Ethos

A small eternity after the Son of Rome and the Young Griffon come charging out of the immortal storm crown that hangs above Kaukoso Mons, six Heroic souls come tumbling out after them. Four Heroes and two Heroines, each of them marked by the raven’s hand.

All six of them are brimming with vitality and joyous defiance. Through the efforts of one, all six have been given the once in a lifetime opportunity to drink from divinity’s cup. Each of them has suffered terrible injuries, but only one of them has the wounds to show for it. The rest of them emerge from the storm crown healthy and whole, better off than they were when they entered it.

That isn’t to say that each of them drinks their cups equally dry, of course. Of the six Heroes afforded the opportunity, only the Sword Song chooses to drink every drop of nectar she’s given. The nectar cleanses her of everything but her scars.

The Captain of the Depths drinks half a cup in his delirium, and in so doing his sudden blindness is more than just reversed. He looks upon the world with new eyes when he emerges from the storm, seeing more than even a Hero is meant to discern.

The Caustic Queen and the Gold-String Guardian each drink just enough to mend their wounds and carry them through the storm. The Caustic Queen saves the bulk of her panacea brew for her mother - and for a physician’s future research. The Gold-String Guardian saves the bulk of his cup for the boys he’s taken in. It’s less than he wanted for them, but far more than he expected to get. Both the Heroine and the Hero lurch out of the storm in painful shape, but that small sip is enough to swiftly make them whole again.

The Huntsman touches only a drop of nectar to his tongue. His virtuous beast has taken the brunt of the storm’s wrath on his behalf, and the only reason he takes that drop at all is to see if it works. Once confirmed, the Huntsman pours the entirety of his cup into the open maw of his crocodile companion. The Huntsman emerges from the storm looking no worse for wear, despite only barely tasting of the brew. The only visible change is in his crocodile skin cloak - steam pours off of it like morning vapor from a lake.

Finally, the last of the six - and the only one to be offered a cup unprompted - drinks no nectar at all. The Hero of the Scything Squall gives half his cup to the Captain of the Depths, and the rest he holds in reserve. No matter how many wounds he suffers, and no matter how many times his own Muse urges him to take a sip, he never once considers changing his mind. He is ashamed enough that he gave away the majority of the cauldron to his peers, though he knows the Son of Rome would not have wanted them to die just so he could gain.

The Hero Scythas holds half his cup in reserve for Solus. Because of this, he emerges from the storm crown in by far the sorriest state. His hazel heart flames burn brightly, unmarred by heaven’s wrath, but his body is so battered that Jason has to hold him up every few seconds when the lingering lightning damage turns his limbs against him. Despite this, he is happier than he can remember ever being. For the first time in his entire life, Scythas thinks triumph is within his reach.

Then he staggers out of the storm, and the sound of everything unfolding below strikes him like a hammer.

The breeze carries everything to his ear. Everything. The voice of the wind is panicked, and so it does none of its usual filtering to soften the blow for him. Scythas collapses to his knees not because his body is at its limit, although it is, but because the cacophony of noise robs him briefly of his senses.

The Raging Heaven Cult is tearing itself apart, like a giant driven mad, and Scythas hears every broken bone in deafening clarity. The cruel tumult of cultivators beating their peers to death, seniors crushing juniors they should have been protecting and juniors swarming seniors they should have been looking to for guidance. The unspeakable roar of architectural wonders that have stood proud for centuries, breaking apart and cascading down the mountain in man-made rock slides. The heart-wrenching noise of children abandoning their façades of lofty refinement and wailing in pain and fear.

Scythas hears it all and in those first few moments is nearly driven mad. Two slender hands of ethereal light are what save him, clamping over his ears and blocking out the noise. Normally, something as trivial as a hand’s obstruction wouldn’t have a chance of silencing the wind. But this is no ordinary savior - this is Urania, the true Urania, returned to him now that he’s left the storm.

Breathe, hero. The Heavenly Muse whispers, and for a blissful moment her voice is the only thing he can hear. Now brace.

Scythas grits his teeth and hardens his resolve, and Urania pulls her hands away. Not entirely - just enough to allow in a fraction of the noise, a portion of it that he can handle.

“Scythas?! Scythas! Can you hear me!?”

It’s Jason’s voice he hears first, but it’s Anastasia that he sees. He flinches, drawing back, but the Caustic Queen holds him firmly in place. Jason hovers behind her in plain distress.

“Easy,” Anastasia murmurs distantly, biting her lower lip as she focuses. “Almost there.” By the time Scythas realizes he’s being mended, the work is nearly done.

Together, Urania and Anastasia’s efforts are enough to fully clear his mind of its haze. Scythas immediately casts out his senses and is nearly undone a second time. The first assault was pure, chaotic violence, a hammer blow to both temples. The second is worse. Focused now, Scythas cuts through the myriad voices on the mountain and latches on to the ones that matter most. The reality of the situation strikes him, not like a hammer, but like the lightning fist of god.

“How did it get worse?” Elissa is demanding just out of his sight. She stands with Kyno and Lefteris, and though they lack his hearing, all three of them are Heroic cultivators with refined senses to match.

“We were gone for half the day!” She’s saying, furious as she’s ever been. “What have they been doing?”

“What they’ve always done,” Kino answers grimly.

