Chương 149: 1.120 [KINDLE RELEASE]

The Young Griffon We sprang forth seven strong into the Storm That Never Ceased, and in seconds it divided us. The roiling cloud cover was as oppressive to the senses as I remembered, the roar of thunder just as deafening and the lines of lightning wrath every bit as blinding. It was unchanged since the last time I had suffered it, and it staggered me in spite of that. Beside me, Sol ducked his chin and raised an arm against the storm, marching on without pause.

Our Heroic companions came rushing in behind us at speeds neither Sol nor I could ever hope to match. The storm did not hesitate to humble them. Lightning flashed in whipcrack strands and every one of the Heroes burnt their hearts' blood in anticipation of a punishing blow. Crackling hands of my violent intent slammed twenty blades of tribulation iron into the mountain path in a wide octagon around us. I had already begun drawing them from my shadow as soon as we took our first step into the chaos.

If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been nearly fast enough. The lightning changed its course and plunged through the blades, seeping into the mountain stone. Distantly through the storm, I heard the thunder clap of barking hounds. When I looked back to our companions, just a couple steps behind Sol and I, the only portions of them visible through the storm were the flames behind their eyes. My pankration hands wrenched free each of the blades I had stolen from the mountain and held them ready in the air.

"With me!" Sol commanded, and sprinted towards the braying hounds. He did his best to hold us all together, as he always had, but Thracia had stolen from him the use of his virtue. Without it he lacked the means to truly guide his loyal toy soldiers. Instead, he began calling a cadence. He drew them into his rhythm and the riptide of his influence, a touchstone in the storm.

When a dog of the lightning wrath spring from the cloud cover and was intercepted by one of twenty tribulation blades, the reverberation of its impact scattered us worse than if the hound had found its mark. A sound like a giant striking a gong and a tree splitting down its center rang out. Each of us was flung away from the blade, all in a different direction. I felt it as the storm consumed them all, and I cast out the hands of my intent.

I reached out urgently, grasping for the arms- Elissa flailed and met me with her blade, stabbing through my lightning palm. The tail of Kyno's crocodile cloak whipped my reaching hand away. Lefteris flinched back, Jason twisted to avoid me, and Anastasia ignored the limb entirely in her attempt to re-orient herself midair. Was it malice or a Hero's simple instinct? Did the distinction matter in the end? Now, as once before, the outcome was the same.

Hurtling through the empty rage of the immortal storm crown, I might as well have been back in that worthless Scarlet Stadium. Why wouldn't they take my hand-? A heavy hand struck out through the storm and latched onto my own, gripping it tight and pulling me back down to the earth. We hit the ground together and tumbled. My crackling pankration hands swarmed us, bracing against our momentum and pulling us to our feet. Sol released my hand of flesh and blood and plucked a hand of my intent from the air.

"I'm keeping this," he declared. Somehow I had to laugh. We were only moments in and the storm had already divided us. I couldn't detect a single one of our companions no matter how hard I strained my senses. In this place, it didn't matter that they could have been a single bound away. The storm that separated us made it an unbridgeable gap. It was as if Sol and I were the only two left on the mountain. The only ones left on this earth. So why was it that my heart was beating easier now than it had been before?

Why was it that I felt better about our chances as we resumed our march alone? I pondered it as we climbed.

"You never carved out a spirit block." The immortal storm crown of the Raging Heaven Cult was a vicious opponent, even to those that had faced it once before. We took refuge from the storm whenever it was offered to us. At the moment, that was beneath a familiar stone statue. Sol glanced sidelong at me, confused. There was blood on his face. The hounds hadn't touched him, but they'd shattered mountain stone every time they struck and the flying shards had cut him.

"My what?"

"The blocks of marble I had you carting around," I explained.

"During the qualifying trials before the Rosy Dawn's initiation." He grunted, acknowledging the memory.

"That wasn't all for show, not entirely. Chiseling them was a test of skill. A measure of one's self-awareness, their understanding of their own burgeoning myth."

"And?" Sol asked knowingly. His eyes scanned the storm ahead. We had yet to reunite with any of the Heroes we had entered with, and we hadn't found our wayward eighth either. We may have been close. There was no way to know.

"And," I continued with a flourish of my pankration hands, brandishing all twenty of my stolen blades at the statue of Sisyphus we were crouching underneath.

"The result was its own reward. A statue chiseled by your own pneuma, from a block of spirit marble, is a tether to your own refinement. It grows alongside you, refining itself in a direct reflection of your own progression." The Rosy Dawn dedicated entire temples to the keeping of such statues. As a child, I had wandered up and down those shadowed halls and marveled at the spirit marbles of those that came long before me. Immortalized in their final moments, standing strong and tall and proud.

