Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter .e [Old 'Zalus]

The war for the indigo throne was over. A cold conflict until the very last moment, eight elders of the Raging Heaven Cult had clashed in lethal violence - every one of them reaching for that empty seat, and its dominion over the beating heart of the free Mediterranean. Eight Tyrants had gambled everything on that prize, knowing only one of them would emerge victorious to claim it.

Yet in the end, all eight of them had lost.

In his final moments, Ptolemy Resolved had eviscerated all seven of his rivals on the mountain. He had forced them to choose between his life, and their hopes of any true victory. In his passing, his final breath had obliterated the only structures left standing on Kaukoso Mons - the branch estates of every greater mystery cult. The seven Tyrants that had joined their waning strength to commit a coward’s execution were too weak to protect their domains from the sudden winds.

Broken and without a place to call their own, the seven elders were made mortal once more. Naturally, that had only encouraged them to snuff the others out. Madly, senselessly, they had ripped each other to pieces. And in the end, none of them had gained.

The Dragon of the Coast fled first, slithering north and west towards the Adriatic Sea. Ancient creature that he was, he was wise enough to know the war could not be won now, and he was patient enough to accept that before his wounds undid him fully. He sank beneath the breaking waves of the Adriatic, and as he did, he rendered judgment in his soul. The lawgiver’s tortured criminals rejoiced at their new verdict, even when the dragon snapped them each up in his teeth. Such were their original terms that they smiled and wept in sweet relief even while he ate them all alive.

Least ruined of the lot, and by far closest to the crown, Solon the Reformer was the second one to leave and the only one not to flee. He left in pursuit of Drako, hunting him to the detriment of all else, as he always had. He was only a few steps behind when the old dragon slipped into the Adriatic Sea. The fallen statesman of the Coast followed his charge down into the bleak depths, no weapon but a whaling spear in hand.

Of the rest remaining, only one other escaped the mountain under their own power. The king of seers, Aleuas Pyrrhos, whispered sulfurous oaths and black bile curses upon the stars of every soul that had played him for a fool and dragged him to his lowest low. He cast hateful omens upon the Tyrant Riot, upon Ptolemy, upon Polyzalus, upon the Raven from Rome and his scarlet accomplice, upon anyone and everyone that he could think to blame. He didn’t stop until he got to the pitiful Thracian traitor he’d thought to name his heir, and only then because his daughter burst into violent tears beside him when he spoke the traitor’s name. They staggered on in silence after that, the Hurricane Hierophant carrying on his curses in the privacy of the void that had once contained his heart.

Precious few of the Raging Heaven Cult’s mortal scholars had survived the opening clash of their elders. Tragically, those that lived were forced to watch the war unfold beneath them on the mountain, because their elders had always resided at its base. Trapped and doomed to die by bland logistics.

Some had tried their luck and leapt clear off the side of the mountain. Most did so in helpless panic, a small few with treasures and techniques that they trusted to deliver them safely to the earth. Either way, they died.

Others tried hiding, higher up. Most perished in seconds, their hiding places collapsing on their heads and turning into graves. A fraction of a fraction found hideaways that even a Tyrant’s last breath could not blow down. A fraction of that fraction, the truly desperate and the mad - though only the Fates knew which of them was which - fled up to the Storm That Never Ceased and disappeared behind in the storm crown curtain.

The martial mystikos of the Infernal Frenzy Cult had chosen to hide, not behind storm clouds, marble columns, or even amethyst veins, but instead behind their shields. At the command of their elder - their king - they had drawn together precious moments before the war began, forming an enclosed shield formation that resembled an onion more than it did a turtle. Shoulder to shoulder and back to back, in tight circular ranks, Leonidas’ soldiers had weathered the war like it was a volley of arrows. For their hubris, they had been forced to watch as outer layer after outer layer of their comrades and arms were stripped away and scattered to the four winds. When all was said and done, only one layer remained - a newly risen Hero at its center.

