Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.32

The Young Griffon

“So, you just happened to cross paths after the funeral, and just happened to come to an accord on the topic of insurrection out of the goodness of your hearts,” Elissa said skeptically, throwing a wet towel at Kyno. He didn’t bother opening his eyes, reclined as he was at the edge of the hot bath, only grunting as the towel slapped against his face.

“To think that you marked us all from the start,” Jason murmured, shaking his head. He had disdained the hot bath entirely, back stroking idly through the cold pool after a quick cleansing. “How did you know we’d all be open to this insanity?”

Sol, upon realizing that the question wasn’t rhetorical and that I wasn’t rushing to answer it for him, paused his vicious scrubbing to think up an answer that sounded appropriately ominous.

“One of your elders marked you all that night,” he said, finally. Anastasia, from her place close by him, blinked and paused with her own olive branch scrubbing, visibly putting the pieces together. She hadn’t been there when Sol had declared the presence of a greater cultivator’s attention.

“That’s why you called out to me,” she said, caustic green eyes flickering. She then affected a pout, leaning sideways into his personal space. “And here I thought it was my beauty that had caught your eye.”

Sol sighed and shoved her back.

“One way or another, you weren’t going to suffer these maneuverings for long without acting,” he said flatly. “Not without losing a part of yourselves. Or, if the crows got to you first, having it taken from you.”

“You say that…” Kyno murmured, peeling the towel back from his eyes to look gravely at Sol. “But there were six of us that night that you called, and now there are only four.”

“Five,” Anastasia corrected idly. I raised an eyebrow, fully opening eyes that had been half lidded for most of our time in the bath house

“Ho? Did you make another friend, Sol?” I asked, curious. Sol and I hadn’t had a chance to exchange a private word since the previous night’s festivities had given way to the dawn. Our new companions had done more than enough chattering for the both of us after we’d commandeered an unopened bath house. The place was closed indefinitely for reconstruction, not because of the late kyrios’ final breath, but because an unfortunate soul had recently plowed straight through the roof and collapsed a portion of the building. It had happened a few nights back, it seemed, and the villains responsible had yet to be found.

“Just a girl in over her head,” he dismissed, though there was a pensive frown there. Of course, I didn’t fail to notice the tense looks that Jason and Elissa shot my brother at his casual statement.

“You say that,” Anastasia murmured, “but the two of you seemed quite familiar. And she was determined to tag along.”

“Where is she now?” I asked.

“Back on the mountain where she belongs,” Sol said, shaking his head. “We spoke briefly after the kyrios’ funeral. She’s just a child with a powerful father, looking for an escape from her sheltered life.”

“How immature,” I said disdainfully, and Sol snorted, lips quirking in amusement

“That is… certainly one way to describe her,” Anastasia said, amusement warring with genuine uncertainty. “The two of you just happened to run into one another?”

“After you and I split up,” he said, nodding.

“Unbelievable,” Jason muttered.

“How many of the aristois do you have tucked away in your tunic?” Elissa pressed, accepting a jug of olive oil from Anastasia and dumping a generous portion over her shoulders and arms. Jason’s eyes flickered, towards the trailing streams of oil that wound their way into the small dips of her scars.

“The aristois?” Kyno muttered, lifting his head fully and, with something like dread, asking, “This girl. How powerful is her father, exactly?”

At that, three sets of eyes flickered Sol’s way. Seeking permission to speak, for all of Anastasia’s teasing and Elissa’s surly demeanor. He nodded, glancing my way, and I realized after a moment that he didn’t know the answer to that question any more than I did. But they did.

Elissa took his permission, and said shortly, “It was Selene.”

Kyno stared at her for a long moment. He looked then, to Sol, seeking confirmation. Sol nodded.

The Heroic Huntsman of the Broken Tide tossed his head back, striking the stone lip of the pool hard enough to crack it.

“‘Zalus’ daughter,” he breathed, pressing two massive hands to his face, palms digging into his eyes. “You’ve brought Zalus’ daughter into this.”

