Chương 196: [2.24] Noble Beasts

Griffon, the Risen Flame It was the inclination of all human beings to light fires in the cold and dark. That was the gift that Prometheus had given us at the cost of his freedom, the spark that he had stolen on our behalf. Yet there was more to us than burning. It was one thing to see the truth hidden in the dark, and another thing entirely to confront it. The unknown was only the first of many primordial fears, and fire alone could not keep them all at bay. So we addressed the danger as men were wont to do.

We took from the world outside ourselves to feed the flame and keep it burning. We took up the stones that weren't good for striking sparks, and we took up the wood ill-suited for kindling, and from them we fashioned our first means of murder. We ventured out, away from hearth and home, and when one man's spear was not enough to bring down the predators of that primordial dark, we brought them down with two. When two spears were not enough, we brought them down with three. On and on we went.

Inevitably, we encountered things that could not be murdered with a spear, and so we pressed against the horizons of our violent intentions until they expanded. We developed traps, set snares and dug pits, mastering all manner of sly brutalities. Inevitably, we encountered things that our spears could not kill and our traps could not fool. We pushed again, once more against that far horizon, and when it refused to budge we turned our eyes away from heaven and onto earth.

We dug deep into the mantle of our mother, pulling up the bones from beneath her fertile soil. We gave them to the fire of our hearth, melted them down and made bronze. Before, we had carried stone spears and worn the skins of what we murdered. Now, we forged spears that could pierce what stone shattered upon, and we forged armor that could turn aside what tore through leather and hide. We baptized ourselves in bronze, and with its sheen upon our hands we forced that far horizon further back.

For a time that was enough. Inevitably, we encountered things that could not be killed at all. Humanity split apart at its seams. Some – most – refused to accept such a fearsome truth and continued to strive in vain, as they always had, for a new form of murder. They lived pure in their purpose, and they died pure in their droves. They pressed against that far horizon long after it had become a wasted effort.

They wasted their lives on it, and when that proved insufficient they wasted the lives of their sons and daughters too. Most of mankind languished in this way, lost to that primordial dark. Most, but not all. Some chose to build walls instead. Those inheritors of wisdom, the most distant ancestors of me and mine, built cities around their burning hearths. They turned their eyes neither up towards heaven nor down towards earth, but in, towards the uncharted darkness that lay within humanity.

They found a vast primordial dark inside themselves, just as their ancestors had found outside, and they approached it the same way. First, with a flame. And second, of course, with violence. On the surface, it seemed easy enough to judge which of our ancestors had made the right choice. The savages of the world had not found any golden means of murder in the end. They still armed and armored themselves with bronze. They still huddled around their hearth flames at night in fear of the ravening dark.

After all this time, the edges of their far horizon had yet to move a finger's width. But what had we, the enlightened thinkers of the world, received in exchange for our refinement? A fire within to match the fire without. A horizon of violence broadened by the iron march of civilization. These things weren't nothing. Undeniably, we had gained. And yet, what of the horizon we'd found inside ourselves? What of that primordial dark that we had stirred to wakefulness with the burning of our blood?

We had gained, that much was true, but the dark had gained as well. And unlike our savage cousins, we had forgotten ourselves. In some ways, the barbarians were blessed. My ancestors had built their walls high enough to brush the heavens, built their walls thick enough to hold them out, all because they could think of no other way. Yet time had smoothed away that scar upon our psyche. We had spent so long inside ourselves that we'd forgotten the world outside our walls. Time passed.

Eventually, we convinced ourselves, from father to son to grandson, that man did not only exist apart from beasts, but above them; that we were not a product of heaven, but rather a prelude to it. At some point, we had forgotten to warn our sons and daughters that the stories we'd told them as children were only meant to soothe their fears; that there were monsters beyond the boundary of the hearth, and that if we ever allowed them in, they would eat more than just the boys and girls that misbehaved.

Somewhere in the turning of the wheel, we had forgotten how small we were. There was a reason why the enlightened masses suffered Tyrants. There was a reason why the sheath on my hip had ten great acts of murder etched into it, and only five of those victims were kings. A Tyrant's yoke was a terrible thing, but there was safety in their shadow. It would have been far too kind for the monsters of this iron age to be as diminished as its heroes.

The world outside our iron order was a wild and treacherous place, unkind to mortals of any sort, whether they be enlightened thinkers or savage barbarians. The Egyptian jungle was more unkind than most. Especially at night. I crept through that jungle, shrouded by that black tar night, and listened attentively to the cries of virtuous beasts. Outside the free cities, there was always a risk of encountering a beast that advanced through hunger.

