Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.64 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

The Raging Heaven had called for aid in Olympia’s name, demanding a resource that only institutions of greater mystery could hope to provide. I had wondered, when pirates were the greatest threat in my consideration, what cargo was worth the Riotous Tyrant's attention. Then, when a woman’s cries and a monster's flesh had erupted from the whirlpool currents, I had wondered what cargo could possibly be worth the risk.

The woman charging on my brother's heels reared back and let fly her javelin, a Philosopher's pneuma rising up around her. The lance struck the drakaina in one of its glossy black eyes and punched clean through. Thin, watery ichor sprayed from the wound.

The monster rolled, burying the upper half of its narrow skull in the sands - in the same motion releasing every ounce of breath it had stolen while crossing the beach.

The woman grabbed Gyro by the back of his sword belt and yanked him behind her, digging her feet into the sand and raising her red sun shield.

The monster screamed.

“I WANT TO LIVE!”

The crude attack, violence in shrill sound, struck the woman’s shield and rebounded off its surface. It struck back at the screamer, and though the serpent had no means of hearing that I could see, it flinched and flung every coil of itself back.

Gyro took the opportunity for what it was, and I called upon the strength of conviction to cross the distance between us. I immersed myself in an ideal- a principle that I had internalized as a philosopher and followed faithfully ever since.

A lord may lead that men may follow - but brothers stand side-by-side.

I planted my back foot and pushed off, crossing the wreckage and the woman with her shield in a single bound to land beside my brother. I dispersed my pains with the hunting bird's breath as the force of my movement fractured the bone just under my knee. It wasn’t enough to stagger me, not with my principle raging and Gyro by my side.

He flashed me a grin while we sprinted in synchronicity. “The eyes!”

“Obviously!” I shot back. He laughed.

We jumped at the same time, just as the drakaina thrashed up in pain and disorientation and exposed its eyes once more. Gyro unleashed his own Sophic strength with a shout, burying his blade to the hilt in the monster's good eye. I sailed past its sloping head entirely, cracking my line of rigging rope as I passed and wrapping it around the javelin lodged in its other eye.

[Dawn arrives upon its throne]

The burning light of my mystery faith rushed down the length of the rope and ignited the javelin in an instant, flash boiling the molten ichor oozing from the wound. Not hot enough. That being so, I piled on the truth as I hurtled past.

Flame needs fuel - it hungers like a living thing. Flame needs room to grow - it covets like a living thing, too. Some flames are quenched in water, but others burn even over waves. To kill Greek flame you must contain it. Starve it, like any other ravenous soul. To nurture it is far easier - simply feed it and set it free, beyond your shackling will.

Let it breathe.

If a Philosopher's only strength was his grasp of natural law, then that would be enough. I called upon the truth of tending flame that I’d learned from tutors and practiced with my own hands, and through it I bid the fire boiling the monster’s eye to multiply. Light flashed and the low rushing sound of devouring heat overtook the creature, burning its punctured eye to ash in a split second.

I landed heavily in the sand further down the beach, the rigging rope going taut in my hand and tearing the woman’s javelin free as I went. A second searing flash of light heralded Gyro’s own invocation. I watched him push off its head, back towards the gutted ship, backflipping and landing adroitly beside the woman.

“Magnitude,” Aristotle said, sand spilling down his head and shoulders as he rose inexplicably up out of the beach next to me. This time I only grit my teeth at his sudden presence. “Your rhetoric is crude, but I suppose your foundations are firm enough. Unfortunate, that it won't help you here.”

“You sure about that, elder?” I cracked my impromptu whip again, flinging the javelin back across the beach. It sailed over writhing hills of flesh, the serpent unable to react to it visually and in too much pain to bother even if it could. Gyro caught it out of the air and offered it back to the woman who’d thrown it. She smiled and said something I couldn’t make out over the crashing of beach dunes.

“Maybe you’re right,” I continued, waving a hand at Fotios and the crew as they came charging over. “Maybe a philosopher can only influence the simplest mechanics of this world, and perhaps all that I’ve done is shift the magnitude of a flame. But if that’s enough to blind a monster, how is killing it a leap too far?”

Aristotle sighed, combing sand out of his ragged white beard and shrugging more off of the rags draped over his shoulders. His next words were delivered without any of his prior heat - nothing but a teacher’s worn patience.

“Look, and you may see.”

I rolled my eyes but obliged him, looking at the blind drakaina.

Liquid black eyes stared back at me.

“Impossible,” I spat, and the monster lunged.

