Chương 134: 1.107

The Young Griffon Not everyone is made of iron, Griffon. For some, the fire only burns.

"Griffon?" A woman's welcome voice woke me from my dozing. I opened my eyes and smiled languidly up at the Heroine standing over me, incredulous at the sight of me.

"What are you doing here?" Above her, the marble columns of the indigo stadium jutted up into the clear blue skies, winding like vines up a formless tree and reaching vainly for heaven. The Olympic Stadium was an architectural wonder in an entirely different class from my home city's Scarlet Stadium, where I had 'competed' for glory in the Daylight Games more than half a year ago.

Where the Scarlet Stadium was a product of man's creation, carved out of the earth with mortal implements by mortal hands, the indigo amphitheater was ever more. It rose up, a goliath of pristine marble in colonnades and archway paths that wound in a spiral up towards the clouds above. There were nine rows of marble columns, each level separated by entablature statues - carvings of men and women bracing their feet on the columns below and hunching their shoulders beneath the weight of the columns above.

Each of them was carved as if in motion, the tendons in their legs rendered in profound detail, immortalizing the struggle of a step that they would forever be frozen in the middle of taking. They were all marching up that winding path, carrying their colonnades with them up to heaven - the pillars of virtue each and every one of them had built within their souls.

As my senior brother Chilon had informed me after our exchange of discourse, beaten and bloody but satisfied with his progress, every statue was a former victor of the Games. Every marble man and woman was someone that had stepped into this stadium a Hero and walked out of it a champion. The indigo amphitheater was larger than any man made monument had a right to be, and its stands could seat nearly a hundred thousand spectators at its fullest capacity.

It was an intimidating venue, more than any other I had ever set foot in. In its own way, empty as it currently was, it was more unsettling than anything I had seen in Thracia. It also had a very comfortable sand pit.

"Elissa," I greeted the Sword Song, shifting and patting the sand beside me invitingly.

"The shade is pleasant here. If you lay in just the right spot, Diocles blocks the rays." Across the indigo amphitheater, atop the first row of colonnades, the statue of a seven hundred year old champion strained against the weight of all eight levels above as he marched tirelessly up the spiraling path to heaven.

"You know that isn't what I meant," she said, rearing back her leg and laying a kick into my side. I caught it with a pankration hand and twisted sharply with two more, seeking to pull her off her feet. The Sword Song pulled the bronze blade from the belt on her hip and drove it down through my violent intent, skewering me as surely as if through flesh and bone. I cleared my throat and turned my head, spitting a mouthful of pink saliva onto the sand.

"Incredibly rude." Her eyes rolled.

"This isn't a public estate. More importantly, this isn't safe. Look around you - this pit is crawling with cultivators from every faction in the Raging Heaven. What are you going to do if you're recognized? What are you going to do if you're confronted?"

"What do you think I'm going to do?" I asked her, honestly curious. She sighed.

"I don't know why I bother."

"What about you?" I continued, rising up onto one elbow and looking the Heroine up and down meaningfully. She was in her proper cult attire again - fuschia robes accented with winding lines of white and gold, and she had her eponymous bronze blade hanging unsheathed from the leather belt slung across her waist. The last time we'd spoken to one another in her home, she had been disguised in plain clothes without her weapon at hand to give away her identity.

Now here she stood, scolding me in plain view of the Raging Heaven Cult's favored sons and daughters. A Heroine stolen in the night by hungry ravens, returned healthy and whole to the wider world.

"What are you going to do if someone tells your Elder they saw you here, speaking to me without any iron bands to bind you?" I asked the Sword Song.

"What are you going to do when they realize you weren't taken after all - that you went with us willingly?"

"Haven't you heard?" she asked archly, procuring a rolled slip of papyrus from a fold in logic within her fuschia robes.

"My shadowed captors have set me free." Elissa dropped the message on my chest, and I flicked it open with the hands of my intent, lighting the words with the rosy glow of dawn. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the contents of the message itself quickly identified the author.

"A message from your Elder," I murmured, scanning each line with mounting admiration. I felt my lips twitch towards a smirk.

"It seems your master's been busy," Elissa said, feigning neutrality and failing utterly. Audacious Roman. We'd only been back for two weeks, and he'd already made a mess of things.