The last of the spartan king’s soldiers carried him down the mountain on a bed of shields. The king lived, but only in the bleakest sense. No matter how his soldiers begged him to command, to guide them to the Golden Road that would give meaning to their comrade’s deaths, the king didn’t speak. Couldn’t. A Tyrant, especially one like Leonidas, didn’t need words to speak to his soldiers, and Ptolemy Resolved had only crushed his throat. Yet, somehow, the Macedonian had taken his voice. All of it. He could do nothing but listen and watch, trapped inside himself, while the newly risen Hero assumed command in his stead.

Likewise, the man-eaters of the Blind Maiden Cult had not sought refuge in collapsing estates or hopeful hollows. Instead, their despoiled queen had hidden them the moment the war began and her dead eye arrow had pierced the setting sun. They crept out from the blind spots of those few that still lived on the mountain, livid and all too lethal for it.

When they finally found Thalestris in the rubble, they saw their stunted sister had long since beaten them there. Drawn to her mother’s side by a sacred oath sworn out of spite, and drawn away from aiding her own daughter as a result, Ivy’s expression went unseen until her fellow amazons found her. Ptolemy Resolved had torn out the Despoiler’s eyes, had somehow wounded her even more gravely than that wound implied, and so the former queen of the Amazons was entirely blind to the hatred on her poisonous Ivy’s face as the Heroine fed her a cup of nectar she’d stolen from the starving wolf the night before the war.

Lacking both the strength to flee and the surviving supplicants to carry him away, the false king of waning wax could only drag himself out of the stone depression Ptolemy Resolved had put him in once the rest of his rivals were gone. His spine was shrapnel and powder, and somehow, though a Tyrant could control even the smallest portion of their body independent of the rest, his legs would not oblige him. Paralyzed from the neck down, Midas dragged himself across the earth with his chin alone. Like a worm. Unable to bear the shame, uncertain of his chances at escaping the city at all in such a state, and uncaring of the consequences, Midas called in every one of his scattered debts.

Whatever he touched, his domain could turn to gold. That was what the faker had convinced the great city-states of, and their trade partners beyond - the greatest lie he’d ever told. Now, as he dragged himself bonelessly across the dirt, and he put to proof the lie.

Across the Mediterranean and beyond it to the four corners of the earth, every coin minted in his name abruptly lost its golden sheen and reverted to what it had been before he laid his hand upon it. Some turned to silver, but more by far turned to utterly worthless substances. In their thousand-thousands, golden coins across the world became coins of rough stone, of imperfect glass, of worthless splintered wood. From the start, the faker had known he’d only get to make this play once, and only if he was willing to make an enemy of every ruling body from Alikos to the furthest eastern reaches of the Conqueror’s Silk Road. It had never been worthy of the risk.

Not until now.

The false king Midas called to collect the full sum of false currency he’d put in circulation over the long centuries of his life. As he did, the coffers occupying the space where his heart had once been began to fill with more than just fools gold.

The first coin to clatter home in his soul had been in circulation for over 50 years. In that time, it had passed from hand to hand a staggering number of times. The coin had been spent to purchase food, to purchase drink, to purchase company and trinkets and beasts and slaves - in every case, above all else, purchasing time.

Plant a seed and tend the vine until it yields you grapes, or substitute a golden coin in place of that labor and enjoy your wine at once. Pay the farmer for their crop, pay the shepherd for their stock, pay the scholar for their wisdom and the mercenary for their blade. Pay them for their efforts. Pay them for their time - the most important portion of their lives.

The first coin collected had been in circulation for over fifty years, and for over fifty years, countless men and women had sacrificed their time and their labor in exchange for its supposed value. Now, the gap between that false promise and the coin’s true value spilled into his soul. He took the time and the vitality that they had been tricked into selling so very cheap, and he took it all. Every changing of hands was accounted for. Every outstanding value was seized.

After the first coin came another. This one had been in circulation longer than the first.

The pretender of the Alabaster Isles filled his coffers with the fruits of his false labors, and it was just enough to begin paying the crippling debt that Ptolemy Resolved had ground into his spine.

