An Unkindness

“Violence is an art.”

The Heroic huntsman, clad in his midnight black rags, twitched and looked over his shoulder. As he did, he palmed another man’s head as easily as one would an apple. The hunting crow regarded the hungry raven on the right, lounging above, in a dip between two conjoined archways.

The raven reached up, twisting his hand as if to grasp the moon the same way the hunting crow had grasped his unfortunate prey. As if to pluck it from the sky, like an apple. The markings on the raven’s bare torso glowed blood red, a muted, seething source of light.

“As much as sculpture, as much as any poem or song, violence is an expression of inspiration. Violence is the oldest art, in fact. The first of them all. Back when the pyramids did not exist and men had fewer thoughts in their heads than fingers on their hands, violence was our first expression of self.”

“What-?” The crow’s prey asked, bewildered, before being slammed face-first into the dirt.

“What?” The hulking crow asked, his voice like tumbling stones. Even beneath the cover of darkness his annoyance was clear.

The hungry raven chuckled and rolled off his leisurely perch, falling-

Another figure of rust and shadows speared through the darkness of the archways, utterly silent and blisteringly quick. The hulking crow tensed and released his prey, raising both hands to catch the assassin’s lunging stab.

The raven fell upon the new arrival with unlikely force, crushing them flat to the ground and raising his knee up before bringing it back down three times in a vicious sequence. Between each crack of the knee, the shadowed assailant twisted and thrashed like a landed fish, and each time the raven expertly countered their attempts to grapple. On the fourth and final knee the would-be assassin arched up and let loose a breathy scream as their spine audibly snapped. They slumped, going abruptly limp.

“It’s easy enough to forget our grim origins,” the raven continued, hoisting the crow up and pulling the hood from their head. A young man with pale, rugged features was revealed. He was still alive, his eyes rolling helplessly in their sockets. “While we lounge in cleansing baths, wearing our silks and ornaments, exchanging our thoughtful discourse. These kind luxuries drive us further from our roots, closer to civilized existence.

“But,” the raven whispered, the sound like shifting sands. He leaned in, his veiled face inches from the paralyzed assassin.

“Even so,” the young man’s eyes, the only part of himself that he could still control, quivered as they stared into the shroud.

“All that we are, and all that the unwashed barbarians of this world are not, was built upon a foundation of inspired violence. We are free to be more, because our brutal ancestors murdered all those that would have made us less.”

“What’s your point?” the hunting crow asked impatiently, unmasking his own captured scavenger and shaking his head at what he found.

“My point, friend, is that I worry for you and our companions,” the raven said softly, his shifting veil brushing against the pale man’s nose. “I worry for you too, little scavenger. For everyone on this mountain.”

The hunting crow bit. “Worry about what?”

“I worry that you’ve forgotten the rules of nature now that you can defy them,” he told the Hero disguised as a crow. “Where is your spark? Where is your creativity for violence? You walk around Olympia like your wrists are bound simply because you can’t leverage the full weight of your soul. What does it matter if you can’t use everything that you have against a lesser opponent? What does it matter if you can’t fight a greater opponent at your fullest strength, even, so long as you are better than them?”

The hulking crow looked silently down at the cuts he’d endured thus far in the night. Nothing more than small cuts and abrasions, but they wept tainted blood, marred by poison.

“Violence is an art like any other,” the hungry raven repeated. “You heroes have grown so used to being the loudest voices in the choir that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be silenced. What it’s like to be outmatched in every aspect except for the one that you can control.”

The distant, victorious cry of an eagle split the night. Their companions had found their marks.

“I consider these nights a return to form,” the raven said, tightening his grip on the paralyzed assassin's neck until his eyes rolled up in his head. Mercifully unconscious. “A crow can’t be anything more than what it is - a scavenger. While you’re here, unable to fight with any of the gifts that make you truly unique in this world, focus on what every man has had from the moment we were shaped from worthless clay.

“With the proper refinement, even a crow can kill a king.”

A bird of midnight ink exploded out of the unconscious assassin’s robes, taking off in the opposite direction of the eagle’s cry with desperate speed. The hulking crow lunged for it, twisting and curling his fingers with obvious intent, but whatever would have happened in the light of day was lost in anonymity.

A massive celestial axe struck the crow cleanly out of the air, spinning end over end and pinning it to the nearby cliff face. It died before it could make a sound.

