Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter .3

Griffon, the Risen Flame

The day I watched my cousin’s golden mother die, a question had taken root in my mind. No matter how completely I’d tried to suppress it, utterly uncaring of my efforts, that uncertainty had remained - festering somewhere in the shadow of the soul that every man feared to shine light upon. Years had passed, and I had met Sol. I’d allowed myself to forget.

Then I’d met Melpomene, the Tragic Poet of the Muses, and she had reached out through the Oracle of Broken Tides to remind me of the question that I had for so many years refused to ask.

A vow sworn with golden intention, yet in the end not upheld - was that a failure, or a lie?

As if you needed someone else to tell you the color of clear skies.

Decrepit old ghost. Get back into your tomb.

No.

I glared irritably at the shimmering ruby gem hanging from my neck. Not for the first time, I cursed my past self for stealing it from the Rosy Dawn’s ancestral pools. Priceless relic that it was, it was far from the only gem in this world that was pleasing to the eye. I could have draped myself head-to-toe in jewelry like a low-class reaver - or worse still, a Persian - and not suffered a single spoken word from the finery. Instead, I had chanced upon the one and only scarlet stone among thousands with a parasite attached.

This barking act demeans you. A lion of my line should roar.

Festering corpse.

Foam of my loins.

My thoughts were under siege, and the flickering remains of the Titan Flame’s golden ichor had yet to find the root of my so-called ancestor’s presence in my mind. Until that leading thread was found, I’d have no choice but to suffer him.

Fortunately, I had no shortage of interesting things to distract me in the meantime.

“Push.” Sol’s voice carried easily over the light crashing of waves, and eleven voices rose up in response to the captain’s command.

“THIRTY-EIGHT!”

Ten newly awoken cultivators and one exalted Heroine pressed against the ship’s deck, straining with all their might against an unseen pressure. Teeth gnashed and muscles bulged. Ever so slowly, they rose.

I pushed myself up in one smooth motion, basking in the familiar burn of overburdened muscles like an old friend’s embrace. How long had it been since I’d enjoyed this simple pleasure? Years and years, and far too long.

“Drop,” Sol demanded, and I lowered myself alongside him until our noses brushed against the wood. The muffled grunts and groans from the crew and my sister were a nostalgic sound, one I had never forgotten but for so long been unable to take part in for myself. We held ourselves there, half a hand from kissing the Eos’ deck, and I relished every breath.

“Push.”

“THIRTY-NINE!”

Past a certain point of physical refinement, a cultivator ceased to feel the burden of their own weight. In many ways this was a boon, allowing for the deft alacrity and thoughtless acrobatics that so dazzled mortals who had yet to start their climb. However, the drawbacks to this weightlessness were keenly felt in the gymnasium. Beyond a certain point, one that I had surpassed early in my life, calisthenics weren’t worth the time.

It was possible to add on to the body’s natural weight, of course, and many did - but it was an imperfect solution at best. It was all too easy to lose track of your body’s ideal balance and overburden one portion of your musculature at the expense of others. Even beyond that concern, there came a point where it simply wasn’t practical to strap a boulder to your back and push.

“Drop.”

I lowered myself once more to the deck, and it was an effort to hold myself steady. The sensation of the Greek captain’s virtue was not like a boulder balanced on my back - it was like a second skin, a coating of oil that pressed down upon every muscle at once and burdened them in perfect proportion to one another. My breaths were steady, my arms flexing without tremors, but I felt sweat beading on my brow.

“Push.”

“FORTY!”

I pushed myself up off the deck, and it felt like I was a child again. I felt my body refine itself in real time, and it was the simplest sort of wonder.

I glanced at Sol through the curtain of hair hanging over my eyes. He’d discarded his breastplate and shrugged the white chiton off his shoulders while he went to work on his new soldiers, and his back glistened with sweat as he pushed himself up beside me. Muscles like coiling iron flexed beneath the Roman’s tan skin, struggling against a weight far heavier than the fraction he’d allowed his men to shoulder while they trained. He’d given Selene and I more, of course, but not the full amount - he’d promised I could try it when we had firm land beneath our feet, and I intended to hold him to that.

