One of the better indicators of a person’s character was the way they treated their juniors. The hunger for standing was a natural element of every human soul, and the temptation to abuse that standing was ever with us. Not always for its own sake, perhaps, but all too often opportunities presented themselves just out of reach, and all too often there were other people, subordinates or friends or even family, positioned just right to act as stepping stones so you could close that distance.

For many, it was a question that almost didn’t warrant asking. When it was nothing more than glory or fortune on the line, the temptation was strong enough. But for cultivators, those who coveted divinity’s distant star, existences that gained years of extended life for each small advancement? Well. For them, it wasn’t a question at all.

The path to heaven was only wide enough for one man to walk it at a time. My tutors had hammered that into me at an early age. In the end, we were all alone when we challenged the Fates. The only uncertainty was how many lesser men we stomped down on our way up.

Eventually, a cultivator placed all beneath them. It was only a matter of when. We called it the Tyrannic Realm for a reason, after all.

Still, there were those that understood this fact and accepted it as a necessary consequence of defying what the Fates had planned for them—good and bad. And on the other hand, there were those that hid behind it like a shield, cringing away from all responsibility.

I was pleased to find that Elissa was the former of the two.

“What did I say? It isn’t a matter of force or finesse, it’s your grip,” the Heroine said sharply. The scars on her marble skin turned an otherwise stern frown into something truly vicious.

The boy she was lecturing, a tan youth that looked to be somewhere between Heron and Castor’s age, stood like he had been struck, quickly shifting his grip to something less comfortable for him but better overall. His blade was a fine thing, simply crafted with impeccable materials. Flawless iron, and a wavering line of bronze traveling through its surface like a serpent or a sun ray. Looking at it and the boy that held it, nervous and eager and hopeful, his Raging Heaven attire neatly folded and set aside in a way that spoke of his care for it, I got the impression that they were together a product of simple laborers and backwater settlements.

For him to have qualified for admittance to the Raging Heaven at his age, the indigo jewel of the Half-Step City, he must have been truly talented. His pneuma, firmly in the Sophic Realm, spoke to this as well. Still, even among prodigies, there were those who stood above.

While the boy and four others brandished naked iron, Elissa held only an olive tree’s branch in her loose grip. It was more than enough.

Desert-heat eyes scoured the boy’s form until, satisfied, she made a come-hither gesture with her free hand. All five took a different approach, some lunging low and others taking wide, sweeping strikes. Her olive tree branch whipped out with improbable speed, not only taking strikes from weapons that should have severed it with ease, but knocking them aside without care. She pivoted—pranced, really—moving through them with the grace of a dancer at a symposium.

Without looking, she whipped her branch around to meet the knife-edge of my descending palm, scowling as the Rosy Fingers of Dawn lit her impromptu weapon on fire. Five young Philosophers of the Raging Heaven leapt back, alarmed and shouting.

“What do you want, Griffon?” Elissa asked irritably. I smiled and shrugged, pivoting on one foot and driving up with my other hand.

[The sun rises.]

I didn’t manifest any violent intent, and my attack wasn’t particularly quick. In an instant, the Heroine figured out what I was doing and scoffed, but, nonetheless, she twisted with a similarly languid motion and swept her burning branch at my hand, forcing the strike aside.

“This lowly sophist heard that a Heroine was dispensing wisdom to her juniors. What else could I do but seek some out for myself? For a newly minted Philosopher, such a fortuitous encounter might only come once in my life.” As I spoke, I led her through something that was as much a dance as it was a fight, a nameless game of choreographed violence that I had often played with Nikolas when I was younger.

“Newly minted Philosopher,” she repeated as we moved, almost offended in her skepticism. In response, I flexed my Pneuma. It was undeniably of the Sophic Realm, first rank.

Elissa didn’t believe it for a moment. But the boys did.

“Junior!”

“Without even asking!”

“The audacity!” The boy with the shoddy grip rushed me with his blade poised. He was older than the trio of boys I’d slapped around the day before, closer to his physical prime, and that made his superior cultivation far more dangerous.

A pankration hand yanked him back by the white cloth hanging around his waist. When he jerked around to strike at it another two hammered up between his legs. The boy choked and fell to the dirt.

“I’ve noticed a trend among the initiates of this cult,” I said conversationally, splaying ten more hands in a burning ring around us, warding off the other philosophers. They eyed me warily while their fellow gagged on the ground.

“I don’t care.” There had been a bare flicker of something fatally sharp in those desert heat eyes, an instant of protective rage. It was gone as quick as it came, when she realized I’d only given the boy something convincing to think about.

“Yes, you do,” I said easily, continuing our dance without missing a step. It was a game as much as any of the others I’d played the last couple days, a lighthearted representation of a fatal encounter. We took lazy, almost sloppy swings at one another, but the strikes they represented were a murderous blur in my mind’s eye. This was not a game won by increments. The first to falter lost.

As her branch represented a blade, and my fists were only that, I was at a firm disadvantage. In theory. But I had been smacking down live steel since I was a boy. And this game was entirely a question of tactics.

