Chương 79: 1.52 [Jason]

Hero of the Alabaster Depths What distinguished a hero from a man? [Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.] Back then, he'd been certain that he knew. Every time they took up oars, each of those among his crew, and heaved against the fickle waves. The tang of the air and the rolling of the ocean, randy sea shanties and laughter filling the sails. On days like those, he could have sworn that his epic was just over the horizon. But all he'd found on the other side was black sails and howling whirlpools.

Whatever had washed up to shore afterwards was no hero. It was hardly a man at all. Jason had forgotten what a Hero was meant to be years ago - the alabaster sea had taken it from him. The demons had raked their claws through his soul and devoured what they found, and they'd hollowed out his heart. The man that the ocean had spit back out onto the shores of the greater Mediterranean could hardly remember the feel of an oar in his hands, let alone whatever it was he thought he had seen just over that far horizon.

Life at the Raging Heaven hadn't helped. He hadn't thought that it would, of course, hadn't thought much of it at all outside of it being close at hand and within his means to join. He would have gone anywhere at that time, so long as he didn't have to cross salt water to get there. But even a husk had eyes. And a hollow heart had twice the room for outrage when it came to the whims of rivalrous Tyrants. Impotent outrage, that was. That was the most a man could ever feel towards the elders of the Raging Heaven.

A mortal man or a Hero, it hardly mattered. They all fell in line. Jason was no exception. He fell. Fell in line, fell from grace. Fell, fell, fell to the bottom of the sea. And then the Crows came. Something changed that night. Nothing tangible, certainly nothing he could grasp. But ever since the Crows had nearly returned him to the Icarus on the night of the kyrios' funeral, ever since he had been saved, the urge to fight had appeared at the corners of his vision.

Gone whenever he turned to look, but always there. The captain of the Icarus was still drowning, but his feet had started to kick. And at times, times like these, he could almost imagine that whatever the sea and her demons had taken from him, whatever lay beyond that far horizon -"This is justice," my father told me. The bisected corpse of the fallen sun god reached up and laid its incomprehensible palm over my eyes.

"Remember its face." - Griffon and Sol had come here to remind him of it. A thunderous impact jarred him from the unearthly vision, along with Scythas beside him. They both watched in disbelief as the Gadfly staggered back into the room. Jason hurriedly stepped right while Scythas stepped left, each making space for him. The man that had defied the Tyrants of the Coast, lived to spit their own poison back in their eyes, gagged and gripped his neck. Griffon had punched the Scholar in the throat.

"Socrates!" he greeted, arresting the momentum of his mad dash down into the heart of the mountain with thirty burning hands of his own intent.

"Or should I say, master. I've come to thank you for your guidance!" The Hero from the Rosy Dawn straightened up out of his striking stance, resting one hand negligently on the pommel of his sheathed blade. The Gadfly inhaled a single sharp breath, his expression murderous, and the scarlet son bared his teeth in a wild grin.

"Reckless, arrogant -" Jason eased back another step, and - no. No. He wouldn't run away. He wouldn't spend another second drowning. He spat at the ground by the Gadfly's feet and took hold of the blood burning inside his heart. Across from him, Scythas whistled a low note and his pneuma whirled.

"- children," The Gadfly finished, his tone severe.

"Who told you that memory was yours to share? Who told you that you were allowed in this place?"

"Ho, it seems the philosopher has lost his way," Griffon jeered. Striding forward, towards the danger. As he had before and as he always did. Towards that far horizon.

"Thinking I need anyone to tell me anything at all. Allow this humble sophist to educate you on the truth of things. Atten-" Griffon stopped short, just outside of the doorway to the room. His pneuma flickered and vanished from the room, the grasping hands of his intent disappearing in an instant. Without a word, he dismissed the Gadfly entirely. The Hero of the risen sun and the Scarlet Oracle stared at one another. Slung over Solus' shoulder as she was, the Oracle was at eye level with the man.

Face-to-face like this, hardly a foot apart, they almost- Jason squinted. Scythas' whistle faltered. Sol tilted his head. [Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.]" Sunkissed," spoke the Scarlet Oracle. Griffon blinked at the holy woman that Solus had thrown over his shoulder like a bundle of tangled line.

