Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia
Chapter Chapter [2.21][Lydia] Upon the Alikonia

Lydia Aetos,

The Young Miss-tocrat

First light was just seeping through the wool curtains of the captain’s quarters when Lydia entered, bumping the heavy oak door open with her hip and sweeping through the room with a platter of food balanced on her left hand, a jug of water and a jug of wine tucked under her right arm, and a third jug filled with honey swaying precariously atop her head.

Her steps were certain as she paced across the quarters towards the captain’s commandeered bed, the steady sway of the waves nigh imperceptible even to her refined senses.

More than it was a ship, the Alikonia was a city that happened to sail. As was the case with so many of his designs, the Sand-Reckoner had achieved his primary aim - namely, making sure the ridiculous thing could float - almost as an afterthought, satisfying every other nascent impulse along the way first. The result was an unwieldy behemoth of sophic engineering, overburdened with amenities and riddled with thousands of little insanities that Archimedes had installed in place of a proper crew in order to keep the beast moving.

Lydia set the platter of salted meats, pickled vegetables, and fresh-caught fish down on one of three dining tables clustered beside the captain’s bed - a bed more plush and lavishly adorned than her own was back home, and nearly three times the size, set aside for a man that slept on the floor surrounded by his work if he ever slept at all.

In the Sand-Reckoner’s perpetual absence, Niko had claimed the captain’s quarters for his wife.

Lydia brushed a few limp strands of honey-wheat hair from Iphys’ face, idly setting down the jugs of honey, water, and wine while she did.

“Good morning, Iphys,” she murmured. Her law-cousin didn’t respond, beyond a strained gasp and a fresh wave of tremors.

With her eyes clenched shut and her lovely face pinched with pain, she could almost be mistaken for mortal. Her Heroic frame gave her away, of course, along with the iron manacles fastened around each of her wrists. Her wrists weren’t bound together in the way of chattel slaves, but fastened down at her sides by fat iron chains anchored to a pair of heavy iron rings set into the floor on either side of the bed. The restraining irons had been there already, a mystery that the Sand-Reckoner hadn’t bothered to explain and no one else had bothered to investigate.

The least alarming possibility was that they’d been installed for a situation exactly like this, a wounded cultivator in need of rest and restraint. As if summoned up by the thought, a fresh wave of agony sent the Heroine into hysterics, arching up from the sweat-soaked sheets and screaming through clenched teeth. Lydia inhaled sharply and snatched back her hand, mindful of the terrible strength her law-cousin had even while the bulk of her cultivation was bound by iron.

All she could do was watch helplessly as Iphys Aetos suffered, until finally the worst of it passed and the Heroine collapsed back into the bed with an explosive sob and the dull rattle of settling chains.

Lydia didn’t waste a moment. Experience and more than a few close calls had taught her that the safest time to tend to the bedridden Heroine was in the immediate aftermath of such a throe, and so she made short work of the sheets and the ruined silk dress that her law-cousin had torn at some point in the night. She wrenched open an ornate wooden chest at the foot of the bed, geometric carvings flaring with faint light and a release of pneuma across its surface, and plucked a chunk of ice the size of her clenched fist from the pile before latching it shut again and activating the chilling array with a careful application of her own pneuma.

The ice sublimated instantly where it touched the Heroine’s fevered skin, scalding Lydia up to her elbow, but she was made of sterner stuff than most. The Young Miss carried on implacably until all that remained of the frozen block was a thin film of condensation on the ceiling.

In this way, Lydia settled into a small routine that she’d built up and refined in the weeks since that stark light had split the heavens. She cleansed her law-cousin as best she could, slid clean sheets beneath her and dressed her in fresh silks, then set about feeding her. The soiled linens were dropped through a hole that opened up in the floor like the yawning mouth of some great beast, panels of wood sliding open and shut at the behest of grinding iron wheels that the Sand-Reckoner called gears.

Coaxing the Heroine into relaxing her jaw enough to pour liquid past her lips was ordeal enough, but Lydia persevered until the older woman had taken a savage bite out of a bonito, shearing through scale, flesh, and bone with little regard for which was which. Only once that was done and the kykeon jug was empty did she whisper a quiet farewell to the suffering flower of the Aetos family and take her leave.