"He sold you back for favorable terms." I chuckled.

"Who else has the Roman offered back to their distraught city?"

"Scythas was the first." She walked past me and leaned back against the marble walls that separated the lowest level of the stands from the pit.

"Nearly two months ago he vanishes without a trace and no one in Olympia can find him. Then your master is spotted with the Gadfly on his way out of the Howling Wind's estate, and the next day Scythas is out and about in his cult silks like nothing happened in the first place.

"After that, the Broken Tide reached out. They were… displeased when Kyno was kidnapped. When he walked out of that meeting in one piece, the rest of the Elders seemed to realize there was a game to be played. Soter brought him into his confidence the next day, and that night I received this from his eagle."

"Making you a free woman again. Congratulations," I said, saluting her with the letter and flicking it back to her. She tucked it away, that neutral glare cracking at its edges. Hidden from me but not entirely silent, I felt the beat of her heart as it churned uneasily.

"What happened in Thracia?" she asked me.

"When Solus sent us those letters, he made it sound like you'd be gathering up ingredients all at once. He said you wanted to have everything ready before you came back here. What changed?" What had changed in Thracia? What had shifted in the Orphic House, and fallen firmly from its place on the journey back down the Aegean Sea? My heart stirred in my chest. There were any number of answers I could give to that question, each of them true - or rather, none of them a lie.

But only one of them would answer her question in the spirit that she'd asked it.

"We met Orpheus," I said, and my heart beat steadily in my chest.

"Griffon," Elissa sighed, exasperated. When I didn't smile or otherwise react, her brow furrowed, creasing the brutal lines of scars on her face.

"You're serious. You - what, you went to his tomb?" Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"We did," I confirmed. Again, I could have left it there, allowing her to draw what conclusions she would from that statement. But would that have been the truth? I elaborated, "And Sol and I spoke to his shade, ensconced inside his chthonic singing house."

"You what?" Elissa appeared over my head, staring down at me with wide eyes.

"You're lying," she accused me. I stared steadily up at her.

"You can't possibly be serious." How cruel, that a woman I had never lied to in my life would regard my word with such suspicion. Though, had I ever told her the truth?

"Why didn't you come with us, Elissa?" I asked the Sword Song. The desert-heat flames behind her eyes flickered in time with her heart, and she looked away.

"You know why."

"Pretend that I don't," I invited her.

"Enlighten me."

"You know," she insisted.

"You can't tell me you don't know how ridiculous it all sounded. How convenient it was. The Gadfly decides he doesn't like what we're doing and ambushes us outside a bathhouse, drags your master up the mountain and throws you up into the storm crown - then, what? He decides it was all a misunderstanding? Solus makes amends, and they spend the next month as teacher and student in Bakkhos' estate?

"Then you come roaring in and punch him in the throat, make a mess of the Oracles' shared domicile and risk the wrath of every Tyrant on the mountain in the process, and the Gadfly rewards you with a quest? Suddenly, there's a cure for the Scarlet Oracle where there wasn't one for the last decade and a half? And the only way to synthesize it, of course, is to travel the full breadth of the free Mediterranean over the course of weeks and months when the Games are only a couple months away."

"It was convenient," I agreed.

"For him more so than us." Sol and I had known it from the start. The Gadfly didn't know us nearly as well as he thought he did, but he'd known us well enough to know we'd jump at the opportunity if he waved it over our heads.

"And yet. Serving his purposes, serving ours - do the two have to stand apart from one another? Bakkhos knew how to synthesize nectar from mortal materials. If he could do it, why not the Gadfly? Why not us?"

"You aren't Bakkhos," Elissa hissed. Frustrated that she even had to say something so obvious.

"You aren't Bakkhos, and you aren't the Gadfly either. You're just-" She spat a curse and turned away, stalking along the perimeter of the stadium away from me.

"You don't believe," I called, and she stopped in her tracks.

"You think you don't believe it's possible, but there's a part of you that knows it can be done, because Bakkhos did it. You don't believe we're capable of it. You don't believe you're capable of it. Why not?" The Sword Song laid her palm on the hilt of her bronze blade. Her heart roiled in her chest.

