The urgency in General Maximus's voice was a physical force, a jarring alarm that shattered the fragile peace of the garden. Alex's heart, which had been filled with the quiet hope of his secret project, was now pounding with a new and sudden dread. He exchanged a quick, worried glance with Sabina, wiped the dirt from his hands, and followed the General without a word.
They moved quickly through the opulent, sleeping palace, their footsteps echoing in the long marble corridors. Maximus led them not towards the public halls or the Senate chambers, but up a narrow, winding staircase that Alex had never used before, a stairway meant for soldiers and watchmen. It emerged onto the windswept battlements of the palace's massive western wall, the fortified perimeter that overlooked the city sprawling below.
The moment they stepped into the open air, the sound hit them. It wasn't the familiar, distant hum of a great city at night. It was a roar. A low, guttural, continuous roar, like that of a single, immense, and wounded beast. It was the sound of tens of thousands of angry voices, merged into one.
Maximus led them to the edge of the parapet. Alex looked down, and his blood ran cold.
The scene below was apocalyptic. The wide, sloping avenues leading up the Palatine Hill were gone, completely submerged beneath a river of humanity. It was a vast, seething sea of people, stretching as far as he could see in the flickering torchlight, a crowd so dense it seemed to move as one organism. It was no longer a small, localized bread riot in a distant quarter. This was the city itself, rising up.
He could see their faces, upturned towards the palace walls, and they were the faces of famine. Gaunt cheeks, hollowed eyes, and mouths stretched wide in anger and desperation. They were men, women, and even children, their bodies thin and ragged, but their voices united in a single, terrifying purpose. They were chanting, a low, rhythmic, thunderous roar that seemed to shake the very stones of the ancient wall.
"Panem! Panem! Panem!"
Bread. Bread. Bread.
This was a direct, visceral confrontation with the consequences of the crisis. Alex had seen the reports, he had read the numbers, but seeing the faces of the people he was trying to save—and seeing them contorted not with hope, but with pure, desperate rage aimed squarely at him—was a shattering blow. He heard his own name being shouted from the crowd, not with the praise he had once courted, but as a vile curse.
"Commodus the Hoarder!" a man's voice shrieked, clear for a moment above the din.
"Give us the Emperor's grain!" a woman screamed.
"Commodus the Starver!" another voice roared, and the chant was picked up by thousands.
The propaganda his enemies had whispered in the Senate had found fertile ground in the empty stomachs of the people. To them, he was not a reformer struggling with a crisis. He was a tyrant, feasting in his palace while they starved in their hovels.
His allies gathered on the wall beside him, their faces pale in the torchlight. Senator Rufus looked down at the crowd, his expression one of deep, paternal horror. Perennis seemed to shrink into himself, the practiced political manipulator terrified by a force of raw, popular fury he could not control. Sabina stood beside Alex, her usual cynical wit gone, her face a mask of grim, silent shock.
"We must speak to them!" Rufus pleaded, his voice thin against the roar. "We must go down and assure them that we are doing everything we can! We must reason with their leaders!"
"You cannot reason with a tidal wave, Senator," Sabina said, her voice tight. She had never seen anything like this. "They are past the point of listening to reason."
"Then we must give them a concession!" Perennis urged, his eyes wide with fear. "A promise! Distribute the last of the wine from the imperial cellars! Anything to placate them, to buy us time!"
Maximus, who had been silently observing the crowd with a professional soldier's eye, finally spoke. His voice was blunt, brutal, and devoid of all sentiment. "They are no longer petitioners," he said, his gaze fixed on the front ranks of the crowd, which were beginning to push against the line of Praetorian guards at the base of the wall. "They are an invading army. They have breached the security cordons established by the Vigiles and are now attempting to storm the palace. This is not a protest. This is insurrection."
Alex was horrified. The thought of turning Roman swords on Roman citizens, on the starving, desperate people he was working day and night to save, was physically sickening. His entire mission was to be a better kind of emperor, a ruler who served his people, not one who slaughtered them.
"No, General," he argued, his voice strained. "We can't. These are my people! Look at them! They are not soldiers. They are fathers, mothers… they are just hungry and desperate!"
Maximus turned to face him, and in the flickering torchlight, his scarred face was as hard and unforgiving as iron. "They were your people, Caesar," he said, his voice cold and hard. "Now they are a mob. And a mob has only one mind, a mind that understands only one language: strength. If you show weakness now, if they sense even a moment of hesitation, they will swarm us. They will tear down the gates, they will butcher the guards, and they will pour into this palace and tear us all to pieces. And your precious miracle sprouts in that garden," he gestured back towards the palace interior, "will be trampled into the mud before they ever see the sun twice."
The general's words were a brutal dose of reality. "Your sentiment is noble, Caesar," he concluded, his voice softening almost imperceptibly. "But it is a luxury we no longer have. It will get us all killed."
As if to punctuate his words, a new sound erupted from below. A sharp, splintering crack, followed by a roar of triumph from a section of the crowd. They had breached a secondary gate, a smaller entrance to the palace grounds, using a felled log as a makeshift battering ram.
A wave of people surged through the opening, pouring into the outer courtyards of the palace complex. The thin line of Praetorians guarding that section was instantly overwhelmed. Rocks, bricks, and debris began to fly through the air, clattering against the marble walls of the palace itself. The situation was no longer a threat. It was an active, ongoing assault. It was seconds away from becoming a full-scale massacre.
Maximus grabbed Alex's arm, his grip like a vise. He turned his Emperor to face him, forcing him to look away from the chaos below. His face was a grim mask of absolute certainty.
"There is no more time for debate, Caesar," he said, his voice low and urgent, cutting through the roar of the mob. "The choice is yours, and it must be made now." He pointed down to the courtyard, where he had already positioned two full cohorts of his most disciplined Praetorians, standing in perfect, silent formation, a wall of steel and shields awaiting their orders.
"Order my men to charge and clear the courtyard," Maximus said, his eyes boring into Alex's. "Or we die here. On this wall. Now."
The choice was laid bare, stripped of all philosophy and idealism. Become the butcher he had sworn he would never be, or watch his entire mission, his life, and the lives of the few people loyal to him be consumed by the righteous, ravenous fury of the unfed city.