What is the nature of tribulation?

Back when I had leapt from the top of the eastern mountain range with Sol at my side, in the throes of my ascension to the Sophic Realm, I had experienced a moment of perfect weightlessness, freedom in the truest sense. And then, when reality had asserted itself—as it always did—my stomach had risen into my throat, a giddy and exhilarating sensation in its own way. It was enough to put a smile on my face whenever I thought back on it.

When Socrates threw me at the sun, my breath was slammed out of me as if the sky itself had punched me in the gut. I spun madly, without control, the world little more than a revolving blur of mountain and city and skies above. Then, I reached the storm and plunged into the wrathful crown of the Raging Heaven Cult.

At once, I was drenched from head to toe. The clouds were shockingly cold and alive with dancing threads of lightning, spreading like grasping hands through the moisture in the air. I struggled to right myself, twisting and throwing out my arms. I had just begun to regain control when I saw the face of the mountain rushing forward to greet me.

[Dawn shines forth with rosy fingers.]

Twenty arms of pankration intent struck out, some grasping me and others reaching out for the mountain’s jutting ridges. The same way that I had helped my younger cousins learn how to flip and contort their bodies in the air as children, by tossing them up and guiding them back down with steady hands, my pankration intent did the same for me. I flipped myself, bleeding off as much momentum as I could by bouncing back-and-forth between the hands of my own intent, and then I hit the mountain, tucking my shoulders and rolling until everything came to a stop.

Panting harshly and nearly vibrating with adrenaline, I rose into a crouch and assessed my situation.

I was somewhere inside the immortal storm that hung around the peak of Kaukoso Mons, that much was obvious. How far up I was, how close to the hidden peak, I had no idea. But I was far enough up that I noticed the effort when I inhaled. It wasn’t just that the air was frigidly cold. It was also thin—more so than it had ever been at the top of the eastern mountain range back home. The mountain itself didn’t seem to be much different up here, but immersed in the clouds as I was, I could only see a few feet in front of my face. Even with the light of dawn in my twenty-two palms. The only way I could truly gauge distance was by watching the—

Lightning struck beside me, close enough to electrify the fine hairs on my arms and make my teeth buzz in my mouth. I rolled sideways, watching another searing lance strike the stone where I had just stood.

I tried to curse the old philosopher that had thrown me up here, but instead, I coughed up a mouthful of blood.

I rolled away from another thread of lightning, hacking blood as I went.

Well. This seemed appropriate.

As it turned out, the storm was aptly named.

“Whimpering Heaven,” I growled regardless, the taste of my own blood thick on my tongue. The stone was slick this far up the mountain, treacherous. What paths that existed were even more so.

I leaned sharply back, lightning arcing past my face and striking an outcrop of stone. As it passed, though, thin trailing fingers split off and grasped the tip of my nose. My teeth slammed together, muscles locking up as the lightning coursed through me. I exhaled a seething breath and just barely managed to wrench back control of myself from the storm.

But there were paths. And that suggested something that I had suspected but never known for certain. I raced down the path as fast as I dared to, crouching low as I went. I had tried jumping only once. It had nearly killed me, just like that. The skies weren’t safe. Not even for a moment.

Heaven was my enemy.

But returning to the paths. It was simply the case that the mystery cults of the free Mediterranean hoarded their confounding questions at all costs. The mystery of a cult was its founding myth, the thesis statement upon which the entire institution was built. These treasures were hoarded from the public, from outsiders, and even from the cult’s own initiates outside of significant occasions. It was not within the power of a Rosy Dawn mystiko to gaze upon the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god whenever the urge struck them.

It was simple enough to guard that corpse, of course. After all, it was buried in the heart of a vast mountain range. But not all cults were as the Rosy Dawn. Not all mysteries were buried beneath spans and spans of ancient rock.

How did one guard a mystery with no natural barriers? How did one obscure from view something in plain sight? Out in the open air? Every cult had its own initiation rites, governed by a unique set of rules and regulations. But the purpose of those rites was always the same.