Still, though his burden was greater than the rest of ours combined, he watched his soldiers like a hawk. That distant look I’d grown so used to seeing in his eyes was gone as though it had never been, replaced with a focus sharp enough to cut clean through iron. His eyes flickered from man to man, and through the lense of my pneumatic senses I observed his continuous adjustment of their burdens. The instant before a man began to falter, he’d find his burden lightened just enough to keep going. Every time a man grew too comfortable with the pace, he’d blink and find the weight had become just a bit heavier.

Like this, Sol kept each of his men toeing the line of failure without letting them tumble fully over into it. It was a deceptively complex working of his virtue, artful in its way, and I’d praised him for it when I first noticed what exactly it was that he was doing. The Roman had rolled his eyes and otherwise ignored me, but he’d been unable to hide the hint of thrumming pride in his heart.

“Drop.”

“Give me a bit more,” I urged him under my breath. He ignored me. “The ship can take it. She was built to last.” He ignored me still. I blew a lock of hair away from my eye, cocking an eyebrow at him. “Perhaps that isn’t it. Could it be the captain’s worried his good brother will show him up in front of the men? How embarrassing would it be to pass that weight off onto me and see it makes no difference? Perhaps it’s for the best this way-“

Sol snorted, and the weight of another twenty men nearly slammed me through the deck. I braced myself with the limbs of my own pankration intent, hands of rosy pneuma vanishing from the oars of the Eos and appearing beneath my own to act as stable ground. I grunted, teeth gnashing, and matched myself against it.

“Push,” the captain called, the men of the Fifth roaring their effort in turn.

Grinning ferociously, I rose.

———

The men ate ravenously, and they ate well. A common misconception of the crude masses was that cultivators needed less nourishment than an unrefined man, owed to their ability to go days, weeks, and months ascending without eating a meal, depending on their level of advancement. In reality, a Civic cultivator required far more to sustain them than a crude soul. A Philosopher required yet more than that to nourish their ceaselessly wondering mind. A Hero needed more still to nourish their passionately burning heart. And a Tyrant…

A Tyrant’s hunger was never truly satiated.

Why was it, then, that cultivators were not seen gorging themselves at every opportunity? The short answer was that we were. Just not in a way that an unrefined soul - or even a newly awoken cultivator - could understand. We feasted every moment of our lives, endlessly hungering for more even in the moments that our souls were so overfull we wanted to retch. It was our lowest nature, the one we shared with every beast on this earth.

Naturally, we ate food as well. When the demands of our hunger outstripped our means, we had only two choices. Devour, or starve.

The Eos’ crew, the ragged sea dogs that Sol had commandeered as men of his Fifth Legion, tore through their stores of salted meats and wine in a single day. They had each worked hard, as diligent as they were clumsy, to meet their new captain’s demands. Sol was being gentle with them to start - too gentle, a searing voice inside my soul insisted - but it was still worse than any of the work they’d done as slaves. They ate desperately when they could, and slept like the dead when Sol eventually called an end to the first day of their training. When they overturned the last of their jugs the next morning and found them empty, I saw the men of the Fifth fall fully into panic.

Sol waited patiently in the middle of the ship’s deck, back straight and arms crossed while he stared up at the cloud-darkened skies. I sat behind him, on the opposite side of the ship’s mast, my legs crossed and the lead-stained silks of my station pooling around me as I went about my steady work. Neither of us had slept the night before, of course. After what we’d seen and done, I wasn’t sure we’d ever sleep again.

So dramatic.

On the other hand, a night’s rest might be exactly what I needed. Perhaps my mind would be free of buzzing flies when I awoke.

Or perhaps I’ll make use of your body in your mind’s absence.

I paused in my work and looked narrowly at the man looming behind me, his body shifting like smoke where it overlapped with the wooden beam of the ship’s mast. Throughout all his heckling and all my movement around the ship since he’d first announced himself, I’d still yet to see his face. No matter which way I moved or how swiftly, he was always there just behind me when I turned to look, his back to mine and his arm propped indolently upon my head.

My so-called ancestor chuckled. It was a low and ominous sound.

Forgive me, child, at times I forget my age. I’ll explain. In my time, this process was known as gag-šu.

The last word was utterly foreign to my ear, and that was enough to warrant my full attention.

