Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.66 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Move, boy,” Aristotle said, grabbing a fist full of my hair and dragging me bodily across the beach. “You’re no use gawking.”

“Old bastard, you’re no use at all!” I slapped his hand away and staggered to my feet.

“Old bastard am I? What happened to honored elder?”

“What happened to you?” I snapped. “Where did you go while we could have used you?”

“Somewhere I was needed more,” he said, and had the audacity to sound exasperated. “Selfish child, you’re not even my student. Be thankful I’m here at all.”

“Who is that?” Elena called, eyes flitting from me to the old philosopher. Trying to decide which of us was the greater threat. “Where did he come from?”

“One of life’s greater mysteries,” I answered sourly.

A tremor in the earth rocked my feet out from under me a few steps away from the woman and her ship. Impossibly, absurdly, I saw the drakaina roll away from my brother with what looked to be an oversized splinter buried in one of its weak spots.

“Another!” Gyro called, hitting the beach and rolling backwards to bleed off momentum and avoid the serpent’s retaliation.

“You can’t be-“ serious, I tried to say, but stabbing pain in my chest cut the word off. I hacked and spat a mouthful of blood, sucking air through my mouth and feeling precious little of it fill my lungs.

Another shard of broken wood sailed through the air, tossed by Menoeces. This one was hardly fit for a practice bout compared to the one Gyro had carved, but he joined it to his iron hilt nonetheless. He shrugged tattered cult cloth from his shoulders and let it hang around his waist. He swiped the ‘sword’ back and forth to get a feel for its weight and then went charging in again.

Warmth like afternoon sun bathed my left side. Elena knelt beside me, keeping her shield just out of reach and laying a hand on my chest.

“Breathe deep,” she told me. I tried, and cut it off half way before another coughing fit took me. When I exhaled, it was equal parts wheeze and whistle. Her eyes widened in dismay. “Your ribs are broken. They’ve punctured your lungs.”

“Tartarus it is, then,” I rasped, forcing myself to one knee and then my feet. There were many wounds that a Cultivator of virtue could shrug off where a mortal man would surely die, and the list only grew the higher up the mountain one climbed. Past a certain point, ailments ceased to matter at all. But no matter your standing among heaven and earth, there was one thing that could kill any cultivator if the worst came to pass.

Citizens and Philosophers could walk away from injuries that would cripple or kill a man with no standing. The Epics claimed a Hero could carry on even if they lost their limbs or lesser organs. Our uncle had told us, only once, in one of his sentimental moods, that a Tyrant could survive with no heart at all - so long as he could eat.

But beneath the light of raging heaven, every man needed to breathe.

“Conserve your strength,” Elena urged me, trying to force me back down with a hand on my shoulder. Without her shield, though, she was only a low Philosopher. And while she had evidently trained her body as well as her mind, I'd worked mine harder. I rose anyway.

Gyro hit the beach again, the serpent pursuing him with another stake in its side. Menoeces threw him another crudely carved blade of wood, covered in his own blood. He immediately went to work on the next piece of wooden shrapnel, scraping it to shape with his fingernails for lack of a proper tool.

“That shield is adamant, isn’t it?” I demanded, the words scraping painfully as they left my throat. “It’s more than just a shield. You know it’s more than just a shield, don’t you?”

Elena eased back a step. “It’s…”

“Divine metal,” Damon‘s mentor said, suddenly leaning down beside her to observe it. She inhaled sharply and thrust the shield forward in a bash. He sidestepped it, tracing a finger over the scarlet sun embossed on its surface. “Something like diamond, and something like iron - bronze if it were better. A fantasy material, forged through any number of means depending on who you ask.”

“A monster killer,” I concluded, readying myself as best I could. The old man sighed.

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “Or perhaps just wishful thinking. Either way-”

Without looking at me, Aristotle pulled a clay jug from his rags and tossed it at my face. It had no cover but it didn’t spill over when I caught it. The contents were too thick.

“Drink,” he said. I swallowed it down laboriously, spooning it out with my fingers when waiting for it to creep down the sides of the jug took too long. It was almost unbearably sweet, with an underlying bite that I couldn’t identify. I muscled down one mouthful and took a breath to ask him what the point of it was.

Then when I realized how much easier that breath had come than the one before it, I dug my entire hand into the jar and shoveled as much of the amber elixir into my mouth as I could fit.

