Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.134 [Son of Scarlet Sin]

Son of Scarlet Sin

I watched the dawn break over scarlet waves. The sinful tang of sacred wine coated my tongue.

Four years old. I was so small that holding my cup with both hands was a necessity as much as it was an act of reverence, the wide-rimmed skyphos comically large compared to me. While the rest of the hopeful initiates and senior mystikos waded out several stades into the Ionian, I stood just deep enough for the ebbing sea to wet my feet. When the gentle waves came in, they crested at my waist.

The kykeon burned, branding my throat and searing my insides as I swallowed it down. I blinked rapidly, trying to dispel the sudden bleeding of the rosy-fingered dawn. Each time I opened my eyes the effect was worse than before. I swayed, and the next gentle wave nearly knocked me off my feet.

Cultivators in scarlet and white silks hovered around me, far enough away that they could claim it was coincidence but close enough to give their anxiety away. Even I could tell they wanted to take the cup from my hands and hoist me up into their arms. Some of them even reached out to do just that before remembering themselves and pulling away.

I had been a Civic cultivator for less than a year, but my father would not allow any man, woman, or child to take part in his cult’s holy rites unless they did so under their own power. His son was no exception.

I held on to my too large cup of sacred wine, drinking it stubbornly down. I was only four years old, hardly capable of understanding even before the potent wine had stuffed my head full of cotton and fuzz. All I knew was that this was a challenge. I would overcome it.

A wave came rolling into shore that was taller than the rest, if only by a bit. I was forced to thrust my cup up high above my head lest the seawater taint its sacred contents. I saved the kykeon, but the wave bowled me over. I fell.

A strong arm wrapped around me and a firm chest pressed against my back, steadying me. I looked back, aghast at the betrayal, and Nikolas Aetos pressed a finger to his lips.

“I won’t tell Uncle if you don’t.” His blue eyes were bright in the rosy light of dawn, his smile mischievous. The cultivators that had been fretting anxiously nearby breathed quiet sighs of relief, returning their full focus to the rites rights.

“Cheater,” I accused him. The word was slurred by spirit wine and a child’s clumsy tongue. Niko flicked my nose.

“Foolish little Lio. I’m only following their example - even in a place like this, brothers stand side by side.”

The brightest jewel of the Rosy Dawn’s young generation winked, and then he attacked my unprotected sides with cruel tickling fingers. More than a few of the gathered mystikos turned their heads away to hide their smiles as I tried and failed to fight him off while holding my cup steady over my head.

The rest of the procession was a wine-drunk blur. When it came to the initiation rites of the Rosy Dawn, only the beginning and the end truly mattered.

My father didn’t take me into the crook of his arm as he had before, when he’d brought me down into the mountain depths alone. I walked through torch-lit tunnels under my own power, surrounded by the members of my father’s faith. I saw the story of the Rosy Dawn’s greater mystery painted on the walls and acted out by cultivators in blank theater masks and luminous cloaks.

I forged ahead through a child’s heavy fatigue, determined to the end. And finally, I was rewarded for my efforts.

I saw-

Half a scarlet sun, shining blindingly bright in the heart’s broken cradle. Beating, somehow stillbeating-

-half of a corpse that defied all description. The harder I looked, the less I understood it.

I watched the sun rise in the corpse’s hand, surrounded by the members of my faith. When they began to funnel out of the cavernous room on some unspoken understanding, I followed them.

My father laid a hand on my shoulder, rooting me in place. It was the first time he had acknowledged me since the beginning of the rites.

We stayed there while my newly enlightened juniors, my seniors, and even my aunts and uncles filed out one by one. Soon enough only three of us remained there with the corpse - my father, myself, and Niko. The latter fidgeted in place, excited and bashful in a way I had never seen him before. When the last of the fading torch light was gone from the mouths of the tunnels, he looked expectantly to my father.

Damon Aetos smiled faintly. He reached out to grasp the empty air above the corpse, drawing it back like he was pulling aside a curtain, and-

A woman appeared on the cavern floor.

“Mother!” Niko’s joyful cry split the solemn silence of the cavern in two. He rushed out from my father’s shadow and threw himself into the woman’s open arms. She accepted him gladly, wrapping him up in a mother’s warm embrace.

Even reclining as she was, it was clear the woman was enormous. She was taller than any woman I had ever seen, taller than both of my uncles - even taller than my father. Her physique was cut from the same cloth as my aunts, powerful, defined, yet gracefully beautiful, as though the sculptor responsible for her creation had smoothed away the harsh edges that men like my father and my uncles carried with them everywhere. She was to my aunts as my aunts were to the rest of the city’s marble beauties.

