Written by David Snee#

Cleo crawls to a collapsed sprawl in the scant shade of an olive tree, the first in a grove where the grass meets the sand. They’d made it, as planned, to the vanishing isle of Lyra—in a manner of speaking. A place that shouldn’t exist, except in certain tides and certain prophecies. The wooden scraps of her ill-fated ship scratch at the shore with the tide. Drowned bodies bob on blue waters beneath the radiant dawn, casting a death-and-destruction pallor on paradise. The things she needs to do are clear and simple, but she can’t get herself to do them. Mixed emotions play out in her chest: grief and relief, hope and despair, exhaustion and urgency.

Yannis snores, face down at the edge of the lapping waves, the only other survivor she can see: a drunken satyr with salt foam pooling in the curl of his horns.

She resigns herself to circumstance and stands. The muscles in her back and shoulders ache, knotted from days of pulling an oar across the Cerulean Sea. As she walks, her fingers fumble absently after her short sword but find an empty scabbard slapping the outside of her thigh.

Yannis startles awake at her approach. “We’ll refill the stolen wineskins with piss,” he says, before rolling to a seated position to take in their surroundings. After a silence that seems too short, he says, “Was it the storm that got us, or the serpent?”

“Bit of both.” Her throat is sore and salty. “How did you slip your shackles?”

He looks down at his wrists and then acts unsurprised. Then he gets up and begins to run but doesn’t make it far before he realizes that he doesn’t know where to go. When he returns with a sullen look on his face, she’s unclasping a red cloak from a corpse to lay flat in the sun to dry.

During this, she catches him eyeing her backside and arcs her brow. Really?

He shrugs. Hoplites aren’t exactly thickly clad. The light battle uniform ensures mobility, consisting of a mid-thigh skirt with leather sheafs and a short-cropped bronze breast plate, just enough to stop a spearpoint and keep her tits from getting sunburned. Helmets lie about, bronze faceguards with crescent-shaped horsehair plumes, but she never favored the pageantry or the loss of peripheral vision. And now there’s no one around to make her wear one. Instead, she wrings the water from her curly black hair, which hangs to her shoulders, and then ties it back with a stray length of hemp.

Yannis scavenges the shoreline for rations and water but comes back emptyhanded.

Cleo rips a notched shield from a bloated corpse with bulgy eyes and purple cheeks and fashions a spear from an oar. In her heart, she knows: you can’t make a shield wall with just one hoplite. How is she going to fight? She dons the damp red cloak and then removes the sword belt with the empty scabbard from her waist.

Meanwhile, Yannis gets sick and then tries to read the auguries in his vomit. That’s what you get when your prophecy cleric’s a satyr: he can only see the future when he’s drunk. “Same as before,” he says. His last vision foretold that Phaedon would find a dragon egg. It’s not wrong yet—they haven’t found his body.

They journey inland across rocky hills carpeted with hip-high oleander shrubs and a sparse smattering of trees: fir, pine, cypress. Tall enough to sit under but not to stand beneath. Never enough to block their view of the sea in every direction.

Yannis struggles to keep up, but even his panting isn’t enough to keep him quiet. “Maybe one of the think-it-out types survived the waves and set up a camp?”

She doesn’t say so, but they share the same foolish hope, which is worth what it weighs when you’re stranded on an island.

Yannis continues, “As we speak, they could be roasting a boar on a spit over an open fire so that the simmering juices make slurping sounds when they dribble onto the coals.”

She tries to resist licking her lips. Only wizards can wish things into existence.

They pause at the top of a cliff so she surveys the area, straining her eyes to find sign of anyone: campfire smoke, a village of huts, shepherds grazing their herds. No such luck.

Yannis bends at the hips when he catches up, resting his hands on his knees. He sputters, finally too winded to speak, and then points to an overgrown stone ruin, straddling a creek in a gully. As they descend, she studies the crumbling marble pillars—white and draped with twisting grape vines—two to each side of a raised staired platform with a broken statue seated at its center. A male figure, headless and missing an arm. Sculpted with deep musculature.

Cleo clears dirt from an inscription on the floor, whose ancient language she can’t read.

Yannis hovers a finger over the symbols and pretends to sound out the syllables before declaring that it says, “You’re fucked.” Then he picks up a pebble to toss at the seated figure.

“Don’t,” she says, but not soon enough. The pebble deflects from its torso. Yannis’ face slackens when the “statue” rises to stand. He shouts something, which she can barely hear over the sound of its grinding stone joints. “Marble golem!” As it steps forward, the crashing footfall shakes the ground and centuries of dust from its shoulders. With its remaining arm, it hefts a boulder and then hurls it at the two of them, who dive away in opposite directions. The explosive impact showers them with shards of broken stone.