Fotios slammed into my side, a diving tackle with force enough to send us both careening over the beach rocks and into the riptide beyond. I felt the whirlpool’s notice, felt it seize us with greedy hands and pull us in. I kicked frantically, pumping my right arm while I gripped Fotios’ shoulder with my left. He did the same, and for all our troubles we only just managed to stay together.

But not escape. We sank and kept sinking, tossed and whipped around the spiraling currents all the while. I had thought the island was the central point, the originator of this grand ocean sink, but I had been wrong. The true source drew us down past the island into the furthest depths, and every truth and conviction my brother and I leveraged wasn’t enough to escape it.

When my lungs had fully depleted and darkness crept across the edges of my mind, I emptied my pneumatic chambers one by one back into my lungs, allowing me to fight on for precious moments. At this depth, there was nothing that a man’s eyes could see. The vertigo of tumbling down a drain and the frigid chill reaching for us from the bottom of the sea were all that could be sensed.

I let go of the vital breath from my third pneumatic chamber, in my panicked delirium imagining that I could see it spill past my lips, precious bubbles rising swiftly out of reach. I began emptying my fourth and final chamber of breath back into my lungs, knowing as I did that it would only last me another minute while fighting the riptide. Two if I was blessed.

Then all of that ceased to matter. Fotios’ hand went slack on my shoulder and the riptide jerked it away - my twin nearly with it. I snarled beneath the sea, wasting precious air, and abandoned fighting the current entirely to wrap both arms around my brother's chest, pinning him back to me.

“Idiot twin,” I spoke in the only voice that could be heard down here, my heart hammering in my chest. “You told me you had four chambers, too.”

“I do.” Even the voice of his soul was weak, distant. “I drained the first one saving you.”

“Is that what you call this? Salvation?” Panic and frustration and a need to keep him lucid drove the words. We spun blindly, falling further into the whirlpool mouth.

“Can’t…”

“Can’t what? Can’t do anything right? Can’t help but be a pain in my ass?”

“Can’t feel my soul, Stav.”

It was said that every man confronts the Fates alone. Though we cultivated virtue alongside our peers in the gymnasiums, though we challenged the rhetoric of our fellow Sophists in the agora, and though we stood together against the whims of both Tyrants and raging heaven, there came a point where every man was forced to choose. Our father had told us as boys to seek the first virtue. Our uncle had told us at his funeral that the first virtue was oneself - that was why he’d let his brother die.

It was a cultivator's nature to stand alone. Who among heaven and earth could judge him for preserving himself above any other, when divinity and endless glory were on the line?

“We can,” Damon had said, while we laid our father to rest. With a quiet anger, one that endured. “And we will.”

I forced my brother’s mouth open and exhaled half of what remained of my soul into his.

Fotios seized, jerking back and grabbing a fist full of my cult attire.

“Bastard!” his rhetoric thundered. “Who said you could die first?”

“Who said you could die alone?” I fired back, every bit as furious.

“Who said your deaths were yours to choose?” a woman’s lilting voice asked, clear beneath the waves despite the fact that it wasn’t spoken through pneuma. Light followed, a dim silver glow, rising impossibly from below.

A woman reached up to us. Her arms were so pale they were nearly translucent, her slim fingers tipped with wicked claws. The woman’s eyes were black and wet, her lips slightly parted. Silver white hair rose around her head like mist on winter waters - and she was completely nude, slender and beautiful from the curves of her hips to the modest lines of muscle in her stomach.

Below that, reflecting a light that had no source beneath the sea, thousands upon thousands of silver scales coiled down into the furthest depths of the Ionian, extending seamlessly from her waist.

The serpent woman reached up while the currents pulled us down, and I readied one last breath before the end. Fotios did the same beside me.

Then in the distant depths, past even the drakaina’s spiraling lengths, a spark of rosy light bloomed.

“Who said you had to die at all?” the voice of Damon’s soul rose up from the bottom of the sea, and that spark of light shot up to us in an instant, grazing a painful line across the serpent woman’s cheek as it passed and slamming through my shoulder.

The impact knocked the last breath out of me and the pain shattered my senses. The whole world seemed to spin around me, the only anchor being my twin’s iron grip on my arm as the arrow continued on its course. Darkness encroached, the arrow boiling the water around us and cauterizing inside of my shoulder. I lost my grip on my senses-

And we exploded out of the water, rising up above the central island until the light abruptly went out of Damon’s arrow and it lost its blistering momentum. The two of us hurtled down without a breath to bolster us.

Thon caught me in his arms, grunting and staggering back a step while Dymas did the same for my twin.

“Stavros!” Thon exclaimed, ugly face contorting in panic. “Are you alright!?”

I gasped, inhaling sweet freedom’s air, arching up and slamming my forehead into his nose. He fell back into the sand bleeding.