Of the Rein-Holder, there was no sign.

Old ‘Zalus

The tunnel had been carved out with a mortal frame in mind. A cultivator that had a taste of glory and grown to match their story would need to duck their head and hunch their back beyond a certain point, though it was rarely more than a mild inconvenience. For a man of his stature, though, the journey to the heart of the mountain became truly ridiculous. One of many humiliating rituals, neverending since the day the Tyrant Riot had taken him in hand.

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But the kyrios was dead now, and Polyzalus knew he wasn’t far behind. He lurched down the tunnel steps, one slow step at a time, leaning heavily against the stone wall as he went. In his passage, he left streaks of blood on the walls and puddles of it on the steps.

Folded over nearly in half, his left hand held his bowels from spilling out of the gaping wound in his stomach. His right hand held an ivory wedding band, carved to fit a finger much smaller than his own.

Every step that Polyzalus took, his body tried to make his last. He refused it every time. His domain was scattered rubble, his ethos much the same, and he had no reins remaining. His vital essence stained the stone behind him, draining faster than he could replenish it. Even so, he continued down the steps, the wedding band a burning brand in his fist.

He reached the final threshold, an amethyst arch that the Tyrant Riot alone among his peers could step through without stooping. Polyzalus wavered - the blood loss to blame, or perhaps even now the memory of his shame - and stared blankly at its surface. Unbidden and undesired, he remembered the Tyrant Riot’s parting words before his death.

The last of his humiliations.

“Even if you did defeat me - what would you do then?”

Polyzalus ducked under the amethyst arch and into the late kyrios’ subterranean estate.

The cavern was full of babbling children, and not one of them belonged. The oracles were nowhere to be seen, and he lacked the strength to pry through their closed doors with his perception. In place of holy women, or honored guests, the late kyrios’ cavernous courtyard was packed pillar to pillar with unaffiliated philosophers of the Raging Heaven Cult. Young and old, junior and senior alike, they filled the cavern to its lofted ceiling with their sophistry. They swung baseless speculation like swords at their fellows. They debated what was to be done - stay, fight, flee, persuade - and plied one another for solutions that not a single one was capable of providing.

When Polyzaulus stepped inside the cavern, all the chatter stopped. The children - some of them bearded, some of them mothers, but all of them children - shrank back when he stepped forward. Some clutched weapons like a frightened child clutched their mother’s hand. Others bowed their heads in immediate supplication. A few began to sob. He ignored them all, advancing another agonizing step forward.

Seated in the center of the cavern, slumped wearily with his back against an oracle’s displaced tripod, Socrates watched him come.

Off to the side, a ninth rank Philosopher surrounded by piles of rolled papyrus looked up from his work a beat after everyone else and laid manic eyes on Polyzalus. He looked from Polyzalus to Socrates, then back again. The moment the young philosopher realized what he was seeing, his pupils shrank down to bare needle points.

Without hesitation, the manic philosopher cast aside the papyrus scroll he’d been so focused on a moment prior and seized a blank one from the stack, unfurling it with a sharp snap of his wrist. As he did that, he took the dagger he’d been holding in his teeth and swiped it down his arm, splitting the bandages wrapped around it, and parting his flesh as well. The sophists surrounding him cried out in alarm, their fear of Polyzalus briefly overwhelmed, and tried to wrestle the knife out of the man’s hand.

He let them take it, drawing an eagle’s feather from his cult attire and wetting it with his blood. His pneuma rose up around him, and his hand swept across the papyrus in a blur.

“Save your ink,” the Gadfly spoke, too exhausted to do more than wave a weary hand at him. Too exhausted to do anything but watch Polyzalus take another step forward. “This won’t be a story worth telling.”

One last step before his body failed. Then another after that.

Socrates’ wrinkled face twisted in disgust, and something like sorrow beyond that. His skin was pale and drenched with sweat. His eyes were glassy and distant.

“We’ve lost our way, old king. No, worse than that. We’ve been lost for longer than we’ve walked the proper path. Tell me - do you remember the moment that you strayed?”