“I haven’t brought her into anything. She isn’t a part of this.”

Zalus, I mused. I wondered why that name sounded familiar. Old Zalus, I heard in someone else’s distant voice, a faint memory.

“She isn’t a part of this, yet she joined you on your hunt? She took up arms against the ruling factions of the Raging Heaven? And she isn’t involved?” Kyno pressed, rubbing insistently at his eyes. I offered him a few pankration hands to help, and he batted irritably at them, splashing me with scalding water.

I dashed wet hair from my eyes, frowning faintly. Old Zalus, that memory mused. The name was spoken with contempt.

“She didn’t take up any arms,” Sol said, returning to his scrubbing. “And she won’t be in the future. Not with us.” Anastasia cupped a palm beneath a trickle of olive oil and overturned it on his back, adding to his scrubbing with her own olive branch. She smiled innocently when he turned flat gray eyes on her.

“And yet she promised to find us again tonight,” the caustic Heroine put forward.

Old Zalus, my father said, in a child’s vague memory. My eyes lit up.

“You’ve caught the eye of a Tyrant’s daughter,” I accused him delightedly. He mastered himself as he always had, revealing nothing to our companions, but I could see the sudden dread as his worst suspicions were confirmed. “Not only that, but the eye of our own scarlet Tyrant's daughter! You sly Roman dog!”

“You’re not supposed to say that,” Jason despaired, ceasing his backstroke and floating miserably in the water and as he stared up through the gaping hole in the ceiling. “You’re supposed to tell us that you’re acting with the Rosy Dawn’s blessing.”

“Who said we aren’t?” I asked, unable to contain my smile. Elissa slapped her branch against the surface of the pool, kicking up a spray of steaming water.

“As if he would consent to his daughter’s involvement,” she hissed. Desert heat eyes burned with a fearful wrath. “You may think we’re fools, but we’re not! Involving her in these games is madness, and not the kind that you adore. He would never allow it.”

“The question was,” I repeated slowly, with purpose, “who says we aren’t acting with the Rosy Dawn’s blessing?” I relished the looks, the tension. “Is Old Zalus the Rosy Dawn?”

“No,” Kyno said, darkly resigned.

”Who is?” I asked gently.

“Damon Aetos,” Sol said, when it became clear that no one else would.

“This is a fine line you’re walking,” Anastasia warned, though even in her seriousness she continued to caress and poke at Sol with her olive branch. “Even for someone like you. The elders of the Raging Heaven are in conflict now, that’s true, but an outsider is still an outsider. If we prod them too hard, too fast, they may just decide to act as they should and band together to purge you from the ranks.”

“And us with you,” Elissa added. With something like disgust for herself, she said, ”We’ve thrown our lot in with you two. Don’t go dragging us down to Tartarus with you.”

That one affected Sol, hit him somewhere raw and painful. I inserted my own voice before the others could pile on.

“Of course we won’t. How could we, when we have no intention of going there ourselves?” I chuckled. “Not until we’re ready for a dip in the Styx, at least.”

“So if the elders turn against us instead of each other,” Kyno said. “You can take them all?”

Allow me to be clear.

Sol and I had amassed something of a myth between ourselves since arriving on the shores of Olympia. Something small and infirm, but no less powerful for the people that it touched. These cultivators surrounding us in this bath were true heroes and heroines. They had cut their teeth on monsters and villains, and been acknowledged by the Fates and the Muses both for their struggles.

Compared to their full splendor, Sol and I just weren’t enough. Their capacity for cultivation dwarfed ours by several factors, a question of exponents rather than multipliers. In a just world, they would outstrip us in every metric.

But they were afraid. And for reasons that Sol and I had only just begun to unravel, they were, each of them, haunted by distant troubles. They had an obligation to right what was wrong as heroes, and because they were not fulfilling their divine imperative, because their very essence told them that they were not living their lives the right way, Sol and I had stepped in to fill that void.

