Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia
Chapter Chapter [2.22][Myron] Fortuitous Encounters

Myron,

The Little Kyrios

Alone at sea, there was little for Myron and his stowaways to do but fish and tell stories.

Once enough time had passed for Myron to separate his own emotions from the situation, he was able to acknowledge that meeting the Deceiver and his brother had been a moment of unbelievably good fortune. If they hadn't been there to delay his passage through the breakwater with their would-be banditry, he would have ended up as just another corpse burning beneath the cold Ionian. And more than that, if it had been any other pair of unseemly thieves but them, he would still have no idea what had become of his cousin during his time in Olympia.

It was the sort of thing that Lio would have called a fortuitous encounter. Myron was man enough to admit that, no matter how much the Deceiver grated on his nerves.

And yet, for all that this was an opportunity he needed to grab with both hands, why was it that the more stories they swapped, the less they wanted to listen to each other?

"Stop, stop!" the Deceiver waved his hand in Myron’s face, heterochromic eyes scrunched shut as though he were in pain. "The more you try to clarify, the less that you explain. I can't tell whether it's you that makes no sense, or your whole island."

Normally, this would be the part where his older and more reasonable brother chimed in to chastise him, but even Pyr was grinding his knuckles against his temples, a grimace on his face.

Myron slapped the Deceiver’s hand aside. "I haven't even told you anything noteworthy yet. These are just the basics!"

"The basics, he says," the Deceiver muttered. "It must be the island that's mad. If you were trying to take us for a ride, you would have picked a more plausible story. Unless you knew we would think that..."

"Don't start," Pyre groaned.

"My island isn't weird," Myron insisted, feeling his ears burning as both of them looked searchingly up at him, visibly trying to decide whether or not he was joking. "It isn't!"

"Of course it is!"

"How, then? How! If it's so obvious, put it into words!"

"Where to begin, but with the young master himself?” The Deceiver threw his hands up to the storm-dark sky above. “You claim to be the nephew of Damon Aetos, the eagle that devours emperors, and yet you don't know a single thing about him! You know less than the average cultivator should know about their kyrios, let alone what the average nephew should know about his uncle—I'm surprised you even know his name! At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know he swept the Olympic Games."

Myron focused all of his efforts on maintaining his Lio face, even as that latest uppercut of information struck him squarely in the jaw. Caught up in his own ranting, the Deceiver didn’t notice his reaction.

Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for his brother.

"Truly?" Pyre breathed.

Myron held on to his Lio face for dear life.

The Deceiver stared at him, then at his brother, then back at him.

"You didn't know?" he said in rising disbelief. "Until this very moment, you didn't know that Damon Aetos was the last man to sweep the Olympic Games? You didn't know that your own uncle, the kyrios of your cult, the Tyrant that rules your city—is a Champion?”

“Of course I did,” Myron lied.

Now that the king’s eyes were on him, though, he was seen through all too easily.

“That right there is exactly what I mean. The idea that a Tyrant—any Tyrant, but especially a Tyrant like him—could be a ghost in his own city? It’s nonsensical. A Tyrant’s reputation is everything. It's the source of their ethos—the basis of their authority!”

The Deceiver visibly struggled to find the right words for his outrage.

“A king needs a crown,” Pyre suggested.

The Deceiver snapped his fingers. “Precisely. Precisely! A king wears his accomplishments like a crown upon his head. His domain is an extension of that ethos—his kingdom. Even just walking down the streets of his city, breathing the air that he allowed you to breathe, you should have been able to feel it. The echo of his Epic.”

“Pyr and I lived in a cave on top of a mountain for—what, six months?” Pyr nodded. “Six months, before the Tyrant Riot died. In all that time we never once ventured outside that cave, yet by the end of it we knew more about the Indigo Throne than you know about your own uncle. It doesn’t make any sense!

“It doesn’t make any sense that the Rosy Dawn, a Cult of Greater Mystery, contains only five Heroic souls that you can name.”

Myron’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”

“Heroic cultivators are a mystery cult’s pride! Even if they never returned home to pay their respects to the kyrios in your lifetime, your seniors should have told you stories of them! Your mentors should have been teaching you the lessons that they were taught, holding them up as examples—glories for you to aspire to.