Cleo finds her feet and rushes forward, the only thing she knows how to do. Her head-on approach baits a strike, which she sidesteps. Then she twists the haft of her oar-spear in a tripping maneuver, striking the butt across its shin. The wood snaps, leaving her holding half of a handmade spear, an overlong wooden stake. She hadn’t thought it would work but had to try something. At least, she gets around behind it so that it has to twist back and forth to see her or Yannis.

The golem tries to stomp Yannis underfoot, but the satyr sprints about wildly, eyes wide beneath his sweating brow. Then he ducks behind a pillar for cover and evokes a sacred flame that falls from the heavens onto the golem’s shoulder. But the glowing sphere fizzles against the stone surface, leaving a charred smoking ring. The golem swings at Yannis but hits the pillar he’s hiding behind, creating a web of cracks in its center. The whole thing threatens to topple.

Cleo leaps with what’s left of her spear in hand and slams the point into the golems back, shattering the “spear” into splinters—you’re only as good as the tools you work with. Then she sighs because she knows what’s coming next. She overcommitted to the strike. When the golem spins around, the weight of its impact against her body makes her feel like she ran full speed into a wall. As she rolls to a stop on the ground, she sees that, beyond the approaching golem, Yannis tries to shimmy up the unbroken pillar beside the broken one but keeps sliding back down.

The golem stops and stands over her, raising its stiff stone arm to deliver the deathblow in headless, faceless apathy.

She braces—it all had to end somehow. But Yannis shouts, launching himself with his haunches from the pillar he has half-climbed into the one the golem shattered, hitting it with a headbutt from his horns that knocks him unconscious. It’s just enough, though, with the damage from before to send the pillar crashing down. The marble golem can’t move away fast enough. After the cloud of dust, what’s left of the golem is indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble.

Cleo sits up and lets out a secret sigh of disappointment. Somehow, she keeps surviving, failure after failure, and to what end? You can’t be a phalanx of one. She walks over to Yannis, who can’t seem to stay conscious, and thanks him before he’s awake to hear it.

“Who are you to come to my island?” A woman’s voice? From atop the stone chairback—the throne the golem had guarded—perches a black-feathered siren, a beauty in the prime of her youth with wide crow wings and wrinkled gray bird feet ending in talons.

Cleo struggles with what to say. “Just a fighter.” Although it sounds like “sorry for the mess” when it leaves her lips.

“I am Zenaida. Under sacred guest law, I will do you no harm and bid you welcome.” There’s something begrudging in her tone. “You are with the others?”

“The ones drowned on the beach?” Zenaida waves her hand, and a semi-clear image appears between them. Hoplites in a struggle against a minotaur. It incites something like passion in Cleo’s chest. Among them, barks Phaedon, the Paladin who charged them with the task that they’re failing. He looks almost scrawny without his armor, which he must have abandoned in the swim to shore. Then, with a flick of Zenaida’s wrist, the image is gone.

Before Cleo can follow up with questions, Yannis groans awake. Blinking his eyes, he looks between them. Then, settling on Zenaida, he says, “Are you a goddess?”

The flush shows strongly against her fair cheeks. Too flustered to speak, she turns and leaps. Then flies away on great beats of her wings.

“I had a vision,” Yannis says, as Cleo helps him stand.

“Thought you only had those when you’re drunk?” “Must be a little, or else why headbutt a pillar?” “Can’t argue with that.” “Anyway, we go from here through the Valley of Illusions to where, beyond the Titan’s Arena, lies the Altar of the Furies.” He points as if it proves something.

“Are you a mapmaker now?” “Hey, it was you that told me—in my sleep.” That unsettles her. How could she tell him what she doesn’t know? “Well, there’s no answers here.” She starts off in the direction he pointed.

He offers her a mock salute, seeming proud of something.

“Is this it, then?” she asks when they arrive at a valley clouded with scintillating mist.

“That’s not the worst guess,” he says. “Did I say anything else in your… whatever?” He closes his eyes to better remember. “Each must go alone and not be tempted to stay.”

Before she can protest that’s not what she talks like, a part in the mist reveals a pile of hoplite bodies. How can something that isn’t real be deadly?

She feels a squeeze in her hand and then looks down to see his, there, in hers. “Thanks for believing me,” he says. “No one ever believes me.” Then he steps into the mists before she can utter her own conditional goodbye. So, she does what she does best and follows. Always following, like a good little solider.

