Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chilon

The Obol Orator

Every institution had its daily routines - the underlying maintenances and mechanisms that an outsider looking in might not necessarily see. Naturally, the more prestigious the institution and the grander its scale, the more opaque it became. There was appeal in a veil of transparent silks, as there was mystique in the shifting silhouettes behind a cloth curtain. What, then, lurked beyond the marble wall? A mystery.

As a boy in a no-name village far from any civilized place, those separations had been thin indeed. Children at play and students about their studies had mingled freely with their parents and mentors, the cleansing of garments and bodies had both been communal, and what hierarchy there had been paled in comparison to the stratification of the proud Greek city-states - to say nothing of the greater mystery cults housed within them.

Growing up, Chilon had known exactly who was harvesting the produce and butchering the meat that appeared on his table. He had known exactly who washed his clothes, how they did it, where and at what time of day. He knew who made those clothes, as he knew who made the pottery that held his wine and water. He’d seen for himself how his home was run. They made no secret of it, after all.

The Raging Heaven Cult was a different existence altogether. It prided itself on its secrecy, as all mystery cults did, and that mentality was reflected at every level. Even down to the minutiae of daily living.

Chilon woke with the dawn. At his level of refinement, a cultivator on the eighth step of the Sophic Realm, sleep was an indulgence more often than it was a necessity. In the course of his forty-odd years as an initiate of the Raging Heaven, he’d spent maybe a tenth of that time at rest. In his experience, the further he advanced through the realm of thinking men, the more his thoughts kept him up at night - and the less his body protested the lack of sleep.

Recently, though, his routine had changed. Rather than wandering Kaukoso Mons or the wilds beyond the city, Chilon stayed in his quarters at night. More often than not he kept a torch at hand and passed the time with a scroll of papyrus or a stack of clay tablets at his side, but occasionally he allowed himself to rest.

He wasn’t alone in this shift, he knew. Since the kyrios’ passing, the mountain trails of the Raging Heaven’s estates had been conspicuously empty past sunset. Her polished stone halls went untraversed.

No one wanted to be caught outside their rooms when the crows came calling.

They had all suffered in the weeks and months since the kyrios’ funeral, and none of them could say a thing about it - not to anyone capable of changing things. The Elders were on the hunt, and anyone caught in the middle of their game was nothing but an unfortunate casualty. The knowledge grated on Chilon, made him weary, and he saw that same weariness reflected in the hearts and minds of his juniors. His own peers, senior Philosophers whose wisdom would make waves in any other corner of the world. Here, they weren’t even worth the consideration of a warning.

But it would be a disservice to those that worked behind the marble wall to say that Chilon and his peers were the ones suffering the most from this hostile environment. It was easy to forget, easy not to consider it at all, but beyond the frightening majesty of the Storm That Never Ceased and the trappings of the indigo cult, there were flesh and blood servants that made the smallest wheels turn. Not cultivators like Chilon and his fellow initiates. Just men and women. Just slaves, at the mercy of grim scavengers.

Chilon rolled out of bed, scattering sheets of papyrus covered corner-to-corner in yesterday’s scribblings. There was a fresh set of silk robes folded neatly at the threshold to his quarters, predominantly white cloth with interweaving bolts of cerulean and crimson threaded through it. The senior members of the cult, the prodigies and predominant families, wore indigo. The lowest juniors wore pure white. Those like him, somewhere in between, wore a blend of white, indigo, red, and blue, depending on their relative standing within the cult.

Chilon donned cult attire that hadn’t been there when he went to sleep, and took a handful of berries and thoughtfully arranged meats from a table that hadn’t been there when he closed his door the night before. Absently popping a cut of lamb into his mouth, he drew his fishing net shut and heaved its contents over his shoulder. Ready to face the day.

Someone had made those things happen. It was something the juniors didn’t think about all that often, especially those that had come from aristocratic families already, but it was the truth all the same. A servant had come to his room in the night and quietly taken his unneeded things and left fresh ones in their place.

It was so obvious that it didn’t warrant observing, really. But in a place like this, it was easy to forget that the silks didn’t spin themselves, and the wine didn’t spring from the mountain’s amethyst veins into their waiting cups.

The Philosophers of the Raging Heaven Cult cowered in their rooms every night, while the servants carried on as always. Spinning the wheels that no one cared to see. Suffering the cruelty of crows because they didn’t have the choice of staying home until dawn.

It was wrong that they suffered, the servants as well as the initiates. But what could a man alone do?

Nothing but his best.

“Easy,” he corrected a boy that was young enough to be his son and nearly his equal in cultivation, a mid-rank philosopher in robes of deep cerulean and lightning threads of crimson.

The boy stiffened and stood up straighter, the opposite of what Chilon had advised. He glanced warily back at him, eyeing his attire and the fishing net full of scrolls and tablets he carried over his shoulder.