"You must be Griffon." A fist-sized chunk of broken marble broken off from a bust by Jason's soul - in that split second that he'd allowed the anger and the shame to drag him back down to the Icarus - slammed into Griffon's chest and threw him back out into the courtyard. The Gadfly slapped the marble dust from his palms, each clap an echoing sound.

"Look where they must not be, and there you'll find them," he said, irritated.

"Which of them did you tell first, boy?" Solus frowned, distracted.

"Boy."

"Griffon," he said, though whether it was an answer to the Gadfly's question or a personal realization, Jason couldn't tell. Surely, something like that…

"And how long did it take him to spread the news around?" the Gadfly demanded. He turned first to Scythas, who kept his grimacing silence. Then the Gadfly rounded on Jason, and he was forced to invoke the only strength he could still trust. Euterpe, he called, desperate as the weight of the wise man's years was leveled against him. He reached for that joyful melody, the sound of the Muse's flute and the brush of her flower crown against his brow. He found nothing. His hollow heart stuttered in his chest.

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"Is that the face of a man with something to say?" the Gadfly asked, stepping to him and pressing him back a step with his barrel chest. Old man, they called him, as if the hoplite would never return. Salt and shifting winds, as if he'd ever left.

"How did you get here? Who told you to come?" Without a muse to inspire him, without a crew he could call his own, what separated a man from a hero? What made him anything at all? Jason's focus wavered, and was drawn in by another. Solus drew his eyes as surely as a sail. He didn't speak, but the storm in his eyes spoke for him. [Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.]"No one," he answered, defiance straightening his spine.

"No one. So why are you here?"

"Because I made a promise to the man you took, and I broke it when I let you take him," he said, and flashed his alabaster fang.

"I'm here to balance that scale." Jason stoked the flames of what remained and prepared himself to die.

"Enough." A strong hand came down on Jason's shoulder, the captain from the west interposing himself between Jason and the Gadfly. Jason leaned back, lest the Scarlet Oracle's head collide with his own while Solus swung her around.

"You did this to yourself, walking me down the mountain like a prisoner," Solus said, meeting the Gadfly's glare without any particular fear.

"Of course we were seen. What did you expect to happen?"

"I expected the younger generation to possess at least one functioning mind," the Gadfly said acerbically. He rapped the knuckles of his hand against Solus' forehead.

"And I had hoped that they might share it amongst themselves. I see now that my optimism outweighed my sense."

"A lesson is learned," the captain said blandly. The Gadfly sneered. Without warning, the imposing messenger eagle perched on Solus' arm spread its wings wide, head turning to the open doorway. It snapped its beak once, twice, the virtuous beast's savage pneuma buffeting the air as it beat its wings. Sol frowned, and after a moment's consideration walked wordlessly out of the room. Leaving Jason and Scythas with the Gadfly.

Jason exchanged a look with his fellow Hero, and both cultivators made a mad dash after the captain. The Gadfly let them go, muttering to himself as he surveyed the wrecked room.

Outside they found Solus and the Scarlet Oracle, along with Griffon and the rest of the holy women that Scythas had so carefully veiled them past - He dug his heels into the baked-clay mosaic winding out from the Oracle's quarters, Scythas coming to a similarly abrupt stop beside him as the full weight of the courtyard's inhabitants hit them all at once." This -" he gasped, stoking his heart flame for lack of any other defense.

The overwhelming presence, presences, the excruciating majesty of three sovereign souls pressing down on him from on high. It hadn't been like this before. Griffon lay in the rubble of a holy tripod across the courtyard, sprawling almost as if in leisure. The broken mound of what had once been a hallowed instrument propped him up, the wreckage of the supporting pillar behind serving as a cradle for his head. He had one hand raised to his face, covering most of it but for a narrowed scarlet eye.

His other hand was still on the pommel of his sword. Even now, he refrained from drawing it. Three Oracles knelt on priceless garments, surrounding him. The sources of the suffocating majesty, the pressure that had not been there before. First, the Oracle of the Broken Tide, ancient and so casually cruel, smirked as she brushed the blood from his forehead. Second, the Oracle of Jason's own home, flighty and so wickedly manipulative, murmured softly while combing delicate fingers through his golden hair.