Of course, I could have been wrong. The Raging Heaven’s mystery could have been buried somewhere deep within the mountain. It could have been somewhere else entirely, separate from Kaukoso Mons. Or, perhaps, the Raging Heaven was as unique in this regard as it was in every other. Perhaps there was no mystery at all.

But as I watched another bolt of lightning arc down from wrathful Heaven and abruptly diverge, striking the upraised hand of a cowering stone statue, I began to doubt.

I slid down slick stone until I was crouched beneath the cowering giant. Light flashed—once, twice, three and then four times. The storm hammered relentlessly down on the statue of a long dead monster, and I felt the fury behind it.

I stayed there for a long while, staring up as Heaven came down, safe from the storm only because I was crouched in the shadow of something that it hated far more than me.

“Porphyrion,” I murmured to the monument of the twice-disgraced Giant. “Look at you. Greatest of the great striders, king of those that shake the earth. Isn’t that what they called you? How can you bear to see your likeness chiseled by such a disrespectful hand? Why can’t I hear your soul howling in outrage all the way from bleak Tartarus? They made you look like a coward.”

Heaven screamed and struck the destitute king of Giants, over and over again.

I looked down the mountain. I still couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. I had no way of knowing how far I was from the storm’s edge. I had no way of knowing what Socrates was doing to my brother, now that I wasn’t there to stand beside him. The Fates and Muses knew that our Heroic companions would not stand there in my place.

I looked back up at poor Porphyrion. While he cowered and held a helpless hand up against heaven, his other hand hung worthless beside him. In that hand, insult of insults, the statue’s maker had placed a sword. Never to be properly wielded. Never to be brought to bear. Forever held back in hesitation and fear while its wielder flinched beneath the storm.

No. Not forever.

Pankration hands gripped the Giant’s clenched fist, flaring with the rosy light of dawn and prying apart his fingers. Ancient stone cracked and shattered, and a sword longer than I was tall fell into my waiting arms. I heaved it up onto one shoulder. Its edge was far too dull to cut me.

“Let’s see what Heaven has to say when the damned strike it back,” I said fiercely and charged out from under the Giant’s silhouette.

I felt the lightning come, a vibration in the air that I could taste on my tongue. I dug my heels in and stopped as abruptly as I had started, pivoted, and slammed the Giant’s blade into the mountain.

I let go and watched the lightning veer sideways at the last moment and strike the pommel of the giant’s sword, rather than me. I waited a second longer than I needed to, and then I heaved it out of the stone.

“Is that all?” I taunted the Fates, pounding pankration fists against the ground as I stood tall.

There came a low, rolling growl like the thunder that preceded lightning. I turned my head and beheld a hound of pure, shocking light prowling up the path towards me.

“Heel,” I commanded the storm hound. It barked in response, the sound like a thunderclap.

I turned and sprinted back up the mountain.

Time passed. I knew because my rosy palms grew progressively dimmer as the morning turned to afternoon. Or perhaps that was my own internal sundial sabotaging me. Certainly, there was no way to tell by sight alone. The storm was thick, oppressive, and utterly unrelenting.

I found more hounds.

The distinction between a virtuous beast and a typical animal was similar to the difference between a cultivator and a mortal man, but not quite the same. Beasts could not cultivate in the same manner as thinking men, and so what they did was not entirely equivalent. But it was close enough. Once semantics were stripped away, it became a question of magnitude for both man and monster.

That was the common consensus. That was what my mentors had taught me. But Sol had claimed that his demon dogs had cultivated in the style of men. And though I had dismissed him out of hand at first, I couldn’t so readily deny what was now before my eyes.

Hounds could grasp at primitive virtue, given the time, the opportunity, and the primordial strength of will. But no dog could grasp lightning in its teeth. No hound could cast off its flesh and blood and exchange them for the storm.

Tribulation hounds stalked me up the mountain, and with the appearance of each one, I was forced to question what I had always known to be the truth.

I planted the Giant king’s blade in the mountain and rolled sideways. A thunderclap bark was the only warning I got before the hound lunged. Light flashed, and the giant’s blade rang like a bell, followed by a yelp that sizzled in the air.