The next instant, she’s standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a shield formation with a hundred other soldiers, and a hundred more at their backs. The faces, she knows. They’re dead. From other fights on other fronts. But she’s so glad to see them that she doesn’t ask questions, just takes up her role as part of the whole.

The ground rumbles with the sound of a thousand thundering hooves, a herd of circling centaurs, clouding the air with a swirl of choking dust. Somewhere distant, but not, she feels her body cough. “Hold!” shouts someone, drawing her attention back in. Maybe her father. Maybe a fallen friend. She knows it’s the only thing to do. Brace for impact, ready with your spear. She’s seen what happens when centaurs break the ranks. They run down those that flee in fear and trample them under hoof. They shred and rend with edged weapons them that can’t hold together. Puncture their backs with arrows. Fill the air with their screams. There’s never escape. You’ve got to make your stand. And where better than beside mentors and lovers, men you trust, who trust you too? Anyway, what good is living without them?

Then, a flash of memory: an image of the hoplites, lying dead in the mist. She recalls the words Yannis told her she told him: “Each must go alone and not be tempted to stay.” Again, her body coughs somewhere. She lowers her shield, giving herself full view of the fearsome bloodthirsty horde of centaurs.

“What are you doing?” calls a familiar voice that fills her with longing.

She swallows and takes a small step forward. Doubt weighs down her left leg; guilt weighs down her right. Why not stay and die?

“Let’s fight together.” The invitation fills her body with warmth and pride.

She can feel tears on her cheeks, not her dream-cheeks, her real ones, and wills herself to move forward. Away from those few who would ever truly know her. Into the headlong charge of centaurs, barreling toward her. Frothing with rage. She closes her eyes to embrace the end and, at the moment of impact, she opens them to find herself standing at the other end of the Valley of Illusion, with the shimmering mists at her back.

Yannis stands before her, pissing on a tree—her trials are ceaseless. He startles when he sees her and then pisses all over his feet. Or hooves, rather. “I waited,” he says, wiping his hands on the fur at his hips. “Loyalty’s my only vice.”

She smirks. “Didn’t want to face the Titan’s Arena alone?” “That too.” “Because wisdom is one of your many virtues?” He nods. “Glad you understand.” “I’d rather have a spear, but all right.” There’s no need, anymore, to wonder where to go. There’s a worn dirt road leading from where they stand to an open-air amphitheater. Fresh tracks raise questions neither can answer, so neither of them asks. They just walk down the road before them.

“Did you see an orgy too? Sirens, nymphs, medusas?” Yannis scratches the nape of his neck, avoiding eye contact. “In the valley, I mean.”

“No, I saw something else.” “Yeah, me too.” As they pass through the colonnade, they see tiered spectator seats rising to the outer rim of the arena. Skeletons in togas fill the seats, posed in grotesque imitation of life. Grasping goblets with bony fingers, whispering tongueless secrets into absent ears. The whole scene wants gloomy darkness, but the overhead sun paints it festive.

In the pit below, Phaedon leans against a wall for balance, pressing a bloody palm to his side. Across from him, a manticore bends to chew the throat from a hoplite. Two others lay similarly still in the sand.

Yannis grabs a spear from a skeleton dressed in fancy armor and then, giving the skeleton a moment to protest, tosses it to Cleo with a wink.

“Finally,” she says, whirling the spear about quickly. Weight perfectly balanced. The spearhead should be rusted after however many centuries, but it isn’t. No time to identify whether it’s magic. “Watch for the manticore’s scorpion-stinger. It’s poisoned. Although the lion-claws could do for you just as easy.”

“You’re worried about me, aren’t you?” The thought of it makes him smile.

“Not one bit,” she says and then leaps over the ledge into the pit with Yannis right behind her—a sorry-looking phalanx of two, but you have to start somewhere.

“You’re late,” Phaedon scolds, not turning his head from the manticore which has started to circle. “We have to hurry. A hatched dragon imprints on the first thing it sees.” Yannis’ prophecy foretold that Phaedon would find the dragon egg.

Cleo falls into stance by way of wordless agreement and raises her shield, settling her spear into the notch. Then she advances with slow steady footing.

The manticore hisses, turning its attention to her and Yannis. A slash across its left bat wing has severed a tendon, rendering the wing immobile. Should keep it grounded, at least. There’s a limp in its right rear leg as well.

With the manticore distracted, Phaedon hobbles hurriedly past, toward the far gate.

