Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Youngest of the Convocation

“Pull!”

“The oars in-to your guts un-til the tides are gray,” Gyro sang, volume and spirit filling the gaps a poor singing voice left.

“Pull!” we bellowed, bracing our feet on the benches in front of us and heaving on our oars with all our might.

“The stars, down from the sky, until the night is day!”

“Pull!” The Eos sailed across the waves as fast as an eagle flew. The product of four brothers’ labor seemed to nearly outpace the breeze, though the winds never fell out of her sails.

“The sword, out from the sheath, I feel the fight - it comes!” Gyro sang and worked his oar at once and in rhythm, neglecting neither in the process. He had mastered the hunting bird’s breath long before I had achieved proficiency - there wasn’t a single heavy pant to mark his exertion. As he braced and leaned back to pull, and then hunched forward again, the only signs of his effort were the sweat on his brow and the bulging veins in his neck.

“Pull!” I roared, determined to match him ‘till the end. To my right, on the bench adjacent, Fotios laughed wildly.

“The sun that’s reaching out, from under Tyrant’s thumb!”

Some of us more successfully than others. I gnashed my teeth, watching the wood-carved lady of the Eos drift sideways against the horizon as our ship’s pace was unbalanced once again.

Damon had distributed us evenly across the benches. There were two rows of four on the deck, one for every oar, and the eldest of the young pillars had taken the left and right benches up front for themselves. Behind Damon was the slave whose chains he’d broken, while Gyro’s slave sat behind him. Though Fotios and I had protested it vehemently, we sat the third row benches behind our older brothers’ slaves and watched their backs while they worked. Thon and Dymas, the slaves my twin and I had taken on at Damon’s suggestion, sat the rear benches behind us.

And as I watched our ship drift once more towards mine and Damon‘s side on the left, I began lamenting my choice.

“Pull!” I snarled, twisting as I pulled my oar to look back at Thon. My blood roared in my ears, such that I didn’t register Gyro’s next line at all.

“Pull! Damn you to the pits beneath the earth, like you mean it!” I shouted at the slave. Thon gasped raggedly, his ugly face contorting as he pulled back on his oar. Drenched in sweat and flushed from the tips of his ears to the divots of his collarbone, he looked for all the world like the hardest working man on the ship. And yet, with every cut of the oars, our course drifted further left.

I inhaled sharply, gathering up every scrap of pain and exertion that the hunting bird’s breath had dispersed throughout the channels of my body. My pneuma rose.

“I said -”

“Pull!”

“- yourself together, brother!” Fotios hollered, meeting the furious glare I turned upon him with wild cheer. The wings of our influence beat challengingly, true wind kicked up by formless pneuma buffeting us both and blowing back the damp curls of our hair. “You have no one to blame but yourself if he falters!”

“L-lord Ae-” my worthless slave tried to speak up, gasping the words, and I saw our side of the ship lose further ground as he diverted his efforts from the oar.

“I’ll-”

“Pull!”

“- your tongue out of your mouth! Be silent!” I beat the wings of my influence once. Thon’s teeth snapped together and he hissed through them, throwing his body back into the next pull.

“This is my fault, then!?” I demanded, rounding on my twin. “I’m to blame because the ugly wretch couldn’t -”

“Pull!”

“- a thought from his empty head, let alone an oar! That’s my burden!?”

Fotios rolled his eyes at me, his good cheer not faltering. I knew, in the way that only siblings that had shared a womb could know one another, that he was taking nearly as much joy from my anger as he was from this excursion itself. I tried to hold onto that knowledge. I tried to brace myself behind it like a shield, to resist my rising ire. I failed miserably.

“Choosing him is your burden,” my twin threw back. “Leaving him to suffer is your fault, asking him to -”

“Pull!”

“- a cultivator’s share without the breath to fill his lungs - that’s your blame to take!”

“Pull!”

Fotios took one hand off his oar and pointed it at me in condemnation. I stomped the bench in front of me in frustration when Dymas, the slave he’d chosen for himself, inhaled sharply and put twice the strength into his next pull. Compensating for my twin.

“Idiot brother,” Fotios condemned me, “you’re the only one whose slave is still in chains!”