Her smile was bright enough to blind me, her voice more pleasant than a song bird’s as she cooed over her son. Her eyes were the color of scarlet dawn, and twin flames burned merrily behind them. Her hair was thick and long, pooling like a golden halo around her head. Her skin was tanned so that she looked perpetually flushed. She was joy and vitality personified.

The golden breastplate she wore as comfortably as court silks had a gaping hole blasted through its center. Blood flowed freely from the crater.

“And who might you be?”

I looked up from it, somehow guilty, like I’d been caught in a sinful act. There was no accusation in her eyes, though. Only warmth.

“I’m the Young Aristocrat.” My name didn’t feel good enough for someone like this. The woman’s smile deepened, and her eyes crinkled fondly.

“Liar. You’re my little Lio, aren’t you? I’ve been waiting so long to meet you.” She took one arm from her son and held it out for me. “Come closer, dear heart- I want to see your face.” Her blood pooled in the cavern up to my ankles, making an island of the broken dais that the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god lounged upon. Now that my father had lifted the veil, I could see the corpse’s hand wasn’t hanging limp, but instead resting on the crown of the woman’s head.

“Come on, Lio,” Niko urged me, holding out an arm of his own. I hesitated, waiting, though for what I wasn’t sure.

“Enough of these theatrics, Damon,” the woman chided. My father chuckled.

“As you wish.” He lifted his hand from my shoulder.

Niko grinned and his mother laughed delightedly as I ran into their arms.

The fire burned and burned. I fought to get away from it, snarling like a cornered animal as the merciless flame boiled the flesh of my hands from my bones. My feet scrabbled and kicked at the forest debris, but they couldn’t kick enough dirt into the fire to put it out. I sank my teeth into the arms holding me firmly in place. They couldn’t even break the skin.

When my father finally let go of my hands, I tried to fling myself away from the fire I had so carefully built myself. I ran into an unbreakable wall. Sitting as I was in my father’s lap, I still couldn’t escape. His chest was at my back, his arms and legs walling off either side. There was only one way.

I dove through the fire, hitting the ground on the other side of it and rolling through the grass.

My hands were a grotesque sight. As I stared at them, the animal fury drained out of me and my chest began to heave. Small, wretched noises of pain bubbled up in my throat.

“Stand,” my father commanded. I had to brace my elbows against the dirt while I got my feet under me. I stood, fighting panicked gasps. My father looked down on me from across the fire, as pitiless as the flame.

“This heat is justice,” he told me. He hadn’t drawn his own hands from the fire. “If it burns you, it’s your own lack that’s to blame.”

I sniffed. “It hurts.”

“Refinement always does.”

The next time I saw the woman I was five years old. I ran side-by-side with Niko into her warm embrace, burying my face in her hair and basking in her presence. She accepted us both gladly, and showered us with praise.

“My, my, who is this shining star? Your father would be spitting blood if he could see you now - he used to brag up and down that he’d spoil his son with refining treasures, and here you are growing like a weed without him!”

In the year that had passed between our first and second meeting, Niko had transcended the Civic Realm and then advanced a step further than that to the second rank of the Sophic Realm. Meanwhile, I was still a first rank Citizen.

The Rosy Dawn’s initiates praised me readily and often for being a cultivator at all. That I had been awoken to my soul so very young was a good omen beyond good omens, they assured me. My star was surely destined to rise.

“And look at you,” Niko’s mother whispered, stroking my head. “Your hair’s grown so long. If your legs don’t grow to match it soon, you’ll be dragging it behind you like a cloak. Ah-! Don’t cut it though. You were meant to have long hair, I can tell.”

I tightened my arms around her as she went back to praising Niko, needling him for the details of his advancement. I wanted her to praise me more, but I knew I didn’t deserve it.

Niko had grown by leaps and bounds without a father’s hand to guide him.

What was my excuse?

The fire burned and burned. I curled my fingers watching it twist and dance between them. The pain was still there, sharp as it had ever been, but it was only a memory. It couldn’t hurt me now.

I stepped away from my father into the flame, turned on my heel, and sat down inside of it. I looked up expectantly while the fire burnt my clothes away.

He nodded once.

“Now we can begin.”

The next time I saw the golden woman, Niko and I had each advanced twice. She wasn’t astounded as my fellow mystikos had been, and her praise was measured by comparison, but for some reason it made my ears burn and my chest ache with pride. I drank it in, like I was dying of thirst and every word was water.

