Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.116

The Young Griffon

Three Heroes came to me in the aftermath of Alazon’s shameful defeat, and all three produced a letter written by a Roman’s heavy hand.

Sol had given each of them a destination to search when he first reached out to them through Sorea. All three of them had rejected our grand mission in the aftermath of Chilon’s story, but Sol had given them the information anyway. He’d given them the option, as well as time to consider it. As it turned out, that had been enough for Alyssa and Kyno to change their minds.

It didn’t amount to much. The Sword Song and the Heroic Huntsman came back as empty-handed as the Gold-String Guardian, who had never left Olympia in the first place.

Kyno brandished the carefully folded slip of papyrus Sol had sent him. To his right, Elissa’s eyes slid away from me to watch two of Alazon’s fellow competitors drag him cursing and struggling out of the Olympic Stadium. On the other side of the Huntsman, Lefteris stared hard at me. His own papyrus message was a cracked and crumpled mess, held in a white-knuckled fist.

“Is this the truth?” Kyno asked me.

Not too long ago, I would have deflected that question without hesitation. Now, I lowered myself to the pit sand and motioned for them to join me.

Kino knelt obligingly, though even then he was taller than most mortal men. Alyssa tore her attention from Alazon’s retreating figure with the ghost of a smirk on her lips and sat cross-legged beside Kyno. I waited a moment for Lefteris to join us in the sand. He stood stone still, glowering down at me.

I hummed, considering them each in turn. The Sword Song, the Heroic Huntsman, and the Gold-String Guardian. Three Heroes that I had claimed as my own, the same way that Sol had claimed Scythas, Jason, and Anastasia as his. Three Heroes that regarded me now as a dangerous unknown. Had I not been every bit as truthful to them as Sol had been to his Heroes? Had I ever once told them a lie?

My heart flickered in my chest. An answer, maybe. I ignored it.

“Show me and I’ll tell you,” I told them.

Kyno placed his letter on the sand in front of me. Elissa followed his example, flicking her own missive across the space between us. Lefteris clicked his tongue and threw his crumpled ball down last.

“Elissa and I have spent weeks abroad, searching for mythical ingredients without any clue as to what those ingredients actually were,” Kyno informed me quietly, dark eyebrows furrowing as he regarded me. He wasn’t quite angry. More discontented. The skinned crocodile he wore like a cloak looked furious enough for the two of them. “We could have spent that time preparing for the Games. Instead, we spent it helping you.”

“Helping us?”

A muscle in my neck twinged when I tilted my head. I had shown Alazon the difference between us, but I hadn’t come away from it unscathed. Even the small movements were painful, more so as the moments passed and the numbing thrill of our fight seeped out of my body.

“You help yourselves,” I corrected him. “You have something you want, and you’re no longer certain the games are the clearest path to achieving it. You don’t believe you can win, not really. You don’t know that it would matter if you did. After all, what’s a laurel crown worth beyond the warmth you’d glean from burning it?”

I leaned forward, an elbow propped on my knee. “A cup of nectar, though? Even if it’s less than a cup - even if it’s only a sip, its value is undeniable. Worth more than any crown.”

None of them denied it. I turned and spat blood onto the sand.

“If it’s a lie, then he lied to me too.” I held up my own message from Sorea, and though the exact details of it were different, the thrust of the message was the same. The Gadfly, Socrates, had deceived us. The ingredients needed to synthesize nectar had been known to him from the start - more than that, they’d been in the old wretch’s possession this whole time. The only portion that he’d been missing was the cup of mad wine that we’d retrieved from Thracia.

Now that we knew, we could search with clear intent. We could scour the nearest marks on the map with purpose, and we could comb through the wares of merchants traveling from the more distant destinations. And if all went well, if there was wine remaining after the first batch was brewed, we could take the Gadfly’s knowledge and make a second for ourselves.

The benefits of nectar were the subject of myth and legend. Immortality, divine constitution, advancement through entire mortal realms, and on and on it went. Even if only a few of them were true, even if only one of them was reality, a cup would be a treasure worth any Tyrant’s favor. A paltry sip would be more than equal to a lifetime of closed doors cultivation.

The possibilities were endlessly enticing. It was enough to draw even Lefteris here, in spite of his misgivings. It was enough to draw any sane man away from this stadium in its pursuit.

“Then you’d be coming with us?” Elissa asked me.

“No.”