“Pull!” the Young Aristocrat demanded. Seven cultivators of virtue and one bonded slave pulled their oars against the waves.

“What’s stopping you, Stavros?” Gyro called back across the deck, abandoning his next verse. “You liked him well enough to pick. Why not set him free?”

Damon had broken the shackles that bound his slave to the Rosy Dawn Cult before the Eos was even built. I knew it, because he hadn’t left the sun-bleached sands of the docks even once during the ship’s construction. He’d worked without sleep, without sustenance, from the moment the figurehead’s first grasping hand was carved and until the ship’s last rope was tied.

Gyro had reached out and taken his slave’s wrists in hand as soon as the Eos breached the waves, breaking the gaunt man’s bonds without a second’s hesitation. As if he had made the decision long before today, just like Damon. As if he had only been waiting for the proper time.

Seeing that, and seeing the haste with which our older brothers set the rowing pace, Fotios had followed suit while we all settled into our rhythm - reaching back without looking and tearing Dymas’ shackles off his wrists with a sharp jerk. It had broken the slave’s skin and coated his hands and part of his oar in blood, but he didn’t utter a word of complaint. His eyes were clear and bright, his spine straighter with every pull. My twin’s slave worked his oar with mangled hands like he was rowing straight to heaven.

There had been a moment, then, a hesitant beat in the motion of the oar behind mine. It was no longer Kronia and the slave I’d chosen had enough sense not to voice his expectation in that moment. But it had been there, and it had been loud. Thon had asked me without words to break his chains as well.

And I had ignored him.

Why not set him free? I felt my expression twist. I put everything I had into the next turning of the oars, but Fotios simply matched me. As Damon and Gyro matched one another, and as their slaves matched each other in turn. The one and only dissonance in our efforts lay behind me. In the ugly slave with the often broken nose, and the newly woken cultivator rowing on his right.

“Why should I!?” I shouted. Damn them all, and damn him twice. This was supposed to be an adventure worth remembering fondly. The young pillars of the Rosy Dawn, the young generation of the Aetos family, positioned ahead of everyone else in the Scarlet City during a time of crisis - poised to seize glory before even the indolent Burning Dusk could take it from us.

This was supposed to be fun.

“Why should you follow your wiser and better looking brother’s example?” Gyro responded, winking over his shoulder at me. “Was that the question?” Directly behind him, the slave he’d freed had the audacity to chuckle. To laugh at me.

“No.” The wood in my hands groaned and flexed, each of my knuckles bleeding white. “Why should I turn aside my principles because you and Damon have a plan?” The wings of my influence beat, filling the Eos’ sail and spilling over its edges. “Why should I risk the virtue in my soul because Fotios didn’t bother to think before he followed your example!?”

“What do your principles have to do with this?” My twin asked incredulously.

Thoughtless twin. You should know.

I answered in the way only a Sophic cultivator could. With the full force of a truth that I had learned, a principle that I had refined - and I slammed it through their skulls with the blade of my own lived experience.

[Young Aetos, please - it’s enough.] My forehead rebounded off the chipped and weathered marble of the octagon, light exploding behind my eyes in place of pain. The senior cultivator eyed me scornfully as I forced myself back up. Around us, his fellow mystikos of the Burning Dusk heckled and laughed while the children of the dawn averted their eyes in shame.

[Young Aetos, please - there’s nothing you have to prove to them.] The people of the Scarlet City cheered wildly as my opponent wrenched my left arm from its socket. The sand of the pit was hot enough to burn as he rolled me and pressed my face down into it, the falling sun burning over the Scarlet Stadium. I bucked wildly against him, even when the grinding of my dislocated shoulder overwhelmed the hunting bird’s breath and the pain filled my senses. I tried to rise, rise like the dawn, but it was already so close to dusk. My opponent in the wrestling event pressed down on me with the full force of his foundational mystery and drove me into the sand.

[Young Aetos, please - an aristocrat has better things to do.] I slammed a clenched fist through the teeth of a burly mystiko of the Burning Dusk. He staggered back with both hands over his mouth, blood pouring out from the creases between his fingers. His fellow initiates cursed and converged on me all at once, beating me in a back alley of the Scarlet City that the Burning Dusk Cult had claimed as its own.

