The Son of Rome

We flew.

There was no other way to describe it. The old man in his rags of unassuming filth held tight to my hair and pulled me up to heaven, faster than sound could travel. The city of Olympia grew small beneath us in the blink of an eye.

No man can ever truly fly, of course. That had been hammered into my head long ago, as it had into every cultivator. It was the core conceit of those that pursued divinity. A natural desire, one felt anytime you looked up at a cloudless sky, or down at a sprawling valley. It almost seemed a natural step along the path of advancement. After all, why else would man cultivate virtue if not to claim the heights that his father couldn’t reach?

On more than one punishing campaign, camped out beneath the Republic’s siege works, I had gazed up at a city’s stubbornly kept walls and longed to simply vault them like a garden fence. And why not? The men of Gaius’ legions were surely powerful enough for such a maneuver. Alas, my father had soon corrected me of that delusion, and my uncle had later enforced the lesson.

Our hunger was something no man could escape. For as long as we had looked up and seen, we had desired the climb - for no other reason than that we could. But there were some places that even a cultivator couldn’t go.

There were some domains that even the mightiest Tyrant didn’t dare trespass. Heaven was one such domain.

What the man who claimed to be the master of my master’s master did was not flight - more of an absurd hop - but in that moment before freefall, while we hung weightless in the air, I felt the weight of heaven’s notice. It was no cultivator’s sense or legion instinct that allowed me to detect it.

Any man could hear the thunder.

And it was made all the more apparent by the fact that we were hurtling directly towards the Raging Heaven’s tribulation crown, the Storm That Never Ceased. I finally regained the breath that had been knocked out of me by our rapid ascent and shouted a curse, calling upon the captain's virtue with force enough that the air itself groaned, a subsonic vibration that would have shattered stone walls if we had been around any.

The old vagrant’s rags might have flapped a bit more insistently than they already were in the wind, maybe, but that was the only reaction I got for my efforts. The man himself didn’t even twitch. Just tightened his grip on my hair, and then without warning twisted and heaved me down at a small chasm in the mountain, just below the storm.

It was like being shot from a bow. I flexed the captain's virtue desperately, but I wasn’t in the business of using it on myself, and so all I could do was clear a few particularly painful looking rocks from my path before I plowed into the cave, my vision flashing white as I crashed through stone and kept going.

A bare, filthy foot came down on my back, stopping me abruptly. My head whipped forward and then back, cracking against the stone with the momentum, and I glared blearily up.

The vagrant philosopher stepped off of me, shrugging out of the soiled layers of cloth he’d built his aura of anonymity out of, until he stood over me in a simple white toga. He crossed his arms, and as the weight of his expectation came down upon me, crushing me to the stone as I tried to rise, I came to a realization.

The reason that Griffin and I had experienced such success in our subterfuge since arriving at the Half-Step City. The reason why Scythas, Alyssa, Kyno, Lefteris, Jason, and Anastasia had so readily accepted our posturing and vague implications despite only being philosophers. It wasn’t that we were spectacular actors. It wasn’t even that we were particularly special.

The master of my master’s master waved a hand, and the overpowering thunder of the Raging Heaven’s perpetual storm vanished into mist and whispers. No, it was more than that. As the whiplash ringing faded from my ears, I understood that all of the background noise of nature, the ever present hum that existed even here on this mountain, was suddenly gone. Like it had never existed in the first place.

Heroes greater than us were willing to believe our lies, because men like this existed in the world.

“ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα hèn oîda hóti oudèn oîda.”

“… What?” I asked.

A truly wrathful expression overtook him. I tensed, and my blood thundered in my ears, but he mastered it in the next moment, scoffed and spat on the cave floor.

“He didn’t even bother to teach you a thinking man’s tongue? I’ll throttle that boy the next time I see him.”

“He did,” I protested, this time in the Scarlet City’s tongue rather than the Latin I had been defaulting to lately.

“Alikoan,” he said with distaste. “The ugliest language in the Greek Isles, to match her ugliest city. Why would he teach you that tongue over his own?”

I thought back. Many of Aristotle‘s teachings were more impressions than they were true recollections, overshadowed by years on campaign, years at war, and a year of shellshocked slavery. But this one stood out. It always had. It had been cemented in my memory the moment the shackles were affixed to my wrists.

“He told me that I would need it,” I said quietly. “He told me it was the most important language I could possibly know.”

