![[Image: fr0msWK.png]](https://i.imgur.com/fr0msWK.png)
THE HOUSE THAT ASCENT BUILT
Inside the private world of Hektor Nikandros.
—
There is a particular kind of irony in standing at the gate of the Nikandros residence, a big house, really more of an estate, north of Helios. The man who lives here has spent two decades attacking inherited wealth, the idle rich, "bourgeois decadence," the accumulation of money by sedentary and "flabby men." He is not himself a member of government, citing his commitment to the movement above mere office, but his lieutenants and protégés (Oh just you wait until we tell you about Ajax) have become rather instrumental in Phalanx's continued grip on power.
—
In this estate he currently employs a staff of nine. Nine. A former member of it, Sofía, agreed to speak with us. She worked in the Nikandros home for the better part of eleven years. "I am not angry at them," she told us, more than once, over the afternoons we spoke. "It is a good house to work in. He is not cruel."
—
Hektor Nikandros was born in 5683 into what his party's literature describes, when it bothers to describe it at all, as "humble origins." The reality was far harsher, and actually quite sad. His mother was killed in a street accident when he was eight. His father suffered a breakdown and was committed. Stephanos, his elder brother, kept the family fed for a few years and then died of a lung infection. The boy Hektor and his younger sister, Thaleia, lived on the streets of Helios. He was taken in, eventually, by a clergyman who brought him to an Action Group gym. So far, so saintly. Hold that thought.
—
Because before Hektor Nikandros was a revolutionary, he was a quantitative trader. After university he went to Quadriga, yes that Quadriga, that private equity firm buying up every family home. Nikandros was, by every account, ferociously good at it. He made himself wealthy. Not comfortable. Wealthy. And he made it in precisely the trade his own doctrine would later spend two decades condemning. Funny, that.
—
"He left the finance in 5717," Sofía says. "He talks about it like he walked away from it. He calls it 'narrow' and 'empty.' But he didn't walk away from the money." No. No, they never do.
—
The investments, we are told by a second source, a former business manager for the family who spoke on condition of total anonymity, were never wound down. "He doesn't trade himself anymore, hasn't in years," the manager said. "To be frank, he doesn't really need to. Several firms manage the bulk of his assets now. A number arrives every quarter that most Kalopians wouldn't earn in a lifetime, and he lifts not a finger for it." The idle man of accumulation, sitting far from the labour. We believe those are his words.
—
And then there is Kassandra. Every single person we spoke to said it first, unprompted: the marriage appears to be genuinely, almost nauseatingly happy. Kassandra Nikandrou, née Stylianou, married Hektor in 5708. The staff adore her. The marriage, by all accounts, is rock solid. Yawn.
—
So, and I bet you are bored already. A man of real and terrible childhood poverty, who became rich in the most bourgeois trade imaginable, who built a movement against exactly that, who lives in a large house with nine staff, and a happy marriage. God, how dull, some sort of sappy film. It would be hypocrisy, perhaps, and not a very interesting one. What's new, another rich politician railing against the rich. Except for the children. Oh. I bet we have your attention now.
—
Alexios
![[Image: Patrick-Schwarzenegger-debut-on-The-Whit...&strip=all]](https://i0.wp.com/www.muscleandfitness.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Patrick-Schwarzenegger-debut-on-The-White-Lotus-Season-3-told-to-stop-working-out.jpg?w=940&h=529&crop=1&quality=86&strip=all)
— Images of Alexios from his brief stint as a model
—
Alexios Nikandros is twenty-six, profoundly useless, and, as stated by his own father loudly and in company, a great disappointment.
—
"With Alexios it is disappointment, a constant look and constant words of disappointment," Sofía says.
—
The accounts paint a young man of genuine charm and not a single applied talent to his name. "Everyone likes Alexios," a former driver told us. "He is the most likeable person in that family by a distance. And very good looking. He could talk to anyone, quite charming. He just never does anything with it." The staff describe a parade of abandoned beginnings: a law course left after a term, a modelling career he was asked to leave, a fencing phase, languages picked up and dropped, and most recently some sort of business venture that, by Sofía's account, never advanced past Alexios asking his father for the start-up capital. "It was clear he had little idea what the business would even be about. He kept talking about connecting people, a social broker, logistics." She laughs. "I don't think he even knew what logistics. Needless to say, he did not get the money."
—
The business manager, present at the meeting, recounts part of it.
—
Alexios: "I'd be overseeing it."
Nikandros: "Overseeing what, precisely."
Alexios: "The logistics."
Nikandros: "Which logistics."
A silence.
Alexios: "There would be people under me who handle that part."
Nikandros: "Name one thing you have finished in the last half decade."
Alexios: "There was the modelling campaign."
Nikandros: "BAH! That was four years ago, and they asked you to leave after two shoots."