“I can’t decide what’s more absurd: a Greater Mystery Cult that treats its Heroes like ghosts, or one that has only five Heroes to its name!”

“We have more,” Myron quickly said. He had no idea if that was actually true—maybe if he counted Niko’s wife—and yet, how could they not? “Of course we do. I just... never thought about them.”

“You never thought about them. Of course. Naturally.”

The Deceiver was pacing atop the rail of the ship now, balancing with deceptive grace even as his tone grew more frenetic.

“You didn’t think anything of them, just as you didn’t think anything of the fact that you live on an island that receives no visitors from the West, and yet your eastern port has been empty for months.

“The same way you thought nothing of the fact that there are more holes in your education than a pearl-diving bumpkin’s. It’s understandable, really. After all, it all makes perfect sense when you explain it!

“Why wouldn’t the old failures of your cult be responsible for your education, while your mother and father watch you struggle from the peak of the Heroic Realm? Why wouldn’t the Sand Reckoner build his workshop in the shadow of a mystery cult and refuse to teach its mystikos? Much more sensible that he would ignore you all entirely! Even more understandable that such a man would let you stroll into his workshop unannounced and uninvited! And only to be expected that you’d walk back out with the schematics to a boat you had to build yourself—because your free-city’s primary dock had no fucking ships!”

“What next, Aetos?” the Deceiver rounded on him, wild-eyed. “Next you tell us that Griffon really is just a Philosopher? And perhaps after that—”

Again, it was Pyr that caught him out.

“He is?”

Thus exposed, Myron let his confusion show.

“Of course. What did you think he was?”

His stomach sank when even the Deceiver couldn’t find the words to respond to that.

“What? Are you telling me he pretended he wasn’t? Did he tell you that he was still a Citizen?”

Lio didn’t lie, but Myron had heard more than one story of cultivators hiding the full extent of their refinement while traveling—for their own safety, in a world where violence was ever close at hand, and every advantage mattered.

The Deceiver wavered on the edge of the rail, running a hand through the bright red curls of his hair. Eventually, he began to chuckle.

Myron bristled. “Do I amuse you, little king?”

Rather than take offense, the other boy only dissolved further.

“You do. You really do! Every time I think I have your measure, you say something even more ludicrous than before!”

He resumed his pacing, mismatched eyes distant, and beckoned Myron without looking as he did.

“In fact, go on! Let’s hear the next one. Let’s hear about how the Revenant came to know your cousin, I’m sure that will be an unremarkable story. Tell us how he spent his days in the Rosy Dawn. Was he a ghost just like your uncle? Or maybe he composed poems for the marble beauties of the island.”

“Maybe he spent his days gambling at the docks,” Pyre suggested, with his usual dry humor.

The Deceiver barked a laugh, which soon broke and crumbled into hysterical giggles.

“Of course! Gambling at the empty docks, that sounds about right. And I suppose that’s how Griffon found him! He must have tripped over the Revenant while looking for a ship!”

“It would only make sense,” Pyr agreed. The Deceiver snorted, before rounding on Myron.

“Well? Tell us, Aetos—how close are we?”

They both looked so expectant that, for a moment, Myron hesitated to say anything at all.

“Go on! We must have been on the mark if you’re this reluctant. Let’s hear it!”

“Who is the Revenant?” Myron asked.

Just like that, their mirth vanished like it had never been.

“…The Revenant, Myron,” Pyr said after a long, silent beat. “Griffon’s mentor.”

His mentor?

“The Roman,” Leo said.

Myron blinked. Suddenly everything made sense. And nothing did at all.

“You mean the slave?”

The Deceiver slipped and fell into the sea.

Days passed.

They had no supplies, nothing but the open sea to sustain them, but the fish were plentiful enough and the heavens were kind even in their cruelty. The storms that rocked their—his—ship also wet their throats with an endless supply of crisp rainwater. The waves would kill them long before the thirst did.

Assuming they didn’t kill each other first.

“Enough of barking dogs!” Myron shouted through the storm, angry enough to spit blood.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

His fingers flew across the myriad levers, dials, and switches that the Sand Reckoner’s blueprints had called for but never truly explained. Through manic trial and error, carried out in the midst of crashing waves that rivaled the Scarlet Stadium at their zeniths, Myron had slowly begun to understand their auxiliary purposes. He was still not entirely familiar with them all, and he still had that gnawing feeling there was an element to their design that he was missing entirely—but he would have to make do.