I spent more than one sleepless night as a slave wondering how much Aristotle had suspected. How much he could have possibly known. And I had wondered how much more he knew - it was why I was here, searching for him. It was why I’d been found.

“That boy,” he muttered, running callused fingers through a long white beard. The man was built like a siege weapon, sculpted in the way of the Greek heroes we had been keeping company with, but with more overt signs of his age. The color of his hair, washed out. Crows feet at the corners of his eyes. And deep, thinking lines carved across his forehead.

“You said Aristotle was your student’s student,” I said. He grunted, eyes distant as he thought. “Do you know where he is?”

“West.”

My heart sank. Alikos. I should have known. For a year I’d assured myself that he couldn’t possibly be back in the Scarlet City, that he surely would have sought me out if he was. I should have known that was a child’s delusion.

He wasn’t my friend. He was my mentor, and my father wasn’t alive to pay him his due anymore. He didn’t owe me anything.

“No.”

I blinked. “No?”

“No,” the old philosopher repeated. “Further.”

Further west? “Impossible.”

Somehow, the silence grew even quieter. The very air between us seemed to hold its breath. The philosopher looked down upon me, and in a deathly quiet voice he asked, “What did you just say?”

“That’s impossible,” I repeated. “I’ve seen what’s west of the Scarlet City. If he’s still out there, he’s dead.”

“You think so, do you?”

I matched his glare in defiance, and with memories of howling thunder informed him, “I know.”

The philosopher kicked me in the gut, and I gagged as dust and shattered stone filtered around my head. Seconds later, my senses caught up to the rest of me and I realized that I had been buried in the far wall of the cave.

“You know?” the old philosopher said, advancing on me. “You know nothing. In fact, you know even less than that. Was Aristotle such a failure that he couldn’t plant a single thought in that thick Roman skull of yours?”

He grabbed me by the neck and pulled me out of the stone. I snarled and spat in his face. The spittle halted a hairsbreadth from his eyes, and then abruptly whipped back into mine. Worthless, sanctimonious Greeks.

“What is it that you think you’ve been doing since you darkened these shores?” he demanded. “What have you accomplished, and to what end?”

Contrary to his demand for answers, his hand only tightened further around my throat. I forced the words out, even as I scanned our surroundings in my peripherals. It was a cave like any other, but with the bare echoes of habitation to show for the philosopher’s presence. A bedroll off to my left, a small set of cups and plates to my right, along with a small mountain of rolled up papyrus and various tablets.

“I came here looking for Aristotle,” I choked.

“Is that what you call this?” The old philosopher demanded, and reached for my shadow. The darkened silhouette, already undulating wildly in the scattered lights of the storm outside the cave, darted inexplicably away from his hand. Moving with its own intent. “Inserting yourself into a political struggle that you have no stake in, no influence over, for no reason at all other than to cause mayhem? Because you believe you can? What are you thinking?”

“I think,” I hissed, “that scavengers are eating this place alive.”

“So you decided to join in, take a bite for yourself?”

“No. I decided to take a bite out of them.”

Gravitas rocked the cave, and though it didn’t move the old philosopher, the stone that I took hold of with the captain’s virtue and slammed into the back of his head certainly did. He staggered forward a step, against me, and I slammed my forehead into his nose. It was like headbutting Kaukoso Mons itself, but I forced down the nausea and thrashed free while he was stunned.

My shadow offered up the celestial bronze spear and I gripped it tight, turning and whipping its tip up with all my strength.

The philosopher caught it by the shaft and struck me once with his free hand. I lost another few moments, and when I came to again I was laying on my back just outside of the cave, staring up into the storm. Dew droplets trickled down my face, mingling with the blood of a broken nose. Lightning flashed a thousand times in rapid succession, vast branching networks of lights that were swallowed up by storm clouds in the next instant. In the distance, I heard a familiar shriek.

The philosopher grabbed me by my foot and dragged me back into the cave.

“I won’t be lied to, boy,” the philosopher said as if nothing had happened. “And I won’t be sweet-talked either.” If he had taken any lasting damage from my suckerpunch, I couldn’t see it. He dropped me in the middle of the cave and sat beside me, legs crossed, one hand on a knee while the other propped up his chin.

