Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.135

When the Despoiled Queen of the Amazons let fly her blind arrow, starry night seeped through the skies above the City of Olympia and beyond it. For those unfortunate enough to still be in the city, it was an instantaneous shift. For those that had taken the Raging Heaven Cult’s earlier unrest for the warning that it was, fleeing the city with their most valuable possessions bundled up in carts and carried on their backs, the sunset lights were ripped away like a tablecloth to reveal the dark heavens behind it. Further beyond that, on the Ionian Sea, it spilled across the horizon like the Father had turned out his cup.

Aboard the unwieldy Alikonia, the excited buzz of conversation between Nikolas Aetos’ companions died a swift death as they noticed the dark tide bearing down on them. By the time the lesser cultivators in the company had the presence of mind to look, the setting sun at their backs had already been swallowed up.

“Niko,” the Rosy Dawn’s Young Miss whispered. Her younger siblings and her tagalong slave were too frightened to speak. “What just happened?”

The Stark Blade of the Aetos family had already gathered his youngest cousins loosely to him. Now he leaned over them protectively, one hand falling to the hilt of his sword as he stared out past the ship’s bow.

“Was that-?” One of the heroes clustered around the Sand Reckoner squinted up at the stars above, like the answer was written there in small print.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” another immediately shut them down. “You’re just not… looking… hard enough…” Their voice slowly trailed away.

“The moon is gone,” the Heroine Iphys quietly observed.

“Thalestris?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s gone.”

“Why would she ever? In the middle of the city, now of all times, with every hero there just itching for their shot?”

“Then where is it?”

They bickered on like this until it became apparent they wouldn’t reach a consensus alone.

“Niko,” said a Heroine with features like autumn leaves, silencing the back-and-forth. “What do you think?”

The Stark Blade gathered his heavy pneuma around his cousins like a cloak. Blue eyes burning bright, he spoke.

“I think-”

Light.

Every Heroic cultivator on the ship lit up in alarm, their pneuma spilling across the deck of the Alikonia and threatening the lives of all its lesser passengers. The cloak of the Stark Blade’s own pneuma acted as an inadvertent shield to the three Civic cultivators piled up in his lap. The girl that had begged to be taken along in pursuit of the Young Miss nearly died on the spot - would have died, had the Sand Reckoner not snapped his fingers and caused the planks she was sitting on to cave in, sending her plummeting down into the safety of the ship’s lower quarters.

Those left above deck stared in naked alarm at the grim horizon. Wary hands reached for any weapon they could find.

In the distance, originating from a point they still couldn’t see from this distance, a pillar of light too large to be believed rose from earth up to the heavens and burnt away a ring of clouds ten leagues across in its passing. It lit up the world, bright and all-encompassing as the sun, but harsher - its stark glow was as much lightning as it was dawn.

It cast long shadows across the Free Mediterranean, resonating with a long-forgotten purpose.

It said this was the end.

Unnoticed by his stricken passengers, the Sand Reckoner clicked his tongue and scrubbed a charcoal circle off the deck with the heel of his hand.

“He always gets his way.”

The Young Griffon

It was more than just a sword.

Glaring lights and coronating heat scoured the broken city around me in a circle wide enough to build a second stadium upon. In the time it took me to rip the blade from its sheath in a rising parry, it reached out and consumed everything but the earth itself within that circle. It made no sound at all. It was deafening.

The Flame’s golden ichor screamed an outraged warning in my veins, abandoning all its current refinement and converging on the covetous invader. Its efforts were in vain. From the moment my late uncle’s blade had cleared its sheath, it had turned its edge upon everything within reach.

My soul was no exception.

The blade howled, and it devoured. In the time it took to follow through with my parry, it took more from me than any mundane sword was capable of taking. I felt my boiling blood sublimate in my veins and vanish. In the time it took me to lower the blade to a ready position, it took twice that much again.

It was said that a Captain of the Sophic Realm could live to be ten thousand years old if the Fates were kind enough to allow it. By that measure, as a second rank Philosopher I had two thousand years worth of vitality flowing through my veins.

In the time it took the blade to rise and fall, it stripped decades off my life.

“You’ll die!” the golden ichor warned me in Niko’s voice. I straightened up, standing tall and rolling my shoulders.