Elissa’s swordplay was some of the best I’d ever seen, but it had been Nikolas Aetos that taught me this game.

“Tell me, then,” she demanded, focusing intently as the blade of my left hand met the tip of her branch and gently burnt it away.

I could almost see the image in her head, of ten thousand pankration hands slamming against her blade with ruinous heat, breaking it at its imperfect points. As far as she was concerned, we had both only been feeling one another out when we clashed at the funeral. She thought I had far more to give.

I glanced at the young men ringed around us. Outrage and jealousy abounded, and it was easy enough to see why. I hadn’t inserted myself into her impromptu lesson immediately, after all. In observing, I’d spent as much time taking the measure of her juniors in relation to her as I had of her relation to them.

It was fortunate enough for a cultivator in the Heroic Realm to give you a moment of their time. It was doubly fortunate when they were a beautiful woman and you were just discovering your body’s earthly desires. These five had sought her out on this jagged peak within spitting distance of the Storm That Never Ceased because she was by far the best swordsman that would give them the time of day.

“They’re all soft.”

But more than that, they’d come to bask in her attention.

Five Sophic cultivators seethed at my disdain, their influence lashing out impotently at my pankration hands. Their egos broke against the rosy fingers of dawn without resistance, closer to sea spray than any true wave.

“They’re young,” Elissa reproached me. Ho, there was real anger in that desert heat. How surprising.

“Children are young,” I dismissed, ducking a sharp jab at my eyes and thrusting a palm at her kidney. She twisted artfully, fuchsia silk shifting across her sculpted skin. I snorted as five sets of eyes stared. “Cultivators are only ever unrefined.”

“It isn’t enough to say things that sound meaningful,” Elissa replied, striking. “It has to actually mean something, too.”

“How cruel.” Advance, feint, step back. “But you know, it isn’t enough to dismiss a point you disagree with, either.” Above our heads, the undying storm rumbled. “You still have to prove me wrong.”

Elissa scowled and suddenly shifted the rhythm she’d kept thus far, adopting a new style. The transition was so smooth that I almost didn’t notice in time. I leaned away from the next three strikes, raising an eyebrow.

She caved. “Soft in what way, then?”

“I have a cousin,” I said, and the pankration hands surrounding us turned their palms inward. Two went rigid and flat like daggers and were seized by two others in turn. They began to dance through the air in a series of sharp jabs, slashes, and cuts.

For all that he had harbored absurd shame over his lack of manifested virtue, the little kyrios had never allowed himself to wallow and shirk his martial pursuits. The five young Philosophers watched with reluctant fascination as I illustrated Myron’s dagger forms. One boy, in particular, with delicate features and thin fingers, traced the motions with intense focus. He’d come here to learn the sword, ostensibly, but knives were clearly his true interest.

“You have a cousin,” Elissa repeated flatly.

“Several, actually. But the youngest is nine years old, and already his foundations are packed tighter than anything I’ve seen on this pretty mountain. Compared to these boys, his cultivation may be lesser, but he is the better man. When discourse turns to dispute, he possesses the only characteristic that truly matters. The element that these boys lack.”

One of the two pankration suddenly twisted and threw its makeshift dagger-hand. It drove through the stone behind the sun ray swordsman, just missing his head. He flinched sideways.

“An edge.”

Elissa said nothing.

She was surprisingly kind to her juniors, that was the truth. She was surprisingly tolerant of their obvious motives, that was the truth as well. She was even, most surprising of all, a bit protective of her junior mystikos in spite of the way she’d treated Scythas and me at the kyrios’ funeral. But in the end, there was one aspect of her that was not surprising at all. She was a Heroine, and she knew what distinguished those that ascended from those that did not.

She bore its mark all over her body.

And she knew that these children didn’t have it.

“What am I missing here, honored Heroine?” I pressed her quietly, closing the distance and drawing her into the final exchange. “This is the Half-Step City, isn’t it? This is the cult that only accepts the finest souls of the free Mediterranean, isn’t it? So tell me, why are they all so soft?”

I knew why, of course. I felt it in my bones, in the new marrow that coursed through them like ruby veins. But some things were too important not to confirm. Our exchanges became frenzied, though the speed never changed. Elissa’s burning eyes darted this way and that, tracking burning fists that didn’t exist. In my mind’s eye, I waded through a storm of bronze.

Iron sharpens iron, she spoke in the voice of her soul, a clear chime to my Sophic sense.

Her burning branch halted beside my right ear. The Heroine snarled in frustration and threw down her weapon. I tapped her chest a second time, directly over her heart. One of the boys made a disbelieving sound and was quickly hushed by his fellows.

“Elaborate,” I invited her, stepping back and inclining my head. She mirrored me, grudgingly.

“Iron sharpens iron,” she said out loud. There was something there, a contempt for someone other than me. “A strong foundation requires strong opposition.”

“Naturally,” I agreed. I waved a hand at the young Philosophers. “So then, you’re saying these shining gems of the free Mediterranean didn’t experience any true hardship on the road to the Raging Heaven Cult?”

It was rather sad, watching them throttle their indignation before Elissa could notice it. As if they could hide anything from her. She pretended not to see it anyway, for their sake.

