Chapter 7: The Voice of the Sybil
"As the scroll of time unfolds, it will shrink me down, melt more of my flesh, shorten my bones, melt my marrow until, from this still large body that you now see, I shall have shrunk to a tiny, weightless, wisp of a thing…What will be left of me then? What will be left to me? For I shall dwindle down to a nothingness alive, wind down to an unrecognizable shade of my formerly robust self. No eye will know me then. What comfort then…This comfort: the world shall hear my voice. The Fates have allowed it. The Eumenides have granted me this."
Quoted out of Ovid's Metamorphosis--book XIV
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From early on in the ritual, the heavy scent of incense and myrrh, the pungent perfume of saffron-spice, filled her nostrils, the smoke rising from the libation vessels where the thorny, writhing branches of hawthorn smoldered among clusters of goatsweed--yellow-beaded flowers desiccated to raisin-like drops of carbonized plant material--purified the air of evil, maligning spirits. In the dark, shadowed chamber of this mephitic, underground spring, deciphering what was true to her senses became an increasingly difficult task, inhaling the swirling vapors, vision blurred, bending darkness into cohesive form. A haze mingled with the smell of damp earth and peaty sulfur, wrapping around votary bowels with amorphous, wraithlike fingers, misty steam rolling across the glasslike opacity of the subterranean pool, refracting flickering coals. She could not help imagining the shades of those who had gone before her emerging from corners, obscured by the gloom.
The ambience of this underground kingdom echoed to an age lost in geological memory. A time when the shifting layers of liquefied mantle, far below the earth's crust, had buckled under the thermal pressure of magma, breaking through yielding bedrock, layers of limestone, and solidified volcanic ash, in an explosion of underground water--aquifers feeding these cratered wells.
And later—much later—feeding humanity's belief in earthen-concealed pools acting as gateways to the dead.
Pools like this hidden pond, surrounded by obsidian, and encased underneath layers of rock and acidic soil, formed long ago, and ancient beyond human memory, preserved in universal conscience as a place of worship.
Of death.
And rebirth.
For Lucilla, time grew indistinct, slowing while she continued to breathe the near noxious odors of various herbs, moist loam, and damp rock. The ceaseless chanting of women's voices echoing throughout the underground chamber, buzzed in her head like a repetitious, sweet chord upon the lyre. Motion, too, grew deliberate, no longer entirely under her conscious control, her dazed attention focused, entranced, upon the rippling, watery images refracted by the glasslike opacity of the pool.
Three forms had gathered around the submerged spring: the elder priestess, her daughter, and Lucilla—crone, maiden, and mother. Cycles as eternal as the earth itself, details of their separate features rippling, reflected by the mirror-like, black waters, transmuting into figures adorned with beaded necklaces, chains of cowry shells dangling between full, bare breasts, and pleated, flounced skirts of felt-hair. Inky black waters blurred once more, revealing a more antiquated memory of three women surrounding the pool, soft animal skins draped around the proud swell of hips in a fringe of thin tethers, imprinted with sacred signs of the elements and Nature's creatures. Women's arms—female arms—firm with muscle, twisted in a dancing flurry, spinning about this shadow-hidden pool, skin glowing in firelight, tattooed in spiraling patterns--flowing water, shifting winds, and the helical designs of the Mother's essence.
In every age, the worshippers were always women, their chanted mantra, an intonation preserved since the first nomadic hunters crossed the great glaciers in small bands, escaping the frigid lock of the north. A note gone sharp with the dying squeal of a suckling piglet, as Lucilla—fascinated, disgusted--sliced through its fragile throat, ending the creature's life in a moist, bubbling eruption of blood and viscous warmth. The sanguine juice passed through her fingers, collecting in the hollowed out scapula of a virgin heifer, sacrificed the same way earlier that morning.
From the scapula, the blood was mixed with honey and wine, meant for the tongues of the dead to lap up so they might take shape in the world of physical form and being. A concoction fragrant with traces of mandrake and wormwood, dangerous herbs said to speed the spirit on its journey to the afterlife—a concoction the daughter of Marcus Aurelius hadn't known was meant to be poured down her throat. Lucilla resisted, shaking her head furiously, fighting the firm grip holding her chin in place, gagging, forced to swallow or choke up the grisly tincture. The never faltering tone hit an ear-shattering crescendo, her neck contracting only once, and the mixture of blood and herbs flowed down her throat like the slime-ridden fingers of the dead, carrying the last bit of her consciousness not clouded with scented smoke, darkness, and the sonorous chanting, along with it.
What followed was indescribable--an uncontrollable tremor that might have been her body, the quaking of Gaia Herself, and a tortured, voiceless upheaval. In agony, she felt her body as earthen rock, sundered by an upwelling of lava, or the crashing of tidal waves upon fragile sand; violent seizures through the very fabric of her muscles and nerves. She was helpless, had no control over the involuntary spasms jolting her limbs.
Then, after a protracted time of agonizing affliction, there was stillness.
And darkness…so deep, a quiet so seemingly vast, only a tomb meant to house the dead could have rivaled the gloomy vacuity of this new arena in her soul.
