As a child grew old in body and soul, walking that crucial transitory bridge between adolescence and adulthood, the first iteration of their identity finally cemented itself. In those formative years, a human being laid the foundation for who they would be in their highest highs and lowest lows. Just as the bridges between realms were the most crucial for a cultivator’s development, so too were those formative years critical for the mundane growth that every human being experienced.

Body and soul. The body’s growth was self-evident. Bone and muscle grew into their adult frames, cherubic faces turned lean and angular. Human beings were made in the image of the divine. It simply took time for our worthless clay selves to take the proper shape.

The soul’s growth was less easily observed. In my formative years, the development of my body had seen to itself. I’d chiseled it from marble a little more each day, testing myself against all that would stand and fight me. Progress could be measured in practical terms. It could be seen in the definition of my body. But my soul’s development was not so straightforward.

Reason, spirit, and hunger. It was no easy thing for a lion to grow old in a cage. Perhaps a wild childhood wouldn’t have been any better for me, but I doubted it. Growing up within the sterile halls of the Rosy Dawn estates, I had no choice but to refine my burgeoning soul through abstraction. Adventures half-lived through others. Tribulations that I could not undergo myself, lessons that I had not personally suffered in order to learn.

It wasn’t ideal, but I made do with what I was given—as I always had. Just as I chiseled my body from marble, so too did I forge my soul from purest gold. I created myself in the image of those who came before me. I devoured stories of Heroes and Tyrants, drew from them the principles of a virtuous life, and with each and every one, the flames of my spirit were fanned higher.

I understood the anatomy of an epic better than most. A story worth telling. For each and every one, the beginning was always the same. Even the Muses needed someone to sing of—before the vile monsters, before the triumphs and the tragedies, you had to prepare your audience for what was to come.

You had to set the stage.

“You say you’re from the Rosy Dawn,” Elissa said, not hesitating to question me. She stepped closer, shoulder to shoulder with Sol, lowering her voice so that no one else in the agora could overhear. “The Raging Heaven Cult hasn’t seen a fresh face from across the Ionian in nearly two decades. I checked. What’s changed?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Aside from the obvious?”

The Heroine took that about how I expected her to. Beside me on the lip of the odd fountain of rising water, Jason cursed under his breath.

The death of the kyrios still hung, like a funeral shroud, over every interaction within the Half-Step City. Reconstruction efforts could be seen on every residential street, the Tyrant’s last gasp putting countless families out of their homes. There was a profound grief, a bleak pessimism, that permeated every interaction if you looked close enough. It was only natural that our Heroic friends would think first of his passing upon hearing such a suggestive question.

After all, what were the odds that Sol and I had just happened to set sail for Olympia on the day of the kyrios’ passing? Long odds indeed.

“You said that Sol was fighting demons on the western front,” Jason said, choosing to set aside that particular suspicion for the moment. The Hero that Sol had snatched back from the shadows looked searchingly at him. “How far west? And what sort of demons?”

Sol stared at him in silence. That storm flashed in his eyes, his influence lashing out in every direction. It was an unconscious reaction, I knew, but they didn’t. Both Heroic cultivators visibly tensed. Jason set his jaw and leaned forward.

“If you want me to follow you, I have to know where we’re going. And I deserve to know who’s leading me there. Who are you, Solus?”

For a long moment, even I wasn’t sure what he’d say. I wouldn’t lie for any existence on this earth, not even him, but I wouldn’t force him to tell the truth either.

Thankfully, he chose to do so himself. My brother, for all his traumas, was no coward

“There are demons in the city of Carthage. Wolves in the shape of men. They walk on two legs and fight with arms and armor, and they can cultivate. A year and a half ago, they consumed the city of Rome. In another year and a half, they’ll have consumed everything west of the Scarlet City.”

Elissa was immediately skeptical. Jason, on the other hand—I saw the sudden fear in his eyes, and the rage, before he overcame both and hid them from view. Ho?

“Monsters of that caliber, in those numbers, and the Scarlet City didn’t see fit to warn her sister cities?” Elissa asked.

“When’s the last time the colonies told us anything?” Jason responded. Elissa inclined her head grudgingly. He continued, almost hopefully, “But if this wasn’t enough for Damon Aetos to break his silence, then he must not consider it a threat to those of us east of the Ionian. Toppling a few barbarian nations is one thing. But a free city-state built by the children of Helen? A monster’s primitive approximation of cultivation simply can’t compare. They’re only wolves.”

Sol’s influence rippled.

“You’ve made two assumptions, just now,” I informed the Hero before my brother snapped. I glanced Elissa’s way. “Both of you.”

Jason frowned. “Enlighten me.”

Gladly. “You asked why the Scarlet City hasn’t sent word of the coming threat,” I said first, savoring their realization. I gestured lazily. “And yet here we are.”

“And the second?” Elissa pressed.

“You assumed that when I said the demons of Carthage could cultivate, I was exaggerating. You decided that I was referring to the unrefined strength of monsters and animals,” Sol said coldly. “I wasn’t.”

Silence.

“Something like that,” Elissa finally whispered. She was unable to vocalize the rest.

“If that’s the case,” Jason picked up for her in a strangled tone, “why are you telling us here like this? Why not… someone…”

I chuckled. “In power?”

Elissa’s knuckles were white around the hilt of her blade. “Enough games. What are you here for?”

What could I do but tell them the truth?

“A good time.”