Alexios: "Well. I finished those two shoots."
—
Sofía tells us Nikandros says the cruelest things about his eldest warmly, and at the table. "He told a guest that Alexios was 'sitting right there in a good jacket, the great grief of my life,' pointing at him." She pauses. "And the terrible thing is he meant it almost tenderly. He was not trying to wound the boy. In his mind I think it was simply an observation." A guest who confirmed the broad outline put it less generously: "He talks about Alexios like a bad investment. Not a son. A disappointing asset." Needless to say Alexios lives a lavish life, and lives at home, and has never had a real job.
—
Philon
![[Image: mega703544002-1692214794730.jpg]](https://media.radaronline.com/brand-img/hZN55hbcG/0x0/mega703544002-1692214794730.jpg)
— Philon last summer
—
If Alexios is disappointment, Philon is the neverending project.
—
Philon, the second son, twenty, has struggled with his weight since boyhood, which, given that both his father and his younger brother are accomplished athletes, is a rather awkward fact to have sitting at the dinner table. The doctrine that made the family name holds, ad nauseam, that the body is "the first material," the first visible proof of one's discipline. And the father has, by every account, proven utterly unable to leave his son's failure in this department.
—
"He takes him to the gyms, constantly," Sofía says. "His own old gyms. To train him. In front of people."
—
Multiple sources, including a former trainer at one of the Action Group halls who spoke briefly and nervously, describe the sessions as painful to witness. "The Director-General would correct his form loudly," the trainer said. "In a full room. Telling him the body 'does not lie.' Or his favourite, I suppose it was meant as motivation, 'the magnificent ground to be covered.' He would poke the boy's belly and say, 'Look at all this progress to be made, magnificent!' Everyone in the hall would be staring at the floor."
—
Sofía tells us the family has their clothes tailored regularly, in no small part because the father's own cycle of bulks and cuts demands it. "Every winter they let the trousers out a little, Philon included. And every time, when Philon is being measured, Nikandros tells the tailor, 'You watch, by spring we will take that in three inches.' I don't believe Philon has ever once had his trousers taken in."
—
A nurse who briefly attended the household when Kassandra was unwell told Sofía, who told us, that she once watched Nikandros stop dead mid-sentence at dinner, mid-discourse, on the subject of moderation and appetite no less, because he had spotted Philon reaching for another bread roll. "The nurse said he just stopped talking. Watched the boy eat the roll. Never finished the thought. The whole table sat there. Quite, waiting for Nikandros to start talking again, it was like watching a duck, Nikandros kept letting out a few squaking sounds until somebody changed the subject."
—
The party and parliamentary staff say Philon is the only subject on Terra that can reliably stop Nikandros mid-lecture, and Nikandros is a man famous for his verbosity . "You want to end one of his speeches early," Sofía says, "you mention Philon. It is the one thing in the world that makes that man go quiet."
—
And yet, Sofía insists, there is love in it, which is precisely what makes it unbearable rather than merely cold. "He clears his mornings for the boy. His own mornings, worth more than gold to him, he gives to Philon for the training. He thinks the mornings are the gift. He cannot understand that the boy would trade every morning he has left to never be taken to that gym again." There is a litany of diet programmes, regimes, shakers, bands, running shorts and shoes that Nikandros buys or designs personally, with enormous care, for Philon every year. A constant, loving microscope trained on the one son who would give anything to be left alone.
—
Damon
![[Image: hlh030122cvrmarch-002-1643744645.png?cro...size=980:*]](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/hlh030122cvrmarch-002-1643744645.png?crop=0.888xw:0.793xh;0.0459xw,0.0931xh&resize=980:*)
— Damon posing for one of his many bodybuilding wins
—
And then there is Damon, and with Damon, dear reader, the whole thing tips from sad into genuinely strange.
—
Damon is the youngest, eighteen, and by every measure the perfect son. He has trained since he was twelve at North Helios Hall, his father's own old gym. He competes. He placed as a finalist this year and is openly tipped, in the bodybuilding press, for a future run at the Demetriad title, the very title his father won four times over. He is top of his mathematics class at Helios University, his father's own degree. He is, in the burtal terms of the ideology, the most formed of the three. The living proof of the entire doctrine.
—
His father does not appear to know he exists.
—
We want to be very careful here, because this is the most extraordinary claim in the piece, and we put it to multiple sources independently. They told us versions of the same thing. We do not mean the father is negligent, or absent. We mean he does not appear to be aware that his third son exists.
—
"He forgets him," Sofía says, and she is not laughing now. "He forgets him the way you forget what you had for breakfast two days ago. Truly forgets."
—
It is not, the staff insist, a estrangement. That would have a cause, a falling-out, some buried grievance, and there is none. "They never fought," Sofía says. "There is no story. That is the thing people keep waiting for me to tell, the big quarrel, the day it all went wrong between them. There isn't one. You cannot fall out with someone you were never quite aware of."
