Chapter 1.135

Chapter 1.135

When the Despoiled Queen of the Amazons let fly her blind arrow, starry night seeped through the skies above the City of Olympia and beyond it. For those unfortunate enough to still be in the city, it was an instantaneous shift. For those that had taken the Raging Heaven Cult’s earlier unrest for the warning that it was, fleeing the city with their most valuable possessions bundled up in carts and carried on their backs, the sunset lights were ripped away like a tablecloth to reveal the dark heavens behind it. Further beyond that, on the Ionian Sea, it spilled across the horizon like the Father had turned out his cup.

Aboard the unwieldy Alikonia, the excited buzz of conversation between Nikolas Aetos’ companions died a swift death as they noticed the dark tide bearing down on them. By the time the lesser cultivators in the company had the presence of mind to look, the setting sun at their backs had already been swallowed up.

“Niko,” the Rosy Dawn’s Young Miss whispered. Her younger siblings and her tagalong slave were too frightened to speak. “What just happened?”

The Stark Blade of the Aetos family had already gathered his youngest cousins loosely to him. Now he leaned over them protectively, one hand falling to the hilt of his sword as he stared out past the ship’s bow.

“Was that-?” One of the heroes clustered around the Sand Reckoner squinted up at the stars above, like the answer was written there in small print.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” another immediately shut them down. “You’re just not... looking... hard enough...” Their voice slowly trailed away.

“The moon is gone,” the Heroine Iphys quietly observed.

“Thalestris?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s gone.”

“Why would she ever? In the middle of the city, now of all times, with every hero there just itching for their shot?”

“Then where is it?”

They bickered on like this until it became apparent they wouldn’t reach a consensus alone.

“Niko,” said a Heroine with features like autumn leaves, silencing the back-and-forth. “What do you think?”

The Stark Blade gathered his heavy pneuma around his cousins like a cloak. Blue eyes burning bright, he spoke.

“I think-”

Light.

Every Heroic cultivator on the ship lit up in alarm, their pneuma spilling across the deck of the Alikonia and threatening the lives of all its lesser passengers. The cloak of the Stark Blade’s own pneuma acted as an inadvertent shield to the three Civic cultivators piled up in his lap. The girl that had begged to be taken along in pursuit of the Young Miss nearly died on the spot - would have died, had the Sand Reckoner not snapped his fingers and caused the planks she was sitting on to cave in, sending her plummeting down into the safety of the ship’s lower quarters.

Those left above deck stared in naked alarm at the grim horizon. Wary hands reached for any weapon they could find.

In the distance, originating from a point they still couldn’t see from this distance, a pillar of light too large to be believed rose from earth up to the heavens and burnt away a ring of clouds ten leagues across in its passing. It lit up the world, bright and all-encompassing as the sun, but harsher - its stark glow was as much lightning as it was dawn.

It cast long shadows across the Free Mediterranean, resonating with a long-forgotten purpose.

It said this was the end.

Unnoticed by his stricken passengers, the Sand Reckoner clicked his tongue and scrubbed a charcoal circle off the deck with the heel of his hand.

“He always gets his way.”

The Young Griffon

It was more than just a sword.

Glaring lights and coronating heat scoured the broken city around me in a circle wide enough to build a second stadium upon. In the time it took me to rip the blade from its sheath in a rising parry, it reached out and consumed everything but the earth itself within that circle. It made no sound at all. It was deafening.

The Flame’s golden ichor screamed an outraged warning in my veins, abandoning all its current refinement and converging on the covetous invader. Its efforts were in vain. From the moment my late uncle’s blade had cleared its sheath, it had turned its edge upon everything within reach.

My soul was no exception.

The blade howled, and it devoured. In the time it took to follow through with my parry, it took more from me than any mundane sword was capable of taking. I felt my boiling blood sublimate in my veins and vanish. In the time it took me to lower the blade to a ready position, it took twice that much again.

It was said that a Captain of the Sophic Realm could live to be ten thousand years old if the Fates were kind enough to allow it. By that measure, as a second rank Philosopher I had two thousand years worth of vitality flowing through my veins.

In the time it took the blade to rise and fall, it stripped decades off my life.

“You’ll die!” the golden ichor warned me in Niko’s voice. I straightened up, standing tall and rolling my shoulders.

“Sheathe it! Don’t you understand? You’ll die! You’ll die! You’ll die!”

As if I hadn’t known that from the start.

The blade was polished bronze, double-edged and forged in the style of a one-handed xiphos but longer than a greatsword. Looking at it was like staring at the sun back when its light could still blind me. It cast off heat and stark light in relentless shockwave currents, yet somehow, paradoxically, it drew everything around it into its gleaming surface.

In manic hilarity, a distant portion of me noted that the blade perhaps most deserving of decoration had been left all but bare. Its only ornament was a pair of words inscribed into the base near its hilt, the script too small and plainly etched to be pleasing to the eye.