But that did not mean we were delusional. Sol and I were destined for great things, and I intended to grasp even greater things than that, but a Philosopher was still a Philosopher. A Hero was still a Hero.

And a Tyrant was still a Tyrant.

Our new companions had just about convinced themselves of an absurd estimation of our relative strength. But even then, trying to claim that we could take on all of the elders of the Raging Heaven alone was a step too far. Even implying it would be an outrageous lie.

So I told him the truth. ”Of course not. We’re scavengers snapping at the heels of powerful beasts, hoping they’ll turn their irritation on their rivals before they come for us. A single mistake could be the end of us all.”

“We put on that performance last night for a reason,” Sol added, contributing to my point as naturally as if it had been his own, just the student parroting what his master had designed. “As far as your elders are concerned, you were kidnapped in the night. Go back now, fabricate a passing story of your escape, and wash your hands of this.”

We would have to flee the city, of course, and that would be a shame. But the Oracles weren’t going anywhere. The Olympics would come again in four years. And there were other ways to grow strong without devouring the starlight marrow of Tyrants.

If these Heroic cultivators truly feared death more than they despised the yoke of a tyrant, then there was nothing we could do for them.

“Dammit,” Jason said quietly. ”Dammit. I said I was with you, Solus. I won’t let you make me a liar.”

Elissa‘s jaw clenched, but she shook her head once when I glanced her way. Kyno, likewise, resigned himself with a low sigh.

“You have us netted,” Anastasia said, propping her chin up on one hand. ”If you say that Selene and her stark father won’t be an issue, I’ll choose to believe you for now. But the good hunter raises a fair point. Scythas and the archer are notable in their absence. Have you approached them yet? Will you?”

“Lefteris has been doing his best to avoid us since he incurred my master's wrath,” I said, amused. ”But I’ve kept an ear out, and if the Fates are kind I should be able to find him before sundown.”

“And if they aren’t kind?” Elissa asked, in the suffering tone of someone who knew what the answer would be before she asked her question. I smirked.

“I’ll find him anyway.”

“And what of sweet Scythas?” Anastasia pressed, watching intently as Sol dipped his head down into the scalding bath, rising back up and running his fingers through coarse black hair.

“Scythas will find us,” Sol said with certainty. Anastasia hummed, accepting that without protest.

“We’ll have to lay low for the time being,” Jason mused, pulling himself from the bath and grabbing a towel. “Kaukoso Mons is off-limits for now. We can’t exactly be kidnapped every single night, after all.”

“We’ll have to find neutral ground,” Kyno agreed and rose at the same time, shifting aside the tail of the crocodile skin that he’s been wearing the entire time to wrap a towel around his waist.

“I have a place,” Elissa said simply, wringing the moisture from her hair.

As we filed out of the baths and into the light of day with towels over our heads to partially cover our faces, under the guise of drying our hair, Jason eyed the awakening streets of Olympia’s eastern district warily.

“We’re already tempting the Fates, being out like this,” he said in a low voice.

I snorted, tilting my head at our rapt audience. To our left, a pair of women were hollering at one another from their adjacent balconies about some spat or another from the day before. On the streets themselves a handful of children raced around in a game of tag, and a couple stray hounds sniffed around an old vagrant in filthy rags sleeping fitfully in the shade cast by the damaged bathhouse. By the standards of the Half-Step City, it was deserted.

“I think they’ll keep this to themselves,” I told Jason, laughing as he jabbed at me with an elbow.

“You think so, do you?”

I glanced down at the vagrant in his rags. The old man had cracked an eye open, and now he stared balefully up at me. Plain brown eyes with no flames behind them. The eddies of my influence brushed against him and found nothing of particular note. Just an old man sleeping on the street.

Sol and our companions regarded the vagrant warily, looking to one another and exchanging silent words of intent. The Heroic cultivators among us shifted their towels just so, hiding as much of their defining features as they could. For Kyno and Elissa, whose stature and scars betrayed them regardless, it was a fairly comical sight.

