The Gold-String Guardian

Names were strange things.

Eleftherios. Lefteris for short. Neither name had been given to him at birth, but his mother had told him from a young age, over and over until he was old enough for the sentiment to stick, that his name was too dangerous for the world to know. That it was a secret between the two of them that had to be kept at all costs.

They moved often, early on. Each place was a new home, and each home meant a new name. It was safer that way, his mother insisted. This way if anyone did find out his true name, they wouldn’t be able to track them through the fake. If every village and every city knew him by a different moniker, they would be safe.

One day, when he was five years old, he asked his mother why she had named him at all, if it was such a burden. It wasn’t the first time he’s seen her cry, but it was the one he remembered most vividly. He’d tried comforting her, blindly, the way that young children did - assuring her of things he had no understanding of and no ability at all to deliver on.

A child’s platitudes always cut deepest. Because unlike with an adult, you knew they believed them wholeheartedly. That they didn’t understand some things were impossible in such an ugly world.

He grew up, eventually, and came to understand the way of things. He took what control of his life that he could, deciding at least that if he had to live under a fake identity that it would be one of his choosing. He chose an audacious name, admittedly, but after a lifetime of hiding he felt he was due some audacity.

Eleftherios. The liberator.

He had grown up, but that didn’t mean he had entirely given up on those ideals. He would do what he could. And when he could, however he could, he would help those who suffered like he had suffered.

Until the day his name caught up to him

“Theri,” the usurper whispered. Another nickname, one that the boy had decided on himself. He was poised on hands and knees at the edge of the cave, peering out as far as he dared. The boy was equal parts curious and wary. “Who is it?”

Lefteris didn’t move, didn’t look back, didn’t even flare his pneuma in wordless response. He didn’t dare to.

Not while the gadfly was watching him.

There were some things that were universal in the free Mediterranean. Stories of people and places that every Greek child, even one such as him, cut their teeth on around crackling fires. Every young boy had shed bitter tears at least once for the tragedy of Heracles, the Champion, cut down in his eleventh labor so unjustly after completing the tenth. Every free citizen knew of the Conqueror and his greed, knew to fear him and to never speak his name directly, because there was no guarantee he wouldn’t hear them say it.

And of course, every academic with a thought in their heads knew of the Scholar and his influence. The man that existed not only in legends, but also in the same modern world that Lefteris had been born to. The man that Tyrants regarded as an unshakable pest. The man that all cultivators considered to be their master’s master, in some distant way. The philosopher that even the Coast couldn’t kill.

Socrates.

Before Lefteris’ disbelieving eyes, that man strode out of a cave not fifty feet away from the safe haven he thought he had established, within leaping distance of the alcove where his charges laid their heads to rest every night. All this time, and he had never once known that they weren’t alone. He had chosen this spot, just beneath the immortal storm crown of the Raging Heaven, because proximity to the storm was the only way to escape a Tyrant’s roving eye. And he had been fool enough to think that was enough. To think it made them safe.

Lefteris watched, frozen in horror, as the gadfly picked up the Rosy Dawn’s sly competitor by his golden shawl belt and heaved him into the storm.

Socrates turned his head, then, and looked him dead in the eyes.

Polyhymnia, Lefteris desperately invoked. The muse of sacred poetry immediately pressed her finger to his lips.

Be silent, she whispered in his ear, graver than he’d ever heard her speak, draping her cloak protectively around him as she pressed against his back. And be still.

Lefteris obeyed, as he’d obeyed since he was a boy, bowing his head and hoping for greater men to take no notice of him. For a long, long moment, he thought it was over. That he had been found out, in one way or another, and that the gadfly would surely expose him. That his destiny would come crashing down on top of him and his charges both. Polyhymnia held him steady through it, smoothed out the tension in his body so that he wouldn’t move in even the slightest of degrees.

Then it was over. The gadfly shook his head and muttered something that Lefteris couldn’t hear over his own pounding heart, and walked back into his cave as if nothing had happened. As soon as he stepped into the shadows, he vanished once again from Lefteris’ senses. He had never noticed the Scholar before, because to his pneuma, it was as if that cave didn’t even exist.

Slowly, now, Polyhymnia urged him, her veil brushing against his cheek as she pulled him back towards his own alcove, one slow step at a time. Only when he was fully inside, away from prying eyes, did she remove her finger from his lips and whisper a grave farewell.