“I don’t want to hear that from you!” the Deceiver screamed right back at him, red-bright hair plastered to his face by the sheeting rain. He was crouched at the front of the ship, gripping the rail for dear life even as he leaned precariously over its edge—jutting out over the waves like the maidenhead that Myron hadn’t had time to carve.

“Dogs! Idiot fucking mongrels, the both of you!”

“Watch your filthy mouth in the presence of royalty!”

“Try to steal my ship. Mock my upbringing. Waste my time,” Myron raged. “And here you are, about as valuable to me in this moment as a sundial and a bucket full of piss.” Lightning flashed overhead, thunder roaring across a curtain of ashen clouds. “No, less! I’d still rather have the sundial!”

“You asked a question and I answered it, you ungrateful little peasant! Thirty degrees starboard!”

Myron spat an oath that would have gotten both his ears boxed if Lydia had been around to hear him say it. Latching three mechanisms into temporary stasis with his left hand, thus freeing up his right, he gripped a lever by his knee with both hands and yanked it sharply back. The ship groaned and lurched right, carving a wide arc across the rising surface of another wave.

“You can’t even keep your own stories straight! To hear you two tell it, Lio and Sol were here and there and nowhere at all, or else they were everywhere at once! Unseen and unknown, yet felt and feared by all! Depending on the night, of course!”

“I won’t explain the nature of a Crow to you again! I refuse!”

“You couldn’t even explain it the first time, and yet I’m the fool!?”

“You are! You are exactly that! You’re the fool that thought the Revenant was a slave!”

“He was!” Myron howled.

“So it was a slave that took the Gadfly in his hand? It was a slave that stepped into a dead god’s domain and challenged them to a fist fight? It was a slave that dragged four Tyrants of the Raging Heaven Cult into his confidence? That was a slave’s work, was it!?”

“Saying a thing with an arrogant expression doesn’t make it true, you ass.”

“I might as well be trying to teach a dog Greek,” the Deceiver lamented. His eyes narrowed and he leaned out even further over the rail, snapping, “Hard left! Left!”

“It’s port, fool,” Myron bit out, wrenching at a lever by his left knee. The ship swung back around on an even tighter arc than before, and the Deceiver lurched halfway over the rail before his brother caught him by the back of his chiton.

Pyr hunched miserably over the rowing bench, guarding their dwindling supply of fish from the gale-force winds.

“What is the point of this?” the older brother asked them both. “The two of you grow more stubborn by the hour. Let it be! There are more important matters at hand!”

“Don’t you high-hand me, you bit part,” Myron seethed. “You aren’t as subtle as you think you are. I heard every word that you slipped in under your brother’s ranting. You were every bit as smug as he was back when this began!”

“That was before the sea tried to swallow us!” Pyre screamed, his voice hitting a shrill pitch even as his younger brother howled for another course correction.

“Don’t change the subject!”

“I can see it!” the Deceiver shouted. In the distance, slicing through the rising wall of water, Myron saw it too—a sleek white sword of a fish, nearly as long as their ship.

“Double back, starboard!” the Deceiver called frantically back.

Myron’s hands flew across the levers and dials, drawing his ship around and into a suicidal climb, straight up the long face of the wave.

“No, I said starboard! Starboard—”

“Be silent!” Myron snapped.

They climbed and they climbed, but even as Pyr took up the oars in a hopeless effort to give them just a bit more momentum, they began to slow as the rules of nature asserted themselves. The crest of the wave was bearing down on them now, the great slavering maw of the storm snapping shut, poised to swallow them up.

Both of the brothers were screaming at him now. Myron ignored them both—or tried to, at any rate.

“Now I see it!” the Deceiver howled, the whites of his mismatched eyes standing out stark against his face. Unlike his brother’s expression of pale, bloodless terror, rage had made the Deceiver’s face nearly red enough to match his hair. “Now I finally see it! You’d rather die than admit what this is really about!”

“I told you not to change the subject,” Myron bit out.

The Deceiver stabbed a finger at him from across the deck, a feral tilt to the baring of his teeth.