“You know I’m not saying that.”

“I do.”

“Then why—” She shook her head. Disgusted with me, no doubt. “The initiates here are all exceptional cultivators, the best of the best. It isn’t their fault that this place is the way it is.”

“Whose fault is it, then?” I asked. It had been a gut feeling, a supposition built upon small observations and simple intuition, but here and now, as one of the stronger existences in the enlightened world stared at me silently, unwilling to speak, I knew it was the truth.

Tyrants.

“You grew up in a nowhere nation, separated from the enlightened world by an entire ocean,” she finally said. I nodded because it was true. “If you decided one day that you were going to beat a rival of yours to death, who could punish you for it?”

My father. “The kyrios of the Rosy Dawn.”

“Damon Aetos,” she said, and the immortal storm roared above our heads. “Did he make a habit of intervening directly in the affairs of his younger initiates?”

I snorted.

Elissa nodded, taking that for the answer that it was. “Then if not him, who? The elders?”

“If they noticed.”

“Exactly.” Her jaw, slender and refined and marred by deep scars, flexed. “There are limits to the perceptions of Philosophers and Heroes. Lapses in awareness and simple lack of care. It is not in a Philosopher's nature to ignore life’s greater mysteries in favor of tending to children. It is not in a Hero’s nature to ignore life’s greater threats in favor of small disputes.”

She explained the problem to me in the only way she could—by explaining everything else instead.

It was not within the capabilities of Philosophers and Heroes to keep track of everything that took place in their vicinity. Nor was it in their nature to care overly much about what those beneath them did. To subjugate them at every perceived slight.

But Tyrants were a different existence altogether.

“Eight kings, but only one crown,” I mused. The alarm that took hold of her in that moment was as sharp and immediate as it had been the night of the funeral. Lightning flashed above our heads.

“Must you always tempt the Fates?” she whispered furiously.

I tilted my head to regard the five frowning philosophers. At a certain point, they had started to understand the difference between us. They regarded me as prey regarded a predator. As they should have from the start.

“My senior brothers,” I said and smiled as they leaned in, unconsciously, to listen. “You came here for wisdom, so listen for a moment. You are surrounded, and you are watched, that is true. It’s entirely possible that no matter what you do beneath this curtain of tribulation, you will be angering a lion. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t act.”

Without looking, I picked up the discarded olive branch with a pankration hand and offered it to Elissa. She eyed it like it was a real blade after all.

“Neutrality won’t protect you forever,” I promised them all. “The higher-ups may only be watching for now, but they’ll get hungry eventually. And when the lion is hungry, he eats.”

The young woman, once a crow but now unmasked and someone again, choked as the hungry raven on the right gripped her by the throat and slammed her against a marble pillar. Chains rattled and went taut, binding her to the stone and throttling her cultivation.

“She wasn’t wrong,” the hungry raven on the right mused in a voice of shifting sand. “Cowards you may be, skulking around in the dark, but you’re the only ones getting anything done around here. A cat’s paw is still dangerous, isn’t it?”

The young woman gritted her teeth and thrashed against her binds. The raven chuckled.

“Which king do you serve?” Her small part of providence urged her not to speak, to give nothing away. As if she would have. The young woman kept her silence.

The hungry raven on the left drove its bronze spear through her thigh, and she choked back a scream.

“Where is the man who knows everything?” the hungry raven on the left demanded.

“I asked first,” cawed the other.

“We’re not doing this.”

“Anonymity isn’t an excuse to be rude.”

The hungry raven on the left ignored its bare-chested counterpart, leaning down until its face was level with hers. By its build, it was almost certainly a man. And while before she had been nothing but shadows and unseen malice, she was now Harmodias of Krókos. A woman, her wrists bound to the marble column by chains. At their mercy. She closed her eyes and leaned away from it all.

“What do you know of the man who knows everything?” he asked again.

“Nothing,” she whispered. He twisted the spear’s head in her thigh. She winced and shivered. “Nothing.”

He considered her silently while the other raven waited impatiently, resting his weight on the shaft of a ludicrously large bronze war axe. Finally, he sighed and drew back. She could feel the end approaching. After all this time, all that Harmodias had given in pursuit of the heights, this was where she succumbed. In the dark, with no one to mourn her passing. It was too cruel. It was simply too cruel—

The raven on the left broke the chain that bound her, and without another word, they threw her off the side of Kaukoso Mons.

“Worthless—” she heard the raven on the right begin to shout before the whistling winds stole it all away. Her small part of providence suddenly came alive within her unseen shadow, cawing and flapping its wings furiously as it burst out of a fold in her clothes and took flight. It would return to its source, and they would know what had taken place here. Who had killed her, and what they were after. If nothing else, she could take some comfort in that. Her death wouldn’t be entirely without meaning.

The last thing she saw was an eagle cutting through the sky like an arrow. It overtook her crow in an instant, sinking its talons into ink-black flesh and careening back up the mountain.

Harmodias opened her mouth to scream and promptly slammed through the sloped roof of one of Olympia’s nicer bathhouses.