Chương 195: [2.23][Jason] Upon A Mat

Jason, The Sinking Ship In the long, dull, grinding months that had followed the sinking of his ship, the miserable little eternity that he had spent in the half-step city of Olympia, Jason had often wondered what it would feel like to sail upon wide open waters again. He had tried not to. Oh, he had tried. But there was no escaping the nightmares, and the only thing that came from avoiding sleep was a long wandering of his mind back to shore. He had dreaded it more than anything else in those days.

He had been certain that the sea would swallow him whole if he gave it a second chance. Even now, a portion of him still believed his end would be down in those depths, somewhere deeper and darker than any heart-flame ought ever tread. Maybe that was the case. But if it was, that day wasn't today. And it wouldn't be for some time yet – not if he had anything to say about it. In the end, returning to the sea had been both a nightmare and a dream. It was like falling back into the arms of a maligned lover.

Familiar in so many ways, yet somehow more exciting than it had been the first time, because now he knew the fullness of it. He knew what it was like to live without it, knowing that it was gone. Shameful, short-sighted, doomed to end in tears. Sublime.

"Dig your elbow into me one more time and you'll be drawing that bowstring with your teeth."

"So says the sacred cow that keeps rocking the gods-damned raft."

"I could be dancing on this heap of driftwood, and it wouldn't shake a finger-width."

"Then stop dancing and let's see! Surely it's getting old, dreaming up new ways for the bastard to scrape his octagon clean with your teeth."

"Say that again, Left."

"I'll say it twice, if it pleases the Muse!" Jason's only regret was that he hadn't built a bigger raft.

"Peace, now, among the passionate," the earthly voice of divinity chided the Sword Song and the Gold-String Guardian, untangling the twin threads of their tempers as skillfully as any mother would her squabbling children. Because in the end, that's what the two of them were to her. That's what they all were. Jason glanced sidelong at the Hurricane Harvester, who raised an eyebrow in response – over the head of the stone Muse, who was pressed snug against his side by their shared robe. Well, perhaps not all of them.

"There are a great many times when, and a great many places where, that sort of discourse might please me," the Heavenly Muse Urania, marble beauty in every sense including the most literal, told the two Heroes with good humor.

"But at this hour, on this raft, it would please me much more to hear of the man you call Conqueror, and the great city that he so recently built." Elissa and Lefteris shared a brief look. Jason well understood the ripple of unease that passed over and through them. It wasn't the man himself, though he too was a delicate subject at the best of times. More than that, it was the weight of years that burdened every word the marble goddess spoke.

If there had been any doubts as to her authenticity before their journey upon the mat, they had all been put to rest once they'd spoken to her at length. The lingering presence of a Muse was a boon that most cultivators could only ever covet, and they each did their best to take full advantage of it. But in so doing, they were forced to confront an uncomfortable truth, one that every cultivator spent their life striving to disprove.

For all their glorious titles, both self-proclaimed and heaven-sent, and for all the floral rhetoric of the old men and women that considered themselves wise, a Hero was still mortal in the end. Urania was not. It wasn't just that the Conqueror was a young man to her. There were Tyrants and even many Philosophers in this world that could say the same. It was more than that, more than just a matter of years to her.

There was a distance between the Star-Charter and the Conqueror that transcended the physical, and even the metaphysical. For all that a Tyrant might put on airs and make light of the man who broke the back of the Free Mediterranean before he turned thirty, the lie would give itself away in time. Any child of Helen who had known the Conqueror well enough to speak of his works, even if only to disdain them, bore his mark upon their minds.

Even those that had missed his coming in its entirety – whether they were behind closed doors, on a distant shore, or yet unborn – even for men like those, for men like Jason himself, the Conqueror's legacy was a brand upon the psyche, a scarlet stain that could not be scoured clean. It didn't linger like that echo of the Waning Wax Cult's foundational mystery. It didn't jar him like that memory, the one that Jason could never quite remember.

