Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Griffon,

The Risen Flame

For a time I just leaned against that forward rail, basking in the afterglow of our survival while Sol wrangled the crew. My arms burned, throbbing painfully where I had torn the muscles while acting as an anchor weight. It felt as though my skull had been stuffed full of wool and buzzing insects, the effect only worsening the more I probed my memories in search of answers. Somewhere in that empty space between Olympia and now, my heart’s blood had been reduced even further.

While Sol grilled his men for answers and Selene scampered up the mast to the crow’s nest, I called upon the healing hands of my intent. They spun into being around me, the manifestations of my pneuma made visible by the dry blood that coated each of them from fingertip to wrist, and went to work mending my torn muscles.

I inhaled slowly, steadily, bidding the wheel of channels to move inside my flesh. It obeyed, burning and turning, and to my deep satisfaction I felt the confirmation of a prior suspicion - the burden of my healing hands lightened. The wheel made their efforts twice as effective, for half the prior cost.

Selene beat the Eos’ scarlet sail like an old blanket as she shot up the mast, searching its folds with sharp eyes. Whatever had rattled my brother and I so severely, it hadn’t laid a finger on my sister. She was still every bit the nimble Heroine, while I felt the same way Sol had looked when he staggered out of the Orphic House in Thracia. My brother was little better off than me, remaining on his feet only by virtue of spite and the bronze spear he’d pulled from his shadow to leverage as a walking stick.

Whatever entity it was that had put its filthy hands on our hearts and minds, I didn’t know. Sol didn’t either, and I could tell from the looks on their faces that the crew wouldn’t have anything meaningful to tell him when he asked. Something ominous had taken place on this ship, that much was clear. But there wasn’t a living soul among us that could remember it.

Of course, that still leaves you.

The lingering spirit that called itself my ancestor chuckled, the sound just as I remembered - deep, menacing, and vaguely bored. Of all the lived experiences that had been stolen from me, our thief had left behind the one thing that I’d have freely given.

Selene vaulted up over the lip of the crow’s nest. I sneered at the spirit lingering in my blindside. Cruel, me? No, the true cruelty was a perfectly fine piece of jewelry being wasted on a-

“They’re gone!”

Sol’s head snapped up, the riptide current of his influence sweeping over the ship as he took another count of those on board. I saw it, the moment that he realized what he’d missed. What we had both missed in our torpor.

Selene leaned out from the crow’s nest, panicked. “Lync and Sorea! They’re gone!”

Something flashed behind my brother’s eyes. Something that wasn’t quite terror, wasn’t quite rage. He turned to the men who’d gathered in loose ranks around him, and barked a word I’d never heard before today.

“About face!” That was what the worldly tongue rendered as its meaning, but beneath that, the true word was vertere. A Latin word of power - a captain’s order. It wasn’t the first of its kind that Sol had spoken in the days since he’d taken our crew into the fold. And like the rest that had come before it, I watched it move the men on its own.

As one, like it had been rehearsed, the new men of the Fifth pivoted on their right heels and spun to face the stern. Sol ground his teeth in frustration.

“The ship,” he corrected himself, pressing vainly against the Nile’s current with gravitas. “We have to turn the ship around.”

I waved the bronze boarding hook. “And what? Give the whirlpool a second taste of us?”

“We know the trick of it now.”

“The oars will break long before this river does if we try to row against it,” I told him through our joined shadows. “Even if they were made of adamantine, our crew is not.” ℟ἈƝO͍ʙЕʂ

He stared hard at me, his shadow rippling. “Then we beach the ship. Retrace our steps.”

“Retrace them where? I can’t remember a thing. Can you?”

We both reached for some touchstone, some beacon in the wine-dark waves of our recollection, and both of us grimaced as the drums beat double-time against our skulls.

Selene leapt from the crow’s nest, twisting with a Heroine’s careless artistry in midair and pulling her spear from the fold in her silks. I tucked and rolled sideways across the deck, separating my shadow from Sol’s as she thrust her penumbral spear down.

The shadow cast by her spear sank into the shadow cast by Sol, but my brother didn’t dodge. His jaw tightened, and his right hand lashed out to catch the Oracle’s spear by its prophecy-carved shaft. Selene gasped but hung on, hanging a handspan above the surface of the deck. A few of the men eased back, watching her warily. The rest had turned and torn across the deck, overturning rowing benches and calling out the ornery pirate child’s name.

