Chương 94: 1.67 [Stavros Aetos - END]

Youngest of the Convocation Tribulation lightning. There were as many explanations for it as there were thinking cultures on the earth. From the truly ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and golden Egypt, to the lowest barbarian hovels in the east and west, every cultivator knew a singular truth. Regardless of what we cultivated, how we cultivated, where we did it or why. One thing remained the same. We were all reaching madly up to heaven. No matter what that meant to a man, the result was what mattered.

Reach high enough, and Heaven will take notice. Of course, Heaven's response was always the same. The bolt from Raging Heaven struck the Hero Anargyros and seared my vision white. Elena's adamant shield rang like a bell, a sound altogether different from the unsettling reverberations that followed when she used it to block the monster. Not close enough to benefit from its protection, I was flung back by the force of my brother's tribulation.

I scrubbed frantically at my eyes and spat a taste I had never experienced before out of my mouth, the faint echoes of what my brother had taken on his chin coursing through my body and wreaking havoc on my limbs. When I managed to clear my eyes and rise again, my heart in my throat, I saw that my worry had been wasted. He stood in the same place, unchanged despite the fact that the sands around him had been turned to molten glass and the monster's corpse beneath his feet had been charred from silver to black.

Urania was gone, if she had been there to begin with. Yet the Hero Anagyros still kept his silence, his head tilted thoughtfully as if listening to a voice only he could hear.

"The drakaina," an old man spoke when the Hero did not. My brother blinked and looked down at the Father of Rhetoric, kneeling before the corpse of the serpent.

"A female dragon spirit, a cursed spawn of Echidna and Typhon. Its scales are harder than iron, and its veins are filled with molten lead. It does not age. It can not starve. Any wound inflicted by mortal man will heal in moments, mended by its ichor." The Hero Anargyros said nothing still. Elena crept forward, peering over the rim of her shield with scarlet wonder.

"Only the divine can unmake what the divine have cursed to live forever," Aristotle continued, raising a frail and wrinkled hand. His pneuma gathered between his fingers, taking shape as he manifested his intent - and I flinched and drew back my Sophic sense at the same time that Elena did. I swallowed, and tasted blood that had not been in my mouth moments before. Whatever intent the old philosopher had called upon, it was so sharp that it had cut my Sophic sense itself.

"With golden ichor running through your veins, or with arms and armor of incorruptible adamant. Those are the only ways I have ever seen a monster die." Aristotle reached for one of the many gouges my brother had carved into the serpent, cauterized by the bolt of tribulation lightning. He drew his intent across its flesh, and his hand abruptly jerked as his intent broke against the serpent's corpse.

"Even in death they are impervious. Or so I thought." My brother hummed and pinched the unsharpened edge of the talon. With a twist and a sharp crack, he broke a splinter off the sword that had just slain an undying drakaina. Shaving an edge into it with his driftwood blade, the Hero Anargyros flipped the wooden scalpel so he was holding its edge and offered Aristotle the handle. We watched the old man drag a wooden scalpel across flesh that had rebuffed bronze and tempered iron.

Scorched scales and sinewy muscle parted like blooming roses, with no resistance at all. Aristotle's hand shook. But his voice and his bearing were unchanged when he spoke.

"I've seen you bleed before, Anargyros Aetos. It was blood, not molten gold that sprung from your wounds. You are no son of heaven."

"No, elder," the newly risen hero agreed.

"Only the son of a good man, and a loving mother."

"I've seen ships built," the old philosopher carried on as if he didn't hear him.

"I recognize the timber that made the Talon, and I've seen wood of the same kind used in practice blades. That sword and the scalpel. Neither one is peerless adamant."

"They are not."

"I know what such a blade is capable of against a creature like this." He scowled.

"No. I thought I knew. This and a thousand-thousand smaller truths. I thought I knew." A sound like breaking glass assaulted my Sophic sense and my Sophic sense alone. I saw alarm steel across my brother's face for the first time since our shipwreck. The flames behind his eyes flared and his pneuma, still pouring out of him in torrential waves, converged on Damon's mentor.

"Wait-""I was wrong," Aristotle admitted, and the three of us watched in horror as his cultivation broke apart.