They moved more like the lightning they were composed of than the dogs they had taken the form of. They crouched, and they prowled, that was true enough. They went through the motions of snapping their jaws and lunging like hunters. But the motion that was meant to bridge the gap between crouching and sinking their crackling teeth into prey happened faster than the eye could track. One moment there, the next, gone.

I had been clipped by lightning three times before the first hound had found me. I hadn’t allowed anything to touch me since. I knew in my virtuous heart that the fourth strike would be justice rendered. If one of these dogs got their teeth in me, I wouldn’t be getting them out.

I spotted another looming silhouette up ahead and wrenched free the giant’s blade with hands of manifested pneuma while I rushed up to it.

I’d also found more monuments to the condemned.

I lunged and rolled beneath another statue as Heaven struck down, my heart hammering a frenetic beat in my chest as the lightning slammed into the hunched shoulders of a struggling stone man.

“Isn’t it sad, Sisyphus?” I asked the degraded tyrant. He didn’t respond, preoccupied as he heaved against the boulder that was his perpetual punishment—and also, perhaps, because he was made of stone.

I gripped the blade buried in his stone back and wrenched it free, passing it off to a pankration hand and adding it to my growing collection. That made eight suffering souls thus far. Seven stolen blades and one Giant’s broadsword were my weapons against the storm. Periodically, as the lightning struck and I had no sorry victim to shelter in the shadow of, my pankration hands would offer their blades up to heaven and dispel the moment before they struck.

Dodging the blades after the lightning blew them out of the sky was a trial, but it was one I was well-suited to handle. It was far better than the alternative, at any rate.

“Take heart,” I told the statue of Sisyphus, clapping him on the shoulder and squinting up the mountain. “I think we’re nearly at the top.”

Thunderclaps sounded below as well as to my right. Upward it was.

Fatigue began to take its toll.

There were many things a cultivator could do without. Sleep, sustenance, even water in the most extreme circumstances. Citizens could put off these necessities for days at a time with the proper conditioning. Philosophers even longer, and Heroes longer than that until at a certain point a mortal man could be born and die before a Tyrant was forced to break his fast.

But no cultivator could go without air. Even the best of us required a moment to breathe. And as much as it galled me to admit, I was approaching my limits. Skulking around and picking off Crows in the night was one thing. This was another entirely.

I fell more than I slid beneath my latest haven, slumping down onto one elbow, precariously close to touching the statue and sharing in its tribulation as lightning struck it over and over again. Twelve pankration hands drove their stolen blades into the stone around me in a circle. I heard barking thunderclaps in the distance—still closer than I preferred.

Rebuffing them with the blades stunned the hounds long enough to put distance between us, but that was all it did. I had tried cutting one by heaving the blade like a javelin at it, but all I’d gotten for my troubles was a re-creation of what happened when I threw the swords up into the air to intercept lightning bolts. Only, ten feet away from me instead. I hadn’t tried it again.

“It could be worse, I suppose,” I panted. I flashed blood-stained teeth and glanced up at my unwitting protector. “I could be you—”

I blinked and tilted my head.

The Oracle of the Broken Tide sat upon her holy tripod, the seat and the soothsayer both carved out of the mountain itself. Amethyst wound through her body in place of veins, and the tridents in her eyes glowed with the indigo light of prophecy. She was young in this iteration, the lines of her face changed enough that I wasn’t sure if this was simply the younger version of the woman I’d met with Kyno or if it was another Oracle entirely.

Either way, she was certainly the Oracle of the Coast. If the eyes hadn’t given her away, her company surely would have.

Over a dozen suffering statues were poised around her, flinching, raging, and grasping ineffectually for the light of the sun. These were men I vaguely recognized. Heroes and Tyrants that the Oracle had cast down with her prophecies throughout history. Great men laid low by the heartless judgment of a holy woman. They formed a cage of sorts around her, their bodies acting as the walls, and their grasping, outstretched arms forming a roof of sorts over her head. And as I watched, lightning came down upon them a dozen times in quick succession. It washed over the cage of men each time, dispersing through their arms and down their bodies before a spark could ever touch the woman within.

