When I was seven years old, I called upon Nikolas to face me in the marble octagon. He was exactly twice my age at that time, and his cultivation was exactly one realm above my own.

A fifth-rank Citizen, challenging a Philosopher equally far along in their own realm. It was utterly absurd, and everyone involved had known it. Nikolas’ peers and his followers had laughed and urged him up. It was all a game to them, of course, a play fight between the junior and senior young pillars of the Rosy Dawn. The gymnasiarch, a famously no-nonsense man, had evidently felt the same way because he’d allowed it.

But when Nikolas gave in to the heckling and climbed up onto that marble stage, when he met my eyes and we clasped forearms, I knew he saw the truth of it. And though he asked me in a private whisper if I was sure, he did not hesitate to oblige me.

There was a reason I admired my cousin.

When the gymnasiarch gave the call to fight, my cousin came at me with the full force of everything he had as a cultivator, and I met him with the same force in turn. It was over in seconds.

I lost horribly, of course. The gymnasiarch was furious, and even Nikolas’ companions within the cult weren’t sure what face to show him. It was understandable. After all, my elder cousin had never treated them with the same ferocity that he had served me in those few brutal seconds.

But it was exactly what I’d needed. In that moment, as my face struck the edge of the marble octagon and two of my teeth were knocked into the back of my throat, as my right elbow loudly broke, I saw for the first time the difference between heaven and earth. And I knew, without a doubt in my heart, that it was not an impossible gap to bridge.

I never fought my elder cousin seriously again. There was no reason to. I knew myself, and I knew him well enough to understand that I wasn’t ready, and before long, my father bundled him up on a ship and sent him out into the world, leaving me to take on the role of young aristocrat in its full scope. But that was fine. I had gotten what I wanted.

The greatest men knew their limits better than anyone else.

The vagrant philosopher raised one hand against me, three fingers tucked in and two pointing up to heaven. A lecturer’s pose, as he prepared to educate me on the vast distance between us once more. Unfortunately for him, Romans make for horribly impolite students. Sol surged up from the ground behind the philosopher and tackled him, a furious grimace on his face made utterly vicious by his broken nose.

I struck the old man like a falling star, hammering his face with twenty blazing hands and using the instability that Sol had provided for me to knock him off his feet.

Gravitas hit me like a tidal wave, and this time I allowed it to wash me away in its current, flying backwards as if I was falling out of the sky. The philosopher’s counterpoint, something wordless and unseen, reached out for Sol in my place. I disdained that with twenty pankration hands, dragging my brother away from the attack.

The entrance to the cave collapsed in on itself before we could make it fully out, an unfortunate coincidence I was sure. Gravitas struck the falling stone but was somehow dispersed, leaving us trapped inside.

I planted my feet and pulled Sol up to stand beside me.

The vagrant philosopher snorted, annoyed, and brushed off his tunic as he stood. Without looking, I reached over and gripped Sol’s nose, setting it back properly with a nauseating crunch. He cursed, and at the same time, he gripped a finger of mine that I hadn’t noticed dislocating and popped it back into place. Silver threads of lightning sensation shot up my hand, and we were good as new.

“Let’s try this again, old man,” I said gaily, shifting into a proper pankration stance. Fists loosely clenched in front of me, the majority of my weight braced on my launching foot. “My name is Griffon and this is Sol. Who do you think you are to lay your ragged hands on my brother?”

He appeared unimpressed, but he answered. “My name is Socrates. I am who I am.”

When I was seven years old, my elder cousin taught me what it was like to fight an opponent that I could not possibly overcome. I never forgot that lesson. And here, now, I reaped the bitter rewards of it.

With our companions it might have been possible. But alone?

Oh well. I hadn’t asked for it to be easy.

“Let’s exchange discourse,” I proposed.

“If we must.”

The three of us exploded into motion.

“I’ve asked the Roman already, but I’ll ask it again. What is it that you think you’re accomplishing here?” Socrates asked, parrying my opening combination with short, efficient chops and blocks. He turned sideways as Sol lunged past me with his bronze spear, avoiding it by a whisper.

“Here?” I caught a straight left punch with five pankration hands overlaid on one another and swallowed back blood at the shockwave impact it sent through my soul. “I’m reminding an old man that experience is no substitute for vigor.”

“More deflection,” he said, catching a flurry of punches on raised forearms, protecting his temples and the sensitive juncture between his jaw and his neck. We each raised a knee at the same time, bone slammed against bone, and I winced as something in me cracked.

Sol struck out with the butt of the spear, catching Socrates in his kidney and forcing him back a step. The philosopher took the spear in the exchange, and Sol didn’t fight him for it, instead adopting his own loose, roughshod boxing stance.