Lefteris’ pneuma shifted dangerously. In my mind’s eye, I pictured it pulling taut like the string of a bow. Ready to loose at the subject of his ire. Me, naturally.

“If this was real, you’d happily abandon your time in the pit for it. Not ask us to do it in your stead,” he said tightly. The flames behind his eyes brightened. “You have as much to gain from this as we do.”

I considered that.

“Do I?”

They didn’t know me. Not well enough to say one way or another.

In the end, they didn’t care enough to ask.

Kyno, Elissa, and Lefteris took back their marching orders and left me in the pit. Off to do the raven’s work, regardless of how much it chafed them to waste time running errands with the Games on the horizon. I hadn’t lied in my goading. They valued the nectar more than they valued their slim chances at an Olympic crown.

As for why that was the case? Of course, I couldn’t know. None of them would tell me.

“Griffon…” Chilon laid a careful hand on my shoulder. “Breathe.”

I obliged him.

The irritation remained.

I became something of a novelty to the Heroes in the pit after my scrap with Alazon. I supposed that in their eyes, that had been my crucible overcome - it was a grand triumph for a lowly second rank sophist to overcome a Hero in even the most controlled environment. As far as they were concerned, I’d earned myself his place in the pit.

That didn’t make me a competitor, of course. But I was interesting enough to have around until the true games began.

I broke bread and exchanged words with more Heroic cultivators in the days that followed than most people would ever see in their entire lives. Some of them wore the colorful silks that marked their mystery faith allegiance, but most didn’t bother. Some of them were kind, offering kernels of their expertise to the young upstart. Some were flippant, calling me over to parade around their peers and daring me to try on them what I had done to Alazon.

It was behavior I’d seen before, in the mountain trails and sparring halls of the Rosy Dawn Cult. They were senior to me, and so my actions didn’t truly matter to them.

I amused them. Nothing more and nothing less.

Elissa was the first to return with ingredients in hand.

Of the three Heroes I’d claimed, I had met Elissa first. Sol’s wandering eye had called them all to us through the funeral crowds, but it had been my hand that slapped the Sword Song’s face. By my notice alone had she been condemned.

She was known as the Sword Song because her master had been the finest blade to grace Olympia in generations, and under his guidance she made every blade she touched dance. The sword she carried with her was pure and undecorated bronze. She was less brazen with its use than our first meeting had led me to believe.

Elissa was kind to her juniors in action if not word. She was quick to anger, and biting in her rage. Her master was gone in search of something she wouldn’t speak to, and he hadn’t taken her with him.

Her eyes were the color of desert heat. Her marble-pale skin was marred by ugly scars uncommon for someone of her standing. She wore the fuchsia silks of the Scattered Foam Cult in Egypt.

It was information I could have gathered from any number of loose-lipped sophists on Kaukoso Mons. It was all I knew.

Elissa brought me milk in an ornate jug carved from white-gold electrum and sealed by a lid of the same material that interlocked with its container when twisted. The milk was from the cattle plains beyond the mountains Boeon, just east of Olympia. It was thick and rich, coating my tongue like sweet cream when I dabbed a drop of it on my tongue.

While I admired the taste of it, she dropped a chunk of brick-red cinnabar the size of my clenched fist in the sand.

“Cream from Levanta’s sacred cattle, and quicksilver mined from Giza,” the Sword Song declared.

“Egypt and back in three days?” I asked, impressed.

She snorted. “To the agora and back in three hours. The cream was the more difficult prospect of the two - I had to milk the damned cow myself.” Her eyes swept over me, and her nose wrinkled. “You look vile.”

I ran a hand through the golden snarls in my hair. It had grown longer and wilder in the months since I’d left the Scarlet City, and I’d neglected its care recently. Though I could burn away the sand and sweat that clung to me here in the pit, I couldn’t do much for my tangled hair and tattered silks.

“I suppose I could use a bath,” I mused. I raised an eyebrow up at the Heroine. “Care to join me?”

Elissa’s eyes rolled. “I’ve wasted enough time as it is.” Her delivery done, she promptly toed a circle in the sand and claimed a portion of my space for herself. She drew her bronze blade and began smoothly working it through the air, limbering up her body slice by slice.

“Time spent in good company is never truly wasted,” I reasoned.

“True enough.” She continued through her sword motions.

I tucked the electrum jar of sacred cream and the chunk of cinnabar both into my shadow and stood, pulling from the raven’s talons in turn one of the blades I’d stolen from the storm crown.

