Chương 154: 1.125

The Son of Rome"GO!" the Titan roared, as the phoenix of the caucuses savaged him with its talons-"SEEK SAFER SHORES," the Titan commanded, as the legions of Rome fell screaming up into the sky. We raced down the mountain without a moment's pause for the Storm That Never Ceased. Our steps were bounding, our energy overflowing. The tribulation hounds that pursued us in our descent were met with Griffon's lightning limbs and the tip of my celestial spear.

Our momentum was unstoppable, as much within as it was without. The Titan Flame's golden ichor burned in my stomach, warming me to the tips of my fingers and toes and growing warmer every second. My every step crushed the loose stones on Kaukoso Mons and caused the nearby veins of amethyst to flare indigo-bright, but in spite of that my heart felt lighter than it had in years. The weight on my shoulders was heavier than it had ever been, but I no longer doubted my ability to bear it up.

"STAND READY WHEN THE CAPTAIN CALLS." It was one thing to see the truth of something with your own eyes, to live through that experience for good and for ill. No matter how harrowing a thing might be, no matter how cruel or improbable, it was human nature to trust what your eyes told you if nothing else at all. The secondhand conveyance of that lived experience was another thing entirely. No matter what the Greeks claimed, theirs was not the only way to cultivate - and further, it was not a perfect way forward.

Even my mentor, one of their greatest thinkers, had acknowledged that much. Some things had to be seen firsthand. Some things could not be taken on faith alone. When the imposter wearing Anastasia's face had presented me with her living memory of Caesar's Edict, my desire to believe her had been desperate. But some things were too outlandish to be taken on faith.

I had never heard of a philosopher using their rhetoric to convey a lie of lived experience, but neither had I seen a titan of lightning wrath appear above my own legion as I had the men in her memory. I had seen staggering wonders and horrors both during my time afield, but never had my eyes seen anything like that. I still didn't fully trust the mad visions I had seen in the Orphic house. How, then, could I trust the story of an imposter?

The woman wearing Anastasia's face had struck me with her memory like a club and vanished into the night before I could regain my senses. Then, tragedy of tragedies, Socrates had returned and declared the nectar spoiled. I had wanted to believe in the truth of her lived experience. I had desired it so desperately that I could have spit blood. But I wasn't that foolish anymore. Then I'd laid eyes on the Titan Flame, and realized I knew even less of this world than I'd thought.

"KNOW THAT GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR'S WILL HAS CAST YOU OUT." There were calamities in this world that I had never even imagined beyond the boundaries of night fire stories. Buried beneath the earth and chained to unseen mountain peaks were answers to questions I had forgotten how to ask. I had been arrogant. I had dismissed the imposter's memory not in spite of my desires, but because of them.

I had grown so used to having no hope at all that its sudden arrival had felt like thrusting my frost-bitten heart into a roaring flame. Who was I to doubt the General of the West, to question what he had been capable of in his final moments? Compared to what I had seen inside the Storm That Never Ceased, what was so impossible about Caesar's final act? How could his Edict be any more outlandish than the enemy that had necessitated it - the legions of unnatural demons that I had seen with my own eyes?

Killed with my own hands? Nothing. Nothing at all. Griffon's joy was dazzling as we burst out of the storm crown and inhaled the open air. I couldn't have stifled my own smile if I'd tried. I had been aimless the day I set foot in the city of Olympia. The wisdom of an old mentor had been the only thing left for me to cling to, along with the cold comfort of my resolve. I had arrived seeking a spark to light my own pyre, and what I'd found instead was something infinitely greater. I had found hope.

Seek safer shores. My city had fallen, but Rome was more than concrete and winding roads. I had failed Caesar, failed my legion, but the war was not yet over. I was not all that remained. It could no longer be enough for me to share a funeral flame with Carthage's dogs, not when I was needed elsewhere. Seek safer shores. The legions of Rome were lost. Caesar's hand had cast them out and only the General of the West knew where they'd been sent.

Hundreds of thousands of Roman soldiers and provincial citizens of the Republic, gone as if they'd never been. They were lost. But I could find them. SEEK SAFER SHORES. And I would. I would cover every coast on this earth with the print of my boot if that was what needed to be done. We kept on running without pause, racing down the craggy mountain path towards the invisible line that turned Tyrant eyes away. Griffon caught my eye and clenched the fist he'd marked with Herakles' blade.

"Enough of barking dogs," he reminded me. As if I'd forget. I raised my own clenched fist and knocked it against his.

"Enough of higher powers." I'd do whatever it took to bring Roma's lost legions home. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. And when the work was done, it would be my own hands that nailed their traitorous generals to the cross. — It had been early morning when we first set foot inside the storm crown, the rosy dawn a bright promise of the coming day.

When Griffon and I came charging out we found the celestial glory descending swiftly into burning dusk. The final day before the month of mandatory training for the Olympic Games was nearly at its end. In our absence, the Raging Heaven Cult had fallen into madness. We raced down stone-carved steps ten at a time and very quickly found ourselves enveloped in a chaos I'd seen the likes of only once before.

Only on the first day of the Rosy Dawn's initiation rites had I seen such an undisciplined mass of cultivators laying into each other like this. The difference here and now was the scale of it all. The brawling crowds and spirited games that had spilled across the Scarlet City's eastern mountain range during the rites had been composed primarily of civic cultivators, and low ranking ones at that.