“Sheathe it! Don’t you understand? You’ll die! You’ll die! You’ll die!”

As if I hadn’t known that from the start.

The blade was polished bronze, double-edged and forged in the style of a one-handed xiphos but longer than a greatsword. Looking at it was like staring at the sun back when its light could still blind me. It cast off heat and stark light in relentless shockwave currents, yet somehow, paradoxically, it drew everything around it into its gleaming surface.

In manic hilarity, a distant portion of me noted that the blade perhaps most deserving of decoration had been left all but bare. Its only ornament was a pair of words inscribed into the base near its hilt, the script too small and plainly etched to be pleasing to the eye.

ϝάνακτος καταρϝος

The King's Curse.

The wanton blade drank my heart’s blood greedily, exacting its terrible price for daring to wield it as my own. It took decades from me as I stood in the inverted eye of its scouring storm. It took centuries.

By the time I turned my eyes upon my enemy, a third of my future was gone.

Reunited with her body, Elissa looked at me with wild eyes. Half-crouching and half-sprawled at the edge of the blade’s scouring pillar, the desert heat wavered behind her eyes. For the moment, she was terrified beyond action. The sound that I had parried was nothing more than an echo of her sword, yet somehow the bronze blade shaking in her hands had been severed halfway up its length. As she shook, a vertical line appeared in the center of her forehead and parted, weeping blood that split at the bridge of her nose and carried on in two trails.

The rest of them were just as stricken. The King's Curse staggered them all, scattering them with its terrible presence even as it drew them in.

There was Kyno to my right, overshadowed now by the gargantuan Sah-Bakari, the virtuous beast looming over him like a protective mother. I saw Lefteris to my left, his mangled fingers just out of reach of his discarded bow. His lips moved soundlessly as he looked upon me, unable to make sense of it. Anastasia’s hunting hounds shrank back from the pillar, whimpering in terror, while the Caustic Queen herself hid somewhere out of sight.

Sol and Selene crouched behind me, well beyond the pillar’s reach. Two rosy palms had struck the scarlet Heroine in center mass and flung her out of harm’s way. The remaining twenty-eight had just barely been strong enough to send the Roman skidding out to join her.

Not far enough. The drilling column of coronating power wasn’t a boundary for the blade - it was only a declaration of its intent. The King's Curse reached beyond it, taking from my brother and from Selene, taking from the Heroes arrayed against us, and reaching further across the ruined City of Olympia to take from ever more. Standing at its starving center, it consumed me most rabidly of all.

One was enough. Presumptuous, ugly blade, I didn’t say you could have them all.

I hammered down on it with all that I was, everything I would ever have to give, and the King's Curse ate that too. It drew me in. It made me a part of it, a portion of a greater whole.

As it drank me dry, I saw the world as it perceived it.

Olympia was dying. It had been gutted by my brother, scarred by the wayward acts of Tyrants, and burnt out at its heart by unworthy champions. The King's Curse swept over them all, enveloping them in the shadow of its ceaseless hunger as it expanded.

The Heroes - no, the animals still inside of the Olympic Stadium, were ripping themselves limb-from-limb with techniques that should have leveled the city three times over by now. The reason why that hadn’t happened - the reason why the stadium was still standing at all - was invisible to me, but plainly apparent to my wanton blade. I looked through its eyes and saw it for myself.

A wretched captain of the third realm shouted his bloodthirsty defiance as four lesser dogs converged on him from every cardinal direction.

The captain burned seventeen years along with one more spring and summer from the end of his life, distilling that down to pure potential, time, and instantly transmuting it to magnitude. His beating heart supplied the burning fuel, his mind supplied the question of what would be done with it, and the instinct in his gut gave him the answer.

The wretched captain’s soul was built on foundations of speckled limestone, worn down and made smooth by the ceaseless crashing of broken tides. Its load-bearing colonnades were stout and ugly things, all ten of them pockmarked principles of aimless violence. The statues dedicated to his fulminating acts were little better - every one of them a brutal culling. The captain’s soul was a monument to cruelty without purpose.