The philosophers in the cavern held their breath in horror, silent but for the drip of a Tyrant’s blood hitting the mosaic floor, and the scratch of an eagle feather across papyrus.

Polyzalus took another step. His left leg gave out, forcing him to catch himself with one of his hands - either the one holding in his bowels, or the one holding the ivory band. The sound of his innards hitting the floor was a grotesque thing, the sight of it even worse. More than a few of the children gathered in the cavern gagged and retched in response.

“For me…” the Scholar rasped, unbothered by his silence, “I think it was the day I left The Coast. The statesman of my city sentenced me to death by hemlock consumption, but I understood the substance well enough that it could never kill me unless I first allowed it. I told myself that consuming it at all was my sentence rightly served. And when I left my city after that, I told myself it wasn’t the younger generation I was abandoning, only the Tyrants that had taken me in hand.

“I think that was the moment I was lost.”

Another lurching half-step. His own offal dragged across the stone behind him.

The Gadfly chuckled faintly. “All I have ever known is that I know nothing at all. And yet, I found a way to learn the wrong lesson regardless. It’s no wonder I haven’t heard the daemon speak since my golden age of youth. It knows I’m not worth the trouble.”

Young sophists gathered around the Scholar cried out in protest. Some turned their heads away, others had their faces in the crooks of their arms, unable to stand the degradation of the man that even their ancestors had long admired.

“We have such wonders lurking in our souls,” Socrates said in rueful lament. “We could have made this world a better place if only we had looked beyond ourselves. In a world, this small, what excuse do men as large as us have to leave it worse off in our passing?”

Step. Drag. Stagger. Fall-

He saw her then, in the muddled haze of his absent heart. He heard her distant voice. Saw the salvation in her smile.

“Courage.”

Polyzalus seized the reins of his own corpse and forced it to continue on.

“The day I let a spiteful jury of decrepit old men dissuade me from my principles, that was the day I lost my way.” The Gadfly ran a shaking hand across his ruined rags, smoothing out their wrinkles and tears.

“When the cruelest of our kind only grow stronger and more terrible with time, it’s the statesmen and the kings whose ears you have to bend.” The words were spoken with such scorn that it made the nearest children flinch. “I learned the wrong lesson. After all my years of presumption, teaching as if I had something worthwhile to say, I allowed them to mislead me. It wasn’t that I had failed The Coast by emboldening the younger generation at the expense of its old movers. My focus wasn’t wrong.

“They sentenced me to death because I was right.” The Gadfly’s knuckles popped as he clenched his fist hard enough to crush iron. The old scholar was furious, at himself more so than any other.

“Courage,” she urged him lightly.

Step.

“The more that we learn, the more we stay the same. The ages pass us by no matter how we try to keep their pace. The young are meant to flourish, and the old things must decay. our statesmen have forgotten their place in the grand order of it all. They’ve forgotten what is owed-“

The Gadfly hunched over suddenly, coughing violently. When he drew his hand away, it was covered with black blood.

“-to the sons they brought into this world,” Socrates ground out.

Every step forward was a step his body couldn’t take. It took all of Polyzalus’ waning resolve just to remain upright. He had no effort to spare for the buzzing of flies. Nothing Socrates said mattered. It never had.

And yet.

“As if you’re any better.” If the reaction of their audience was any indication, Polyzalus’ voice was an even more terrible thing than his appearance.

“Of course not.” The Gadfly scoffed. “If anything, I’m worse.”

The cavern erupted, scholars young and old defending the greatest of them all in his own words. Polyzalus was halfway to the courtyard center, halfway to his goal.

“I could have done more today,” Socrates said with absolute certainty. “I would have done more if only I had never strayed. I could have stopped the riot at its source, if I had stepped in directly instead of wasting my time on trying to convince you and yours to act.” There was no heat behind the accusation. He didn’t need there to be.

