Sol, The Raven from Rome

Cultivation.

The race against mortality went by many names, depending on who was asked and where. The people of Rome knew it as the course of honors. The children of Helen called it the stairway to heaven, and the hollow Macedonians referred to it mournfully as the hitching of their stars. I had learned these terms, among others, from my mentor Aristotle.

Others still I had gleaned from the men of my father's legion. The rank-and-file of the Fifth Legion were native conscripts, harvested like wheat from foreign fields by the General of the West. By his blessing, and by their actions on campaign, these men had transcended their origins and become shining sons of Rome, one and all - but they had never forgotten their roots. Around warm night fires and in the ranks of marching formations, they had shared those origins over the years with me.

The Gaelic tribes were a fractured union on the best of days, and bloody rivals the rest of the time. Yet there was a throughline that connected them all, a Celtic understanding of this life and their place within it that spanned further than even the endless Black Forest - traversing the seas themselves to reach the misty isles of the inscrutable Britons.

The officer ranks of the Fifth Legion were reserved for natural-born Romans, but the First Spear was ever a pragmatic man. Even his black hatred for the western hordes couldn’t blind him to the true value of a soldier in his care. It was one of many reasons why my father had fought to have him in the Fifth. So while he couldn’t promote them in full, the First Spear had elevated the brightest of the Black Forest's people to positions of authority and advisement just beneath his own centurions.

One of those bright sons of Rome had been a druid in his past life, a holy advisor known to his people as an oak-seer. It was this hulking man of wizened faith that had sat me down in the shade of a gnarled willow tree shortly after my father’s death, and showed me how to build a wicker man in his memory. I had seen this druid tear the heads off grown men and beasts with his bare hands in the press of war, but he was as gentle as a summer breeze and patient as a stone while my fingers fumbled and I drifted in my grief.

When the work was done and the wicker man stood tall and proud, we dressed it in the druid’s own armor. I remembered asking him who had given him permission to use the legion’s resources in this way, and I would never forget the ease with which he’d answered that no one had at all. When we lit the wicker man on fire, it was like watching my father die again.

As the wicker man burnt away, the oak-seer who had followed my father into terrible war finally relaxed. It was only in its absence that I noticed the tension had been there at all. Warmed by the fire and protected from the rain by the solemn willow tree, the oak-seer explained to me the divine dividing - the perfecting of a Celtic soul.

To cultivate was to refine. What that meant was a subject of unending debate. Every culture on this earth had their own answer, every man and woman within those nations their own interpretation. Which of them was correct? Was there only one true way forward, a single golden road, or were there many? Could it be that every gate to heaven was made of horn? Or were they one and all of ivory?

I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with ocean air. I breathed in beyond those limits, tracing the excess breath as it spilled from my lungs and filled my pneumatic channels instead. The unnatural pathways had been carved out of my flesh by the starlight marrow of the Rein-Holder and further refined by my time in the Orphic House, taking the shape of a wheel. Beyond the obvious utility of the expanded channels allowing me to more efficiently circulate my pneuma, I hadn’t found any clear use for it in the weeks since.

That had changed the moment that I’d advanced to the third stage of the Sophic Realm. In that moment I had felt a shifting in my flesh, and with the awareness granted by the Titan Prometheus's golden ichor, I had seen the carving out of a new channel. At the time, there had been more pressing concerns.

Now, I filled the wheel to its limits with vital breath and focused on that newest addition. The wheel had three spokes, and as I took that third spoke in my hand-

[I’LL RISE.]

-I forced the wheel to turn.

Flesh and blood that had been burnt away by starlight marrow regrew from full cauterization, creeping like weeds from the western edges of the wheel. At the same time, the eastern edges smoldered and surged forward, burning away new flesh at the same rate that the old flesh was mending. In terms of healing wounds, the pace was unbelievably fast. In terms of a spinning wheel, however, it was an agonizing grind.