Her blood kept flowing. It pooled around my knees.

“I want to learn the sword,” I told my father one day, while he poured over the business of the kyrios in his office. The sheathed sword hung there on the wall above his head as it always had, ornate and proud in its place of prominence.

“Then learn it.”

“I want you to teach me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He never once looked up.

“You aren’t worthy of it yet.”

Over time, the golden woman’s complexion had lost its perpetual flush. Her eyes burned as bright as they ever had and her smile was just as vibrant, but on our next visit my father pulled us away sooner than he had before.

I practiced on my own. First, with a clumsy wooden sword that I had carved myself, then, with a stolen sword from the junior mystikos’ armory.

I scoured the written texts available to someone of my stature for their techniques, and only once I had exhausted every path forward did I turn to the old wisemen charged with instructing me.

“You- I’m sorry, young Aetos, what did you say?”

The man was an accomplished cultivator by most metrics, closer to my uncles than he was to me. He looked far younger than he really was, and he acted like it too. Surrounded by papyrus scrolls in the center of a ransacked library, the disheveled Philosopher looked like a frazzled junior initiate more than an honored elder.

I asked him again. He smiled, setting aside his scrolls. The gesture felt wrong, somehow.

“If you’ll accept this lowly sophist’s wisdom, it would be my honor to show you what I know.” That said, the wiseman pulled a sword from a fold in his attire far too small to accommodate it. I brushed my odd feeling aside. “First, observe my grip.”

I studied until he had nothing left to teach me, and then I moved on to the next of my mentors. I consumed all that they had to give, and when I was done I sought practical experience in the gymnasium. I toiled, and I learned, until finally there was no one left on the eastern mountain range to teach me - none but Niko and the stalwart pillars of the Rosy Dawn.

My aunts and uncles smiled and patted my head, praising me for my work ethic, and the gestures felt as odd as they had in my tutor’s hectic library. In the end, though they lavished me with kind words, each of them turned me away and told me to seek out my father instead. Niko readily offered to train with me when he could, but he was all too often wrapped up in private lessons with my father and our aunts and uncles.

I asked my father again to teach me how to use a sword.

“You aren’t worthy of it yet.”

Again he told me no.

“My boys,” the golden mother sighed, content now that she had us in her arms. “It’s been too long. Tell me all about it.”

“I learned how to shoot a bow on horseback,” I offered up.

“Ho? And was the horse moving?” she asked, amused.

“It was galloping.” I pointed at a glittering gemstone embedded in the far side of the corpse god’s cavern, smaller than my fingernail. “My target was smaller than that, and ten times further away.”

Her scarlet eyes widened just the slightest bit. It was a greater reward than all of the praise heaped upon me by my peers.

“My, my, that is impressive. Did you have time for anything else?”

Nestled against her other side, Niko laughed.

I practiced archery. I practiced the javelin. I practiced the spear, and the axe, and the sling. I learned how to use every weapon in the armories, and I did not stop until I was better than the best of my peers in their use. I went further than that, spent my nights and my days toiling in the academic pursuits expected of a Young Aristocrat.

I tried everything under the sun, and then I asked my father again.

“You aren’t worthy of it yet.”

“Liar.”

Finally, my father looked up from his work. His blue eyes were narrow. His expression was flinty.

“I’ve done nothing but refine myself, worked harder than any of my peers!”

“You haven’t done enough.”

“When will it be enough!?” I shouted.

He rose from behind his desk, towering over me. I lifted my chin, glaring up at my Tyrant father.

“You demand I show you how to run when you have yet to even walk.” He rounded the table, and as he did he shrugged his fine silks off his shoulders, letting them hang down around his waist. “A sword is a weapon, and a weapon is a tool - they exist to do what your body cannot do alone.”

He made a fist to show me what was coming. I leapt away and he struck me regardless. I tumbled across the marble floor, bouncing off of the office’s far wall.

“You tempered your body in flame, and only then did you call upon the rosy-fingered dawn. This is just the same.” My father dragged me up off the floor by my neck, heedless of my thrashing. “You’re on your feet. Now walk.”

He threw me down again, but I didn’t hit the marble floor of his office. Sand filled my mouth and the midday sun beat down on my back. When I looked up I saw clear skies and the empty stands of the Scarlet Stadium.

“The gods gave you a weapon the day that you were born,” my father declared, stalking through the sand pit towards me. I rose up into a defensive crouch. “You can play with knives after you’ve mastered your body’s full potential.”