Elena’s brow furrowed. “Is that-?”

“Oxymel. The boy's lungs are punctured, not torn out of his chest. He’s young and fit enough for time to mend it.”

The philosopher had influenced that time, somehow through his medicine. Whether it was the ingredients involved or how it had been prepared, he had imbued it with the essence of natural recovery. I felt my body heal itself of its many aches and pains, my ribs and lungs captain among them. It was a process I had experienced many times in my life, but now I felt it happen over the course of seconds rather than days and weeks.

A month of focused recovery, distilled and stored inside a chipped clay jug.

I forced myself to stop as soon as the tight pain in my chest receded to the point where I could properly move again. I thrust what remained at the old philosopher and nodded towards the broken ship.

“Take this to Thon, help him drink it if he can’t do it himself-“

“Were you listening to me, boy? You were fit enough to walk away from what it gave you with broken ribs and punctured lungs, wounds that heal with time. Oxymel can’t remake bone from dust - time won’t compel a pulverized heart to beat again.”

The jug fractured in my hand. “What will?”

“Nothing that we have here.”

“Nectar,” Gyro answered, landing in the middle of us. He caught another wooden blade when Menoeces threw it, panting heavily and gleaming with sweat. He glanced wryly at Elena while he assembled his next absurd blade. “Didn’t take you this long to explain things to me.”

Elena flushed. “We got a bit sidetracked. Stavros was injured, and this old man appeared out of thin air.”

“Aristotle does that,” Gyro confirmed. Scarlet eyes widened.

“Oh my,” she breathed.

“Don’t worry about Thon just yet,” Gyro said to me, rolling his shoulders and dragging his blade through the air experimentally. “In all the world, there are only a few places he’d be better off at than where he is right now.”

“In the wrecked ship?” I asked incredulously.

The drakaina struck before I could get an answer, forcing us all to scatter. The monster bristled with all of the wooden blades Gyro had left behind in its flesh, a hazard all their own as the serpent spun and whipped its coils across the beach. With furious zeal, my brother kept adding more. As fast as Menoeces could make them, first with the Citizen’s nails and then with his teeth once all the fingernails had torn away, Gyro would fasten them to his iron hilt and bury them in the beast.

“Pointless,” Aristotle observed, ducking the serpent’s tail while I dove over it.

“Perhaps,” I echoed him, twisting and cracking my whip. I caught the serpent by the tail and invoked conviction, planting myself in the sand and refusing to be moved. I stopped its motion long enough for Gyro to give it another kiss. The monster screamed in building frustration and whipped its tail into me rather than away from me.

Elena appeared between us and took it on her shield. A ruinous crack rang out alongside the reverberating hum. My heart stuttered in my chest.

“The shield-”

But when the woman from Olympia turned, her shield remained diamond pristine. It was the recoiling tail that was broken, a new crater in the scales leaking ichor where it had struck the scarlet sun.

Elena offered me a hand up. I took it.

“The shield is our best chance,” I told her. “If you won’t lend it to us, then it has to be you that kills these things.”

I rushed back in, invoking principle - a lord may lead that men may follow, but brothers stand side-by-side - to appear at Gyro’s side in the space between breaths. He flashed me a quick grin and dove through the coils, trusting me to cover him. I did, and I called fire to my rope whip to light the way while he planted another thorn in its side.

“I can’t!” Elena called, leaping in and bashing its head away with her shield when it snapped at him. “I was given this to protect, not to kill!”

“Father in Raging fucking Heaven,” I seethed, dashing and diverting what I could from my brother. “What does it matter?!”

“I made a promise!”

“You made a promise,” I repeated, scrambling and kicking up sand as the drakaina rolled nearly overtop of me. “You made a promise. Look at where we are! What is a promise worth right now!?”

“It’s worth a shield,” Elena responded with conviction, raising it against the serpent’s maw.

The monster bit down on peerless adamant and four of its teeth audibly fractured.

“Lord Aetos! I found it!” Menoeces hollered, running full tilt out of the graveyard of ships with a thick beam of wood balanced over one shoulder.

“I knew you would!” Gyro landed beside me, Elena bracing in front of us. Wild blue eyes met mine in the dark, aglow with sourceless light. “It’s time for your final lesson, brother.”