Lefteris turned and regarded the usurper, currently fighting against a headlock that the vehement protector had put him in.

They were just boys. Young enough that they could almost pass for his sons if not for the fact that they looked entirely different, red-haired and bright-eyed where he was painted in desert shades. The usurper was the younger of the two, slightly shorter than the vehement protector and far more flagrant in his mannerisms. Which was unfortunate, because his real name was by far the more dangerous of the two of them.

“What did I tell you about poking your head out?” Lefteris demanded, before anything else, and the adrenaline pounding through his veins gave heat to the words that he hadn’t intended. Both boys froze, staring up at him. “Well?”

The vehement protector spoke in the usurper’s place, stepping in for him as he always did.

“Be wary without Theri,” The older boy answered, reciting it from memory.

“But you were right there!” The usurper protested, jerking back and forth in the vehement protector’s grip. “I only wanted to see.”

“And you saw,” Lefteris said, kneeling down in front of them, “but you were seen in turn.”

The usurper paled, and his vehement protector shook him by the neck.

“I told you,” the older boy hissed. “I told you to wait. All you have to be is patient.”

Lefteris watched them go back-and-forth, an odd combination of fondness and dread festering in his heart. They had grown so much since he’d taken them on, and their spirits were starting to assert themselves. Their sense of self was solidifying, and they were aching to live their lives. He knew they wanted to walk the earth freely, without fear of being recognized for what they were through no fault of their own. They were growing tired of waiting for a liberator.

Eleftherios. It was a name he wanted to live up to, someday. But that day evidently wasn’t today.

“Both of you, be quiet,” he finally said, looking past them at the modest conditions he’d managed to establish for them since coming to the sanctuary city. Furniture and tools for dining, a few toys and curiosities that he had picked up after months of walking through the markets, and as many tablets and scrolls as he could feasibly smuggle into a cave at the top of a mountain. Which was quite a few.

“Is it time to go?” The usurper asked, watching him as he surveyed their things. Now there was remorse in his mismatched eyes. He knew what that look meant. “I’m sorry, Theri. I didn’t know - I promise, I didn’t mean to be seen.”

Without being told, the vehement protector released the usurper from his chokehold and went over to their section of the cave, gathering their things up with practiced efficiency.

Lefteris sighed, and placed his hand upon the younger boy’s head.

“It’s fine,” he told the boy. “It might be time to go, it might not. I’m not sure yet. For now… for now I need to talk to a few people, and you two are coming with me.”

The vehement protector paused in stuffing a toy sword and its accompanying shield into a large leather sack. “Now?”

Lefteris nodded grimly. “Now.”

§

They took the long path, the boys disguised as casually as they could afford, each wearing a straw farm hat that obscured their defining features from most casual eyes and allowed them to blend in just fine with many of the other children on the outskirts of the city.

They took the long road because Lefteris could no longer be sure that he had been at all successful in hiding them. As they meandered through the city of Olympia, the boys inevitably forgetting the tension of the situation in favor of exploring the markets and engaging with the other children out and about, Lefteris cast out with all of his senses for followers. He didn’t find any, but then, he had never found any before in Olympia, and that hadn’t stopped Socrates from stepping out of that cave within spitting distance of him.

It hadn’t stopped the revenant from Rome.

They walked the city nearly in its entirety, corner to corner, and passed through the agora several times. The usurper reveled in every moment of it, eager to explore the place that had been in his sights but out of his reach for so many months, and though the vehement protector did his best to stay vigilant, he was still only a boy. After the second pass through the agora, he was enjoying himself just as much as the usurper.

Eventually, morning turned to afternoon. Afternoon turned to evening.

By the time Lefteris had satiated his paranoia and they’d arrived at their destination, the burning embers of dusk were fading from the skies and the moon was ascending to its throne in heaven. They stood before an unassuming door in one of the less renowned residential areas in the city, and he motioned for the boys to be silent. Exhausted by a long day of adventure, they obliged without protest. He raised his hand and rapped it against the wood.

Lefteris only had to knock once before the Sword Song’s door swung open. Elissa stared at him, and he saw his wild eyed paranoia reflected in her.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered harshly, immediately looking down at the two boys hiding behind his legs. “And who are they?”