“Grandfather,” I greeted respectfully, inclining my head. “These lowly sophists were in dire need of a bath. Please forgive our indiscretion.”

“I’ve forgiven you for more than that,” he said, surly and gray. He propped himself up on an elbow and shifted his rags, drawing them tighter around himself. It was still winter after all, and the sun had only just arisen. For someone without an advanced cultivator’s constitution, it was uncomfortably cool here in the shade. “You young cultivators are all the same. It wasn’t enough that you vandalized this bathhouse, rendered it unusable for the citizens it was built to accommodate. You had to add insult to injury, return and make use of it while the rest of the city couldn’t.”

I blinked, and slowly, asked the man, “Who said we vandalized this building?”

“I did.” The vagrant cleared his throat and spat phlegm on the street beside him.

Kyno placed a massive hand on my shoulder, pulling subtly, urging me back. I shrugged him off. “It was like this when we got here this morning,” I informed the vagrant.

He sneered. “You’re a terrible liar, boy.”

Sol inhaled deeply.

“My virtuous heart won’t accept such an insult,” I said very quietly. “Not even from an old man.”

“A truth told with false intent is a lie like any other,” he said, waving me off. The audacity of this homeless wretch. “Every man in the Half-Step City knows how to twist his words and make them pretty. What makes a man shine is not rhetoric alone. It is substance.”

Sol stepped forward, suddenly keenly interested. “Who are you to say that? Are you a philosopher?” His influence rippled out to test the man the same way mine had, and found just as little oing by the frown on his face.

“Philosopher,” the old man echoed, and spat again. “No, boy, philosophers are men in the business of knowing things. Look at me. Do I look like a man that knows anything at all?”

“Your definition of a philosopher is different from mine,” Sol said, that storm gathering in his eyes. I muscled down my annoyance and forced myself to look past it, deeper.

“By all means,” invited the vagrant. “Enlighten me.”

“Sol,” Jason murmured, edging up beside him. His eyes continue to shift behind the edges of the towel, watching as more and more people trickled out of their homes and businesses onto the streets. “We should go.”

“In a moment,” Sol said, distracted. He knelt in the front of the living bundle of filthy rags, Anastasia kneeling down beside him with curiosity and a vague puzzlement in her eyes. “I was taught that a philosopher is a man that knows only one thing, and that is the fact that he doesn’t know anything at all.”

The old man snorted. “How pretentious. You might as well call them fools, if that’s all that distinguishes them.”

Sol didn’t respond for a long moment, searching the old man’s face for something. “Truth told with false intent is a lie,” he finally said. “What would you call an opposed opinion that you present as your own?”

“I’d call that disingenuous.”

“And I’d call you a liar,” Sol said with something like triumph. “You know what it means to say that a philosopher is a man who knows he knows nothing. It’s an admission of man’s limitation. It’s the crystallization of a mindset.”

The old man tilted his head. “Who taught you those words, boy?”

Sol leaned forward, eager now, but I saw the puzzlement in Anastasia turn to something deeper. Troubled. She was racking her brain for something crucial, just out of reach. I frowned, manifesting three pankration hands behind Jason, Kyno, and Elissa, tapping between their shoulder blades with gentle rosy heat. We settled into postures not visibly threatening, but ready nonetheless.

“My mentor,” the Roman said with rising purpose. “He guided me as a boy. I owe a portion of my best traits to him. Have you heard of him? Better than that, have you met him?”

“How would I be able to tell you when you haven’t given me a name?”

Anastasia’s eyes suddenly widened. I inhaled sharply through my nose.

“In my city, he was called the man that knows everything,” Sol confessed. “My other tutors called him the Father of Rhetoric.

“But his name is Aristotle.”

Anastasia stared at the old man in abject terror.

“Foolish,” the old vagrant sighed. And he rose, shedding his soul's disguise.