The barking dog chose one of ten acts that had defined him, the slaying of a terrible virtuous beast. Though an entire settlement had lent him their spears along with their fathers and sons to see it done, he had taken all the credit as his own as the battle’s sole survivor. As such, the ability manifested in two parts - one, a cloud of sea spray that drowned all those who inhaled it, and the other, a protective ring of seven hundred and thirty-two bristling spears. One for every son and father that had died to mauling or to drowning while they held the beast in place for him.

When the wretched captain of the third realm invoked that act and burnt his heart’s blood, he proposed a question: If I could live this moment for seventeen years, plus another spring and one more summer, how much greater could that act have been?

This was how cultivators in the third realm empowered themselves beyond the boundaries of their station. As a result, the wretched captain’s sea spray strike exploded from his every pore, not simply drowning those who breathed it in unprepared, but also blinding them with salt that melted their eyes in their sockets, seizing them in riptide currents that halted their momentum, and wearing away the flesh from their bones as though they’d spent the better part of twenty years ravaged by constant crashing waves.

It was a common use of passion. At the same time that the captain was doing this, the four lesser dogs arrayed against him were doing much the same. One offered up twenty-four and a half years of their lifespan to empower their motion, dancing through the worst of the spray with impossible grace. Another offered forty-seven years and a single cloudless night to empower the magnitude of their manifested shield, blocking not just the sea spray’s ability to blind and grind flesh from bone, but also blocking the imposition of the act - protecting him, impossibly, from the label of beast that the captain’s act imposed, and thus negating its ability to drown him. Another still gave up exactly one century in order to lend her sling enough force for its iron orb projectile to punch through anything short of adamant.

The last of the four, and the runt of their unsightly litter without any greater mystery to inspire his foundations, burned with an insecurity backed by personal hatred of his opponent. This one set fire to twenty thousand years, and he gave it all to his dagger before he threw it. It left him defenseless while the knife spun unerringly for the wretched captain’s heart, coated in hateful poison that was potent enough to kill a man on the thirty-fourth step towards divinity.

By all standard measures, the wretched captain should have been ripped apart by his lessers. He was outnumbered and had sacrificed the least of all of them for his technique.

However, the captain had not called upon a standard act. How could the effects of its empowerment be anything but warped as a result?

The four leaping dogs had accounted for the empowerment of his sea spray, but not his secondary attack. When the wretched captain offered up time to empower his deed, he gained more than he should have from the exchange. More than just his own impossible efforts, taken from the future and condensed down to this moment. More than that, he gained the efforts of the settlement’s sons and fathers too.

Seven hundred and thirty-two men, given seventeen years plus one spring and another summer to devote themselves to their spears. Seven hundred and thirty-two men, given seventeen years plus one spring and another summer to reach their full maturation, to raise their sons that had been too young to aid the captain on that day. Seventeen years, plus one spring and another summer for those seven hundred and thirty-two men to have more sons, and to raise them for this singular purpose.

This was not an act of passion. The King's Curse recognized it for what it was: an echo of the fourth realm. And because the King's Curse knew it, so did I.

The wretched captain offered up three thousand six hundred and ninety-four tortured souls, fathers and sons that had died to protect their home along with an entire generation of their unborn heirs. Of the four lesser dogs converging on the captain, only the runt that had sacrificed twenty thousands years to his knife was unsurprised by the second layer of the attack.

Three thousand six hundred and ninety-four spears exploded from the sea spray, skewering the four challengers from every possible angle. Three died instantly, their techniques and the last of their vitality leaving their corpses in a destructive rush. The runt alone clung stubbornly to life, unable to move but determined to watch as his tumbling knife sank into the captain’s chest.

The wretched captain’s breastplate, another product of toil not his own, stopped the dagger with only a sliver of its tip pressed into his skin. The captain plucked it out and sauntered over to the runt, twirling it between his fingers. He said something cruel and unimportant, then buried the knife to its hilt in the lesser dog’s neck.

A moment later he collapsed screaming to the sand, scrabbling at his breastplate where it covered his heart. The runt, suspended above the captain by the spears of his father, his brothers, and all their tortured neighbors, hocked and spat bloody spittle onto the writhing captain’s face.

The wretched dog ripped the breastplate from his chest, revealing a rugged torso marred by ugly inflammation. The runt couldn’t speak, skewered as he was by spears and his own poisoned knife, but with the voice of his soul he whispered something spiteful and unimportant down at the captain.

