Chương 169: 1.140

Griffon, The Risen Flame The fight was ours to end. I could see it in their eyes and feel it in their hearts. It was arrogant of me to think it, absurdly so, but the truth of it was plainly so. These men and women - these impossible glories - were breaking apart, their hearts and minds steadily unraveling. The more we stripped away from them the quicker that they scattered. Sol and I drove them back, clashing with such ferocity that our bones began to crack in spite of the fortifying ichor burning in our blood.

It was a testament to their stature that even as they danced with deviation, each of our would-be companions pushed us to our furthest limits. Every moment, in every exchange, I watched myself die. I saw them snuff me out, and I knew that the man I was today had no chance of defying their strength. Kyno stepped into my octagon, feinting right and surging left, trying to slip past me and free Sah-Bakari from my blade. I took him to the ground, dwarfed by his stature and his horrible strength both.

Even his flexibility outstripped my own. Against such a physical gap, superior technique meant all too little. I saw it vividly. My limbs broken, my face twisted by a massive hand to snap my neck. I may as well have been a child trying to wrestle a lion. I burned my heart's blood, sacrificed and spent my potential, and made a lion of myself. I grappled him, matching him strength for strength and overwhelming him in the rain.

Despite his size, Kyno was an ambush hunter - and I had invited him into my den with full awareness. In seconds I had him submitted, his cheek driven into the dirt so that he could see his crocodile familiar writhing in agony. I put terrible pressure on his right shoulder, forcing him to choose. To his credit, the Huntsman didn't hesitate. He lunged forward, shouting, wrenching his right arm out of its socket while his left gripped the hilt of the King's Curse and tore it out of Sah-Bakari's mouth.

His hand spasmed and dropped the blade the instant it was out, the skin of his palm a burnt and bubbling mess where it had touched the hilt. I caught the King's Curse with the blood-stained hands of my intent, spun it around and drove it down through the Huntsman's back. His Loving Muse skipped past cursing me to a grave, condemning me with her impotent heckling straight to dark Tartarus instead. But she withdrew, wanton fingers pried off of Kyno's heart.

I waved mockingly with the scarlet hands of my intent as she fled. It gave me no satisfaction. She would be back. They all would. I ripped the blade from the Hero's back before it could do lasting damage, rising up and tossing him from my octagon. By the time I'd finished collecting my octagon swords, Sah-Bakari was gone - rolling fitfully out of existence to escape. I ran wild. I burned. Scythas alone shone brighter than he ever had before.

Even as Sol hammered him down again and again with the full weight of the captain's conviction, the Hero from the Hurricane Heights struck back even harder. All the while, in the shadow of his cloak, lurking in the juncture between death and deviation, that stone siren of his waited for the moments that he needed her help most. There was so much that I didn't know. We left Olympia behind, striking through the starlit stades between the ruined city and its nearest coast.

We rushed along the grim line of the Rein-Holder's molten scar, tracing it back to the wine-dark Ionian. They couldn't stop us. They hardly knew why they were trying. I had a decade left to burn. By the time we reached the coast I would have less. I could end this now if I desired it. Abandoned by their higher powers and stripped bare of all their hopes, they would crumble if I struck them down. I would win - a junior Philosopher matched against six great Heroes.

A lowly sophist, the instrument of a rotting institution's just collapse. It would be a victory worth telling stories of. All I had to do was leave this world worse off than I had found it. My heart throbbed, despising the very thought. I hadn't freed them of their chains just to watch them wither. I hadn't told a lie when I had promised them a place within my world. What would be the point of it all if I let it end like this? What would have been the point of all their pain?

How could I justify their suffering if I didn't make them better than they'd been before? I couldn't, of course. That premise was flawed. It had been from the start.

"This heat is justice. If it burns you, it's your own lack that's to blame."

"Not everyone is made of iron. For some, the fire only burns." Both of them were wrong. Humanity wasn't nearly so easy to refine. Heart of iron. I advanced, burning my remaining years down to single digits. Heart of brass. Sol marched on, a legion man at war again. Heart of fire. Heart of glass. Elissa bled out through her blade, too battered to be dancing yet too proud to concede. Her bronze sword was short as a dagger now, nicked and melted along the scant edge that still remained.

