Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.58 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“You did well, both of you.” Gyro paced a winding line through the sand, rhythmically easing his blade out of its sheath a sliver before dropping it back into place. “I couldn’t have found better materials if I tried.”

“Joy,” Fotios muttered beside me, holding scarlet cloth in front of him like a shield. “Joy and rapture.” His eyes were clenched shut in expectation of pain.

Not that I was very much different. I ducked my head and hunched my shoulders, hiding behind the ash tree as much as I was holding it upright. The rhythmic click, click of our older brother’s sword falling back into a sheath paused. In an instant, Gyro’s pneuma rose and the trace of a blade cutting through air tickled my left ear.

“Fuck!” I snarled. A section of the ash tree cut so cleanly that I had only felt it’s sudden absence in the shifting of weight hit the sand and toppled. Another hiss and a brush of phantom sensation by my left knee. “Gyro!”

“Yes brother?” he asked pleasantly, circling around with a critical eye.

“Watch where you’re cutting,” I demanded, feeling sweat bead on my brow. “The Aetos line needs heirs.”

“Not that that has anything to do with you,” Fotios remarked. A moment later he yelped and flinched back, a section of scarlet cloth falling away without any frayed or jagged edges to mark its separation.

“All these years of practice and my brothers still doubt me with a blade,” Gyro despaired, lashing out half a dozen times as he did. Sections of cloth and hardwood fell away with every lash, and soon enough the tree had been trimmed down to a single heavy beam and planks of varying length and thickness. The scarlet cloth was added to a pile of other myriad silks, blood oranges and vibrant yellows.

“The only thing I doubt is your intent,” Fotios said petulantly, smacking sand out of the rugged cult attire that every initiate wore for Kronia. Gathering up the sail clothes, he wasted no time sprinting to the other side of the beach. Idley, as he passed, Gyro flicked his blade and cut a few curls hanging by the nape of his neck. I watched my twin curse and stumble into the shallow waves with mixed feelings.

“Please don’t touch my hair,” I said when Gyro looked back at noon. “It’s just how I like it.” He smiled and dipped his head towards the cypress tree, still in need of carving.

Midday gave way to dusk, each of the shades represented in the pile of silks we’d stolen for our ship reaching out tirelessly across the heavens. Lunch came and went along with dinner, an unforgivable shame that we had not been present to entertain our slaves on this day of festivities. Alas. Our brother had decided that a ship had to be built. And as with most things, when Damon decided a thing needed to be done, all else fell away.

“Boys,” the man in question called as the moon fell up into the sky and the rosy light of our cult’s greater mystery bloomed in his palms. “Come make yourselves useful.”

Boys, he called us, as if we were separated by more than a few years. I hopped up onto the skeletal frame of the ship, still just the suggestion of a whole. It was going to be another long night.

An even longer night, I realized, when I landed precariously on one of the naked beams and saw what my eldest brother had been doing with his time.

“What is that?” Fotios asked incredulously, landing adroitly beside me.

Surrounding Damon, spanning out from the central point where he sat, the beams and planks that I had so painstakingly gathered that morning were covered in burning formations. As we watched, he dragged the tip of one finger across an ash beam and a line of smoldering lights followed. The word didn’t burn, not fully, the way a mundane flame would. It blackened beneath the lines of light, but it never once spread.

“Decoration,” Damon answered, pulling back and flicking the rosy light from his finger. It landed in the sands beside the ship and bloomed, slowly like a flower, until it was the size of a bonfire. A suitable source of lighting that impossibly gave off no heat. Damon had always been the one with the finest control of the four of us.

“Naturally,” I said, as if that made perfect sense. “What do you need from us?”

He propped his cheek up on a clenched fist, cross legged in the sullen lights of his designs. In the light of our foundational mystery, the concentric circles ringing his pupils seemed to burn malevolently as they sun.

“Add to it,” he bade us.

“Absolutely not,” I said immediately.

Fotios didn’t even bother with a verbal response, stepping backwards off the skeleton of the ship and falling into the pile of sailing cloth.

“I sacrificed an entire day for this, and that’s fine,” I told him, “but I’ll swim laps in the styx before I sit down and finger-paint a ship when I could be in the gymnasium.”

“It’s necessary.”