—
She describes the room. "Mr. Nikandros would come up the corridor and see a room with a young man's things in it, the training kit, the competition photos, and he would be confused. He would ask, 'Why is the guest room in such a disordered state, who has been in the guest room.' And I would say, 'That is Damon's room, sir. Your son's room.' And he would say, 'Ah, yes, of course,' and go on. And the next month, the next week, sometimes the same afternoon, he would ask me again." The house has many guest rooms. This one is Damon's childhood bedroom. The three boys' rooms sit in a row, and none has ever moved from them, save when each left for university, excepting Alexios, who, naturally, still lives at home.
—
There are five places set at the family table by default. Nearly every night Nikandros asks after the fifth: "are we expecting someone?" Damon has eaten at that table for eighteen years. When the family photographs come out, Sofía says, Nikandros will sometimes point at Damon, his own son, ask who the young man is, accept whatever answer he is given, "a friend of Alexios's," "a boy from the Hall," and move on. "I stopped correcting him on the photographs," Sofía admits.
—
The most consistent stories, across every source, are the introductions. At functions, party events, competitions, Nikandros has reportedly introduced himself to his own son, more than once, as one does to a stranger.
—
A party aide, who for obvious reasons would not be named, described a scene backstage at a fitness exhibition. "He was going down the line of competitors, shaking hands, asking each what club they trained at. He gets to Damon. Asks him his club. Damon says 'North Helios,' the Director-General's own hall. And Nikandros lights up: 'My own old club, you could not have chosen better, son.' Calls him 'son' the way he calls every young man 'son.' Then he turns the boy to face the others and tells him to 'go out there and show them what the club's got.' The whole time, no idea he is talking to his own child. None. I had to lean in and give him the name. He repeated it like a stranger's. 'Damon. Good. Strong name.'"
—
— Damon at an Action Group gym, winning a junior division. His father is in the background, and would introduce himself to Damon shortly after.
—
Another source, present at a reception, watched Nikandros introduce his family to a delegation, naming his wife, naming Alexios, naming Philon, then arriving at the large young man standing directly beside Philon, faltering completely, and recovering with a joke: that Damon was "so often at the Hall that I forget he is also occasionally a member of this family." The delegation laughed. A father's affectionate joke. "But it was not a joke," the source said.
—
The details, when he does reach for them, come out wrong, and confidently so. He has told people Damon is sixteen, or twenty, or twelve; the boy is eighteen. He has said the boy started training at fourteen; it was twelve. He has, on at least one occasion Sofía heard of from Kassandra, asked Damon at a family gathering where his "family" was from, and complimented the young man on having "a Helios look about him."
—
"The madam finds it the hardest of anything," Sofía says quietly. "With Alexios and Philon, at least he sees them. Too much, in Philon's case. But Damon he simply does not see, and Damon is the good one, Damon never gave anybody a moment's trouble, Damon did everything the father's books say a man should do, and the father looks straight through him. She says his name a great deal. I think she is making up the difference on purpose."
—
We asked Sofía the obvious question. Is the man unwell.
—
She was careful. "I am not a doctor. I will only tell you what I saw, and what I saw was a father who looked at the one child who turned out exactly as he had always preached a child should, and did not recognise him. A doctor did come once, on the madam's orders. He said it was as inexplicable to him as it was to us." She paused, and giggled. "You know how they say a T-Rex can only see you if you move, or at least the film says so? Well, the staff used to joke it was the opposite with Nikandros. He could only see you if you stayed still. And Damon, you see, is not still much."
—
It should be noted, that no source ever once described Nikandros as unkind to Damon. The opposite. Every one of these encounters ends the same way: with warmth. He claps the boy on the shoulder. He tells him he has "got it," that he "can always tell the ones who have it." He is, to the son he cannot recognise, unfailingly, generously, hopelessly kind. He simply does not know who the boy is. "He is kinder to Damon than to either of the others," Sofía says. "Of course he is. You are always kindest to a stranger who admires you."
—
So what are we to make of this house that ascent built.
—
The Kalopian Tattler is, frankly, at a loss, and we are not often at a loss. That he is a strange man is perhaps the only firm conclusion on offer. Here is the great theorist of human perfection, a man who has told an entire nation that the unformed life is a moral failure, and what has all that towering drive produced under his own roof? A layabout eldest who has finished nothing in half a decade but two photo shoots he was asked to leave. A second son the great improver cannot improve, poked in the belly in front of strangers and promised, every spring, three inches that never come off. And a third, the one boy who did everything the books command, top of the father's own old degree, tipped for the father's own old title, whom the father does not reliably seem to know exists.
—
Make of it what you will. We could not.
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