ϝάνακτος καταρϝος

The King's Curse.

The wanton blade drank my heart’s blood greedily, exacting its terrible price for daring to wield it as my own. It took decades from me as I stood in the inverted eye of its scouring storm. It took centuries.

By the time I turned my eyes upon my enemy, a third of my future was gone.

Reunited with her body, Elissa looked at me with wild eyes. Half-crouching and half-sprawled at the edge of the blade’s scouring pillar, the desert heat wavered behind her eyes. For the moment, she was terrified beyond action. The sound that I had parried was nothing more than an echo of her sword, yet somehow the bronze blade shaking in her hands had been severed halfway up its length. As she shook, a vertical line appeared in the center of her forehead and parted, weeping blood that split at the bridge of her nose and carried on in two trails.

The rest of them were just as stricken. The King's Curse staggered them all, scattering them with its terrible presence even as it drew them in.

There was Kyno to my right, overshadowed now by the gargantuan Sah-Bakari, the virtuous beast looming over him like a protective mother. I saw Lefteris to my left, his mangled fingers just out of reach of his discarded bow. His lips moved soundlessly as he looked upon me, unable to make sense of it. Anastasia’s hunting hounds shrank back from the pillar, whimpering in terror, while the Caustic Queen herself hid somewhere out of sight.

Sol and Selene crouched behind me, well beyond the pillar’s reach. Two rosy palms had struck the scarlet Heroine in center mass and flung her out of harm’s way. The remaining twenty-eight had just barely been strong enough to send the Roman skidding out to join her.

Not far enough. The drilling column of coronating power wasn’t a boundary for the blade - it was only a declaration of its intent. The King's Curse reached beyond it, taking from my brother and from Selene, taking from the Heroes arrayed against us, and reaching further across the ruined City of Olympia to take from ever more. Standing at its starving center, it consumed me most rabidly of all.

One was enough. Presumptuous, ugly blade, I didn’t say you could have them all.

I hammered down on it with all that I was, everything I would ever have to give, and the King's Curse ate that too. It drew me in. It made me a part of it, a portion of a greater whole.

As it drank me dry, I saw the world as it perceived it.

Olympia was dying. It had been gutted by my brother, scarred by the wayward acts of Tyrants, and burnt out at its heart by unworthy champions. The King's Curse swept over them all, enveloping them in the shadow of its ceaseless hunger as it expanded.

The Heroes - no, the animals still inside of the Olympic Stadium, were ripping themselves limb-from-limb with techniques that should have leveled the city three times over by now. The reason why that hadn’t happened - the reason why the stadium was still standing at all - was invisible to me, but plainly apparent to my wanton blade. I looked through its eyes and saw it for myself.

“I have climbed twelve steps towards divinity. Soon, I’ll climb a dozen more.”

Whatever the King's Curse could perceive, it could present in stark clarity. I saw all of it, all at once, even as I was consumed. Yet, as I fell fully into the horizon of its insatiable desire, I realized there was one thing even the King’s Curse could not fully understand.

“Liar!” Elissa accused me one last time, while an existence like shadows swimming beneath a frozen lake hovered just over her shoulder.

“Liar!” Lefteris named me while his heart broke apart. Just behind him, close enough to whisper but too far to be touched, an existence like morning mist lingered.

“Liar,” Kyno denied me while his hopes withered away. Lurking behind him almost like his crocodile cloak, a presence loomed like a mirage.

“No.”

I took another step. My heart’s blood dwindled.

Now that I had noticed one, I noticed them all. Watching, whispering, waiting - but never ever helping. There was one for every Hero in the city.

“No,” a sonorous voice echoed my sentiment, only half a step away.

There was even one for me.

“His virtuous heart won’t tolerate a lie,” Melpomene declared with powerful satisfaction. Her voice emanated seemingly without a source, giving lie to her true intent as she reached out for my heart. Abruptly, I understood. She wouldn’t reveal herself in full until she had her prize in hand.

The veil of the Muse’s mystique was impossible to pierce. Even to the King's Curse, she was hardly more than a shifting haze. The blade couldn’t lay her bare like it had everything else.

But it could still see her.

And what it could see, it could consume.

Presumptuous waste of accursed higher power.

[My virtuous heart is MINE.]

My pneuma doubled and redoubled, driven to advancement by the appearance of a golden ideal. Sparks flew inside my soul, the King's Curse consuming all of them as they fell. All of them but one.

As that lonely spark fell and the Flame’s golden ichor caught fire in my veins, the blood staining my hands rose up from my skin and latched onto the sword’s hilt, spinning the blade around and sideways through the empty air.

Melpomene, Tragedy’s Muse, stared at the bronze blade buried in her stomach with something like disbelief. The world itself seemed to hold its breath, unable to reconcile the truth of my reaction. Then the King's Curse began its hungry work, and she threw her head back and screamed.

