Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Griffon,

The Risen Flame

Sol’s eyes shut, his chin dipping down to his chest. His shoulders shifted all but imperceptibly, moved by a sigh that the Roman did his best to stifle. It was the reaction of a man that was all too used to being disappointed by his mentors, a man that was far too considerate of them in spite of that. As the student of a mentor, he held his tongue.

As the brother of a sister, I did no such thing.

“Haaa!” My sigh was explosive. The crack of my skull against the mast as I flung myself back in disgust, sharp as a knife. The flourish of my hand as I pressed my arm against my eyes — admittedly a bit dramatic.

“To think I haggled on your behalf,” I lamented. “To think you let me!”

“Griffon,” Sol sighed, too defeated to properly rebuke me.

“The shamelessness of it, to accept my brother’s gold with a smile when that’s all you had to say! Even a brother can only take so much from his sister—even I!”

“Would you like to know why?”

I straightened and sat back up in interest. Sol raised his head, watching her intently.

“I can’t tell either of you what you must do, because I don’t know,” the daughter of the Oracle said with sympathy—but not, I noted, a hint of apology. “But I can tell you why I don’t know. If you trust me enough to listen.”

Her heartbeat was steady, and though there was some sadness there—and some worry—there was no shame. My ribbing hadn’t flustered her because this was something she believed she couldn’t know.

“You don’t have to ask for our trust,” Sol told her without hesitation. “You already have it.”

I hummed in agreement. “We know your word is good.”

“Thank you,” she said softly. “But that isn’t quite what I meant.”

The scarlet heart-flame behind her eyes flared, and in one swift motion she pulled the Oracle’s ceremonial spear from a fold in her silks and spun it around with two hands to point the tip at her own heart.

Blood-stained hands of my intent seized her in a dozen places up and down her arms, folded themselves protectively over her heart, and pressed the spearhead back while Sol and I lunged toward her.

She stopped us both with a single look. I had never seen its like before. It was too old for the rest of her, unsuited to her face. Too heavy for her heart to have produced it on its own, it seemed.

“Do you trust me?” she asked again, though this time the question was mine alone to answer.

One by one, I forced the blood-stained hands of my pneuma to pull away. Some of them refused to budge and had to be broken by the more obedient manifestations of my violent intent. The last one, cupped over her chest—directly over her heart—was broken in all 27 places that a hand could be broken, until Sol finally grabbed it himself and pulled it back.

“Of course I do, sister,” I said, swallowing down my bile.

The joy that radiated from her heart felt like a betrayal.

“Thank you, brother,” she said, and stabbed herself in the heart.

Something lurched inside me. The world changed in the blink of an eye. The sensation started in my gut. The Nile fell away—like a fist—no, it gave way—wrapped around my intestines—no, it had always been this way—clenching—no, it had never been there at all—twisting—no, it was still there now—

I opened my eyes.

I was kneeling—on the ship’s mast—in the shallow basin of a fountain filled with saltwater. Above me—on the lip of the crow’s nest—on a tripod carved from honeycomb, sat a woman I had known by many names, and who had been known to the world by many more than that.

I knew her as the daughter of the Scarlet Oracle, as the girl, as the heir to Polyzalus, as the heroine, as my junior, as my sister, as Selene.

My stomach roiled.

There were other names that I had never known her by, that I had always known her by, that I would inevitably know her by. Dear heart. Little bee. Honeydrop. Saving grace of Burning Dusk. Young blood. Daughter of Destiny. Mother of Mercy. Names that made no sense, names that could never apply, names that I could not deny.

I had known her—wrong.

We had known her—wrong.

The world had known her—wrong.

The heavens had declared her—WRONG.

She was the Saint of Scarlet Hearts.

“What is this?” I ground out.

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Her lips did not move, but her voice struck me from every angle.

[The broken chain that binds.]

“Those pillars,” Sol murmured, just barely audible over the ringing in my ears. I glanced sidelong at him—in the crow’s nest—crouching on the balls of his feet in the saltwater fountain beside me.

If the Roman was disoriented at all, it didn’t show. His eyes swept across the portrait of the world that the Saint of Scarlet Hearts had painted over—had unearthed—had forged—with naked fascination.

