Savannah Thorne

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The Gulf of Baiae

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Autumn, 39 C.E.

 

 

I am dead. The world bore solemn witness to that fact. But the urn bearing my name in the Mausoleum of Augustus holds only charred wood and blackened animal bones. Leavings from braziers and campfires.

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Gaius, my brother, my ruin—he could embrace his destiny if he believed I was dead. If he could let me go.

 

I hear his voice, fragile as spun glass, shattered in the cypress branches. I almost turn. But it is just a memory, ringing through the courtyard like bronze cymbals at the Ludi. He was eight, maybe nine. We were in Germania then, in that gray-sky season when the rivers hissed with ice and even the trees seemed to groan. The camp was quiet that day—no drills, no shouting. Just the muffled sound of snow being trampled, and the clink of chains from the farrier’s post. I found him behind the supply tent, curled over something in the dirt. His shoulders hunched like an animal’s, and I thought he was hiding.

 

“What is it?” I whispered.

 

He didn’t look up. “I didn’t mean to,” he said.

 

In his hands was a lizard—long-bodied, glassy-skinned, its tail gone limp. A slowworm, I think the locals called it. Not quite snake, not quite lizard. Strange little thing.

 

“I wanted to see if it could swim,” he said. “So I dropped it in the trough. Just for a moment.”

 

He was crying without sound. Not loudly, not for show. Just two bright tracks freezing on his face.

 

“You were only curious,” I said. “You didn’t mean to hurt it. It’s out late anyway, and might have frozen soon.”

 

“But I liked it,” he said.

 

Not I’m sorry. Not I didn’t know. But: I liked it. He held it like a broken relic, trying to will it back to life. That was Gaius—before the temples, before the gods, before he knew he could make people live or die with a glance. Even then, he grieved like a boy who thought love should undo death.

 

Perhaps it can.

 

The guards on the water have doubled. The empire has shifted. Then, last night, the oracle muttered his name in her sleep.

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It’s time. I’m ready.

 

I failed as a sister, a woman, an empress, and a goddess. The only miracle I achieved is the one no one believes: I survived. But I did not live. For my silence has rotted into a lie as, for months now, I’ve hidden un solace here in Zeus’s lakeside temple.

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I remove the veil that has hidden me for so long. It flutters weightless in my hands. I let it go, releasing it to the wind. It whirls through the air like an unclaimed breath before catching in the gnarled branches. My palm presses against the bark, rough and solid.

 

The other priestesses pass me, silent figures. Their faces are hidden, their eyes downcast. They do not speak to me. I am their ghost.

 

When the ink dries, I will bundle quill, knife, and inkwell, and entrust these scrolls to the temple. I will set down events as I remember them—not like Ovid or Virgil or florid Uncle Claudius, carving their verses into marble, praying for immortality. This is a darker thing: women’s history, the kind that slips between ledgers and law.

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Then I will perform a miracle. I will rise—not the girl who ran, but the goddess reborn.