I exhaled slowly, steady as my innards burned away and regrew. Stubborn determination allowed me to maintain control. That, and the experience of dozens of prior attempts that had ended in horrible coughing fits. As the wheel turned, consuming and mending, it worked that same wonder on the rest of my body. Gouges given to me by Scythas knitted themselves shut strand-by-strand. Nicks and burns left by Anastasia cycled through a kaleidoscope of ugly inflammation as her poison worked its way through my body and was purged. Time passed. The wheel made my body well.

As for my heart and soul?

My eyes were shut, but I watched on the back of my eyelids as the wicker man burned. It was larger now, so much larger that it dwarfed the willow tree we had sought out for its shade. Rather than a legionnaire's armor, it wore the tents that I had ordered burned the night that the Fifth Legion fell - it wore them like a captain’s cloak. Inside the hollow frame of the burning wicker man, the soldiers of the Fifth Legion screamed and begged for mercy as they were burned alive.

The fire seared my face, but I couldn’t have turned away from it if I tried. The oak-seer gripped my head tight, as he had gripped so many heads before he’d torm them from their shoulders, and he whispered in my ear as the legion went up in flames.

"For every rise, there must follow an equal fall. Do not avert your eyes from your works, young tyrant. Observe their flesh now as it cracks. Observe the thrashing of their limbs. These things describe the future - their death throes are the path. You’ve bid your soul to multiply, but ascension is a provocation of natural law. For one of us to rise to greater heights than three thousand men combined, heaven demands three thousand men must fall in kind." The druid's broad and calloused fingers dug into my skull. His voice took on a scathing edge -

"Observe the divine dividing."

And he tore my head off my shoulders. My breath caught, the wheel of channels grinding to a halt within me and scattering the image from my eyelids. I bit down on another coughing fit, smothering it in my chest. I inhaled. Exhaled.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Griffon staring back at me.

"You can do better." His lips didn’t move and his philosopher’s influence didn’t stir, but I heard the words all the same. We sat in mirrored positions across from one another on the deck of the Eos, one knee pulled up to our chests and the other folded underneath. Our shadows mingled with that of the ship's mast, and the ravens lurking inside them murmured quietly to one another.

You can do better. “How do you know?"

"Because I am doing better."

Though he wasn’t diverting breath to speak to me the normal way, it was still a diversion of focus that I couldn’t have afforded while turning the wheel. Yet as I watched, his chest continued its steady rise and fall, and his wounds continued to mend themselves at a pace that had nothing to do with what Anastasia had taught him. He was still maintaining it.

If we had been having this conversation a week prior, that would have surely frustrated me. If we'd been having this conversation just a day ago, he likely would have taken the opportunity to taunt me for my lack. As it was, I understood the problem now in a way that I had been all but blind to before.

"From the body comes the soul," I told him, certain of it after this latest attempt. "I can’t isolate the Greek portion of this any more than I can turn one half of a wheel and not the other. Whatever this is, it’s an all or nothing effect."

"And the Roman portion of you won’t tolerate anything that’s beneficial to your heart."

Griffon’s scarlet eyes narrowed. The golden flames behind them had burnt down to fading embers, imperceptible unless you knew to look for them. Where they had blazed before, they now lent just a touch of golden light to his gaze.

"Be done with it, then," he told me.

I inhaled. "Do away with half of all that I am?" Exhaled.

"Do away with the portion that yearns to do away with you."

"I’m too weak as it is. I can’t afford to cripple myself now."

"You’d be better off with one leg than with this rotting limb you insist on dragging along behind you. It’s a poison to you. You don’t need me to tell you that."

I didn’t.

"Amputate it," Griffin urged me without words. Above our heads, Sorea let fly a hungry cry.

I closed my eyes. Exhaled. Inhaled. The wheel began to fill.

"I should," I admitted.

And it was true. The golden ichor that I had drunk out of my brother's hand was all but gone now. I had burnt it for fuel, rendering it all but worthless in our running fight to flee Olympia. What remained was too diminished to refine even the crudest aspects of my cultivation, too weak to be a threat against my better judgment. Still, even rendered down to almost nothing, the golden substance remained a force of change. It was too weak to change me directly, so instead it had settled in the back of my mind as that same passive awareness of myself that had allowed me to precisely direct its efforts before. If it couldn’t do the work itself, it could at least give me the clarity needed to see it done.

