2/18/18: Edited a few things to account for the rewrites to Hic Sunt Leones and the change in direction for this fic.

Chapter 4: The Tide:

Agea

Mars

March 16th, 2841

Darrow was silent as he flew through the lowColor district of Agea. Craters pockmarked the streets of the Martian capital, while buildings glowed from the residual heat of pulseFist blasts. Graffiti and rage bled out from the cracking walls, depicting profanity in fifteen different dialects. And to the right of a crude sketch of the Sovereign being decapitated by a scythe was an image of Eo hanging from the gallows in digital paint, her hair aflame and "Break the Chains" written diagonally across her chest, a single flower among the weeds of hate. A knot formed in Darrow's throat This was the real world, not the dream that Golds lived in. Everywhere the Reaper looked, he felt the silent screams of a civilization that had been stepped on for hundreds of years.

The Sons of Ares were not ready for open war. Fitchner had known that. But now, there was no choice. The resistance against Gold had been operating in the shadows for over two decades, but now Antonia's publicizing of his carving had dragged them out into the light. In the days of Old Earth, the conquistador Hernan Cortez scuttled his own ships during the Spanish conquest of Mexico so that his men would have no choice but to conquer or die. The rebellion, Darrow reflected, was in a similar situation now, although they hadn't been the one to burn their own metaphorical boats. Whether we were ready for open warfare or not, the Reaper thought to himself. We have no more options. We conquer, or we die.

It had been a little over six hours since he'd regained his mobility. Sevro, Ragnar, and the surviving Howlers had arrived with Dancer and the remaining Sons of Ares troops an hour after that. They'd lost over a thousand men and women in the Lurcher raid, along with most of their materiel. The two groups had rendezvoused at an Agean police station five hours ago, where the Gray officers, sympathetic to their cause, had provided them with food and beverage while they planned their next move. Three hours after their departure from the Pearl Club, Victra managed to contact the Julii Industries offices on Phobos and reach someone who wasn't a paid stooge for her sister, offering the lowColors in the building promotions, raises, and other benefits in exchange for opening the building's armories for the mobs that were churning even now thousands of kilometers above their heads.

Quicksilver's resistance cells on Phobos managed to coral the riots into some semblance of organization, and Sons of Ares informants under the command of a Red named Rollo were currently laying siege to the Society's main military spire. Surprisingly enough, at least a dozen Golds were helping, pooling in their house resources to replace the loses the Sons had suffered on Mars less than a day before. Two hours ago, they received word from Mustang that the Telemanuses were en route to the surface to evacuate everyone they could, and Darrow told her his plan. An hour later, Quinn, Victra and Roque returned to orbit with a quarter of their new forces. Ragnar took another fourth to the Citadel, where they would rendezvous with Quicksilver's spies and other Sons of Ares informants inside the Martial capitol building in preparation for their stage of the plan.

Shiro left mere minutes ago with a small strike force of veteran Sons for his own mission, while Tactus took one more quarter of their troops to seize the other cities of Mars. The rest stayed with the Reaper. The Telemanus clan brought fresh armor and weapons to the bereaved defenders, and the group painted sling blades and wolves on their armor to mark their allegiance to the Reaper. Shiro couldn't resist adding a multi-color lion underneath the wolf head as a personal touch, however. Seven hours of frantic regrouping and careful preparation had gone into preparing for this moment. And as the coat of blood-red paint on Darrow's new pulse armor dried, and the surgical scars on the backs of his hands stopped hurting as he donned the armor in preparation for his march to war. Everything was ready.

Now, the Reaper carved a wake of silence into the heart of the Agean slums with his bone-white razor on his arm. Sevro flew to the left, proudly wearing the spiked war helm of Ares. Milia followed behind alongside fifty Sons of Ares troops and the rest of their army. The Sons were awkward on their gravBoots, but his friends did what they could coach the lowColors as they went along. Some carried razors, while others preferred pulseFists. But, per Darrow's orders, none of them wore helmets as they flew. He wanted the lowColors of Agea to witness their treason, so that they would feel emboldened by Reds and Oranges and Obsidians wearing the armor of the masters.

