Constantine Nikeodemos 2 - The Mausoleum
Like most of the major noble houses of the Golden Devil Clan, the Nikeodemos' power stems from two primary sources. Most prominently, of course, is their bloodline. There's no special gimmick inherent to it, but nonetheless the linage consistently proves fruitful and produces capable cultivators, which is, at the end of the day, the most basic requirement to hold any meaningful power in the Third Sea. House Nikeodemos's long and proud history of serving the Clan stretches back into antiquity, they have a pedigree of heroism and never fail a chance to display it. That being said, there are plenty of noble dynasties in the Golden Devil Clan boasting unfathomable histories, potent inheritances, and reputations for valor. Depressingly often, this does not translate into much material fortune, proud and ancient lineages hovering barely above poverty, or simply passing into the long night. House Nikeodemos doesn't boast of it in the same way they do of their martial prowess or ancient legacy, but what fundamentally sets them apart from their less fortunate peers is not their fecundity or strength, but the 600,000 total mortals that the House directly governs.
If a young Nikeodemos scion fails to match up to the expectations of his family to achieve glory through cultivation, then they are undoubtedly greatly ashamed at failing their ancestors and clan in such a manner. They are not, however, discarded into a corner to be forgotten about. Instead, the House quietly shuffles those who cannot stand in the limelight as heroes to take up the less glorious tasks that maintaining a major noble house requires. In specific, they set about governing House Nikeodemos's vast material possessions, the great stretches of land and prosperous cities all requiring guidance from upon up high to maintain order and productivity, to ensure that the wealth flows back into the coffers of the House. Taxation and mortal management are no glorious things, but they are part and parcel of maintaining the little empire the Nikeodemos' have accumulated, and it is from their efforts that the House enjoys its exalted position. And it was their ranks that Constantine long thought he was going to entire, his noted diligence and intelligence but lack of talent for cultivation earning him a nice, cozy position as a governor of some major settlement, playing his part in the constant battle to hold back the desert and serve the Clan from a nice, comfortable, safe, lazy seat of telling mortals what to do and filing paperwork.
Alas, it was not to be. Certainly, he could blame whatever bastard found that new substance the Clan had been using to boost bloodlines. It was "only" by a fifth, on a rough mathematical scale, but that was still no small boost in power and so Constantine, along with the rest of the scions who were weak enough for it to work properly, underwent the procedure at the earliest possible opportunity. For everyone else it worked as expected, but Constantine ... he was special, as it turned out. "Blessed." A decade of sandbagging undone in a single, horrible moment. Worse, the apparently drastic transformation had convinced the Elders that he must be their own version of Rina Callista, some former irrelevant bookworm suddenly gaining drastic power and now clearly set for a magnificent fate. And from there it had all spiraled - someone had the genius idea to concentrate the artifacts on his person to maximize the chances of survival and growth, as a new Single-Piller cultivator was just the shot in the arm the House needed.
It was there, Constantine groused, where the heart of the problem really laid. Face. The House had undergone tragedy before. Perhaps nothing quite so shocking and severe as losing all their Core Formation Elders at once, but tragedies and setbacks nonetheless, and they had been recovered from in due time. But that was the issue - the House didn't have centuries to pull themselves back together. Even the moment after the Trials had ended things were already in motion, with the Clan inflicting a stunning and total defeat on the Cannibals ... but one that the Nikeodemos' had been in little position to assist or take advantage of, the Harbingers of Victory having been absent from the Golden Devil's greatest triumph in recent memory. It was a humiliation, and already new, fresh bloodlines were awarded swaths of the conquered lands and turned eager eyes to the vulnerable House's vaunted privileges.
For all that ancestry and tradition defined the Clan, it was remarkably meritocratic in its governance. Your status was defined by what you provided, and the land was no exception. House Nikeodemos fundamentally ruled their miniature empire because they were effective at running it and provided significant amounts of skilled manpower. For this, they were awarded more and more land, granted greater privileges, and overall earned and kept themselves a lofty position amongst the nobility of the Golden Devil Clan for a very long time. But this could all be taken away. It had, with other, less fortunate Houses. Once the Myias and the Theodorsi had also been grand, vaunted Houses with vast demesnes, but once they lost their power, the land and the wealth didn't take long the follow.