Through that intimate awareness, I had been able to distinguish the Roman half of my foundations from the Greek. At the time, that clarity had allowed me to call upon my adopted father's virtue without suffering the consequences that had plagued me since I’d stepped out of the Orphic House. Now, that same clarity made it impossible to ignore the first and most daunting obstacle that stood between me and further advancement.

The Roman half of my foundation was fractured at its core. Any monument I built upon it would suffer the consequences of that infirmity. There was no point in denying it. I should have cut it away the moment I broke my chains and fled the Rosy Dawn. Now, it was even more important that I rid myself of its taint.

"You should. But you won’t." The raven in Griffin's shadow snapped its beak in corvid irritation.

I seized the second of three spokes-

["I am a raven, and I am an unkindness."]

- and turned the wheel again.

"No. I won’t."

Had I possessed the clarity I needed to isolate and cut away that portion of myself a week ago, I would have likely done it. Back when the destruction of accursed Carthage was my one and only aim, an amputation of my heart would have seemed an all too fitting consequence. Now, though?

"Say that your vision was true,” Griffon said, reading me like an open book. "Say that you seek these safer shores and find your legions lost. Why should it matter what they think of you when you pull them from the pit? What could any of them say to you that you haven’t told yourself already? Their judgment doesn’t matter."

"It doesn’t. And it does."

"Worthless Roman. I won’t forgive you if you fall behind."

I smirked faintly, watching broken roads unfold behind my eyelids. "I’ll do my best."

"Will you?" Something about the tone of the raven's voice made me open my eyes, abandoning the wheel before I could truly get it turning. Griffon was still watching me. The accusation was deeper now.

"Say it plainly," I told him, and every eye on the ship turned to watch us in response. Some were furtive about it, others less so. Selene, for her part, poked her head out from the crow's nest and stared openly down at us alongside the red headed pirate child. Only Sorea wasn’t swayed, eyes firmly set on the horizon.

Griffon sighed, releasing his own breathing technique in a rush of steam and leaning forward.

"Since we left Thracia, you’ve ignored this half of who you are and I haven’t said a word because you’re better off without it. But if you must cling to it, then you owe it all your efforts. If you’re determined to keep this unsightly leg attached, I want to see you run with it. It isn’t a question of whether or not you can. I know you’re capable of it. This is a question of will."

The salt of the sea coated my tongue.

"I have no right to lead a legion now."

"Would you let those legions die if they desired it?"

I blinked, utterly thrown by the question. "What?"

Griffon held out a hand, offering it to the open air, and a rosy-fingered hand of his pankration intent appeared opposite of it.

"If you found your lost legions and offered them your hand-" his pankration hand slapped his hand of flesh and blood aside, "-and they refused to take it, would you accept their judgment of you? Even if it killed them?"

I watched the rosy limb sink down, down, slipping through the deck of the Eos like the planks were ocean waves. The men of the Fifth beat their fists against the confines of the wicker man, crying out in misery.

Would you let them burn?

I seized the pankration hand by the tips of its fingers and dragged it back above the deck, tightening my grip when it fought to escape me.

"Of course not," Griffon said, satisfied. "Let them judge you safe and sound upon the shore. Until the day comes that your lost legions are found, you are what remains. You are Rome. The only judgment you have need to fear is your own."

After a heavy beat, Griffon grinned and spread the fingers of his hand. "And mine, of course."

I threw his pankration hand back in his face, and he laughed as it exploded into cinders.

The ship dipped as I rose to my feet, the men at her oars shifting quickly to keep their balance. I swept my eyes over them, searching for something. Some flinched when I laid my focus on them. Others began to sweat, their eyes shivering as they met my stare. Though their reactions varied, the ragged men that Griffin and I had freed from a pirate galley the day we broke our chains looked back at me, one and all, with fear and crushing awe.

I raised my hand and beckoned. "All of you. To me."

Had I invoked the captain's virtue, they couldn’t have crossed the deck any faster.