The faces were a blur. Thousands of Reds, Oranges, Pinks, Browns, Violets, and Greens, peered out from makeshift shelters, and bombed out buildings in all directions. Neighbors jerked their heads towards the throaty hum of his gravBoots, a they had all heard before flying overhead but never so close. They pointed in his direction as they recognized him, and Darrow recognized his name on their lips. Somewhere, security cameras would be transmitting news to the Jackal or the Securitas antiterrorism apparatus that the Reaper of Mars had finally emerged from hiding. As he coasted into the district square, Darrow prayed silently, willing Eo's spirit to give him strength. There, a massive holographic display broadcasted images of Society programming outward, the harsh neon light of the screen dimmed somewhat by the sunlight overhead. Speakers laughed on cue as blue light played over the Reaper's armor.

Greens from the Pax focused their helmet cameras on Darrow. The Sons arrayed around him like an honor guard, their eyes smoldering at the surrounding lowColors and their red hair floating like angry torch flames. Milia and Shiro flanked him on either side, floating a hundred meters in the air and surrounded by buildings. Silence gripped the city, broken only by the laugh track of the comedy programing playing on the HC behind them, sick and weird as it cackled out from its speakers. Darrow nodded to the Greens, and they cut the noise, while somewhere in his tower, Quicksilver's hacking teams hijacked every broadcast on the planet and issued commands to secondary datahubs on Earth, Luna, the Asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter, so that the Reaper's message would burn across the blackness of space, taking over the web of data that linked mankind.

Quicksilver was proving his allegiance with this broadcast, seizing control of the network he'd spent two and a half years helping the Jackal to build. This would not be like Eo's death, a viral video you had to dig for in the dark spaces of the holoNet. This was a grand roar across the Society, broadcasting on ten billion holos to eighteen billion people. They gave these screens to us as chains, Darrow thought to himself as he readied himself for what was to come. Today, we make them hammers. Karnus au Bellona had his faults, but Darrow knew that the man was right when he said that all they had was their shout into the wind. Karnus had shouted his own name, and Darrow had learned the folly in that.

Before the Reaper truly began the war that would claim him one way or another, he would make his shout. And it would be something far greater than his own name. Something far greater than a roar of family pride. It would be the dream he had carried and shepherded since he was sixteen years old. On the hologram below, the comedy vanished, and in its place, Eo appeared beneath him, a ghostly giant of the girl he knew. Her face was quiet and pale and angrier than in his dreams. Her hair, dull and stringy, her clothing drab and ragged. But her eyes burned out from her grey surroundings, bright as the blood on her mangled back as she looked up from the whipping box. Her mouth barely seemed to open, just a sliver of space between her lips, but her song bled from her. Her voice as thin and fragile as a spring dream.

Her singing echoed across the metal city louder than she had echoed in that far off city of stone. Her light flicked across the pale faces watching from their cages. These Violets, Pinks, Oranges, and Reds who never knew her in life, but heard her in death. They were silent and sad as, up on the screen, she was walked to the gallows. Darrow closed his eyes as he listened the vain cries of his younger self in the old footage. He looked up to see himself sagging in the hands of the Lykos Grays, feeling like he was back there again as the video reopened an old wound. He remembered the hard-packed dirt on his knees as the world fell out from under him, Augustus speaking with Pliny and Leto as frayed hemp looped around her neck.

Hatred radiated from the faces in the streets, and Darrow could no more stop his late wife's death then than he could do it now. It was as if it was inevitable. On the screen, his wife fell, and he flinched as he heard the rustling over her clothing, the creaking of the rope. He looked down at the hologram, forcing himself to watch as the boy he used to be stumbled forward to wrap his hands with their Red sigils around her kicking legs. He watched himself kiss her ankles and mercifully pull her feet with all his feeble strength. Her Haemanthus fell, and now, he opened his mouth to speak.

"I would have lived in peace," he began. "But my enemies brought me war. My name is Darrow of Lykos. In the last twelve hours, you have all seen my story. It is but an echo of your own. They came to my home and killed my wife. Not for singing a song but for daring to question their reign. For daring to have a voice. For centuries, millions beneath the soil of Mars have been fed lies from cradle to grave. That lie has been revealed to them. Now, they've entered the world you know, and they suffer as you do."

