I awoke gasping in gold.
The air in my throat—not air, not fire, but thick, viscous gold, slow as honey, trickling down the back of my throat, filling lungs, pooling behind eyes. My body swayed forward and I poured it onto marble—yes, on a slab of marble. White and cool, veined like an old senator's hand. The stone glowed under me. I clutched at it like a drowning man.
The ache was agonizing. Bones reforming, swelling larger with each break. My skull exploded open and closed again in an instant; teeth fell out and regrew harder. The flesh on my breast turned hard, thickened, grew whiter. I could feel thunder piling up behind my ribs, like my own blood seething in lightning. And I laughed at all that.
Yes, I laughed.
When you're nothing for so long--just another gray meat-thing in an overfilled world full of meat-things--when you've prized that inner silence of mediocrity, that gnawing for distinction, for significance, is unbearable. And you wake up a god.
I am named Jupiter.
Not the symbol. Not the idol. Not wax-tainted abstraction studded with a dozen Catholic hands. I am not metaphor. I am Jupiter Optimus Maximus, godfather to gods, lord of thunder, creator of order, fear of kings. I am Rome's devourer and protector, in one beat.
And I awoke beneath the oculus of my own temple.
The Pantheon, of course. Not dead Rome that moderns see, their decay tended by priests and sightseers. No, this was living. This Rome was alive. Incense hanging in mid-air stank of fat from sacrifices. The ground that I walked on glistened with oil and goat's blood. Slaves moved silently, quickly, eyes downcast, never even glancing at me. Sweat and authority permeated the air.
And I was not alone.
"Domine," a voice said in a low, masculine, cultured tone. I shifted my head stiffly, muscles still in learning mode, eyes adapting to their new all-commanding strength.
A priest. His robes were fastened high on his chest. His hair cut short at temples, like a good state official. Kneeling, but not trembling. Interesting. My eyes were drawn to his lips.
"You're different, father," he told him, and for an instant, his eyes flashed upward. "You did not fall. You… awakened."
I stood over him before he could even finish speaking.
I don't walk. That is not how gods travel. I unfolded—I chose each arm, warned with every breath. I grasped the jaw of the priest in one hand and drew him off the marble. His spine snapped under tension. Not broken. Just—reminded.
"You're seeing too much," I answered him, my own voice rough, wet, with new thunder. "What's your name, insect?"
"Lucanus," he gasped.
"Lucanus," I whispered, as if relishing it. "You serve me?"
"I am yours, father!" he shouted. "I have interpreted the omens. I tended to your fire. I—"
"You were mine," I whispered to him, constricting his throat. Not quite all the way. Just enough to watch him panic.
Don't get it twisted. I never hated him. He was a kind man. He simply needed to discover, as all men discover, that worship without fear is masturbation. Adoration without dread is mockery.
I let my grip relax. Lucanus collapsed to his knees, spewing blood onto the hem of his robe, mouth twisting silently like one yanked from the sea.
"Rise," I told him. "Get wine. And bring me someone to kill."
The man didn't ask why.
**
The wine was warm. Blended with myrrh and quite possibly with arsenic—Romans were not short on trying to woo their gods with poison and flowers. I consumed it anyway. Let it leave my lips crimson.
The second offering was a boy.
Nubian, not more than sixteen. Tall. His wrists were bound with lion gut. A soldier--no, a slave dressed in soldier's attire. To entertain me. Or to atone. What he might have done, I don't know. His sulky, defeated eyes. I despised that.
"Name," I responded.
He remained unresponsive. I smiled.
"Flay him, Lucanus. Not to kill. Just to hurt."
He bowed. "Yes, Lord."
"No, wait," I stood up. The static crackled in the hem of my toga. "I want to do it."
There is an audible silence even for gods. It came then.
I raised my hand. Thunder amassed in my palm, spun. Not metaphorical. Real. When you've stood too close to an electric strike, you feel its hunger. It is eager to enter. To invade. I let it go.
The boy cried out once as he dropped, still twisting.
No claps. Just the soft hiss from charred remains and the gentle crackle that occurs when one stretches fingers after slumber.
"Lucanus, prepare the Forum," I whispered softly.
He didn't flinch. He knew. The hour had arrived to go to the Senate.
Not to be witnessed. Not to beg for adoration or reseal some ancient bargain. No, I'd go because I could. Because the anthill needed to be agitated. I desired to know which senators were worshipers of their gods, which ones had invoked our names for politicking. I had no desire to rule mortals, but I'd remind them what it felt like to be ruled by someone with authority over them.
Then—I would choose one. A tribune perhaps. Or a praetor's wife. Or some serving girl. I would defile them. Destroy their mind with epiphany. Enable them to carry fragments of me about like pieces from broken amphora.
I drained the wine. Crushed the goblet in my fist. Its sound was sharp. Clean. Almost… elegant.
