Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter .5 [Scythas]

Scythas,

The Hurricane Harvester

When Scythas woke, the sun had risen behind a curtain of ash. The Sanctuary City of Olympia had been reduced to an airborne miasma, a sickly yellow film that tainted the morning skies. It reminded him of the extra set of eyelids that some beasts had, thin enough to see through yet thick enough to smear. The film was thin enough to see the sun’s glow through, yet thick enough that he couldn’t feel its heat.

The sand beneath his cheek was still hot, as if it had been baking all day long.

He heard voices on the wind.

Who do you think you are?

Let me go. Let me go! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill your mother, I’ll slaughter your sons! Let me go!

Please. Please. Please.

Three lines for the same act, but each was delivered by a different voice. There were more, every pleading word drilling into his head just a bit deeper. He heard the voices of grizzled men and hard-hearted women, grown adults who had made their choices with open eyes. He heard the wary words of crones and old wise men. He heard children.

For a moment, Scythas was sure he heard his brother.

Not there! Don’t! Please, please! Stop!

Urania, he reached out for the goddess of stars. What is this? Why won’t it stop? For a moment he feared that she’d left him once again, but then he heard her quiet voice.

"These are the final words of the fallen. A burden that the wind chose you to bear.”

I don’t want it. Make it stop, close my ears to it. Please.

The Heavenly Muse had done it before, sparing him his sanity when a line of fire had broken Olympia. This time, though, her mercy never came.

"A hero shouldn’t be so cruel," said Urania, laying only a comforting hand on the back of his neck. It was colder than ice. “The wind won’t tell any other. Without you, they'll only waste away."

Scythas wrestled with their death throes until the breeze waned and ceased, taking their voices with it. He had no idea how much time had passed when he opened his eyes again. The sun was still there, lurking behind the curtain of ash. For all that he knew, it could have been a full day. Belatedly, he took stock of his surroundings.

Olympia’s dock town was gone, claimed by the waves. There was nothing left of it other than that tainted film in the air. Fire wouldn’t have been enough for such a scouring, he knew. There should have been evidence of the cataclysm, burned remains of broken homes at least. But the burning heat of dusk was no mundane fire, and the tyrant Polyzalus was no mundane man. Everything the whip had touched, whether wood or stone or living flesh, had burned until there was nothing left but ash.

All that remained was sand and molten earth, steaming where it met the sea, and mingling with the smoking miasma in the air. If any of the wild beasts had survived, they had long since fled the wreckage.

But that didn’t mean he was alone.

There were four sorry souls trapped there with him, straddling the line between the blue Ionian Sea and Olympia’s smoking corpse. He watched them with dull eyes.

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Elissa stalked up and down the beach, lashing out at the air with a jagged little shank that had once been a Heroine’s proud sword, striking out over and over again at an opponent no one but she herself could see. Every few seconds she would jerk away from an invisible blow, only to stumble and flinch away as she took a blow that only she could feel. Every time, her lips would move silently, her hand would tremble and clench around her worthless shank, and she would turn and move back the other way, beginning it all again. Steam rose in thin, steady streams from the corners of her burning eyes.

Kyno sat motionless in the Ionian’s shallow waters, hunched over with his head cradled in both hands while the waves lapped at his bare chest. His crocodile cloak was nowhere to be seen.

Lefteris, surprisingly, wasn’t the worst off of the three. What Scythas could see of him without moving his head was a man possessed by manic purpose. He had eschewed them both to seek out another hero, which struck Scythas as being even odder. Then Scythas realized he didn’t recognize the larger hero that Lefteris was exchanging frantic words with, and lurched up from the sand in alarm.

“Who-?”

The three that he knew froze at the sound of his voice, each of them looking at Scythas with foreign expressions. Not disdainful, as he had grown so used to. Why were they looking at him like that? Who was that man?

The man pulled tight a knot of rope around two fallen tree trunks, looking back from his work and offering Scythas a tired smile.

“How’d you sleep?” Jason asked, taller than he had ever been before. Just a bit larger than life.

Scythas went to push himself to his feet, a thousand questions on his tongue, and promptly fell back on his face.

His limbs were longer than they should have been.

“You…” He grimaced and spat sand.

“Advanced?” Jason asked wryly. “I’m not the only one.”

“You saved us?” Scythas asked instead, and Jason’s faint good humor faded.

Jason scratched his cheek. He had shaved at some point while Scythas was unconscious. Combined with his longer limbs and the new depth of passion carved into his soul, he looked like he had stepped forward through time. Finally, he nodded.