“You’re drawing back the curtain?”

“I am in fact.”

I choked on a laugh, furious and relieved in equal measure. “Good. Any longer and I would have left the theater.” Anargyros Aetos’ teeth flashed in a wicked grin, his bare chest heaving.

“What is the nature of a Hero?” he asked me, while the wailing serpent gathered itself. A recap, then.

“To liberate, and to slay.”

Menoeces heaved the thick beam of wood down at our feet and immediately dropped to his knees, prying at it with another piece of shrapnel. Gyro followed suit, digging his nails into the wood and somehow carving out clean lines as he did it. I knelt and added my own efforts, tearing strips out of the beam alongside the freedman while Gyro trimmed out the finer details.

“How do you slay a monster, Stavros?”

“I already told him,” Aristotle said, abruptly there watching us work over my brother’s shoulder. “There are only stories-”

“Father of Rhetoric whom I have long admired,” Gyro said, turning his steadily brightening eyes up to regard the philosopher. “I wasn’t asking you.”

Aristotle regarded my brother curiously.

“Fine.”

“Boys,” Elena warned us, shifting her sandaled feet. “With haste.”

“Well?” Gyro prompted me.

I nearly repeated everything Aristotle had told me, but instinct stopped me short. I considered it, imagined what my answer would have been before the father of rhetoric took an interest in my oldest brother. What would it have been when I was a boy, when our father was still around to tell us stories of his triumphs and his conquests? Better than that, what would he have answered? The Tyrant Aetos, the man better suited than any of us to say.

I thought back to all the Epics I had heard outside of him, of Perseus and Jason and grand Achilles, of the champion Heracles. How had they done their brutal work? How had our father?

How did a man slay a monster?

“He does it with divine strength, granted by his faceless father. He does it with divine guidance, led by oracles and mystics when the path is unclear. He does it with divine gifts, a sickle sword of adamant granted by the Thunderer. He does it with help. He does it with divine blessing.”

“And now that the gods have turned away from us?” Gyro pressed me. He stood, joining a blade carved from a dead ship’s beam to his broken sword's hilt. “How did our father do it without a shield or sickle sword of adamant? How does any man stand against the bleak midwinter?”

“With reason,” spoke the father of rhetoric.

“With spirit,” suggested the woman with the divine shield.

“With hunger,” declared the newly freed slave.

The drakaina shrieked and tore through the dunes separating us, moonlight gleaming in its scales. Gyro rolled the shoulder of his sword arm, watching it come with shining blue eyes. Waiting for the spark. Waiting for the answer that only I could give him.

Elena caught the spear of its closed mouth on her shield, shouting as it pushed her back into us. Gyro exhaled.

How did we stand against relentless despair? I gave him his answer.

“With courage.”

Sky blue flames erupted behind his eyes, and Anargyros Aetos plunged a blade of carved driftwood through the monster's mouth. Pinned it to the beach and killed its momentum in an instant.

“What!?” Aristotle roared. “How?”

My brother twisted at the waist and tossed the serpent that swallowed ships clear across the beach, those blue flames spilling out from behind his eyes, and he leapt after it with force enough to rock the entire island beneath our feet. I called upon conviction, invoked the principle that allowed me to stand by any of my brothers with speed no philosopher could match.

And it wasn’t fast enough to catch up to him.

“Why did we build the Eos, brother?” Anargyros asked, slamming into the serpent's side and lashing his driftwood blade across its hide. Pristine silver scales that had weathered bronze and iron without a scratch now shattered and tore apart, molten ichor spewing out of the gouge left behind and not stopping.

“To sail it together!” I caught up just in time to whip my rigging rope around its maw, shifting its head just long enough for the driftwood blade to open another trench in its side. The serpent screamed through its teeth in our mother’s voice and I yanked the line so hard it snapped.

“Yes, but no!” Anargyros struck it again, carving away a patch of flesh and revealing monstrous pulsating organs beneath coal black ribs. “From another angle- why did the kyrios of the Raging Heaven let an Oracle leave his city before she was properly anointed?”

I sucked in a breath.

“She’s-?”

“Further, why would he send her out with only her sister to protect her? Why would he give them nectar and ambrosia and a shield sent from heaven when he couldn’t be bothered to give them a proper crew?”

“Her sister?”

