The Caustic Queen

Cultivators lived long lives.

It was known that a crude woman could live to see a hundred years if she was both healthy and fortunate. The nature of refinement was continuous growth, the changes to the cultivator made greater and greater the further they advanced - one above matched ten below. That being said, there was a reason the true climb started at the second realm and not the first.

Civic cultivators tended to live longer than the average unrefined soul, but a century was still their limit.

A wise woman that understood her place in the world, standing at the peak of what the Peloponessians had dubbed the Sophic Realm, had taken twenty steps up the divine mountain. She had refined herself ten times as a Citizen, and then ten times again in the realm above, and her lifespan was extended accordingly. History showed that a Captain of the Sophic Realm could live to be a thousand years old if the years were kind to her.

It followed that a Heroic soul at its peak could live ten thousand years, provided the Fates were kind. And if that was the case, then it held true that a Tyrant at the uppermost limits of their dominion could live for a hundred thousand. Provided the Fates were kind.

Beyond the mortal boundary of the Sophic Realm, the Fates were never kind.

But the distinction between ten lifetimes and a hundred, a hundred lifetimes and a thousand, was meaningless to the young soul that had yet to live even one to its limit. A cultivator’s longevity was staggering, and it made them more in every way. Stronger. Wiser.

Hungrier.

The Despoiled Queen of the Amazons sat discontent upon her throne of ivy and bone, the Tyrant Thalestris towering over all that crept through her domain. If it were to come down to physical stature alone, she would tower over every soul in Olympia, including her rivals. The royal huntresses of the Blind Maiden Cult had always stood tall, even among other cultivators. The queen stood tallest of them all. Seated on her throne of elephant bone, Thalestris presented an image that transcended mortal authority. She looked greater than a Tyrant. Larger than mortality.

Yet here she sat, in the shadowed grove that the late kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult had so thoughtfully prepared for her three hundred years ago. Here she ruled, far from any game worth hunting. The only woman of her standing in the Raging Heaven Cult. Outnumbered and outcast.

She was the second oldest of her sisters, but the truest heir to the queens that came before her. In the Blind Maiden’s hallowed temple, she was the only one of her generation that could stand eye-to-eye with the ancestral statues standing guard. Penthesilia’s armor had fit her and only her. And so, young and old, all of her sisters had knelt for her anointment.

Thalestris had ruled for centuries. The weight of those years was carved into her soul, and she carried it with her wherever she went. Longevity had tempered her as surely as any cultivation technique. Longevity had given her perspective. It had given her sight, where before she had been blind. Her years had informed her of her purpose in the grander scope of the Amazons.

And longevity had tormented the Despoiled Queen when she failed in her pursuit of that purpose. For centuries after, and for centuries yet still to come.

There came a rustling of feathers in the shadow of her soul. Pursing her lips, the midnight messenger kneeling at the Despoiled Queen’s feet laid the unkind thought to rest. It was not her place to question. Only to serve.

The cawing crow serves nine generations of Tyrants and their purposes.

Each of them that donned the midnight veil was at once a crow, unique and fragmented in their goals, and also the crow. Simultaneously the shard and the mosaic that the fragment had chipped away from. Beginning at the moment they took that starlight marrow into their bodies and swallowed it down, from the instant that they accepted the subjugation of the hungry hand behind it, they became something else. When the sun rose and they drew their midnight veils away from their faces, when the night was beaten back, they looked just the same as they had before. But the truth was in their blood.

It didn’t take much. Even the briefest taste of starlight marrow was enough to make a crow out of a man.

One drop was enough to spoil the blood.

A year ago the Raging Heaven Cult had been home to nine Tyrants, eight elders and one lord above the lot. Now there were only eight, and the indigo throne sat empty beneath the immortal storm crown. It wouldn’t be empty for long.

The Half-Step City was the hallowed nexus of the Free Mediterranean, the only city that had suffered neither famine nor war since the inception of her Olympic Games, and the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult was king within her walls. It was inevitable that the vacancy would be filled sooner than later - the indigo throne wouldn’t be empty for long.

But who decided, in the end? A vote among eight elders would return eight results. Seniority was a reasonable consideration in any other institution in the world, but when it came to the elders of the Raging Heaven it was nearly a mark against them. After all, none of them had joined the cult willingly. What did seniority matter, when it only meant your knees were first to fall?

The ink-black bird that lurked within the shadows of her cloak cawed a soft warning.

Of course, she’d never say such a thing out loud.

The crow snapped its beak, and a portion of her pneuma vanished. The crow swallowed noisily and settled back to rest in her shadow.

… If the kyrios had named a successor upon his passing, that might have made things simpler. But he hadn’t, and somehow in spite of his proclivities the man had left behind no heirs willing to claim his name. What, then, were they to do? The kyrios had chosen an unfortunate time to die. The Olympic Games had been only a few short months away the day of his passing, and now with the competitors at their door they were no closer to a consensus than they had been before. Soon enough the Elders’ usurpers, the men and women that had taken up the mantles of kyrioi following their disanointments, would come to see the Games.

Naturally, they would be coming to weigh in on the question of succession just as well. The Elders of the Raging Heaven were each and every one of them mighty, each of them once a kyrios in their greater days, but the lords and ladies of the greater mystery cults were kyrioi today. Some of them would argue that that fact meant something. Some of them would offer themselves up as contenders instead.