"Stop!" Elena cried, lurching for him with her arm outstretched, as if she could pull him behind her shield and protect him from what was happening inside his soul. The Hero Anargyros leapt down from the monster's corpse, the stifling heat and wonder in the air around him growing thicker as he knelt in front of the Father of Rhetoric. The wings of his influence, vast enough to cast their formless shadow over the entire island, folded protectively around the old man's hunched body.

It did about as much good as Elena's shield. This wasn't something that could be defended against. As cultivators of virtue, we refined ourselves with every step we took up the divine mountain. Through every advancement and every grand ascension, we built upon what we had built before. As Citizens, we gathered the materials and searched for the proper place within our souls to lay the foundation for what was to come.

In order to ascend to the realm of Philosophers, a cultivator needed to first lay the foundation inside their soul. Then came a man's first principle. His first thought worth having. The culmination of all his efforts as a citizen. It was upon this foundation that a philosopher built a monument inside their soul. Every truth learned was a brick laid, and each principle internalized was another pillar that would bear the weight of all that was to come.

In a confrontation between cultivators of virtue, whether it be an exchanging of discourse in the agora or a round inside the marble octagon, that monument could be broken down like any other man made wonder. Done properly, with the right intent, a man could attack his opponent's soul at the same time that he picked apart their arguments and assaulted their bodies. He could force his opponent to doubt themselves, could make a demon of their heart.

In the most extreme cases, you could even tear down the edifice that every cultivator builds inside their soul. Their monument to Ego - the culmination of all their efforts as cultivators of virtue. Apparently, you could even do it to yourself. Aristotle's Ego shattered and flew apart, and we all felt it in the deepest of our senses. The bricks of polished marble truth that he had used to build the walls of the monument crumbled and fell away, each one a disdainful whisper as it tumbled away.

Then, one by one, the towering columns of his principles and ideals groaned, fractured, and fell apart in chunks, the impact of each as they hit the floor echoing in my Sophic sense. The old philosopher's soul shed more internalized truths in those paltry moments than most thinking men would ever learn. Nine times he discarded principles that had made him the most feared man in any agora for decades before I was born.

He shed his pneuma too, a tired exhalation that filled the air with nearly as much vitality as my brother had been emitting since his ascension. The difference was that my brother's strength was still growing, outpacing everything he was throwing off. What Aristotle lost was not returned or replaced. In seconds, his influence fell from that of a Sophic captain all the way down to the very first rank of the Sophic realm.

When the stones stopped falling and the dust had settled in his soul, only one column of principle remained. The Father of Rhetoric inhaled slowly, tattered rags stretching tight across a rugged chest. Calloused hands rose and brushed thick dark curls out of weary eyes. The irritated scowl was the same as it had always been, even on a young man's face.

"What have you done?" I asked, aghast. The man that had just shattered his own Ego and shed his wisened years alongside his principles and strength, pinned me with a glance.

"Humbled myself," he said, as if that was any explanation at all.

"Elder," the Hero Anargyros breathed, though Aristotle hardly looked older than him at all now.

"Why? It's all gone. Everything that you've built- our mentors told us stories about the Father of Rhetoric, about the wonders you unearthed from uncharted mist. And you just-""Threw it away," Elena whispered, looking for all the world like she had just witnessed a murder. Aristotle made a dismissive motion with his hand. Brushing off our concern, or maybe brushing the rubble of his Ego's monument from the foundations.

"It wasn't the first time. Odds are it won't be the last," he said, resigned.

"A philosopher is a man seeking order in a chaotic world. We build walls inside ourselves, set boundaries - whatever we can fit inside those boundaries as possible, and everything outside of them is not.

"What you just did had no place inside the walls that I had built. But you did it anyway, and I saw it with my own eyes." Aristotle shrugged.

"When Ego obstructs possibility, a philosopher loses his curiosity. At that point, it doesn't matter how appealing those truths and convictions are. They're wrong. That makes them worthless."

"That's the opposite of what you should be taking away from this," my brother said in exasperation. He laid a hand on Aristotle's shoulder, sky blue flames burning earnestly behind his eyes.

"There will always be an unknown, a contradiction or a truth we can't explain. The Father of Rhetoric should know better than anyone that any truth can be made a lie with the right persuasion."

"In these moments more than any other," Elena said emphatically, "conviction is the way forward. Every path has its obstructions. If you discard your progress every time you reach one, double back and search for a different, perfect path every time, you'll never reach your destination."