Without her muse, without a living Tyrant to appease, she had nothing but her spite. Brittle, clear, and hollow. Lefteris fought me like a man possessed, his murderous hatred replaced by black accusation. He fought to have his chains back, desperate for his muse's tethering. His resentment and his sudden desperation would burn him to the ground if only someone cast a spark his way. Kyno stalked on through the rain, hunted and yet ever the hunter.

There was fear there in his eyes, more apparent the longer that we clashed, but there was grim resolve, too. Even when his crocodile failed to return from its hidden place, he never once tried to flee. He weathered my blows, determined to outlast me, to protect the rest of the world from my fury. Even if it meant burning out beside me. I had been drawn to these three for the same reason Sol's trio had been drawn to him. There was a resonance in our stories, a rhyme within our hearts.

Where Sol's Heroes had been washed ashore, cast out and forced to flee from broken worlds, my trio had come to Olympia pursuing. Seeking something for themselves. I had felt that from the outset, remembered it in the drunken stories that we'd shared the day after Bakkhos died. And I had made the fatal mistake of thinking that our resonance made us the same. A flame could do more than burn or blind. There was a reason that we kept a hearth in every home. A reason that the most vibrant flowers only bloomed at dawn.

I had erred twice with these Heroes. I had made a mistake in thinking that we were the same. Worse than that though, unforgivable to the grave, when I had finally realized that we weren't, I'd decided that our contrast made them less. Iron and brass made better swords than glass, but a Hero was more than just a striking blade. If I accepted that a Hero's highest calling was to cut down, to sever, then I was no different from the gladiators in that bloody pit.

There were as many paths to glory as there were stars above. And there could be even more than that, if only this world allowed them to be born. The Huntsman. The Sword Song. The Gold-String Guardian. They had the power to make wonders on this earth. All they lacked was the hope needed to try. The path forward was darkened by mystery faith, obstructed by the corpulent souls of those that had started their climb first and refused to finish last.

These Heroes didn't know what they were capable of, how far they'd come already - how close they were to the peak. They hadn't seen Heaven defied in any way that truly mattered. They didn't know it was possible outside of myth. My children are freezing. My children are blind. All this time I'd tried to temper them, when what they'd lacked was guiding light. If this world wasn't what it was meant to be, I simply had to refine it.

If these broken hearts had lost sight of pure passion and defiance, I had no choice but to rekindle them myself. I had to show them it could be done. Screaming winds preceded the whistling scythe. Scythas raged against the storm, gathering more of it with every swing of his obsidian harvester. The breeze aided him as surely as the stone siren did, muffling and amplifying the sound of his passage, pitching it around, making it impossible to track him by ear and disorienting to even try.

His pneuma continued pouring out of him in a flood, showing no signs of stopping. My brother marched grimly through it all, far from me yet ever by my side. Though their exchanges left weeping gouges in his flesh, Sol did not relent. Though his heart was dwindling as surely as my own, the passing seconds never made him less. Through the fire and past the storm, there was something new there in his eyes, something I had never seen in him before. It was hope.

Sol matched himself against the Hurricane Harvester in the throes of his Heroic ascension, and the Roman forced the Hero back with every exchange. He burned, he bled, and he learned from every wound. He adapted. He grew stronger. I'd always known he would. We differed in uncountable ways, but we were exactly the same in every one that mattered. Heart of iron. Heart of brass. It was the losing battle that defined us.

"I trusted you!" Scythas howled, furious vapor-tears spilling from his eyes. His swings were growing wild, easier to avoid.

"I confided in you! I betrayed my father, abandoned my wife! I would have fought for you! I would have died for you!" Sol dodged or diverted with his spear every wild slice, but there was no saving him from the accusations. They cut him deeper than any blade could, straight through to his heart. My own clenched in sympathetic suffering.

"I know," Sol said, lunging up underneath the arcing scythe and reaching for the Hero's throat. The stone siren chose that moment to manifest, catching his wrist and clamping down to break it. Sol reared his head back and slammed his forehead into hers. The stone statue of a woman reeled back, and the Roman kicked her chosen Hero in the chest.

"You lied to all of us! You lied to me." Scythas bared blood-stained teeth, righting himself in midair as he flew back.

"I did."

"You swore you'd stand with me against the storm, to help me save my brother! You swore it on the Styx. You lied!"

"No." Gravitas took hold of the current in the air, shifting its course so that the more it tried to stabilize the Hero, the harder it battered him instead. Sol advanced with fire in his eyes, smoldering heat behind every word.

