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One of the downsides to this Infimap artifact: language was not a constant throughout time and space.
At least it had seen fit to keep him on Earth. Natural ghost portals appeared anywhere life was prevalent enough to warp reality with consciousness. Earth, Titan, the rings of Saturn, probably other places just in this solar system alone.
Compared to the oily ice-fields of Titan the Roman Empire was a paradise.
Now if only Vlad could speak Latin. He understood snippets of it, his own experience with French enabling him to recognize verbs, conjunctions, some nouns. But the grammar was incomprehensible and when he opened his mouth to speak it...
He wasn't entirely sure what 'morionem umbra' meant but that was what they called him.
*****
This life wasn't too bad. He was learning Latin. He was fairly well kept here in the Temple. He had been given a slave boy with the prettiest round... eyes... to attend to him and teach him the language. He attended services and sacrifices, received offerings, hand-raised sacred birds, laid around drinking wine all day, all in all it wasn't a bad life. Boring but not bad.
In the months since appearing over the altar of the Temple of Saturn he'd abandoned his black suit, favoring a white toga and red cloak while in human form. The Mediterranean breeze felt good on his face, his legs, every inch of skin he was allowed to leave exposed here in the Temple. He was still expected to take his ghost form outside the inner chambers of the Temple but that wasn't difficult...
Footsteps behind him. Vlad turned to meet his visitors, attempting to use his meager Latin skills.
"Greetings, bacon- I say, priests, yes, priests of the temple, what... fables from Rome?"
Three men in red cloaks and snowy white robes approached from behind. Their white beards marked them as priests of Saturn. They looked shocked at his usage of Latin, stopping to speak among themselves. Vlad strained his ears to keep up.
"It speaks?"
"I thought this was just an idiot shade."
"So you have an oracle then. But its language doesn't sound like prophecy. Sounds barbaric."
"No, it doesn't prophesize. It can't be an oracle."
"It's certainly chaste like an oracle. Hasn't once tasted the boy we gave it."
Vlad gave his slave boy an odd look. Wait, so he was supposed to... Oh... No wonder they gave him an attractive slave. Wait a minute, he was no idiot. "I am no idiot shade," he snapped in poorly constructed Latin. "I am no oracle. I have a destiny here. I am here to fondle it." That sounded close enough. Wait, 'fondle' was the wrong verb. What was a better one... 'capture', 'conquer', 'ravish'...
"It's sounding more and more like an oracle all the time." One of the priests laughed, hiding behind the others as snorts and snickers escaped from the hand he had clamped over his mouth.
"Maybe it's a god."
"Parva deus."
Vlad picked up on that. He nodded quickly. "Yes, yes, ego parva deus." He just wished he knew what 'parva' meant. "See, I can fly." He transformed, taking ghost form, before rising from the floor of the temple. The wind toyed with his cape, white and red like the priest's own vestments.
"He certainly looks like a son of Saturn."
"I can prove I'm a parva deus," Vlad said, cutting off the priest's discussion.
Three old men looked at him with calculating curiosity.
"Facitis," they said.
It sounded enough like a command that Vlad agreed.
*****
Three sacred birds stood before the temple altar. Golden chains locked around their feet prevented them from flying away. They clicked their beaks at each other and at their blue-skinned priest. They knew what was coming. They were about to have their chains unlocked and then they'd have to fly and feed themselves and sleep in trees and all sorts of nonsense. They were temple birds, dang it, pampered and spoiled and well fed and they were not going to have that taken from them! They were young! So young, they couldn't even fly right yet!
The priest pulled out a knife. Well, at least it wasn't the key. But why did the knife glow pink? Why was their priest doing this? He'd raised them from eggs, this blue-skinned priest, what was he going to do? Something wasn't right here. This wasn't normal.
The birds chattered to each other. Clutch mates, the three of them. They would not live alone, not without each other. They didn't know how.
Don't take us from each other...
*****
Vlad sheathed the sacrificial knife. It was done. Now with any luck at least one of them would come back as a ghost and he'd be heralded as having raised the dead.
One bird stirred. A green wing rose out of black feathers. Red eyes blinked in the sunlight.
A second and a third awoke.
"Oy!" one crowed.
"This is new," said another.
"You! You did this," realized the third.
Three sacred birds hopped down from the altar and bobbed their heads at Vlad. "You did this, neh?
A sense of deja vu washed over Vlad as he observed his handiwork. "Yes, I did," he said. There was something very familiar about these three birds... Three vultures...
Oh fudge buckets...
"It's you," he whispered, falling back into English. "You three idiots. I made you..." Suddenly it all made sense now. Three ancient vultures all seeking him out, claiming to have been looking for him, waiting for him. Dancing when they found him. Calling him their 'Boss' from day one, doing his most menial of tasks without question, grovelling when they failed him, never once even thinking of rising up against him...
He made them.
"You're our master then! You did this! We're yours, master! Keep us in your temple and feed us and praise us and preen us and we'll do your bidding forever..."
Forever...
Vlad stood in the middle of a circle of dancing vultures. Manic laughter bubbled up in him, spilling out as the absurdity of time's twists and turns gave him his own most useless, most trusted, most willing servants.
*****
"I proclaim Vladdius Plasmius, son of Saturn, to be magistrate of this province."
Vlad bowed as the crown of olive leaves was placed upon his brow. It wasn't the throne of Rome but it was a start.
He gazed through the diaphanous white veil the priests made him wear while outside the Temple in his human form, down at the people filling the cobble-stoned roads of his city. They cheered his presence, his benevolence, his strength and power. They worshiped him as a symbol of the god they thought his father: Saturn, the god of the harvest, of justice, of time.
Soon they would worship him for his own power.
And then he would begin the long, arduous task of taking Rome.