Sertorius's breakneck ascension to Core Formation had served to stabilize the situation and stanch the bleeding of influence, but simply having one Core Elder wasn't enough to truly maintain the House's position. It had been the numbers and the consistency that truly cemented the House's status, and if they wanted to keep it, they needed to restore that prior state of affairs, if not go even further. It was a Grand Era, after all, and thus far the Nikeodemos' had been left behind. Hence, the almost obsessive focus on raising new scions. That was the reason why his family wouldn't just let Constantine slip away, not before when he had shown a glimmer of promise, and certainly not now.
Needless to say, Constantine was feeling the pressure. After a few days of 'preparation,' his new treatment and the crushing implicit expectations had gotten to him. Increasingly being driven up a wall, he had turned to the one place he was sure he could find privacy, for all he had avoided it for so long.
The Mausoleum of House Nikeodemos.
***
How to describe the Mausoleum? On an elementary level, you could call it the tombs of the clan, where they kept their deceased ancestors since evacuating the Mountains. It was very big and very deep, placed at the center of the House's grand Keep. A grand temple carved far into the sand and stone in memorial of the revered dead, twisting further and further into the ground, and always, always under expansion.
To Constantine, it was a haunting and horrifying thing. As a child, he'd had nightmares of the walls of plaques and statues to long-dead kinsmen, feeling the gazes of a thousand spirits come to punish him for disappointing his parents. He'd looked down the grand cavern in the center of the construction, upon which stairs wound around and alcoves were carved from, and saw no end the Mausoleum. In his mind, you could walk forever and only find further and further catacombs, all the while the air grew thinner and colder until it would eventually suck the life from you to join them.
His family had never understood his attitude, and eventually Constantine understood to keep such thoughts to himself. Now, however, reeling from his entire life having been turned on its head, the scion sought to touch upon the peace and purpose they all seemed to take from the place. Maybe if he meditated in the place where his ancestors rested forever, he'd be able to touch upon a fraction of the storied bravery he was now expected to emulate.
Five minutes into the descent, he was having second thoughts. Wanting to avoid the shrines set up for people to meditate at, he'd decided to go deeper, but although his feet no longer ached from the endless decline like as a kid, walking past walls so thick with plaques you couldn't see the stone behind it, avenues branching off to tombs after tombs, and of course the statues was having an effect on his resolve. It felt like those great clay armies the mortal barbaroi would construct for their chieftains, but instead of mass-produced peons to aggrandize some perished king, the mausoleum held masterfully crafting artworks depicting a great hero in the apex of their life, accumulating over thousands of years to form an endless marble legion gazing upon their descendants. If Constantine hadn't a specific destination in mind, he probably would've second-guessed himself, but he carried on.
Time felt difficult to keep track of the further you went, the only sources of light being the flickering of candles and incense, the only sound your muted footsteps and subdued breathing, the only sensation the ever-increasing sense of pressure from the depth - and the corpses of cultivators from a time when the Clan was far mightier and didn't need to melt their own deceased down for material. He'd been told that if a mortal were to traverse far enough into the crypt the sheer power emanating from the tombs would kill them and Constantine believed it.
After a while, it became too much, and he stopped for a breather and to recuperate himself. Sitting by the entrance to an unusually large sepulcher, Constantine noted the jarring gash where some treasure had been pried off the wall, like a scar from a traumatic surgery. The House could replace the decorations and cover up such distasteful sights, but grandfather insisted on leaving them - a reminder, he said, of what their failures had costed. Even Constantine, the cynic he was, felt an angry twinge at the sight of someone's final resting place defiled like that. Trying not to dwell on the matter, or if one of the treasures he now owned had perhaps come from here, the scion moved on.
At long last, he arrived at the grave of Sextus Nikeodemos. A young master who had achieved much acclaim for his accomplishments in the field despite his lack of talent at cultivation or raw power, always trying to compensate for his weakness with sheer effort and willpower. Friendly and encouraging, he'd made many relationships with his family and comrades in the field, sticking up as a notable rising star. His career had culminated in a final fit of heroics during the Great Plain War as one of the cultivators the Clan had sent as an expeditionary force, sacrificing his life to save several of his fellows from a raging blood path combatant. For his efforts, the House had commissioned a grand statue to be made of him to be placed in front of his (empty) tomb, a grand honor for someone who had never escaped Qi Condescension and a testament to what Sextus had accomplished regardless. There had been a celebration, his immediate family and many others bearing witness to the sealing of the ossuary. Constantine would always remember how proud Sextus's parents had looked seeing the effigy erected even as tears streamed down their faces, his siblings swearing to emulate his example as best as they could. It was the height of what a Nikeodemos scion could accomplish, the ultimate reward, to have your loved ones weeping proudly as a sculpture of you is placed outside your empty grave.