“Senior brother?” the boy asked, letting his sword fall to his side. He was polite, but only just. His annoyance at being interrupted was clear enough.

“Your stance is too stiff,” Chilon elaborated, moving up beside him. He’d glimpsed the boy practicing with his blade in the shade of a stone-garden grotto, and immediately picked out the leading flaw in his approach. “Let me guess - you’re trying to imitate the Sword Song?”

The boy’s irritation shifted at once to knee-jerk offense. He spun and jabbed his blade at Chilon’s chest. Chilon jerked back a step, and the boy sneered up at him.

“This lowly sophist thanks his wise senior for his attempt at guidance, but you’re mistaken. My style is mine.”

“You and I both know that isn’t true,” Chilon said patiently, skirting around the threatening edge of the blade and poking the boy’s wrist. “Again, you’re too stiff. You’ve done an admirable job of imitating the final step in a long and elaborate dance, but you don’t know any of the preceding steps or how to connect them. You can’t hear the song.”

“I told you-”

“Relax,” he urged the young mystiko, leaning down to press a hand against the back of his right knee so that it would reflexively bend. When the boy hissed and spun around with his blade, he quickly jerked away from it again. “These stances aren’t meant to be this stiff - the Sword Song was named for her fluidity, the grace of her motion. Every step should contain a portion of the step that came before and the step that follows after. Continuous-”

“Enough!” the boy snapped. His pneuma rose, his influence lashing out in the beginning of a tantrum. “Enough. I don’t need advice from a scribe without a blade, and I didn’t ask for it. Leave me be.”

Chilon looked him up and down with a critical eye. That had been better, in that moment where his temper nearly overcame him. “Have you tried thinking less about the forms?”

The boy blinked owlishly at him. His pneuma whirled around him. “You’re telling me to stop thinking?”

“It seems to be working against you,” Chilon agreed. The boy’s lips drew back from his teeth, an ugly expression to match his form.

“Old man,” he seethed, tensing, “Let’s exchange discourse.” All at once, his pneuma surged and his blade surged forward with his full weight behind it, a coiling thrust that Chilon had seen before in a far more sophisticated form.

Shifting sideways and letting the blade blow past him, Chilon swung the fishing net full of stories from over his shoulder and slammed it into the boy’s unguarded side.

The breath exploded out of the young sophist and his blade flew from his fingers, tumbling end over end in the grass while the boy flew across the shadowed grove and bounced off the face of Kaukoso Mons with an ugly crack. Chilon winced. A bit too hard, then.

“Do you know why that didn’t work?” he asked the boy, kneeling beside him and placing his sword gingerly outside of his reach.

The young mystiko glared blearily up at him, his eyes unfocused by the blow he’d taken to his head.

“Take your time,” Chilon told him.

The boy vomited on the grass between them.

More than a bit too hard. Something to keep in mind for the future.

“Y’er my sen’r,” the boy slurred, once he’d finished heaving up the contents of his breakfast. “Stronger. Fast’r.”

“Hardly.” He shook his head. “I’ve never been much of a fighter. But I didn’t have to be, when I knew what you were going to do before you did it. You’re too stiff - it makes you transparent to an opponent that cares to look.”

“But the Sword Song…”

“The Sword Song might use a thrust like that,” Chilon agreed, “but she’d do it as one part of a greater sequence, and her opponent wouldn’t be able to dodge it as easily as I dodged you, because she’d already have them cross-eyed. Each movement feeds into the next, and is fed into by the one that came before. It’s a simple style when you look at the individual steps, but together it’s profound.”

The boy forced himself up onto his hands and knees, wincing and squinting past the disoriented nausea. He reached falteringly for his blade, and Chilon guided his palm to the pommel.

“I don’t know the whole style,” he finally admitted, a fraction ashamed and a fraction horribly frustrated. “Only bits and pieces.”

“You’ll be better off looking elsewhere, then,” Chilon advised him. “It’s not a style that will serve you well in independent portions. You need the whole thing.”

“How do you know?” the boy demanded, lashing out again. “How are you an expert when you don’t even carry a sword!?”

It was a child’s anger, a child’s grief. Hopeless, impotent frustration, driven to a premature high by the tension every mystiko within the cult had been suffering since the kyrios’ death. The boy was a prodigy for his age, but that wasn’t good enough. He wanted to be stronger. Strong enough to feel safe when he slept at night.

A few weeks ago, Chilon might not have bothered engaging with him at all. He was a tragic sight, but there was no shortage of that on a mountain crawling with cultivators. Every day was a new conflict, a new series of highs and lows. Before, he would have shaken his head, perhaps uttered a quiet prayer for the boy, and continued on. It wasn’t as if he had any advice worth giving, after all.

Except, well. Perhaps that wasn’t true.

“I’m no expert,” he said, and when the boy drew up in outrage, he continued, “But I’ve seen an expert in action, and I remember the sight of it vividly. And I can tell the difference between an amateur, a master - right now, you aren’t either. You’re only pretending.”