“They’re with me,” he said simply, leaning in. “I’m here because I saw something outrageous this morning. Have you spoken to those two cultivators from the Rosy Dawn since we met them? From the kyrios’ funeral?”

Her expression changed, and his worst fears were confirmed. He grabbed each of his boys by the shoulder and pushed them inside the Heroine’s home. He slammed the door shut behind him, and Elissa immediately pressed a hand to the wood, closing her eyes and invoking something wordless with her pneuma. When it was done, she turned and stalked down the hall.

The dread he was feeling redoubled as they followed her into the next room, and beheld a full party of Heroic cultivators.

“Lefteris?” Kyno asked, confused, from his place in front of the hearth. He had his crocodile skin laid out across his lap, and he straightened from a hunched, wary posture when they entered the room. “What’s going on?”

Rather than answer immediately, Lefteris found himself staring at the other two cultivators in the room besides Kyno and Elissa. The Hero of the Alabaster Isles and the caustic queen herself. Jason glanced at him through split fingers, his hand splayed over his face while he hung halfway off of a lounging couch. Anastasia didn’t even bother to acknowledge him with a look, leaning against a shuttered window with her eyes closed.

Lefteris knew for a fact that Kyno and Elissa didn’t keep company with those two. He also knew for a fact that they had been there, the night of the funeral. The memory was almost completely black, washed out by foolish amounts of alcohol, but he remembered the club. He remembered the shrieks of eagles and crows, of the weight of command and the revenant that bore it on broad, wrathful shoulders. The man that Jason and Anastasia had been following.

“This must be a joke,” Lefteris said, distantly, as if with another man’s voice. He willed it to be true, stoked his heart’s flame unconsciously to make it so, but such an alteration was beyond him. His expression twisted. “The two of you, with them? Are you out of your fucking minds?”

“‘Left-” Kyno tried again, swinging his crocodile skin over his shoulders and rising, reaching out a hand to him. Lefteris slapped it away, seething. The usurper and the vehement protector both flinched.

“Don’t ‘Left’ me! Look at you! Look at both of you!” He rounded on Elissa, leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed. She scowled. The Sword Song wouldn’t meet his eyes. “What could have possibly possessed you? What could have been so tantalizing that you would throw in with them? With that man? The first time we saw him was after he’d slapped us all in the face and dared us to do something about it, and the second time was with a broken Crow in his hand!”

“Things have happened since then,” Kyno said, holding both arms out placatingly. The vehement protector glanced worriedly between Lefteris and the Heroic Huntsman. A distant part of Lefteris realized that Kyno might have been the largest man the boy had ever seen.

“You weren’t there,” Elissa added, stubborn till the end. “What’s going on now is-”

“Is what? What could be significant enough to throw in with the man making enemies of Tyrants in their own domain? What could possibly be compelling enough to implicate yourselves with stowaways from the Rosy fucking Dawn?”

“Enough of barking dogs,” Anastasia murmured, opening her eyes. Lefteris bared his teeth at her.

“Enough of venomous whores.”

She raised a dark eyebrow, unimpressed.

“Sit down, ‘Left,” Elissa demanded. “You’re scaring your own children.”

He looked down and saw it was true. The usurper and his vehement protector stared up at him, wide-eyed and afraid. Even in their past moments of crises, during the conflicts that had forced them into the Half-Step City, he’d never spoken like this in front of them. He’d thought himself better than that. Lefteris grit his teeth and reached for calm.

Polyhymnia met him halfway, as she always did, and he exhaled slowly.

He sat down and addressed the room. “Tell me why this morning I saw the gadfly throw Griffon into the Storm That Never Ceases.” He took what little satisfaction he could from watching that statement wash through the room. Jason viciously cursed.

And then they told him.

It was a story told in waves, each of the Heroic in Cultivators offering a perspective, an anecdote that the others had not been present for. A side of the revenant and his student that hadn’t been seen that night at the funeral. They took their time, one occasionally chiming in for the other to emphasize a certain detail, and it was clear that they had been telling each other these stories all day. Trying to make sense of what they’d gotten themselves into, and why.

By the end of it, Lefteris was no more satisfied than before. If anything, he was angrier.