"Sometimes we have to step off the path and walk uncharted steps," the Hero Anargyros advised the wise man, glory rolling off him all the while.

"The world of Heroes and Tyrants is different from the world of Citizens and Philosophers, but that doesn't make your knowledge worthless. There are just some things that reason can't explain."

"No." Aristotle was a newly minted philosopher again. His pneuma was unmistakably that of a first rank Sophic cultivator. Far lesser than Elena's, laughable compared to mine, and an entire realm apart from my newly risen brother. In nearly every way that mattered, his cultivation was crippled. And yet. All three of us could not help but attend when the father of rhetoric invoked the only principle he had retained. The one marble column left standing inside his soul.

"There is nothing in this life that cannot be explained." I fought the urge to bow my head, and as a result saw the exact moment that my brother's disbelief gave way to mirth. The Hero Anargyros laughed and stood, whirling his driftwood blade.

"Urania says that this is why her sisters despise you," he said, eyes crinkling.

"Trying to tear down all the world's mystique and wonder. Even if you could, how do you know you'd be satisfied at the end of it?" Stolen story; please report.

"I don't," the philosopher admitted freely. He laid his hand on the corpse of the drakaina." The only thing I know is that I know nothing at all." The drakaina vanished. If I was careful about it, I could fit three jugs of wine and enough food to satisfy me for a week in the pocket of folded logic within my cult attire. Anything more and I risked losing all of it. Aristotle had just tucked a serpent large enough to devour an elephant whole into his rags.

"I'm keeping the scalpel as well," he declared, and this time even I had to snort at his priorities.

"I'll need it for the dissection. Later. When I'm not surrounded by mouthy children and sanctimonious muses."

"And if it doesn't cut when I'm not there?" my brother asked, amused.

"Then I'll have learned something regardless."

"Gyro," I said, wincing as I reached for what was left of my strength. Across the beach, distant enough that the silent monster's rampaging could hardly be heard over the roar of the whirlpool, Fotios and Dymas along with Damon's freedman were doing their best to draw the serpent with a woman's torso to us. Damon was nowhere to be seen.

"The work's not done yet."

"Take heart, brother," he told me, gazing knowingly up.

"We're nearly there." For the second time that night, lightning lit up a cloudless sky. Elena crouched and raised her shield above her head, and I readied the hunting bird's breath to disperse what came, but it didn't hit any of us. It struck the Ionian, piercing through the whirlpool and lancing down through opaque waters. The roaring inhalation of the monster Charybdis stopped. The island, the entire thing, shook once, twice, three and then four times as something too vast to be described choked beneath the sea.

And then it was done. I followed my brother's line of sight.

"Ah."

"How spiteful," Elena whispered. The whirlpool created by Charybdis' grand inhalation was wide enough to fit the entirety of Alikos inside of it, and deeper than our eastern mountain range was tall. Without the monster's grotesque suction to maintain the currents that had drawn the Eos and so many other unfortunate ships in, the Ionian sought to rebalance itself. The sea collapsed in on us, dark waters swallowing up the stars in the night sky above. Fotios hollered in alarm but I couldn't see from where anymore.

The only light left came from the blue flames in Gyro's eyes, and those were angled up at the falling hammer that was the Ionian Sea.

"Humbled just in time to see the underworld, like the Broad always said," Aristotle lamented, leaning back on one hand.

"Worthless student - if you'd been faster than your brother, I could have died ignorant and proud."

"Who says you have to die at all?" Gyro asked him lightly. Light bloomed beneath the island. A scarlet glow rose like blood in water, seeping up over the rocks that lined the shores and illuminating every span of the beach. Broken and battered ships, dozens of them, were revealed by the rising light. Precious cargo scattered carelessly across the beach, chests cracked open like oysters.

Their contents glittered in the light - ornate metal works, coins of gold and precious gems, some half-buried in the sand and others sitting in plain view. Entire fortunes left to rot. Scarlet pillars of light rose up out of the collapsing currents, five of them in all, and arched up over the island. Each one was glory and triumphant vitality, so bright I had to squint. To raise my hand against them or be blinded. They curled together overhead, the curtain of falling waves replaced with a dome of brilliant light.

The Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn took the island in his hand, and the Ionian whistled and shrieked as it sought to subsume the Rosy-Fingered Dawn and was vaporized instead.

"And here I thought I was showing off," Gyro said ruefully.