Didn't scrape against his neck like that noose, the one that tightened every time he looked up at the sun. For all his terrible immensity, the Conqueror could not turn the seas upon themselves and make a maze of the wide open ocean, could not tangle up the stars that hung above it. Couldn't fill a man's nostrils with the stench of melting wax or strangle him like a wild dog. The Conqueror's legacy couldn't do any of the vast, incomprehensible things that the memory of the Strider could.

Any Greek cultivator worth their salt could tell you that his legacy never even came close to that profundity. But Jason suspected the gap between the two wasn't nearly as wide as they hoped. Yet there was a gap, and Stone Urania was the proof of it. No matter how many terrible things they offered her of the man called Conqueror, or the myriad tragedies unrelated to him that had occurred in her time beneath the storm crown, the Muse never once suffered it the way a mortal might have.

She did not slip beneath the current of his ethos one way or another, either to disdain him or to worship his name. She very clearly cared. She cared for the impact of his works upon the world, cared for all the great and terrible men and women and monsters of the era. But she was never moved by them. By him. He was a point of fascination to her. One of many. Would that make any sense at all to someone that hadn't been sitting on this raft with her? Maybe not. How frustrating.

Was this how Griffon felt, every moment of his life? It would explain some things.

"Before that," Elissa spoke haltingly, "or in exchange, if not – could you give us an answer to our questions?" Lefteris cast his gaze across the waves and added in a low, apologetic tone, "If it pleases the Muse." Stone Urania sighed, the sound of it not quite right to Jason's mortal ear – less an organic, living noise and more the soft sound of sand spilling from cupped hands.

"My answer remains the same today as it was yesterday, and the day that came before that," she said apologetically. It was comical, in the tragic sort of way, how they both deflated. Jason had also hoped for a different answer, but he hadn't expected one. For better and for worse, he had given up on the Chorus when he went down with the ship. Still, even when she denied them, the statue was kinder than the Muse might have been.

She reached out across the raft and cupped Elissa's cheek in one hand, and she threaded the fingers of her other hand through Lefteris's unkempt hair to comb out its knots.

"It isn't that I won't, or that I'll forever be unable," she assured them both. Startled by her touch, they each watched her with wide eyes.

"This world is yet unfamiliar to me – wonderful and terrible in ways I had never imagined before I left the confines of my court," she explained, and they all listened with rapt attention.

"It is the privilege of the Chorus to guide the ones that seek in blindness, and to make ready those that strive for impossible futures. I can see the need in each of you, and at night, when the skies are clear and the stars are bright, I can read the preludes to your prominence." She shook her head, and the stone strands of her hair shifted with the motion before settling abruptly, unnaturally, back into place.

"But I can't guide you yet."

"Why not?" Lefteris asked.

"I don't know how." There was an apology in that. Living, breathing sadness etched in marble.

"Don't know how?" The Sword Song caught herself before her voice could rise past the point of propriety – either because she was speaking to a heavenly existence, or because Scythas had turned his head to look back at her with a narrow burning eye. Quieter, she went on, "It's said that the Tyrants of the Free Mediterranean could gather all the world up in a single palm, if only they had no rivals to contest them in the venture." The Sword Song exhaled.

"But as wide as the gulf is between Heroes and Tyrants, the gulf is wider still between a Tyrant and you. Surely, the stories we can tell you must pale in comparison to your own."

"Many of our questions could be answered if you only turned your eye towards the wider world," Lefteris murmured, unable to hide his hope.

"Would that it were so," Stone Urania chuckled, dragging the cold marble of her thumb up and down the ugliest of the scars on Elissa's cheek, and kneading at the tightest knot of tension at the base of Lefteris's neck.

"It is true enough that I was born Urania, that my cradle is nestled among the stars. But that is only part of the story." She drew back, spreading her arms apart and holding her palms up so that they faced one another. In the empty space between, strands of stars spiraled outwards from either palm, forming constellations at their joining. They flared, warping around and into and through one another, bending the air, driving the trailing threads of light into spiraling contortions.