I departed from the temple when the sun started bowing.
And yes, it did not set. It bowed. I could feel it. That bending light, that instinctive hesitation before shadows fell—a pause when even the sun noticed that it must temper itself in my sight. Once, Rome had thought that I was man fashioned from tempest. But not anymore. I arose as Jupiter, not their father, not their savior—but as I was.
A correction.
The marble steps groaned under foot. My soles scorched—they were meant to. The form I wore was open to power, naked, barely fashioned in human shape. I was not used to it. The lungs inhaled too slow, the blood circulated too hot. The heart's pulses arrived like commands shouted from afar, and I obeyed them by perverse curiosity. Flesh is slow. It listens in lag.
The Forum came before me.
So open to the air, sweeping in with column-spines made of marble and fragrant with aspirations. Senators walked between columns, their togas bound across their bodies like white slugs. Lines of dignity furrowed their faces. Decade-counting had made their hands soft. Some patricians were huddled in conclave over near the Rostra, intensely discussing—presumably about prices on importation for grain or taxations or war with the Dacian. Whether or not, it mattered not. Their speeches were halted in mid-stream when their gaze fell upon my face.
And I smiled, slow and deliberate, as one might smile at a painting before one burns it.
"Who's that?" someone whispered from behind a pillar. The high-toned speaker could not have been a soldier, not could she have been a thief.
"That is no consul," another snarled. "He walked from the Pantheon."
"Not walked. Descended."
"Don't be stupid. Gods no longer descend."
"They do now."
I paced slowly. No god should ever rush. I walked along, my right hand absently fingering the hilt of an unused gladius that I had stripped from one of the temple guards, not to employ—it was rough—but for symbolic purposes. Rome loves her symbols. I walked past Castor's and Pollux's statue and spat between their twin physiques. Phony sons, those. Bulk boys with lies drawn tight over myth. I had neither brothers. I had neither equals.
On the Senate step, Lucanus reappeared, robe soaked in wine. He had run ahead to warn them, to confess, perhaps. The priest's face was white with fear or awe—I had confused the two. He bowed low, as if to let the stone devour him.
"They're all here, Dominus," he answered.
I peered past him.
Two hundred men in that hall of power. The Curia Julia. Seething with law, oaths, convention. Stank with olive oil and compromise. And on their feet stood they—praetors, consuls, tribunes, censors. Not for honour. From fear. Gaze fixed on mine like goats in thunder.
"Who is in charge?"
"Marcus Fulvus Junius, Consul Ordinarius," Lucanus spoke, hardly managing
"Bring him here," I commanded, gesturing indolently
Two praetor guards, but in fact two lictors, in their ceremonial attire advanced to arrest Fulvus, whose lips quivered at the edges. Older than I thought. Fifty, perhaps. Rings on all four of his knuckles. Glistening with sweat and oil, his balding pate shone. They escorted him to me like a sacrificial animal.
"Do you know who I am?" I whispered in a low, intimate voice.
He swallowed hard, nodding. "You're Jupiter."
"Incorrect," I replied. "I am yours."
His face lit up in relief, foolish man.
"Yours to test," I responded.
So I struck him—not with lightning, not quite. That might have been too speedy. No. I struck him with an open palm. The blow echoed in the chamber like that of an amphora crash. He spun, struck the wall, slumped down it. A thin rivulet of blood from his broken lip trickled down his purple border.
Quiet.
I shifted to one side. Looked across at the gathered Senate.
"You're a disease," I said to him. "You rot behind laws that you pervert, you cringe before ideas that you feign to understand. Rome exists not by virtue of you but in defiance of you. You suck on her breast and describe it as duty."
One senator stammered, "This is blasphemy—"
"No," I cut in. "This is truth. Something your gods forget when they let you name them."
Some boy in the rear—tunic spotless, son of some patrician, perhaps—advanced. "What is it that you desire?"
Finally. The real question.
I stood face to face with him. His eyes were green. No soldier's calluses on his fingers. "Name."
"Gaius Aelius Varro," he answered.
Step forward, Gaius Aelius Varro."
He moved forward slowly, as one goes toward an animal pretending to be asleep. I extended my hand, resting my palm on his cheek. I touched his fear—a fragile, crackling human thing, too simple to manipulate.
"I want Rome, Gaius. Not her architecture. Not her legislation. Her soul. And I'll start with yours."
He did not move when I touched his forehead.
And in that moment, I gave him a shard of myself.
A sliver, that is. A bare hint at eternity. Just enough to unravel his identity from within like a worm in an apple. His eyes snapped wide open. He began to scream, but not from pain. From realization.
There aren't any gods, only winners. And I had won.
Gaius Aelius Varro fell to his knees like one man whose bone-memories remembered slavery. His mouth agape, wet with an incantation that had no alphabet. I watched him gasp, break—yes, break, like fire on glass. The mind is not a fortress. It is a tent in a gale. I had tugged on one edge.