Sextus had also been a good friend of Constantine, although that didn't get written down on his plaque. He had sat down and comforted his nephew when a young Constantine was feeling down, introduced him to a world outside of the keep and trying to become as strong as possible. They'd shared books and traded stories, talked about what they planned to do in life. He'd had awful luck with his romantic pursuits, and although he joked about it, Constantine knew it actually bothered the scion a lot. Sextus had been the one person in the world that he'd been the most honest too, although not even he had been told the full truth about Constantine's "lack of talent," if probably suspected it. All of this ... dust in the wind. Something only Constantine remembered now, and once he inevitably perished, not even that. How was ... how was that something to be celebrated?
Looking up at the statue that Sextus had fought so hard to earn, Constantine tried to remember why he'd come here in the first place. He'd wanted to touch upon that bravery, the alien emotion that had driven his cousin to end his life for the sake of a stranger, to put himself in such danger over and over until the reaper came to collect. But staring up at that marble statue he couldn't help but ruminate on if the various flaws he saw were mistakes made in its construction, or holes that had appeared in his memory. He didn't feel any better, or braver, or anything but angry and afraid. Sextus had been a hundred times a person than his cousin, and he had died in his twenties in some foreign ditch at the hands of a blood-drunk animal. What the hell was he supposed to do? With that, Constantine came to a revelation.
He couldn't do this, not even if he'd wanted to. He didn't want to die, not anywhere but his own bed after a good, peaceful life. It didn't matter how much it shamed his family, he wasn't going to sacrifice himself so that his House could keep its vaunted position. They could find some other shmuck to take up the mantle of chasing that Callista girl's shadow, because he was -
"Hey."
Constantine's soliloquy came to an abrupt end as he whirled around in a heart-stopping moment where he believed somebody had somehow heard his thoughts. Standing awkwardly to the side was Decius, the House's previous favorite prodigy and Constantine's older brother. They had never been close, and needless to say after Constantine underwent the procedure, things had become strained. For a moment, lurid, paranoid predictions of some kinda revenge plot out of a bad novel being enacted whirled in the scion's brain before he was able to calm his startled mind and restore sanity. Instead, there was just a long moment where the two waited for the other to say something, and after a few false starts, Decius managed to go.
"I, uh, wanted to apologize. And give you this." He said, stepping forward, sending Constantine through another confused double-take."
"Oh, no, it's okay-" Constantine tried to protest, knowing that really he should be the one apologizing for running his brother's dream when he didn't even want to do this in the first place.
"No, I insist." Decius continued more confidently, holding up an object Constantine didn't immediately recognize - a token of some sort? "I've been acting immaturely for far too long and intended to keep this to myself. But after thinking about it, I realized I was being selfish and foolish, sabotaging the future of the House for my own gain." He pressed the token into his brother's hand, which Constantine limply accepted, still not understanding quite what was going on.
"This really isn't necessary, Decius," he protested, trying to future out what was going on, but his sibling was on a roll and barreled on.
"It - it is. I need," oh imperator is he crying "to make amends to a lot of people, but you were the most important among them. It cost the House and myself a ... great deal to get the invitation, but you're the best person suited to use it." Decius almost seemed ready to go for a hug, but thankfully managed to pull himself together before things got too painfully awkward.
"Look, it's okay. It really is, I never held a grudge about it." Constantine reassured his brother, trying to help him calm down. "I'll, uh, make sure to prize this forever!" At that, Decius seemed to brighten, and gave his brother a shaky smile.
"Thank you, Constantine." There was another long silence, and finally, Decius turned to go, but not without one final message. "Good luck - I'm sure you'll make it." Wait, what.
Now more than a little concerned, the scion waited for his sibling to disappear into the distance before furiously trying to figure out what on earth he had just made a heartfelt promise to accept. It didn't seem to be some kind of dangerous object, and it wasn't until he realized what the barbarian markings on the token meant that it all clicked together in one horrific realization.
It said Yuan.
And that's when Constantine's heart fucking stopped.
*****
Word Count: 2,796