She found an old man waiting for her outside the threshold, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main hall and scribbling away with a stick of charcoal on a scroll of papyrus.

“You took your time today,” he said irritably without once looking up at her. Lydia inhaled slowly, imagined a world where she’d brought the soiled laundry with her and dumped it on his head, then exhaled with a small smile.

“Good morning, master.”

“Is it, now? I suppose it must be, for those blessed with diligent students and quiet workshops. Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that—”

Lydia dropped the platter of Iphys’ uneaten breakfast onto the Sand-Reckoner’s lap, smearing the latest of his scribbles and jarring his hand in the midst of a stroke. The charcoal stick snapped in his gnarled fist.

“A satiated mind is a sound mind,” she said dutifully.

“There is no such thing as a satiated mind, girl.” Archimedes shoved a cut of salted lamb into his mouth, giving her an ugly glare for her troubles. “Meet me in the Antikytherium. Now.”

“I’ll be going to the gymnasium first, master. The others are expecting me.”

Archimedes spat an oath through a full mouth of food, slammed a fist against a mosaic panel on the wall behind him, and fell abruptly out of sight, consumed by the iron teeth of yet another gear-driven chute.

Hours later, dripping sweat and aching in places she hadn’t known could ache, Lydia gratefully accepted the offered hand of a woman with black, burning eyes, and an aura of horrible malice.

“Thank you, my lady,” she spoke, and the Heroine’s expression darkened further.

“I wish you would call me Heka. At my age, it’s embarrassing to be called a lady by a flower in full bloom.” The words were so at odds with the Heroine’s appearance that it was as if another woman entirely was speaking through her as a medium. It was a disorienting effect, but one that Lydia had long since gotten used to.

“At your age?” she asked, puzzled. “Aren’t you and Niko peers?”

“Worse,” the menacing woman said, her lip lifting in a sneer. “I’m older by a year. I’ll be thirty soon enough, too old for anything but a loom and my mother’s despair.” She spun her iron staff around and up onto her shoulder like it was a hollow reed, nodding derisively down at Lydia. “You did well today. I can see why Niko brags so much about you. I’ll be back tomorrow morning if you’d like to exchange discourse again.”

That said, the Heroine spun on her heel and stalked out of the gymnasium, looking for all the world like she was off to commit unspeakable violence.

Heka was an odd one, but she was as kind a woman as Lydia had ever met, and an able sparring partner besides. She’d be back tomorrow.

“Antikytherium,” the Sand-Reckoner called from the far corner of the gymnasium, waving a needle-tipped compass at her like he meant to throw it. “Quickly, now! With a purpose!”

“I’ll be bathing first, master.”

Archimedes snarled and thumped his left heel against the gymnasium floor, falling through it a moment later.

The baths were one of many miracles that Lydia hadn’t been able to help herself from examining further, and the mechanisms that kept them functioning in the belly of a ship put out to sea were truly fascinating. Great spiraling screws spun tirelessly, driven by ceaselessly turning gears, funneling new water in from the very seas beneath the ship to be heated and transferred through to the primary bathing pool, the fouled runoff of which was collected and then returned to the sea by screws of the same type.

A dozen other little sophic oddities filtered and heated the water on its way to the primary pool, creating a bathing experience just short of otherworldly.

Lydia wasn’t too proud to admit she spent more time than was strictly needed in that bath, basking in the steam and tracing the passage of golden spirals behind her closed eyelids.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

She leaned back against the lip of the pool with a soft sigh, letting her eyes drift shut, ignoring the persistent hammering of a fist coming from the other side of the wall.

When she finally emerged from the ship’s belly, the sun was on its downturn and the deck was buzzing with the noise of Niko’s companions, returned from their latest venture inland.

“I’ll be speaking to Niko first, master.”

The Sand Reckoner had only just opened his mouth to speak. While he processed that, outrage darkening his already dour face, she bumped her hip against a mosaic tile in the wall and sent him plummeting down through another vent in the floor, waving pleasantly as she passed.

“No need to thank me,” she called over top of his fading ranting.

Preempting their master's desires was a diligent disciple’s pride.

