Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

The Little Kyrios

He had done his best.

It was a cold comfort, he knew, but it was what he clung to in the end. In the business of cultivation the results were all that mattered - the tribulations were hardly worth mentioning, so long as they were overcome. Hubris unending was permitted, so long as one advanced forward in the end. And in that same vein, no amount of well-meaning virtue would make a difference in a man’s final judgment if he succumbed to the unforgiving defamation of a bottleneck.

Yet even so. Myron had done everything he could. Was it really his fault that he’d failed in the end?

Well, yes. Obviously.

“Niko!” he called out to his eldest cousin, one morning and every morning, the same routine every day. Spotting a space on the side of the bench not occupied by his cousin’s wife, Myron squeezed in beside the Hero and looked up at him expectantly.

“Yes, cousin?” Niko ruffled his hair, today and every day just a bit faster than Myron’s attempt to dodge his reaching hand.

“When are we leaving?” he asked. Today, and yesterday, and the day before that.

And today, as he had every day before, Myron’s eldest cousin winced and turned his burning gaze to the distant clay-shingles of their family’s estate.

“Not today. But soon.”

“You said that yesterday,” Myron pointed out. At this point, he was too familiar with the feeling to let his disappointment show. Niko sighed and nodded, returning his attention to his meal.

“That I did.”

It had been months since Lio and Sol ran away from the Rosy Dawn, across the Ionian Sea to Olympia. Every day that passed was another day’s travel put between them. Though Niko insisted that they’d find them soon enough once they set sail, Myron was beginning to wonder. And more and more, he was beginning to feel something he’d never expected to feel in regards to his eldest cousin.

Doubt.

“We’ll train later, alright?” Niko said around a mouthful of salted sea bass, nudging Myron with his elbow. “You just focus on your own refinement for now - if you keep progressing the way you have been, you’ll be handing Griffon his hide all on your own when the time comes.”

They both knew that wasn’t true. Or rather, they should have both known. For some reason, the version of Lio that existed within their eldest cousin’s mind was entirely different from the true Young Aristocrat that had beaten Myron, his older brother, and each of his cousins sans Niko like unruly dogs for daring to stand between him and his wanderlust. Had the five years between Niko leaving and returning to the Rosy Dawn really been all it had taken to change Lio so severely? Had he not always been himself?

Myron didn’t know. He’d been too young in the days before Niko left to remember more than a handful of vivid moments. But in his gut, his deepest instinct, Myron suspected that Lio hadn’t changed. He’d only revealed more of his true self with time. That was what cultivation was, wasn’t it?

But saying these things wouldn’t make them true in Niko’s eyes. If it were that simple, Lydia would have convinced him weeks ago. So rather than make another scene, Myron just nodded and reached for a plate of bread and goat cheese.

“Okay.”

He’d tried.

“Myron?” Heron eyed him strangely, halfway through the marble entry to the room they’d shared for as long as Myron could remember. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” he replied archly. “I’m cultivating.”

Admittedly, his methods might have appeared a little strange from the outside looking in. But Niko had told him that the Hunting Bird’s Breath was a technique that required precise control in every situation, under every duress. The more oddities he exposed himself to, the better able he would be to maintain the pneumatic chambers within his body when he truly needed them. To that end, he’d experimented with as many odd environments and scenarios as he could think of.

At the moment, that involved hanging upside down from their shared room’s ceiling while a brazier burned merrily underneath him. Myron inhaled deeply, with water eyes and a heavy head, all the while carefully cradling both of the pneumatic chambers within his body even as he coughed on the smoke rising up from the brazier.

“Another one of Niko’s lessons?” his older brother asked, a faint undercurrent of discontent beneath his exasperation. Heron shook his head and walked on by, shedding his cult attire as he went and collapsing face-first onto his bed. “They get more ridiculous every time. What’s this one meant to teach you?”

“Control,” Myron coughed.

“Control,” Heron muttered into his pillow. “Right.”

They lapsed into a silence that was just a bit too heavy to be comfortable. Ever since Lio had left - no, before that. Ever since Myron had broken through his bottleneck and advanced past his older brother, there had been a tension between the two of them. It wasn’t anything Heron had put into words, and so Myron hadn’t either, but it was there. And it was only getting worse with time.

It had gotten worse when Lio left. Heron had been nearly as happy to see him go as their parents, and that made Lydia furious. She ignored him outright, now, and while the rest of their cousins remained cordial with him, the line had been drawn. On one side stood Heron and Castor, at odds with Lio for as long as Myron could remember, and on the other side stood Myron and Lydia. For now it was only a theoretical divide, but that was because Heron and Castor still didn’t know what they had planned.

