Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.50

The Young Griffon

The ideal of the institutions that we called the greater mystery cults was camaraderie in pursuit of greater understanding. These were learning places, yes, as well as fonts of overwhelming strength in times of strife. But their central purpose was not to uplift, nor to make war.

The mystery cults were a timeless reminder that every man was equally worthless under the sun.

“You’re certain that you can’t tell me anything about it, senior brother?”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” my senior within the Raging Heaven Cult affirmed. His pneuma marked him as a cultivator in the eighth rank of the Sophic Realm. Yet even so, I had found him more than halfway up the mountain. A man of his standing would have enjoyed comfortable seniority within the Rosy Dawn Cult, but here in Olympia he was hardly fit for the second-rate estates - only the junior mystikos slept closer to the storm crown than him.

No, that wasn’t true. The ones that slept closest to the storm crown were the boys following me like lost ducks, their guardian, and the ugly philosopher that had dared to put his hands on my brother.

Still, it was a shame. A man of such advanced cultivation, and yet so little renown to show for it. I wondered what he could have accomplished by now, this senior of mine, if he hadn’t wasted his time vying for the approval of men that couldn’t care less about him or his life.

“Surely, there’s something you can tell me,” I pressed him. He frowned, shifting the bundle on his back - dozens of papyrus rolls tied by string, clay tablets wrapped in leather, and the whole lot of it bundled in a fisherman’s net of all things.

“I never made it past Sisyphus,” he said ruefully, raising his hand to shield his eyes against the glare of flashing light above. “Up there in the storm, the words your seniors used to comfort you lose all meaning. The thunder is so loud that you can’t hear yourself think. They urged us to go it alone, of course, but once the seniors were out of sight we all bunched up like sheep.”

“They don’t go with you?” I asked. Kyno had said that every senior mystiko within the Raging Heaven Cult was sent by their elders to guard the new initiates during their trial. The Rosy Dawn’s initiation rites were much the same. Everyone, even the pillars of the Aetos family, descended into the heart of the eastern mountain range together to behold the confounding sight of the fallen sun god.

“They do, but only so far,” he said, tearing his eyes away from the Storm That Never Ceased. He sighed and tousled the sandy curls of his hair. “For a man to prove himself worthy of the Raging Heaven he must bear its weight alone, even if only for a step. That is the final trial, the one that every hopeful initiate must surpass.”

“Only one step?” the little king asked, and I smirked at the disdain in his voice.

Fortunately, my senior was just as amused. “Only one,” he confirmed, chuckling. “And I’ve seen boys your age with twice your refinement fail, sulking all the way down the mountain because they couldn’t manage it.”

“Cultivation alone isn’t enough,” the little king declared, puffing out his chest and pounding it with his first. “Pyr and I will make it at least as far as Griffon. Farther, even!”

The little sentinel viciously smacked his younger brother over the head, at about the same time that the boy himself realized what he’d just said.

“You’ve already…” My senior looked sideways at me, his brow furrowed.

“I’ve already decided that I’ll reach the top,” I said, and understanding gentled his expression. That, and a nostalgic sort of mirth.

“Second rank of the Sophic Realm,” he said, fondly and a bit sadly, having gauged my standing just as I had gauged his. “I remember those days. I thought I would be competing in the Games by now, or perhaps pioneering a new field of natural philosophy. The possibilities seem so vast when you’ve only just reached the foot of the mountain.”

“You’re talking like an old man,” I said, knocking him sideways with my elbow. He laughed.

“I am an old man, by the Raging Heaven’s standards. And you’re not far behind me.”

“Is that so?”

“It is so,” he confirmed. “Out in the villages where men like you and I carved our names, captain of the Civic Realm is a rank worthy of respect. No man would hesitate to offer his daughter’s hand in marriage to such a citizen. Reaching captain of the Civic Realm before you’ve even reached legal adulthood? Your father would have to beat the suitors off with a stick.”

“I don’t recall saying that I grew up in a village,” I said, raising an eyebrow. He waved the hand not holding his bundle of texts, gesturing at my tattered cult attire.

“You strut through the premier cult of the free Mediterranean, waving down senior initiates as if it’s only natural that they give you their time and insight, all while wearing the colors of a cult that you can’t possibly be from,” he said. The odd sensation of being pitied and supported at the same time washed over me. “In a way, the trial of the storm crown is much like the experience of stepping into Olympia after a lifetime of shoveling shit on a farm.”

“I think you’re projecting, honored senior.”

“‘Honored senior,’ he says, while sneering in my face.” The older cultivator lashed out with his free hand, a slap to the back of my head that the boys didn’t notice until the clap of flesh against flesh made them jump.