“I could have done more for those boys,” the man they called the Scholar admitted, and the regret behind his eyes was an ancient, bottomless thing. “I tried to chain them up until the world could change them, when from the start that force of change was theirs. They didn’t need a warden. Even my foolish student understood that much. They needed someone to teach them. They needed guidance.

“I failed them utterly in that.” The Gadfly waved a trembling hand, stained by black bile and blood, encompassing the cavern and all the world beyond it. “This is my result.”

“Courage.”

Another step forward. Polyzalus was all but empty now. A hollow shell, and a wedding band without a wife to wear it.

”The man I sought for his counsel wouldn’t have tolerated such an ending,” Socrates, declared. Even if he had the strength to put logos behind it, though, Polyzalus had no ethos left to shatter. “That man was just. That man was wise. Tempered. Brave.”

Polyzalus staggered.

“Your wife is dead in part because those children lacked guidance, and for that I take full blame. But your actions today have condemned more wives than mine. No matter how small a portion of the result is yours to claim, the king I knew wouldn’t have shied away from blame. I know my younger self would hate the man I am today. What of yours, Polyzalus?”

“A king has no peer but for himself, no jury but his soul,” the Gadfly continued when he didn’t answer. “Those were your words, were they not? Then show me justice, old king. What is owed for your transgressions? What is to be the punishment for the atrocities you have committed?”

Courage.

Polyzalus bared blood-stained teeth. The children in the cavern pressed themselves against the furthest stone walls in terror.

His transgressions. His atrocities. As if he’d been given a choice. As if he’d had the freedom to decide.

“Nothing,” the First Son to Burn growled. “I would suffer no blame at all.”

Socrates closed his eyes, weary beyond his years. When he opened them again, they were dim with his acceptance.

“So be it.” The old philosopher reached into a fold in his rags and pulled from it a golden cup filled to the top with a substance that was not quite wine. He drank deeply from it, draining half the cup, then held it out to Polyzalus. “One last cup, in memory of better days,” he offered with dark humor.

Taking the cup and drinking from it was almost more effort than the elixir it was worth. But even his fading perception of smell and his numb pneumatic sense could tell this was no ordinary wine. It wasn’t even kykeon. It was something far more significant, something familiar, and he was in far too much pain to refuse the offered aid.

Still, he paused with the golden rim pressed to his lips. He stared down at the Gadfly, two questions burning in his mind, though he only needed one answer for them both.

“Why?”

Why help him then, when the hierophant went to strike him down? Why help him now, when he had ignored the philosopher’s every olive branch?

“Admiration is a terrible thing,” Socrates said simply. Polyzalus tipped the cup back and drank the rest of the elixir down.

So this was what the Tyrant Riot filled his cups with. Polyzalus breathed deeply, savoring the impossible amalgamation of perfect flavors. He traced the elixir’s passage down his throat and through his body, guiding it with a Tyrant’s firm hand to the places it was needed most. He straightened up from his hunch, relishing the heat within him, as the elixir went to work on the worst of all his wounds. Burning them away. Burning.

Burning.

Polyzalus coughed and vomited putrid blood-bile onto the mosaic tiled floor. He staggered, legs giving out - courage - before he reasserted control of himself-

He fell.

The elixir burned like acid through his body, and too late he realized it wasn’t cleansing. It consumed him, leaving nothing whole in its wake. He took hold of it again, asserting control over the only domain that every Tyrant had if nothing else beyond it - his own body. He had been poisoned, but poison could not kill a man like him unless he willed it to be so. Polyzalus dragged the elixir‘s taint out, willing it to expel itself from his pores and be gone.

Darkness crept in all around him. On hands and knees, Polyzalus stared down at the faceless portrait of the man who had claimed this mountain for himself. The mosaic relief was an extravagant collection of precious metals. His biles and his blood seeped into the cracks between the pieces, making it look as though the faceless man was bleeding too.

The poison wouldn’t go. The harder he tried to rip it out by its roots, the deeper that it drove them in.

Socrates was within arms reach, yet he could hardly make out the scholar’s face when he raised his head. Socrates’ voice carried distantly over top the roar of rushing blood.