They had all been of the Rosy Dawn, and though I hadn't taken the time to count them all back then, I was confident their sum total hadn't surpassed a thousand. The Rosy Dawn was in some ways only half a cult, and doubly limited in its scope by its colonial status. The Raging Heaven Cult, by contrast, was the largest institution of its kind. The baseline for its mystikos stood an entire realm above the Rosy Dawn, and there were thousands of them.

More importantly than either of those facts, though, was what the Raging Heaven lacked in comparison to Griffon's humble colony cult. Even the chaos of the Rosy Dawn's initiation rites had been carefully controlled by the unseen hand of Damon Aetos. The Raging Heaven, by contrast, had lacked a clear leader since Bakkhos' death. Its internal factions had been left to stew in that uncertainty for months, jumping at every shadow and eyeing every faction outside their own.

All of them waiting for the bones to drop, and all of them dreading their new place in the mountain's hierarchy when they settled. I didn't know whose hand it had been to cast the dice, but it was plain to see that they'd been cast. Men and women in torn silks and dangling sleeves of blue, yellow, fuschia, and grass green abounded near the peak.

Though there were others caught in the press, most notably the native members of the Raging Heaven with no affiliation to other cults, the vast majority were from the factions I had dealt with since returning from Thracia. Some of them recognized my face as we sprinted down the steps. A mid-ranking Sophic cultivator from the Howling Wind Cult lurched away from the woman he'd been beating bloody and called out frantically to me as we passed.

Whatever he said was lost in the dull roar of the hundreds waging crude war all around us, and when he tried to pursue us his opponent took the opportunity to leap onto his back and dig her nails into his eyes. He was far from the only one to call out to us, but we didn't slow down for any of them. Our momentum was only growing more unstoppable the more of the mayhem our eyes beheld. The Titan's golden ichor was only growing brighter within me, cycling faster and hotter every time my heart beat.

We ran, avoiding what could be avoided and brushing aside what could not with pankration intent and limbs made heavy by the weight of better men. The enormity of it, the aimless violence - there were children in the mix. They were young prodigies with potential far beyond their peers, but it did them little good when adults twice their size broke their teeth against the stone steps. Everywhere I looked I saw the mad injustice of Greece on proud display. No. This went beyond the worst of Greek culture.

This aimless, staggering violence was a cultivator's sin first and foremost. Griffon and I broke up the worst of what we saw, but only what we could reach without breaking stride. A brawl on this scale was beyond either of our abilities to stop. We lacked the power. More importantly, we lacked the time. [Seek safer shores.] Whatever came of this, a portion of it would be on my head. Even so, I wouldn't waste another day on this mountain.

Fortunately, there were forces on this mountain that could raise their hand against this chaos and snuff it like a candle. That one of them hadn't already stepped in told me the stalemate between the Raging Heaven's Elders was still holding strong. That changed tonight." Say this works," Griffon called out to me in the voice of his soul, the words carrying easily through the equally soundless cacophony of weaponized rhetoric.

"Assume that Old 'Zalus lets us in to see his wife at all, and take it on faith that he loves her enough that curing her wins his favor. What then?" Two young men in ragged Waning Wax attire appeared in my path, both of them near the peak of the Sophic Realm. They each shouted a warning, and at the same time they struck out at me with the strength of learned truths. I lowered my shoulder and stepped through their influence, and then I stepped through them.

They were both flung back in different directions, bonelessly, as if they'd been struck by a charging bull.

"He puts a stop to whatever this is," I answered Griffon.

"And when all seven of his peers strike him down for stepping out of his gilded cage?"

"Not seven. Four. The other four are on my side. With 'Zalus, we'll have the majority. They won't start a fight they have any chance of losing, not if they can avoid it." Griffon vaulted over a man and a woman that were kicking seven shades of shit out of a boy his cousin's age, and as he passed his pankration hands gripped each of their heads and slammed them together. He cocked a golden eyebrow at me while the two fell into a limp heap behind us.

"They're only 'on your side' because they hate Zalus more than they revile you. What makes you think they'll stand with him? What makes you think he'll stand with them?"

"Experience." Griffon barked a laugh.

"And after that? Once the dust has settled and we've returned to where we started, what do we do about the question of the crown? Even a city like Olympia isn't large enough for five men to rule it."

"It's larger than that. The indigo throne is large enough to seat eight."

"Ho?" Scarlet eyes glittered with anticipation. Caesar's Edict had changed everything, and at the same time it had changed nothing at all. My current purpose had no impact on the actions I'd taken as a raven among crows. The consequences remained the same, and here and now they were spilling over like blood on Kaukoso Mons. Indirectly or not, I could see my hand in this mayhem. If it was a choice between my conscience and the people of Rome, I'd suffer the sleepless nights without a second thought.

Thankfully, this situation wasn't quite that binary. There was work here that I could do before I set sail for safer shores. I couldn't replace Bakkhos, but that was fine. A city could survive without a king. Even better, it could thrive. Left to their own devices, the Tyrants of the Raging Heaven Cult would sooner drink liquid lead than embrace their fellow Elders in alliance. However. My time as the Raven had proven they could be persuaded.

My unlikely coalition, threadbare as it may have been, was proof enough that they could play the game if pressed. A greater theater could force them all to stand together, if only for a time. Unfortunately for the Raging Heaven's venerable Elders, and fortunately for everyone else in Olympia, that greater threat would be here in a month. What better enemy to bring them all together than the upstart kyrioi that had taken their old thrones? It wasn't a perfect solution, but the best ones never were.

It would have to be enough. Though the words were silent to my ears, the voice of my soul resounded with the pride I felt for my once great city - my still great city.

"In Rome, we called them the Triumvirate." —