“Deflection,” Socrates said again, scornfully. He tucked the bronze spear—inexplicably, all ten feet of it—into a fold in his tunic and crossed his arms. “Doublespeak, half-truths, and implication. You progressed to the second realm and think that people calling you Philosophers makes it true.”

Socrates tilted his head as if to urge us out the door, and in the eddies of his influence, I felt the bare flicker of something crucial, something profound. I would have missed it entirely if I hadn’t been looking directly for it already.

I blinked, startled, as Sol reached both hands under my arms and pulled me bodily to my feet. At some point, somehow, I had been driven to my knees.

Lights illuminated the walls of the cave despite the lack of any visible source. Shadows danced across the stone, resolving themselves into vague shapes that I couldn’t quite decipher. Socrates advanced forward a step.

“All too often,” he said, “young men mistake sophistry for sophisticated thought. It is not enough to be convincing.”

And then he was abruptly gone. I frowned, wary, and glanced around. Sol did the same beside me, casting out with his riptide influence in search of the vagrant philosopher.

“It is not enough to win the argument,” an old man said, walking up to us.

“Not now, grandfather,” I said, waving a distracted hand as I ran the incorporeal fingers of my violent intent across the walls of the cave, searching for a crack or a crevice, something the philosopher could have escaped through.

Wait.

Sol shook it off a moment before I did, reaching across my body to catch an uppercut that would have lifted me cleanly off my feet. I saw the tightly controlled agony in his face, heard the crack of his hand breaking. Socrates leaned back and kicked him into the far wall for his troubles.

“You see? Distraction is not enough,” Socrates said. “Whether in a fight or a conversation. You need fundamentals.” I inhaled sharply and closed to engage. I sought to enhance myself with the principles of my soul, but he countered each and every one as I invoked them, just as he had outside the bathhouse.

What remained was pure technique, the conditioning of our bodies. Fundamental qualities.

“What is rhetoric if not the art of convincing others?” I countered with words and with clenched fists. “A philosopher is above all else a wise man. And I say that a wise man knows what he wants. I say that a wise man knows the value of his time! Why shouldn’t I use the tools at my disposal to get what I want?”

I landed a blow to his ribs and took two on the chin for my troubles, but Sol came rushing in before I could be fully put down. He swung with quick and ugly intent. I could perfectly imagine him in a camp filled with rowdy soldiers, brawling and knocking out fellow legionaries to blow off steam.

“A wise man knows what he wants,” Socrates repeated. “And yet when I ask you what you’re here to accomplish, you play glib and dance around it. What are you here for, boy?”

“I’m here for a challenge,” I said, and my heart sang the truth of it.

“Looking for a challenge, or looking to be challenged?”

I smirked faintly and whipped my body around with my right heel as the pivot point, striking at his temple with a roundhouse kick. The philosopher caught it by the ankle and slapped me across the face.

“Word games,” he scolded me. “Life isn’t a competition to see who can layer more meaning into a single phrase. Give me clarity.”

Sol latched onto the arm holding my leg and drove his shoulder up into Socrates’ chest, pivoting and attempting to pull him over. Gravitas rocked the cave, scattering the shadow silhouettes on the walls and reforming them into orderly ranks. Toy soldiers marching across the stone.

Whether it was because of proximity or negligence on the philosopher’s part, Sol’s virtue was able to reach him this time. Briefly. The philosopher fell up, into the air, and then slammed down as Sol’s virtue spun the axis of the world. Sol brought him back down to earth with punishing force.

“Speaking with clarity,” my brother mused, leaping back from the philosopher’s formless retaliation and escaping the brunt of it, only grimacing as something struck his right shoulder with an audible clap.

“Something like that would surely deviate his cultivation.”

I looked sharply at him, and he found it in himself to smirk.

“My virtuous heart can’t lie.”

“That’s my principal,” I said, betrayed.

“Ah, true.”

“This is a game to you, is it?” Socrates said, addressing Sol as he rose once more. It didn’t escape my notice that he looked no worse for wear than he had back at the bathhouse. By contrast, Sol and I were bruised and bleeding, broken in several places. “Your city is a smoking ruin and here you are, in another place on the brink of a similar fate. It’s funny to you, is that it?”

What small joy my brother had found tucked away in his heart vanished from his face. I scowled.

“I’m here for a challenge, and I’m here to be challenged,” I said, striding forward and flexing my pneuma. “I’m here to see the Oracles, and I’m here to compete in the Olympic Games. I’m here to meet interesting people, powerful people, and match myself against them. I’m here to learn all of the secrets that you and your Tyrants don’t want me to know.”

“Is that all?” Socrates asked. Thick gray eyebrows furrowed as he regarded me. “You’re too young to be this greedy.”

I grinned fiercely. “I am who I am. And I want it all.”