“While I was wasting my time and yours trying to convince you of their good intentions, one of the boys received a visit from a scavenger. It distracted him from the brew I’d forced him to tend in my absence, and he suspected her of tampering with it. He tried to take the blame and test it for himself, but for once I acted as an elder should. I took a single drop upon my tongue,”

Socrates exhaled explosively, as though he’d been holding up a heavy weight for hours, and was now finally throwing it down. As he did, the same putrid blood-bile that Polyzalus had vomited up began streaming from the corners of his mouth, from his eyes and his ears and his nostrils all.

“It killed me,” Socrates revealed without fanfare or regret. “Nectar is an amplifying substance. Joined with healing herbs, it becomes a perfect panacea. Joined with hemlock, it becomes an unshakeable poison. The moment it touched my tongue I knew there was no shaking it. You feel it too, don’t you?” He wasn’t smug, or spiteful, or even sad.

If anything, the Gadfly seemed content.

“Walk with me, old friend,” Socrates said, though neither had the strength to stand. “We’ll find the path once more below. Leave the young blood to their struggles.”

With one hand, the Gadfly picked up the golden cup. The other, he raised above his head, pointing a single finger straight up. The philosopher sign - a signal for all those that could see it to attend. A symbol of the first and most important of a man’s principles. The first thought he’d ever had that was worth the breath of sharing.

The best of us are yet to come.

His final lecture thus complete, Socrates slumped sideways to the tiled floor and died.

Polyzalus’ right arm gave out beneath him while the gathered sophists filled the courtyard with their weeping and hysterics. In the state that he was in, closer to the Gadfly than he was any of the living, it was a wonder he could hear anything at all. Let alone the light, scattering noise of ivory, bouncing and rolling across the tiled floor.

The ivory wedding band rolled away from him. Out of reach. The last of his life slipped away like cypress smoke between his fingers. The underworld beckoned him to its darkened shore.

Even if you did defeat me, a man’s voice echoed in his ears. What would you do then?

They were the Tyrant Riot’s words, but it wasn’t the late kyrios’ voice that Polyzalus remembered.

It was his.

Polyzalus snarled and drove his fist through the mosaic tiles, wrenching a fistfull of stone fragments out and scattering them across the floor. Then he did it again, and again, tearing the mosaic out and revealing what had laid beneath it all along. All at once, the hysteric grieving and the fear drained out of every cultivator in the cavern as Polyzalus unearthed something beyond their mortal comprehension.

The gathered philosophers stared in blank wonder at the unearthing of a corpse.

The goddess had no face, no defining features at all. There was only a glaring cause of death - her heart had been ripped out, her ribs jutting up from the gaping wound like blooming lily petals.

And there, beating senselessly in the gaping cavern of her chest, was a heart unmistakably not her own. It was a human heart, and it was surrounded by a blazing flame - the first of them to burn.

The Olympic heart flame burned defiantly in the Mother’s empty chest, its very presence there an insult to her name.

With profane hands, Polyzalus lifted the olympic heart flame from the corpse’s chest. As he did, the goddess laid her hand upon his wrist and stopped him short. A blessing for a grieving spouse. A warning for a man at the precipice of profanity. She had no mouth to form the words and no lungs to give them breath, but they were deafening all the same.

[Accursed is the cannibal.]

Polyzalus closed his eyes and looked west, to the distant shores of Alikos. Now as before, as it had been for nearly twenty years, the sight remained the same for every Tyrant that dared to look upon it.

Through the cold stone of the mountain and past the Ionian's wine-dark seas, there loomed an island upon the far horizon. Crowned by concentric rings of blinding light, the smallest of which could have encircled half of Peloponnesia, it was a searing brand upon the senses of all who could perceive it. A funnel of stars fed down into its center, called down from highest heaven by him. The curse that every king reviled. The hand that drew the damning string.

The Island in the Sun.

“Courage,” Polyzalus vowed over the Mother’s corpse. “Until the war is won.”

He dipped his head and ate.