I clenched the muscles of my stomach, seized the wheel of channels that had been carved out of me by Orphic madness, and I wrenched it into motion. The vertigo tried to fight me, tried to hang on, but the wheel burned and the wheel turned, crushing it under its spokes.

Breathing very slowly, very carefully, I followed Soul’s gaze and looked upon the sanctum of the Saint.

It was an island of sorts, an open air temple without any roof to speak of, only ten colonnades ready to bear weight. Beyond the salt water fountain we were in, the floors were scarlet marble veined with amethyst and gold. The temple was a perfect circle, lovingly carved, with ten steps that encircled the entire structure, leading down into a sea of softly glowing clouds.

Above our heads was an entire world writ upside-down, a mountain range cut in two and an ocean of glittering blue waves, stretching out as far as the eye could see. The earth mother as she was seen by birds and the heavens, staggeringly vast and beautiful and bleeding.

I turned the wheel and forced myself to focus.

The pillars.

I looked at them, closely now, pushing back the image of the Nile that vied desperately for their place in reality, and in an instant I realized what it was about them that had caught Sol’s eye, more so than the impossibility of this place and the absurdity of its scale.

There were ten pillars, the load-bearing principles that gave structure to the Saint of Scarlet Hearts. As a Heroine, it was only natural that there would be ten, and as they were my sister’s principles, it was only natural that they were each a masterwork of spiritual architecture. But what wasn’t natural, what screamed at me from a primal place within my psyche and made the King’s Curse burn at my hip, was the sight of them together.

Every single one of them had been chiseled by a different hand.

“What is this?” I asked again, the words rough with disgust and an animalistic alarm. The Saint of Scarlet Hearts - my sister, that deepest part of me snarled, wrenching the wheel around when the false world tried to overwrite it - tilted her head back, considering the distant mountain range hanging above us where the sky should have been.

“There is a technique that every Oracle knows, passed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken chain, known as the Empty Throne of Heaven.” She fanned out the fingers of her right hand, and then closed them one by one until a closed fist rested against her chest. “It allows the user to retreat within themselves during moments of prophecy, to a place that even heaven can’t lay claim to. Of the seven women I shared a home with in Olympia, only one was old enough to remember what the life of an Oracle was like before this technique’s creation.”

I remembered milk-blind eyes with trifurcated pupils, the stench of brine and holy vapors. A cypress mask of tragedies.

“Dona,” Sol supplied the name of the Broken Tide’s withered Oracle, and my sister inclined her head.

“Back when I was still young enough for her to coddle me, she told me stories of those days. She was always fond of describing the mania, the way their minds would bend back upon themselves and fracture. She never forgot the sound that the pieces made when they scattered.” Her voice was sad. “In those days, madness was a mark of authenticity for a wise woman. We were not meant to share our mortal vessels with divinity, not even for a moment. And so the technique was made.”

“That’s what this is, then?” the Roman asked doubtfully. “An empty throne?” Sol and I were of the same mind, then. It sounded wrong.

“The opposite,” she said, a bit of that impishness returning to her as she splayed open the fingers of her hand again, then curled the first four into an arch and left the thumb jutting out. I reached up and curled my fingers to match hers, forming the other half of a heart. She winked. “Dona would beat me if she knew I was calling it this again, but she’s not here right now and this is my heart anyway, so I’ll say what I want. This is an inversion of the Empty Throne of Heaven, a technique that Bakkhos helped me create against all common sense:

[ATotal Eclipse of the Heart]

The world pulsed in recognition of the name, and I felt the countless truths of the Saint of Scarlet Hearts impose themselves upon me once again. I couldn’t have avoided understanding it if I’d tried. If the Empty Throne of Storms was a defense mechanism used by fragile mortal seers to escape the consequences of divine possession, then this was…

“An attack?” Sol looked as confused as I felt.

The Saint shook her head. “An invitation. It wouldn’t have worked if the two of you hadn’t accepted it.” She raised her left arm, sweeping it around in a wide arc and drawing our eyes back to the chaotic mess of pillars encircling the temple of her heart.

“I promised you a ‘why not’, in the absence of a ‘how’,” she said. “See it for yourselves.”