The statue of the soothsayer stared gravely down at me as if its maker had always known I’d be here, now, looking up at this moment. I could hear her laughing voice in my head, clear as day over the storm.

You scarlet sons are all the same.

I scoffed and rose to my feet, looking down upon the amethyst oracle. From this angle, I could see the inscription on her seashell crown.

Melpomene

“I’ve seen you before,” I dismissed her. “Show me your sisters.”

Lightning flashed, forking seven ways. I traced the path of each branch and then favored the oracle and her crown of tragedy with a wild smile.

“My thanks,” I said earnestly, and the fatigue was surely getting worse because I would swear on my deathbed that I saw the statue wink.

I found the oracles one by one. It wasn’t how I had originally intended to meet them, true enough, but even a storm like this had its silver linings.

I found the Fuchsia Oracle first, with her crown of risen foam, and I beheld the throng of maddened suitors and scorned lovers gathered around her in a perversion of a cage. I looked her in her sultry eyes, admittedly less tempting when cast from stone, and addressed her by the name carved with amethyst into her crown.

“Erato,” I greeted the Oracle of Foúskia. “I’ve come to seek your wisdom. Tell me, what is the nature of tribulation?”

I blinked and dropped each of the swords in my hands to rub the fatigue out of my eyes. When I looked again, her smile was no longer deepening. She was simple stone again. Behind me, I heard the snarling rumble of thunder that preceded attack, and I lunged inside the oracle’s cage of statued men.

I watched the tribulation hound strike the cage, and instead of rebounding as all its siblings had when I’d intercepted them with a flying blade, it yelped and howled as it was wrenched apart by the many linked limbs that made up the bars of the cage. I watched as the hound was spread agonizingly thin across the cage. Until, finally, it dispersed with an ear-splitting crack.

Never let it be said that the young Griffon was ungrateful. I bowed my head to the Oracle with the seafoam crown and pressed a kiss to her forehead. If her smile widened, I was too far gone to contemplate it overmuch.

I moved with greater purpose through the storm, sideways more than up or down now. The hounds added new members to the pack to replace the one I had dispersed, but I managed to stay just a few steps ahead of them all the while. I found the oracle of Nkrí next and traced my fingers across her crown of pewter stars.

“Urania,” I said to her, “what differentiates the light of tribulation from mundane elements?”

My answer came first as a bolt of lightning striking mindlessly, relentlessly, above our heads, dispersed by the cage of those she had disgraced with her soothsaying. Then, my answer came twice as the hounds caught up to me. This time, however, they didn’t lunge blindly into the cage to be dispersed. They paced around it, eyeing me intently.

“Not the answer I would have preferred,” I said wryly, flicking the stone nose of the Pewter Oracle. I knew without a doubt that that nose could not have possibly scrunched up in response. It simply didn’t make sense. And so I dismissed it and made a break away from the hounds after hurling all of my stolen blades at the pack.

“If tribulation can discern, then it can reason,” I proposed to Clio, the other Oracle of the Coast, with her wrought-iron crown. “And if it can reason, does that mean it can be spirited? Does that mean it can hunger?”

The good Oracle gazed imperiously down her nose at me, and I followed her stone hand as it pointed in an entirely different direction than the one I recalled, at the pack of hounds roving farther down the mountain. As I watched, one hound among the dozen raised its crackling head to heaven and howled loud enough to shatter my eardrums. From this distance, I could just barely make out the sparks flaring from the corners of its crackling jaw, drooling in its hunger.

I spoke to each of the oracles, seven in all, and I gleaned from each of them a truth of tribulation. Finally, with unspoken anticipation, I hauled my battered body and my eighteen stolen blades—plus the Giant king’s broadsword—over the ridge that I had seen marked by the branching lightning. I laid eyes on the Scarlet Oracle.

No. That wasn’t true.

I laid eyes on what remained of the Scarlet Oracle.