Lydia found her eldest cousin in a section of the ship that only the Sand Reckoner and his students—past or present—were afforded access to. In practical terms, due to its isolated nature and the Sand Reckoner’s mistrust of every other cultivator frolicking on his ship, it existed for Niko and Lydia alone.

The Young Miss of the Rosy Dawn Cult stepped into the circular chamber and shut the door behind her, lingering there for a brief moment to watch the geometric seal lock it into place. The formation responsible was a chaotic mess of interlocking triangles and a series of looping, golden lines that spilled out across the room in every direction from the central point of the pyramidal knob embedded in the center of the door.

It only lasted a moment before the golden lights faded. It wasn’t the sort of formation she had paid much attention to in the past—the Sand Reckoner made use of similar things in his workshop back on the island, but they’d always seemed a bit nonsensical to her. A cynical part of her had always assumed that the bulk of it was there for aesthetics alone. Or, knowing her master, as geometric noise, meant to obfuscate the true formation buried beneath all the scribblings.

Recently, though… Lydia traced that central formation as it faded, tracking her memory of it with her eyes as far as she could, picking just one of a hundred branching paths and monitoring not the shape itself, but the sensation of her eyes rolling in her skull as she followed it.

Castor and Rena were right. She wasn’t getting enough sleep.

Shaking off the half-formed curiosities, she turned away from the door and stepped into the isolation chamber, where Niko sat quietly with his sword balanced across both knees.

The room itself was bereft of any furnishings, but that was to be expected given its purpose. This place had been constructed with closed-doors cultivation in mind, and given the man that had designed it, it was only natural that it had taken this shape.

Lydia stepped carefully over a curving band of copper buried in the massive disk of stone that defined the boundaries of the room. She crept past that bronze circle, carefully balancing on the tips of her toes so that she could step first into the narrow section of stone where the bronze intersected with a circle of silver.

As the pad of her right foot touched down in that slim intersection, the two points where the bronze band and the silver band intersected lit up to mark her passage. Each of those two thumb-thick sections, where bronze met silver, had been given all the manic care that she had come to expect in her master’s passion projects. The two intersecting points were neither bronze nor silver, but an alloy of the two that the Sand Reckoner had painstakingly forged himself in the pursuit of a perfect balance—equal parts bronze and silver.

The entire room was like that, overlapping circles of nearly every precious metal known to man. They served as a mental warm-up and a security formation at the same time, preparing the scholar of geometry for their impending stretch of closed doors cultivation, and preparing any would-be intruder for their time to come in Tartarus.

Lydia’s destination was the center of the room. By the time she got there, she had danced just over three full revolutions around it in order to satisfy the sequence that unlocked a cold stone circle for her to sit down in.

Kneeling with both legs tucked beneath her, Lydia waited patiently for her eldest cousin to gather his thoughts—or perhaps to find a stopping point in his current cultivation.

Niko’s eyes remained closed and his breath remained steady. Time passed.

Patience was the lesson of the day, it seemed.

Sighing, Lydia settled in and focused on the circulation of her own pneumatic scripture, passed down from the Sand Reckoner to her—if reluctantly.

The Last Gasp of the Golden Age was a breathing technique that sounded far more impressive than it really was, a product of her master’s occasional flair for the dramatic. It was a breathing technique that became more baffling the longer that you studied it, more difficult to maintain the longer that you kept it going. In many ways, it was the polar opposite of what could be considered a good technique by the average cultivator. Her master had admitted that much himself, though his tone had made it very clear what he thought of the average cultivator’s opinion.

The Sand Reckoner had insisted that there would eventually come a turning point. At the moment where the technique seemed the most convoluted, when the strain of maintaining it was the most overwhelming, the technique would undergo a profound transformation. At the pinnacle of mastery, there would come a time when the Last Gasp of the Golden Age reversed course and became easier to maintain the longer that she kept it going. At that time, all of the branching complexities would narrow and become one, and all the ugly, confounding factors of creation would be pulled into the perfect path that she had pioneered for herself.

Of course, Archimedes had explained all of that in the context of himself, not her. As far as she could tell, it was all just pretty conjecture.

Lydia contemplated those memories and many others while she waited for Niko to acknowledge her, inhaling and exhaling steadily, no matter how many lines split and diverged at the edges of her perception and within the channels of her body. Her head throbbed, and her lungs labored, but the rise and fall of her chest remained smooth.