The space around them compressed until it was as though they were dancing, writhing, embracing, devouring one another endlessly – a death, a birth, a blooming of some cosmic serpent that ended as abruptly as it began. Tangled vines of stars and shifting clouds of cosmic dust dangled in the space between her hands for all the world to see.

"This is the crown that marks my providence," she said with quiet pride, holding it up to heaven.

"None other than Urania can call upon it. None other than Urania can I be – as surely as the north star guides the weary sailor. As steadily. As undeniably." For a moment it felt as though the entire world had been laid out at their feet. Bask­ing in the light of Urania's providence crown, Jason felt as though the past, the present, and the infinite spiraling futures had been frozen in place, tethered to the earth and held fast by anchor weights.

They seemed to hang before him, waiting for him to reach out and take them in hand. To observe them, and thus understand them, and thus understand the progression of all things. He inhaled a shuddering breath, and the pneuma that filled his chest was unlike any other. It was a heady, intoxicating thing. For just a moment, bathed in the light of the Muse that inspired all astronomers, Jason felt as though he could even chart the Strider's course." I am that I am. And yet…"

Urania twisted her hands outward, one palm facing east and the other west. As abruptly as it had appeared, the crown of charted stars turned to stone and plummeted to the deck. It struck the curve of a log with a dull, mournful thunk, and bounced at a sharp angle over the edge of the raft towards the sea. Scythas caught it a hair's breadth above the water and flicked it up onto his brow. Jason shook his head. Miserable show-offs, him and Solus both.

"I am Urania," she concluded, "but I am of the earth, not of the raging heaven." She was wounded again, Jason saw. Starting from the center of each palm and spiraling outward and upward, as far up as the crooks of her elbows, hairline fractures split the Muse apart. Pockmarks in the stone spoke of the ruin that followed deep erosion. It would have concerned him more if her other wounds had not healed over completely in the days that they had spent upon the mat.

Whatever stone the Muse was made of, it was as much a living thing as it was a product of the earth.

"I am capable of much, but not all. I am only one of many faces, in some ways the least of them all." And here, her lamenting turned to mischief.

"But for all that I am burdened by this marble convalescence, blind and blighted by the storm, I am present, in a way that my other self and her miserable sisters aren't. In a way that they can never, ever be again, no matter how they try. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"There are benefits to be found even in the bleakest of circumstances, and if you'll only be patient with me, you'll soon see them for yourselves." The Star-Charter winked.

"I only need a bit of context." The Sinking Ship and his companions, the Hurricane Harvester and the marble likeness of a Muse, did not make it far upon their mat before they were accosted. Their oars had hardly carried them a stade across the blue Ionian when a trio of voices rang out from shore.

"Wait!"

"Take us with you!"

"Don't leave us here to stray!" Three Heroic souls fought through the corpse of Olympia's port city and flung themselves onto the raft. They begged the Hero of Sunken Ships and Alabaster Depths to bring them with him, and though he had only built the raft with his own weight in mind, the Hero agreed. So powerful was their relief, and so rattled were they by the parting words of the Muse, that the group of three said nothing for hours while the Sinking Ship and the Hurricane Harvester worked their oars.

Surprisingly, it was the Heroic Huntsman who broke his silence first.

"Oh, heavenly Urania, you say that you cannot pry the fingers from our heavy hearts, and I have accepted that this is so. You say that I am capable of more than I ever thought possible, and though my eyes yet fail to see it, I have accepted that this is so. Tell me then, if it pleases she who sets the sails, what must follow this low point of my life? I ask you not for the means – only for the measure of my coming labor. Show me true north and help me chart the course. I will do the rest.

