Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia
Chapter Chapter [2.12] From the Vine

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

It was a nostalgic feeling, marching outside myself again.

Selene had been right to assume that gravitas would allow me to function within the boundaries of her soul. She had been right, right enough that it made me wonder. What else did she suspect about the captain’s virtue? It wasn’t a connection the average cultivator would make. It wasn’t even a connection the average heroine could be expected to draw between the flashier applications of gravitas and its underlying mechanisms.

It was a nostalgic feeling because I hadn’t shown myself to be capable of it in all the time I had known Selene, or Griffon for that matter. It had been more than three years since my soul last walked outside the boundaries of my body. Three years since Gaius died.

On the surface of it, it was nothing more than a platitude to say that a Captain carried the weight of all the men that served beneath him. Of course the captain didn’t physically march with three thousand men piled up on his shoulders in a mountain of arms, armor, muscle and meat - as much as Griffon might have found that an amusing picture. Yet even so, it was the case that the Captain carried his men with him wherever he went.

I had never been the sort of scholar that would try to break it down to actual ratios, but I knew what I needed to—for every man, every true Roman that served beneath me and swore the sacrament to me as their Captain, I took a portion of their soul with me wherever I went.

It was not a painful schism. In fact, most legionaries never noticed the separation at all—at least, that’s how my adopted father had explained it to me. In hindsight, I wondered if the men of the Fifth Legion had felt it from the very beginning, when they swore themselves to me. Felt that portion of their souls trapped outside of themselves—tethered to an incompetent child, forced to buoy him up, when the opposite should have been the case.

Done right, I knew the process was painless. I had observed it from the soldier’s side of things. At fourteen, Gaius had brought me into the fold of his legions, and until the day he died three years later, a portion of my soul had marched alongside the Tyrant of the West, no matter how far my body strayed from his in the theater of war.

It was one of the most understated uses of the Captain’s virtue, and not by mistake. Gaius had warned me never to speak of it, not even to my fellow officers. I had never truly understood why, until the moment I recruited the new men of the Fifth Legion and held their hearts’ blood in my hands.

In my time as a soldier in his legions, Gaius had been a pillar, an unshakable support for the portion of my soul that marched in his wake. He had been a beacon of light and an impenetrable shroud both, a shield against all but the most devastating spiritual attacks.

It was impractical to the point of foolishness for a captain to carry his troops with him physically every second of every day. But with gravitas, the same didn’t hold true for their souls.

Flexing that old, forgotten muscle and forcing my soul to march while my body hung back took only a moment’s effort. It was strange, doing this without any captain or general to anchor my soul. It felt aimless—dangerous, in a way I couldn’t quite explain. But it was a familiar motion all the same.

“What do you make of it?” Griffon asked in a low voice, kneeling beside me to observe the first of Selene’s pillars. Carefully, he traced a line of chiseled artistry with the tips of his fingers—more carefully than he would have prodded at a lion’s teeth. He frowned.

“Make of what?”

“The pillar. The engraving. The material. All of it. This place makes no sense at all.” His scarlet eyes flickered my way. “Why are you glaring at me?”

I stared flatly, my spirit to his, while my body massaged its temples and tried to block out the boisterous shanty that Griffon’s drunken body was belting out for all the Nile to hear.

Selene had been right about my virtue. She had been right about the Tyrant Riot’s method, too. Unfortunately, intoxication had worked too well. The mermaid ichor hadn’t loosened up the tether that connected Griffon’s soul to his body–it had severed it entirely.

Unless the smug cock was only pretending not to notice the things his body was getting up to while he calmly investigated the Total Eclipse of the Heart. Which was possible. But assuming that wasn’t the case, he had been all but fully severed. The soul was blind to the body, for as long as we resided here within the confines of his sister’s soul.

I sighed and turned back to the pillar.

“It’s nothing. As for this… I haven’t seen anything like it, but that doesn’t mean much. There has to be some thread that connects it all. She didn’t bring us here just to tell us that Greek cultivation makes no sense. There’s a lesson to be learned.”

Griffon muttered some grudging agreement, moving on to the next column. I hung back, observing the first pillar for a few moments longer.

It was chiseled from limestone, tattooed top-to-bottom by carved iconography and what looked for all intents and purposes to be the daily life of a young woman. Mundane little murals covered every handspan of the column’s surface, senseless in their composition, underwhelming in their scenes. The moments depicted were so varied that I struggled, at first, to draw any clear connection between them all.

Here, a young woman picking apples from a tree.There, the same woman running naked across a stadium’s sand pit. Over that way, sitting with an open scroll of papyrus on her lap and a stack of several more beside her. Simple moments, drawn from a simple life. Varied and scattered as they were, they were all roughly the same size, as though the owner had known from the start exactly how many moments she planned to carve into the column. Or, as though they had shrunk to make room each time a new one was added.

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The only portion of the myriad scenes that stood out from the rest was a small string of iconography cutting through the middle of the pillar, wrapping around the full circumference in an unbroken ring. The frame outlining it was a sculptor’s approximation of creeping grapevines.

A circular moment wound its way infinitely around the column.

A young woman tended to a withered vine in the earth.

The wretched little plant was hardly strong enough to breach the surface of the loam. Its leaves were all shriveled, split from its stem—dead before they could truly live—forming a carpet of decay on the earth around it.

A continuation of that scene presented itself further along the ring.

The young woman was on her hands and knees, toiling at the earth. Jugs, pouches, and baskets surrounded her, filled with fertilizing bounties. There were enough agricultural treasures there to nurture an entire field of crops, but she was spending them all on that pitiful little plant.