I spat blood and a baby tooth onto the sand.

“Teach me,” I demanded.

The kyrios assumed a stance.

“Attend.”

Niko told his golden mother about all the plans he had made, and all the places he intended to go before he died. I told her about pankration, and all the ways I had learned to wield my body like a blade. She listened patiently to us both, content as always. As the years had passed, we had returned each time with more and more to say. It was only natural she’d say less and less in turn.

Her smile was as warm as it had been the very first time, but her fingers were cool as they cupped each of our cheeks.

“You’re both too big for this place,” she told us fondly.

The blood was up to my waist.

The absence of the Aetos family’s second pillar was an aching wound, keenly felt but never prodded. Anargyros Aetos had been the kind of man that was worth telling stories of, all too easy to admire and all but impossible to hate. Knowing that, it was easy enough for even a child to understand why the brothers Aetos and their wives so heavily favored Anargyros’ only son.

Niko was his father’s living legacy, and I loved him as much as my aunts and uncles did - as much as my father did. It made sense to me that the two of us were treated differently.

It wasn’t until I saw that same dissonance in the treatment of my younger cousins that I began to wonder.

It was perhaps only natural for Uncle Stavros and Aunt Raisa to dote over Heron and Myron, just as it was natural for Uncle Fotios and Aunt Chryse to fawn over Lydia, Castor, and Rena. These were their children.

But why, then, did Uncle Stavros make time to teach little Rena how to ride a horse when he had never had a moment to spare for me? Why did Aunt Raisa forgo her ancestral place in the pyanopsia to help Castor with his leading role, when before she had watched me play that same part alone? Why would Uncle Fotios teach Heron how to hunt and skin a deer, when I had always been too impatient to take along? Why would Aunt Chryse shower little Myron with gifts whenever she saw his face, when she had only ever gifted me a smile?

It was petulant, just as it had been petulant for me to desire the golden mother’s praise without doing anything deserving of it. I put it to the side in favor of more important things.

I refined myself in body and soul, ever pursuing Niko’s distant example. I scoured my father’s cult and his city both in search of new experiences - new skills to learn, new stories to be told, new challenges to overcome. It was only ever enough to keep pace with the shining gem of the young pillars, and never for long. The more that I devoured, the less I had to gain.

Niko had all the same opportunities at hand as I did, as a Young Aristocrat in all but name, and he had the instruction of his uncles and aunts in addition to the rest. I would stagnate long before he did. I would starve before he’d fully hit his stride.

I could have hated him for it, I supposed. But why would I hate him when the chase had brought me this far already?

I was having fun.

Along the way, our numbers grew. While Niko spent more and more time behind closed doors with his aunts and uncles, I found myself with tagalongs of my own.

There was Lydia, quietly seeking my company whenever she had time away from her parents and the duties of a Young Mistress. There was Heron, bright-eyed and brash, bragging that he was my right hand to anyone who would listen. There was Castor, flighty and a bit frail, drifting my way when the rigors of his martial training wore him down to dust. There was Rena, sweeter than honey, seeking me out to say hello and lingering long after just for the sake of it.

And of course, there was Myron. Cherubic and boundlessly energetic, too young to cultivate, but just old enough to know his family and want to seek them out. More often than not, Heron would have him riding on his shoulders when he came charging in to disrupt my day.

They hindered far more often than they helped, trailing behind me like ducklings, but I didn’t mind. They were all of them dear to me, and that was worth the hours wasted. After everything that Niko had done for me, how could I do any less for all of them?

The more time we spent together, the more apparent the differences in how we were treated became. It went beyond our aunts and uncles. The indulgent smiles of the honored elders and the vacuous praise of the Rosy Dawn’s mystikos, the odd dissonance that I had no name or face for, ended at my feet. I watched gushing praise temper itself into pride, sometimes in a single breath as a scholar turned from me to address one of my cousins. I watched, and I wondered what it was I was seeing in their eyes. What I could hear in all their voices.

I could have hated my cousins for that, as I could have hated Niko. But why would I hate them when they were the only ones aside from Niko and his golden mother that didn’t treat me this way?

We grew together, chasing distant stars and carving kingdoms of our own out of our mountain home. I did my best to guide them, to make strengths out of their faults, and pull them up to join me. My refinement slowed as a result, falling by slight degrees behind Niko’s pace.

It was enough.

I was ten years old, heart hammering in anticipation as the last of the initiates vanished through the tunnels on their way back to the surface of the mountain. The rites were over. I glanced at Niko, and he winked back at me.

