Chapter 1

I woke choking on dirt.

It scraped against my teeth, packed beneath my tongue like the dry rot of an old tomb. I tried to spit, but my lips were cracked, parched, half-buried. Somewhere above me, flies buzzed lazily in the heat, their hum mocking the stillness of death.

But I wasn't dead. Not really.

The sky stretched overhead—an unforgiving slate of pale blue, sharp with sun and the stink of smoke. I clawed my way free from the shallow pit, limbs trembling like a foal's. My hands bled, knuckles raw from stones and grit. Blood felt familiar. That was something. The body was not.

Too lean. Too young. Too... Roman?

I staggered upright, dirt clinging to my skin like a burial shroud. My breath came ragged. Around me, the land unfurled in dusty ochres and iron browns. Cypress trees lined a distant ridge. Fields lay fallow, scorched by late summer. I recognized none of it—and yet my bones whispered something older than memory.

Then came the pain.

It always returns first.

My head throbbed with a dull, rhythmic pounding—each pulse a drumbeat of nausea. My back, bruised and sunburnt. Ribs flared sharp with every breath. No wounds, not this time. But the ache of rebirth was deep, cellular, like the soul itself had been skinned and forced back into flesh.

I had died again. That much I knew. How, where, or when—those pieces would come, eventually. Or not. Time is a liar. I should know. I've walked its length barefoot, bleeding, cursing gods I no longer believe in.

A voice reached me, low and wary. Latin. Crude, rustic Latin, not the polished rhetoric of Cicero's descendants.

"Hey! You there! Are you alive, or just another corpse too stupid to stay buried?"

I turned. A boy stood a dozen paces away, no older than fifteen. His tunic was ragged, patched with rough wool. Dirt streaked his legs, and a slingshot hung from his belt. He eyed me with the same caution a man gives a snake in the grass—wary, but ready to kill.

"Where am I?" I croaked. My throat rasped, voice rough as gravel.

"Where?" he snorted. "You're two days east of Rome, that's where. Near the Via Salaria. Bandits dumped a wagon back there—bodies and broken things. Guess they thought you were both."

Rome.

The word struck like a nail driven into soft wood. Rome. Not Byzantium. Not Paris. Not even London. Rome. But young still. Not an empire yet. A Republic, if I remembered right. A hungry one.

The boy edged closer. "You deaf, corpse? You speak Latin or just groan like the rest of the dying?"

"I speak," I managed. "What year?"

He blinked, suspicious now. "Year? You mean consuls?" He scratched his head. "Censorius and Dentatus, I think. They posted a new list at the crossroads. My brother can read it."

Censorius and Dentatus. I rifled through fading memories, matching names to dates. Publius Cornelius Cossus Arvina and Manius Curius Dentatus... That would make it 269 before Christ, not that anyone here would say so. Here, Christ hasn't even been born to disappoint them yet.

My knees gave out.

I fell hard, the earth jarring through my bones. The boy didn't move to help. Smart. Never touch what you don't understand. I stared at my hands—blistered, pale, trembling—and knew without doubt: I had died somewhere far from here. And awoken in a Rome that did not know me.

But I remembered Rome.

I remembered what it would become.

And I remembered the long curse that bound me to its blood-soaked future.

"You're not right," the boy said, taking a cautious step back. "You stink like something pulled from the Tiber. You sure you're alive?"

I looked up at him, lips curling into a smile that felt like it belonged to another man. "No," I said quietly. "But I don't die easy."

The boy swallowed, then turned and ran—bare feet kicking up dust.

I let him go.

There was no one left to run to.

Only forward. Only Rome. Only the next betrayal waiting just over the horizon.

And so I rose, reborn again into a world of bronze, blood, and wolves. The Odyssey had begun anew. I only hoped this time, it might end.

Of course. We'll continue Chapter One, deepening the sense of place, grounding the immortal's physical struggle in his new body, and foreshadowing Rome's harsh political-religious atmosphere. He's disoriented, but not naïve—wary of his curse, aware of the brutality of history. We'll slow down into the aftermath: survival, observation, and first real contact with the world that will come to know him.