“Then, that means he couldn’t keep you down,” Scythas said, pushing himself carefully back up. He felt like he had been crushed into a ball, compressed and trampled by a herd of wild horses. His silks were gone, replaced by robes of cold liquid stone that could only belong to Urania. They shifted as he rose, revealing an ugly black bruise that emanated from a central point on his collarbone, as though the valley of his throat had been struck by a meteor.

Though he had been to the Underworld once, Scythas had never actually died. He imagined that when the day came that he did, it would feel something like Solus dropping an elbow on his throat.

"You saved us from him," Scythas clarified. Even though he knew it was hopeless, he allowed himself a moment of blind optimism. "You matched yourself against his-"

High on rising currents and stronger than he’d ever been. Soaring heaven and harvested storms. No burning sea can save you from me.

The lying raven held out an empty hand of broken promises and made of it a bloody fist. He cocked his thumb out.

He turned it down.

[Judgment.]

Heaven and earth, and sea and stars. Everything that he could see. Everything the captain led. Goddesses and heroes alike. All of it, none of it, no one.

They fell.

"-him. You matched yourself against him," Scythas pressed. "And you won. You must have."

He had seen the look in Solus’ eyes that final moment before the captain took him to the bottom of the Ionian. There had been no mercy there. The golden light of burning dread, and lightning behind it. Solus would have dragged him down to Tartarus if he hadn’t been interrupted. Scythas was certain of it.

"You beat him," Scythas said. He can be beaten, he meant.

Jason turned to look down at his work. To call it a ship would have been an insult to any proper sea vessel. Even calling it a skiff would have been generous. Whatever it was, the platform of lashed-together trees was clearly meant for the sea.

"I did what I was allowed to do."

"What?" Lefteris spoke up for the first time since Scythas had made himself known. He leaned away from Jason, suddenly as wary of him as he had been when he looked at Scythas. "What are you trying to say?"

"I should have known," Elissa kicked up sand as she stalked back towards them. Pneuma rose up around her, sharp and uncontrolled. Jagged, like her shank. "I should have known better than to trust the coward. You worshiped him until the end, even when he confessed his crimes to your face! I should have known something was amiss the moment I woke up and saw your ugly face. You’re no hero. A clean shave can’t hide a dog’s face-!"

"Enough," Scythas whispered.

Elissa tensed and went still.

It only added to the vertigo he was feeling. In the short time they had known one another, Elissa had never respected him as an equal. There had always been a measure of contempt in her eyes when she looked upon him. The day he had fled the Storm That Never Ceased, the Sword Song had marked him as a coward, and that had been that. Why was it, then, that she looked at him now as though he were a snarling beast?

“What do you mean?” he asked Jason, noting that the other rank two Hero hadn’t risen his Pneuma in the slightest bit while Elissa was stalking toward him.

Jason sighed, hefting up a branch that he had stripped from one of the logs. He rolled it between his fingers, considering it. “Do you remember what I did in the scarlet oracle’s room? Before you went to Thracia?”

"You lost control."

“I did. And in my anger, I struck him with the essence of my spirit.” Jason didn’t have to specify whom he meant. Scythas remembered it clear as day. Jason’s pneuma rose up around him in a controlled current, more potent than it had been the day before. “It didn’t do a thing to him, and at the time, I thought that was only right. After all, what chance does a Hero’s stray wrath have of harming a tyrant in their prime?”

Jason exhaled, and his pneuma crushed the heavy branch into a ball of splinters the size of his fist.

“About as much chance as a philosopher has of surviving it,” he finished, letting the crumpled ball of wood drop to the sand. “A Hero’s heart is an open flame. It’s dangerous to mortals; we learned that the moment we advanced. But here was a man that had only just set foot in the Sophic realm, and the flames didn’t so much as singe him. The pressure, the crush that is my full heart’s way, couldn’t so much as bend him. How can that be?”

“It should have been obvious. He all but told me the answer himself, the day that I swore to stand by his side.”

Jason looked down at the crumpled ball of splinters, haunted. “Our origins rhyme. We were both captains once. That much I know was not a lie.”

“You share a virtue,” Lefteris realized.

“Not quite. Just like the circumstances of our suffering, our virtues only rhyme. The day my ship went down, I tempered my spirit at the bottom of the sea, crushed and slowly drowning. But I left the work incomplete. I fled the sea that had raised me since I was a boy. I fled the shadow of my sunken ship, left to me by my mother. I fled the corpses of my crew. I fled. And a part of me stayed behind. That day, a part of me went down with the ship.”

Jason considered the gentle, crashing waves of the Ionian. There was a deep unease that yet lingered in his eyes, but there was fondness too.

“If I hadn’t left her, maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe my virtue would have changed. Maybe if I had stayed…”

“But you didn’t,” Kyno rumbled, pulling away from his cupped palms to look back at them. He looked tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix.

