The Forum Boarium, Rome's bustling cattle market, was a microcosm of the city's anxieties. The air, usually a chaotic but vibrant mix of livestock, commerce, and cooking food, now felt taut, strung with a low hum of discontent. The price of bread, that simple, daily barometer of the city's health, had risen again. The smiles of the merchants were strained, and the laughter of the common folk was brittle. Fear, Alex was learning, had a scent, and it smelled of sour wine and damp, nervous sweat.
This was the new frontline of his war, a battlefield of whispers and glances, and Tigidius Perennis's spies were his legionaries. They moved through the crowds like gray smoke—a beggar with sharp ears, a prostitute with a loose tongue and a keen memory, a dockworker who listened more than he spoke. One of these agents, a man named Cassius whose unassuming demeanor belied a terrifyingly precise memory, made his way back to the warren of offices near the Subura that served as Perennis's nerve center. The report he delivered was so alarming that the spymaster himself scurried to the palace, seeking an immediate audience.
Alex received him in the study, the lingering scent of Sabina's alchemical experiments still faintly clinging to the air. The report Perennis delivered was chilling, not because it spoke of plots or assassins, but because it dealt with something far more volatile and impossible to fight: the mutating narrative of the Roman street.
The rumors were no longer just about a failed crop. They had festered, taking on a darker, more superstitious hue. The quarantined villa on the Palatine was no longer just a place of sickness; the plebs had given it a new name. They were calling it the Domus Morbus—the Plague House. But they didn't believe it was a natural plague sent by the gods. They believed it was a man-made curse.
The story of Drusus's tavern brawl had been told and retold, each telling adding a new layer of grotesque fantasy. The word on the street was no longer that the Emperor's guards were sick; it was that they were possessed. The whispers said that Alex's strange, unholy gardens, hidden away from public view, had drawn down demonic spirits from the underworld, and that these spirits now inhabited the bodies of his elite soldiers.
And the name of his new medicine, so carefully chosen, had been twisted into something terrifying. They were calling it "Caesar's Fire," not as a term of reverence, but of fear. It was not a medicine, they whispered over their watered-down wine, but a sorcerer's potion, a form of black magic that granted unnatural, monstrous strength at the cost of one's immortal soul. The men who drank it became things, not men.
The narrative was being twisted into something primal, something that bypassed logic and went straight for the ancient, superstitious heart of the Roman psyche. They were beginning to see their new Emperor not as a reformer or even a tyrant, but as a malevolent warlock, a blasphemer who dabbled in forbidden forces that defied the gods of Rome. This was a threat Lyra, with her cold, hard data, could not compute. It was an enemy Alex could not fight with a sword or an edict. How do you assassinate a rumor? How do you reason with a nightmare?
Alex's hand clenched into a fist on the arm of his chair. He was furious, a cold, sharp anger that burned away his earlier anxieties. "How is this happening?" he snarled at Perennis. "You are my spymaster! I pay you to control the city's whispers, not to deliver a recitation of them!"
Perennis, who was already pale, seemed to shrink in on himself. He was trembling, not just from fear of Alex's wrath, but from a deeper, more existential dread. "You cannot control fear, Caesar," he whispered, his voice cracking. "It is a plague of the mind. And you cannot reason with superstition. It is a poison for which there is no antidote."
He took a half-step closer, his fear making him bold. "Pertinax… Pertinax gives the people water. A thing they know, a thing they understand. He builds with stone and timber. He speaks of duty and tradition. You… you give them rumors of secret crops from unknown lands and magical fires brewed in hidden rooms. In the minds of the people, Caesar, he is a Roman. You… you are becoming something else."
The words struck Alex with the force of a physical blow. His obsessive secrecy, his reliance on anachronistic knowledge he could never explain, his entire brilliant strategy had backfired in the most spectacular way imaginable. He had tried to be a god, dispensing miracles from on high. In doing so, he had created a vacuum of understanding, and the common people of Rome, in their fear and ignorance, had filled that vacuum with their own darkest fantasies. He had become the monster under their bed.
He dismissed Perennis with a wave of his hand, the spymaster all but fleeing from the room. Alex was left alone with the bitter truth. He needed to counter this narrative, to seize control of it before it consumed him. But how? Reveal the truth of the alien grain? They would call him a madman and stone him. Destroy the Aeterna Ignis? He would be throwing away his only trump card against the sickness and the only new commodity he possessed.
As if summoned by the thought, a messenger arrived from the physician Philipos. The news was, on the surface, good. The guards were recovering fully. Their strength was returning to normal levels as the last of the aqua vitae left their systems. But the report contained a deeply disturbing addendum. The men were becoming insubordinate. They were demanding more of the "medicine." Not because they felt sick—their health was restored—but because they missed the feeling of power it gave them. They craved the fire. They were becoming addicts.
Alex now faced a horrifying new dilemma. He was the sole physician to a dozen of the strongest warriors in the city, men who were now loyal not to him, not to Rome, but to their next fix—a fix only he could provide. He was no longer just an emperor; he was a dealer, and his most elite soldiers were his first junkies.
The final blow of the day came without warning. As he stood in the workshop, staring at the bubbling stills that were the source of all his power and all his problems, a frantic Timo burst in, his face ashen.
"Caesar! It is Senator Rufus! He begs an immediate audience. He would not be turned away. He says it is a matter of the gravest spiritual importance to the Republic!"
Alex closed his eyes. Of course. The whispering plague had finally reached the ears of the one man whose opinion he still, foolishly, valued. The one man whose integrity was beyond question. He was about to be confronted not by a political rival, not by an assassin, not by a terrified spymaster, but by his own conscience, walking and breathing and cloaked in a senatorial toga. And he knew, with a sinking certainty, that Rufus was not coming to discuss policy. He was coming to face the warlock he now believed was sitting on the throne of Rome.