“Decoration is going to make the ship float, is that it?”

“It might.”

I blinked and turned to regard an old man in rags of scarlet and gray sitting beside my brother.

“Elder.” I bowed my head, confused but not bereft of my senses. “I didn’t notice you there.”

“I know you didn’t,” Damon‘s mentor said, sitting with one leg tucked up underneath him and the other dangling as he balanced on the figurehead of the Eos - for some reason, the very first portion of the ship that Damon had completed. “But I was here, even so.”

“Elder?” My twin’s face appeared at the edge of the ship, Fotios pulling himself up just enough to see the unkempt philosopher. “When did you get here?”

“Yesterday. Your brother has been busy.”

“He always was.” I frowned and brushed my thumb across one of the lines he’d burnt into the ship. A shock of something, some whispered sensation, leapt from the design to my hand. It raced through the channels I had worn through my body with the hunting bird’s breath, settling at the base of my skull as an echo of a truth.

If God wills it, you can sail even on a mat.

“Decoration,” I repeated, while Fotios followed my example and stiffened up at the feedback he received.

“Decoration,” the old philosopher agreed.

“I’ll admit that I spend more time in the octagon than I do with my tutors,” I said. “But this feels more significant than that.”

“How so?” Damon’s mentor asked.

“Brother,” I entreated him. I had learned my lesson long ago that the only man with the patience for Damon‘s mentor was Damon himself. These days, I didn’t even bother engaging him if I could avoid it. My ego could only suffer so much abuse before it shattered

“It is a decoration,” Damon said, taking pity on us. He brushed wild dark hair out of his eyes and leaned down. The rosy light grew brighter in response to his proximity. “It’s also an appeal to higher power.”

Fotios raised an eyebrow and held out his own empty palm, coaxing light to it. He nodded down at his hand, at the application of a question inspired by the mystery of the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god.

“That sort of higher power?” I asked.

“The world does not revolve around your lonely burning god,” the old philosopher in rags of anonymity said with polite disdain. “There are as many natural mechanisms as there are stars in heaven, as many gods as there are no constants in this life.”

“If not a god, then what?” I cracked my neck, the eerie weight of that burning truth I’d overheard in the flame still noticeable at the point where my skull met my spine.

“No, it is a god,” the old man said. “Just not your corpse god. An originator. In building this ship, We take a substance changeable and perishable and shape it to our needs. In beautifying it, we appeal to the unmoved mover, immutable among heaven and earth, in the hopes that our ship might become something closer to the divine - changeable, yet eternal.”

“You don’t believe us,” Damon said without any particular heat. If anything, he was amused. “Allow me to make up for fourteen years of poor instruction, then - our wise elders taught you the principal theories of natural philosophy. They did that much, at least.”

“As best they could, yes.” An elder in the cult was due a certain level of respect, but an elder in cultivation was due even more. It was difficult to take our boyhood mentors seriously these days, regardless of my disinterest in their teachings.

After all, how could a captain of the Sophic Realm show academic deference to a bunch of old men that had yet to breach the ninth rank?

“Then you understand what it is we do when we invoke the rules of nature,” Damon continued, licking his thumb and dragging it back down one of the burning lines in the ship. A sharp hiss and rising steam followed. When the steam cleared, A furrowed scorch remained.

I flexed the fingers of my hands, all ten of them, and then curling each digit I recalled a principle that I had internalized during my time as a Philosopher. One for every rank. ten lessons learned, ten rules of nature I had made my own. Every one of them carved into my soul.

“It’s a Philosopher‘s nature to question greater authorities,” I said, reciting an old line our father had told us when we were boys.

“It’s a Hero’s nature to defy greater imposition,” Fotios picked up where I left off.

“And it’s a Tyrant’s nature to impose,” Gyro said, appearing silently behind Damon and leaning over his shoulder, one arm hooked around his torso with a hand loosely splayed over his brother’s chest. “The greater question is, what is a god’s nature?”

It was the final question our father would always ask us, and I've never been able to give him an answer that satisfied him. Neither had Fotios, or even Gyro. Damon had never bothered to try.

Until now, apparently.

“A god’s nature,” mused the young aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn, “is to live apart. Untouched and unspoken of.”

“An island in the sun,” his mentor, Aristotle, concluded.