Out of spite, if for no other reason, she had long ago promised herself that she would surpass her master’s expectations of her in mastering his pneumatic scripture.

She would surpass his expectations of her, and then, while he was busy patting himself on the back for the accomplishments of his student, she would surpass his own mastery of the technique. Make it her own. Maybe even rename it.

When the throbbing of her head and the crushing pressure inside her lungs became too unbearable for any conscious thought, when even the warrior spirit was ready to throw down spear and shield and admit defeat, Lydia would let her mind settle on the fantasy of that future—the face she imagined the Sand Reckoner would make when he realized that the fool girl he had been forced to take under his wing had not only exceeded his expectations of her, but eclipsed him in his entirety.

Accurate or not, that look that she imagined on his face was always enough to get her through another few minutes of torturous breathing exercises.

"You're getting better every day, cousin," Niko spoke after an indeterminable amount of time, and Lydia let the Last Gasp of the Golden Age go with relief.

As she opened her eyes and looked around, she saw the spiraling lines of gold that acted as visual aids for those honing their pneumatic scripture. They retracted with every normal breath she took, spiraling back toward the central point that was herself until they vanished entirely into the stone beneath her.

"Even the smallest effort of a day is its own crucial step upon the great path," she said wryly, injecting a bit of the usual sophist pomp into the platitude. It was a line the old sophists of the Rosy Dawn Cult enjoyed repeating to its junior mystikos in lieu of real wisdom.

Niko shook his head, reaching out and gripping her shoulder with a hand that was larger than it should have been by half a span.

"I'm serious," he said with earnest admiration. "I've been keeping an eye on your progress since we first met here. Every time, you make it further along the path for less effort. I only know a bit about the technique from my own short, unpleasant eternity trying to learn it, but that’s enough to see how impressive your progress has been. You’re supposed to slow down the closer you get to the tipping point. Yet here you are, speeding up.

It was a genuine compliment. It always was with Niko. That was what made him so difficult to talk to, these days.

More and more, Lydia found it easier to understand her fiancée’s frustrations in the days leading up to their eldest cousin’s wedding.

"Is that why you're always here when I want to talk to you?" Lydia asked archly. "I can't imagine this room is of any value to you."

"You’d be surprised.” He leaned back in the circle that he had claimed for himself—the one in the very center of the stone, and the only one that didn’t intersect with any others. Pure, unsullied gold. "I didn’t last long with old Archimedes as my mentor, and I won’t pretend it was a mutual parting that split us. But that doesn’t mean I learned nothing from the old fox."

Niko tapped the naked iron of his blade meaningfully. "I just never used the things he taught me in the ways he felt I should. Being here reminds me of a few of those things, lessons I’ve started taking for granted since my ascension. I think it’s good that I refresh myself on them now, while I still can."

"While you still can," Lydia echoed. "So you found one? A new ship?"

The Hero shrugged. "Maybe. It’s not much more promising than the last three we found, but I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll never find a vessel that can match the Eos. Not one that’s for sale, at any rate."

"And?" Lydia pressed, satisfied that she had waited long enough for him to reach the point on his own. "Did you find any leads?"

She didn’t have to specify what kind, naturally. Niko and his companions hadn’t been leaving the Alikonia to sight-see.

Niko grimaced. Lydia leaned forward eagerly.

"You did, didn’t you? And you had the nerve to keep me waiting!"

"It’s not what you’re hoping," he said. But still she waited, not letting the wind fly fully from her sails. "It was just a rumor. Maybe the most absurd one yet."

"Tell me," she demanded.

Reluctantly, he did.

“On our way back from Lacedaemonia, Thaum crossed paths with a cultivator on the brink of death—a Hero that claims to have spent months in OIympia prior to its fall. The man was half-gone already, but in a moment of clarity, Thaum said he spoke of an unkindness that fell upon the Half-Step City in the wake of the kyrios’ death. A pair of hidden monsters that haunted the halls of the Raging Heaven Cult for months thereafter.

“Supposedly, one wore the tattered, blood-stained silks of the Rosy Dawn. The other walked in the shadow of the Storm Crown, a silent weight upon the mountain, known to its mystikos only as the Raven…”