"This is too much," Elena said quietly, barely audible.

"He'll burn out." It seemed to hit her, then, and she grabbed my brother's arm and pulled him urgently to her.

"Anargyros! We have to stop him - he'll burn himself away!" Our father had told us long ago that a Tyrant alone could survive without a heart, and only then because he had no other choice. To become a Tyrant, a man had to be a Hero first. And a Hero's nature was to burn. Brilliantly, gloriously, for all the world to see. But burn nonetheless. We called the light behind a Hero's eyes their heart's flame.

We called it that because it rose and fell in time with their spirit, their joys and their sorrows, and we also called it that because of what fueled it. Every flame needed fuel, an Aetos knew that better than anyone. Within a Hero, there was only one source that would suffice. The heart's blood. Hero's burned their own blood to draw glory from their souls. It was how they defied Tyrants an entire realm above their own, just as they defied monsters and cruel nature.

It was why every Hero's story was a tragedy in the end. Greek fire was unlike any other in the world. Once it started burning, it never, ever stopped. Not until the world was ash. It was said that a cultivator wasn't fully committed to the divine climb until they reached the Sophic Realm. Prior to that, they could live a citizen's life and be content. But even a wise man could find some solace in his studies.

It wasn't until the third realm and the fourth realm beyond it that a man was left with no other choice but to reach the heights. It was every Tyrant's fate to starve, no matter how many they consumed. And it was a Hero's destiny to burn, no matter how they stifled their passions.

"The low flame burns the longest," I quoted our late father, and Gyro smiled. Elena flushed, having pulled her to him almost nose-to-nose. I forced my aching body to move, warming up to a sprint as I made to help my twin. Behind me, I heard Gyro finish the quote.

"But we don't light candles to usher in the Games," he intoned. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him grip the back of Elena's head and press their foreheads together. Startled, she raised her adamant shield with its bisected sun and pressed it half-heartedly against his chest. She didn't pull away, though.

"My brother will die on his own terms, whether it's here and now or never at all. Let me handle my mad siblings, and I'll let you handle yours."

"Oi," I called.

"Don't lump us in with Damon." The wings of my brother's Heroic influence smacked me upside my head. My vision flashed white and I stumbled, snickering.

"You aren't what I expected of the Rosy Dawn," Elena admitted.

"Thank you." The Oracle's daughter huffed a laugh. Within the clenched fist of the Young Aristocrat's burning spirit, the entire island was lit up. I could see the treasures left behind and the ships laid to final rest on the shores. I could see Fotios, Dymas, and Damon's man as they raced to meet me in the middle. And I could see what my twin was pointing to, back they way they had come. The second drakaina wasn't pursuing my twin and the members of our crew.

The woman fused to its silver coils straightened her back and drew up her monstrous bulk, expression unreadable as distant as the creature was. Its attention was focused on someone else entirely.

"Elena?" I called back.

"Yes, Stavros?"

"Is that one yours?" Bathed in scarlet light, her anklets and bracelets and necklaces and earrings - all of them ruby and gold - glinting as they swung, a woman with the same golden hair and scarlet eyes as Elena raced across the beach. Her form was inexperienced and she had a bolt of bloodstained silk pressed against her mouth and nose, but she had started running while we were distracted. She was already past Fotios and the crew. The drakaina watched her steadily as she sprinted towards it.

"Calliope!" Elena cried. Fotios' brow furrowed, mirroring mine.

"The muse?" I asked, confused, as we finally reached each other. Fotios shook his head, bracing his hands on his knees and panting for breath. Dymas planted his blade in the sand and leaned heavily against it, while Damon's man collapsed entirely to his hands and knees.

"Unless she's a Heroine in disguise, I'm thinking not."

"Her sister," Aristotle said, abruptly beside my twin. He cursed breathlessly and stumbled sideways.

"I was hoping you'd lost that ability," I said sourly. He snorted.

"Lost it-?" Fotios' eyes widened as he noticed the young man where an old man should have been instead.

"Aristotle? What happened?" The overpowering glory of a Hero swept over our heads along with a very real shadow. Gyro sailed through the air with his Talon in hand, seeming to almost fly with the wings of his influence spread wide. Elena shot by moments later, her pneuma riotous with fear. Fotios and I shared a glance and took off after her.

"That's your sister?" I asked, catching up on her left and ignoring my body's worthless pleas to stop.

