Sol and Scythas vanished down an alleyway in pursuit of a kidnapping. A beat passed.

“You’re not going after them?” the cultivator with the bow asked me. He was less cautious now, tension easing out of his posture in Sol’s absence. I glanced at the Heroine and the cultivator in the crocodile skin and saw them relax as well. My nose wrinkled in irritation. I’d done all the work, yet in their eyes, I was just another competitor. Meanwhile, Sol was my perceptive and dangerous mentor.

Twice the renown for half the effort. Worthless Roman.

“Why should I?” I asked, miraculously not spitting blood in my annoyance. “I may be a western savage, but even I know that it’s rude to leave a conversation unfinished.”

“This conversation never should have started in the first place,” the Heroine declared flatly. The desert heat in her eyes was only embers now. The tribulation, Sol’s nebulous comment, and the apparent kidnapping of another cultivator had thoroughly doused her competitive spirit, it seemed. A shame.

“How cruel,” I said. I tilted my head, absently rubbing the cut she’d given me on the cheek. “You know, I still haven’t gotten your name. You started a fight before I could properly introduce myself.”

“I started—” A muscle in her scarred jaw throbbed, but the larger cultivator placed a hand on her shoulder, and she sighed, relenting.

“Elissa.”

“Griffon,” I replied in turn. “Well met.”

Elissa spat at my feet.

“And you, friends?” I asked the other two, ignoring her.

“Kyno,” said the man in the crocodile skin.

“Eleftherios,” said the archer with the gold-strung bow. “Most call me Lefteris.” That was fortunate because I would have shortened it anyway.

I struck out with three hands of pankration intent, and to their credit, all three of the Heroic cultivators surrounding me reacted instantly. Heroic pneuma rose and heart flames burned as three warriors, each individually capable of wiping me from the earth, prepared to defend themselves from my attack.

Each of my pankration hands slapped against their own and gripped tight, giving them a firm shake.

“Friendship seals our fates,” I said brightly, savoring their reactions. “So tell me, friends, what sort of games are at play here? What vile political maneuvering does the Cult of Raging Heaven get up to behind closed doors?” Or in the middle of crowded pavilions, as it were.

“Nothing beyond the usual,” Kyno said when it seemed the other two would be too uncomfortable to speak. “The strong wish to be stronger, and the weak are caught up in their schemes.”

“It was inevitable that there would be a… question of succession,” Lefteris said. “The cults of greater mystery are institutions that shape entire generations. The opportunity to lead one and decide what that future will look like? That sort of renown is something cultivators work countless natural lifetimes to achieve.”

“Something like this could never be peaceful,” Elissa said, eyes shifting minutely as she surveyed the crowd, looking for more thieves in the night.

“I don’t know about never,” I mused. “The Rosy Dawn’s transition of power was fairly simple, I’m told.”

The three Heroic cultivators looked at me as if I’d just said something incredibly dim.

“The Rosy Dawn is the Rosy Dawn,” said Lefteris.

“Damon Aetos is Damon Aetos,” Kyno amended.

Ho, so my father had admirers even here.

“Then you’re saying the fight for the throne has already begun.” I radiated disapproval despite not caring much at all—a skill I’d developed early in life to keep my cousins honest. “And before the funeral has even ended. Scythas was right. These elders truly are shameless.”

“Quiet!” Elissa hissed. “Do you want to die?”

“Not particularly.” I then continued on, finishing my thought, “The question now is: which elder do you three answer to?” There was a moment of heavy silence, punctuated by meaningful looks shared amongst the three of them.

“We’re here to compete,” Lefteris said as if that was answer enough.

Admittedly, it may have been. My knowledge of the wider world wasn’t yet what I wanted it to be. I knew precious little about the internal dynamic of the Raging Heaven Cult, or any of the mystery cults aside from the Rosy Dawn and the Burning Dusk. I didn’t have any of the context that was taken for granted among my “peers” in this circle.

I knew that the Raging Heaven was unique among the greater mystery cults, in the same way that the sanctuary city of Olympia was unique among the free city-states of the Mediterranean. As the nexus of all civilized cultures, the cult’s initiates were the finest of the finest, the most elite cultivators from all over the free world.

I knew that among these elders, each of whom would be on the level of my uncles at the bare minimum, only a few would have been born and raised in this city. The majority of the candidates for the kyrios position were foreign-born. Men who had been born and raised in far-flung city-states, with far-flung priorities and ideals. It was only natural that they would disdain propriety in the pursuit of those ideals. Home first, Olympia a distant second.

What I didn’t know was how an Olympic competitor’s status fit into that. Kyno seemed to see my confusion and elaborated in his rumbling tenor.

“Every four years, the entire civilized world converges in this city to witness people like us compete. For glory, for standing, and ultimately, for the title of Champion.”

“The Champion stands supreme above all other martial cultivators,” Lefteris said as if reciting a prayer.

“The Champion is their own existence,” Kyno explained. “Free from the trappings of filial obligation. Immune to any higher authority.”

“We crossed mountains and deserts and seas to catch lightning in our teeth,” Elissa said proudly. “Why should we involve ourselves in the squabbling of politicians?”