“Teach me,” I demanded, and only then did the Sword Song grace me with her full focus. I stepped over the line she’d drawn in the sand and joined her in her dance.

The sun rose and fell, and rose again. The final day before the mandatory month of training loomed large on the horizon. Soon, the greatest of the competitors would arrive. Soon, even the Heroes that refused to tolerate a Tyrant’s yoke would have to make themselves known or else forfeit their chance at the Olympic flame.

Soon, the real Heroes would come.

Lefteris returned second.

The Gold-String Guardian had been the last to directly answer Sol’s call at Bakkhos’ funeral rites, though he’d broken off from the trail of the Roman’s influence when he spotted three of his peers gathered in apparent confrontation around a single first-rank sophist. His eyes had landed first on Scythas, and in the same moment dismissed him with contempt. They’d settled on Kyno and Elissa, wary and questioning.

There was history between them, camaraderie that ran deeper than the fragile understanding between Sol’s companions. Lefteris was a known quantity to Elissa and Kyno, just as they were to him.

Alone, he may as well have not existed in the Raging Heaven Cult. It was a Hero’s nature to stand out in every crowd, but Lefteris did everything he could to avoid the questing eyes of the masses - besides, of course, not being a member of the most renowned cult in the free mediterranean.

He was protective of his secrets and prone to paranoia. Not that he was wrong.

The Gold-String Guardian was tall, lean, and tanned a deep bronze by the desert weather of his mystery faith. He wore the same fuschia silks that Elissa did, belted negligently around his waist so that they hung loosely from his shoulders and revealed the bronze breastplate he wore at all times. He carried a greatbow with him everywhere he went, and its string was shining gold.

I’d learned more about Lefteris from the two boys he watched over than I had from the man himself. A pair of young civic brothers with mismatched eyes and spirits that matched their fiery hair, Lefteris acted as a secret guardian to both Leo and Pyr. Whatever else could be said about the Gold-String Guardian, he took that role seriously. The one and only time he’d struck out at me had been the moment I had reached for his boys in Elissa’s home with apparent malintent.

How they’d come to be in his care, and why he’d chosen to hide them in the Raging Heaven Cult of all places, I could only guess. The boys didn’t know everything about their guardian, unfortunately. And of course, he’d never tell me himself.

Lefteris tossed a hemp sack and a chunk of yellow ore at my feet while I traded choreographed blows with Elissa. I scooped each up in hand of pankration intent and brought them into my line of sight while I continued moving through our dance.

Inside the hemp sack was what looked like shimmering black sand. When a pankration hand carefully dabbed a crystal to my tongue, it tasted like a rotten egg. The pale yellow mineral chunk was about as large as the cinnabar that Elissa had brought back, though this one was brittle in comparison.

“Black lava salt from the Himalayas and sulfur from Libya’s fire mountains,” Lefteris reported. He didn’t wait for me to confirm before adding on, “I want two portions of the brew.”

“Ho?” I raised an eyebrow at him, tilting my head bemusedly and avoiding Elissa’s telegraphed stab in the process. “How greedy.”

“If he gets two, then I want three,” Elissa chimed in. Lefteris shot her an ugly look, and she smirked. “Only fair, Left. You spent all your time in the market - I had to milk a sacred cow.”

“You are a sacred cow,” Lefteris snapped, and she laughed.

“If we’re measuring by that metric, the two of you will be lucky to receive a drop,” I said lightly. Lefteris’ ire swiveled back to me, while Elissa heaved a sigh.

“This story again,” the Sword Song lamented.

“A mad dash through the underworld for the perfect cup of wine, and a meeting with a faceless wonder to crown the journey,” Lefteris summarized the story as Elissa had told it to him and Kyno, derision behind every word. “Truly, I’m surprised the two of you didn’t ascend on the spot.”

I brushed aside Elissa’s bronze blade with my own tribulation iron and stepped back, ending the dance. My eyes narrowed.

“I showed you the proof.” I held up the totenpass from Philadelphus so both of them could see it. When I’d first shown it to her, there had been a moment where I’d seen her waver on the edge of believing me. There had been an opportunity there, I knew. But it had passed before I could grasp it in my hands.

Now, Elissa only shrugged. “It’s a pretty necklace. Goes well with your ruby.”

