Chương 191: [2.19] Twice-Named and Twice-Forgotten

Sol, The Raven From Rome I still couldn't see Selene, but as I ripped and tore my way through the corpse-domain of a long-dead titan, I heard her voice in the distance—clear as crystal and sweet as mad honey.

"Bakkhos offered me the one thing that could withstand the weight of a heart flame's burden alone," she said.

"A pillar that could not be broken under any pressure, even if it was the only one left standing in my soul. A column of his own creation, dug up from the depths of his own wine-dark heart.

"Impressed by my conviction—""A strong word."

"— dazzled by my resolve, he offered this to me with only one string still attached." There came a rumbling, in the dark beneath the surface of the primordial sea.

"You'll have to come and take it." From the soup of titan bile emerged a creature that could swallow cities and shatter mortal minds with its visage. It forced its way up out of the sea, not winding like a serpent, but spilling onto the stage like intestines from a disemboweled stomach.

It opened all eight thousand mouths along the surface of its sinuous bulk, turned its single unblinking eye upon me, and cracked that eye open along the ridges of eight segments, each one blooming like the petals of a flower to reveal a barbed tongue that had tasted titan ichor so many times that it had lost all pleasure in the sensation. That barbed tongue flickered through the air, tasted my vital essence in the dark, and all eight thousand of its gaping mouths began to keen in slavering desire.

The silver-age gut worm poured over me, like it was liquid more than it was a living beast, and swallowed me up in an instant. Through the tattered-cloth of the Raven veil, I could see even what went on inside that unfathomable parasite with perfect clarity. It was worse than being blind. By the time I tore myself out the other end of it, dragging it across the oil-slicked marble and kicking its coils back into the wine-dark sea of clouds one pile at a time, I was more than half mad.

"He promised that no harm would come to me from any demon of his heart while I walked within his shadow," Selene said, perhaps to reassure us. Still, she hesitated at the next line.

"And yet… it may be best if what I saw in that place remains behind the curtain. His domain was not a pleasant place—even to those he wished well."

"How cruel." I found her, then, as I stepped through the quivering chitin of an armored lamprey. I tossed its alien skull to the ground and crushed it underfoot. Selene lifted her head at the same time that I spotted her, and for a moment I thought our eyes met. But her low-burning eyes slid past me without recognition, or any awareness of my presence at all, and settled on the distant audience while she wrenched her spear from the corpse of a newly risen heart demon.

It was one that she had killed before—and I saw that it wasn't the first one that she'd been forced to kill again. The crumpled corpses of eight other demons lay scattered at her feet. As Selene rose proudly to her full height, I realized that she couldn't see me at all. She stared through the primordial madness that had fallen like a shadow across her heart without a hint of unease, and I knew that it wasn't me alone. She couldn't see anything that went on within the shadows.

All this time, she had thought we were sitting quietly in the dark, spectating from the stands—the same now as before. Even now, she was under the Tyrant Riot's protection. A protection she wasn't aware existed. One that did not extend to her audience. Ting. Another chime shivered through the primordial dark, and I turned back to look across the short, limitless distance to the opposite end of the stage. There, I saw the hunched figure of the Tyrant Riot, raising that hammer high.

In the churning shadows that surrounded him, he looked larger than he had before—his outline blurred, making it impossible to tell where the actress in the blank mask ended and the shadowed silhouette began.

"My tenth pillar of principle was a gift that was very nearly more trouble than it was worth," Selene declared.

"Unfortunately, those are the only gifts a man like Bakkhos is willing to give."

"I can assure you, I am willing to give worse gifts than that."

"Still, it was a gift that I needed," she went on, "and by internalizing it, I found a way to close the incomplete circle of my soul." Slowly but surely, the corpse of the long-devoured titan began to fade from the world around us. The sea of clouds that had been there from the very beginning began to thin and dissipate. The scarlet glow did not return, but a new, far more vibrant source of light rose up around the edges of the platform in its place." I kill heart demons.

By taking that ideal upon myself, I found a way to bind together all the mismatched links of chains that I had broken away from the hearts of others." As the last of the clouds faded, I leaned out over the edge of the platform and beheld a mad wonder.