I knew I liked these people.

“Why involve you in this at all, then?” I supposed it wasn’t necessarily the case that the cultivator being kidnapped was another competitor, but it felt right. The way the three of them had been acting since they’d arrived was all too telling. Even after Sol left, there was tension in their souls. He’d confirmed something that they had been suspecting already, and it wasn’t difficult to guess what it was.

They were jumping at every shadow. And every pankration handshake as well. They were targets tonight, and they knew it.

“The Champion’s accomplishments are their own and can be no one else’s,” Lefteris finally said. He frowned, eyes shifting towards the center of the agora. “But there are some who claim a portion of the glory regardless.”

The crowd had rapidly thinned around us, all that remained being those powerful enough to withstand the sound of the rites. Through the diminishing haze of smoke and embers, I could just see an outline of some sort of raised platform. There was movement within, but it was impossible to discern anything further.

Kyno’s arms crossed over a broad chest. He frowned darkly. “It isn’t uncommon for matters of promotion and other rewards within the cult to be predicated on the success of a city’s representative in the games.”

“And what greater promotion than to the mantle of the kyrios?” I asked rhetorically, nodding along. They were eliminating the competition, sabotaging the athletic talents of the opposing home cities. It was just the sort of indirect attack that usually made me sick.

Somehow, though, the execution made up for the intent. The funeral rites continued to sow chaos in the ranks of the citizenry, and the remnants of ember and smoke that had been struck down by the heavens circulated through the crowd, obscuring sight and smell. In the confusion, I witnessed another kidnapping.

The eddies of my Sophic sense brushed against their kicking feet like low tide waves. They were younger than me, wearing fine lavender robes and boasting the pneuma of a Sophic cultivator, fifth rank. For all the good it was currently doing them.

I couldn’t hear them scream, but the sight of them thrashing in the arms of two masked assailants carried loudly enough. In a flash of motion, they were gone, dragging into a residential building and condemned by a front door slammed shut. It wasn’t just the competitors being targeted, it seemed.

“This is vicious,” I said appreciatively. “They’re not even bothering to hide it.”

“Why would they?” Lefteris’s lips twisted, working over a bitter taste in his mouth. “They’re all doing the same thing. And they know none of the others will dare to interrupt the funeral rites. They’d be crippling themselves.”

So it was the elders conducting the funeral. I’d suspected it already, but having it confirmed was nice as well. A Tyrant seen off by Tyrants. A jealous affair, to be sure. I started walking towards the thinning miasma in the center of the agora.

Elissa caught me by the arm. Her hand gripped tightly around the laurel leaf crown I wore on my bicep, my own champion’s token from the farce my father had put on for me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked in a quiet, deadly tone.

“Introducing myself to the wise men of the cult.” What else?

“Not now,” Kyno said. I cocked an eyebrow, but he only shook his head once, with solemn finality. “Interrupting a man’s funeral is cause for retribution. Interrupting a Tyrant’s…”

“If the heavens opened up for a second time tonight and struck you down where you stood, it would be a mercy,” Elissa promised me. How sweet. She was concerned about my health. As if sensing the thought in my head, she scoffed and shoved me away.

I smiled wryly, shrugging with twenty-two arms. “I’ll defer to my seniors.” I’d still do it if the opportunity presented itself, of course. I had nothing to fear from the heavens. If I was struck by tribulation lightning for my hubris, I would simply not die. “Are we to mourn while our fellow sophists are snatched out from under us, then? I have to admit, we handle the passing of friends differently in the Scarlet City.”

“The elders are the elders,” Kyno echoed Scythas’ sentiment from before. “The actions of others can have no impact on our duty tonight. No matter their standing.”

“A great man died,” Lefteris agreed as if remembering. “The greatest I’ve ever known. To do anything less than mourn for the length of his eulogy would be to insult his epic.”

“You respected him quite a bit,” I observed.

“We respect him still,” Kyno firmly corrected me.

“Of course we do,” Elissa said, in that way of hers. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “He was one of us. One of the best of us. A breaker of chains.”

“Leader of men,” Lefteris added.

“Slayer of monsters,” Kyno murmured.

“Olympic Champion,” I realized. They each nodded.

“Epics like his can’t be told in a single story,” Lefteris said somberly. “Among heaven and earth, it’s common sense that men reign supreme over beasts. It’s even more obvious that cultivators reign supreme over lesser men. But the kyrios. The kyrios stood above us all. His very existence laid siege to the heights of Olympus Mons.”

I hummed. “But he failed.”

They didn’t react as I expected them to. There was no outrage, no You dare?s or You’re tempting the Fates!, and no blood spat. The flames in their eyes only dimmed, and their divinely sculpted bodies slumped ever so slightly.

“He failed,” Kyno agreed.

Elissa looked bleakly up. “So what hope do we have?”

In the aftermath of a great man’s failure, while our fellow sophists were pilfered in the night by the grasping hands of greedy old Tyrants, we considered the legacy of the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult. A great man, who, in the end, had been only that.

A man.