He shouted. Not this time. No, he laughed.
It began in him, tiny, in his belly. Then it seeped out. His spine stiffened as if strings were being pulled behind the curtain. He laughed like one who discovered fire, like one seeing one's children drown. Laughter is truth when there is no sense. The senators stepped back, all of them, as if derangement might ride on breath.
He turned to them.
"Do you see?" he grinned too widely. "Do you see him? He's alone. He has no counterpart. No Minerva. No Neptune. No Venus. Just him."
And there it was.
Their eyes shifted towards me, and behind them—not in the world, not in the room but in the space beneath it—I sensed them shift.
The others.
Not because of what I did. Not for that. But I've crossed agreement. That thin, fine line between function & fear. That tacit, polite untruth that gods exist as mirror images. That rules apply to them.
And I had stopped playing.
The light extinguished--not in Rome, not in heaven, but in the heart. Mortals violate commandments, they face legal retribution. Gods violate commandments, reality notices.
Once more Lucanus fell to his knees. "They're coming," he whispered. "Good gods, there are coming."
"Let them," I replied, and walked.
I never saw Gaius's second breakdown. His body might survive, but that mind would never stray back to where it started. He had seen me. Not my shape, not my face— but the concept behind the lightning. He belonged to me now, in some way even I could not fully understand. A painting that now only exists if I look at it.
The air curled about me as I went to the Capitoline Hill. It recognized me. Even the crows who made their homes there fell mute, cocking their heads to one side in respect or fear. I caught whiff of ambrosia before I could smell it. That sickly, rot-reeeking perfume of unpossible fruit and honey scorched to ash.
"Jove."
Slowly, I rotated.
She stood. Venus, to be exact. Venus Victrix, Venus Genetrix, Venus Cloacina—how numerous the names they had piled on her? Not one of them accurate. She adopted shape that they gave her: female contours too perfect, breasts sculptured for worship not for gratification. But her eyes. Her eyes were daggers.
"You shouldn't be here," she told me. Not threatening. A warning.
I noticed her hands. Soft. Too soft. She hadn't grasped anything in centuries. Not even actual desire.
"Yet, I am," I answered. "And so did you."
She stepped closer, footstep by footstep on bare feet on stone. Neither feet was hurt. "You infected the boy. What was he to you?"
"A canvas," I told her. "He dreams my dreams."
She flinched. Flinched. The war goddess, the goddess of desire, flinched like some delicate debutante. There is no war for her anymore, not since the Republic fell. She was now ornamentation.
"You're disrupting the balance," she told him.
"Balance," I chuckled. "That word again. You talk as though it ever was in the world. Rome doesn't pray for balance. Rome prays for dominance."
"You speak like a foreigner."
"I speak like the only one who remembers."
Behind her, she was followed. Not in formation. No trumpets. In slow motion like rot spreading on overripe fruit. Mars led them in—of course. Always willing to shed but not to perish. Mars in red, cuirass on arms, but eyes not quite sure. Staring at me in awe with which a little brother contemplates a fire that cannot be extinguished.
He muttered to me, "I know what you have done."
"And?"
"You embarrassed us."
"I revealed you."
He continued forward, bracing himself with his spear. "You're forgetting that we're from the same pantheon."
"No," I said. "I am the pantheon. You're its apology."
Then came Minerva. Quiet. Owls behind her. Not one word she spoke. Not that she speaks unless she must. But her eyes—icy grey eyes that observe—tried to balance me like philosophy. She could not discover anything to measure. Then she began to back away.
Diana never arrived. She never comes. She knows when there is fire in the woods, even the moon cannot camouflage you.
I turned to them all.
"You forgot who we were," I reminded him. "Not gods. Not custodians. We were storms in minds. We were terrors carved into stone. I only remembered. That is my sin."
Venus tried to touch my shoulder.
"Don't," I told her.
She stopped.
"You're Jupiter, but you're not," Mars told me at last.
I stepped forward. "I am what happens when a god stops asking mortals what they want."
They drew back, not in fear. Not yet. But in bafflement. Like a dog watching its master lose control.
"I will not kill you," I told them. "Not yet. You can still be of some use to me. As decorations. As echoes. But if you try to interfere—"
Mars raised his spear.
"I'll unmake you," I said to him. "Not with thunder. But with truth. I'll demonstrate to them who is following you. Not legend, but letdown. Your followers will abandon you. And you alone will perish, as all discarded falsehoods perish."
He clung to the spear longer than I expected.
Then he dropped it.
They did not kneel. Gods don't kneel. But they stepped back. And I stepped forward.
Author's Notes: Let me know what you guys think.
Obviously it goes without saying that he will do some "questionable" things as a Roman God inspired by a Greek God. So this is not for the faint of heart.