In response, the captain drove his own fingers into his chest, breaking past his ribs and taking hold of his heart. He howled in terror and outrage, pulling, and they both vanished beneath the light of tribulation lightning.

Similar scenes played out across the bloody sand pit, and the Olympic Stadium contained them all. The King's Curse knew why. Though the walls of the stadium, such as they were - less walls and more an ascending spiral ramp, with each layer supported by statues of past champions rather than traditional load-bearing columns - appeared to my eyes to be more form than they were function, the truth was entirely different. The spirit lime chosen for the load-bearing statues was durable in a way that defied the rules of nature, relying upon the legacy of the former champions whose shapes it had taken to retain its shape and resist external wear.

No matter what havoc the animals inside the pit unleashed, they were all of them lesser than the Champions that had brought glory to those sands before them. So long as that was true, the stadium’s walls would never fall. Nothing would trespass them. It was one of the most remarkable feats of architecture that this world had ever seen - the King's Curse knew that with authority, and so I knew it too.

While my mind was there in the pit, observing that madness, it was a thousand other places at the same time. I was made aware of countless revolting scenes playing out in the crumbling ruin of a city that had once been without equal. And as I watched through the wanton blade’s awareness, I understood something pivotal. Whatever the King's Curse could perceive, it could eat.

On the distant mountain beneath the Storm That Never Ceased, eight Tyrants were laid bare before my borrowed senses. I understood them with the same vivid clarity that I had understood the third realm animals down in the pit. The soul of a fourth realm cultivator was exponentially more complex than those of the third realm, but to the King's Curse it was like comparing a child’s aimless scribbles to a student’s sloppy imitation. It was all the same.

Foundations warped - tempered, my dwindling voice whispered - by greater mysteries. Ten pillars of load-bearing principle. Ten statues dedicated to legendary deeds. And above it all, a sloping dome roof, each Tyrant’s formed from a different material. Gold for the sullen King of Setting Suns, Pewter for the lying Queen of the Amazons, and so on and so forth. Regardless of their composition, all of them blocked out the skies above their souls. On the inside of those domed roofs, each of them had painted a mural of their dominion.

Men, women, and children huddled beneath these roofs in their hundreds and their thousands, bound by purpose and shackled to the pillars and the statues.

Distantly, I felt someone whisper in my ear.

The fraud from the Alabaster Isles, king of any number of kingdoms depending on who was asking and how he felt that day, possessed a dominion faker than his name. The Golden Touch, he called it, the ability to turn anything and everything within his purview to gold - and to revert it back at any time. In reality, it was tarnished iron imitating the real thing. Fool’s gold.

The whisper persisted. It was closer than before.

The forked-tongue bastard of serpent seers, king of tall grasses and overturned breadbaskets, possessed a dominion more deceptive than his mother. Drowned out by the howling of hurricane winds and the obnoxious cacophony of clattering wind chimes, the serpents that lay basking on the domed roof of his soul hissed their constant omens in his ear. It was nothing even close to true prophecy, only a beast’s crude approximation, but it was more than most men would ever be allowed to know.

It insisted.

The unyielding dragon of the coast, king of rigid order and endless reparation, possessed a dominion as inflexible as his judgment. So long as he followed the letter of his soul’s every law, he could impose those same restrictions upon the people around him as if they were their own load-bearing pillars. And should they break those pillars, he could take from them until that wrong was made right.

It took its chances.

The hollow shell of a good man, king of what was left behind, possessed a dominion as broken as his spirit. Vacuous where there had once been purpose, empty where there had once been light. He was barely a remnant now, rail-thin and haunted by his worst mistake, the only one that mattered-

He was spinning away from his fight to stare at the pillar of coronating light. His dull eyes were wide, tracing it to its source. They settled on me, and from the void of his soul an emotion reared up with startling intensity - outrage.

Reaching out.

Ptolemy the Savior roared, and from the empty void of his dominion came light. Spilling out, bolstering him as he had not been bolstered since the day he turned his back on-

Transgressing-

“JUST ONCE!”