For a single endless moment, I stared without comprehension at the space where he had been, reclining fitfully on the road, and where he stood now, palming Sol’s head where he knelt. For that moment, as the old man’s formless veil of inconsequence fell away from him, and that same terror in Anastasia‘s eyes spread immediately to all of the mythical Heroes in our group, I was as paralyzed as them.

But it was only a moment.

[The dawn breaks.]

Twenty fists of pankration intent blazed as they crossed the distance between us, reaching, clawing, striking. I leveraged the full weight of my pneuma and lunged forward, reaching for my brother where he knelt.

[Dawn gives way to dusk.] intoned the old man’s soul. The fire in my palms guttered out, and I felt the jarring shock of bare fists slamming into an utterly unyielding surface as they hit him. The old man’s filthy rags shifted beneath my assault, the only reaction he gave, and fell away to reveal a body like twisted iron.

“Arrogant child,” he said, lashing out with a backhand that I caught on crossed forearms, slamming me back across the street with force enough to dig furrows in the dirt.

Gravitas rocked the street, sending citizens and children that had not yet noticed the confrontation tumbling. Screams rose into the air on black wings. But try as he might, Sol could not rise against the hand on his head. The storm roiled in his eyes.

“Turning justice upon me like I have anything to fear from it,” the old man said to me contemptuously. “Citing your heart’s virtue while you skirt around a lie. You have no concept of virtue. Where is the excellence in your soul?”

“You’re…” Anastasia breathed.

“That’s-” Jason bit.

“I am nothing,” said the vagrant, dismissing each of them in turn. He glanced down at Sol, watching him struggle. He inclined his head, acknowledging, “I am a learning man. A philosopher. And I know what I know.”

These cowards. These worthless mongrels. Why weren’t they fighting?

I leapt straight up, twisting and reaching into my shadow, pulling from it the raven’s broad celestial axe and wreathing it in rosy flame.

[The sun rises.]

The vagrant didn’t even look up.

[Night falls.]

I fell out of the sky and slammed back down to earth in a crouch, heels driving through the dirt. I exhaled sharply and rose again. My senses continued to tell me the same thing they’d been telling me since he shrugged off his unremarkable veil.

His pneuma, without question, was that of a Philosopher. No more.

And yet.

“No student of Aristotle would have made such a mess in such short order,” the old man said, shaking his head. Sol glared up at him as best he could. “You’ve only been here for, what, a week? Five days? You’re lying to me, or else that young fool did you a grave disservice.”

I gathered my pneuma and laid a hand on the pommel of my uncle's blade. I felt my blood begin to boil.

Sol snarled. “He did the best he could with what he was given.”

“Then he failed. And as his master's master, I have no choice but to make right what he left unfinished.” Without looking, without turning his dull, unassuming eyes my way, the old man waved his hand, as if to brush a fly from his shoulder, and I blinked as rubble and ruined stone rained down around my head. I realized that I wasn’t standing poised to attack, as I had thought I was. I was crouched in the entryway to the bathhouse, having plowed straight through one of its pillars.

Four Heroic cultivators watched, frozen, as the old vagrant raised my brother up and met him glare for glare.

“Aristotle has evidently failed to prepare you for this world. I, your grandfather, will teach you the way of things.”

And then he crouched as if to hop over a puddle and exploded upward, sailing clear over the Half-Step City towards the looming edifice of Kaukoso Mons and its immortal storm crown.

He took Sol with him.

For a long moment no one said a word. Citizens, those that had made it off the streets or never left their homes in the first place, peered out from behind slatted windows and cracked doors, curiosity warring with rational fear. In the distance, the howling of dogs drifted hauntingly on the wind.

One by one, the four heroic Cultivators looked back at me. Whatever it was they saw, it didn’t do much for their unease.

“That’s quite a face, Griffon,” Anastasia whispered, a faint attempt at humor.

I didn’t smile.

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