Lefteris spits it like a curse. “Nothing.”

Scythas is so overwhelmed that it takes him a moment to find his voice. In that time, the Sword Song casts her gaze their way and calls out.

“You three - this mess isn’t going to fix itself. Are you coming or are you-?”

“Polyzalus,” Scythas gasps, watching the confusion bloom in Anastasia and Jason’s eyes and knowing it’s not enough. He lunges sideways, rising into a crouch, and he howls, “Polyzalus is-!”

The suffocating weight of a Tyrant’s pneuma subsumes them all - eight times in an instant. Scythas heart is already hammering before it happens, but he sees the animal alarm take hold of each of his peers. They stagger as if in an earthquake and the flames behind their eyes flare and overflow, spilling out from their eye sockets into the open air. Scythas, Anastasia, Jason, Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris. All of them waver on the edge of fight and flight as the dread intent of every elder on the mountain encircles them like a clenched fist.

There’s no time left to move, but Scythas forces his battered body to try. He lunges past his peers, down the mountain path towards Polyzalus’ broken domain, and gets three steps before thunder rocks his feet out from under him.

“AETOS!”

He watches in mute horror as tree trunk thick tendrils of molten heat surge up to their eye level and above it, coiling in the skies around the storm crown like burning serpents.

Scythas watches the tallest of the lines contort, and his heart flies up into his throat. He lurches to his feet.

Urania! he cries out, and the Heavenly Muse provides the path forward. Scythas burns his heart's blood, surging along the path of floating stars provided by the Muse and blasting each of the other Heroes off their feet with the force of his passing.

The instant that he reaches the end of Urania’s charted path, the tallest of the burning tendrils snaps like a striking serpent, burning a line of molten slag in the face of the mountain that would have encompassed all six of them had they remained where they were standing. The other five Heroes are still tumbling through the air when the burning whip cracks and lashes forward.

Scythas watches in impotent despair as the First Son to Burn’s opening strike carves a strip out of the city of Olympia and all the lands between it and the Ionian Sea. Less than an instant after that, the other seven elders strike.

It’s like the world is ending.

Urania clamps both hands firmly over his ears again, but she can’t block out his vision. The moment unfolds in perfect silence, so slowly that it’s as if the whole world has been submerged in honey.

Lefteris is screaming, his eyes locked on the distant horizon where the molten line of Polyzalus’ strike ends. The others are less singularly distressed. They thrash like rabbits caught in a snare, turning every which way, but never moving a step in any direction. There’s nowhere for them to go.

Move. Move. Scythas braces his aching legs, but he doesn’t know where to go either.

Urania can’t chart him a path forward without a destination. So even though it threatens to unmake him, even though his muse tells him urgently to stop, he pries her hand away from his ear and calls out to the wind.

Naturally, it answers.

“Oath-breaker!” Aleuas roars. His wrath is echoed by a rising hurricane. “Spineless, conniving RAVEN!”

“Raven?” Scythas breathes through the connection, and in an instant feels the Hurricane Hierophant’s ire narrow to a screaming point. It centers on him.

“You.” The vitriol cuts like a blade. Scythas can feel the Tyrant’s ire as a corporeal burden on his soul. “This is your doing. Do you have any idea what you’ve invited into my domain? What your pretender has wrought upon us all?”

“Solus isn’t-!”

“I should have seen it from the beginning! I thought he had to be more than what he was because he’d taken you as a hostage. I should have seen the signs the moment you brought him to my attention.”

“Signs of what?” Somehow, though the exchange is painfully swift, the world continues to crawl through honey around him. Scythas wonders if he’s dying.

“You were the raven’s hostage, sure enough, but he didn’t take you by force. You ran freely into his open palm.” The man that had promised Scythas his daughter’s hand in marriage snarls in disgust. “Look upon his good work, now, and tell me if it was worth betraying your only ally in this world.”

“You’re lying! Solus didn’t cause this- he was the only one trying to avoid it!”

“Then why is he running away?”

A scathing response rears up in Scythas’ soul.

And then he sees it.

In that frozen moment, Scythas can only stare in abject confusion at the trio of distant specks soaring off the mountain towards the city of Olympia. Solus, Griffon, and Selene are fleeing the mountain at the moment the Son of Rome is needed most.

Not a single one of them is even looking back.

“Again you’ve let yourself be used,” Aleuas hissed through their linked influence. “And this time your weakness has burdened me.”

Where are they going? Why aren’t they looking back?

“Fix this. Bring them down, now, or you’ll never see your brother again.”

Though the Hero of the Scything Squall has no way of knowing it, he isn’t the only one trapped in that frozen moment. He isn’t even the only one exchanging words with a furious Tyrant. Each of the six Heroic souls held hostage by the raven are dealt the cruelest blow any of the city’s Tyrants are capable of dealing them.

They’re told the truth.

Scythas’ heart rebels against his mind. He’s unwilling to believe it, but unable to comprehend the picture painted by their retreating backs.

Where are you going!? Why aren’t you fighting!?

For the first time since Solus picked him up off that mosaic floor in the kyrios’ estate, Scythas feels something other than shining admiration for the solemn Son of Rome. Something dark and nauseating.

Doubt.

The frozen moment ends, torn apart by the force of eight Tyrants clashing, and all six of the staggered Heroes explode into motion.