"I'm not the man I led you to believe in. I'm worth less than you deserve for everything you've given me. Those things are plainly true- but I will not be less forever. And though you owe me nothing, although you're right to hate me, that oath was not a lie." Sol clenched his left hand into a fist and took Scythas in hand. The Hero's stone siren strained against the invisible fist of the captain's virtue, prying its fingers apart even as Sol burned more of his blood to spite her.

With passion and with purpose joined, Sol refined the oath he'd given Aleuas.

"I swear to you, my heart and soul upon my city, I will help you save your brother." That said, Sol cast his empty hand out, and gravitas flung Scythas back the way we'd come. Heart of iron. Heart of brass. I should have known my brother wouldn't scatter them like broken glass. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Sol set his sights on Anastasia in the distance where his punch had flung her back.

The Caustic Queen drank weakly from a cup of golden wine, her chest shuddering beneath her funeral silks as the nectar did its work. When she saw the Roman running her down, her pupils shrank to pinpricks and her pneuma surged to greater heights. I had my own battles to fight. Without their muses, the trio of Heroes I'd burned were forced to fall back on tactics and techniques they'd long since left behind in the Sophic Realm. They railed against me with rhetoric long rusted by disuse.

They levied potent truths and higher ideals in place of their Heroic miracles. As if they needed the guidance of a muse to shine defiant. It had been years since any of them had fought this way, and it showed. But beyond that rust, deeper than I could have seen without the King's Curse acting as my eyes, I saw what could have been. What could still be, if they only tried.

"You aren't justice," Lefteris spat. I drilled him through the dirt with fists of rosy violence.

"You're worse than any flame!"

"I thought you were an omen - a warning sent by the sun." Elissa tumbled back from the King's Curse, the weapon in her hands more hilt now than it was blade. Her glare had not lost any reach.

"But you're worse! You're worse than any tribulation!"

"You've ruined us." Kyno tried to bring me down like I was some feral creature. I punished him for it with fists and knees and striking elbows. His eyes were haunted.

"You'll ruin more before it's done. You're worse than any starving beast." I dug my heels into the earth, sliding like an eagle glides. The Heroes I'd maligned gathered themselves in turn, controlling their momentum and rising up against me. It was instinct that drove them. Without their Tyrants or their Muses, with nothing but their flames, they opposed me because that was what they were beneath it all. They were fighters. They were mine.

"I'm worse than what you think," I declared over the wind. They tensed and reached for glory.

"I'm nothing so succinct - not a fire you can douse, not a tribulation you can endure, and not a monster you can slay." I had four years left remaining in my heart. I cast three into the flame, and from their embers rose three pairs of bloodstained hands.

"I'm the answer to the question you were too afraid to ask!" Is this the best that I can be? Of course the answer was no.

"You don't need them. You never did!" I saw their resentment. I saw their rage. But clearer still, I saw their fear that I was right - that they'd wasted all these years in search of helping hands they'd never once required.

"Don't believe me? I'll prove it!" My hands were stained by scarlet sin. As one, all of my violent intent surged forward in a storm of striking limbs. In the moment of their distraction, the six bloody hands that I had given three of my last four years to slipped past the rest and plunged into their chests through the wounds left by the King's Curse. By the time they reacted it was too late.

The echoes of my scarlet sin settled around their hearts, stained hands cupping together to form a barrier against any and all incursion. Elissa, Lefteris, and Kyno staggered back from me, somehow more aghast now than they'd been before. They dug helpless fingers into their chests, scrabbling for some loose strand to yank my influence out by. They grasped nothing but their own skin.

"I'll prove the peak is closer than you think!" I knocked them off their feet while they were distracted by horror, pursuing faster than the wind.

"I'll show you what your souls are made of! Because I'm worse than any demon of your heart!" I told them what they deserved to hear. The truth I'd been too proud to say all this time that I'd known them.

"I'm the passion you forgot - the promise that you'll win!" I blew past them, racing for the sea. Between one step and the next, Selene was sprinting by my side.

"Where do we go?" she shouted. Her hair whipped golden-bright behind her, her scarlet eyes flaring as they settled on the distantly burning shore. Her voice was thick with despair as she continued, "My father, he- there's nothing left of the docks! There aren't any ships left to charter!"

"Then we'll swim!"

"We'll never make it!" I bumped her shoulder with mine, all, but knocking her off her feet. Finally, she turned her bleak eyes from the burning shore and instead glared up at me.