Then my father turned and walked away from the bisected corpse.

“Father-!”

“Uncle-!”

“Be silent,” the kyrios commanded. Both our mouths were shut. We could only stare at him, and then each other, utterly aghast. Our lips wouldn’t have formed the words even if we had known how to convince him.

“Damon.”

Thankfully, we didn’t have to.

“Let me see my boys.”

My father stood with his back to us, silent as a grave. The muscles of his shoulders flexed and coiled, a promise of unspeakable violence.

“As you wish.” Without looking back, he reached out and drew the curtain aside. Then, unprecedentedly, he stepped into the central tunnel and left the cavern entirely, leaving us alone with a bleeding woman and a corpse.

The golden mother smiled brightly and beckoned us toward her.

I waded through her blood and wrapped my arms tight around her. She returned the hug with all her strength. For the first time, my grip was tighter than hers.

“I’m not a boy anymore, mother,” Niko said lightly, embracing her other side. Was he blind? Did he not have eyes to see how pale she had become? She was weaker than she’d ever been, cold to the touch where before she’d been warm. Why was he smiling?

“You’ll always be my boys,” she said, stroking frail fingers through my hair and guiding Niko’s head down to press his brow to hers.

“Even when we have children of our own?” Niko needled her. She chuckled. Her eyes closed.

No. I was wrong.

“When that day comes, you’ll understand exactly what I mean.”

All this time, I had been the blind one.

Niko carried on teasing his golden mother with unshed tears in his eyes, his voice steady as a stone. Of course he knew. He had known all along. My father had known, too. I was the only one that had been seeking refuge in my ignorance.

If she could bleed out for five years, why not for five more? Why not forever?

Of course that couldn’t be the case. Why had I let myself believe it?

“What of you, Lio?” She murmured when Niko had finished telling her his stories. “A year has passed since last we spoke. What have you made of it?” I’d come here with a thousand answers to that question. I reached out and couldn’t find a single one.

“Nothing.”

Burning scarlet eyes cracked open, searching my face. The golden woman pulled me gently - weakly - closer. She planted a kiss upon my brow.

“I doubt that,” she said softly. “But well enough. What will you do with the year ahead of you?”

I’d come with a thousand answers for that question too, and all of them turned to smoke when I reached out to grasp them. I reached further, desperate, and finally found one. An answer that hadn’t been there before.

“I’m going to save you,” I decided.

“The audacity,” Niko lamented. It was a faint thing, since he’d turned his face away from us both.

“Oh, dear heart,” the golden mother regarded me fondly, and without any real hope. “You’ve already saved me in every way that matters.”

It wasn’t good enough.

I wasn’t good enough.

I tore through everything at my disposal in the Scarlet City, and when that well ran dry I reached beyond my station. I stole my peers’ ancestral knowledge, piled high the scriptures passed down to them by their fathers and their father’s father’s before them, and found nothing worth the insult I’d given them. I climbed the western mountain range and dared Gianni Scala to kill me while I hounded his initiates for their knowledge. I searched high and I searched low, and I did all of it for nothing.

I wasn’t good enough, but they were all worthless.

My little cousins followed me wherever they could, and in my manic obsession I allowed them each to do it. To them, it was all the same adventure.

My uncles and aunts were another matter entirely.

As the days slipped away from me, and I chafed harder and harder against the boundaries of my father’s city, my aunts and uncles drew my cousins further from my reach. It was nothing I could point to and say there, that was the moment. They simply filled their children’s days with tasks at odds with my purpose, bit by bit, until one day I found myself alone again.

That same day, I marched into the private courtyard where my aunts and uncles trained Niko in secret, and I cast my ugly iron sword down at my cousin’s feet.

I challenged him to trial by hunger. Suddenly, I was more than worth the full attention of my uncles and aunts.

Niko bent and picked the ugly sword up by its blade, offering the hilt back to me.

“You don’t have to fight me for my favor, cousin,” he said sadly. “Just ask.”

“I don’t need your favor.” I took the sword and leveled it behind him. “I need theirs.”

I saw a glimpse of it then, but it was gone from their faces before I could describe it. That nauseating vertigo rose up in its place.

“Don’t be silly, nephew,” Fotios chuckled. “You’re our brother’s son. You’ve always had our favor.”

“You worry too much,” Raisa chided me fondly.

“Just like your father,” Chryse teased.

Stavros only scoffed and patted my head.

It was too much. Any more and I would vomit.

Our uncles and aunts went quiet as I settled into a swordsman’s stance.

