User:Fish/Damon Magica Roma
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This story is a work in progress. |
Magica Roma
When Damon makes his selection, the world seems to stutter and go dark. There is nothing in existence, nothing anywhere, but a sound: a clicking, humming sussuration just below the edge of hearing. It drops down through the subsonic register. If Damon still had a body — and he doesn't feel as if he does, because he is part of the nonexistent nothing of Void — he would feel a disturbing nausea and disorientation. After a moment or two as the Dreams computer adjusts its sensory timing to Damon's own human brain, the world of Magica Roma starts to flicker into existence, at first choppy and accelerated like a hand-cranked silent movie, and then more steadily. In an almost-physical assault of scent, light, sound, and the rush of air, the world appears.
All around Damon, the rugged, Mediterranean hills of central Italy coalesce. The folded terrain, dry in the summer heat, spans the skyline on three sides: north, east, and south. Somewhere to the east and south, a road pierces the hills, a gray span of stone two chariots wide, winding south toward Brundisium and ending far to the southeast on the heel of Italy's boot, on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. To the west, the road wends its way down from here, cut through limestone and earth with all the methodical and bloody-minded determination of three centuries of Roman engineering, down the valley toward the city of Neapolis. Forests of pine and oak and beech lie scattered about the hills of the Apennines, obscuring the nearby fortified town of Beneventum, shading the cobbled stones. This is the Queen of Roads, the carrier of Roman troops in antiquity: the Appian Way.
Damon and Seth are standing together by the road, with the rest of the Century nearby, taking a midmorning rest from their strenuous uphill march. The Century is in full battle gear, and their segmented iron armor gleams in the sunlight as they gather one by one to drink their fill at a roadside stream. Damon's horse grazes on the dry grass, close at hand.
Neither one of them can explain how they know, because the Dreams computer can expertly insert knowledge and memories and understanding into the human mind, but nevertheless they understand that they are soldiers of the Sixth Century, First Foward Triarii. Damon is the centurion in command; Seth is his optio. Both also know, without knowing how: Rome is at war, and Rome is losing.
It is a scene from a history that never existed, in a fantasy version of Rome that never was. In this history, the myths of the Greeks and Romans, the capricious gods and their magic, the sorcery of Ovid and Homer, are very real. In this history, Greece never fell to Rome at the Battle of Corinth, was never sold into slavery or entered the Roman empire as a subjugated state. This Greece defended itself with magic and turned aside Achaicus and his army and even now, to the north and west, Greek quinqueremes sail up the Tiber River to a retributive assualt on Rome itself.
And somewhere along the Appian Way, a second column of Greeks are marching, a wave of reinforcements that will follow up the attack on land.