Sol stared flatly at Selene. “Why.”

“You were doing it again.” She glared back at him, dangling. “Cutting me out of things.”

“There are less violent ways to make yourself heard.”

“Less effective ways, perhaps. If I want the two of you to understand me, what choice do I have but to speak your primary language?”

Sol snorted, unimpressed. I raised one hand, the other kneading at my aching temple.

“If I may?” I asked politely.

Two crackling limbs of my intent struck out and speared the soft flesh of my sister’s wrists. She yelped and fell to the deck, her fingers spasming as the lightning current swept through her. When she turned on me, her heart flame flaring, both of my pankration hands smacked her over the head.

“Violence is our native tongue, that much is certainly true,” I said genially, while my foolish little sister tried and failed to smooth down the hair that the lightning current had frazzled. I leaned forward. “But never mind fluent - you’ve yet to string a proper sentence together in this vicious tongue of ours.”

Close enough now to feel the low hum of the lingering static, I lowered my voice to a murmur that only she and Sol could hear.

“Do you recognize every man on this ship?” I asked, and the Heroine went very still.

“What-?”

“Answer the question.”

The scarlet flames behind her eyes flickered. Her gaze darted past me and traced from ragged sea dog to ragged sea dog, paranoid and pondering.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Yes. Why?”

“Because one of them does not belong.”

Sol stared over our heads, his expression carved from stone.

“What?” Selene whispered, disguising her alarm as anger towards me. “That can’t be. I know all of these men by name-”

“So do I.”

“Then what are you trying to say? There’s a… fake?”

“An interloper.”

She struggled visibly to parse the difference.

“How do you know?” she finally asked.

Sol answered in my stead, tossing her ornamental spear so that it skewered the deck halfway down the length of the ship. It didn’t hit any of the men, didn’t even come close. But even so, a man’s pained scream split the air.

Nine men spun and turned to regard one as he clawed at the deck in vain, trying and failing to escape the spear that had pinned his shadow to the deck. It held him there, tethering him, and his silhouette writhed in terrible agony around the spearhead. Beside me, Selene exhaled like she’d been punched in the gut as she finally noticed what Sol and I had seen the moment she jumped down from the crow’s nest.

Where I had rolled and Sol had braced for the impact of the penumbral spear - the silhouette of the Oracle’s weapon, which could strike at raven mantles like they were flesh and blood - the rest of the men on board had reacted to the descending Heroine herself. Only one other, the interloper, had reacted as Sol and I had.

The men parted to let Sol pass, his every step a crack of thunder against the deck. Such was the downed man’s agony that he didn’t notice his captain’s approach until Sol was looming directly over his head. The new man of the fifth bit down on another animal sound of pain, his fingernails broken and bloody, and looked up into Sol’s eyes. Whatever he saw there, it chased the pain away with terror.

I remembered this man, of course. He was a reserved soul, dark of hair and skeletally thin, even by the standards of his fellow slaves-turned-soldiers. His skin grew pale with dread, making the dark bags under his eyes stand out twice as starkly.

While the man froze like a cornered rat before a hunting hound, the man’s shadow continued to writhe and claw at the silhouette of the spear that had skewered it. The shadow and the self were out of sync, just as they had been when Selene leapt down from the crow’s nest with her holy spear in hand.

“Sephor,” Sol said quietly, taking the spear in hand. “Grit your teeth.”

The man’s name was Sephor, and he was the only Egyptian in our crew.

Sephor shivered and nodded once, speaking through his clenched teeth. “Aye, captain.”

Sol ripped the spear out of the deck, and Sephor jerked like it had been his own flesh. I knew the pain well.

I brushed one of the men aside and stepped into the tense circle they’d formed around their captain and crewmate. I crouched beside Sephor’s head, peering down into the man’s bloodshot eyes. He was terrified, that much was clear as day. More than that, though, he was confused. I knew that look. I’d seen it in the eyes of countless young mystikos after I broke them down to their smallest parts in the marble octagon. I’d seen it in my own reflection the day my father took the first manifestation of my violent intent into his hands and broke every one of its incorporeal fingers, one by one by one.