"She is," Elena gasped, running like she was chasing gold in the sprints.

"And your father had the audacity to name her after the Chief of all Muses?" Fotios added incredulously, coming up on her right side. The woman from Olympia bit down on a sob, furiously blinking tears from her eyes.

"He did! And she's suffered for his hubris! Now it's come to this-!" Her sister, the Oracle-to-be draped in jewelry and silks, stumbled and fell to her knees just short of the serpent woman. Her body, thin and frail beneath the finery, trembled as she coughed. The drakaina tilted her head, silver-white tresses spilling over her chest. The monster's bulk shifted, lowering her torso down.

"She's ill," I realized.

"She's always been ill." Why did the kyrios of the Raging Heaven let an Oracle leave his city before she was properly anointed? Gyro had asked me. Why did their kyrios send her out with no one but her sister to protect her, yet gift them with an adamant shield and nectar to sustain them? I had found the answer another way, but it still applied here.

"Bakkhos was appealing to higher power when he sent the two of you alone," I said, ignoring Fotios' questioning look. Elena bit her lip.

"What were you meant to do? Where were you meant to be?"

"Here."" Here? He sent the two of you to fight monsters?" A low rank Philosopher and her ill sister? The frail woman raised her head, dropping her bloodstained bolt of silk as she did. The serpent with a woman's face reached out, clawed fingers grasping for the daughter of the Oracle. She didn't flinch away. Didn't move at all.

"I snuck onto the ship against his orders," Elena admitted, bitter tears taken by the wind as she shed them.

"He sent her out alone. Not to fight." The woman known as Calliope knelt in the sands and awaited the serpent's grip. Too weak to fight, too weak to even raise the ornate dagger in her other hand. Crippled by illness, cursed at birth for her father's hubris. Yet, by Elena's own admission, heir apparent to the mantle of Oracle. As if such an insult to the muses could ever be allowed.

"He sent her here to die." The Hero Anargyros descended from the curtain of scarlet light above and sank his talon into the serpent's scales, cutting through undying flesh as easily as he had the first time. The monstrous woman recoiled from Elena's sister, her mouth opening in a silent scream.

"He sent her here to die, and she thanked him for the privilege!" Elena seethed, outrage and hope rekindling her conviction.

"They told her that this was the righteous path and she believed them! She told me not to come. She told me to take her place. She said that was justice for what our father had done, but even so-!"" But even so," spoke a voice I knew all too well. I dug my feet into the sand and Fotios did the same, both of us reaching out with unspoken understanding and grabbing Elena by either arm. She fought viciously against us, but I only pointed up ahead.

The Hero Damon Aetos stepped out of the light on the island's edge, triumphant vitality and glory rolling off of him like heat from a flame. The concentric rings within his eyes glowed vibrantly, and his pupils blazed with his heart's flame. Steam billowed off his body, and each stride across the sand left molten glass behind. He had our uncle's bow - no, he had his bow in hand. But the quiver was nowhere to be seen.

"He's out of arrows," Fotios muttered.

"The Tyrant Pierus had nine daughters, and every one of them he named after a muse," Damon said, heedless of that fact as he approached the monster.

"That was his hubris. But it was his daughters that dared to challenge the nine in a contest of song. That was their hubris. That was their tribulation earned." Gyro flew back, his Talon wet with molten lead.

"The kyrios of the Raging Heaven decided to avoid the issue altogether, to offer one Oracle up to the divine and keep the other for himself. That was his hubris. He may have had good reason. He may have even been right to do it. But even so, even though he only wants one back, we'll return to him both." Damon Aetos stepped in front of the Oracle-to-be and pressed three fingers to his chest, drawing an arrow of rosy flame from his heart.

"Once given and twice returned," the Young Aristocrat intoned, nocking the arrow to his bow. The Hero let fly his heart's arrow and the serpent fell dead, pierced between the eyes. Fingers of a vast scarlet hand unfurled above us, revealing stars once more. Somehow, some way, he had lifted the entire island up out of the sea. Calliope the woman stared up at the eldest of the four and spoke to him in a voice soft with shock and wonder.

"Who are you?"

"This is Justice," Calliope the Muse answered. The Goddess with the Heavenly Voice cradled Damon's jaw in her ethereal hand and laid her golden crown upon his head.

"Remember his face." As if she could forget.