“I can show you,” I offered, ignoring the dull roar of blood in my ears and gathering my pneuma around the memory of that mad journey. My eyes flitted from Elissa to Lefteris. “In fact, why don’t we trade? Truth for truth, lived experience for lived experience.”

“Two portions,” Lefteris said simply, ignoring the offer entirely and shrugging off his black and fuschia silks so they hung around his waist like mine. He pulled his bow up over his shoulder and nocked an arrow to it. “Elissa, get moving. You’re my target.”

“According to who?” she challenged him. Lefteris hummed, drawing back his golden string. The fires behind his eyes burned brightly.

“According to this arrow, I’d say.”

Elissa cursed and lunged sideways as he loosed, but she was too close and he’d predicted her. The arrow whistled across the distance in the blink of an eye-

And froze as a bright rosy hand caught its shaft out of the air.

I gave the Gold-String Guardian his arrow back, dropping my tribulation blade back into my shadow as I did.

“I’ll be your target,” I offered him. Lefteris eyed me for a long moment.

Then he nodded, and drew his string again.

Every heroic soul was a uniquely excellent existence. Every Hero was a man worth telling stories of, and every Heroine was a woman worth knowing.

So why was it the more of them I met, the less I cared to ask their names?

Kyno’s journey took him furthest by far, and so he was the last of the three to return.

The Heroic Huntsman, son of Broken Tides and largest of us all. I’d noticed him long before he’d reached us through the funeral crowds, towering as he did over everyone else in attendance. He’d held Elissa back from seeking a second round with me while Sol was busy elsewhere, and the longer I knew him the more it became clear that that was a familiar role for him.

In spite of his dark eyes and the cruel power in his hulking frame, Kyno was slowest to anger of the three and moved always with a hunter’s careful purpose. He acted as a balancing force between Elissa and Lefteris, anchoring them when their tempers ran away from them. He was observant, and thoughtful in his way.

He wore a virtuous beast like a cloak over his Broken Tide blues, a skinned crocodile that could act on its own volition at any time. He was broad, tanned, dark of hair, and perpetually scowling - though he rarely meant anything by it.

The one and only time I’d seen him truly shaken had been in the hallowed temple of the Broken Tide’s Oracle. Slowest to anger and last to speak his mind in rage, I knew him least of all.

The Heroic Huntsman sat beside me in the shaded sand while Elissa and Lefteris dueled with knives out in the sun, each of them dripping sweat and intensely focused. Kyno held his spoils out to me and waited patiently until I took them.

“A fine bouquet.” I accepted the bundle of flowers and herbs and raised them to my nose. The smell of them was pleasantly refreshing, and one scent in particular stood out sweetly among the rest. It was the centerpiece of the bouquet, a vibrant blue lily with a golden bud in its center. There was only one in the entire bundle.

“Blue Lily of the Nile,” Kyno said, nodding to the centerpiece. “And medicinal herbs from Paleta’s healing hills.”

“Purchased from the agora, I suppose?” I murmured, plucking the blue lily from the bundle and twirling its stem between my fingers.

Kyno shook his head. “I’m not that fortunate. No, I swam for this one.”

I blinked. “You swam? From Pelloponesia to Egypt?”

“I had help.” He patted the tail of his crocodile skin, and the creature’s reptilian eyes glinted. I might have mistaken it as a sunlight reflection if not for the fact that we were both sitting in the shade.

“Does it have a name?” I asked. For some reason, Kyno seemed surprised.

“Sah-bakari.” An Egyptian name.

“You met in Egypt,” I said, the pieces coming together in my mind.

“I met the crocodile in Egypt, yes,” Kyno said, smiling faintly. I waved a hand.

“No, not the beast. You met them in Egypt,” I said, pointing to Elissa and Lefteris as they dueled. Kyno winced and said nothing.

I frowned, considering his silence. Perhaps they’d only bonded over it. How long had it taken them to form their current camaraderie? How much of it had been forged beneath the storm crown in Olympia, and how much of it had developed in the south? Had they been in Egypt recently?

Had any of them been there to see Sol mount a Roman flag atop the Conqueror’s lighthouse?

“Kyno-”

“Another time. It’s not my story to tell.”

The burning hands of my intent dug furrows in the sand around us, forming a molten octagon. I stood and offered the larger cultivator a hand up.

“Pankration,” was all I said. Kyno nodded and took my hand. I heaved him to his feet.

Then I hooked my heel around his and dropped him straight back down to the sand.