"Nine pillars that I stole with a singular purpose. The one and only tenth pillar that I was given to consolidate them. Bound by virtue, they form an unblemished truth." The actress on the stage vanished, and the statue of the Saint appeared once more, perched atop her honeycomb tripod—a statue dedicated to her first heroic act.

"I am Selene," she declared proudly, and the sanctum of her soul pulsed with the truth of her purpose.

"The Scarlet Heart that deviation dreads." As the psychedelic curtains fell one last time on the shadowed stage of the Saint, I stared down over the edge at the total eclipse of her heart. The curtain of heaven stretched out endlessly beneath the platform of her foundation — infinite star-bright constellations that were slowly but surely eating away at the primordial rot, banishing it back to the chthonic hovel where it belonged.

The crown to that celestial kingdom was a ring of fire a thousand-thousand leagues across, burning far below the platform of Selene's foundation. The surface of that sun loomed larger than it had ever had in the real world—close enough to make ashes of every peak and valley on earth. Close enough to boil every sea down to salt.

The only thing that stood between that sun-crown and the world within Selene's heart was the shadow-shield of a moon that had eclipsed it perfectly, such that only the burning halo of its majesty could be seen leaking out around the edges. It was an awe-inspiring vista. And if that had been all there was to it, it would have been astonishing enough for any first-rank Heroine. But what drew my eyes in wonder wasn't the curtain of stars, or even the Total Eclipse of the Heart.

It was what those lights had illuminated, directly underneath the platform of her foundation. I leaned out over the edge of the platform and beheld nine more below it, each one the same size as the first, and beneath them all, a tenth that was as large as the rest of them put together.

Each scarlet stage had been hung in the shadow of the one that came before it, joined to the one above it and the one below it by a single unbroken pillar of shadow-tainted adamant that ran through all eleven and supported their combined weight on its own. Each of the nine lesser platforms carried nine pillars, plus the one that connected them all. Looking closer, I saw that every pillar was different not just from the others in its circle, but from the pillars of the other circles too. There was more.

Those lower levels weren't empty. Broken, sun-bleached bones overflowed from every circle beneath the first— skeletons of heart demons that the Saint of Scarlet Hearts had murdered, piled so high that the lesser platforms couldn't contain them all. I watched as they toppled over the edges in their multitudes, tumbling down to the greater circle underneath. That final platform was large enough to fit the first ten inside of it, exactly large enough, and it held dozens of pillars.

I couldn't count them all, not from my vantage, but something told me that if the number wasn't an even hundred, it was close. There were no mountains of sun-bleached bones in that final circle, despite the fact that all the lesser circles above were letting the bones of their dead fall like rain.

The moment that a heart demon's remains reached that final platform, it shattered into pieces, and every one of those pieces burnt to ash before they could hit the marble floor a second time, cremated by roaring heart flames. It wasn't just pillars of principle that proudly decorated that greater stage. Statues of Heroes and Heroines alike stood sentinel all across its surface, heart flames spilling out of the hollow sockets of their eyes and licking up at their heels from the burning hearths they stood in.

Some of them guarded individual pillars at the edges of the circle, one hand pressed protectively against the column, the other held tight to their chest. Others stood ready in the center of the stage with weapons in their hands, their empty, burning eyes gazing up at me. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. They were relics of the Heroic souls that Selene had saved.

At the outer rim of the circle stood the ones that she had saved in full, guarding the same flawed pillars that she'd stolen from their hearts to save them. The ones standing center stage were the statues of Heroes and Heroines that Selene had only granted a reprieve with the temporary murder of a heart demon, the ones that had dealt with the root of deviation themselves — or died trying.

I recognized two of them, and though it was undoubtedly just a trick of the light, I could almost believe that the statues of Dymas and Scythas recognized me in turn. Saint of Scarlet Hearts, indeed. I crept quietly back across the stage as the tenth act gave way to the final curtain call, moving with the receding shadows.

As I stepped past the fountain, I pulled the Raven cloak off my shoulders and drew from the dark an ivory lie told in my own image, planting the statue at the edge of the pool and draping the Raven's mantle over it. I continued on, not looking back even when my mentor began her closing monologue, tying the lesson all together.