I looked down on the Sword Song, as I looked down upon the entirety of the Half-Step City and its petty warring Tyrants. As I looked down upon my brother, and even upon myself.

We were all so very small.

“For once in your miserable life!” Elissa screamed, her spirit - her ego - cracking like glass. It would only take a glancing blow to shatter it. “Tell me the truth! Who are you!? Why are you here!? What could possibly be worth this madness!?”

Hers wasn’t the only spirit at its limit. The King's Curse cut them all to their cores, flaying them open and exposing their hearts. I saw how close to breaking every one of our companions was, and more than that, I saw how much closer to the brink my trio was compared to Sol’s. I had burned them. I had pulled their hands into the fire, and I had held them there in the hopes that they would learn. But I hadn’t taught them anything in the end.

I had only made them suffer.

How much time had passed since I’d drawn my blade? It felt like weeks, inundated as I was in this terrible awareness, but it couldn’t have been more than seconds. The King's Curse drank ravenously from my heart. By its own measure, it had taken another six hundred years from me since our senses had been joined.

Who was I, really?

It devoured me, and it reached beyond me to devour everything else within the city.

Why was I here?

It hungered for the ruins. It hungered for the corpses. It hungered for the living, no matter their standing. Animals. Slaves. Citizens, Philosophers, and Heroes. Even the Tyrants. Even the-

What could possibly be worth all that I had done?

“My name is Lio Aetos.” I stepped forward, and Elissa skittered back. “I am the Young Griffon of the Rosy Dawn, the first and only heir of Damon Aetos.”

The King's Curse sank its teeth into their denial and their doubt, consuming their black biles without hesitation.

“I have climbed twelve steps towards divinity. Soon, I’ll climb a dozen more.”

Whatever the King's Curse could perceive, it could present in stark clarity. I saw all of it, all at once, even as I was consumed. Yet, as I fell fully into the horizon of its insatiable desire, I realized there was one thing even the King’s Curse could not fully understand.

“Liar!” Elissa accused me one last time, while an existence like shadows swimming beneath a frozen lake hovered just over her shoulder.

“Liar!” Lefteris named me while his heart broke apart. Just behind him, close enough to whisper but too far to be touched, an existence like morning mist lingered.

“Liar,” Kyno denied me while his hopes withered away. Lurking behind him almost like his crocodile cloak, a presence loomed like a mirage.

“No.”

I took another step. My heart’s blood dwindled.

Now that I had noticed one, I noticed them all. Watching, whispering, waiting - but never ever helping. There was one for every Hero in the city.

“No,” a sonorous voice echoed my sentiment, only half a step away.

There was even one for me.

“His virtuous heart won’t tolerate a lie,” Melpomene declared with powerful satisfaction. Her voice emanated seemingly without a source, giving lie to her true intent as she reached out for my heart. Abruptly, I understood. She wouldn’t reveal herself in full until she had her prize in hand.

The veil of the Muse’s mystique was impossible to pierce. Even to the King's Curse, she was hardly more than a shifting haze. The blade couldn’t lay her bare like it had everything else.

But it could still see her.

And what it could see, it could consume.

Presumptuous waste of accursed higher power.

[My virtuous heart is MINE.]

My pneuma doubled and redoubled, driven to advancement by the appearance of a golden ideal. Sparks flew inside my soul, the King's Curse consuming all of them as they fell. All of them but one.

As that lonely spark fell and the Flame’s golden ichor caught fire in my veins, the blood staining my hands rose up from my skin and latched onto the sword’s hilt, spinning the blade around and sideways through the empty air.

Melpomene, Tragedy’s Muse, stared at the bronze blade buried in her stomach with something like disbelief. The world itself seemed to hold its breath, unable to reconcile the truth of my reaction. Then the King's Curse began its hungry work, and she threw her head back and screamed.

Across the city, every hero with Melpomene’s fingerprints on their heart fell like puppets with their strings cut, convulsing and crying out in sympathetic agony. The heavenly chorus of heaven’s gleeful spectators turned to shrieking fury as the Tragic Muse’s seven sisters converged on me like falling stars. They cut me with blades I didn’t have the slightest hope of understanding, let alone deflecting. They pierced me to my deepest core, beyond even my blade’s ability to expose me. They questioned all that I was and could ever be, and they declared my soul unworthy.