“And if the muses are kind,” the raven murmured, dropping his charge to pry his axe from the stone. “Why shouldn’t a hero be able to topple a tyrant?”

The hulking crow and his captured scavenger watched, aghast, as the raven tore the ink-black bird apart and sucked the starlight marrow from its bones.

“You aren’t used to fighting like this,” the hungry raven on the left observed, parrying the attacks of two separate crows with wide sweeps of his celestial spear. “Constrained.”

Behind him, two Heroes disguised as crows nursed bleeding wounds as they fought off their adversaries.

A murder of the Tyrants’ assassins had taken the initiative, finding before they could be found, and baited them with easy targets separated from the flock. As soon as they’d taken the bait the night had exploded with bloodthirsty scavengers. Both heroic cultivators had sustained cuts that would have killed a lesser existence in the opening moments. That they were who they were was the only reason they could still fight at all.

They were chafing against the bonds of anonymity, that much was clear to see. And the crows capitalized on that inexperience with vicious intent.

“Why would I ever fight like this?” the Sword Song Heroin snarled behind her veil, gripping her bow like she wanted nothing more than to club her opponent over the head with it. She nocked an ordinary arrow to its golden string and let fly, cursing when her opponent dove under it and stabbed at her ankles.

“Moments like these,” the raven replied without hesitation.

“I don’t intend on being in this situation twice,” the disguised Hero of the Alabaster Isles said dryly, weaving through the press of two other crows. Three more idled around the edges of the conflict, taking shots at the raven and his heroic companions as the opportunities presented themselves.

“You will be,” the raven said simply, halting a sweep of his spear mid-motion and jabbing it back into a surging crow’s gut. It was a short, ugly strike, and it took the attacker utterly by surprise. The crow yanked itself off the spear’s head and staggered back, clutching their bleeding wound. “What will you do when you encounter a force that’s greater than yours? What is your only recourse if an enemy beyond your strength attempts to strike you down?”

A pulse of nameless force struck another crow. They abruptly fell sideways as if plummeting off a cliff, slamming into their fellow and sending both to the ground.

“What will you do if not submit?”

“I’ll get stronger,” the Sword Song declared, shifting her grip on her celestial bow and slamming it over a crow’s head. Then, while they were staggered, she lunged into their guard and struck down with a hammer blow, burying an arrow into the juncture between their neck and shoulder in lieu of firing it.

“You don’t have time,” the raven dismissed. “Say the Tyrants come for you tonight. What do you do?”

“We fight together,” spoke the Hero of the Alabaster Isles, pivoting and heaving his warhammer in a two-handed blow at a crow as it leapt at the Sword Song’s back. It slammed home, audibly shattering ribs, sending the scavenger into and through a statue in the nearby grotto.

One of his opponents took the opportunity to hurl their rusted dagger at his back, and an invocation of hissed rhetoric saw the shadows themselves leaping up to tangle his limbs. An arrow struck the dagger midair, and the Sword Song appeared by his side, viciously kicking the crow’s knee out from under it.

“You fight together,” the raven agreed, banishing another crow into their waiting blows. “A man that can fight with the strength of a thousand-thousand men is an incredible force. But five hundred men that can fight like they’re one is even better.”

“It’s been some time since I studied the quadrivium,” the Sword Song admitted through gritted teeth, visibly correcting herself as her body attempted to make certain instinctual motions, combat tricks ingrained over the course of a lifetime. “But I don’t think that math adds up.”

“It doesn’t add, no,” the raven said, his footwork taking him slowly but surely back to them, until the three of them formed a triangle facing outward. The two Heroes had taken cuts, but the enemy was feeling the worst of the confrontation. They paced in a loose ring around them, vanishing and reappearing in the shadows of the grotto’s swaying almond trees.

“Five hundred good men fighting as one don’t add up to a man with the strength of five hundred. It isn’t an additive property.”

The two Heroes disguised as crows stiffened as that nameless pressure settled upon them, adjusting their posture in a dozen small ways, orienting them towards their opponents. They could feel it. Their next steps would be like running downhill, with the raven’s own influence behind them. A tailwind urging them into the mix.

“Left.”

Both heroic crows planted their left feet and shot forward like arrows from a bow. Their opponents reacted with admirable speed, moving to block or counter with daggers and chains and whips of woven hair.