“Don’t change the subject, because you might not be able to dance around the new one until the sea swallows us all whole! Don’t get to the crux of it, because we can spend the rest of time debating the truth of things that neither one of us experienced for ourselves! Because all you have to do when I tell you that the sky is blue is gouge your eyes out and say you don’t believe me—anything to avoid the reality of things!”

The keel groaned torturously as the mast drew perpendicular with the face of the wave, and the outline of an eagle burned bright beneath the deck as Myron threw his ship into an impossible spin.

“Tell me the truth, then, Deceiver!” Myron hollered back, even as he sent the ship plunging down towards its certain doom. “What is it that a king’s eyes see? What is the truth that I would rather die than accept!?”

The king did not hesitate.

“The truth is that for all that you grew up in a place that defies all common sense, for all that you overlooked the Revenant, for all that you are less pleasant company than the snake that bit me when I was a baby—in spite of all those things, you still have eyes to see! You know what kind of man your cousin is! No matter how much you tried to cover it up, I could see the stories that surprised you, and I could see the ones that didn’t! You can’t fool the King’s eye, Aetos!”

The Deceiver let go of his precarious grip on the rail, risking everything just to jab two fingers at his bloodshot eyes, and then jab them back at Myron.

“I saw the moments that shook you and the moments that didn’t. I saw that no matter how ridiculous your cousin’s crimes became, you never once doubted that he was capable of them. That was never the issue.”

Myron found himself snarling back at the boy.

“Then what was?”

“It was never about your cousin’s deeds. It was Griffon’s disposition that threw you.”

Myron’s gut twisted and lurched. He told himself it was because the ship had entered freefall.

“You’re not mad at either of us, not really! You’re furious that the caged king you described isn’t anything like the man we met! You’re furious that he’s thriving—that he’s happier without you! Because deep down, you were hoping that he'd falter until you found him!”

Myron screamed, wrenching back on two levers with all the strength left in his body, and the pressurized vitality of a full pneumatic chamber on top of that. The brothers joined their screams to his as they spiraled through the storm—Pyr wordlessly, and the Deceiver with an infernal, frenzied spite.

“So be it!” he shrieked. “We'll settle it beneath the earth!”

It happened too fast for mortal eyes to track.

The virtuous beast—the sword in the shape of a fish—stabbed straight through the surface of the wave and out into the open air in a spray of salt and surging pneuma. Pyr scrambled across the deck, trying desperately to dive in front of his brother, but the beast had struck first and it had struck faster. The Deceiver leaned back, almost casually, staring curiously at the tip of the blade as it closed the distance—a sharp thrust that would skewer his heart and carry them both over the side, to be swallowed by the sea and, soon thereafter, the beast.

Myron exhaled sharply, depleting the second pneumatic chamber that he had held in reserve for this very moment, and his fingers danced across the Sand Reckoner’s controls.

The ship’s crossbeam swung wide and slammed into the fish like a swung elbow, catching it just above the tail-fin and spinning it like a discus in the air. As the crossbeam swung, the scarlet sail that had been tied down for the last two days straight suddenly sprung open, catching the gale winds and nearly ripping free as it filled to its fullest extension in an instant. But before the storm could take it or the virtuous beast could react to it, Myron had already snapped it shut around the fish, nautical mechanisms grinding through the burning guts of the ship, latches sinking back into place like the teeth of a sleek wooden beast that answered to Myron alone as its master.

It all happened in the span of a second, and it left the Deceiver and his brother both staring up at the thrashing knot of fabric-and-fish in complete disbelief.

Myron inhaled sharply.

“Kill it,” he growled, before turning his full attention towards escaping the crashing wave intact.

To their credit, neither one of them hesitated. While Myron salvaged their ship’s suicidal course, the brothers each took up one of the ship’s oars and beat the struggling fish to death.

Time passed. How much of it, Myron couldn’t say. All he knew was that at some point the worst of the storm passed. The clouds were still churning, and the rain was still pouring, but all at once it was as though the sea heaved a great sigh and gave up on sinking them that day.

That, or he had finally gotten good enough at guiding the Sand Reckoner’s ship that the storm no longer mattered. Either way, the result was the same.

It was in that moment of relative peace, as he watched the Deceiver and his brother wrestle the corpse of the sword beast out from the sail, that Myron finally conceded the point.