My senior stared curiously at the pankration hand that had intercepted his own just before it struck me. Without the Rosy Fingers of Dawn to render it visible to the naked eye, he instead observed it with his sophic sense. Unlike the aggressive overtures I had often encountered since unlocking my Philosopher’s eye, his influence felt less like a wave and more like the waterfall currents that fed a bath. It coursed over my pankration hand, flowing into the gaps between its fingers and the creases left behind in the skin when those fingers curled and uncurled.

The older philosopher squeezed the hand of my intent, and I squeezed back. He let go.

“I meant no disrespect,” I said honestly. He hummed.

“You may have been right. Perhaps I was projecting. Certainly, my intent was nothing like that when I was a newly minted Philosopher. How long have you been refining that ability?”

“How long has any man been refining the use of his hands?” I asked in turn.

“Fascinating,” he murmured. “I take it next you’ll tell me that you really are from the Rosy Dawn.” I smiled faintly, and he shook his head. “Right, right. That aside, being stronger than I was at your rank doesn’t mean much on this mountain. I said it before, but a captain of the Civic Realm is only impressive in the settlements that can hardly be said to have citizens at all. How old were you when you reached the peak of that realm?”

“Seventeen.”

“Which would put you somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years old now, if you were fortunate while bridging the gap and didn’t waste a moment in your studies.”

I said nothing, and thanks to the little sentinel’s quick thinking, neither did the little king.

“A secret, is that it?” We both watched the little sentinel grapple with the little king, one hand planted firmly over his mouth while the other struggled to fend off his brother’s fists and elbows. “What a sad day, when a junior can’t trust his senior with something so basic.”

“Ah, but you already have me at a disadvantage.” I conjured burning hands of pankration intent between the two boys, separating them, and then when they both simply glared at one another I drowned them in a flurry of slaps and light punches. The little king and his sentinel let fly their battle cries, pneuma surging, and began to fight back against the hands of my intent.

“How’s that?” My senior asked, eyes tracking the now visible limbs with keen interest.

“You’ve seen a manifestation of my soul,” I said, conjuring another pankration hand in front of his face, close enough that his eyes crossed as he looked at it. I flexed and waved the fingers of dawn, contorting the limb this way and that so he could observe it. “You’ve also heard my name, though it was given to you secondhand. And I still don’t know yours.”

“Chilon,” he said, his eyes not wavering from the pankration limb even as he offered his free hand to me. When I clasped it with fingers of flesh and blood, he seemed almost disappointed. “I didn’t notice it before, but in the light…” His eyes flickered, tracing the shadows cast by the rosy light of dawn - the faint silhouette of an arm beyond the flaming hand. “There’s more to it that can’t be seen, isn’t there?”

“You have a keen eye, Chilon,” I complimented him.

“And what illuminates it? It’s not quite a flame, but it’s more than simple light.”

“It’s called the Rosy-Fingered Dawn.”

He exhaled heavily. “Of course it is. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting technique. You can control the heat and the intensity of the light?”

“I can.” Behind us, fighting for every step against flurries of pankration hands just bright enough to distract the eye and just hot enough to let them know they’d been burned, the boys were proof enough of that. In contrast, the hand hovering in front of Chilon’s face was burning bright enough to blind a Civic cultivator.

“You were saying about my age?” I prompted him, when he continued to run the streams of his influence and most of his attention over the pankration hand. I dismissed it and he blinked, returning to himself.

“Right. Well, whatever age you are, and whatever backwater town or Island in the Sun you came from, the fact remains that you’re a grown man and only a Philosopher of the second rank. Am I right about that much, at least?”

“You are.”

“Then the circumstances hardly matter,” he said, conviction returning to him as he lectured. “Even the strongest ant in the colony is still an ant. In the world that I grew up in, Sophic Realm by the age of twenty was a feat worth celebrating. Worth telling stories of, as if I had skipped the second realm entirely and jumped straight to the third. But the city-states of the free Mediterranean are a different world entirely, and their standards are tailored to match.

“When I was offered an opportunity at the trials leading to admittance in the Raging Heaven, my family threw a party. And when the leading men of our little town found out about it they scolded my father for not telling them sooner. They declared a festival then and there in my honor, and neighbors and distant relatives that I had grown up doing chores for hoisted me up onto their shoulders, each of them in turn, so they could parade me through the town. As if I was Heracles himself. Children that I had shared lessons with, boys that I had considered my rivals and girls that I had pined over, showered me with praise and begged me to remember them when I was gone.”