In most of Peloponnesia, at least, such an encounter was considered bad luck. Here in the undergrowth of Egypt, it was infinitely close to being inevitable. Tonight, it seemed to me that there were as many virtuous beasts on the prowl as there were mundane animals. Perhaps more. The Egyptian jungle was its own little paradox, a hunting ground teeming with far more predators than there could ever be prey. I crept alongside one such creature, a raven in the shape of a man.

Ten men marched silently in his wake, all of them trying and failing to mask their terror. Each man of the Fifth Legion held a spear with a sharpened stone head. Although they were cultivators now, as the Romans understood it, they had not yet advanced to bronze murder. The horizons of their violence were small, cramped things. The shadows within their souls still slumbered, with no lit flames to rouse them.

They were wary of the world beyond their hearth, and in the wake of my sister's lesson, of the silver age scavengers I had found in the total eclipse of her heart, that wariness seemed appropriate. Fortunately, the captain's virtue kept them honest. To my Sophic sense, Sol's gravitas felt like whirlpool currents tugging each of the ten men along in his wake. I perceived them as waves. In their effect, though, they were more like strings.

A sharp sound cut through the northern dark, and I observed how the men of the Fifth Legion reacted to it. My Orphic heart sense felt their terror first, yet none of them flinched. Their jaws tightened, and the eyes of a few rolled in their skulls like spooked horses, but their formation held firm. It was not their own mettle that kept them steady. Sol raised his left hand in a silent gesture of command, his ivory gauntlet almost shining in the dark, and the legionaries shifted fluidly into a new formation.

An impossible level of cohesion, given the stress they were under and their relative lack of practice. It was Sol that moved them. The captain's virtue was upon them all, if not in the form I was used to seeing it. Rather than moving them with a blanket of expectation or an uncompromising wall of force, Sol had hooked it through their flesh in a thousand places, and to each of those hooks he'd attached a string.

With every breath, I felt the faintest resonance of his virtue as he adjusted their posture for them, as he kept their breathing even and forced their hearts to beat slow. The only member of the Fifth Legion not in perfect sync was Sol himself. There were small moments. Fleeting things, there and gone before any of the legionaries could have noticed. At one point, Sol took a step without the proper care, and the undergrowth crunched faintly beneath his boot.

He said nothing and the men didn't hear it, but I saw the fingers of his left hand curl fractionally, flexing towards a fist. A while later, he seemed to drift someplace else just before a lesser beast of virtue sprung down from a branch above our heads. He crushed it to pulp with the Greek captain's virtue, but only after I had already snatched it from the air with an invisible pankration hand. It wasn't like the Roman to daydream in the midst of danger, especially not when he had soldiers to be mindful of.

I considered the possibility that this was an unavoidable consequence of his virtue. I had never seen him use gravitas in this way before, with such fine control over such an extended period of time. I soon dismissed that thought. This may have been the first time I had seen him acting as a proper legion commander, but it was far from his first time stepping into the role. He would have known about such a glaring weakness if it existed. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road.

If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. There was a more likely explanation, though it pleased me none to consider it. It had been two days since my sister's Total Eclipse of the Heart, and neither one of us had said a word about what we'd witnessed in its tenth act – no matter how incessantly Selene pestered us about it. Of course, it didn't need to be said that the experience had changed us.

The memory of that ink-black dark remained with me, along with the sensation of barbed teeth in my skin and an insistent, inexhaustible hunger swallowing me down. If not for Sol, would I have simply woken up from it the way I would a bad dream? Or would my soul have stayed there in that silver age stomach, leaving my body empty and untethered? I didn't know, and I had no intention of finding out.

All I knew was that I had been helpless to defend myself again, and again, it had been a corpse without a face that was to blame. We hunted through that long night, gathering up a bounty fit for any king. Still we did not turn back. The Roman was in search of something in particular, though he had not told me what it was. Only that I would know it when I saw it. He was right.

The lion's pride ambushed us in the darkest heart of the Egyptian jungle, in a stretch of land so vivacious and teeming that the stars could not be seen shining overhead, so thickly clustered were the trees. The world, as we understood it, was far behind us, and while Sol could see clearly in the dark with his raven mantle, and could guide his men with equal precision, that was not the same thing as seeing the truth for themselves.

For that reason, and because I refused to don my own treacherous mantle of shadows, I took one look at the skulking pride and brought light to the untamed wild. Forty hands of rosy-fingered dawn lit up the deep wood with a level of clarity that seemed to transgress some unspoken law. The jungle erupted with a thunderclap of ungodly sound, and above it all rose the roaring of a lion writ too large for its frame. At that signal, the rest of the pride pounced.