"But I didn’t," Jason agreed. "And because of that, and perhaps because of a thousand other choices, our virtues only rhyme. In the end…"

Jason clenched his hand into a fist. "His path is mine… but more."

"You still believe in him," Scythas felt sick. "After what they did, you still—"

"I don’t know what they did," Jason shook his head. "None of us did, and we still don’t now, no matter what you think. I won’t pass judgment until I understand."

"You still haven’t explained what you meant earlier," Lefteris said. "What did the revenant allow you to do?"

"He allowed me to fight. He demanded it. If he had wanted to kill all of you, there isn’t any question that he could have done it. At the start of that fight when he snatched us up like unruly children and tossed us into the sky, I was the only one unable to fight it. When he banished us to the far horizon, and I was the only one whose heart burned in vain, that’s when I understood the nature of our paths. The rest of you exist outside of his jurisdiction. I do not.

"He moved me like I was another limb," Jason shook his head. "If he had wanted you to die, he would have banished me back to Olympia, and I wouldn’t have been able to do a single thing about it. He let me dive in after you. He wanted me to contest his virtue in the only arena where I could properly fight it.

"Solus dared me to defy him. He wanted me to win."

It was too much for Elissa. The Heroine screamed, her aura cutting trenches in the beach, and she turned and flung her broken shiv of a sword into the Ionian. Her chest heaved and her shoulders shooked, her jaw clenching hard enough to crush marble between her teeth. Her hair was a mess of mismatched locks, chopped and singed and severed by Griffon’s burning blade. She was scarred. Worse now than ever before.

Scythas didn’t feel any better off. The more he thought about it, the less sense it all made. Every time he thought he’d gained a bit of understanding, some coherence, he remembered another offhand comment that Griffon had made, something so absurd that it couldn’t possibly be true. Every time he thought he’d come to terms with the reality of things, he remembered another impossible act that Solus had taken and treated as the minimum expectation. The more he tried to make sense of it, the more his vision swam. He tried to imagine himself in their place, standing where they stood, and every time he failed.

He had been a rising star in his own right, a prodigy that the Howling Wind Cult was proud to claim, and he remembered vividly how invincible he’d felt when he first advanced to the Sophic Realm. The first time Scythas had reached out with the refined senses of a Philosopher and first brushed up against the whirlwind currents of what scholars called logos, pathos, and ethos, he had felt as though the whole world was unfurling like a scroll before his eyes. He’d never forget that arrogance.

And yet, even in that high, could he imagine himself charging headlong into a fight with a man he didn’t know, pursuing assassins whose capabilities he couldn’t even begin to understand, just to save a stranger that should have been able to save themselves? Maybe. Maybe, if he didn’t understand the danger. But Scythas knew the moment he’d felt the stirring of a Heroic soul in that shadowed alleyway, he would have fled as fast as the wind could carry him. Even then, at the height of his arrogance as a fresh-faced sophist, nothing could have compelled him to strike out at someone a full realm above him. Nothing.

“Nothing?” Stone-Urania murmured in his ear, a question without accusation. “You sell yourself short.” Scythas grimaced.

There was madness, and there was madness.

In the press of a foreign crowd, surrounded by cultivators his equal or greater, and within spitting distance of eight Tyrants whose ages could be more readily measured in generations than seasons, could Scythas imagine himself slapping Elissa in the face? Even as he’d been that day, at the kyrios’ funeral, Scythas knew the answer was no. Because he hadn’t. He’d bit his tongue when she called him trash, and not solely because it wasn’t worth the fight.

Could he imagine himself standing where Griffon had stood as a first rank Philosopher? Watching a Hero back down from an apparent peer, seeing the desert-flames burning in her eyes that marked her as a legend, and choosing to slap her across the face regardless? Could he imagine doing it twice? All because she’d torn his shawl and insulted an acquaintance he'd only met a moment ago?

Of course he couldn’t. There was sticking to your principles, and then there was suicide, and then somewhere distantly beyond that, there was that. The more he remembered and the closer he examined their actions, the more apparent their madness became. Had it been Justice to step forward rather than shrink back when the Sword Song shoved an innocent aside and called her fellows trash? Perhaps. Perhaps if one considered those facts and nothing else at all.

Was it a Captain’s obligation to charge into a losing fight for the sake of two strangers, one he’d met minutes ago and the other that he’d never met at all? That didn’t make much sense to Scythas, but the alternative was hardly any better. Had Solus already marked him as an eager recruit, even then? From that first conversation Scythas had felt as though the Roman saw through every layer of him, straight through to the core, but that wasn’t possible if he was a lowly sophist. Right?