"You said it yourself," the Heroine muttered.

"We're all cowards in the end." Not every soul was tempered in flame. I stood.

"Your master. Why did he leave?"

"What?" Elissa blinked and turned to face me fully. Distantly, across the vast sand arena that served as the staging ground for the Games themselves, cultivators from the Sophic Realm to the Heroic trained and fought and reveled in the midday sunlight.

"Why did your master leave the city of Olympia?" I pressed her, stepping across the sand.

"And wherever he was going, why didn't he take you with him?" After Bakkhos' funeral, I had shared drinks and played games with Elissa, Kyno, and Lefteris in a crowded club while they told stories of the man in remembrance. One of those stories had been about Elissa's master.

"They'd always been on friendly terms, but when my master decided he was leaving Olympia for good and severing all ties, the kyrios offered him a wager. A single sword exchange, no pneuma involved, and if the kyrios won my master had to keep his faith. They squared off in an octagon of marble and gold…" That story had ended the way that every story of its kind ended for the kyrios - Bakkhos was victorious, and in the end he got his way. Well, the same story every time except for one.

"What does it matter?" Elissa asked, confused. It was a fair question. The truth of things was, I didn't know. I only had my suspicions. Since the day Sol and I had stepped off the Eos and into the city of Olympia, that was all I'd ever had. Suspicions, educated guesses, and instinctive impressions. Sol and I had decided on our way out of Bakkhos' estate that we wanted to know these people, these Heroic souls that we had claimed within our hearts as our companions. We had each agreed that they were worth knowing.

Yet, what had I done to know them? What overtures had I made in good faith? It wasn't a coincidence that of the six Heroic cultivators we'd grown so fond of, Sol's three had agreed to lend themselves to our cause immediately, where mine had drawn back in suspicion and doubt - doubt of me, and doubt of themselves. When we first met them, Elissa and Lefteris had derided Scythas and Jason as cowards.

They had carried themselves with an unmistakably greater confidence, and that had drawn me to them over the Heroes that Sol had taken under his wing. And now, hardly two months later, Scythas walked as if with an entirely new purpose, with fire in his eyes, and Elissa turned away from prying eyes and called herself a coward. What had changed them? Who had changed them. Which had been for better, and which had been for worse? I had seen them for what they were, and simply made that fact known.

That was what I'd thought at the time. What I'd known to be true. How could they improve upon themselves if no one had the temerity to make their weaknesses known? I was only challenging them. I was only reminding them that they were more. That had been my intent. But what had been the result?

"You want people to meet your expectations. You want to help them exceed them." In the end, the girl had been right.

"You know why I'm here," I said, and ignored the flickering of my heart.

"What of the Sword Song? What is it you're hoping to grasp alongside your glory when this stadium is filled end-to-end with spectators and the Olympic flame is lit?" What did you see in the story of the Brothers Aetos that shook you to your core? Elissa stared hard at me, gripping the hilt of her blade so hard that even her pale fingers visibly bled white from the pressure. Finally, she came to a decision.

"Tell me what really happened in Thracia. Trade me truth for truth." I tilted my head.

"I already did."

"You already lied," she said derisively.

"'Spoke to Orpheus', as if you were just passing through the underworld on an evening stroll-" I reached up and grasped the thin plate of gold that I wore around my neck, beside the scarlet-jewel necklace I'd taken from my ancestor's statue in the Aetos filial pools. I pulled the gift from Philadelphus up over my head and tossed it to Elissa. She caught it, confused, and at my inviting gesture began to read from it.

Her lips moved silently, and I followed along - I'd already long memorized the contents of the totenpass. You will find a spring on your left in the Unseen halls, And by it the cypress with its luminous sheen. Do not go near this spring or drink its water. You will find another, cold water flowing from Mnemosyne's lake; Its guardians stand before it. Say: " I am the son of earth and starry heaven, but of heaven is my birth."

I am parched with thirst and dying: quickly, give it to me; The cool water flowing from Mnemosyne's lake." And they will give you water from the sacred spring, And then you will join the Heroes at their rites. This is darkness, folding you within it. This is the end.

"What is this?" Elissa whispered, when she was done. My answer was mild.

"Directions for a stroll."