"We won't know until we've tried," I told her fiercely. She wavered. Then, from beyond the burning curtain of Olympia's scoured dock city, there came an eagle's hunting cry. And as if it had been summoned from the burning depths themselves, the reaching hand of the Eos' figurehead pierced through the flames, followed swiftly by the ship herself. I couldn't help it. Despite it all, I laughed. There was no time to wait for the ship to come to shore, and Polyzalus had turned the beach to molten glass regardless.

We leapt clear over the corpse of the dock town, past the burning waves, and hit the deck rolling. The sea dogs toiling at her oars shouted, crying out first in alarm and then in joyful recognition. I rolled up into a crouch, sliding back across the deck, and slammed the King's Curse home into its sheath. Its stark insight and its overwhelming hunger vanished from my heart. Selene tumbled and crashed through a bench.

The men turned away from their oars, rushing back to aid us, and a child's shrill cry rang out from the crow's nest atop the mast.

"BRACE!" The pirate child screamed as my brother reached the apex of his leap and fell. Sol struck the deck hard enough to crater stone. The Eos dipped precariously down, the men screaming and flying off their feet, and the image of an eagle burnt into the ship's frame flared blindingly bright beneath the deck before abruptly catching flame. Sol rose up and turned to meet our end. Five Heroic souls - no, six - had followed us to shore.

As we watched, the men in horror and Selene in numb despair, Scythas exploded up over the dock city's burning corpse, dragging a storm behind him in the shape of a harvesting scythe. Anastasia, Lefteris, Elissa, and Kyno were just a single step behind him, leaping over the breakwater after us. Only Jason didn't follow, stumbling to stop as quickly as he had reappeared from the burning treeline of the coastal fir forest. He stared at the churning waves, paralyzed by fear at the defining moment. That still left five.

I only had a year left in my heart, not nearly enough to match them all. The hand that gripped the King's Curse reversed its motion, pulling the blade free once more- Glory overwhelming poured out from my brother's soul, more than he had leveraged in the entirety of the fight thus far. More than all of his prior sacrifices combined. Sol reached out and closed his hand into a fist. Scythas howled a challenge, the skies above echoing the call.

With heavy deliberation, Sol unfolded his thumb from his closed fist, jutting it out to the side. Kyno, Anastasia, Lefteris, and Elissa matched their pneuma against his current. Sol turned his thumb down. All five Heroes and every cloud above their heads slammed down through the waves. The sea dogs that had come to save us clutched the ship's rails, her benches, and even each other in search of sure footing as the axis of the world shifted on a scale that defied mortal understanding.

The Heroes plummeted to the shallow bottom of the breakwater boundary. It wasn't as deep as I would have liked, but it would have to be enough. We'd need to be swift- Sol snarled, his eyes burned golden-bright, and the Ionian Sea around us cratered down to twice its furthest depth. I watched, wide eyed, as the molten glass at its edges and the encroaching tides behind us rushed to fill the sudden gap in walls of coursing waterfalls. The Heroes were so far down I could hardly see them now.

More than far enough for us to make our escape.

"Solus," Selene protested. The son of Rome ignored her. The Ionian buckled further beneath his fist.

"That's enough," I told him. He didn't respond, didn't acknowledge us at all.

"Sol!" I snapped, rising to a swordsman's stance. Sol kept burning, driving them down further still. I couldn't see them fighting anymore. A moment later, I couldn't see them at all. The King's Curse ground against its sheathe as I drew a sliver of it out. Sol stared steadily ahead. Not at the five Heroes that he'd buried, but at one still standing at the shore. Jason's chest heaved, his heart tearing itself to pieces as he watched his peers sink helplessly down.

He looked from the sinking shore to us, to Sol, and I could see it in his eyes. He was broken already. This moment would unmake him." Brother," I said.

"You'll kill them." Sol buried them deeper. I moved to cross the deck. The moment passed, and Jason was- Jason was leaping forward. The Hero of the Alabaster Isles dove into the sinking whirlpool, his terror cast aside like anchor weight, and plunged down to his certain death. Two bolts of tribulation lightning struck the sinking sea - and through the sliver of the King's Curse that I'd drawn from its sheath, I saw his glory written in the stars.

