Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.20

The Young Griffon

It paid to have friends in high places, after all.

The temple of the Oracle was an eerie edifice. Frankincense and myr hung thick in the air, stifling the senses and making the eyes burn. Walking through the gilded archway, past the Heroic cultivators of the Broken Tide Cult that guarded the Oracle with their lives, I could hardly see a foot in front of my face.

The winter winds of the Mediterranean were hardly worth mentioning for a cultivator of even the most pitiful ranks of the Civic realm, but inside this temple I had to fight my teeth not to chatter. The smoke from the torches lining the walls were somehow cold, and from one moment to the next smelled of frankincense, of myr - and of the Ionian Sea.

The smoke clung like salt water to my skin, drenching me in a cold sweat not three steps past the archway. My pulse beat a quick rhythm in my throat. I swallowed down the instinctive urge to fight. I’d never felt a presence like this in my life.

“Be mindful,” Kyno muttered. “The gods are watching.”

“No, they’re not,” I said, distracted. I peered through the smoke and seafoam. “But she is.”

The Oracle of the Broken Tide was an old woman, shrunken and frail. In contrast to Kyno, her teal attire was pristine, its colors vibrant, while the woman herself was washed out and grayed. Her hair, the pallor of her skin, and even her eyes. The blind woman stared unerringly at me, the wrinkles on her face creasing as she smirked.

“Someone is here that doesn’t belong.” Her voice was as brittle and aged as the rest of her, a bare rasp that could hardly be heard over the crackle of sea salt torches on the walls.

Kyno clapped a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back a step before I could speak. He leveled me with a severe look, as if I’d start firing off at a divine woman in the seat of her power for one snide comment. I hadn’t even introduced myself yet.

“Honored Oracle,” he said respectfully, bowing his head. “These lowly sophists have come to pay their respects.” He glanced my way again, and seemed surprised to see me bowing my head as well. Honestly, what had I done to give him such a low impression of me?

“I’m sure you have.” The old woman beckoned us forward with a spider-thin hand. “Come then, into the depths - if you can swim.”

I stepped forward without hesitation, and her presence subsumed me.

Depths had been the appropriate way to describe it. I felt myself sinking, falling endlessly into an existence that only got darker and colder the further down it went. Even as my feet padded silently across firm stone, I plummeted into the deep. The woman’s washed out gray eyes tracked me as I approached. A reflex, I realized. It wasn’t that she could see me, not with her eyes. It was that she knew where I was, and her eyes remembered to follow.

“How long have you been blind?” I asked the Oracle, stopping just within her reach.

“Since the day I was born,” she said, reaching out and grasping my face with a frail hand. Her skin was colder than the smoke, and smooth, utterly free of calluses. “Since when could you see?”

I considered it. “Four months ago.”

“Cocky boy,” she chortled, pinching my cheek. “The proper answer is perhaps tomorrow, if fortune favors me.”

Kyno came to stand beside me, his posture rigid as the Oracle’s presence washed over him. The flames in his eyes flickered and guttered, muffled beneath the waves. There was a slow, rhythmic quality to the motion of his chest. A breathing technique.

“And what about you, young Hero of the Broken Tide?” The Oracle turned those blind eyes on Kyno. “What brings the great huntsman to my humble shrine?”

“We seek guidance, and offer our devotion to the tide,” he answered, his voice faintly strained.

The Oracle wagged a finger. “It should be in the reverse order!” Kyno grimaced and bowed his head.

“My apologies.”

“And what sort of guidance can I give you? A young man of your standing should know at least this much of how the world works. The gods don’t guide us anymore.”

“That’s all you’re good for, is it?” I asked, idly observing the finer details of her. There were remnants of striking features, worn down by time - a royal nose, sharp cheekbones, and there, beneath the milk and mist of blindness, serrated pupils split into three segments. “A lifetime of keeping company with the world’s finest men and women, legendary souls seeking you out at every opportunity, and you have nothing to say? I could spend a lifetime in a box with no holes and still have something useful to say at the end of it.”

Kyno attempted to strike me, but he wasn’t Sol. I knocked the blow aside with pankration intent, maintaining eye contact with the blind Oracle. He wouldn’t dare exert himself enough to break past my hands. Not here.

“Wiser than you look,” the old woman said approvingly. “But what makes you think you’re worthy of my wisdom?”

I scoffed. “What makes you think your wisdom is worthy of me?”

“Griffon!” Kyno snarled, panicked and infuriated in equal measure. Ho. It seemed all I’d needed to do to break through that rugged stoicism of his was involve his cult’s divine messenger.

The Oracle laughed.

