’s ichor burned brighter than the sun. Too little… too…

“Why?”

[Late]

Life returned to my tripartite soul in a heady rush, and I inhaled a greedy breath of smoke-stained air before my mind could think better of it. I doubled over, coughing so hard my vision swam and my throat tore and the taste of blood filled my mouth. Selene appeared at my side, shielding me from her father and bracing me so I wouldn’t fall. I welcomed all of it, and I wondered how it could be.

The Tyrant’s death sentence had been real. More than that, it was still there. I could feel it like a blade pressed against the back of my neck, like a hand wrapped around my heart just waiting to squeeze. For some reason though, the blow didn’t come. It waited. Why?

Old ‘Zalus turned his head and cast his dread glare back out into the hall, towards a steadily growing glow.

Socrates appeared in the ruined hallway, a lantern swaying in his hand. He looked like he’d run sprints from Olympia to Egypt and back again, drenched in sweat and hobbling like he was every bit his age. His eyes, though, were as sharp as they’d ever been.

“Why what?” The First Son to Burn spoke without any inflection.

“Why do they deserve to die?” Socrates asked, coming to a stop just a few feet away from Dymas. The old philosopher gestured at the mangled corpse with his lantern, grim shadows swaying across it with the motion. “This man betrayed your trust and attacked you in your home, endangering the lives of hundreds in the process. You could argue his death was righteous. But what have these children done to deserve the same sentence?”

“They killed my wife.” The blade of his authority bit into my neck.

“They only came here to help,” Selene spoke up, her voice raw from sobbing. Even so, she drew herself up and mastered her shuddering breaths. She faced her father in grief. “They brought her nectar just like I told you they would, and it worked. She woke up. She spoke.” The Heroine’s voice cracked. “I finally got to meet her, appa. That’s all they came here to do. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

The Tyrant’s dread mask cracked as he looked upon his daughter. Just for a moment.

“They used you, little heart,” he said softly. The blade dug deeper. “From the very beginning they played you for a fool.”

Selene shook her head angrily, but the battle was lost.

“A witness has presented her case,” Socrates interjected, each word heavier than the one that came before it. “Who are you to ignore her testimony?”

“I am Polyzalus. I am king.”

“These two are members of the Raging Heaven Cult, entitled to the judgment of their peers. Killing them here and now before their guilt can be determined flies in the face of the code you swore yourself to uphold when you arrived here in Olympia.”

You lack context, Dymas had declared with perfect certainty, and I felt the truth of it now as Socrates wove into existence a prison around Polyzalus that I could barely perceive in the first place - let alone understand.

“Where is Justice to be found in an execution without fair trial?” Socrates, pressed. “Where is Temperance in a good man’s full surrender to wrath? Where is Wisdom in the neglect of a hundred dying citizens for the one that’s already dead?” All the while that he spoke, the whispering threads of the Gadfly’s rhetoric wound themselves around the Tyrant and his sovereign suite. They spread like spiderwebs, entrapping him.

“Where is Courage in the murder of a child?” Socrates thundered, and the death sentence fell away from my soul.

This is how a Philosopher stood against a Tyrant. Not with cataclysmic violence like the Butcher and his blade, but with intent. By means of ideology. Searching not for mortal blows, but aiming instead at the foundation of the monarch’s strength.

“The sunset king wouldn’t act in such a way,” Socrates asserted. Every line was a grating buzz. “The First Son to Burn wouldn’t leave his subjects to die while he pursued his own petty vengeance. He wouldn’t disgrace the power vested in him by Burning Dusk by turning it against children. This isn’t who you are.”

Trapping them within the boundaries they had built for themselves, the framework they had designed over the course of their life. A prison fit for a king.

“I don’t care.”

Of course, that was assuming the king cared at all for his kingdom.

Polyzalus didn’t even try to debate the man known far and wide as the Scholar. Instead, he immediately conceded the point and accepted the consequences. His dread authority fractured at its foundation, visible in the sudden flood of real sunlight as the illusion beyond the veranda dispersed and the world outside the estate was revealed to us. And us to the world in turn.

Invisible smoke like raging forest fires flooded the room, seven new strains all layered one atop the other, as every Tyrant scattered across the mountain turned their gaze upon old Polyzalus.

The dread mask broke along with his foundations, and the First Son to Burn bared his teeth in visceral hatred. Hatred for the Gadfly, for his rivals, or for us? It could have been any. It could have been all. It hardly mattered now.

The incomprehensible sensation of a Tyrant’s rising pneuma blanketed the mountain and spilled over like an avalanche, washing over the Sanctuary City of Olympia.

The indescribable burden of seven more rose up to meet it. In the distance, light bloomed in the Olympic stadium as hundreds of Heroic souls reared up in instinctive fight or flight.

The Tyrants spoke up in their multitudes. Each of their voices was a grim and rolling thunder.

“I should have known you’d be the first of us to burn.” Leonidas of Infernal Frenzies.

“No man exists above the law, least of all you.” Drakon of Broken Tides.

“It isn’t too late. Cast away, dive deep, and this need not be the end. Even you can be reformed.” Solon of Brazen Aegis.

“Another treasure wasted on the waves.” Midas of Waning Wax.

“Not like you at all to afford us such a blind spot.” Thalestris of Blind Maidens.

“Enough.” Ptolemy of Scattered Foam.

“So I swore, and so shall I stand.” Aleuas of Howling Winds. “Strike the first blow, raven. I’m with you.”

Socrates met my eyes from across the hall.

“Run.”

Seek safer shores.

I spun on my heel and seized Griffon by his hair, bounding across the room and leaping over the edge of the veranda. Selene followed a split second behind us, her scarlet heart flames blazing. We soared clear over the edge of the mountain and all of its madness, the force of our jump carrying us fully to the shimmering city of Olympia. Behind us, eight Tyrants flexed their strength for the first time in centuries.

Kaukoso Mons erupted.