And then I waved my hand as if to brush a drifting ember from the air.

“It’s in his pneuma,” the shadow that was the raven on the left whispered to my shadow that was the raven on the right, while the cultivator that was Sol pulled me to my feet. “A philosopher builds a foundation of a thousand-thousand truths, that’s what you told me. He’s using those truths now. He’s lecturing us.”

Socrates hummed in surprise as I struck him with a plain truth.

Kronos leaves his mark. With age comes gray hair, and with gray hair comes infirmity.

Just as I had before, in dealing with that trio of young philosopher boys, and later when fighting the Rein-Holder’s two crows, I observed my pneuma’s natural reaction to a force that I had no knowledge of, and I understood. I saw the flickering light, felt the rush of my influence surging out of me of its own accord. I felt the same thing that Sol had felt and conveyed to me through our shadows.

A Hero distills the strength of a thousand-thousand different truths into himself, turning each and every one into pure power. But a Philosopher deals directly in these truths. He isn’t yet strong enough to bend them entirely to his will.

He can only guide them.

The truth of old age struck Socrates, and in my mind’s eye I saw it do its unstoppable work. I saw it weigh down his posture, hunch his back, and drive into the segments of his fingers its aches and ruinous pains. I saw the hand of time press him down and make an infirmity of him.

I saw the theory of it in perfect clarity. Unfortunately, the reality of things was slightly different.

“A gray hair can be a sign of many things,” Socrates said for my benefit, verbalizing the counterpoint that he invoked with his pneuma. “A sign of age, yes. Or a poor diet. A deviation of the heart, also known as stress. Even a god given pigment at birth.”

My attack, such as it was, slid off him like rainwater. But that was fine. I knew the trick of it now.

And so did Sol.

“A young man can’t teach another young man how to be wise,” Sol asserted, pacing along the edge of the cave, his pneuma catching the dispersed streams of my plain truth and reforming them. “You’re the master of my master’s master. A wise man, who taught a wise man, who taught a wise man. Old three times over.”

“Who says a young man can’t be wise?” Socrates challenged.

I answered instead. “A young man is like a puppy with an argument. He can’t truly understand it. One of the definitions of wisdom is experience, and experience comes with time.”

“You need wisdom to be wise,” Sol completed the thought. And together as one, we struck the old philosopher with the truth of his years.

Socrates huffed something almost like a laugh. “And yet here you are, trying to lecture the lecturer.” And that was all it took to brush us off his shoulder. I exchanged a look with Sol as he continued to circle behind the philosopher. “Not the worst attempt, but certainly not the best. Age leads to infirmity, true enough, but in degrees. There are things that we can do, things that we must do as men of virtue, to preserve our strength and craft our perfect bodies. A cultivator is the same, but even more so.”

Sol and I moved as one, closing the gap once again.

“But enough of that.”

Something like one thousand flickering whispers in Socrates’ influence were the only warning I got, and then I was outside the cave, my torso and head hanging over the edge of Kaukoso Mons. Upside down, the Half-Step City was truly dazzling in the early morning light. I blinked as I noticed a familiar silhouette up above, which was to say below, crouched in the shadow of a nondescript alcove similar to Socrates’ own.

Lefteris stared down at me, which was to say up at me, with wide-eyed intent. He had his bow in hand, its gold string pulled back taut despite not having an arrow nocked to it as far as I could tell.

Who? he mouthed to me.

Blearily, I watched the blood drain from his face as Socrates stepped out of his cave.

“These games you’re playing, and the people you’re playing them with,” he told me, “the consequences are real. They're severe. And they aren’t yours to bring about so frivolously. You two have attracted remarkable people to you and roped them into something entirely unreasonable. Have you considered why they were willing to follow you? Have you considered what they stand to gain, or more importantly, what they stand to lose if things don’t settle the way you implied they would?”

Behind him, back in the cave, I saw Sol struggling to rise. His celestial spear had been returned to him, driven through the meat of his left thigh in such a way as to render the entire limb useless.

“I never lied,” I said defiantly.

“No,” Socrates acknowledged. “You didn’t. But neither did you tell the clear truth. You decided they didn’t deserve it.”

I bared my teeth and forced my body to move, sitting up from the edge.

“You don’t know me.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “But I’ve experienced you. And I’ve experienced your father.”

My eyes widened.

“You scarlet sons are all the same,” the wise man said, bending down and gripping in his fist the golden shawl that I’d been using both as a belt and as a satchel for my tribulation mask. He lifted me up by it, regarding me critically. “You want to see all there is to see, do all that there is to do, and damn all the natural consequences. You want to challenge, and to be challenged? So be it.”

He turned, and the muscles of his arm bulged.

“Behold—tribulation.”

And he threw me up into the storm that never ceased.