"They serve as monuments to our journeys, no matter where the winds might take us. A piece that can be left behind." I glanced up meaningfully.

"A part of us preserved." The Twice-Killed Tyrant was as I had left him before, straining against his boulder's weight and hunching down beneath the storm. Cowering at Raging Heaven's wrath.

"What a shame, Sisyphus," I lamented.

"Of all your triumphs and transgressions, this alone is what remains. You waited 'til the very end to flinch." A lightning hound howled in the distance. Sol rose to his feet, gripping the same crackling hand of my intent like a tethering rope.

"We're going."

"If you were to chisel one out here and now, what sort of bearing would it take?" I asked him curiously, rising up as well.

"What expression would you find on your face?"

"The same one as always," the Roman said dryly. That storm flashed in his eyes, a mirror image of our surroundings. Somehow, I doubted that. One of my twenty pankration hands spun its tribulation sword around and drove it into the Twice-Killed Tyrant's back, returning it to its proper place. I spared Sisyphus one last glance before joining Sol on the path up to the peak. Scythas commanded the breeze that carried every spoken word in the Raging Heaven Cult, but that unique ability ended where the storm crown began.

No matter how many times Sol and I called out his name, we never received a response. Though we didn't find any of what we sought, we were found often enough. Standing back-to-back in a narrow cage made of stolen iron swords, Sol and I gasped for breath while another manifestation of tribulation lightning yelped and howled and was torn apart – dispersed amongst the blades. Returned to the earth. It wasn't the first dog that had found us, and I knew it wouldn't be the last.

The longer we spent in this story, the less likely it became that we'd escape it. Between panting breaths, I knocked my head back against Sol's.

"I have an idea, slave." Sol snorted.

"I'm not your slave."

"You were my slave," I pointed out.

"And I'm feeling nostalgic. Humor me."

"No."

"Thank you. My idea is thus: we right the wrongs the Rosy Dawn did unto you and give you a proper marker of your refinement. We carve it here and now. Something that will endure no matter where your journey takes you - a statue worth admiring, even if its subject is a Roman." He sighed.

"This again." The Roman had his bronze spear in hand, the one we'd taken from the temple of the Father. When another point of light appeared amidst the storm clouds, a static growl betraying its true nature, he didn't wait for it to test the limits of my cage again. He reared back and heaved his spear through the gap between two swords and struck the hound between the eyes as it leapt forward. The tribulation hound exploded, like it had been struck by a ballista more than any mortal man's projectile.

A hand of my intent darted out past the cage and caught the spear before it could fly off into the distance and be lost forever, returning it to Sol. He had lost his virtue's invisible touch during our time in Thracia, but he'd gained something else in exchange. He moved with a weight far beyond the limits of his frame now.

"We have no time," he said, accepting his spear when I offered it back and stepping past the safety of the cage. We continued on, retracing steps that I had walked months before.

"We are cultivators. We have nothing but time."

"I have no interest," Sol corrected himself.

"I'll join you," I offered. Through flashing lights and rolling thunder, the Roman glanced sidelong at me in vague disgust.

"I don't want your hands chiseling any part of me from marble."

"Worthless Roman, I'll carve my own. We'll stand together through the storm."

"One immortal vanity isn't enough for you?" I smiled faintly, gathering my blades around us as another howl rose up from the east.

"I never said I had one either." The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"It occurs to me," I said, a few minutes or perhaps a lifetime later, "that we might have been better off waiting outside the storm for Scythas to emerge."

"Likely." We crept like hunting cats along an overhang that looked down over a pack of hunting hounds. Their lightning hides stood out brightly in the storm. Sol gripped his bronze spear in one hand and one of my stolen tribulation swords in the other. Lacking a third to keep hold of his tether to me, he instead held my lightning limb between his teeth. It gave the impression of a constant snarl.

Aside from freeing up his second hand for a blade, it also gave him an excuse to only speak to me in single word increments - if at all. Between the former and the latter, I suspected I knew which had been the more enticing factor.

"It's not too late to double back," I said. It would be treacherous no matter what, but we could make it back down. Seeking out something within the storm crown was an all but fruitless effort, but that did not mean it was impossible to navigate it. No matter how the Storm That Never Ceased sought to addle your senses, it could not move the axis of the world. The crown atop the mountain was only that - a crown. It could not change the nature of the mountain.

Regardless of the path we took, descending down the mountain would lead us back to the Raging Heaven Cult. Scythas knew that fact as well as we did. Sol shook his head and continued on. I chuckled and raised my hands in acquiescence. Of course, the opposite was also true. No matter how long it took us or which mangled paths we were forced to take, our destination was equally assured.