It was carnage carved from stone. There had been an Oracle perched upon a tripod once, and a stone cage of all the great men and women she had cast down with her divine commandments. They were all shattered and cast out now. A miasma of scorched rock and indigo mist hung in their place now, in the glassed crater of what had once been a monument to holy retribution.

Broken, scattered limbs remained, unmoved by the gale winds of the storm, somehow as timeless as the statues they had once been. I stared down into the fractured eyes of the Oracle’s severed head, broken in three places, and assembled her name from the pieces of her broken sun crown.

“Calliope,” I whispered hoarsely, kneeling beside what remained of her in the crater. I asked of her, “Who did this to you?”

My shadow laid its flickering hand on my shoulders. The raven on the right leaned over my shoulder and whispered the answer into my ear.

“I, your father.”

And it pressed the twentieth blade into my hand.

The hounds surrounded me. There were well over a dozen of them now, each of them tall enough at the shoulders to look Myron in the eye. They paced around me in that odd way of theirs, lightning limbs flexing as if to move and then suddenly reappearing several steps away, little more than frenetic flashes of light.

In the end, it was inevitable that they would corner me. After all, no man can escape tribulation.

No man could escape justice.

“Tell me something, cousin,” Nikolas prompted me, either in a memory or just out of sight. I couldn’t be sure which. My head was pounding too hard. My body was aching too fiercely to tell. “What is the first virtue?”

“Justice,” I whispered because it was what I had been born to say.

Every tribulation hound surrounding me snarled and pounced at once, the whole world turning to blinding light and crashing thunder. Before they had even moved, and as a result just barely in time, my pankration hands drove fifteen of the blades I’d taken from the Raging Heaven’s immortal victims into the stone around me, while the remaining five were raised horizontally above my head.

Over a dozen hounds struck my iron cage in tandem, and their agonized howls split the earth.

“And what is justice?” Nikolas asked. I felt his hand dig into my hair and ruffle it, but my neck was far too stiff to turn my head and confirm whether that was a memory or something happening here and now. “And don’t give me Uncle Damon’s answer. I want to know what you think.”

Up until this moment, and every time before, I had done everything in my power to avoid touching my stolen blades in the moments that they were intercepting tribulation lightning. After all, it would surely defeat the purpose of using them if I shared in the experience by holding on, whether with hands of flesh and blood or pankration intent.

But that was when I still had hope of escaping a direct conflict. That was when I could still envision a world in which I came out of this any way but straight through.

And that was before I had my answers.

“Justice is a grasping hand,” I declared, and I reached back out with twenty hands of pneuma to grasp the pommels of my sword cage while tribulation lightning coursed through it.

Light and heat, unlike anything I had ever experienced before, shot through my soul. I had compared the damage I took in the past by blocking attacks with my pankration hands to real-world injuries, but it had always been metaphor more than material. This time, I doubled over and vomited blood onto the face of the mountain. It sizzled as it left my mouth.

“Justice,” I gagged, “is a punch in the gut.”

I focused on breathing, on the heat of the Rein-Holder’s starlight marrow as it coursed through my scorched and ruined body, mending what it could. I had only touched true tribulation for a fraction of a second, and it had nearly killed me.

But only nearly. And in return, I’d seen it.

The answer to my final question.

“Justice is two clenched fists in return for one,” I said, reaching up and rubbing my face. When I lowered my hands, they were covered in blood. “Stained by scarlet sin.”

“The world doesn’t have to be so brutal, cousin,” Nikolas said sadly. I laughed, the sound hysterical, as a dozen more hounds came prowling up the mountain, circling around the blade bars of my cage. Patiently. Ravenously.

“Maybe not,” I agreed. The wind was howling. Thunder shook the earth. Sleet and freezing rain washed the blood away nearly as fast as I could bleed it. But I was alive.

And I was free.

“Justice is whatever I can reach.”

And I lunged forward, reaching through the cage and grasping lightning. My vision flared white, and my blood flash-boiled in my veins. But those were only impressions. Theoretical truths. What should have happened to a man that reached out and caught lightning in his hand.

But I knew now.

“Behold,” I snarled triumphantly at the struggling hound. “Tribulation.”

And I crushed its skull in my fist.