My virtuous heart would accept nothing less.

“You really are mad,” Jason said wonderingly.

My eyes rolled. Always the same. “Of course I am. What sane man looks upon all that the gods have given us, all the bounties of nature and its earthly pleasures, and decides that they are not enough? What is a cultivator if not a madman? Where I come from, we don’t make any excuses for our behavior.”

I tilted my head to face Sol’s little reaver, so small in spirit despite the grandeur of his soul. How was it that a Hero, the subject of an epic all his own, could be so pathetic in the face of overwhelming danger?

“Until death or divinity,” I said. “While those who came before us plummet to the earth on melting wax wings, we are all flying perilously into the sun. What could possibly be more insane than that?”

I’d felt the same instinctive revulsion when I saw Alazon turn tail and run from Sol in that club, only moments after he’d so confidently staked his claim on the place and all those within it. Another Hero. Another shining soul acknowledged by both the Muses and the Fates. Another coward. How dare he lay claim to the same heights as Nikolas and the greats? How dare these Heroic cultivators cringe away from the wrath of Tyrants, when liberation was their central creed?

How dare they act weak when they were strong?

“The two of you aren’t who you are by mistake,” Sol said. They latched onto his quiet intent like a lifeline, making the unfortunate assumption that he was the saner of the two of us. “You each have something that drives you forward in the face of adversity. Something that even tribulation, heaven’s lightning wrath, could not take from you. A Tyrant’s retribution is nothing compared to that. Is that not so?”

Both Hero and Heroine nodded.

“For us, this is one of those things. The free Mediterranean is meant to be a paragon of enlightened virtue. The city of Olympia is meant to be the jewel in that crown. And yet, I’ve walked the steps of your mountain cult, chased the shadows down your halls, and seen such acts of wicked vice that it would make your kyrios weep if he was still alive to see them.”

“After twenty years, the rosy fingers of dawn have stretched themselves across the Ionian Sea once more, and what is the first thing they’ve found?” I asked quietly, adding my weight to Sol’s subtle rhetoric. “Injustice.”

“There are certain injustices in this life that a Hero won’t ever stand for, is that not so?” Sol asked. Slowly, reluctantly, both nodded again. Sol considered them both for a long moment. Then, almost gently, he said, “This is one of them.”

Jason shook his head. “This sort of thing… I know what I said before. And I do want to help. What you’re trying to do… it’s righteous. It’s heroic!”

Elissa sighed and finished his thought. “But most tragedies are at the start.”

The mask of my tribulation burned on my hip, opposite my uncle's sword.

“What about you two?” I asked.

“Us?”

“There is no us,” Elissa said shortly.

I waved an impatient hand. “Yes, yes, I get it, you aren’t friends. I’m asking what it is that makes the two of you tick. Where is your line in the sand? What are you here for?”

The two Heroic cultivators shared a look. The Heroine with her scars answered for both of them again.

“We’re here to compete.”

“We haven’t lied to you,” Sol said. The message was clear. Don’t lie to us.

“It’s true,” Jason insisted. “We’re here for the Olympic Games. All of us are here looking for glory.”

“Just because something is not a lie doesn’t make it fully true,” I said, ignoring the look that Sol shot at me. “Allow me to refine the question, then. Why are you here to compete? What is it you hope to find in a laurel leaf crown?”

“What are you running from?” Sol asked.

Enlightened thinkers placed such emphasis on cultivation, on the quantification of the soul, that we often forgot even the greatest among us were made of the same flesh and blood as the least. They had the same minds, the same hearts and desires. A Hero could be swayed as easily as a Citizen, as easily as a mortal, even, under the proper conditions.

Sol and I struck out with our rhetoric in the most mundane sense, both of us from different angles, and in that moment, two Heroic cultivators faltered. I knew it as soon as I saw the first stone fall within them. Sol saw it too, I was sure. We had them.

We were all here for our own reasons, true enough. But there was a thread that connected us all, and Sol and I had pulled it taut around their throats.

“… Say that you succeed in this,” Elissa finally said. “And say that we help you declaw the cats’ paws. What have we accomplished, then, aside from angering greater powers?”

“Take away their shadows and they’ll have nothing left but the light,” I answered simply. “They want to fight for the title of kyrios? So be it. Let them fight like men, without proxies, and to the strongest goes the crown.”

“The strongest fighter,” Jason realized. “The strongest leader of men. Not necessarily the strongest politician.”

“In times of peace, a good politician is a great thing,” I agreed.

“But in times of war…” Elissa half-recited, frustration clear in her bearing. Remembering some past lesson and hating the fact that it rang true. “What then? You’ll force the issue? How will you ensure that the… proper candidate…”

Jason and Elissa both looked at Sol.

What could we, two mysterious cultivators with no established spheres of influence, have to gain from orchestrating such a conflict? In a conflict between Tyrants, it was self-evident that only a Tyrant could possibly emerge victorious. So what were we playing at? The audacious young competitor and his master of unspecified power?

In that moment, they teetered on the edge of an utterly outrageous assumption. Unwilling to believe it, but unable to fully dismiss it either.

I smiled secretively, leaning in. “The privileges of an Olympic Champion are surely grand, I won’t deny it. But it’s not often the kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult owes you a favor.” In the end, even Heroic cultivators were still just that. Cultivators.

And cultivators, at their core, were entirely selfish existences.

Sol and I reached out and pulled them up onto the stage.