“It’s alright,” Niko said, drawing his own gleaming blade and tapping it to mine. “I accept.”

I called upon every ounce of my strength, all that I had built within my soul, and I struck faster than I ever had before.

Niko struck me down.

I rose, quicker this time, lunging up from the unexpected angle to deliver a cruel strike to-

Niko struck me down.

I rose, spitting blood.

Niko struck me down.

I rose, twice and twice again more determined than before.

Niko struck me down.

I rose.

I fell.

I rose.

My ugly iron blade shattered in my hands, leaving me with nothing but my rage.

A shadow fell over me while I pounded my fists against the dirt. My uncle’s voice was a sympathetic rumble. It made me want to scream.

“Let this be a lesson, nephew. Skill and strength-of-arms go hand in hand - pig iron like that won’t be enough to bridge a gap this wide.”

With that, he clapped me on the back and rose. They left me there with my anger, taking Niko with them.

I couldn’t bear looking at her. I cradled the golden mother’s right hand in both of my own, and pressed my forehead down into her palm. Her blood pooled cold around my chest.

“It isn’t your fault,” Niko quietly assured me. He reached across the weeping crater in his mother’s chest to grip the back of my neck - his hand was broad and warm. “If Uncle Damon couldn’t do it, you can hardly blame yourself for falling short.”

I grit my teeth.

“Dear heart.” Her voice was whisper-thin, now. “I can’t bear to see you bleeding like this. Look at me, let me see your face.”

Worthless. Wretched. Niko’s mother was dying, and I was forcing them to comfort me.

“I promised you.” I made myself confess it, though my voice was ugly and raw. I forced myself to raise my head and meet her eyes, though my own swam with bitter tears. “I promised.”

Steam rose from her scarlet eyes, water turned to vapor by the flames behind them. I realized the golden mother was crying.

“Oh, Lio. You can’t afford to care this much. This world won’t tolerate such weakness.” She smiled in spite of her sorrow, or perhaps because of it. Her cool thumb stroked my cheek. “But I love that about you, too.”

It would have hurt less if she’d stabbed me.

I refined myself. I searched for answers. I waited.

I saw my opportunity and I took it.

The sword was heavier than it looked. I laid it across my father’s desk, tracing my fingers reverently along its sheath. On one side, the sheath had been inscribed with a master crafter’s precision and an artist’s skilled design. The bladehouse mural depicted five terrible monsters and five men - or rather, the same man five times - striking them down.

My whole life I had wondered what was on the other side, the one that faced the wall. I turned the sheath over on the table and I saw that same man five times more. Instead of fighting monsters, though, he was fighting crowned kings.

This was the blade of the late Anargyros. This sheathe was his story.

I took the sword’s well-worn hilt in hand, and felt a sensation that was foreign to me now that I’d been free of it for nearly half my life.

I was burning.

I knew then that this was right. If this couldn’t bridge the gap between Niko and I, then no sword ever would. I forced aside my body’s instinctive desire to let it go, to flinch away in animal panic. I forced myself to draw the blade.

The moment I saw the first sliver of that blade, I knew I’d underestimated it. I could do more than win the support of my uncles and aunts with this. I could challenge my father directly. I could go beyond him and do what he should have done already.

I could strike down death itself.

I could save her-

“STOP!”

Niko appeared from thin air, flying through the veranda into my father’s office and striking me like a spear. He held nothing back. I heard three of my ribs break before I hit the marble floor. My uncle’s blade slammed back fully into its hilt and flew out of my hands, skittering across the marble tiles.

I choked, arching up and gasping desperately for air. I was hurt in a dozen places, bleeding where the back of my head had broken through a dining table. Somehow, though I inhaled enough air to make my broken ribs scream, it only scalded the burns inside of me.

Niko hauled me up and slapped me hard across the face.

“Are you out of your mind!?” he shouted at me. He slapped my other cheek with the back of his hand, splitting my eyelid with the force of it. “Do you have any idea what you had in your hands!?”

Niko shook me like a dog, more furious than I had ever seen him.

“You would have died!” he raged. “Do you understand that!? Are you listening? If I’d been a moment slower you would be dead!”

His voice hounded me even as I slipped away to darkness. It hunted me through my dreams.

When I woke up, I was mended.

I sat up cautiously on the plush dining couch, bracing for pain that did not come. I was still in my father’s office. It had been full night when I lost consciousness, and now the horizon was light with the promise of predawn. Niko was gone, and his father’s sword was back up on its wall.