It looked stronger now than it had in the first frame. Not quite healthy, but visibly recovering. It had grown a bit taller, sprouted a few new leaves, and the bud of a single flower at the end of the vine tickled the young woman’s nose while she worked. Almost like it was reaching out to thank her.

Further along, far enough now that I had to lean right to see it, the young woman swung a heavy axe at the base of a tree. She was surrounded by fallen logs, in the middle of clearing a wide circle in the woods. In the center of that circle was the vine.

The hands that chiseled the column had managed to suggest sunbeams with the finest little lines. The vine was proud and upright now, basking in the light the young woman had cleared for it. Nestled amongst its blooming flowers was a single fruitful nub. Nothing but a promise for now.

I had to move now, circling around the column to observe the next scene in the cycle.

The young woman had not let the fallen trees go to waste. Instead, she had made a mighty trellis of them all—a towering latticework that supported the vine and allowed it to grow taller than it ever could have on its own. The vine was an astonishing sight now.

It had made full use of the artificial frame and the treasures packed into its soil, growing far beyond its natural limits. It towered above the young woman now—glorious, thriving, the full flourishing product of her efforts.

It reached down to her now, as she had once reached down to it before, laying a crown of leaves upon her head.

The young woman was beaming.

I circled further around, and found the young woman toiling again.

It was nothing but lines carved out of stone, but I could feel it. There was an edge of desperation to her efforts now, a panic that had not been there before.

She was surrounded by ten times as many jugs, pouches, and baskets of fertilizing treasures as the earlier frame, but these were all empty. Most had been overturned. A few of the clay jugs had been shattered and scraped clean of their contents. There were broken axes scattered around her, too. Their edges were chipped and dulled by repeated use, their hafts fractured by the desperate force she’d swung them with.

Blood dripped from the young woman’s overworked fingers. And yet, she carried on.

The vine was a truly monstrous creature now. The latticework was taller than a free-city’s walls, and expanded outward in every direction, reaching, as if with hunger, toward the distant silhouettes of forests on the horizon. As though it was not the beneficiary of the young woman’s toiling, but rather a beast all its own, one that could swallow up that distant life whole.

The sun was gone again, smothered by a canopy of vines. Flowers and thorns covered the surface of it like bristling armor, or a monster’s thick hide. The undeveloped nubs had grown into fat, juicy fruit that clustered thickly on the vine. But they were too far to reach, propped up by the latticework frame out of the reach of mortal creatures.

The young woman eyed one of them wantonly while she worked.

I shifted around the column.

The young woman had run out of trees to expand the trellis with. She had run out of fertilizing treasures to nourish the earth with. She was surrounded by a labyrinth of overburdened wood-framing, and all of it was breaking beneath the weight of the vine.

It was clear to see that the ravenous plant had grown beyond the young woman’s capacity to nurture it. Perhaps even beyond the earth’s ability to sustain it.

It was a wilted, dying thing now, and the young woman knew it.

Hair-thin tear tracks had been chiseled down her cheeks. But not all of her efforts had been in vain, it seemed. Even as she wept, she reached up to accept the offering of a single withered tendril. There was a fruit there, weighing it down like an anchor, fat and overripe. The woman’s bleeding fingertips were just barely brushing its bulging surface.

The still frame was frozen there.

She did not even notice the thorny tendrils creeping up behind her, slithering across the trellis like serpents, reaching for the back of her neck.

I followed the curve of the column.

The young woman screamed silently through the stone.

The vine was tearing her apart, ripping into her with its thorn-fangs and dragging her beneath the earth to nourish its roots. That rancid, overripe fruit continued to dangle, unplucked and overripe, far past its prime.

The next frame was the final one.

There was no way of telling how long the young woman had kept the vine alive after her death. Perhaps its starving greed had been as pointless as her toiling, and no time had passed at all. Either way, the vine was all but dead now.

The vast, looming skeleton of latticework frames had collapsed in on itself. The dead wood rotted alongside the vine. The fruits went uneaten, and in the end, they found little purchase in the long-depleted soil.

The plant curled in on itself—not so much a towering beast now, but a colossal insect, trapped in honey and left to cook beneath the merciless sun.

I returned to where I had started, and looked upon a young woman kneeling over a withered wretch of a vine. It was surrounded by robust, towering trees that blocked out the sun with their canopies. A crown of dead leaves decorated the earth around the vine.

The young woman began her toils.

The plant began to mend.

She couldn’t see what the vine used to be, or what it would become as a result of her efforts. She could not step outside her world of chiseled limestone to observe it from an outside perspective, as I did now. She could not see that her story—framed above and below by bands of creeping vines—was already written.

She could not see that in the frame just before this one, and in the frame soon to come, that those bands above and below her, the borders that defined her world, were the very same root and stem she had cultivated so diligently with her treasures, her labors, and, in the end, her life. She was already trapped, but she didn't know it. And so, she cherished her wretched little vine and dreamed of a future filled with fruit.

I lean back from the column, scowling.

This cyclical band in the middle of the column was the only one with any coherent progression to it. The rest were all self-contained moments, cleaving to the same theme, perhaps, but thinking nothing of one another beyond that. A chaotic mess of a pillar. Almost nauseating to look upon as a singular piece.

At the top of the column, carved into the load-bearing crown, were the words φιλοσόφου λόγος — The Philosopher’s Reason. And at the bottom, carved into the base, was the young woman’s principle:

[A well-kept vine can only thrive.]