Any price you name, I will pay it – if only you will tell me where to set my second foot in this vast and hungry darkness." The Heroes at the oars were surprised, twice over – once for the Huntsman's temerity, and twice again for his rhetoric. The Gold-String Guardian and the Sword Song, however, were not surprised by either thing, as they had known the Huntsman the longest and had both witnessed the shades of his heart that his crocodile cloak so often covered up.

Moreover, their desires aligned with his, and so they added their voices to the poem and beseeched the marble Muse. And although she was made of stone, the statue of Urania still had an abiding love of human beings, and especially their bright-burning Heroes, and so she calmed the churning waters that had been knocking at their raft.

With a firm brush of her palm, she swept the sound of thunder from the clouds above their heads, so that the lightning flashed and the storm raged on in silence for fifty leagues around their raft, roaring twice as loudly in the seas beyond that blessed circle. Then, when all was quiet and their nerves could not bear another moment of suspense, the marble Muse looked upon the trio of Heroes with the keen eye of a cultivator, and she spoke to them thusly.""

When it was done, the marble Muse invited them to ask their questions, for Urania had ever been the fondest of the Nine when it came to tending wayward souls. Alas, they had no questions, because they had no thoughts to give at all. From the beginning to the end, they hadn't understood a single word. At first, Urania thought a tangling of tongues was to blame.

But the broken shards of Babel were as effective now as they had ever been, and each of the Heroes on the raft were able to repeat her guidance back to her, by sound if not by meaning. Eventually, Urania found the root beneath the irksome vine. It was not a trouble of translation, nor a failing of these new-age Heroes, but a shortcoming all her own. Time had passed since she'd last set foot outside her storm crown court, in quantities that mortal minds could not truly grasp. In that time, the world had changed.

The nature of the climb has changed along with it. Urania had not forgotten how to guide the burning hearts of man. But she had missed the turning of a wheel, the changing of hands — and in many ways, that was worse than not speaking the same language at all. Yet she was Urania, unique among the Muses in that she was ninth and last of nine. For all that divinity existed apart, she was still the youngest of nine sisters, and stubborn by design. And so the Heroes told her stories.

Stories of great and terrible scions of humanity, of virtuous beasts and leaden monsters, and sometimes, haltingly, stories of themselves. They spoke for days as they traversed that churning sea, and Urania drank deeply of the world, never quite finding the bottom of her cup. Until, finally, she did. In the end, the story that did it was one they'd all been reluctant to tell her, for admittedly sensible reasons.

Contrary to their fears, however, the marble Muse did not fly into a rage when they described to her the Broad's great work. Quite the opposite.

"Oh, how clever!" The sound of marble hands clapping together was an odd one, but not nearly as odd as the delighted smile on the statue's face.

"How clever, clever, clever! The Fates do love their little trinities. The tripartite soul is such a lovely cloth to swaddle it in – and to have done so much with so little left at hand!"

"You aren't… upset?" Lefteris asked.

"Of course not."

"Despite the Broad's…" Kyno grimaced, unwilling to bring the words home.

"Audacity," Elissa finished for him. Jason contemplated the far horizon. Their course – if it could be called that – had taken them to many places in the last several days, but never to any one for long. They were searching for signs of that scarlet sail and the storm it carried with it. Nothing else really mattered. Not to Jason, anyway, and his word was law upon the mat.

It was enough for them to skim the coasts, close enough for Scythas to ask a question of the inland breeze, and for Jason to read the eddies of the undertow where only Gravitas could reach. They had traveled to all the most sensible places that Solus and Griffon might have gone, given the circumstances.

They had even, briefly, skirted along the line that separated the Free Mediterranean from the Island in the Sun, taking the risk and peering past that dividing line at the sliver of a distant coast that seemed all too mundane to the naked eye. That moment had been enough to tell them both that the Eos had not been near in months. Whatever it was that Scythas heard from the winds that whistled through the Scarlet City, he refused to speak of it.

