Chapter 61: When Myths Become True
Chapter 61: When Myths Become True
The library in the upper tier of Macedonia was nothing like the Library of Palatine Apollo. Where the Palatine was a monument to knowledge, all marble and gold and fading frescoes of gods who no longer answered prayers, this place was a tomb.
The air was thick with dust and neglect, the high windows so caked with grime that the afternoon light struggled to pierce through, casting everything in a sickly yellow haze. The shelves were crammed with scrolls that hadn’t been touched in decades, their labels faded to ghosts of ink, their bindings cracked and crumbling.
Gaius had been here for hours.
His back ached, and his eyes burned. The stool he’d found near the back corner wobbled every time he shifted his weight, which was often. He’d pulled scroll after scroll from the shelves, scanning each one like a man who had spent a lifetime reading, and found nothing.
Histories of Macedonian trade routes, qgricultural records from three centuries ago, a treatise on the migration patterns of some bird he’d never heard of.
"Nothing. Nothing. Nothing." He kept muttering.
He set down the latest scroll—a crumbling account of a provincial tax dispute—and pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. The exhaustion was there, deep in his bones, but it wasn’t the kind that came from lack of sleep. It was the kind that came from being so close to something and not being able to reach it.
The scroll in his bag was the key. He knew that now. The description in the ancient text—the impossible healing, the speed like wind, the armies that fell before one man—matched Albius like a portrait painted centuries before his birth. And the word that kept appearing, the place where the legend had walked and fought and died, was Macedonia. He was standing on the same ground, breathing the same air, and he still didn’t understand the connection.
"You’ve been here a while."
Gaius looked up. The librarian was a thin, old man with a wispy beard and eyes that had the particular squint of someone who had spent too many years reading by candlelight. He stood at the end of the shelf, a stack of scrolls cradled in his arms, watching Gaius with cautious curiosity.
"I’m looking for something," Gaius said. "Ancient texts. Ones older than the republic. I thought this library might have them."
The librarian set down his scrolls and shuffled closer. Up close, Gaius could see the tremor in his hands. Age came for everyone, even librarians.
"Most of the texts that old were either destroyed during the purges or moved to the lower tier." The librarian’s voice dropped slightly on the last two words. "The library down there has the oldest collection in Macedonia. But I wouldn’t advise going."
"Why not?"
The librarian looked at him like he’d asked why he shouldn’t walk into a fire. "The lower tier is not a place for men like us. It’s the worst of the worst." He said, with a hint of disgust. "The library down there is barely standing. The texts are rotting. And the people..." He shook his head. "You wouldn’t make it back."
Gaius felt something spark behind his eyes. Not fear, not caution. Something closer to hunger. The answers may be down there. Everything he’d been chasing since the night he saw Albius heal faster than natural, was sitting in a rotting library in the worst part of the city.
He stood up with a soft groan.
"Thank you," he said. "You’ve been very helpful."
The librarian stared at him. "You’re going down there? After what I just told you?"
Gaius was already walking toward the door. His bag was slung over his shoulder, the scroll still tucked safely inside. His hand found the strap and held it tight.
"I’ve been in shittier places," he said. And he walked out into the fading light.
The lower tier was waiting.
---
The moment Gaius descended the crumbling stone steps from the upper district, the world changed.
The clean white marble and polished statues gave way to narrow streets choked with filth. The air, which had been sweet with incense and flowering trees above, now reeked of rot and human waste and something worse... the smell of bodies left out to rot in the streets.
He walked through streets that were more like open graves.
The buildings leaned into each other like wounded soldiers, their walls streaked with grime, their windows empty or boarded over. The cobblestones were cracked and slick with grime and dried blood. Garbage piled in corners, and rats—fat, bold rats—scurried through the refuse without fear, like they had learned that the living were too weak to threaten them.
And everywhere, everywhere, there were people.
They huddled in doorways and alleyways, their eyes hollow, their bellies distended. Children with limbs twisted from untreated injuries, their small bodies bent into shapes that made Gaius’s medical mind catalog the fractures and breaks. Women with faces gaunt and empty, holding infants who were too weak to cry. Old men sitting against walls, staring at nothing, waiting for an end that was already long overdue.
Some of them were dead. He saw a child—a girl, no older than five—lying in the gutter, her eyes open, her skin ashened. No one had moved her. No one had covered her. She was just there, part of the landscape, another piece of the filth that lined the streets.
Gaius stopped walking, his hand tightened on the strap of his bag. He had seen men die in the arena in every way possible, but this was different. This was not combat neither was was it spectacle. This was slow, grinding, indifferent extinction.
He closed his eyes, as he muttered something under his breath, and continued walking.
He walked a while, and felt like he was walking in circles, then tried to ask for directions.
