Chương 90: 1.63 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation Bursting from the sea and wailing in a woman's voice, a monster took the stage. We watched without comprehension as it exploded upward and cast its shadow over the Eos. Silver scales and coiling flesh that undulated and flexed like nothing I had ever seen in my life. The monster continued to rise, pulling more and more of itself from the comforting veil of opaque waves, and in the light of stars above I saw the scars left by those who came before.

Pockmarks and craters in the creature's hide, each a blow that had marked it - for some of them, even broke scales - but never pierced through. None but Damon's arrow, lodged so deep in a gap between two cratered scales that only its fletching was still visible.

"Give me all your Heroes," the kyrios of the Raging Heaven had commanded our uncle, provoking a fellow Tyrant and risking greater conflict. And here before me was the reason why. The creature's narrow, sloping head cracked open, it's grotesque maw yawning wide. Its eyes, a shimmering liquid black, disappeared entirely behind its gaping mouth. It breathed in and the freedmen among us stumbled and shouted in alarm as the force of its inhalation dragged the Eos towards it.

I felt the ship's frame strain like it was my own ribs cracking. Hundreds of sickle-shaped teeth moved inside the monster's throat, rows of them spiraling down into the black depths of its stomach. They almost seemed to spin, in great, lurching motions, as the monster swallowed down the winds. Finally it had its fill. The winding silver monster lurched down and closed the final span between us, releasing the breath it had taken as it did. I felt the drums inside my ears burst, a woman's voice scrambling my senses.

"I WANT-!" Fotios fell upon it from the top of the mast, howling in terror and defiance, and drove his burning trident down on top of its head. My twin wound over a dozen truths through the spokes of the trident as he fell, focused every ounce of a tenth rank Philosopher's strength into the blow. The monster's jaws slammed shut, silencing it. And my brother's trident shattered against its scales. I lurched forward, leaping up while Fotios bounced off the monster's head and flailed for balance in the air.

It rolled, the motion eerily sinuous and faster than a creature that size had any right to be. Its mouth opened wide again, poised beneath my brother. I exhaled sharply. The hunting bird's breath was a breathing technique passed down through the Aetos family for as long as we'd had our name. A mimicry of the eponymous animal, it required a cultivator to hollow out a portion of their body in the style of an eagle - a chamber that they could store their vital breath within.

A mortal man inhaled and exhaled only once each time, but the hunting bird did it twice. Once through its lungs, and a second time through hollow sacks of flesh feeding to the pneumatic channels in its hollow bones. An eagle had nine such chambers stored within itself, each one a buoying force against the currents of heaven. My mother had told me once that it was the ninth chamber that allowed them to fly.

It was why every practitioner of the hunting bird's breath strove to create those nine chambers within themselves. So that one day we could join them up above. So that one day we could fly. I had only ever heard stories of distant ancestors managing eight. Maintaining a pneumatic chamber at all as a civic cultivator was a feat worth praising. Maintaining two as a philosopher was similarly impressive. Three for a hero, four to a tyrant. Anything beyond that was prodigious, so said the elders.

I drained all four of my pneumatic chambers and shot up from the ship's deck with my spear in hand. The first exhale emptied the pneuma from those chambers into the channels I'd painstakingly carved through my bones. Each chamber contained a breath, each breath the culmination of hours and days of dogged exertion. Every pain that I had dispersed evenly throughout them, every ounce of my conviction built upon a thousand everyday actions.

The second exhale passed through my lungs, steaming as it shot through my grit teeth. The hunting bird's breath allowed a man to break apart the trials of his life, to disperse them within himself and minimize their impact. In doing so, it allowed him to make those pains his own. To buoy himself with them as an eagle in flight. And when the time was right, it allowed him to let those pains go all at once, releasing more than any mortal man could hope to take in with a single breath - and it allowed him to fall.

To dive out of the sky with talons spread wide. That was how an Aetos hunted. I dove up, exerting the strength of four talons with one thrust of my spear into the monster's liquid black eye. The impact slammed the creature up and away from my airborne brother, its entire body flinching away from the blow in a cascade of moving coils. It rounded it on me while I fell back to the deck, holding onto what remained of my spear. I had rocked it, but I'd broken my weapon in the process just like Fotios.