Who are you to touch our flesh? You are nothing. You are no one.

They sentenced me to death, condemning me to the Fates.

“NO.”

They were rejected.

A broad and heavy hand came down on my shoulder and gripped it tight, less than flesh but more than an apparition. As abruptly as the Muses had made themselves known - no, more so, because he truly hadn’t been there before this exact moment - the echo of a man loomed suddenly large over my shoulder. Facing away from me, one hand covering his face, his memory alone was a stark brand upon the world.

He wore a cloak of shining stars, and when he spoke the entirety of the Free Mediterranean stopped its heart to listen.

“NEVER NOTHING. NEVER NO ONE.” The voice of an era rang out across the heavens, shaking all who heard it.

The legacy of the Conqueror dared the world to prove him wrong, his declaration echoing with pride.

“THIS MAN TOO IS ALEXANDER.”

The Muses wailed and flung themselves away, scattering and converging on the Heroes arrayed before me. Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, and Anastasia arched up like they’d been struck by lightning, their minds coming apart as their terror warred with the deafening urges of their Muses.

Golden heat surged to life behind my eyes and spilled forth in a torrent. Melpomene wrenched herself off my blade, sobbing in pain, and I allowed her to flee back to wherever it was that higher powers festered. I strode forward, shrugging off the hand on my shoulder, and the Conqueror’s stark reminder chuckled as it dispersed.

I had less than a century left, my heart’s blood all but depleted, and Prometheus’ golden ichor had been reduced by half before it started burning. Yet as I advanced, I felt the King's Curse withdraw its hunger from my soul until only a fraction of the burden remained - I understood intuitively that I had been paying a pretender’s price for my presumption up until this moment. Now, I suffered only the portion of the wanton blade’s hunger that even the Conqueror hadn’t been able to escape. The inescapable curse that plagued every king.

Now, the blade turned its full hunger upon its surroundings and inverted the balance of its efforts. It reached out to devour the people around me, heedless of their standing.

As if I would allow that.

Rosy flames erupted up and down the bronze blade, bolstered by burning ichor and defiant of its name. The blade absorbed it readily, but the fire fought viciously, and there was always more to take its place. Unable to pierce through the flames entirely, and unwilling to bite back at me, the King's Curse condensed its hunger to a practical burning edge.

The Heroes wavered as I came, on the edge of giving up entirely. If I desired it, I could end this without a fight. We could leave them here, broken and lost, and seek our answers elsewhere. It was the only good option remaining, really. I had lost more in less than a minute than most men would ever have to give, but I still had enough of my heart’s blood left to live for decades more to come. Combined with the Flame’s priceless golden ichor, I could leave this place stronger than any sophist had a right to be.

I could save this gift for a moment where it mattered, when my life was on the line again. These people weren’t a threat to me anymore. They were broken now, and they knew it as well as I did.

No.

Forty hands of my violent intent rose up around me, ten invisible to the naked eye, ten glowing rosy-bright, ten crackling with tribulation lightning, and ten stained by my scarlet sin. My eyes blazed as I burnt away another year of what few I had remaining, and those pankration hands multiplied four fold.

I wasn’t finished yet.

“I came here to answer a question. One that I was too afraid to ask, and one my virtuous heart already knew.”

The distant mountain and the glowing stadium shook as their despots and their gladiators finally reacted to the Conqueror’s curse. If our companions didn’t break on their own, the coming storm would surely do the work for them.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I decided. “I was born into a world of tarnished iron, but I refuse to die in one as well. No matter what it takes, I will make it golden-bright again. And when I do, you’ll see that you’ve always had a place within it.”

“What are you even saying?” Elissa breathed. I huffed a laugh. I supposed that was fair.

Enough sophistry. No more iron truths. No more golden lies.

I leveled my burning blade at their hearts, and the heavenly hands that held them tight.

“Higher power is a curse - your Muses aren’t worth the burden of their favor. You have to cut them out.”

“Or what?” Lefteris challenged me hysterically.

Sol appeared by my side. Selene’s shoulder bumped against mine. We burned and burned.

“Or I’ll do it myself,” I promised them.

Our companions lashed out like cornered animals, and we met them side-by-side.