Chilon stopped short at the next step, his fishing net full of papyrus and clay tablets thumping to the steps by his feet as he dropped it. He tilted his head fully back, gazing unimpeded at the curtain of furious tribulation that forever darkened the Raging Heaven’s door.

“I hadn’t even been accepted yet,” he whispered, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “I had only been given a chance - but to these people that I had known all my life, I may as well have caught lightning in my hands.”

“But you were accepted,” I observed. He inclined his head in the slightest nod.

“I was. And when I joined the others beneath the Storm That Never Ceases, resolved to go as high as any of my fellow initiates, I realized something. I was the oldest among them by far.”

The little king snarled in effort, one of my pankration hands writhing as the little sentinel gripped it with both hands as well as his teeth. The older of the two boys held it steady while the younger bent back its middle finger with all of his strength. Both boys scowled and drew up their shoulders, weathering the slaps and punches of the rest of my pankration hands. The faint taste of blood appeared in the back of my throat as the middle finger of my pankration hand broke with an ugly crack.

Lefteris’ boys shouted triumphantly, and I rewarded them for their tenacity with another ten hands.

“I was twenty years old, in the first rank of the Sophic realm,” Chilon said. “Of the rest of my peers, only three of them were as weak as I was. None of the three were old enough to grow hair on their chins. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”

“Your seniors,” I guessed. He laughed. It was a different sort of hopelessness than the kind I had encountered in our Heroic companions. This was something he had long made his peace with. My ire stirred in the boiling red depths of the Rein-Holder’s marrow.

“My seniors, yes. There were dozens of them there that day. At any given time, it’s natural for half of the Raging Heaven’s senior initiates to be away from the cult, either on elder business or pursuing whatever they pleased. Only the initiation rites can bring them all back. When it comes time to face Raging Heaven, every indigo son comes home to stand beside his new brothers and sisters in solidarity.

“Among all of those cultivators, none of them were below the fifth rank of the Sophic realm - the turning point where a man is closer to a legend than he is a mortal. Captains of the Sophic realm abounded, some of them too young to be married. Even Heroes took time from their epics to support us.

“I saw a Hero that was younger than me that day,” Chilon said, disheartened and awed at the same time. “He was making his rounds through the crowd, like many of the seniors were, but where the seniors were encouraging us, he was encouraging the seniors. Preparing them for another trip up the mountain. Another bout against tribulation.

“It’s different, you know.” Chilon glanced sidelong at me. “Nothing can truly prepare you for the Storm That Never Ceases, not even someone that has lived it before. But when a Hero says the words… Even in the middle of the crashing thunder, when sound has lost all its meaning, those words remain. A senior Philosopher may have seen the lightning with his own eyes, but a Hero has felt its touch. And he’s survived for the Muses to sing of it.”

I flexed the fingers of my right hand, the one of flesh and blood. At any given moment, I could feel the lightning heat of the tribulation hound’s skull. It was as vivid a sensation now as it had been then.

“I believe you,” I said simply, and he turned his eyes back to the storm.

“I wasn’t the only one watching him, of course - my peers were just as enthralled as I was by the sight of so many extraordinary men and women. But he did take notice of me eventually. He looked me up and down with eyes that burned with the flames of his triumphant spirit. Up until that point, he’d spoken to the seniors with an older brother's fondness, despite the fact that he was younger than many of them. He’d graced my peers with words of quiet strength and a father’s stern expectation when it looked like the youngest of them would faint on their feet.”

Chilon rubbed a thumb at his right eye. Unshed tears shimmered in the light of the storm.

“And then he saw me, a twenty year old man standing at the lowest step in the lowest realm that the Raging Heaven would accept.” His voice was thick. “And it was like he was looking at garbage.”

My teeth ground together.

“To answer your first question,” he finally said, after long moments where the only sound was the muted boom of the storm crown and the boys fighting behind us, “I can’t tell you a single thing about the true mystery of the Raging Heaven Cult, because I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I was the sort of man that could reach it.

“The trial of Raging Heaven doesn’t truly begin until you’re inside the storm already. The seniors escort the new blood into the storm, nearly a third of the way to the peak, and the Heroic cultivators among them venture up into the heart of the storm to divert the worst of it. Otherwise, there’d be no new blood to fill the junior estates.”

“And then they set you loose,” I said, leaning against the natural walls of the mountain and relishing the gentle heat of the amethyst veins on my back.

“With a slap on the back and a hearty shove, yes. One step away from the crowd is enough to gain admittance, but I’ll warn you as my seniors warned me - any initiate of the Raging Heaven that does not at least make it out of sight of his seniors will soon wish they had never come to the city of Olympia at all.”