Jason didn't force the issue, and in turn, Scythas didn't press him for the details of what he'd seen in his brief glimpse of the undertow. That had been a day and a half ago. Now they were deep into the meat of the Mediterranean Sea, skirting the edge of the living labyrinth that most knew as the Alabaster Isles. It was a maze that Jason knew all too well, one that they had carefully avoided thus far in their pursuit of more reasonable leads.

More fool him for thinking pragmatism could ever be the prevailing voice between Justice and the Raven. They were close to one of the many, many open entrances to the Isles, close enough that Jason could see its touch on the northern horizon. It looked like sunlight, though it was not. It was too thin to be a single ray of light, too long and winding and sinuous in its course. From this distance, even a Hero's eyes weren't keen enough to spot it cutting through the black clouds.

But Jason's eyes were something else now, something just a bit sharper than a Hero's, clearer in a way he had yet to fully grasp. All he knew was that whatever the nectar had done to repair his vision, it had added on another lens through which to view the world, one with facets he had only ever heard stories of before. Growing up as the son of a reaver, Jason knew how to navigate the waters that wound throughout the labyrinth.

But he knew just as well that there was always a terrible risk to it – perhaps not for his father, but certainly for the rest of his crew, and even more so for the common sailor. It was always better to avoid it if it could be avoided. Unfortunately, it was always an if. The labyrinth had a way of making itself known just a moment too late for a man to readily shift his ship's course. It wasn't impossible – it could be done, and Jason had done it in his bolder, happier years, but always by the skin of his teeth.

Always with death's head leering down at him from the crow's nest. Yet now that had changed, and it had been the nectar that changed it. Now, Jason had the luxury of watching the dangled thread grow large on his horizon without any fear of falling into it. He had the luxury of considering what he would do when it came time to commit his oars. He could see it now, sooner than it could see him, and that gave him power over it. There was something about that which felt presumptuous to him.

Call it a reaver's upbringing, a superstition, or maybe even the wandering eye of the drawn and quartered corpse of the drowning rogue god. Whatever the source, Jason felt a building weight upon his brow as he observed a greater mystery of creation with clear eyes and sound mind. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and into his burning eye, as if to make him blink, but his heart flame only turned it to mist.

Thunder rolled above his head, and for no good reason at all Jason wondered if it was a warning for him alone. Why would Stone Urania take exception to the Broad's theory of man, his model of the tripartite soul, and his framework for enlightened cultivation? Why would an agent of heaven take offense to a mortal hand trying to draw back the curtain of wonder and mystique that separated heaven from earth? Why, indeed. Jason turned his eyes from the horizon, and the waxing thunder waned.

Scythas put the fear into words for the rest of them.

"Not long ago for us, though it was decades prior that it happened, the five of us bore witness to the coronation of a Hero. And shortly thereafter, the crowning of his brother."

"Oh?" the Muse asked, unbothered by the shift in topic.

"What were their names?"

"The first of them was named Anargyros, and he was one of yours," Scythas said.

"The other was claimed by the oldest of your sisters, and his name was Damon Aetos." The statue of a Muse that had not known the world since a time before written histories rolled the name across her tongue.

"Ah," she murmured.

"That man." Jason tried to be surprised.

"That man," Scythas agreed, after a short but heavy pause.

"But it was his brother's part in the play that made us hesitant to speak of the Broad. There was a moment where he exchanged words with another of this world's great thinkers, speaking not for himself, but on behalf of the Muse that had so recently claimed him."

"And what did she have to say?" Jason remembered it as vividly as the rest of them did. For as long as they lived, they would never forget the things that they had seen through Stavros Aetos' eyes. Nor what followed its telling. It had been jarring enough to see the rage on Griffon's face back then – back when he was just a member of the Rosy Dawn. A core member, no doubt, but not the blood of eagles. Not the son.

"Allow me tell you a story of the man I've vowed to defy."

"The wise man's name was Aristotle, and he shared a mentor with the Broad," Scythas explained.

"In that moment he had just put to words the foundation of his refinement – the first of his principles, and the only one that he prized too highly to tear down. The belief–""No," Jason said, shaking his head.

