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You are going to be happy again, he says, and you find yourself inclined to believe him; after all, it's been some time since you found yourself full of—not joy, not quite, you've found joy in your usual murders, and tortures, and half-hearted debaucheries, baths and young virgins and theatre and boredom, and you're tired of being what you were made for.
There's prophets on your streets, yes, two of them, with knives. You're no damsel, you say, and there's no dragons here except the ones you asked for. You don't want any rescuing. You even start to believe it.
Life, then, call it. Or happiness. Or even love. Either way, the Greeks had their Colossus, and Alexander had his Empire, and you've never been good at sharing your toys, have you?
So. It's a choice. He's lying—or you believe him.
(Of course it's both.)
☼
Look, it's not hard; you were built to live a thousand years, but you're tired of knowing that in a thousand years you're going to die. You were born out of stories: arma virumque cano, pen to lips to mind, and this is your heritage, this is your birthright, this is the only thing you're good at, and you don't care.
Don't call it a devil's deal; it was your own damn idea, and you don't regret a minute of it. Sing it, Muse.
☼
March comes like a rainstorm, too quick and over too soon. Antony's no Pythia, and funerals are no place for prophecy. Nevertheless, you nod your head, sway your body with the beat, lose yourself in the crowd, let yourself go; you may as well. There's a debt owed to the dead, whether they lie in the subways or the sewers or the cold Senate floor, and the debt must be paid.
Orpheus returned, didn't he? You can do him one better.
(There is always a price to pay. Here's yours: how many ages hence shall this our lofty scene—)
☼
Afterwards you feel awful, but that's all right; it's almost to be expected. You feel sick, too full and too hungry at the same time, as if some crucial part of you is about to collapse in on itself, and the sky is red and the fields of Philippi are red and your streets are red, but—
You've always been good at lying to yourself; it never occurred to you until now that it might be a character flaw.
This is your body. This is your blood. Gods, but doesn't it hurt?
☼
This is how it works: you take your prophets, your avatars, your cold-blooded little murderers, your two favorite heroes with hands that drip red and faces gaunt with fear, your armor, your weapons, your voices, your messiahs, your kings that never were kings, and you kill them. You kill them with swords, and you kill them with war, and you kill them with embers burning their way down a woman's throat and words burning their way up a man's; you kill them because you want to, you kill them because you can, you kill them because you're too terrified to do anything else.
This is how it works: you have always loved the wrong kind of heroes, like Greece did before you. Heroes that smile, and heroes that do great deeds, and heroes that save the helpless and slay monsters; heroes that are proud, and heroes that are arrogant, and heroes that fail and fall and die in shame. You love heroes, and there is no one to tell you, so did Narcissus.
This is how it works: the stars are scattered across the sky like breadcrumbs, a trail laid by children, leading nowhere. There's blood on the Senate floor today, and some of it's yours.
This is how it works: you have sold your soul in exchange for immortality.
This is how it works: you are already dead.
This is how it works: that doesn't matter.
☼
And yet.
Look; there is more to this world.
You are afraid, and you sell your soul, and you die, and you resurrect, and the next morning the sun rises. The sun always rises, no matter what you do; the wind rustles in the olive trees. Spring is coming.
Spring is coming, still. The world smells fresh, and new, and the sun slants down out of the sky. The war has come, the war has gone, the war is over. The war is over and you are dead; the war is over and you are returning to life.
☼
They kiss each other, and need each other, and find each other, a thousand times over. Their lips are warm, and their blood is bright on the ground, and again and again their fingers tangle in a dusty comfort made from knives and half-cobbled hope and you.
They are tired of fighting; they are tired of running. Their blood is rusting on the ground, and they want each other, their bodies and their blood and their ghosts, and they kiss again and again for the first time and the last time until there is nothing of you left in the land and the temples and the trees, and you are only in the curve of their smiles, only in the crowns they will never wear, only in the press of skin to skin and the pulse of blood under the surface, and it makes you ache to the center of whatever heart you have left, and you would rather die than leave them, and you would rather die than be without them.
This, too, is a choice you can make.
☼
Your prophets are dead.
It would be easier, perhaps, if they had not chosen their own deaths; it would be easier, perhaps, if they had not loved each other. You are the crowds, pressing, cheering their defeat, screaming for their heads; you are the general, endlessly alive, impossibly weighted by what you have chosen to be. You are the Emperor, and you are ready to claim your birthright.
So. Your prophets are dead.
They lie in the dust; one has a half-smile on his lips. They made their choices, each of them, and you tell yourself you do not know whether or not you forced their hands. You always believed lying to yourself was a skill all the best heroes needed; you cannot say whether you are even now convinced it is true.
Your prophets are dead, still.
You followed the stars all the way from the Rubicon to the Senate floor to Philippi, and you are aching.
Your prophets are dead.
So? What's the matter with that? So are you.
☼
Arma virumque cano; it's what you're made from, after all. Words, and words, and words, and your soldiers and your senators and your kings and your poets, tales around campfires and soaring speeches on the Senate floor and cold-eyed decrees and the gleam of the ink on the page, and this was the bargain you made, this was always the bargain you were going to make.
There are two bodies bleeding on the sand. Here, then, is the oldest story: spring is coming.
Our Rome and Rome of our ancestors, restore our dead to life.
☼
You are pillared temples and household gods; you are marble palaces and clattering carriages; you are factories billowing smoke and the faceless crowds; you are windows glittering with light, streets a river of electric life, tall enough to scrape the stars. You are city, and republic, and Empire. You are perfect. You are immortal. You are everything you've always wanted to be, and more.
You are Rome. This is the price you paid.
☼
Long live the king.
☼
The king is dead.