And third, the Oracle of the Brazen Aegis, stern and so mercilessly honest, clicked her tongue as she pressed the folded silk of her veil against a bleeding gouge where the rubble had cut him. There was a reason that Oracles kept the company of tyrants and heroes, kings and their forgotten sons - beyond the political maneuvering, beyond the logistical concerns, the problem with seeking out a seer was their presence. The aura of a woman whose body functioned as a divine vessel could kill a mortal man outright.

It was within their power to control, of course, in the same way that a Tyrant could speak to his lowest Citizen without the weight of his voice crushing their spine. But asking an Oracle to mind her majesty while about her holy work? It wasn't possible. The majesty was the work. It was the entire point, after all. And it was a sensation as profound as it was terrifying. It hadn't been like this when Jason and Scythas slipped into the courtyard just minutes prior.

The Oracles had been chatting idly while Solus did calisthenics and the Scarlet Oracle kept count of his repetitions. It had been as plain a sight as any, reminiscent of the days and nights he'd spent at the dock towns and their markets while between voyages. Heckling and gossipping while going about their casual business.

Now, Jason averted his eyes as the Oracle of the Brazen Aegis turned to regard him, as the sound of hissing snakes filled his ears and the eerie sensation of her majesty slithered across his body. Dread, instinctual and severe, told him not to look. A dormant instinct cried out from the bottom of the sea, the bubbles carrying its voice to the surface of his mind. Don't look into the Aegis. You'll die! Now, Jason's knees bent as his city's holy woman, the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles, settled her attention on him.

The burn of her majesty threatening to melt his skin like wax, and the nauseating weightlessness of falling, falling, strings of gold coiling around his neck- Stay down, stay down. You'll die! Now, Jason's heart stopped as the Oracle of the Broken Tide speared him with the tridents in her eyes, and he was dragged once more to the bottom of the sea.

In the comfort of Elissa's home, Kyno had described to Jason and the rest of those wrapped up in Solus and Griffon's schemes what it felt like to seek the Broken Tide's wisdom. It was something each of them had considered at one point or another since ascending to the Heroic Realm. But none of them had ever gone through with it. By the time they had become existences worthy of an Oracle's attention, they had lost all desire for it. But Griffon had convinced him, and so they'd gone.

And while the man from the Rosy Dawn had sauntered through the seer smoke and majesty as if it weren't there, Kyno had told them the truth of it. The Oracle of the Broken Tide drowned you with her majesty. She filled your lungs with it. She carved it into your soul with three prongs. [Leave it be, leave it be, leave it be.] Jason watched dully as his soul sank into the depths where light could not follow. Past the far horizon, where the Icarus lay at rest with her crew.

All of them except the captain - the only corpse that belonged with her. [I'll find another, better one.]"You're greedier by the day," the Oracle of the Broken Tide chided Griffon, cracked lips curling mischievously.

"Was I not enough for you?"

"Were the eight of us not enough for you?" the Oracle of the Brazen Aegis teased him further.

"Perhaps he's come to ask his question after all," the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles mused, twirling a lock of his golden hair around her finger. She leaned in and whispered, quiet as a mouse and loud enough for all to hear.

"The one he swore he'd never ask. Has pining overturned your principle yet, oh son of scarlet sin?" His face covered by a blood-stained and burning hand, Griffon growled a single word.

"Sol." The captain from the west knelt in front of his student, that curious distance still about him. His eyes swept across his student in the rubble, the holy women surrounding him, and the holy girl that was still somehow thrown over his shoulder. If he suffered at all beneath the weight of their majesty, he didn't show it. Jason supposed a Tyrant wouldn't. Griffon stared at his master, and then at the young woman over his shoulder.

"Who is that?" The seer offered him a smile.

"My name is Selene."

"She's the Scarlet Oracle," Solus added. Griffon snarled and exploded out of his eerie recline in a single motion, throwing off the hands of the three holy women and lashing out. Sorea shrieked and took flight. Jason hissed a curse and Scythas leapt into motion beside him, calling upon the wind. Solus caught his student's grasping hand in a thunderclap of sound, their fingers interlocking as the space between them burned with the rosy light of dawn. His eyes narrowed dangerously.

"No," Griffon snarled, leaning in. The Scarlet Oracle's eyes widened." She's not."