This man had been hurt in a way that he didn’t know he could be hurt.

I tilted my head to regard the true interloper, the shadow intermingling with my own. The hungry raven stirred, snapping its beak in hunger.

“Hello, stranger. What’s your name?”

To my surprise, the interloper answered.

“Sephor-shut.”

Sol dropped to one knee in a smooth, controlled motion. His shadow mingled with ours, the raven within the captain’s mantle shifting in agitation.

“Do you remember what I told you the day we left for Thracia?” he asked me in the raven’s voice.

“Of course.”

Sol offered a hand to his wounded soldier, and after a moment of hesitation the emaciated Egyptian took it. Sol pulled him up to a seated position, and he kept their hands clasped. Slowly, the soldier’s fear faded.

“The Egyptians believe a man exists in eight parts. Khet and Sah, the physical and the spiritual bodies. Ib and Ka, the heart and the vital breath. Sekhem and Ba, the power and the presence. Ren, the man’s name. And Shut.”

“The shadow in his frame,” whispered Sephor-shut.

Jarringly, Sephor the man spoke overtop of his own shadow, his voice rough with pain and unease.

“Captain, what is this? What happened?”

Sol considered him. “What do you remember?”

“Nothing,” answered the man.

“Everything,” declared his shadow.

“I saw nothing but the deck. I heard nothing but the beating of my own heart. I swear it, captain, on my life!” Around us, the men muttered their agreements. Sol stared hard at his soldier, then nodded and pulled him to his feet.

“Tell us everything,” Sol’s raven commanded. “What did you see? Leave nothing out.” He guided the shaken soldier to a bench and sat down beside him on it, gathering the other soldiers to him and questioning each of them on their recollections while our shadows did the real work.

“It came from the coast. You felt it first, but it was too late by then. It blotted out the land and sea, smothered the sun with its arrival. It knew your face, and it named you Captain. Captain of the salt that shrivels corpses. Captain of the ash that falls from sundered heaven.”

“What was it?” I asked, at the same time that Sol asked, “What did it want?”

“It wanted you to remember its face,” Sephor-shut murmured. “It wanted you to return its greeting in kind.”

Selene was beside me, whispering questions in my ear. I leaned forward, entranced, the thunder in my skull doubling and redoubling with every word the shadow spoke. Like sharks beneath the wine-dark waves, the memories swam and struggled towards the surface. The closer they came, the worse the pain. It wasn’t that the moments had been stolen. No, it was a deeper violation than that. They’d been sealed within our own souls, shunted into a corner of ourselves that was closed off to the rest.

More than anything, that was what made my heart skip. The realization that my lack of clarity wasn’t restricted to just the world outside myself. There was a portion of myself that was stranger to my eye.

The gods gave you a weapon the day that you were born, my father once said. You can play with knives once you’ve mastered your body’s full potential.

A man couldn’t truly master a sword until he’d first mastered his body. That principle applied to more than just martial cultivation. It applied to more than just violence. The drums thundered on, growing louder still. I had decided that I would strive to understand this world and all of its wonders. I had resolved to find the truth, in all of its myriad forms. And yet, I still didn’t know the full truth of myself?

Better that the memories had been stolen. Better that the walls had been broken down and the treasures taken from their vaults. Better dead than derelict in duty to my soul. This would not stand. I refused.

While I wrestled with the thunder and the waves, Sol glowered at the sun.

“What was her name?”

He asked it like he already knew.

I breached the surface of the waves within me, heedless of the roaring thunder, diving down in search of silent sharks. My vision wavered at the edges, Selene’s whispers turning frantic. I ignored the pain of something breaking, venturing deeper into the dark.

What was her name?

Sephor-shut spoke a word that slipped through my fingers, slippery as an eel. It melted like sea foam on my tongue. Fleeting. Familiar.

Lie, my dead ancestor said, and pulled me from the waves. The thunder fell away, and I found myself present in my own body once more. Staring across the deck at Sol, who was staring back at me.

“Lie,” I echoed, interrupting a man halfway through his recollection of events. The sea dog turned to me in panic, wondering what he’d said wrong.

The shadow of the Egyptian held its hands out to its sides and splayed all ten fingers wide.

Then, slowly, deliberately, it folded one finger down.

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