“Your left.” Both heroic cultivators dipped their bodies to the left, dodging counterattacks and slipping through guards.

“Your left, right, left.” The Hero of the Alabaster Isles hammered a left cross into a crow’s face, followed by a right hook and a left uppercut. The Sword Song slipped past a stab aimed at her left breast, over her heart, then spun right and lashed out with her left elbow, shattering a crow’s orbital bone and sending them sprawling bonelessly to the dirt.

“Your mother was home when you left!”

The Hero of the Alabaster Isles looked sharply back at the raven. “You’re right!”

“Your father was home when you left!”

The Sword Song spun and said accusingly, “You’re right!”

“Your sister was home when you left!”

Your right!

The crows flinched and whirled around them, caught on the precipice of violence and indecision.

“Your brother was home when you left!”

Your right!

One assassin tried to flee. The raven’s celestial spear took them in the back of the knee and sent them tumbling into one of the grotto’s pools. The raven reached out a beckoning hand, and the spear flew obligingly back to his palm. He inhaled.

“Your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, the slaves, the ruses, the Fates and the Muses, they all were there when you left!”

“You’re right!” The Heroes disguised as crows cried out.

“And that’s the reason you left!”

YOUR RIGHT!

The raven sang his legion song.

“When I left Rome!”

WHEN I LEFT ROME!

“My mama cried!”

MY MAMA CRIED!

They surged forward, three acting as one, and the murder of crows fell to pieces in their hands. Soon enough the two Heroic cultivators were rounding up the unconscious bodies and binding them with the same iron threads that had cinched their own wrists earlier that night.

“Cooperation in combat is an exponential force,” the raven explained, wiping the blood from his celestial spear. Where the cloth of his undulating cloak passed blood vanished, but the material never grew damp. “True cooperation, that is.”

“And what does fighting with our hands tied behind our backs have to do with cooperation?” the Sword Song asked, but her confrontational words were betrayed by her tone. Her heart still pounded to the beat of the legion’s crude cadence.

“Fighting together isn’t necessarily fighting as one,” he said patiently. “A group of Heroes can fight side-by-side easily enough, but if they’re each fighting to the tune of their Muses, how can they possibly move as a single unit?”

“Cultivators are unique existences,” the Hero of the Alabaster Isle realized. The raven nodded.

“You Greeks adore the thought of standing alone,” he said without any particular judgment. “Your cultivation reflects that, I think. The problem with being the Hero of your own story is that it is yours and no one else’s. How can you coordinate properly if you're the only one that can possibly fight the way you fight?”

“Practice,” the Song Sword muttered. “Practice and time, more of each the higher you climb.”

“Exactly. On the other hand, there are some things that any soldier can do. The bare basics of war. The ugly foundations that you cultivators race to cover up with towering coliseums of shining virtue.” The raven clenched his fist, and his influence pressed every one of the crows they had captured flat against the dirt.

“But those ugly foundations are firm. They can carry the weight of a man without question.”

“At a certain point what’s lost must outweigh what’s gained by falling in line,” the Sword Song protested. The raven shrugged one shoulder.

“Maybe so. But you aren’t there yet.”

The raven rose suddenly, and both heroes tensed as he looked south up the mountain.

“I found someone sneaking out,” their caustic crow sang. “I found yet another scout!” Bounding down the mountain hundreds of feet at a time, she had a young woman thrown over her shoulder, ankles and wrists tied with iron thread. She was wearing black robes and a threaded black veil, visibly finer than the rags the others had been sporting thus far.

Their fourth companion landed adroitly among them, presenting her capture with a flourish before dumping her on the ground. The young woman grunted softly, evidently still conscious. The raven knelt to pull the hood off her head.

“Where is the man that knows every-”

He went abruptly still. The caustic crow’s high spirits vanished at once. The Hero of the Alabaster Isles hissed through clenched teeth, while the Sword Song viciously cursed.

The raven tilted his head, regarding the young woman as she blinked burning eyes up at him.

“Selene?”

As one, every single ink construct that the would-be assassins were harboring exploded out of their robes, cawing madly and streaking off each in different directions. Above, Sorea shrieked victoriously as he swooped down from the heavens to give chase.

Selene smiled, the scarlet flames behind her eyes flickering merrily.

“I found you, Solus.”