“You mean to tell me,” he finally said, once the accounts had been made and a tense, expectant silence had settled over the room like a funeral shroud, “that these two plied you with platitudes and heroic ideals, promised you salvation without explaining how they would deliver it, and in exchange you took up arms against the Tyrants of the Raging Heaven Cult?”

“You would understand if you had been there, rather than cowering in your cave,” Anastasia said, shrugging his disdain off and delivering her own with a smile.

“Things are worse than we thought they’d be,” Elissa cut in before he could snap. “We knew it would be bad, but not like this. We thought they’d make their picks and be done with it, but it’s been continuous. Every night since the funeral they’ve had their crows out in force.”

“The mystikos are afraid to travel the mountain alone,” Kyno said grimly. “Even those that shouldn’t have anything to fear, those who couldn’t possibly play a significant part in a Tyrant’s power struggle. Children, ‘Left. They travel in packs, even during the day, because it’s the only way they feel safe.”

“And did either of you, even for a moment, stop to wonder if your new friends had something to do with that?” Lefteris didn’t wait for them to answer. Their expressions said enough. “A strange cultivator appears on the night of the kyrios’ funeral and tears a bloody streak through the cult’s night crawlers, accuses a young aristocrat of the Raging Heaven outright of collusion with assassins, and you’re surprised that the aristois are responding?”

“It’s not just because of Solus,” Jason said, shaking his head. He was hanging almost fully off the lounge now, dangling upside down. “They’ve already started moving in on the juniors, drawing lines and shifting the rhetoric in their lectures.”

“If I wanted to hear a coward speak I’d have gone looking for Scythas. Be silent.”

Jason sneered at him upside down, making a vulgar gesture with one hand.

“You said you saw the gadfly with Griffon this morning,” Elissa said, impatient and restless. “When specifically, and where?”

He’d known from the start that their safe haven beneath the storm couldn’t last forever. Still, it hurt to see his boys’ shoulders slump at the question. They knew that once a hideaway was found, it wasn’t used again. The disappointment fed the flames of anger and disgust, pushing him to his feet. He paced in the middle of the room, unable to sit still.

“It was an hour after dawn, maybe less. We were on the eastern side of the mountain, close enough to the storm for a mortal to cast a stone up into it. Griffon came hurtling out of a cave, beaten half to death, and it was the gadfly that came out after him.”

He ran a hand through his hair, pivoting on his heels again and again.

“I just can’t wrap my head around it. I know you two. I know you’re not this foolish,” he told Elissa and Kyno, hating the way they looked back at him. Like they’d been let in on a secret that he had yet to be told. “I listened to you, I heard you out from start to finish, and I still don’t get it! What could possibly be so compelling about these two, to convince you of this madness?”

Kyno sighed heavily, pulling from a fold in his cult attire a leather skin and taking a long pull from it. He offered it to Elissa, who took a longer pull and grimaced at the taste.

“There’s something to them,” Kyno said heavily. “I can’t describe it with words.”

“Does this nameless thing last after death?” Lefteris pressed. “Because if it doesn’t then it’s useless to you now. And here you are, out in the cold. Do you really think the elders will buy your story of being kidnapped? Do you think you’ll be able to sell it beyond a shadow of a doubt when you’re face-to-face? Are you willing to bet your lives on that?”

“They’re not dead,” Anastasia said, and the simple certainty of it made Lefteris briefly see red.

“I saw the Scholar toss Griffon into the storm,” he said with slow deliberation. “Alone and half-gone already. He’s dead.”

“He’s not,” she replied, just as slowly. “No student of Solus would die from something like that.”

“He’s dead!” Lefteris shouted, despite the fact that it made his boys jump in alarm, despite Elissa’s hissed demands for him to be quiet. His pneuma rose, wrathful beyond belief. “He’s dead, and his master isn’t far behind him! Sitting here and assuring yourselves otherwise isn’t going to change that! It isn’t going to make him walk through that door-”

There came a sharp, piercing crunch as the protections on the front door broke. They all stared at one another, frozen in that moment. Lefteris couldn’t feel a single hint of pneuma outside. Then, as one, they rushed into the hall.

A single murky hand of pneuma had punched cleanly through the door, crackling faintly. As Lefteris watched in disbelief, nineteen more punched through to join it.

And then they were joined by ten more, and thirty hands of violent intent tore the reinforced door clear out of its frame.