My legs didn't want to work. Every joint screamed like it had rusted in place during the centuries between deaths. I'd had worse—gods, I'd had limbs lopped off in front of cheering crowds—but pain is pain. It always feels new, no matter how many lifetimes you've worn it.

By the time I forced myself upright again, the sun had shifted. Shadows crawled longer across the broken road. Flies still buzzed near the ditch behind me. The boy had called it a wagon-dump. I turned back.

There were corpses.

Five of them, stacked like spoiled grain. Slaves, probably—judging by the shackles on their feet, rusted and heavy. One man had a branding mark on his shoulder: SPQR, seared deep in the flesh.

A state brand.

Rome had claimed them. Rome had thrown them away.

I stood at the edge of the pit, not out of pity, but calculation. Whoever had used this spot might return. Bandits? Soldiers? Some jobs blur the difference. A crow pecked at a young woman's face—delicate once, perhaps. Now caved in. Her hands were bound at the wrist with coarse rope. No jewelry. No shoes. No dignity left.

I wasn't one of them. My body was clean. No marks. No collar. Someone had dumped me there after—but why?

Another puzzle in a long chain of forgotten knots.

I scavenged what I could. One of the dead men wore a tunic still mostly intact, though crusted with old blood at the hem. I took it. Tied it around my waist. Found a water gourd—empty—and a rusted eating knife. Better than nothing. My feet were bare, soles already torn from stone and thorn.

The Via Salaria stretched westward, toward Rome.

A road I'd walked before, in other flesh, centuries from now.

And yet... the land already hummed with menace. As if it knew what it would become.

I followed the road until my legs gave again, some miles later. Collapsed beside a marker stone, half-buried by dust and weeds. It read:

"To the Forum Romanum, LXX stadia."

Seventy stadia. Thirteen kilometers.

The bones of Rome were close.

I must have slept. Or passed out. Hard to tell. When I woke, the stars were rising—old, familiar gods burning above a younger world. My body ached, but the first haze of rebirth had passed. I remembered more.

Not of my last death—no, that was still locked behind a wall of fog—but of the curse.

I'd bargained for something once. No. Begged. A battlefield, a wound, a prayer choked with blood. I had not asked for immortality. I had asked not to die—not there, not then.

The gods are cruel literalists.

Now I live. Always. Poorly. Endlessly.

I've forgotten my name more times than I've died. But it always returns in pieces. A soldier called it in the dust of Gaul. A slave whispered it under her breath in Carthage. A child screamed it as fire rained in Antioch.

It will come again.

But not yet.

I smelled them before I heard them.

Smoke. Tallow. Boiled garlic and urine. A camp. Close.

I kept low, cresting a hill on bare feet, careful not to stir the stones. My legs were shaking again. Hunger clawed up from my belly, wrapping tight around my ribs. Below, a caravan had set up beside the road—three wagons, oxen hobbled and dozing, a small fire burning low. Six men. One woman. Traders, maybe. Maybe worse.

I could take food. Maybe clothes. Maybe silence one or two of them, before the others noticed.

I didn't move.

Not yet.

The firelight caught on bronze. One of the men wore a lorica hamata, scale armor over a padded tunic, worn but polished. A Roman soldier—retired, or moonlighting.

More dangerous than he looked.

Another man laughed—harsh and nasal. He spoke in fast Latin, thicker accent. Sabine, perhaps. The woman—dark hair, scarred cheek—poured wine into a clay cup. Their words drifted up in pieces.

"...grain price doubled in the forum..."

"...some Etruscan priest gutted a calf, said Rome's liver was rotting..."

"...Dentatus marches south next moon..."

Politics. Omens. War. Always war.

I stepped back, slow and quiet.

They weren't my beginning. Not yet.

But I marked the faces. And their knives.

The road still waited. So did Rome.

I walked.

Let them forget me before I carved my name back into their stone.