I thought back to the admittedly frenzied hours I had spent in the Storm That Never Ceased. At that time, whenever I stepped away from a statue, three strides had been enough to put it out of my sight.

“That isn’t much better,” I mused.

“No, at best it’s a difference of five steps,” he agreed, sitting down heavily on the stone stairs and fiddling with the knots holding his fishing net together. “But that fifth step is the difference between heaven and earth. Whether you’re five steps away from the group or all the way up at the peak of the mountain, the isolation is the same. In that moment, you experience something that no other cult can provide you. Something that every cultivator beneath the realm of Heroes would kill to know.”

I recalled the lightning. I recalled the storm.

“In that moment,” Chilon said, “you understand the price of ascension. Standing alone against the wrath of heaven itself, you finally realize what it means to defy the rules of nature. The trial of Raging Heaven is a warning and an invitation. The first kyrios, the one that built this institution, speaking to you from the furthest depths of Tartarus - ‘This is what it takes to be a man worth telling stories of. This is the least of what a hero must endure.’

“When my people found out I was a candidate for entry to this cult, they told stories of me as if they were worth hearing,” he whispered harshly, the contents of his fishing net spilling out as he undid the primary knot. Scrolls of papyrus went rolling down the steps, clay tablets slipped out of their leather casings and plummeted to the unforgiving stone.

Little Leo and Pyr collapsed as my pankration hands abruptly lurched away from them, leaning shoulder-to-shoulder and exchanging victorious grins while they struggled to breathe. I caught each of the falling tablets before they could shatter, scooped up all of the papyrus scrolls before they could tumble fully down the mountain. And I watched silently as my senior ignored what he had almost lost, sifting through the remaining contents in his lap.

“Until the day they died, my parents sent me messages whenever they could, asking me for stories of my time in the Raging Heaven. Each year, on the day that I had first received the news of my candidacy, they celebrated like it was a religious holiday. And every year that passed, they became more and more convinced that I had already surpassed the realm of Philosophers, that I was the Hero I had bragged I would soon be when I left. They begged me for tales of my exploits so that they could spread them to all of their neighbors.”

He finally found what he had been looking for, a leather pouch that was filled to bursting with papyrus sheets. As he drew them out, one by one, it was clear that the most recent of them had been sent before I was born. The ink had faded nearly to transparency and the sheets were browned by age.

“I never replied. Not to a single one,” he said, and finally looked up at me. Whatever he saw in my face, it only made him laugh. “My apologies, Griffon. This is why I never offer my juniors guidance. I’m hardly fit for it.”

“The rest of these,” I said, the words carefully measured. My pankration hands brandished in the air what he had let fall. “Are these messages from home as well?”

“No,” he said, watching them fondly as they drifted around him. “These are stories I’ve collected during my time here. Stories worth telling.”

“Where were you taking them?” I asked.

“Everywhere. Most men have a relic that’s close to their heart. An ancestor’s gift, or perhaps a lover’s token of favor.”

I raised an unconscious hand, rolling between my finger and thumb the scarlet gem that hung from my ancestor’s necklace. The one I had stolen from the filial pools in my father’s courtyard, five months and a lifetime ago. Chilon nodded.

“Every cultivator needs something to comfort them when they stand alone against the Fates. Admittedly, I could have chosen something more sensible, but I am who I am. This net and all its contents are my precious relic. Each of those scrolls and tablets is a story that I’ve been told during my time in Olympia, a tale of a Heroic soul that even tribulation lightning could not strike down.”

“You carry all of them with you, and your family's letters,” I said pointedly.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Chilon, an old man with the face and the body of a twenty-five year old, smiled boyishly up at me, shedding all of his years in an instant.

“Because when that hero condemned me with his eyes, I promised myself that I wouldn't utter another boasting word until I had surpassed him. I ignored every letter my family sent me, every request for information - even when they only wanted to know that I was alive. That I was whole, and happy. I was too ashamed to read any of them more than once, let alone reply.

“And when they passed and my siblings gave up on reaching me, gave up on believing that I had passed the initiation rites at all, I realized what a fool I had been. I realized that chasing after that Hero's shadow for so many years had never given me a moment’s joy. I realized that the happiest I’d ever been was riding on my fathers shoulders while he paraded me around the town, holding my mother close when the joy made her legs give out.”

“So you gave up on becoming a hero?” The little sentinel asked. The boys had regained their breath and clambered up my back, peering over my shoulders once again.

“Not at all,” I said. The ire in my soul settled back down to rest. “He only shifted his focus.” Chilon snapped his fingers, pointing at me.