Gag-šu. What could such a word mean in this context? I’ll make use of your body in your mind’s absence. I turned the linguistics of it over in my mind, gnawing at it while I scoured my memories of past lessons for derivative words from younger languages. Possession? Usurpation? A curse, some nascent corruption? Or-

A joke.

I spat on the ghost’s ephemeral golden sandals and banished his laughter from my thoughts.

Sol was looking back at me, an eyebrow raised. I waved him off and returned to my work. Before he could comment on my behavior, the first of his men made their hunger known.

“Captain! We’re out of-”

“Kall,” Sol sharply interrupted the man, and Kall froze. A beat passed as the new man of the Fifth visibly forced aside his panic and searched his memories for what he’d done wrong. Then his hunched back straightened, his filthy bare feet came together, and he thumped a fist to his chest.

“Captain!”

Sol nodded. “Go on.”

“We’re out of food, sir!”

“By whose measure?”

Kall stared at Sol, caught off-guard by the question. He looked back at the rest of his fellows. Three of them were so stricken by morning hunger that they were scraping the salt off the insides of the empty jugs and barrels and licking the crystals from their fingers. The remaining six were watching intently. Kall swallowed.

“By mine, sir,” Kall finally said, turning back to the captain. Sol’s neutral expression didn’t change, but I could tell that answer satisfied him.

“We’ll be ashore before long,” Sol told him, and the men behind him. “A day of hunger won’t kill you. I can tell you now that you’ll suffer far worse than these pangs in the future.”

The men visibly swallowed their protests down, each of them turning their eyes away from the captain’s intense stare and dispersing from around the empty jugs to take their places at the rowing benches. Had Sol been a different man, that would have been the end of it. The new men of the Fifth were only newly awoken, and only then because of his grace. He could have ordered them all to tie anchor weights to their waists and jump overboard into the sea, and after what he’d given them, after what they’d seen him do just two days before, they would have done so without hesitation. He could have starved them for weeks, let alone a single day.

Fortunately for them, my brother was all too softhearted when it came to the soldiers in his care. Sol reached out and clapped a hand on Kall’s shoulder, halting the man when he tried to slump dejectedly back to his bench.

“That being said, you’re more useful to me strong than you are starving. And by my measure, we have food enough to spare.” Sol smiled faintly at their confused looks and tilted his head back. They followed the gesture, tracing it down to me and my work, and the realization spread like a flame.

I dragged the Oracle’s adamant knife down the length of the mermaid’s tail again and again, scraping scales off with each pass. They clattered heavily against the deck, more like metal coins than fish scales, each one shining dazzlingly like sunlit waves. The portion of the corpse that might have been a woman in a kinder world was gone - we’d sawed the mermaid in half the day before, burned her human half and scattered its ashes to the wind, then strung the fish tail up with rigging rope and placed empty clay jugs beneath it to catch the liquid lead draining out of it.

A day later, it looked almost like any other catch of the sea. Monstrously large, of course, the tail alone longer than even Sol and I were tall, and wider at its thickest point than Sorea’s spread wings. Beyond that, though, it could have just as easily been a fish’s head we’d sawed off its end. That was, until you turned a cultivator’s senses upon the meat.

The flesh of a virtuous beast was a delicacy that every cultivator coveted. Unawoken metics with more gold than sense regularly paid small fortunes for even a single plate of such meat, believing a single bite could turn a crude man into a cultivator. Even the seemingly inedible portions of a virtuous beast’s carcass were never wasted - claws and fangs were ground into powder and mixed into wine or used as reagents in alchemy and medicine. Feathers, furs, and scales were fashioned into priceless garments, some even carrying small echoes of the creature they were fashioned from. The hunt for virtuous beasts was an industry that men from every walk of life took part in, the bountiful rewards well worth the risks.

The flesh of a monster, though? Well. That was another matter entirely.

“Captain…” Kall hesitated. “Are y’sure? That rancid blood-”

“Ichor,” I idly corrected him.

“Ichor,” the man amended. “That ichor, it wasn’t-”

“Wasn’t meant for man’s consumption,” spoke up one of the other men, already seated at his bench and hunched over his oar. His voice was faintly haunted, his heart pounding at the memory of our encounter with the mermaid. Or perhaps a more formative memory than that, a superstition passed on from the older generation.