"I am what I am," Selene explained, "because I cultivate a virtue, one that I've known by its face since I was a girl, but not by its name until I laid down that tenth pillar." Her heart beat once, and the scarlet sun flared—briefly outgrowing the total eclipse of the heart—before starry night reasserted itself.

"I have explained what a conventional cultivator's path to providence looks like, and you have seen for yourselves the mess I made of it," she explained quietly, the scarlet flames behind her eyes burning brighter and pushing back a bit of the dark, illuminating the small circle of her saltwater fountain. Griffon moved instantly into that light, and some of the furious, rabid tension drained out of him when he did.

My ivory lie stayed put at the edge of the firelight, and the Raven mantle it wore drew the shadows closer to it, making a convincing suggestion of the real thing. The statue of Selene paused, raising an eyebrow at Griffon's ivory cloak.

"Oh? Where did you pull that from? I don't remember keeping anything like it in my combs."

"A Raven gave it to me," was all that Griffon said. He didn't speak of what he had seen. I'd have wagered a month's pay that he harbored the same suspicions I did about what had happened in the tenth act. The statue of Selene glanced at my shrouded lie, sitting at the edge of her heart light. Though she seemed puzzled, she shrugged it off easily enough.

"It suits you," she told her brother, only half-teasingly, and then returned to her point. I kept moving. A resonant chime rang out, and a spark of adamant light flew. Ting.

"In the end, because of that virtue, I not only survived what should have been a catastrophic failure of cultivation, but I thrived.

"There are words for cultivators like me, someone who refines themselves not in the pursuit of immortality, stability, wealth, or power. Bakkhos called us fools—in the tragic sense. My father called us slaves to excellence. The most accomplished of our kind are known to the wider world—or at least to the Free Mediterranean—as pathfinders. Cultivators like the Physician, the Polymath, and of course, the Scholar, the Champion, and the Conqueror." I was close enough now to see him clearly. And it was him —not her.

The slim Selene dressed up in gaudy purple silks was gone like she had never been. A grown man sat cross-legged in her place before the adamant pillar of Selene's tenth principle, chiseling away even now that the final act had ended. His back was to me and I couldn't see his face, but I could see that his hair was not the spun gold that it should have been.

It was a wild, raging mane of ink-black curls that cascaded down his back and curled around to frame his face, such that I couldn't even see the shape of his jaw. He brought his hammer down again and chipped another shard of unbreakable adamant away from the pillar.

"To cultivate a virtue with purpose is to be marked by the Fates as a figure of note. It is not a power in and of itself, but the promise of its coming. My father cultivated Courage all his life," Selene spoke softly.

"But my father did not cultivate virtue the way that I do, above my own common sense. It is something secondary to him. A tool he keeps inside himself, oiled and sharpened, but subordinate to his heart." I drew closer to the man. The shadows grew thicker as I did, gathering around him in a tight circle, seeking shelter from the light of stars and scarlet suns. They resisted my displacement of them, but they could not stop me from advancing.

"To cultivate virtue above all other things is to stake your claim on a constellation before you even have the wings to fly. You are gambling everything. Wagering all." I came close enough to reach out and touch him, and the shadows rammed against me like an enemy shield wall, flowing through me like a raging river—yet they failed to move me from my place.

"You," I spoke.

"Revenant. Begone." He ignored me, raising his hammer high. I caught his wrist. The ever-burning, ever-turning channel of wheels within me slowed and nearly stopped.

"Dead men have no place in a young woman's heart." He chuckled, and it echoed through every shadow—including my own.

"You'd be surprised." I took a fistful of his ink-black hair in my other hand and wrenched his head back, glaring down at his— Face.

"This is the why not," Selene explained.

"The reason why I can't tell you what must come next to bridge the gap from third to fourth." It was— The face of a man that drove women mad. Perfect symmetry that surpassed humanity's ability to perceive beauty, bypassing the conscious mind and going somewhere deeper—a cold, primordial place where attraction and hatred and infatuation and fear were all the same quivering lump of wrinkled meat and lightning bolt perception. Nothing. Nothing but an empty frame in want of canvas and paint. There was nothing there.