Three days before the gates were to be shut for the final month of training, Chilon offered me a furtive gift while Kyno, Elissa, and Lefteris were occupied.

Three papyrus scrolls, each of them with a different image painted on their outer surface. One of them was a bow with a golden string. Another was a bronze blade clashing against a flute. And the last of them a crocodile with its maw opened wide.

For a moment, I could do nothing but stare down at the recorded tales of the Gold-String Guardian, the Sword Song, and the Heroic Huntsman in utter disbelief.

“You’ve been spending so much time with them,” the senior Philosopher said quietly, tying shut his fishing net of myths and legends, “I thought you might like to know their stories.”

“What makes you think I don’t already?” I found the words to ask. Chilon only clapped a hand to my shoulder and rose.

“Don’t take it so personally, junior. They live in a different world than we do. Be thankful they’ve taken the time to train you. It’s more than most sophists will ever get from a hero.”

With that he took his leave from the pit for the night, leaving me with that foul sentiment ringing in my ears and a bundle of priceless papyrus cradled in my hands. Each of them was a story I’d been trying to draw out of my companions directly for weeks, months. Each of them was a Hero’s labor put to paper. And, if I was fortunate, each of them would be an answer to the question I’d been asking them from the very beginning.

What are you afraid of?

These were the answers I’d wanted all along. These were the stories Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris refused to tell me, no matter how many times I prodded them or what I offered in exchange. Chilon had given me the gift of their origins.

Rosy burning light bloomed in my cupped palms. The edges of the papyrus blackened and curled.

Two days before the deadline, Scythas came to me with his and Jason’s share of the reagents cradled in a jar in his arms. He upended it, and a cascade of lead and silver coins poured out onto the sands.

I ignored the coins. When he went to announce them, I cut the Hero off with a question.

“Would you have told me your story if Sol wasn’t there with us?”

“What?” Scythas’ brow furrowed. His heart flickered in my perceptions. “You mean-?”

“On the Eos,” I clarified. I’d separated myself from Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris, but a few curious eyes turned our way as I pressed him. “If Sol wasn’t there. If it was me, and me alone. Would you have told the same story?”

Our time in Thracia had brought many things to light. It had given us common ground.

Scythas sighed.

“You already know the answer to that question, Griffon.”

I did.

The final day before the deadline, I shattered Chilon’s ribs. It only took a moment of distraction for a fight to turn sour, and my mind had been elsewhere for days. It was an unforgivable lapse in concentration.

While I was fighting his body’s natural inclination to let him die, Anastasia came to me with a jar of honey and her own healing hands.

“Who are you, really?”

As if the answer mattered.

“Not everyone is made of iron. For some, the fire only burns.”

I’d known it since the day I ventured through the storm crown. From the moment that I tore down that door and stalked into Elissa’s home in blood and wrath and named them all cowards for backing down from the Gadfly, I’d seen it in their eyes. Whether or not they believed that my standing was as it appeared, that made no difference.

From that day on I was an enemy to them. An enemy they could work with, perhaps. An enemy they could trust, in some sense. But never a friend. Never what Sol was to his trio.

I’d thought that bond was made of iron. But in the end, I’d only burnt it to ashes and scattered them to the wind. I’d left nothing left to mend.

“If we can kill what can not die, what's to say we can't also mend what can not be mended?”

The dawn broke over the back of a dead moon night. At the end of this day, any would-be champion outside the city of Olympia would be barred from participation.

As the first rosy fingers of morning light reached out past the writhing pillar of the storm crown, Sorea came hurtling out of the sky and struck the sand like a javelin. The eagle shrieked, beating its wings and flinging sand around it in a cloud. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by Heroic cultivators, all crowding around the bird.

“Sorea?” Anastasia reached out, concerned, but the bird only snapped at her fingers.

“What is it!?” Scythas asked the bird urgently.

“Take the message!” Elissa hissed.

The virtuous beast kept on shrieking, making no move to vomit up a scroll. The only thing of note it was carrying was a scrap of torn white cloth in its talons. It took me a dozen pankration hands and several filthy curses to pry it from the bird’s grip. As soon as I had the cloth in my hands, the eagle beat its wings and shot back up into the sky. Off towards the storm crown.

“What does it say?” Jason demanded. Behind him, silent but intent, Kyno and Lefteris leaned in for a closer look.

The message was a single word scrawled hastily on the cloth.

COME

We ran like we had lightning in our heels.