My twin and I hit the deck at the same time, and Gyro was suddenly above us. His blade burned bright for a split second as he leapt, and then it was quenched. Gyro buried it to the hilt in the gap between pockmarked scales The monster screamed again. I gasped, dispersing the wrenching pain in my ears through four pneumatic chambers. Sprawled out on the deck beside one another, Fotios and I watched, dazed, as the enormous serpent writhed and drew away from the Eos.

It dove back into the whirlpool and was gone in an instant. Fotios' head lolled sideways, his lips moving silently. As if I could hear him over the whirlpool and the shrill ringing in my ears. I dug a finger into my ear and flicked the blood at his face.

"Did you bring another weapon?" he asked me in the voice of his soul, like a proper Sophic cultivator.

"No," I responded in kind. He grimaced.

"Gyro is going to be insufferable."

"And why would that be?" Asked the man himself. He leaned over us, one hand on his hip while the other held a sword covered in molten lead." What cause would a man carrying four spare swords have to be insufferable to the boys refusing to carry even one?"

"I would have made room for a spare if I knew we'd be fighting monsters." The voice of my soul seethed. Gyro scoffed. He offered me a hand." A man can't always know when a fight is coming. That's why you carry it everywhere you go."

"Consider us humbled," Fotios said while Gyro yanked me to my feet.

"Now will you loan us some arms?"

"I cannot." Gyro pulled Fotios up and slapped droplets of molten lead off his shoulder, spattered on him by the creature's wound." I gave the last one to Thon."

"Well enough. I'll take Dymas-""No." Gyro shook his head with finality." The freedmen need weapons more than you two."

"Son of a bitch," my twin conveyed in a Philosopher's voice, vitriol behind every word. My own mood wasn't far behind." Fine, fine! What's next, then? The snake's not dead yet - how do we kill it?"

"You can't." I snarled a curse and jerked away from the old man in rags suddenly standing between Fotios and me. The Eos rocked as the whirlpool currents slammed her starboard side, nearly knocking me right back on my ass.

"No! I refuse!" I shouted." I refuse to believe it! How could you have possibly been here the whole time!?" Aristotle rolled his eyes, looking for all the world like a man with two feet in the Styx, yet balancing on the roiling deck without any apparent effort." If you had looked, you might have seen me."

"What do you mean we can't kill it?" Fotios demanded." Stavros and I beat it like a mouthy slave. Damon skewered it and Gyro made it bleed! If it can bleed then it can die-""It did not bleed," Aristotle cut him off, snatching Gyro's sword arm before any of us could react and dragging it up, forcing him to brandish the blade." To bleed is to shed blood. What sort of blood looks like this? What sort of blood clings like molten lead to a blade?"

"Ichor," Gyro answered, watching Aristotle unwrap one of the gray rags from his body and run it down each side of the blade, soaking up the shimmering metallic liquid. He tucked the soiled rag into a fold within his attire when he was done." It's a monster after all." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I could have told you that," Fotios said.

"Could you?" Aristotle asked, rounding on him. My twin flinched, taking a step back and nearly falling over Dymas - the man was still flat on the deck, lying prone with his hands over his bleeding ears." Because it seems to me that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this creature is. If I were an unkind man, prone to unkind assumptions, I might even say you had mistaken it for a virtuous beast. That you ascribed the same rules to one as you did the other."

Another wail bubbled up from the whirling currents. Behind us and away now that the riptide had dragged us further in, but not nearly far enough.

"And if I did?" Fotios demanded." They are the same, aren't they? Beasts that grew beyond the natural order. It's only a question of magnitude that separates them."

"Wrong!" Aristotle's rhetoric thundered, threatening to rupture drums that didn't exist within ears that weren't corporeal." They don't bleed the same blood. They don't conform to the same rules. A virtuous beast is to an animal what a cultivator is to a man. A monster is something else entirely!"

"We can still kill it," I said, stubbornly matching him when he rounded on me." Men have killed monsters before. Why shouldn't we be able to now?"