The new men of the Fifth Legion closed ranks without hesitation, the blood draining from their faces as the animal tide came crashing down on them. While Sol worked their strings and made them dance, I drew from my shadow a celestial bronze axe and leapt forward to meet the leader of the pride. What was it, exactly, that separated noble beasts from the unrefined animals of the earth? And what was it that separated both of them from men?

It was one of many boyhood questions I had asked my father, and one of only a few that he had deigned to answer." Less than men think. More than they hope." There were certain factors that had to be considered in combat. For all that violence was a primordial impulse born of purpose and elevated by passion, man had not risen above the lion with hate and hunger alone. It was our ability to think that separated us from animals.

Our capacity for cold calculation, which existed apart from violence even when we found ourselves fully immersed in it. The noble beast of the Nile pride lunged through the swarm of my pankration limbs with ferocity that was typical of its kind. What separated it from any other lion? Pneuma was the most obvious answer, and I felt it in three parts.

Through my Civic sense, the pneumatic sense, it was a nebulous thing – present, but featureless in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle, as was the case with any foreign cultivator. Through my Sophic sense, the rhetorical sense, I perceived the beast's influence upon the world. Here was the first clear separation between beast and man. The influence a cultivator had upon the world around them could be felt, like eddies and tidal waves.

I had encountered many examples of this in my time as a Philosopher, and while the shape of that influence changed depending on the cultivator, its underlying nature was always the same. The Gadfly's influence had been as irritating as the man himself, a breaking wave that sought to capsize the victims of his ire. The Heroes that Sol and I had made friends and then enemies of in Olympia had all boiled the sea of souls with their influence, as had the athletes I'd met in the pit of the olympic stadium.

My foolish little sister bucked that trend, somehow, and instead of boiling the waves, she stilled them. Wherever she went, churning souls were settled and wandering minds were put to ease. Sol's influence was as it had ever been, a riptide pull upon the sea of souls, though the Titan's ichor and the ignition of his heart flame had made it more severe. The lion's influence was like none of those things, because for all its primal virtue, it was not a man.

It could not exist apart from its mortal shell, could not be abstracted by that ever-churning sea of souls, and so to my Sophic sense it came at me not as a wave or a current, but as itself. It lunged through the waves in the shape of itself, the shape of a lion, muscles bunching and flexing powerfully as it forced its way through the riptide pull of Sol and maintained its course to me. Through my Heroic sense, the Orphic heart sense, I perceived it only as a thundering roar.

We came together in a lightning-crash of violence, and like the lightning it lasted only for a moment before we went hurtling past each other. The noble beast hit the ground in a crouch that dug furrows from the earth, gathering itself quickly and whirling back my way. For my part, I tumbled three times to bleed momentum and sprang back to my feet, twisting mid-air so that I faced the lion when I landed. We'd each landed a blow, though only the beast's had drawn blood.

I flexed my left arm thoughtfully, considering the weeping cut. The Egyptian jungle was stiflingly hot, even at night, but my blood still steamed when exposed to the air. I'd struck the beast hard enough to cleave a tree in two. The bronze great-axe I'd taken from the Temple of the Father had come away from the exchange undamaged, to my pleasant surprise, yet so had the lion. The blow had staggered it a bit, forced its swipe to miss my throat and glance off my arm instead, but it hadn't broken the beast's skin.

In fact, I was certain the bronze edge hadn't reached its skin at all.

"Well struck," I complimented it. It pounced on me again. What separated a noble beast from the other creatures of the earth? Many men, even cultivators, made the mistake of observing only the surface level. The beast was larger and faster than any mundane lion could be, but size and speed alone were not what made it noble. If I wanted to, I could find an unrefined lion cub and feed it natural treasures until it stood taller than the Eos. That wouldn't make it virtuous.

Mankind stood above the rest of the earth's creations, but we were not yet out of their reach. Many cultivators had underestimated the virtuous beasts of the earth, and many cultivators had died for their hubris. I heaved my axe in an overhand throw that sent it spinning towards the lion's teeth. It flinched away from the projectile at the last moment, drawing its head back sharply and allowing the axe to instead slam into its throat.

Sparks flew where the bronze edge met fur, and my axe went spinning off into the undergrowth. In that moment of distraction, while its head was pulled back and it still hung in midair, I tackled the beast to the ground. Golden fur that foiled mortal arms. Wicked claws that sundered mortal armor. Many men, even cultivators, would have hesitated in the face of such a predator. But that too was a mistake. In combat with other human beings, smoke suggested fire.