I stared mutinously up at the stone ceiling for a long moment, before common sense got the better of my pride. This wasn’t what I had been looking for, but it was an opportunity that I wasn’t likely to get twice. And he had said that he was going to teach me the way of the world.

Either I had found myself a new mentor - been found by, more like - or I was about to die. One way or another, I had to make the most of this.

“I came here looking for Aristotle,” I said again. “I’d just broken through in my cultivation and I was exploring one of my new senses at the kyrios’ funeral. I accidentally tipped off half a dozen Heroic Cultivators in the act, made them think I was looking for a fight. What could I do but pretend I was more than I am? Make myself seem too dangerous to fight?”

“You could have explained your mistake and apologized for it.”

I lifted a shoulder in a shrug, not bothering to sit up. My head and nose were throbbing incessantly in time with one another. The ground was comfortable enough for the moment.

“I’m a foreigner in a strange, barbarous land. How was I to know that one of them wouldn’t take offense to my wasting their time? Who would punish a great hero for stepping on an insolent young philosopher?”

“I would.”

I glanced at the master of my master’s master. He met my gaze steadily, and after a moment I nodded.

“I believe you. But I’d still be dead.”

“Justice would be served,” he pointed out.

“Not good enough. I have things I need to do before I die, whether it’s justice or not.”

The old man considered that for a long moment, and then he asked, “What is the first virtue?”

“Freedom.”

The old philosopher looked at me like I had grown another head. “Are you out of your mind, boy?”

I raised an eyebrow. “This is the free Mediterranean, is it not?”

“Aristotle truly did you a disservice,” he said, disgusted. “It’s a question of your soul, boy, not just your beliefs. It’s a matter of foundation.”

Foundation.

“What does it take for a man to lead?”

“Gravitas,” I answered, properly this time. The old philosopher grunted.

“And what is gravitas?”

I forced myself to sit up, turned my head and spat as much of the blood out of my mouth as I could. I inhaled deeply, tracing my vital breath through the channels old and new inside my body. And I forced myself to remember.

“Gravitas is three thousand men sprinting into Tartarus at your command,” I said, each word like broken glass in my throat. “It’s four hundred and eighty shields at your back while you plunge into the enemy’s open mouth. It’s three hundred screaming horses crashing headlong into the sea.

“It’s weight.”

“Weight?” The philosopher echoed.

I nodded once, staring past his shoulder, into the distant past. “Every man is a world unto himself. He’s a city, a family, a wife and children, friends and enemies and comrades. He’s hopes and dreams, aspirations of changing all that he can change. He’s all of these things, and he is heavy.

“Gravitas is the weight of three thousand such men. It’s three thousand worlds, three thousand lives that could have been, borne on your shoulders.

“It is salt,'' I rasped. “And it is ash.”

For a long moment, the cave was silent but for the memories. And then a strong, calloused hand gripped my shoulder.

“How old are you, boy?” he asked me.

“Twenty.”

“An age of child tyrants,” he said, and sighed. “These demons in the west. You’re certain they weren’t human? The world is a vast place, full of odd people.”

I thought of snarling fangs and slitted eyes the color of tribulation lightning. Whatever he saw in me at that moment, the philosopher didn’t press the point further.

“A handful of lost heroes won’t be enough to combat a force like that,” he said, shaking his head and rising to his feet. He slapped down the wrinkles in his tunic. “If it’s demons you’re after, you’ll need more. You’ll need to be more.”

Sorea shrieked again, far closer this time.

“How did you know about the demons?” I asked, and then pressed, “How did you know we were responsible for what happened at the bathhouse? That we’ve been hunting crows?”

The old philosopher snorted. “I don’t know anything, boy. I listen, and I learn. It’s astounding what a man will say when he thinks there’s no one important around to hear him. It’s even more astounding what a man will say when he thinks it won’t hurt to let a few things slip.”

He flexed the fingers of his hands and rolled his shoulders, turning to squarely face the cave’s entrance.

“And most astounding of all,” he said with powerful disdain, bracing his feet, “is what a fool will say when he wants to be heard.”

Sorea shrieked a third time, just below, and the sun dawned twice.

[Dawn arrives upon its throne.]

Griffon exploded through the entrance with blood on his face and fire in his fists. And just before the master of my master’s master could slap him out of the air, I lunged up and drove my shoulder into the old philosopher’s back, knocking him off balance. It only lasted a fraction of a moment. It was enough.

Griffon struck him like a comet.