The first man he approached—a skeletal figure huddled against a crumbling wall—flinched away from him like Gaius was raising a fist instead of a question.
The second stared at him with empty eyes and said nothing. The third pointed a trembling finger down a side street and then scurried into the shadows before Gaius could thank him.
A group of men spotted him near a collapsed fountain. They emerged from the alleys like ghosts—five, six, seven of them, their clothes rags, their eyes wild with the desperation of people who had nothing left to lose.
They locked eyes with Gaius, and started moving toward him.
"Strip yourself of every gold on you." The man in front barked.
Gaius backed away. His hand went to his bag, where a small knife was tucked among the bandages.
"Didn’t you hear what I–"
Suddenly, the guards appeared before the men reached him.
They came around the corner with swift brutality.
Cries and blunt sounds filled the alleyway, as the guards beat the men with bartons, and sheathed swords. The desperate men scattered, those who could still run, and the ones who couldn’t were left bleeding in the street. One of them—the youngest, barely more than a boy—tried to crawl away on hands and knees. A guard kicked him in the ribs and left him wheezing in the mud.
"Pieces of shit." The lead guard spat at the boy.
He turned to Gaius. His armor was dented, his face hard, his eyes the eyes of a man who had stopped seeing suffering years ago.
"What are you doing down here?"
Gaius straightened his tunic. His heart was beating hard against his ribs, but his voice was steady. "I’m a scholar. I’m looking for the library. For research."
The guard stared at him. The silence stretched. Then he laughed—a short, sharp sound with no humor in it. "A scholar. Down here." He shook his head. "You’re either very brave or very stupid."
"I’d like to think of myself as the first option," Gaius said. "Now, he library?"
The guards exchanged glances. Then the lead guard shrugged and gestured for Gaius to follow. They led him through the winding streets, past more bodies, more starving faces, more children who would not survive the week. The lower tier was a wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding, and Rome was the hand pressing down on it.
The library was at the end of a narrow alley, tucked between a collapsed tenement and a building that looked like it had been a temple once, before the gods abandoned it. The structure was barely standing. The roof had partially caved in, and the walls were streaked with soot, reaching fingers that told the story of a fire that had happened years ago and had never been repaired.
"This is it," the guard said. "Good luck finding anything worth reading."
They left without another word, their boots echoing on the broken stone until the silence swallowed them.
Gaius stepped inside.
The smell hit him first. Smoke and mildew and the faint, bitter scent of burnt parchment. The main hall was a graveyard of knowledge. Shelves had collapsed under the weight of their own neglect, spilling scrolls onto the floor in piles that had been soaked by rain and gnawed by rats. Most of the scrolls were ruined—ink faded to ghosts, parchment torn to shreds, edges blackened by fire. The few that remained on the shelves were so coated in soot that he couldn’t read the labels.
He stood in the center of the wreckage and felt something sink in his chest. This was the place. This was where the answers were supposed to be. And it was a tomb.
He sighed. The exhaustion was there, deep in his bones, but he pushed it aside. He had come too far to stop now.
He started searching.
Hours passed. He pulled scroll after scroll from the rubble, unrolled them with careful fingers, scanned the faded text, and set them aside.
Nothing.
The familiar frustration crept back, but he kept going. The truth was here. It had to be.
He kept searching for what felt like more hours, until... he found it. A scroll in the back corner, buried under a collapsed shelf.
The scroll was small, unremarkable, its edges blackened by fire but its center intact. He pulled it free from the debris and unrolled it.
The text was written in Macedonian, a language he could barely read, and beside it, in a second column, was a Latin translation.
The translation was incomplete. It stopped abruptly halfway down the scroll, as if the scribe had been interrupted and never returned to finish the work. But there was enough. More than enough.
Gaius read.
His lips moved silently over the familiar words; the impossible healing, the speed like wind, the armies that fell by the swords of a single man.
"It’s the same thing." He muttered, glancing at the bag on his side
As he read, he noticed that this text went further. This text named the legend. This text told the story of a conqueror who had resisted the first Roman conquest, who had made Rome wait until he was dead to strike again. A man who was supposed to be a myth. A man whose name every Roman knew but no Roman believed was real.
Gaius’s eyes widened.
His hands trembled. The scroll shook in his grip, the charred edges flaking away, the faded ink blurring before his eyes. He read the name again. And again. And again. Each time, it was the same.
"So, ’he’ wasn’t a myth after all." Gaius’s voice trembled, as he thought of the white haired kid somewhere in the holding area.
The scroll slipped from his fingers and landed on the soot-stained floor.
Gaius leaned against the charred shelf and closed his eyes. His heart was pounding. His mind was racing. He had come to Macedonia searching for answers. He had found them, and they were bigger than anything he could have imagined.