"That's all I wanted to know," I said. We were finally of one mind. So long as we kept climbing, we were bound to reach the peak. We fought tooth and nail for every step, and the storm crown pressed back harder the higher up we went. By the time we reached the point where I had been forced to turn back alone, we were both a mess of blood and lightning burns. It had been a small eternity since we'd seen another tribulation statue. An untraceable amount of time since we'd had a moment's rest.

"Tell me something, slave," I said, and only just dove out of the way in time to avoid the lashing of my own blade. Sol didn't say a word, but he bit down harder on the lightning limb between his teeth and the pain of it was clear enough. I grinned viciously back at him and posed another question.

"Why don't we kill the higher powers?" Lightning screamed down from heaven and struck my risen blades. Sol eyed me. I took it as the invitation it was.

"Before the Scholar and before the Conqueror, how did we cultivate virtue? How did a lowly man refine himself before the ages of philosophers and tyrants?"

"Labors," the son of Rome spoke through a mouthful of lightning.

"Labors," I agreed.

"The Champion's path is the eldest and most vibrant of the three. But even Herakles was laid low in the end." The mountain became steep, too steep to walk, and so I took a sword in each hand and stabbed them like ice picks into the face of the mountain as I climbed. Beside me, Sol did the same with sword and spear.

"Ten labors he suffered," I continued, pulling myself up higher every hand.

"Ten steps up the stairway to promised heaven, and each of them he overcame. And what was handed down from Heaven when the final labor was complete? What was his reward for ten?" Sol's answer was grim.

"Eleven." The Champion was the pinnacle, the gleaming standard that bright-eyed children in every corner of the Free Mediterranean dreamed of one day standing eye-to-eye with. In many ways, Herakles was the embodiment of the Hero's journey. He was the flame. He was the glory. He was the reason there were ten steps in every realm. Because he had suffered ten labors, ten steps on the path to heaven, and he had mastered every one." Eleven," I agreed, and lurched another blade length up the sheer face of Kaukoso Mons.

"The cultivator refined himself ten times, and instead of providence he was given an eleventh step to climb. It was the eleventh step that killed him. It was not the Champion's side of the bargain that was unfulfilled, not a lack of virtue in his heart to blame." Ten labors. Ten steps to the peak. That had been the deal, the bargain struck with the Heavens.

"The reward for ten labors is an eleventh," I ground out.

"The reward for escaping the first realm is the burden of the second." Sol stopped climbing for just a moment and hung from his spear alone, just long enough to take the lightning hand out of his mouth and speak.

"What's your point?"

"Longevity is a curse upon the younger generation. In this tarnished era just as it was in the Golden Age of Heroes, Herakles labored under the Mother's yoke and our Heroes suffer under the thumbs of Tyrants. And for what? Nothing has changed. Our ancestors have erected monuments to reason and to greed, built new labyrinths for their children when they should have been fashioning strings to guide them through instead, and still we're not any of us closer to heaven!"

I slammed my knee against the face of Kaukoso Mons and focused on the silver-bright sensation of pain over the cratering of the stone.

"The son is not beholden to the father for the simple fact that he was born," I said fiercely, daring him to deny me.

"We are not obliged to kneel and press our faces to the dirt so our fathers can stand proud upon our backs!" How did you climb the path to heaven when it was only one man wide? I'd asked Lefteris' boys that question once, on the stairway to raging heaven, and the little king had put to words my sentiment.

"You step over top. On the shoulders of the men who came before you." Those words still rang true in my heart. In a righteous world, they would be true. This was not a righteous world. I kept climbing, leaving Sol behind, and my voice challenged the storm crown's roaring thunder.

"Providence is not a consequence of age. A crown is only as worthy as the man that wears it, and these kings and queens, these higher powers - they are not worthy! We can disanoint them. We can take their crowns." My impromptu ice pick stabbed into the open air, and I heaved myself up over the lip with the hands of my intent. Twin hounds of lightning wrath bared their teeth at me, close enough to count their flickering fangs.

The hound on the left barked, a thunder clap that nearly pushed me back over the edge of the sheer wall I'd just crested. I sneered. I'd had enough of barking dogs. When Sol finally caught up, heaving his ridiculous weight up onto the ledge, I was sitting in a crater with my hands half clenched. The muscles spasmed against my will, fingers curling and uncurling as lightning fought to overcome my body's will. Grasping lightning in your hand was a mad venture every time, and I felt the fruits of that madness keenly.

But the hounds were dead, and I was not.

"Why should we appeal to higher power when it's higher power that's to blame?" I asked the Roman frankly.

"Our companions are battered and beaten down because the Tyrants of this world would rather see their children buried than pass along their crowns. They deserve worse than all that they've inflicted, more than the lightning that is cast down on their heads. They deserve true justice. They deserve tribulation." I might as well have been talking to the wind. The son of Rome was as loyal as a dog to the men that had so half-heartedly raised him, up to and beyond his own detriment.