Sol stood from the sea water pool and made to step out–off the crow’s nest–only to pause, grunt in fleeting irritation, and then step out anyway.

To my astonishment, the Sol I saw on the Nile remained standing in the crow’s nest while the Sol in the temple of my sister’s heart strode out of the fountain and approached a limestone column.

“How did you do that?” I demanded. Sol glanced back at me, at first with confusion, and then sudden understanding.

“Like this.”

I felt gravitas seize hold of me. I refused it instinctively, but forced myself to relax after a moment and let it pull me to my feet. I felt the worlds shifting around me, my spirit stepping away from my body to follow the riptide pull of the captain’s virtue. I saw the worlds from two different vantage points, no longer overlaid exactly overtop each other, but off-center, shifting with every step my soul took away from my body.

I swallowed down my nausea and let the wheel turn.

Sol allowed the pull of gravitas to slacken, and I lurched forward as my body and soul were suddenly forced to reconcile the fact that they existed in two different places at once, one kneeling and the other mid-step. Sol caught me again. I shrugged off his virtue, jaw clenching as both worlds fought for my full attention.

I tried to take another step, slowly, and felt my body tense up in response. I glared at Sol.

“How do you keep the two separate?”

He smirked. “It’s a skill. You’ll learn eventually.” Then, to add insult to injury, the Sol that stood in the crow’s nest very deliberately sat back down.

I tested every small motion my body could make, but each attempt was met with failure. Trying to move without moving was a maddening contradiction that my body instinctively rebelled against. It felt like I was a child again, trying to master all the little movements that the human body was capable of but rarely made - like twitching my ears, or flexing certain fingers or toes without the others following suit. It was something I could master eventually, I felt it in my gut. But it would take practice, and I had more pressing concerns.

“Is there a trick to it?” I asked the Saint.

“No,” she lied.

“Tell me.”

“It would be better if you leaned on Solus, if only for today…”

“By all means,” the Sol sitting in the crow’s nest said blandly, while the Sol within the sanctum continued to observe the pillars. “Better yet, climb up on my back. Or would you rather sit on my shoulders?”

The Saint of Scarlet Hearts winced.

I waited patiently.

“Fine,” she sighed. “Stepping outside yourself is a skill that requires precise control of both the body and the soul, operating separately yet in tandem. I suspected that Solus would be able to manage it for the two of you with his virtue, but if you insist on doing it yourself… there is a way. It’s the way that Bakkhos taught me, in one of his less responsible moods.”

She paused meaningfully, but if she thought that would dissuade me she was sorely mistaken. Finally, she gave it up.

“Intoxication.”

Without hesitation, I reached into the shadowed place where ravens kept their trinkets and pulled from it a glossy clay jug I’d pilfered from the Raging Heaven Cult months ago. I thumbed the beeswax stopper from the mouth of the amphora with a sonorous pop and tilted my head back, downing the undiluted kykeon.

Dangerously concentrated spirit wine coursed through me, warming my body from fingertip-to-toe, and I exhaled slowly. It had been too long since I’d enjoyed a good drink.

As I sat there waiting for the drink to do its work, however, I quickly noticed a problem.

I wasn’t getting drunk.

A second beeswax stopper popped and tumbled into my shadow storage, a second jug of spirit wine was drained to its dregs, and still I didn’t feel anything but warm. After the third empty jar yielded the same result, I snorted in disgust and tossed it aside. It shattered on the scarlet marble floor of the sanctum, and it fell into the wine-dark Nile with a splash. The vertigo of that contradiction made the wine churn in my stomach. I turned the wheel again, feeling the wine burn out of me along with the nausea.

The Titan Flame’s golden ichor had wrought a thousand-thousand little changes on my physique before I repurposed it as fuel for my heart’s flame. It seemed that this was one of those changes. I’d need a stronger poison than this if I wanted to step outside myself.

I pulled a wider, thicker jug from the raven space, and this time both Sols turned their heads to stare at me. Neither one looked particularly amused.

“If you fall into the Nile, I’m not fishing you out.”

I scoffed. “Of course you are.”

Raising the jug of mermaid ichor to my lips, I drank.