“I won’t allow it,” the crow within her robes hissed in a woman’s voice. It was the voice of the blind-eye turned, the one and only bellatrix to ever be abandoned by her sisters - left to rot alone in the city of Olympia following her subjugation.

“I’ll tear this city down before I kneel to another man,” Thalestris declared aloud, completing the sentiment.

“Of course,” the midnight servant murmured. She was only a single chip of stone in the tessellate of the Despoiled Queen’s influence, which itself was only a small section of the vast mosaic that was the Crow. Deference was all she could afford.

A vote was pointless, and a naked power struggle threatened the stability of every Elder’s standing. What remained in the end? What was the only option any of the eight would tolerate?

A crow’s diplomacy - cloak and dagger, and a thousand shifting shadows. They were only shards, but even the smallest jagged stone could leave its mark. A humble scavenger in the realms beneath Tyrannic couldn’t hope to strike an Elder’s tempered body, but they could chip away at their influence. They could undermine them in the smallest of ways. A crow’s highest purpose was simple, yet profound in its impact.

Harass, distract, and goad. It was the best a scavenger could hope to accomplish, when they stood so far beneath the weakest of the eight Elders.

[They say that in the legions…]

No.

It was all a scavenger should have been able to accomplish.

“Tell it again,” the Despoiled Queen commanded her, shifting in her throne of bone and ivy. Powerful legs, each themselves as tall as the servant, uncrossed and crossed again, right-above-left shifting to left-above-right. Her fingers drummed against her biceps loud enough to make a lesser woman’s ears bleed. Restlessness was unbecoming of a huntress, to say nothing of a queen. It was a testament to the severity of the situation that Thalestris let her agitation show at all.

“Again,” the servant sighed, bowing her head in acquiescence.

“Explain it to me in the simplest possible terms,” the Tyrant of the Blind Maiden Cult said with quiet rage. “Like I’m twenty.”

Her lowly crow explained.

When she first laid eyes on the Roman, she saw that he was nothing worth acknowledging. His pneuma was weak and fractured in its purpose. It was a subtle dissonance, but one she noticed right away. Standing among the late kyrios’ favored initiates while the funeral drums boomed, he had appeared to her entirely out of his depth. She dismissed him readily from her mind.

Too readily, in the end.

She didn’t see him again until the chaos had already set in and her blades were wet with the blood of crows from rival factions. They were in the shadows of Olympia’s alleyways, in the darkness where crows crept and blind maidens hunted. One of the late kyrios’ favored children had been captured by rival scavengers, and another had mistaken her for one of his captors. She had responded to his hostility with equal force, and battered him bloody.

Before she could complete her kill, the Roman came charging into her shadows with his paltry essence blazing. Like he could accomplish anything against her. She had seen that he was no one worth remembering. Even restraining herself as she was in the confines of the city, his strength was nothing compared to hers.

And then he dared to taunt her.

“You’re not very good at this, are you? A real throat cutter is never seen unless they choose to be.”

He was young and arrogant. He had yet to reap the rewards of his longevity, the perspective of centuries, and it was too late for him now. She drew hundreds of blades from the shadow of three, poison coating every single one, and flooded the shadowed alley with death. She returned him to the earth.

Rather, she tried.

“To Caesar you’re assigned!”

Her oldest and first defiled dagger was nearly at his throat when the words fully registered in her mind. That was the moment she realized the Roman was a Roman. Recognition corroded her disdain, ate away at it and left it something darker.

She lashed murder at his throat, and only then did she see the lightning in his eyes.

“They say that in the legions.”

The force that struck her from the sky was beyond anything a Sophic cultivator could ever hope to muster. And as she burned her heart’s blood to right herself and retaliate, the dissonance she had observed in him earlier resolved itself in her mind. Not the product of a shoddy foundation as she had first disdainfully believed.

The product of a split foundation. He had climbed eleven steps up the divine mountain, but that was only the Greek portion of his soul. But the Roman portion-

It struck her down. Sent her spinning to the dirt.

“The meals are mighty fine,” he informed her, and the outlandish nature of the statement had nearly distracted her from what it was. What he was doing. The Roman was calling a cadence.

The young man belted out lines like he expected a response, like he demanded one, and every one was punctuated by a flash of seething lightning in his eyes. If she wasn’t a Heroine, she wouldn’t have seen it at all. If she wasn’t herself, she wouldn’t have known what it meant. She felt her poison surging through his veins, felt the inferiority of his physique from the inside, and yet the Roman fought her like he had an army at his back. Like he couldn’t possibly lose.

And with every line of his cadence, he grew stronger.

“They say that in the legions!” he roared, and kicked her like a wild dog.

The Roman struck her with strength far beyond his standing, stronger than anything a Sophic cultivator his age could possibly claim as his own virtue.

“The pay is fine it’s great!“

Every blow was an insult. Every strike was a reminder.

“For every coin you gather!”

She hated him.

“The captain gathers eight!”

He tossed her through a stone wall like she was garbage, and she vowed within herself that she would kill him no matter what it took.

“You failed,” Thalestris informed her daughter. The crow’s lips twisted, but the Despoiled Queen waved her rage aside. “Continue.”