“I don’t doubt that Lio did all of those things you described,” he said. “Not even the ones that contradict each other. The truth is, I believed every story from the start.”

The Deceiver turned from his work with a victorious grin. Pyr covered his brother’s mouth with a firm hand before he could speak.

“I still don’t know how he did most of those things, but that doesn’t surprise me. As for Sol… I only ever knew him as a slave, up until the very last moment when he broke his chains. But the day that I met him, the day that Lio introduced me to him… he didn’t introduce him to me as a slave, or as a cultivator, or even as a man.”

Myron gazed distantly across the heaving seas, remembering that quiet, golden moment, hidden there among the wheat fields.

“Lio pointed him out to me, one man toiling among many others to bring the harvest in, and he told me—”

Look there, cousin. Look and see the monster that I promised you.

The brothers exchanged a glance.

“I know more than you think I do,” Myron stated with ironclad certainty. “I understand that some things are ridiculous, but I also understand that my cousin is a ridiculous man. The thing I can’t accept, it’s not the fact that he did the things you say he did. And no matter what either of you believe, it isn’t the fact that he enjoyed himself while doing them. I never wanted Lio to fail, not even for a moment.”

Myron clenched his fists, his eyes stinging where the salt spray struck them.

“The only thing I can’t stand is my place in all of this,” he ground out. “The only truth I can’t accept is that I could have been there, with him, for every one of those impossible moments, if I had only said yes when he asked me to join him. It could have been me, not either of you, if I had only taken his hand!”

For a long while after that, there was only the sting of salt water running down his cheeks, and the distant drumbeat of heaven’s wrath.

Surprisingly, it was the Deceiver who spoke up in sympathy.

“Myron, I…”

Whatever he might have said, though, the hunting cry of a higher-order predator drowned him out.

Myron’s head whipped up. Something hit the deck behind him with a muffled bang, and the two brothers shouted in surprise, but Myron’s eyes remained locked to the skies above, and the massive feathered beast falling from them like a bolt of lightning.

He gathered his pneuma and palmed both daggers as the bird of prey dove down with its talons outstretched. The moment he lunged to meet it, however, the eagle beat its wings once and threw him off his feet, flinging him up against the far rail.

By the time Myron recovered, the beast had already landed, talons wrapping around the crossbeam rather than his throat. The virtuous beast—a golden eagle as tall as he was, with a wingspan twice as wide—stared at him steadily. Myron inhaled and inhaled and inhaled, filling as much of his two pneumatic chambers as he could, heart pounding in his chest as he waited for the moment to pass and the violence to ensue. But it never did.

Instead, maintaining eye contact all the while, the eagle lowered its head and tore a chunk of flesh from the fish that Myron had risked his life to catch.

The audacity.

“Sorea!” Pyre exclaimed, a moment before Myron could fling two knives and a string of expletives at the bird. The Deceiver raised a joyous cry.

“You know this bird?” Myron asked incredulously.

“You don’t? He belongs to them.”

Myron stared at the virtuous beast, and he found himself wondering once again—just how many opportunities had he missed, the day that he chose the Rosy Dawn over his cousin?

“More importantly, look at what he brought us,” the Deceiver said, a drop of that hysterical mirth seeping back into his voice. “Another friend!”

Finally, reluctantly, Myron turned away from the bird, just enough to see what had hit the deck as it descended.

It took a moment to identify the bundle of knobby limbs and sodden cloth as a living human being, slumped over Myron’s rowing bench where he’d landed and only just now regaining his breath. Another moment to realize it was a boy their age.

And then one more moment after that, as the red-headed rat pushed himself up off the bench, to recognize his ugly face.

“You,” Myron hissed. The boy, the same boy that had seen him from the crow’s nest of the Eos the day that Olympia burned—the boy that had ignored him—stared back at him in shock.

“Run,” the Deceiver suggested, and the rat dove across the deck, scrambling for the golden eagle’s protection.

Myron tackled him through the rowing bench, screaming obscenities. Pyr threw himself into the mix a moment later, trying and failing to sway Myron towards reason. The Deceiver, for his part, just cackled and danced around the three of them, heckling the rat and kicking him wherever he found an opening.

Perched atop the crossbeam, the golden eagle observed them placidly as it filled its belly with sword flesh.