JASON GOES DOWN WITH THE SHIP The blackened depths warped and contorted as the advancing Hero's glory clashed against the captain's grim authority. Sol abruptly released his white-knuckled fist, exhaling explosively and staggering back. Selene and I caught him on either side, holding him steady on his feet. Scattered around us on the smoking deck of the ship, the Eos' motley crew stared at Sol like he'd turned the night to day. Overhead, Sorea let fly a thunderous cry, spreading his wings wide over us all.

"Where to, cap'n?" the pirate child called down to Sol. Our eyes shifted south and east.

"To safer shores," Sol decided. We sat with our backs against the rail as the night gave way to day, Selene wedged between Sol and I with each of our arms slung across her shoulders. Our ragged sea dogs were splayed across every available surface, sleeping like the dead after hours of back breaking rowing. The hands of my violent intent worked the oars steadily in their absence. There wasn't a sliver of land on any one of our horizons.

Selene slept soundly, her head nestled into Sol's side and her bloodied hand held tight in mine. Her eyes were rimmed red by long hours of crying. Once we'd left Olympia behind us and the frenzy had abated, the girl had finally allowed herself to break down. She'd sobbed herself to sleep in the end. In the silence of predawn, I told Sol the story of it all. My life before I met him, the full scope of my sin.

And in turn, Sol told me of his vision and the false Anastasia that had delivered it to him, the new conviction that had driven him to send Sorea off in search of a ship before we'd even synthesized our nectar. When all was said and done, we stared across the wine-dark sea at the rosy fingered dawn. Spent in more ways than one.

"How much did you keep?" I asked him. We both knew what I meant.

"A year. Maybe two. You?"

"Less." Sol grunted.

"Might be more than we deserve."

"Arrogant Roman. We weren't the executioner, nor were we the blade. I won't let you take this all upon yourself."

"We played our part. Thousands suffered for our failure. I won't let you make light of our mistakes."

"I don't intend to." I squeezed Selene's hand tight in mine. It was delicate, frail in a way I didn't like. Too easy to break. No matter how great or small, we had played our part in this world's iron decline.

"My heart won't accept anything but a full atonement."

"And what would be enough to make right of our wrongs?" As if he didn't know.

"We'll make this world golden bright again." We lapsed into resolved silence. The Eos cut gently through the waves. Sol glanced sidelong at me. The flames behind his eyes were embers now, hardly there at all.

"Still think tribulations are the best part?" I chuckled, quietly so I wouldn't wake my foolish little sister, and finally the tears fell. My mother was dead, her blood a stain upon my soul. Her daughter, my sister, had lost both a mother and a father because of my mistaken judgment. The Heroic souls we had chosen for companions wanted us dead, along with every Tyrant in Olympia and even more I couldn't name. My future could no longer be measured in centuries or decades - only seasons, months, and days.

Heaven will hurt you in ways your fellow man could never think to, warned Prometheus the Flame. I am the first of your tribulations, warned Melpomene the Tragic Muse, playfully, as though this was all of it a game. Perhaps to her it was. High heaven had blindsided me for my hubris, foregoing lightning for a far more fatal cut. Higher power had tried to break me down, and without Sol it may well have succeeded. Yet in so doing, heaven had shown its hand.

The Fates had spoken through the weave of their design, declaring who I was and how I could be broken to anyone with eyes to see. If I could see the weavers' echo in their weave, I could unravel their purpose along with their threads. I could study them through the lens of their designs. I could begin to understand them. I could begin to see them. And if I could see them, I could consume them. Were tribulations the best part? I hefted the adamant dagger in my right hand, twirling it deftly between my fingers.

"No," I finally decided, smiling wryly while I wept.

"Tribulations are-" -the most important part. I watched the sun rise as a man that hadn't existed before that very moment appeared suddenly behind me. I waited for Sol to react to him. He didn't. Interloper. I've had enough of your kind today to last me a thousand lifetimes- I don't need your favor. I don't want to hear your terms. I won't give you a single drop my blood, so get out of my sight. The spirit chuckled, the sound of it a low and rolling rumble.

He propped an arm on the crown of my head, leaning with his back against mine. He had no cloak of stars or shining crown to mark his status. Turned away from me as he was, I couldn't see his face at all. Belatedly, I felt the ruby hanging from my stolen necklace burning white-hot against my chest. Presumptuous descendent mine. You've only just begun to tell a story worth my time - my attention is the only golden favor you'll get. I don't want it. As though I care. We sailed into the sun.