The boy’s shoulders slumped. “I understand,” he muttered. “This lowly sophist thanks his senior brother for his guidance.” He forced himself to stand on wobbling legs and staggered away, towards the stone-carved trail that led back to the estate he shared with his fellow young prodigies.

Chilon frowned, watching him go. That hadn’t gone how he’d wanted it to. Unfortunately, he really wasn’t a martial expert - he couldn’t even be called a novice, really. What more could he do?

The fishing net of fables was a conspicuous weight on his back. He set his jaw and made a decision.

“Wait, little brother,” he called, and the boy begrudgingly paused. A moment later, he flinched and grasped clumsily for the papyrus scroll Chilon had thrown his way. Chilon winced. Right. The blow to the head. He probably should have handed it to him.

“What is this?” the boy asked once he’d secured it, squinting at the symbol embossed across its outer surface. A fuschia blade beneath a long-faded sun painted in blood.

“The full picture,” Chilon said, and turned back down the mountain. “If you truly want to be the next Sword Song, study it. That’s the story of the men she studied when she was your age.”

“Wha- this…” The boy stammered while Chilon descended the steps towards the city of Olympia. “Thank you, senior!” he finally shouted. Chilon smiled over his shoulder, waving a light goodbye.

It had been a priceless story, that one. He’d miss it in its absence. But that was alright. It wasn’t meant for him, in the end.

His fishing net was a ponderous weight on his back, but it was lighter than it had been a few weeks ago.

And it was growing lighter every day.

If he was ever to become the subject of inspiration and not simply the conveyer of it, he would need to be a man worth telling stories of. In order to advance, he had to refine himself in all ways. Body, mind, and soul. It was another one of those obvious truths that were all too often forgotten.

Chilon was a scholar far more than he was an athlete, he knew that well. But that wouldn’t ever change unless he made it so.

There were countless opportunities offered to the members of the Raging Heaven Cult, whether they be lectures or athletic venues and equipment. The grandest of those opportunities by far, though, was one offered only to the upper echelon of the cult - which Chilon was just barely a part of, thanks to his modest refinement and the decades he’d spent faithfully toiling as a disciple of Raging Heaven.

Though the masses would never in their entire lives set foot on its hallowed ground, the privileged members of the Half-Step City’s indigo cult were allowed the unsurpassed privilege of using the Olympic Stadium itself for their martial pursuits.

Whether it be athletic training in preparation for the legendary games that the stadium would play host to in just a few short months, or whether it was a more lethal sort of practice not suitable for the cramped courtyards and precarious plateaus available on the mountain, the stadium was open only to a precious few. So despite the fact that he was like an ant among ravenous lions, despite the fact that every day he was looked down upon by the Heroic cultivators that would soon be competing and the senior Philosophers that had devoted themselves to the martial path, Chilon made the journey every day and worked his body to the brutal edge of exhaustion.

It was the least he had to do if he wanted to be a man worth knowing someday.

The sun was high in the sky when he finally reached his usual place, in a secluded section of the stadium’s pit close to the stands. It was far enough from the handful of greater cultivators already at work training that he wouldn’t step on any toes, and wasn’t in danger of being stepped on in return.

He let his fishing net drop to the sand and unfurl, the scrolls and tablets remaining largely in place but for one that rolled away. He let it go and began his stretches. He’d gather it up later-

A formless hand that was as invisible to his eyes as it was vibrant to his cultivator’s sense plucked the scroll up and placed it back on top of the pile. Chilon blinked, and turned to face the pneuma limb’s source.

Ensconced in the shadows cast by the empty stands, a junior philosopher’s familiar scarlet eyes peering out at him.

“Griffon?” Chilon blurted, astonished. What was he doing here? He couldn’t possibly be among those allowed entrance - he hadn’t even gone through his rites yet. How had he gotten in?

The young man smiled languidly and rolled his shoulders, raising his left leg and then his right in a casual stretch.

“Hello again, senior,” the supposed scarlet son greeted him, and promptly manifested twenty-nine more hands of violent intent. “It’s been a while. What brings you to my domain?”

“‘Your domain’,” Chilon repeated, and couldn’t help but chuckle at the cheek of it. “You have some nerve, junior.” Nothing for it, he supposed. It didn’t seem like anyone else had noticed his presence yet, or if they had, they didn’t seem to care. “If you must know, I’m here to cultivate mass to match my virtue.”

“What a coincidence,” the scarlet-eyed philosopher said pleasantly. “So am I. Shall we trade discourse?”

Thirty hands of formless intent reached out to him in open offer, and were joined by one more of the boy’s own flesh and blood. Chilon shook his head, but reached out anyway and smacked his palm against the scarlet son’s.

“One round,” he acquiesced. “But be warned, I’ve already rattled one junior’s skull today. I don’t want to hear you complaining when I make it two.”

Griffon grinned.

“Of course, senior brother.”