“You’ve got a keen eye, too,” he said, and I snorted. It only made his grin grow. “Here and in the other great cities, a sixty year old man in the eighth stage of the Sophic realm is hardly worth acknowledging in the agora, let alone listening to. It’s been nearly a decade since I advanced from seventh to eighth. My prospects are terribly bleak.”

Against my best efforts, my lips began to curl. “But even so.”

“But even so,” he agreed. “I will take those last three steps into glory. Even if it takes me the rest of my natural life, the rest of every man’s natural life - even if the stars go out and the sun falls from the sky, I will become a man worth telling stories of.”

“And then what?” The little king asked. His mismatched eyes watched the senior Philosopher intently. “What will you do then? Become a Tyrant?”

“No.” Chilon shook his head, carefully slipping the stack of letters back into their leather pouch. “Then, I’ll respond to each and every letter my parents sent me, because I’ll finally have a story for them to tell.”

“But they’re-” This time, it was my own flesh and blood hand that covered the little king’s mouth.

I bowed my head to the old man.

“Thank you for your story, senior sophist. I look forward to hearing the rest of it some day.”

Chilon smiled warmly. I deposited all of the stories that had nearly gotten away back into his net, and he cinched it shut with practiced motions. But when he rose to his feet and heaved it over his shoulder, there was still one more scroll at his feet. I picked it up with a pankration hand, offering it to him.

His eyes swept over the picture that had been brushed with ink across the outside of the papyrus. An ink painting of four young men, standing side-by-side under a mottled brown ring.

The thumb of my pankration hand brushed against the ring, a piece of it crumbling away, and I realized that it was old blood. When this scroll was first written, those four young men had stood beneath a scarlet sun.

“Keep it,” Chilon said. “A gift for my junior, come all the way from the Rosy Dawn. It’s worth reading, I can promise you that.”

Rather than thank him again, I offered him my arm. He reached out, clasping my forearm while I clasped his.

“I made it to the statue of Sisyphus and no further,” he said, looking down pointedly at his own arm. There, I saw a faint scar just above where my hand was clasped. An odd sight for a cultivator of his standing. “When you go, as proof of your progress, try to find the statues of those that fell before us. Each of them carries a blade. When you can’t progress any further, push on until you find one more statue. Leave your blood on its blade, and all of the Raging Heaven will know how far you went against the Storm That Never Ceases.”

“How will they know which blade left the mark?” I asked, turning his forearm so I could get a better look at the scar. Of all the blades I had taken from that mountain - lurking now in my shadow - I could only think of a few that would leave a mark at all noticeably different from this one.

“These statues are memorials to the stories we were raised on.” What had at first been an unassumingly handsome face, when I marked him as an easy target, was now made just the slightest bit wild by his passion. “These are the stars in the sky that we looked up at as children, that our parents promised us we could grasp in our hands if only we gave it everything we had. These men and women, these giants and monsters and holy seers, they’re the curtain of heaven above. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, every son of Helen sees the same thing when he looks up at the cosmic glory.”

As he spoke the words, his influence impressed them upon my soul. The world as I knew it fell away, and in its place -

“There he is, Chilon,” my mother whispered while I lay in her lap. Her hand pointed up, at the vast expanse of light. “There’s Sisyphus, pushing his boulder up the hill. There’s the tyrant that cheated death.”

- I saw the constellation carved into his arm. It was a scar left on his soul as much as his body. Something that I couldn’t have faked if I tried.

“Good to know,” I said, and meant it twice. “But unless the cult’s mystery has a blade of its own, I don’t intend to come down with any scars.”

His pneuma rippled around him. Not an advancement, not quite - but the promise of one on the horizon.

“To the peak?” He asked, though he already knew.

“To the peak.”

The ideal of the greater mystery cults was brotherhood beneath the storm. The acknowledgement that no matter how old you were, no matter where you stood among heaven and earth, some mysteries simply couldn’t be solved. Every man was equally unlikely to reach that impossible understanding. Any man could stand humble by your side in contemplation of the unknown.

We let go at the same time. Chilon turned back up the mountain, continuing the climb to his quarters. Or perhaps beyond. I slipped the scroll he’d gifted me with its four painted men and its bloodstained sun into the makeshift satchel around my waist, the one that I’d made out of an old woman’s golden shawl. The scroll settled beside the cypress mask of tribulation that I’d taken from Melpomene.

“You ought to advise your juniors more often, Chilon,” I called over my shoulder, turning down the mountain while the boys waved goodbye. The sixty year old Philosopher turned his head, shifting the net that he used to catch stories so he could look back at me.

“Why?” he called.

Why? Worthless old man, that should have been obvious.

“Because you’re good at it.”