“Paladin my ass!” Yannis says. “Stay fo—” Cleo isn’t finished before the manticore leaps and slashes her shield with twin rakes of the claws in its forepaws. The force nearly rips the shield from her arm, but the leather straps keep it in place. The beast darts back before she can counter, having now foregone its feigned limp—easy to forget these things are as smart as humans.

“Me focus? If you die, I’m getting shit out the ass of a cat!” The manticore leaps next at Yannis, but a spell he’d prepared goes off—you can’t trick a trickster. A guiding bolt slams into the manticore’s shoulder, staggering it so that it’s open to attack. Cleo rakes it across the ribs with her spear, which ignites at the point, charring the flesh in a line as it goes.

The manticore does something with its throat between a yelp and a growl. It buffets the air with its unwounded wing to launch itself back. As it studies her, Cleo shrugs—she’s as surprised by the fire as it is.

Yannis is preoccupied with his own contribution. “Did you see what I did?”

Rather than having to admit it, Cleo rushes the manticore, which skitters sideways and then whips its tail in a wide arc that passes over Yannis’ head and grazes the front of her shield. Whatever fluid drips from the barb on impact makes the sand at her feet sizzle and send up a noxious smell.

Quick feint, Cleo pivots and then prods the air to herd it away from Yannis. That gives him breathing room to throw a light cantrip in the creature’s face, blinding it for an instant, which is just enough for Cleo to dodge-roll behind it and thrust her spearpoint into its hamstring. Another flash of flame as she pulls her spear free and then hops over a low swing of its tail. Now it’s limping for real.

With the manticore pincered between them, it makes the split decision to press Yannis, who turns around and runs like he owes it money. It slaps him with its wing hard enough to fling him against the wall of the arena. He falls to the ground unconscious.

The manticore rounds just as Cleo closes and throws sand with its wing toward her eyes. As she looks away, reflexively, it leaps upon her, but she’s planted the butt of her spear into the ground so that, when it lands, it

impales itself clean through, fury abated in death. Its blood joins the sand beneath her. As she rolls from beneath the corpse, Zenaida, the black-feathered siren, lands in the stands, “That spear, where did you get it?”

Cleo’s about to explain how they lifted it from one of the skeletons but, before she does, she sees that they’re all gone. Or maybe they weren’t there to begin with?

“I see,” Zenaida says and then glances at the sky. “You were performing, today, for the Fates.”

“If you say so.” “The Altar of the Furies awaits.” Yannis stands, rubbing his head. “Am I dead?” “Not yet,” Cleo says. “But let’s keep trying.” He waves at Zenaida and then jogs after Cleo. Through the gate, Phaedon lays laughing on an altar at the base of a trove of coins, where a dragon egg sits nested at the top. Yannis can’t help but don a crown with a pearl necklace caught on one of the prongs so that it swings back and forth in front of his face.

“Fucking prophecy.” Phaedon takes shallow breaths, his color gone pale.

Yannis holds up his hands, a man who can’t be held accountable for anything he says while drunk, let alone a prediction.

Phaedon shakes his head. “You only said I’d find it. I did.” His wound, now visible, is a puncture not a slash, one made by a poisoned barb, not a claw.

Cleo creeps forward and then looks around, confused, as the top of the egg begins to crack. Then the whole thing starts to wobble. She feels a touch at her ankle and looks down to see Phaedon chanting. “Bond of the Dragonlords,” he explains before dying.

A dragonling emerges from the egg: squawking, writhing—a wet little thing with big bright eyes that fall upon her. It cants its head in impossible recognition. Then a surge of magic crackles the air, forever sealing their bond.

“Wait, what?” There’s no one for Cleo to argue the point with. “I didn’t ask for this. I’m a follower, a hoplite, not a Dragonlord.”

“Not anymore.” Yannis laughs. Then the bottom of his overstuffed satchel tears and spills coins all over his hooves. Looking at her with his ridiculous crown, he takes his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m getting the strangest sense I’ve seen you like this before—huh, guess I forgot to mention it.” He reads from a scroll that vanishes when he’s finished, and the bottom of his satchel begins to mend. Then he scoops the coins inside again.

Cleo looks at the dragonling. “I was never meant to lead.” The dragonling crawls up her arm onto her shoulder. It nuzzles her neck and then lets out a shrill peal that can only mean its hungry.

Cleo sighs and then says to Yannis. “Let’s get you drunk so you can read our future.”

“No need,” he says. “Either we learn how to parent, or we burn.”

They leave Phaedon on the altar when they go, closing the gate behind them.