I waded through thrashing coils that I wanted desperately to believe were death throes, breathed deeply of air that was thick with promise and the presence of something else that hadn’t been on this island before but suddenly was. I felt my brother's pneuma on my skin, rising and continuing to rise. It spilled out of him in a torrent without end.

I found Elena fighting through it beside me, her shield glowing like a bonfire as the light from his eyes spilled across its surface. I tried to speak to her but couldn’t form the words. I tried to use my Sophic tongue, but the rhetoric was swept away by the currents of my brother's blazing soul. So I waited for her to look, and silently mouthed it instead.

Where?

Her eyes flickered back to the ship. The one she’d been hiding in when we first arrived, and the one she’d been returning to throughout the fight. Standing guard.

Anargyros drove the drakaina down into the beach as if it was nothing but a garden snake, and no matter how many furrows he tore into his flesh, his driftwood blade didn’t once break. Didn’t even chip.

“Why wouldn’t he tell the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn what he wanted us to find, to fight, to rescue and preserve?” He stomped the monster deeper into the sand with each word, blue flames flashing in time with the blows. “Why would he keep it a secret, when it would make the odds of rescue so much worse?”

I finally found my voice, hollering into the wind, “I don’t know!”

“You do!” He fired right back, the wings of his influence spreading wide and casting a shadow over us that could not be seen but could be felt. He beat them once, and the winds drove us to our knees. “It’s the same reason we built our ship, brother. It’s the same reason we burnt our hearts and souls into its bones. It’s exactly that same reason why I chose to fight with carved wood when iron failed me.”

“For the aesthetic?” I asked as much as answered, unable to believe it as it left my mouth.

“Closer. Are you surprised?” He asked, striding down the length of the serpent like it was polished marble tile. “Did you think Damon and I were being metaphorical? Aristotle surely did. It’s why he’ll be a Philosopher until the day he dies.”

My brother planted his foot on the serpent's jaw and forced it shut, and only then did I realize that it had been screaming in agony while he spoke. Somehow, I hadn’t heard it at all.

“This island is a graveyard, have you realized it yet?” he asked, flicking his driftwood blade to the side and scattering the molten ichor from its surface. “This whirlpool is the work of a creature beneath the sea, drinking the Ionian dry and devouring any unfortunate soul caught in her current. She was chained in place once, but not anymore. Now Charybdis roams.

“There are broken ships scattered all over these shores, just out of sight in the dark. If you had been looking closely when Damon lit the place up with his arrows, you would have seen it,” he winked at me, half the light in the world vanishing and reappearing when he did it. “These monsters are ship wreckers. Worse than that, they’re maneaters.

“I couldn’t find the bones because they’d devoured them all, but the ship worked just as well. Monsters broke these ships, battered them with their bodies and dashed them against the rocks. Now we return that unkindness to them.”

He raised his curved driftwood blade, carved from the one part of the broken ship that Menoeces had been searching for all along. The portion bearing its name.

Nychi. The Talon.

“A hero is the shield just as he is the sickle blade,” he promised us from up above. “Virtue is all he needs to do his work. Even if the stars fell out of the sky and even if the glories of the world all ceased to be, I’d face the chaos that remained with fortitude in my soul. Adamantly.”

“Courage,” whispered a voice unlike any other. A woman of formless light, a crown of stars revolving around her head as she embraced my brother from behind. “Courage, until the work is done.”

Anargyros Aetos drove his talon through the drakaina’s skull, and every single wooden blade that he had left jutting out of its body shivered and plunged through into its body in the same motion. Ichor erupted from every wound, and it burned. The serpent with a woman’s voice jerked once, its entire body shivering, and fell limp into the sand.

“Heroes from the golden age and cultivators of virtue as we know them today,” the Hero Anargyros broke the deafening silence that followed. He tilted his head back, gazing up at the night sky, or perhaps at the celestial woman pressing her forehead to his. “We’re no different in the end. We’re all reaching up hopelessly. Foolishly. Courageously. Hoping someone will reach down and take our hand, though we’ll never admit it. Hoping they’ll pull us up to heaven with them.”

“Appealing to higher power,” I realized the true answer. Anargyros smiled brightly, matched by the holy Muse his actions had inspired. The goddess Urania that had lent him her strength.

“Exactly right.”

And lightning struck him from a cloudless sky.