And because they didn’t know what Niko intended to do, it made his disproportionate focus on Myron and Lydia since coming home all the more galling to Myron’s older brother.

“Alright, fine!” Heron abruptly snapped to no one in particular, shoving himself up out of bed. Had he taken Myron’s silence for something else? It wouldn’t have been the first time. “What are we controlling?”

“We?”

Heron waved impatiently at the full picture of Myron’s admittedly odd meditation training. “If I have to share a room with you and suffer this nonsense, the least you can do is clue me in on the lesson. We’re brothers, aren’t we?”

Myron bit down on the first response that came to his mind. When was the last time Stavros Aetos’ sons had gotten along? When was the last time they’d treated each other like brothers - like Lio treated Sol, and Sol treated Lio?

Myron heaved a weary sigh - and promptly choked on smoke and coughed so hard he fell from the ceiling and into the lit brazier.

“Son of a bitch!” Heron snarled, and the world spun as Myron was dragged roughly from the searing hot iron basin and thrown onto his bed. “Are you out of your mind!? Control, my ass-”

“It’s called the Hunting Bird’s Breath,” Myron croaked while Heron rushed across the room to retrieve a clay jug of clear water to douse him with. The water was a pleasant shock, soothing and bright blue-cold.

“The what?” Heron snapped, still a bit wild-eyed.

“It’s a breathing technique,” he explained, dragging damp hair out of his eyes and looking up at his older brother’s confused face. “An Aetos breathing technique. Passed down from father to son for as long as we’ve had our name.”

“An Aetos technique,” Heron repeated doubtfully. “Then why is Niko the one teaching you this, and why haven’t I heard of it before today? If it’s father to son, our father should know it, shouldn’t he?”

“He does,” Myron said quietly.

“Wha-” His brother’s eyebrows furrowed. “That doesn’t… why?”

Why would their father keep such a thing from them, or why would Niko lie to Myron about it? Or, perhaps, why would Myron lie to his own brother about something like this? And if none of those, if Heron believed him and believed what Niko had told him, then why was Niko teaching Myron this secret inheritance and not Heron? It could have been any of them that Heron was asking. It could have been all of them at once.

So Myron told him the truth, though he knew it was likely a bad idea even as he did it.

He was his brother, for all their disagreements. He deserved to know.

So Myron explained their plan to his brother, even as his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed, even as his pneuma rose precipitously with his ire. Even as he turned his back on Myron and gathered up his clothes. Only when his brother had stalked out of their room and left him alone did Myron stop.

He pressed his burnt hands over his eyes and sighed heavily. Within his body, the two pneumatic chambers of his Hunting Bird’s Breath remained intact.

“I tried,” he muttered to the empty room.

He had done his best.

“You want to do what?” Castor demanded, in the quiet hollow where he carved the fruits of his cultivation into the trees. “Myron, he doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be with us. Why in the world would you risk your life just to suffer another heartache when he tells it to you a second time?”

Truly, he had.

“Go after him?” Rena whispered, aghast, in the privacy of her mother’s library. “Myron… I miss him too, but you remember what he said. The way he spoke to us, like all this time we were only in his way. I just - what if he never changes his mind? What if he only hates us more the next time we meet?”

But effort hardly mattered in the end.

“Be patient, Myron,” Lydia commanded him, in the alcove that they the young pillars had carved out of the eastern mountain range for themselves and no one else. Sitting cross-legged beside her was the slave that had so often been in Sol’s company, breathing deeply while a newly awoken Citizen’s pneuma whirled clumsily around her. “Niko told us he’d get Uncle Damon’s permission in time. Until he does, and until we have a ship, there’s nothing we can do but wait. Refine ourselves. When the time comes, we’ll be ready. Focus on that.”

In the end, the result was all that mattered. All that remained was the sweet thrill of triumph.

Or failure’s bitter edge.

“Enter,” a deep and resonant voice spoke a bare moment before his knock struck the door. Myron exhaled slowly, marshaling his courage, and pressed open the door to the kyrios’ private office.

“Uncle Damon,” he greeted the kyrios of the Rosy Dawn. “Are you busy?”

“Always.” Myron’s uncle beckoned him forward with one hand anyway. He had a letter in his other hand, which he folded and tucked away while Myron approached his desk. On the sliver of papyrus- “What brings you to my domain, nephew?”

Let it be known that Myron had done his best to be patient.