“Apologies,” I managed to say, lurching forward and gripping his arm. “I didn’t mean to-“

“‘S alright,” he said, the words slurred by yet another broken nose. He cracked an unsightly smile, blood running down his lips and into his beard. “I've been hit harder.”

I heaved a breathless laugh and we pulled each other to our feet.

“What have we missed?” Fotios asked, standing with Dymas’ help. The freedman pointed wordlessly, a bleak grimace on his face. “Ah.”

The drakaina with a serpent’s body and a woman’s voice pounded down into the beach, its closed mouth like a spear piercing through the island itself. Gyro and the woman from the gutted ship leapt away from it at the last second, our brother lashing at a line of broken crater scales with his sword as he did.

His broken sword.

Gyro’s freedman, the first rank Civic cultivator that had balked the hardest at our venture, swung his own borrowed blade at the monster's dimly glowing scales with wild abandon. Sparks flew up from every strike, shards of iron flying away from the blade with every blow. The man dove and scrambled as if possessed, avoiding thrashing flesh by slimmer margins each time. His pneuma flared wildly all the while.

Even I couldn’t deny it was an impressive sight. It was the sort of valor that every cultivator of virtue claimed to have within themselves, just waiting for the right circumstances to burst forth. But where most played the brave man until it came time to be brave, Gyro’s man had played the coward up until the very end. Until we needed him to be more.

It was inspiring. And it was utterly wasted effort.

“Elder,” I said bleakly, and Aristotle raised an eyebrow from his place now beside me. “Where did its wounds go?”

“I told you already, boy,” he said, resigned. “Mortal means can’t kill what divinity cursed to live forever. You can shoot it with flaming arrows, stab it one thousand times and burn its eyes to ash. It won’t last. These creatures don’t abide by natural law. They don’t abide by anything at all.”

“But it’s been injured before,” Fotios protested. “Someone came before us and battered it, broke its scales and made it vulnerable. Why haven’t those wounds healed if that’s a monster's nature?”

The old philosopher frowned and said nothing.

Across the beach, the woman cried out something and Gyro fell into a deep crouch, dropping his broken sword and linking his hands together. She took two running jumps across the sand and leapt up onto his joined hands. Our brother’s pneuma rose alongside the flexing of his muscles, and he heaved her up into the sky with a shout.

A mound of sand wide enough across to carry a ship bulged underneath her and then exploded as the sea serpent burrowed back up, shrieking at the stars.

“I WANT TO SEE-!”

The woman from Olympia caught it on her shield with a sound like a hammer striking a metal drum, and reflected it back down on the monster once again. The monstrous serpent slammed down into the sand, cratering the beach.

I took a step forward without realizing it. Felt my eyes widen. “You said we lacked the proper souls,” I breathed. “That may still be true. But you also said we lacked the proper tools.”

Gyro caught the woman out of the air, making distance as the drakaina thrashed in miserable agony. Gyro’s man bounded and lunged through the outer scales, hacking his borrowed sword to pieces against its flesh. Thus far, all of our weapons had proven useless in the long term against the creature. Backed by our cultivation, we could stagger it and wound it temporarily with our weapons. The monster would outlast them, though. The woman’s javelin was no different - half of it jutted up from a sand dune beside her gutted ship, broken and abandoned.

But her shield was different.

“What did you mean by the proper tools?” I asked the wise man. I knew he was looking at the same thing I was.

“… in the golden age of heroes, if there was ever such an age at all,” he finally spoke, “it’s said that legendary figures stood against the monsters that haunt humanity with arms and armor forged in divine flame. Unbreakable and unrelenting.

“Adamant,” he said with skeptical reverence, as the scarlet shield’s diamond edges glimmered in the lunar light.

I took off running. Thon followed behind as quickly as he could.

“Stav!” Fotios shouted. “Damon’s still down there!” Frustration and a brother's worry made my heart clench in my chest. But there was nothing for it. The four of us had promised long ago to never let the others stand alone.

“He’s in your hands, Fos!” I shouted, sprinting for Gyro.

I didn’t turn back to look when the seas we had been shot out of erupted. I didn’t hesitate when the geyser rained down on my head, such was the size of it. I left it to Fotios, and trusted him to see the work done.

“Fine then!” Fotios’ pneuma rose, the wings of his influence beating in furious challenge. “Come give me a kiss, you ugly snake bitch!”

“You scarlet sons are all the same,” Aristotle said in exasperation, inexplicably keeping pace with me using only leisurely strides.

I scoffed.

“You’re the one who chose to come along,” I reminded the old man. He shook his head, smirking.

“Yes, I suppose I was.”