[Young Aetos, please - it’s too much!] I waded through rivers of blood-orange flame, inhaled the disturbing odor of my own burning flesh, and reached up. Up, through the difference in our standing. Up, through the vast and endless boundary that separated the eighth rank of the Sophic Realm from the ninth. Up, through the flames of a cultivator’s virtue, to seize a fellow Young Aristocrat by the throat. I pulled a son of Yianni Scalla out from his flames and slammed my forehead against his. Light flashed behind my eyes in place of pain. He went limp.

I took one of the young pillars of the Burning Dusk Cult in hand, one of the favored souls that ruled in this city of bisected wonder, and I threw him off the side of his own mountain range. I basked in my advancement as my pneuma doubled and redoubled. I basked in the rush of winning a trial by hunger. I basked in the real and tangible strength I took from him in that moment, a portion of his vital essence filling the channels of my body as I inhaled, a piece of Anakle Scalla’s soul breaking away in my teeth and settling in my stomach when I swallowed it down.

More than any of that, though, I basked in the incorporeal things I had taken from him. The respect of those he called his friends and considered his peers. The confidence he inspired in those of his cult, the proxy superiority he allowed them all to claim - as if they were all of them better than the best of us. I spread my arms and the wings of my influence wide and cast my shadow upon those that had gathered to watch a young upstart from the Rosy Dawn challenge a young pillar of the Burning Dusk in the middle of his own cult.

Young men and women, boys and girls and elders covering up their age with the cosmetics of cultivation, converged on me from all sides in howling rage. They hurled their own hungering challenges at me. For those without the fortitude to go that far, challenges to the trial by reason or the trial by spirit came instead. The true cowards among them didn’t even venture that much. Instead they challenged my right to be on their mountain, challenged the validity of my victory, challenged my manhood and my virtue and anything else they could think to say while safely backed by the rest of the crowd.

[Young Aetos, please-!] they reached for me, and in those reaching hands I saw the servants of my cult. I saw the elders, the grovelors and bootlickers, the suitors and their scheming fathers. Reaching out, offering me a hand from the very beginning and through every hardship that followed. Offering me an escape from the disparity in my city, assuring me that they’d pull me up to the lowly peak of the Rosy Dawn if I would only let them.

I spat on that outstretched hand -

-and Gyro watched my spittle hit the deck between us.

“A man pays his own way,” I said, and the strength of one of my principles filled my limbs. I exhaled sharply and pulled.

Fotios cursed beside me, his pneuma rising and the wings of his influence beating as he quickly tried to match me. It wasn’t nearly enough. The Eos’ course jerked right, correcting itself as I overwhelmed the efforts of my twin brother and his newly freed slave with the truth of my conviction.

“You shouldn’t need me to tell you what you already know!” I continued, pulling again with all that I had, reinforcing my oar with myriad truths so it wouldn’t snap apart in my hands. “The four of us know the worth of what we are because we earned it for ourselves! Why should I turn away from that now when you’re the ones that set this pace? How can I deprive a man of the promise I saw inside his soul by paying his freedom’s price for him?”

I heard Thon’s ragged breath hitch behind me, saw his oar freeze mid motion. And then all the world heard him shout, heard him holler breathlessly as he reached within himself and found strength where there had been none before. It wasn’t a cultivator’s breakthrough, and no outpouring of pneuma followed.

It was more mundane than that. It was far more profound.

Thon threw his entire body and all that he was into rowing. It still wasn’t enough to match the freedman beside him, but it was enough for me to bridge the gap with the strength of my principle.

“We’re all tenth rank,” Fotios panted, thrown off the rhythm of his own breathing by the memory I’d assaulted him with. He didn’t seem too upset about it, though. “What are you going to do if I pull out all my principles and truths to match you, brother? Catch a muse’s eye and ascend just to spite me?”

“I’d move heaven and earth to spite you, brother,” I promised him, and Gyro laughed from his place at the front.

“If that’s how it is, then fair enough! But don’t expect any mercy from me!”

Thon roared, spittle hitting the back of my neck as he threw even a slave’s courtesy to the wind in favor of force. Heedless to everything but his oar. Finally.

I scoffed at my second eldest brother. “As if we’d need it.”

“Pull,” Damon demanded, with a smile on his face.

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