My father stood in front of his desk, arms crossed, and my uncle knelt stoically in the center of the room.

“My son lives,” Damon Aetos rumbled.

Stavros Aetos inclined his head. “I’m glad.”

I turned my head and vomited on the marble floor. My uncle’s nose wrinkled in distaste. My father’s expression didn’t change at all.

“May I be excused?” I ground out once the heaving had passed.

“No.”

I spat the last of the bile from my mouth. “Then punish me if you’re going to punish me. I’m not sorry, and I don’t regret it.”

I saw it again. Just the briefest glimpse of that something that my uncle didn’t want me to see. It was gone as quick as it came.

“You learned your lesson in the act,” my father declared. His expression was level as he looked me up and down. “You’ve been punished twice over - that much is justice.”

“Then why can’t I go?”

In lieu of an answer, my father turned cold blue eyes back down to his brother.

“How many times do I have to say it, Damon?” Stavros spoke impatiently. “I tried to give the boy advice, and he ran away with it. A tragic misunderstanding is still just a misunderstanding.”

“Lio.” My father demanded my attention, and I had no choice but to oblige him. “How does a blacksmith expose the truth within a blade?”

I thought of the ugly iron blade I had forged in secret. In the end, it had only been strong enough to withstand a few of Niko’s blows, but even that had only been possible after days and days of trial and refinement.

Confused, I answered, “He treats it with heat.”

My father nodded shallowly.

“Men are much the same.”

I followed his gaze down to my uncle.

“Heat reveals both strength and imperfection,” the kyrios explained. “Whichever it may be, the truth is found in flames.”

I followed his intent.

“You knew that I would try to take it,” I realized. My uncle scoffed, glancing back at me over his shoulder.

“Don’t be foolish, nephew.”

“You wanted me to die.” It felt ridiculous to say it, but it didn’t feel wrong.

“Ridiculous. You’re the blood of my own brother - I couldn’t wish for your death any more than I could wish for your father’s. For my own.”

I watched intently as Stavros Aetos drew himself up in righteous indignation, and I recognized that maddening dissonance for what it really was.

A lie.

“You hate me.”

“How could I hate you?”

“You can’t stand the sight of me.”

His jaw clenched in a ferocious scowl.

“You wish your children hated me too,” I accused him. Finally, my uncle spat an oath and stood.

“I’ve had enough of this. Play your games with someone else, brother-“

“Sit,” the kyrios commanded. My uncle’s knees hit the floor.

“Why?” I slid off of the lounge, advancing forward with my fists clenched at my sides. “What did I do?”

“Nothing,” Stavros snapped. “If you’d only listen-“

Treat it with heat.

“Is it because you’re the youngest?” I lashed out scathingly. He looked at me in disbelief. “Do you resent me for my status? Is it because you think Niko would serve better in my place? That your son would serve better than me - or perhaps that you would serve better than my father?”

“Watch your mouth, boy,” my uncle warned me.

“Is it envy, or is it fear? Do I terrify you, uncle? Have I haunted your dreams from the moment I could walk?” I mocked him, pressing deeper still. “Hero of heroes, the great Stavros Aetos, driven to delusion by a boy too young to hold a cup of wine-“

The world went white and tilted in its frame. I pushed myself up off the floor, woozy, and touched a hand to my bruised cheek. I looked from my uncle’s bloodied knuckles to my father.

The kyrios met my gaze without concern.

“Did you think it would be painless?”

I growled and forced myself to stand.

“You’re a liar,” I accused my uncle. A moment later, I slammed against my father’s shelves, scattering scrolls of ancient papyrus.

“Enough of this, Damon!” Stavros shouted.

“You’re a coward!” I snapped, vaulting over the desk only to be driven face-first into the floor. My nose broke and gushed scarlet blood onto the priceless marble.

“Be silent!”

“Too afraid to tell me why!”

He buried a fist in my gut, wrapping me around it. I gagged, sucking in a whistling breath, and latched onto his arm.

“Faker,” I hissed, branding him. A snarl twisted his stoic features. Finally, I could see it.

My uncle flung me away from him like I was too hot to touch. I forced myself up once more, my vision darkening around its edges.

“Just say it!” I hollered.

“BE SILENT!”

“For once, if not ever again!”

“DAMON!”

“Tell me what I did to you!”

“You were born!”

I froze in place halfway across the room, abruptly transfixed. The man I’d known as my uncle all my life glared at me with black resentment. His ire rolled off of him in caustic waves.