"Men have claimed to have killed monsters," Aristotle stressed, " and then crowned themselves heroes for it. Ancestral warriors and demigods with the ichor of faceless divinity flowing through their veins are said to have killed monsters. I have heard these things, and I have also heard an old man claim to be able to show me a king if I gave him a crown while he defecated in the agora. Would you care to guess how many of these things I have actually seen done?"

"None," Gyro answered when I refused to.

"None at all. I've seen things in the course of my life that would seem stranger and more profound to you than even your bisected corpse god; I have even seen monsters before. But I have never, ever seen a creature that sheds ichor in place of blood die. Have any of you?" Our silence spoke for us.

"What do you suggest we do?" Gyro asked, his polite neutrality entirely at odds with the chaos raging all around us. As if to punctuate it, the Eos suddenly rolled, catching on a competing current and leaning so far starboard that her sails nearly touched the water. Aristotle watched us stagger and grab onto whatever portion of the ship was closest at hand to steady ourselves, catching our rattled freedmen by whatever limbs we could before they were tossed fully from the ship.

"Turn back," he said. Damon did not hesitate.

"I refuse." The Young Aristocrat's pneuma rose, the eagle head that he had burnt into the Eos lighting up beneath the deck - just as my wing had earlier. Unlike when I had done it, though, my brother invoked it with a purpose. Narrowing his eyes in concentration and rolling his wrist, he reached out for the Eos with his vital breath. The Eos met him halfway.

Against the current and disdaining the momentum that had nearly capsized her, the Eos swung back up to a proper sailing pitch and the groans of her straining frame went silent. The whirlpool still had her, and we were still careening towards that island with its rocks, but it no longer felt as if the ship was about to fly apart any moment. Gyro whistled appreciatively, though I couldn't hear it. Fotios and I exchanged a wide-eyed look, seeing the same thought in each others' eyes - we could do that too.

Even the freedmen, still utterly shaken by the monster's swift entry and exit, regarded the light beneath the steadied deck with awe. Only Aristotle was unimpressed." Idiot boy. You'll kill us all if you go through with this."

"We'll die anyway if we come home empty handed."

"I didn't say you had to go home," Aristotle said, irritated." I said-" he stopped short, turning to glare at me. No. Turning to glare at the newly freed man I had propped up on my shoulder. Thon's mouth moved and the veins in his neck bulged as he shouted in my ear as loud as he could, for all the good it did. The only one that could hear him was Aristotle. The father of rhetoric clicked his tongue and reached for my face. I leaned back, wary - He snapped his fingers next to my ear.

"-ING ON!? STAVROS!" Thon's voice came thundering through, nearly deafening me again. Another snap by my left ear before I could react, and the vast rushing roar of the whirlpool inundated me.

"Enough! I hear you!" I snapped. Thon stared at me, ugly face scrunching as he tried to read my lips in the low light. Then Aristotle did to Thon whatever he had done to me, and the rest of the Eos' crew each in turn.

"What did you do?" Fotios asked, gingerly touching his ears.

"Nothing that nature would not have done itself," Aristotle said. Clearing Damon's ears last and snorting at the Young Aristocrat's appreciative nod, he waved a hand in his usual lecturing gesture.

"That is all a philosopher can do. He deals in natural law the way a monger deals in fish. You children enjoy your groups of three, don't you? Here's another:"Magnitude. Motion. Time." Each word rang like a bell in the air, briefly muffling the outside world.

"With experience, through ingenuity, a man can leverage his understanding of natural law to adjust these things in his favor. Your ears would have healed naturally over the course of weeks - all I did was shorten that time. This ship was built well enough to sail naturally through rough waters. Damon only lessened the magnitude of those currents and applied a counter motion to them." Another scream. This one angrier than it was pained. And close enough to make my ears ring faintly again.

"What's your point, elder?" Gyro asked the question we were all hysterically thinking.

"My point is that we do not have the tools required to kill a drakaina, and we don't have men capable of doing it without them. A philosopher can't kill what divinity cursed to live forever."

"You don't know that," Damon said with such confidence that I couldn't help smiling.