He'd sooner throw himself into the flame than hold his father to its coals. Worthless, filial- Sol nodded once, and spoke through teeth clenched tightly over lightning.

"Agreed." Something had changed in the Roman. I hadn't noticed it in the chaos preceding our ascent, but the more I looked the clearer I saw it. He was as laconic as he'd ever been. The storm in his eyes hadn't changed. And yet. The initiation rites of the Raging Heaven Cult were not at all like those of the Rosy Dawn. If pressed, I'd guess that they weren't like any other mystery cult's on this earth. They could hardly be called initiation rites at all.

They were not designed to welcome new initiates into the fold. The rites existed only to break them. I had traversed the storm alone my first time and gone further than most before turning, but it had been so long since Sol and I had passed that marker that my past performance seemed like nothing but a poor joke now. It felt like we would never reach the peak. Though I had that thought a hundred times, somehow it never brought my spirits down.

Despite the overpowering fatigue and the weight of all our wounds, the steps never got any heavier. If anything, my feet felt lighter as we climbed. We could have been walking for years, and yet it felt like no time at all had passed. When Sol dropped his sword and his spear and fell to his knees, I thought for a moment that I had imagined that feeling, and that the fatigue would come crashing down on me in the next moment. But it wasn't weariness that had brought the Roman down.

I crouched beside him and joined him in staring at a thin stream of liquid lead as it rolled down the mountain." Prima materia," Sol named it, taking the lightning limb out of his mouth.

"The first material," I mused, dipping the tips of my fingers to it and raising them up. The unnatural smell of it, sharp and brittle as it wound down my throat, invoked a memory that wasn't my own. The drakaina that my father and my uncles had fought as captains of the Sophic Realm, the monstrous serpent women cursed to wander the earth forever undying, had bled a substance just like this. Aristotle had named it ichor.

"Every year that Bakkhos conducted the rites, he'd offer a cup of nectar to any that could reach the top and bring back proof of their passing," Sol explained quietly, eyes flickering to the side. There. Another hair-thin trail a foot away, at the edge of our visible range.

"When the initiates failed, he'd offer the Elders the same opportunity. They refused, always. This is what he'd bring back down in their stead. A cup of liquid lead. This is the proof." His brow drew down. I followed the trail of liquid up until I could trace it no further from where we crouched. I frowned.

"We could fill a cup from here," I said.

"It wouldn't be proof of anything. We aren't at the peak."

"He lied," Sol said, disgusted.

"Bakkhos or the old man?"

"Either of them. Both of them." Sol spat and rose to his feet.

"Whatever the truth is, it's up there." I stood and stretched my arms high above my head. Liars and Tyrants and poisonous wine. I tilted my head to regard the Roman, grinning boyishly.

"Race you." I took off in a dead sprint up the mountain, feet splashing through the thickening trails of liquid lead. The stone shook beneath my feet as Sol raced after me. This world was tarnished iron, less than it should ever be. That had enraged me in the city of Olympia, maddened me in the Orphic House, but the more it discontented me the more I wanted to know.

I'd gone all my life without a drop of water on my tongue, and the first cup I'd been handed upon escaping from my father's domain had been full to the brim with seawater. The more I drank of this world, the less that I was sated. There was a void in my existence, a lack that my soul could not withstand forever. That my virtuous heart would not tolerate. Venturing to Olympia had only made that empty hunger more pronounced. So why was it that here and now, I couldn't feel that gnawing lack at all?

In this raging storm of immortal tribulation, where the brightest spirits of the Raging Heaven were broken and discarded every year. Where Tyrants feared to look, let alone tread? Why did I feel at ease marching through the worst of Raging Heaven, so long as Sol was by my side? Up above me, like the parting of seas, I saw the clouds begin to thin. I realized I was laughing. Sol appeared beside me and we plunged through the gossamer veil together, out of the mayhem and into the eye of the storm.

The peak of Kaukoso Mons. I looked up and saw- To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day--to you, thief of fire, I speak. [] Faceless wretch of silver Heaven. [] Traitor to your sons and brothers. [] Titan of the molded clay. [] Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from-"Prometheus," I breathed, grinding to a halt.

Sol staggered forward a step and planted his spearhead in the stone to brace himself.

"Here?" Sol stared up in baffled disbelief.

"He's not supposed to be here."

"He's not supposed to have a name, either," I said faintly. Or a face. Chained to the peak of Kaukoso Mons by links of swaying adamant, Prometheus the Flame hung limp. Like a man writ larger than any king or god. Like a living constellation. A myth made manifest. How had I forgotten his name? The Titan's eyes opened, and each one was a burning sun.