If a cultivator moved with the speed of a Hero, it was only sensible to consider whether they could hit you with the strength of one as well. If they stepped into a roaring flame and out the other side without burning, it was prudent to wonder if they were as durable in other ways. We human beings were the most arrogant creatures of the earth by far, more willful than all the rest combined, and that meant nothing could be assumed of us. Because of that, everything had to be considered.

The lion's breath exploded out of it in a snarl as its back hit the ground. It contorted with feline fluidity, snapping at me, but I was already slipping up and around it, winding both arms through its golden mane. I was the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn Cult, born to wealth and raised in luxury. A fool might observe that from the scarlet silks I wore and assume I was a wilting hedonist. They might attempt to treat me like one, and receive a clenched fist for their presumption.

The leader of the pride went mad the moment it felt my arms encircle its neck, yowling in panic and scrambling away from me in an explosion of pneuma. I watched curiously as it prowled a wide circle around me, the same predatory stance as before except for the uneasy quivering of its tail. It was wary of me now, warier than any normal lion would have been after such an innocuous exchange. I was the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn Cult, born to wealth and raised in luxury, and I had a fierce right hook.

A fool might observe that and assume I dabbled in pugilism for my vanity, that I was a prancing peacock of the gymnasium. They might attempt to treat me like one, and be cut down for their presumption. The lion's tactics changed in a way that would have made little sense if I hadn't understood its nature. It pursued me now as though I dwarfed it in size, in starts and stops and furtive lunges. It no longer committed itself to outright killing blows, but instead attempted to cripple me.

Its eyes flitted constantly towards my arms. I was the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn Cult, born to wealth and raised in luxury, and I had a fierce right hook. A wise man observed those things and understood that if I was proficient with my fists, there was no reason I couldn't be just as proficient with a blade. Or a bow, or a spear, or an axe. Any number of things. None of them, or all of them. Because I was not just the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn Cult, but also a man.

The lion was warier of me than it should have been, but it was still a predator. It attacked when it perceived weakness, and so I provided it with openings. It would abandon everything and flee if I attempted to grapple it, and my axe could not get through its fur, so I beat it with my burning fists instead. If a man's skin was tough enough to shed sparks when a mortal weapon struck it, then it was worth considering all the other resistances he might enjoy.

If his nails were sharp enough to slice through mortal armor, it was worth considering all the other weapons he might have at his disposal. A martially inclined cultivator could intuit the myriad possibilities of their opponent without becoming paralyzed by them. But those were considerations for other human beings. A beast of virtue was just an animal in the end, and overestimation could kill a cultivator as surely as the alternative.

The lion's golden fur was more durable than purely physical refinement could explain. Its claws were sharper in the same way. And for all that those things were true, they weren't surprising to me, because cultivating by hunger alone meant conforming to an ideal. Human beings could chisel themselves into any shape they desired, but a lion would always be a lion, and the Champion had brought down the mightiest example of their kind for his first labor.

The Nemean Lion's golden pelt had been entirely impervious to mortal weapons, and its wicked claws had cleaved through bronze without resistance. The magnitude of the beast before me paled in comparison, but its nature was the same. As a rule, it could be killed the same way too. Except I had tried to throttle it as the Champion had throttled the Nemean Lion, and it had come apart at the seams with panic before I finished locking my arms around its neck. Almost as if it knew what I was attempting.

As though it knew that was the end. I was very curious about that. If it had just been Sol and me caught in this ambush, I would have taken my time exploring the limits of that survival instinct. As it was, I tucked the thought away for future exploration and beat the beast unconscious. The Champion had stunned the Nemean Lion with his club before he strangled it. My fists were not as powerful as his club – yet – but I was closer to him than this lion was to the Nemean.

I brought it down without taking another scratch. Even unconscious, lying boneless in the dirt, it fought me monstrously as soon as I wrapped my arms around its neck for a second attempt. I tried burning it next, and the rosy light of dawn did catch in its fur, but it was far too slow for my liking. So I took another lesson from the Champion, and I used the creature's own claws to slit its throat. My haste turned out to be unnecessary.

Guided by the captain's strings, the new men of the Fifth Legion were slaughtering the rest of the pride with ironclad discipline. I could have added my own efforts to the mix and ended things sooner, but that would have just diluted the experience for them. Sol would demand my help if it was needed. Instead, I laid back against the leader of the pride and waited for its corpse to burn.