Across the city, every hero with Melpomene’s fingerprints on their heart fell like puppets with their strings cut, convulsing and crying out in sympathetic agony. The heavenly chorus of heaven’s gleeful spectators turned to shrieking fury as the Tragic Muse’s seven sisters converged on me like falling stars. They cut me with blades I didn’t have the slightest hope of understanding, let alone deflecting. They pierced me to my deepest core, beyond even my blade’s ability to expose me. They questioned all that I was and could ever be, and they declared my soul unworthy.

Who are you to touch our flesh? You are nothing. You are no one.

They sentenced me to death, condemning me to the Fates.

“NO.”

They were rejected.

A broad and heavy hand came down on my shoulder and gripped it tight, less than flesh but more than an apparition. As abruptly as the Muses had made themselves known - no, more so, because he truly hadn’t been there before this exact moment - the echo of a man loomed suddenly large over my shoulder. Facing away from me, one hand covering his face, his memory alone was a stark brand upon the world.

He wore a cloak of shining stars, and when he spoke the entirety of the Free Mediterranean stopped its heart to listen.

“NEVER NOTHING. NEVER NO ONE.” The voice of an era rang out across the heavens, shaking all who heard it.

The legacy of the Conqueror dared the world to prove him wrong, his declaration echoing with pride.

“THIS MAN TOO IS ALEXANDER.”

The Muses wailed and flung themselves away, scattering and converging on the Heroes arrayed before me. Elissa, Kyno, Lefteris, and Anastasia arched up like they’d been struck by lightning, their minds coming apart as their terror warred with the deafening urges of their Muses.

Golden heat surged to life behind my eyes and spilled forth in a torrent. Melpomene wrenched herself off my blade, sobbing in pain, and I allowed her to flee back to wherever it was that higher powers festered. I strode forward, shrugging off the hand on my shoulder, and the Conqueror’s stark reminder chuckled as it dispersed.

I had less than a century left, my heart’s blood all but depleted, and Prometheus’ golden ichor had been reduced by half before it started burning. Yet as I advanced, I felt the King's Curse withdraw its hunger from my soul until only a fraction of the burden remained - I understood intuitively that I had been paying a pretender’s price for my presumption up until this moment. Now, I suffered only the portion of the wanton blade’s hunger that even the Conqueror hadn’t been able to escape. The inescapable curse that plagued every king.

Now, the blade turned its full hunger upon its surroundings and inverted the balance of its efforts. It reached out to devour the people around me, heedless of their standing.

As if I would allow that.

Rosy flames erupted up and down the bronze blade, bolstered by burning ichor and defiant of its name. The blade absorbed it readily, but the fire fought viciously, and there was always more to take its place. Unable to pierce through the flames entirely, and unwilling to bite back at me, the King's Curse condensed its hunger to a practical burning edge.

The Heroes wavered as I came, on the edge of giving up entirely. If I desired it, I could end this without a fight. We could leave them here, broken and lost, and seek our answers elsewhere. It was the only good option remaining, really. I had lost more in less than a minute than most men would ever have to give, but I still had enough of my heart’s blood left to live for decades more to come. Combined with the Flame’s priceless golden ichor, I could leave this place stronger than any sophist had a right to be.

I could save this gift for a moment where it mattered, when my life was on the line again. These people weren’t a threat to me anymore. They were broken now, and they knew it as well as I did.

No.

Forty hands of my violent intent rose up around me, ten invisible to the naked eye, ten glowing rosy-bright, ten crackling with tribulation lightning, and ten stained by my scarlet sin. My eyes blazed as I burnt away another year of what few I had remaining, and those pankration hands multiplied four fold.

I wasn’t finished yet.

“I came here to answer a question. One that I was too afraid to ask, and one my virtuous heart already knew.”

The distant mountain and the glowing stadium shook as their despots and their gladiators finally reacted to the Conqueror’s curse. If our companions didn’t break on their own, the coming storm would surely do the work for them.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I decided. “I was born into a world of tarnished iron, but I refuse to die in one as well. No matter what it takes, I will make it golden-bright again. And when I do, you’ll see that you’ve always had a place within it.”

“What are you even saying?” Elissa breathed. I huffed a laugh. I supposed that was fair.

Enough sophistry. No more iron truths. No more golden lies.

I leveled my burning blade at their hearts, and the heavenly hands that held them tight.

“Higher power is a curse - your Muses aren’t worth the burden of their favor. You have to cut them out.”

“Or what?” Lefteris challenged me hysterically.

Sol appeared by my side. Selene’s shoulder bumped against mine. We burned and burned.

“Or I’ll do it myself,” I promised them.

Our companions lashed out like cornered animals, and we met them side-by-side.