"The certainty," Scythas conceded, "that there was nothing in this life that could not be explained. And through the lips of her chosen Hero, the Heavenly Muse condemned him."

"Urania says that this is why her sisters despise you," the Hero Anargyos spoke in mirth.

"Trying to tear down all the world's mystique and wonder." They waited, then, to see what the marble statue of the Muse would make of her other self's judgment. Stone Urania spent all of a moment considering it, and then she turned her head to the side and showed them all that while a stone could not bleed, it could apparently spit.

"I am the matron saint of stars and charters, the inspiration of all scholars," she declared, so firmly that Jason wondered briefly if she was going to call upon her crown again.

"The idea that the understanding of a great wonder could somehow lessen its value, when the truth of things is entirely the opposite… I can only apologize for putting such a thought inside your heads."

"It wasn't you," Scythas assured her, but the marble Muse only patted him fondly on his cheek and sighed.

"It was not, and it was," she said.

"That woman is not me, but she carries my name and she wears my crown upon her head. It is my right, by my nature, to disavow her and shine light upon her lack. But that does not absolve me of her sins." Before they could raise any more objections – and it seemed like Scythas really might – she turned her eyes upon the trio. Kyno levered himself up from the water so that his arms could rest upon the edge of the raft and his hands could clasp together in a student's polite expectation.

Lefteris and Elissa straightened their spines, heart flames flickering with sudden hope.

"But enough of such things. Tragedy is my sister, and I have little patience for her as it is. I'll lay no curses upon the Broad for his audacity, though I may have something to say about his name if his stature does not live up to it." She winked.

"Beyond that, I might thank him."

"Why?"

"Because he's given me the context I needed to guide you." With a flourish of her fingers and a ripple of living stone, the marble Muse drew a shining line of stars from each of the trio's chests. They stared down at the swaying constellations in wonder. A moment later, Urania clicked her stone tongue, and warmth like no other split off from the burning blood inside Jason's heart, a single artery of light that burst free of him and took the form of its own nascent constellation.

It twisted and spun out, stretching into the far distance – farther than any of the other lines from the other Heroes, or so it seemed to Jason. That line of shining light diverged sharply from their current course, away from the golden vein of the labyrinth on the northeast horizon. This line went south and east, towards a place that made no sense at all, and thus made all the sense in the world as the Raven's destination.

"There is a seed of glory inside every child of man," Stone Urania spoke.

"In the absence of mine and my sisters' better judgments, mankind has been left alone to cultivate themselves. You exceptional, lucky few have managed to sprout in spite of this, and I see such beautiful budding flowers in the beating of your hearts.

"But even the finest seed cannot account for lacking soil. Each of you has been uprooted, and that alone is a promising start, but now you must find a cause worthy of your questing roots. A stage where you can grow." Stone Urania smiled at their silent, screaming questions.

"That much is within my power, and with this new framework in mind, I believe I know how to chart your next course. Will you open your arms to me, Heroes?"

"Yes!"

"Of course!"

"We will."

"Aye."

"Always." Her eyes crinkled at their corners.

"Then let us speak of desire, that which drives your sleeping souls. Let us speak of passion, that which spurs your apathy to action. And then, with each of those in hand, let us speak of reason – the ink upon your charter."

The marble Muse twisted her stone fingers, wrapping the index around the middle, and light like shooting stars erupted from Scythas' chest – not one, but three vibrant constellations that shot out in three differing directions: one back the way they'd come, another north and northwest towards the City of Squalls, and the last one south and east along the same path that Jason's wound.

"And so the path will reveal itself," Stone Urania said with deep satisfaction.

"Each of you has been diverted from your golden course, and it will take time to find your way back to it. But it can be done, and it will be done. If you have the will to do it."

"What is the first step?" Kyno was the first of them to ask, in a voice of quiet dread. Stone Urania laughed.

"It seems you know already!"