Right? he wondered, seeking an answer, and heard Stone-Urania sigh.

“These delineations that men have made for themselves aren’t absolute. Your great thinkers have done what they can to make sense of senseless things, and their efforts are admirable - but ultimately, they are incomplete. You are capable of more than you think, young reaper. The same holds true for others. If the stratification of your cities was cosmic truth and not just common law, nothing would ever change. Were your own origins not humble? Yet here you are, capable of greater things than most will ever be.”

Because I refined myself. I am what I am because I cultivated my strengths and cut away my weaknesses. The things that I’m capable of now are a direct result of that refinement. I couldn’t have done half those things before I advanced.

Why was he arguing about this? Why was he gainsaying the literal word of heaven?

“You advanced, and that made you capable of great things? Is that truly so?” Stone-Urania sounded wholly unconvinced. “Or could it be the case that you advanced because you were capable of great things? In the throes of your ascension, are you certain that you didn’t conflate one for the other?”

No. That’s not…

Why did it bother him so much?

“Think back,” the Heavenly Muse urged him. “Every great story begins with a labor. Was yours the product of your ascension, or was it the cause?”

Scythas had ascended to the Heroic Realm in tragedy. He’d watched his sworn comrades die gruesomely, cut down in a foreign land by demons in the shape of men. He had fought more furiously than he thought possible, and he had lost regardless. He’d fled, so close to death that he could feel its breath upon his neck, and clambered onto a ship that had been designed for a crew of thirty oarsmen. Bleeding and broken, he’d sailed it into a storm that blackened the skies and made mountains of the waves, careening across the sea like a leaf caught in a hurricane.

At what point in that nightmare had the lightning struck his head? Between the blood loss and the grief and the howling of the storm, the memory had been blurred like smeared paint across a canvas. He’d decided at some point that Urania had come first, blessing him with her favor. The lightning had struck. And then, once he’d paid the price of his ascension, only then had his passion lit a flame inside his heart. Only after he had been blessed and struck in turn could he have ascended. It was the only thing that made sense.

Every day he told himself it was true, it became a bit more real in his mind. The muddled paint that was his memory seemed to get a bit clearer every day, refining itself into a portrait of that day that he could at least make sense of, regardless of how much it hurt.

Scythas had ascended in tragedy because that was heaven’s will. He had advanced where all of his peers had died, not in spite of their deaths, but because of them. Thinking of it that way saved him from the weight of what could have been. If he had only advanced a day earlier, could he have saved them from the wolves? Ridiculous. That wasn’t how his story went. Urania had told him as much herself.

His story was one of weathering storms.

Scythas watched his fingers dig furrows in the sand, distantly, as though they belonged to someone else.

In the story that Griffon had shown them, the story of the man that he’d vowed to defy, Damon Aetos - his father - and his brothers three, Scythas had seen the process of ascension from an outsider’s perspective. With clear eyes, he had watched Anargyros Aetos set fire to his heart long before the lightning or the Muses tried to claim him. Scythas had seen tribulation strike the whirlpool sea, he had seen the whirlpool die alongside the monster responsible for its creation, and he had seen Damon Aetos stride out of the waves with bright blue fire in his eyes. He’d watched him pull an arrow from his chest and strike down a serpent that bled liquid lead and repelled all mortal blows as a matter of course. All of that before Calliope the Muse had laid her golden crown upon his head.

It had been simple enough to explain it all away in the aftermath of the telling. Lived experience was subject to the storyteller. Stavros Aetos could have forgotten details in the press of violence and filled in the blanks with his best guess later on down the line. His memory could have been at fault. The scribe responsible for recording his tale could have falsified events for the sake of narrative appeal.

“Could have, would have, should have,” he muttered under his breath.

How much of what he’d been taught was truly set in stone? The more that Scythas forced himself to ponder the question, the more pessimistic his answer became. And yet still, there was a part of him that recoiled from the mere thought of a sophist doing even half the things that Solus and Griffon had done. Why? Why did it bother him so much?

“Oh, hero,” Stone-Urania said sorrowfully, brushing cool fingers across his cheek.

It bothered him, because it meant that Griffon was right. It maddened him, because it meant he could have done more. The time he’d wasted in Olympia, the insults that he’d suffered and the favor that he’d demeaned himself to curry, all of it in the hopes of saving his brother - all of it had been for nothing. If he accepted the truth of what they’d done, the truth of Anargyros and Damon Aetos, the truth of his own ascension, then he had no choice but to admit that he was more frightened of the Eye of the Storm than he was worried for his brother.

In order to acknowledge that his shackles were self-inflicted, Scythas first had to admit that Griffon was right.

He’d been a coward after all.