“You were born,” Stavros told me, “and this world has been a bleaker place ever since. You are all of your father’s worst indulgences with none of his virtues to balance them. The opposite of all your cousins.

“Nikolas is a living memory of his father, my brother, someone I’d trade my life for without hesitation. You are a never ending reminder of my oldest brother’s cruelty. Would that I could forget it. Would that I could forget you.

“That your first instinct was to take my plain advice and use it as an excuse to steal from your own father is the only explanation I need to give. You are a danger to my children, a pox upon my brother’s legacy, and the worst of it is that you aren’t sorry at all.”

My uncle glared down at me and I saw there was nothing left to temper.

“I don’t want you to die. I wish you’d never been born at all.”

Stavros jerked, as if released from invisible shackles, and stormed out of the room. I stared down at the marble floor, watching the blood fall from my broken nose.

“Are you glad?”

“No,” I rasped. My father hummed.

“It would be easier to let sleeping dogs lie. If you desire it, I’ll see that this stays between the three of us. You can return to your life as it was before.”

“No.”

I couldn’t.

The initiation rites were still months away when my father gathered me and Niko up for our final farewell.

The golden mother had no strength left to beckon us to her, no strength even to grin. The last warmth left of her was in her eyes. The fires behind them were nought but cooling embers now, yet their passion remained undeniable.

I held her hand in mine carefully, afraid that it would break. The stench of blood and burning smoke brought tears to my eyes.

“There you are,” she breathed. “My sweet boy.”

Overwhelmed, pushed to the limits of my endurance, I did something unforgivable.

“You’re not my mother.”

I tried to temper her.

I regretted it immediately, but she only smiled softly.

“No, but you’re my Lio all the same. Heaven and earth in harmony couldn’t change that.”

I wept furious, anguished tears. It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t justice - and if it was, it didn’t deserve to exist. It deserved to be melted down. It deserved to be scoured.

“Dear heart, remember,” my golden mother whispered, while my father pulled me away and Niko stepped in to take my place. “Your origins are -“

“- hopelessly grim. But this life is yours to decide,” Sol told me. In his burning eyes I saw the sun. “If your story ends as it began, it’ll be because you chose it.”

He kept moving forward, glory rolling off of him in waves. Leaving me to my broken mask. I inhaled a shuddering breath, taking in the world around me as it broke apart and burned. Steam seethed out from between my clenched teeth.

The world is iron now.

Five Heroic souls blazed at their highest potential, unraveling the laws of nature with their deeds. Arrows made of every material above and below blocked out the stars in the sky. Caustic flames in the shape of hunting hounds raced through the wreckage and melted away whatever they touched. A crocodile the size of three elephants swam through the air like it was water, twisting sinuously and devouring every obstacle put before it.

Every king is a Tyrant. There are no more exceptions.

Sol weaved between them with his spear like a grim conductor. Golden fire blazed behind his eyes, and every motion of his empty hand took hold of the world around him and cast it in a new direction. He guided each of their techniques like they were his, using them against one another, and together with Selene he clashed directly with the Heroes themselves. Their blows cratered the earth and sent shockwaves screaming through the city.

My fingers wrapped around a well-worn hilt and my blood began to boil. Prometheus’ golden ichor went wild in my veins.

In a world like this, a Hero doesn’t have to be the pinnacle.

My brother fought beyond any mortal man’s expectation, burning his heart’s blood to do alone what we should have done together. If it had only been the Heroes up against him, it might have been enough. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t.

Selene twisted in alarm, locked into a statemate she couldn’t escape with the Heroic Huntsman, and screamed a hopeless warning.

“SOLUS!”

My brother turned, casting out his empty hand and blasting a city street away from him. The scarred Heroine rushing into his blindspot was sent flying with the wreckage.

It wasn’t good enough.

An otherworldly chime reverberated throughout the city, a sound so bright and clear that only a Muse’s fingers could have possibly called it forth. In response - no, as her muse had planned all along, the Sword Song’s spirit lunged out of her body and through the ringing sound. Sol realized his error a moment too late - if he could hear her song, she didn’t need a body to cut him down.

He tried anyway. He cast magma through her spirit, diverted a hundred of Lefteris’ arrows to skewer her, and threw his own spear when all else had failed. Elissa passed through it all, the sound of her flashing blade a final killing note.

Scarlet silk whirled into the space between them. I bared my teeth at the Heroine's incorporeal soul. The sound of her shock was like metal pulling itself apart.

In a world like this, a Hero only needs to burn.

I drew my sword and set fire to the night.