"Man was born free," Darrow continued. "But from the ocean shores to the crater cities of Mercury to the ice waste of Pluto down to the mines of Mars, he is in chains. Chains made of duty, hunger fear. Chains hammered to our necks by a race that we lifted up. A race that we empowered. Not to rule, not to reign, but to lead us from a world torn by war and greed. Instead, they have led us into darkness. They have used the systems of order and prosperity for their own gain. They expect your obedience, ignore your sacrifice, and hoard the prosperity that your hands create. To hold tight to their reign, they forbid our dreams. Saying that a person is only as good as the Color of their eyes, of their Sigils." The Reaper of Mars removed his glove and raised his fist in the air as Eo did before she died. But unlike her, his hands had no Sigils. Mickey had removed them only a few short hours ago as the Sons of Ares prepared for war. Darrow was the first soul in hundreds of years to walk without them. The silence of the slums gave way to sounds of shock and fear.

"But now I stand before you, a man unbound," he went on. "I stand before you, my brothers and sisters, to ask you to join me. To unite behind the Sons of Ares. To take back your cities, your prosperity. Dare to dream of better worlds than these. Slavery is not peace. Freedom is peace. And until we have that, it is our duty to make war. This is no license for savagery or genocide. If a man rapes, you kill him on the spot. If a man murders civilians, high or low, you kill him on the spot. This is war, but you are on the side of good, and that carries a heavy burden. We do not rise for hate or vengeance, for many among Gold have had their eyes opened to our cause but have never had the courage or resources to act. Now, we all rise together for love. For your children. For their future."

"I speak now to Gold," he said. "To the Aureate who rule. I have walked your halls, broken your schools, eaten at your tables, and suffered your gallows. You tried to kill me. You could not. I know your power. I know your pride. And I have seen how you will fall. For seven hundred years, you have ruled over the dominion of man, and this is all you have given us. It is not enough. Today, I declare your rule to be at its end. Your cities are not your cities. Your vessels are not your vessels. Your planets are not your planets. They belong to us, the common trust of man. Now, we take them back. Never mind the darkness you spread, never mind the night you summon, we will rage against it. We will howl and fight till our last breath, not just in the mines of Mars, but on the shores of Venus, on the dunes of Io's sulfur seas, in the glacial valleys of Pluto. We will fight in the towers of Ganymede and the ghettos of Luna and the storm-stricken oceans of Europa. And if we fall, others will take our place, because we are the tide. And we are rising."

As Darrow finished his speech, Sevro slammed his fist against his chest. Once, twice, thumping it rhythmically. The Sons of Ares and the Howlers echoed the beat, their fists pounding their chests. In their buildings of concrete and steel, men and women thumped their fists into the walls until it sounded like a heartbeat rising through the underbelly of the Martian capital; Out through the Gray barracks in each police precinct; Among the Silvers at their trading desks; the Golds in their mansions and luxury clubs. Outward through the streats of Agea, up into the halls of the Citadel, where the Jackal, newly anointed as ArchGovernor, sat on his new throne, surrounded by a sea of bent necks. There, the sound rattled in his hears. There, Darrow knew that the sociopathic patricide heard Eo's heart beat on. And he could not stop it as it went down and down into the mines of Mars, playing on the screens as Reds beat on their tables and the Copper magistrates watched in swelling fear as the miners looked hatefully up through the duroglass that kept them imprisoned.

Eo's heart beat mutinously through the bustling oceanside promenades on the archipelagos of Venus as sailboats floated proudly in the harbor and shopping backs hung in frightened hands while Golds looked to their drives, their gardeners, the men and women who powered their cities. It beat through the hollows and the Hives up on Phobos as lowColors stormed up through the midSector towards the gentrified Needles. It beat through the tin-roofed mess halls of the wheat and soybean latfundia that covered the Great Plains of Earth, where Reds toiled under the huge sun to feed mouths of people they would never meet, in places they would never be.