“If the captain says it’s good enough, it’s good enough!” another man insisted, one of the three starving ones that had been scratching at the jugs for salt. He, along with the other two, had been too nauseous from the exertion of their training to eat when Sol told him to yesterday, and now he was paying the price.

“We’re eating the mermaid?” Selene’s golden hair appeared above the crow’s nest, the Heroine’s excitement rousing her immediately from a dead sleep to full wakefulness. Her eyes burned bright with excitement. “Oh, you’re all going to love it!”

“You’ve had it before?” I asked, bemused.

“Of course! It was one of Bakkhos’ favorites - he’d go out and hunt them himself, and if it was a special occasion he’d save a plate for me.” The daughter of the Oracle grabbed the end of the sloppy rope hammock strung up under the crow’s nest and shook it firmly. “Wake up, Lync! You’ll miss the feast!”

The red headed pirate child that the Eos’ crew had seemingly accepted as one of their own flailed and tumbled completely out of his rope hammock, screaming in shock as he woke up in freefall.

A hand of my violent intent caught him by the back of his chiton, a hand-span before he hit the deck, and held him there while he gasped for breath and returned fully to the waking world. Selene stared down at us with wide eyes, both hands covering her mouth.

When the little pirate Lynceus finally caught his breath, he looked first up to the rosy-burning hand that had caught him, and then down to me. I cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m not thanking you,” he declared, and I threw him over the rail.

“You’re not wrong to be wary of this creature,” Sol was telling his men, unbothered by our exchange, “Even in death it would have been a threat to you as you were before. Even now, its flesh could kill you if you consumed too much of it in one sitting. But make no mistake, this is a boon. I’ll show you.”

Sol held out an expectant hand, and I drove the ritual knife down through the thickest part of the mermaid’s tail. It was no cleaver, but its blade was still forged from adamant. It carved easily through the infernal flesh, and I slapped a thick filet of silvery flesh into Sol’s hand.

“Pay attention,” he said in that sharp voice of Sol the Captain, demanding, and the ship’s crew focused all of their senses upon him as he bit into the monster’s flesh. He chewed slowly while I cut another two filets for Selene and myself. Then he swallowed it down.

The effect was immediate. As I swallowed my own mouthful of the bizarre flesh, I traced its path down through my throat and observed the effects from the outside and in. To the men of the Fifth, their pneumatic senses still dull and new, it was nonetheless a vivid reaction. The quality of our pneuma, our vitality made manifest, deepened. It wasn’t a reaction any of them could have put words to, but I certainly could.

The Titan Flame’s meddling had rebalanced us, making order of our bodies where our choices up until that point had made disorder. That balancing of our humors had made all the functions and flows of our bodies subtly smoother - as though we’d been unfamiliar with our bodies before that moment, and only then gained full control over them. By contrast, the Titan’s golden ichor had refined us, acting as the catalyst for outrageously swift growth. It had allowed us to shape ourselves, body and soul, as though we were clay.

The monster’s flesh did neither of those things. It did nothing to the shape or order of us. It gave us no further control, though it did try to wrest that control away - it was a familiar routine now, a process that had started in the Temple of the Father with the Rein-Holder’s starlight marrow, been carried on in the Orphic House, and continued with the ravenous consumption of the King’s Curse and the Titan Flame’s own well-intentioned urges. I seized the foreign presence in my hand and crushed it, dousing what remained of the mermaid’s nascent taint.

Thus subdued, the monster’s flesh was made a part of me. And unlike the marrow of Crows and the ichor of Titans, the mermaid’s essence did not seek to change our shape. No, instead, it changed our substance.

I felt my pneuma deepen, felt the substance of myself take on a new quality, as though I had been a painting on a wall all my life and was now just a bit closer to being the model that painting was based off of. As I took another bite and swallowed it down, observing its path through my system with the perceptions granted by the Titan’s residual ichor, I saw that it wasn’t changing my body’s composition any more than it was my pneuma’s. The quality was all that changed.