It was the broken, hacking laugh of an old woman on death’s door, but it was also the waves crashing against the cliffside in Alikos, the roar of a hurricane tearing up the surface of the Ionian Sea. Kyno eased back a step, his chest rising and falling once more in the rhythm of a controlled breathing technique. I squinted through the sea spray, brushing salt from my eyes.

“Indeed!” The Oracle of the Broken Tide crowed. “Just so! How can any of us know what lies beneath the waves unless we plumb their depths ourselves? How can we discern what’s casting the shadows if we don’t first step out of the cave?”

She rose abruptly from the upholstered seat she’d been sitting in, so oversized for her shriveled body, and lurched forward to seize my face with both hands. For all her age, her grip was undeniably strong in that moment. She looked deeply into my eyes, close enough for me to smell the grapes on her breath. She was more than just old now. She was ancient.

Her pupils were tridents.

“What is it about you scarlet sons that compels you to go where you’re not wanted, to say what no one wants to hear, and to do what absolutely must not be done?” Somehow, I got the feeling the Oracle wasn’t speaking to me, or even to herself. “What is it within you that chafes at the suggestion of heaven? Why are you the way you are?”

I smirked and made to answer, but she beat me to it.

“Because the tribulations are the best part.”

“I thought you couldn’t see the future anymore,” I said, bemused.

“I don’t need to see the future when the past is standing right in front of me,” the Oracle said, clapping her hands against my cheeks and turning my head from side to side. Spearing me with those tridents. “You’re all the same. As above, so below.”

Something inside of me spasmed. “What are you talking about, old woman?”

“I’m talking about you, fool boy. What are you talking about? You came to me for advice, didn’t you? Or perhaps you’re only here to gawk at what you hope to one day be.”

With my head tilted back as it was, I couldn’t quite look at her. But I made my intent known. “I don’t hope.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” she mused, running bone-thin fingers along the veins of my neck and down, probing my torso. In search of what, I couldn’t say. “You act. So act, here and now. You have the Oracle’s attention, so make use of it. Shall I check your heart for demons?”

I scoffed. “Please.”

“Physical therapy, then? Shall this old woman ignore her own aches and pains and tend to yours?” Her fingertips dug into the sensitive flesh beneath my ribs, sending lightning threads of sensation up my chest. Not quite pain, but certainly not pleasure.

I took her hands in my own and pulled them away. “There’s nothing your hands can do for me that my own can’t do better.”

“Not the spirit, and not the body either,” she said, unbothered. “A question of the mind, then. Or rather, an answer.”

I tilted my head. There was something in those eyes - aside from the milk of blindness, obviously. Something shifty and mischievous, utterly at odds with her age. The old woman pulled away from me and turned, rifling through the various stands and tables and shelves that surrounded her holy tripod.

Finally, with a triumphant cackle, she pulled a false face from the clutter.

It was a theatre mask, carved from cypress and painted in pale tones. A woman’s face, pale and drawn and horrified. The mouth gaped open grotesquely, allowing space for the one wearing it to breathe and be heard. The eyes were wide and vacuous, the pits of them dilated to allow for the wearer to see. The eyebrows were thick and brushed with gold, arching up in dismay. It was the expression of a woman that had seen a ghost.

“You came here looking for this, didn’t you?”

This? “I don’t know what this is.” The Oracle pressed the mask into my hands. It was smooth to the touch, and inexplicably warm.

“This is the answer to the question you refuse to ask,” the Oracle said. I looked sharply up at her. Her expression was light and devious. It made her look younger by half a century.

“I don’t come here for a mask,” I informed her. She simply smiled wider, baring her teeth.

“This isn’t a mask,” she said, the words heavy with purpose. I realized she was still holding it, the knuckles of her gnarled hands bleeding white from the force of her grip. “This is your future.”

I jerked the mask out of her grip, turning it over in my hands. There was a word carved into its inner face. I read it once, and then I read it again. My heart hammered in my chest.

“Son of scarlet sin,” the Oracle whispered in a voice of low tide and shifting sands, “You have the gall to intrude on a messenger of the Fates before your journey has even truly begun, to plunder them with your arrogant eyes in search of their divinity. There are a thousand thousand mysteries in this world. Did you really think you were ready to solve the greatest of them?”

“Who are you?” I murmured.

The old woman curled her fingers, beckoning me down. I leaned forward and she whispered into my ear.

“My name is Melpomene. And I am the first of your tribulations.”

I turned and stalked out of the temple.

Kyno caught up to me about a hundred steps up the mountain, a thinly-veiled mania in his eyes. His crocodile mantle seemed to lash its tail as he bounded up the steps, such was the force of his charge.

“What was that!?” he demanded of me, his pneuma and influence a riotous wave.

I frowned, turning the mask over and over in my hand.

“I have no idea.”

But I was going to find out.