It beat even along the spine of the empire, raging through the spiked city moon of Luna, passing the Sovereign in her high glass refuge to thunder on down snaking electrical wires and drying clothing lines to the Lost City, where a Pink girl made breakfast after a long night of thankless work. Where a Brown cook leaned away from his stove to hear as grease spattered his apron, and a Gray watched from the window of his patrol skiff as a Violet girl smashed the front door of a Post Office and his datapad summoned him back to the station for emergency riot protocols. And that terrible hope beat inside Darrow's chest, as he knew that the end had begun, and he had finally awoken.

"Break the chains!" He roared. And his people roared back.

"Ragnar," he said into the com. "Bring it down." Down on the screen, the Greens cut to a different feed as the fists thumped and doors rattled. The people saw a distant shot of the Citadel, central command center of all government offices on Mars. From it, the Jackal took the reins of his father's domain. There, Grays and Obsidians would be donning armor under pale lights, rushing through metal halls in tight lines, stocking ammunition belts, and kissing pictures of their loved ones so they could come out into the city and make this heart stop beating. But they would never make it here. Because, as fists pounded even harder into cages, the lights of the Citadel's central tower went black, all its power turned off by Ragnar's troops with access cards provided by Quicksilver's spies.

The Sons of Ares could have bombed the building, but Darrow knew that to win hearts and minds and gain support in this war, they needed a triumph of daring and achievement. Not more destruction. They needed heroes, not an ash city. And so, the people of Agea watched as the Sons of Ares stormed the building under the leadership of Ragnar, using high-clearance access codes to breach the spire with extreme prejudice. The nimbleness and grace the Sons displayed in their new pulseArmor reminded Darrow of the Reds working down in the mines. Darrow was dazzled as more than a thousand welders and former students poured into the vast building like his fleet at the Academy had once tried to infiltrate Karnus' flagship. But unlike that time, nobody was playing for stealth, and the Sons were better in null gravity than he, Tactus, and Victra had been.

Dozens still waiting to enter were ripped to shreds as Grays inside fired railguns through the glass, but the Sons of Ares fired back and poured inward. A ripWing patrol banked in along the outside of the building and slew two dozen soldiers in a strafing run before a Son brought it down with a pulseRocket. Meanwhile, the camera followed Ragnar as he breached a window, entered a hall, and ran full-tilt into a trio of Gold knights. Ragnar flowed through the young knights without stopping, swinging both his razors like scissors and ululating the war cry of his people, followed by a pack of heavily armed laborers and Peerless Scarred. Darrow had told him he wanted the spire. The Reaper had never specified how to take it, and Ragnar had walked off with his arms around Nyla and a Gold from Darrow's army named Dax. Now, the worlds watched a slave become a hero.

"This city belongs to you," Sevro roared to the roiling city. "Rise and take it! Rise, men of Mars. Women of Mars, rise! You bloodydamn bastards! Rise!" Men and women were already pulling themselves from their homes, donning their boots and jackets, pushing themselves towards Darrow and the Sons so that thousands clogged the avenues, crawling over the outside of the buildings. The tide had risen. And Darrow felt a deep terror as he wondered exactly what it would wash away.

"Rape and murder of innocents is punishable by death," Sevro called out to the crowd. "This is war, but you are on the side of good. Remember that, you little shitheads! Protect your brothers! Protect your sisters! All residents of sections 1a through 4c, you are to take the armory. Residents of sections 5c through 3f are to take the water-purification center on…" The biological son of Ares seized control of the battle as the Howlers and Sons dispersed to organize the mob. It was less of an army and more of a battering ram. Many of these people would die. And when they died, more would rise in their place. This was just one district of the Martian capital. The Sons would supply them with weapons, but there wouldn't be nearly enough to go around. Their sword was the press of flesh. Sevro would lead them and spend them. Victra would guide them from Quicksilver's tower up on Phobos, and the city, then hopefully the planet, would fall to the rebellion.

But Darrow wouldn't be there to see it.

Yep, the war is only just beginning. Yeah, Darrow's still going to do what he did in Morning Star, but things are going to turn out a lot differently (Ragnar gets to live, for one, so yay!)