It was common knowledge that a virtuous beast’s flesh was brimming with vitality, a single cut of its meat enough to satiate a cultivator of equivalent standing for weeks. The greater the beast, the more nourishing its flesh and the more profound the properties of its pelt. In the end, though, the consumption of it was a transient affair. Even the grandest beast’s flesh was digested eventually.

This, though? This was different. I supposed it made sense in its own way. This was a creature that had been cursed to live forever. It was in its nature to linger.

“Look closely.” Sol spread his empty hands after he’d finished his cut, presenting himself for the inspection of his men. “Do you see any infirmity in me? None. Now look closer, and you’ll see the opposite is true.”

For some reason, though, even the three hungriest men looked hesitant. The first man to approach, Kall, put their doubt to words.

“Captain… we knew it wouldn’t hurt you.”

I snorted. Mad dogs that they were, at least they weren’t complete fools.

“Take that faith in me, and put it to better use,” Sol said, accepting another filet of mermaid flesh as I carved it free. Above our heads, Selene gnawed happily away at her own cut. Sorea perched over her in the crow’s nest, staring intently down at me. I rolled my eyes and tossed him up a chunk as well. “Trust me when I tell you that I know what each of you can handle, and I won’t give you a single morsel more.”

The captain weighed a portion of silvery flesh in his palm that was worth more than all of their slave’s prices had been combined. His next words were dry. “It’s in an officer’s nature to spare only what he must, after all. This is too valuable for you to go retching it overboard.”

A hilarious understatement. In many ways, this flesh was priceless. Cultivators could and often did fight over the bounty of a virtuous beast’s carcass, but they would commit bloody murder for a taste of this.

Kall accepted a small portion of the mermaid’s flesh, hardly larger than his pinky finger, and the rest of the men soon lined up for their own. Sol fell fully into the sharp focus of his station, instructing each of them carefully on what to expect and how to process the meat, silently wrapping each of them up in the eddies of his influence in a way that went beyond even my understanding - there was a Roman touch to this working, one that I resolved to ask him about later.

For now, I left him to his work and focused on finishing mine. I carved the mermaid up into usable cuts of flesh, gathered the scales up into my shadow for later use, and cleaned the adamant blade of the carcass’ liquid lead ichor. I wiped my hands off on my silks, but those were already soiled and the act did me little good. So I filled an empty jug with sea water, dragging the sputtering Lync up out of the sea as I did so, and set about scrubbing my hands clean.

“Griffon?” Selene spoke quietly, suddenly by my side. I blinked, looking up at her. When had she finished eating? “Are you alright?”

“Of course.”

“What are you doing?”

My eyes rolled. “Surely Bakkhos allowed his Oracles the privilege of a bath in their quarters. I’m washing my hands.”

“Washing them of what?”

“The blood.” Obviously.

Selene reached into the jug of crimson sea water and pulled my hands free. To my irritation, they were still stained scarlet. Some of the blood had been buried so deep beneath the nails of my fingers that I had no idea how I’d get it all out.

“Your hands are clean, Griffon,” Selene murmured. I scoffed, a swift retort flying to my tongue.

Then I paused, staring down at my hands.

The mermaid’s ichor was the color of liquid lead. Not scarlet blood.

Ah.

“No,” I finally said, pulling my hands away from hers. “They’re not.”

A vow sworn with true intent, but lacking the context needed to succeed. I had known what I was capable of, known that I could succeed if I only took the proper steps along the way. In the end, my understanding of this world and its histories, its rotting ages and its miseries, had been lacking. I had been wrong in the end. I had lost, because I had been playing a game without knowing the full extent of the rules therein. No, worse than that. I hadn’t even had all the pieces needed to play.

I had decided in the ashes of Olympia that my failure wasn’t a lie. But that was only if I corrected my mistakes. I had been lacking proper context since the day I was born, and that lack in and of itself wasn’t my fault alone. Now, though, I had been made aware of my lack. The origin of blame didn’t matter - if I continued on as I was, I’d have no one to condemn but myself.

I had only two options in the end. I could open my eyes, or I could carry blindly on, burning everything I touched because I hadn’t bothered to learn any better.

Unacceptable.

For the first time since our joining, the corpse and I agreed.

Sorea let fly a hunting cry above our heads as the Conqueror’s Pearl City appeared on the horizon.