He had no face.

"Those who cultivate virtue above all other things abide by different rules. Unity is my path forward. When I say it, you only hear the word—but I hear enough to fill three lecture halls in the Broad's sunken school. There is a framework in Unity that only I can understand… because it was built for me." I stared into the void of its— Wine-dark lips long accustomed to smirking, permanently stained by his proclivities. A stately nose.

Thick, jagged eyebrows and long lashes, framing a pair of ever-burning, ever-turning— Eyes. It had no eyes. How was it looking back at me when it had no eyes?

"I've known this since I was a girl, and I've been able to prove it since I internalized my tenth pillar. But what I didn't know, not until I met the two of you, was how much steeper the slope could get. In the pursuit of Unity, I've ignored many of the unfortunate realities of cultivation, and gained in the moments where I should have lost.

"But never in my life has the path forward been so clear to me that I could reach out and pluck a principle from the open air, without the slightest hesitation — without even a thought." No, it's more than that. It's as though this whole time the two of you have been skipping past the underlying mechanisms of cultivation entirely. As if you didn't even know they existed. The two of you advance as though you're breathing—without any conscious thought at all.

"I have to ask, though I already know: Have the two of you truly lived your entire lives believing that a soul refined itself?" I stared down incomprehensibly at the void where a man's face should have been— could have been —used to be— was —would be. I heard— A mocking drawl. —nothing but the hammering of my heart—"Well? Won't you greet me properly? It's rude to stare, boy." —the roaring of blood in my ears, deafening—"Every raven knows my name. Even one such as you. Go on, now. Say it."

My mouth opened of its own volition, tongue fighting against the vision of madness, struggling to form a word—"Shall I help?"

"I can't tell either of you what it takes to reach the fourth step, nor what follows after that," Selene said.

"I can't even begin to tell you how to bridge that gap, because Justice and Gravitas have more than just defined you. And now you may rejoice, because this is good news." I tried to let go, to back away, but the wrist I was holding twisted in my grip before I could. The hand attached to it dropped its hammer and gripped my own wrist tightly, while the other hand dropped its chisel and laid itself over the fist I had made in its hair.

"Repeat after me. Bahhh." A strangled syllable crawled up my throat, called up from a place my waking mind dared not tread. Zahhh…

"I suspected it before, but here I can see it plain as day." Selene reached out and brushed her stone fingers lightly across Griffon's forehead, dragging his golden hair away from his eyes.

"You are no cultivator at all, brother," she said gently, with mingled sorrow and admiration.

"You are a flame in the shape of a man. I can't predict what comes next in your journey, but that is good news. Justice will guide you, as Unity has guided me.

"As for you, Solus," Selene continued warmly, withdrawing her hand from Griffon's face and reaching out to my ivory lie.

"You are more than merely defined by Gravitas. You are the ties that bind men together, the living weight of worlds and…" Her voice trailed off as her fingers brushed against the ivory cheek of my false face. With a flick of her finger, she flipped back the hood from my statue's head. Her breath hitched.

"Solus?" she whispered. Then, louder when I didn't answer, "Solus!?" Griffon had already turned to face the tenth pillar. His eyes widened. I heard the primordial drumbeat of a sound—a word— a name. Something no man of my era was meant to hear. A name that meant nothing, and something, and everything. A man with no face that I had seen and known and been.

"Bahhh… Koh…" Zahhh… Gree… I felt it then. The burning of twin suns overhead. The floodlight regard of my shackled Father, the Flame. [KING OF NOTHING] [KING OF NO ONE] [TWICE-BORN HEIR TO RAGING HEAVEN] [TWICE-CURSED BASTARD OF FALLEN STARS] [TWICE-NAMED AND TWICE-FORGOTTEN] And I remembered. Griffon sprang away from the safety of the light, leaping across the stage and reaching out for me.

Selene cried out a word of power, and the scarlet sun rose up from underneath us, devouring the Total Eclipse of the Heart that tethered us here, casting us back into our mortal vessels. Too late.

"Dionysus," I snarled. The scarlet sun consumed us.