"You just haven't seen it done yet," Gyro concluded, his pneuma rising in anticipation. For a blissful moment Aristotle said nothing at all. Crescents of flesh reflecting the light of stars flashed by the port side, the serpent of the sea circling us with ugly intent. The old philosopher sighed.

"I suppose I'll die, then."

"You heard the wise man!" I shouted while Fotios rushed across the deck, gathering up as much rigging rope as he could get his hands on.

"It's time to die!" Thon stood to attention beside me, Dymas and Gyro's freedman mirroring him. Damon's man had already joined the Young Aristocrat at the bow and was listening intently as our brother relayed something to him. The drakaina swept past us again, starboard this time, and struck the Eos with some portion of its grotesque body as it passed. I steadied Thon and accepted a bundle of rope that Fotios tossed my way, breathing deep the salt and thrill in the air.

"You smell that, boys? That tang in the air- do you know what it is?" Thon closed his eyes and breathed in deep.

"Freedom," he said at once.

"Exactly right." I set my feet and watched the island hurtle into view. Almost there.

"That's a cultivator's freedom."

"And isn't she sweet?" Fotios jeered.

"Brace!" Gyro called, and we all brandished our weapons in defiance as the serpent reared up on our starboard side. I drained all of my pneumatic chambers again, cracking my line of rigging rope like a whip and igniting it. The drakaina's sloping head split open, and then its jaw split further on each side, hoods of slick black flesh unfolding like blooming roses. Disgusting creature. I knew, in a primal place deep within, that this was an entity that did not deserve to exist.

And in its passing, the world would be made a brighter place. As cultivators of virtue, what else could we do but see it done? Resolved and focused in the face of certain death, none of us noticed the second monster until it was too late.

"Damon!" Fotios cried, but too late. Too late. Ash and cypress shattered and flew apart beneath the coiling scales and clawed fingers of a woman with a serpent's tail in place of legs. She took the bow of the Eos before any of us could think to move, sent Damon and the ship's wooden figurehead both plummeting into the sea, and dove in after them with a hateful grimace on her eerily human face. Then the first monster struck.

The Eos lurched and broke again, the drakaina's revolting coils spilling onto the deck and crushing whatever they could. Gyro stabbed it again, finding another weak spot left by those that died before us, and the monster sought to deafen us again with its voice. Whatever Aristotle had done for us lingered, though, and I kept my hearing this time. Enough to hear my twin shout.

"Land!" Fotios pointed, and - ah. The island. I threw Thon over my shoulder and leapt off the deck just before the Eos struck the rocks of the central island's shore. We landed in beach sand and rolled, Thon scrambling after the sword that had flown out of his grip upon landing. I rose up with nothing but a line of rigging rope and bare belligerence, Fotios and the rest of the crewmen coming to their feet alongside me to face the undying threat. Gyro ran straight past us.

Away from the rocks and the monster ravaging our beached ship, towards the gutted ship from Olympia further down the shore. Fotios and I shared a look.

"Go!" he said. I took off after Gyro.

"What are you doing!?" I called, squinting through clouds of sand kicked up by his pounding strides.

"Securing precious cargo!" he replied without stopping, diving headlong into the ship's gutted frame.

"Now!?" I sprinted past that, into the wreckage that had been thrown from the ship when it was beached. I tore through broken timber and tangled lines of rigging and sail cloth with a furious purpose, looking for anything worth a kyrios' favor and finding nothing at all.

"Stav!" Fotios' panicked shout rang clear across the beach, and I spun around to see the reason why spilling out of the whirlpool onto the rocks. The drakaina could swim through sand as well as it could water, and it had ignored the freedmen and my twin entirely in favor of pursuing us. It bore down on us faster than Fotios and the crew could match, the spiraling lines of teeth within its mouth devouring the wind and sands between us.

"Gyro!" I shouted, brandishing my whip. Gyro lunged out of the landed ship, his sword blazing with the light of the Rosy Dawn and his own dauntless courage. A young woman came sprinting out after him. She had a javelin in one hand, drawn back to throw, and a shield in the other. The shield was polished bronze. It was embossed with a scarlet sun.