Dedicated to cinnyshy, whose review spurred me on, albeit a bit later than I should have.
In the cab, her body was as cold as her heart, or so she would have wished. For a moment, her mind lingered on her current situation – how had things come to what they were? How had her heart broken as it did?
Athens. The Parthenon. Flavius, his impossibly green eyes, and how handsome he looked in his general's uniform. She was young. Very young, and his flesh was warm as she writhed against him, propped between him and the Corinthian column. "I spoke to your father," he murmured softly into her lips. "He would not give you to me. Come. Let me steal you away." She closed her eyes, let him kiss her, her body breaking with need, want, with something that exhaled more than desire in the way she touched him. His own need was pressed against her belly, and it made her shiver.
"Lady," the young slave girl murmured. "Your father..." Lydia dismissed Flavius with more pride than she truly felt and sat at her dressing table. "Then make me presentable," she ordered dryly.
The girl was combing Lydia's rich, brown curls when her father entered the room.
"You will not see him again," he ordered without further preamble. She nodded, not meaning anything by it other than true submission to her father.
Events precipitated themselves. The young general had to leave before fleeing truly was possible, and she remained on the patio, to look at the plebs' manifestations. Caesar Augustus and his friends were doing well – too well. Her father was more and more questioned at the Senate. The letter came. Flavius had fallen, they said, up, somewhere on the British Isles, or was it in Goth country? Did it matter? She cried for weeks, until her mind broke and more ill omens came.
"Ovid is dead," they whispered in the corridors. Nothing could be found of why he was, and before long, her support was known, and she had to hide. Her father died, and more grief came in his passing. Her brothers wedded, begot children. She remained steady and solitary, waiting.
One night, impossibly green eyes glimmered in the darkness of her room. She froze, not daring to ask. He glided more than he walked to her.
"Flavius." She gasped his name, both a prayer and a breathed fear.
"I return, Lydia," he said quietly. "To make you my bride." His lips grazed the nape of her neck, so cold, a hand running in her lush curls, unbidden. Frozen, she could not reply, and he vanished before she could call a slave.
Back in the carriage, Lydia's tears were dry, long and dark streaks on her marble-like face, nigh a deathly mask. Gengis slips his honey-coloured hand around her waist. "My Lady," he murmured, purred against her neck, where she had been kissed by Flavius so long ago. "Why cry for him?"
She shivered.
"I love him," she murmured. Gengis gritted his teeth, almost biting at her cold, hard flesh. "And me?"
"You," she breathed, "you give me reason to live, which he cannot give me," she said softly. "That is why I made you, my fledgling. So that you would keep me moving. Do your work, then."
Gengis withered a little at the memory – he often forgot that Lydia could undo him with almost a thought. She'd found him, almost dead, on the Tatar plains of Mongolia, in the wake of the Khan's mass massacres. She made him, gave him the means for his vengeance, gave him something to live for in her own need for someone to keep her striding through the centuries.
But she did not love him.