Silence.
Stillness.
And…
A beat, drumming, soft and distant, growing louder with each stroke, swallowed by an onrush of otherworldly wind, whilst simultaneously engulfing the entirety of her awareness.
An awareness absorbed into the rhythm of blood thrusting through her veins; the gentle whooshing of the fetus breathing the waters of its amniotic inhabitance; the shifting rivers of magma flowing beneath the crusts of solid ground and the endless pull of tides breaking upon the boundary dividing land and sea, all subject before the invisible forces of astral bodies—moon, sun, stars. Lucilla's soaring mind faltered, trying to stretch and expand, attempting to grasp the images flooding her sense—specks of crystalline light scattered across the sky, more numerous than the sands of the earth.
Her physical form was now submerged in the depths of the cavernous pool, cradled in the cool spring beneath the small shrine, but within the depth of her being, she had arrived upon a precipice. A precarious point where she, sustained in her ethereal journey by this otherworldly wind--ceaseless, vibrating pulse, thrumming through her mind--had come to a barrier dividing the great threshold between mortal knowing and immortal consciousness.
She suffered a moment's indecision.
To hold back, remain balanced forever on the edge of the Great Well, ignorant of the mystery lying beyond?
Or to jump, delving into the darkness of the cauldron, swallowed like the surrounding night beyond the sacred grove.
Utter stillness and waiting. A minute, several minutes, days, months, years--there was no concept of time passing.
And then…
She leapt.
Over the edge…breath, sound, vision, sensation—all things that gave essence to human life—were sucked out of her, smothered in a sudden burning, painful white brightness, to singe away remnants of physical perception. She knew, in that moment, what it was to be the fall of rushing water plunging over the steep mountain-side; the tidal wave crashing with deathly force upon the land, and the lightening bolt streaking down from the heavens, rendering its scorching voltage upon the ground. In her mind, in her soul, she felt her physicality—the confines of flesh, bone, and cognition—to be an imprisonment, needing to be shed so as to grasp this intoxia of spirit and synergistic energy she was becoming. With her sliding, uncontrolled decent into the Well, the tunnel-force of wind streaming past her senses, came the accompaniment of a thousand, nay million, voices babbling the passage of humanity into a simultaneous communion of death, birth, time and mortality.
And Lucilla--no longer entirely Lucilla--saw as she had only once before, standing on that brink of ripping exaltation between life and death, struggling to bring forth her son. No longer with the eyes of humanity, she Perceived Universe possessing the vision of Immortals.
On and on she fell, until her meteoric plunge began to slow at long last, the crashing falls, an arrowing onrush of water, transforming her disembodied journey into the rough rapids of a river, smoothing, finally, to a basin of stillness.
Peace.
Rest--like the pool cradling her body in its sable-mirrored waters.
Suspended between eternity and other-vision, she examined a great void her meager human-perception barely comprehended. Momentary, the vague memory of a nameless poet she once studied as a young girl swirled through her mind, words describing the vast wasteland before her—all about her--the third kingdom… shadows amongst shadows… the countless hordes of dead generations twitter and flit. Floating in this darkness-- endless and timeless—beyond temporal constraint—to Lucilla's newly expanded sense, it was not shadows amongst shadows she observed; rather, the innumerable silver threads of soul-light sparkling across an infinite darkness. Threads woven into patterns upon the Universe, scintillating beams of light that spiraled about themselves, following a cochlear path like that of the shell she had held in her hands. They would twine, limbs of ivy climbing to the sky, then round back and repeat, branching into parallel rays of light, splicing as sunshine through clouds. In the womb of her mind, these soul-threads were a bright weaving, whirling in the way of women's scarves during a dance, seducing her awareness to merge with the twinkling, cosmic tapestry--a realm of the infinite reflected in the dark abode of the pool.
Gradually, watching the interlacing, shimmering filaments, she finally grasped, vaguely, that these were more than the sources of life-force which bonded each living thing to another, but the congruence of time and history progressing since the dawn of….
Cosmos, her mind stumbling, trying to fathom the concept.
Seeing. Vision. And what vision showed her was an expanse of infinite black, volatile twinkling specks of light, diamonds set into a rippling ocean.
Stars, something in her mind recognized.
A curious impression of buoyancy came to Lucilla in that moment, her soul borne up on the swishing beat of Otherworldly wings. Vision changed, her sight no longer imprisoned within the crude matter of human form, a series of scenes flowing through her inner-eye. The visual impressions followed, one upon the next, lending the sense of a passing stream, or coming swift and abrupt, flashing with the rapidity of lightening across a night-sky.
A distant past, a history molded by the mirage of humanity, emerged to the forefront of Lucilla's astute psyche. Faces bearing attributes of separate, unique origins—ethnicity--evolving natures of custom, belief, and culture. Diverse and differentiated, they covered an expanse from east to west, wending through the ceaseless progress of time—peoples united by death, grief, sorrow, joy, ecstasy, and the numerous tragedies, shortfalls, and vanities, the journey of humanity forming an uneven stumbling of achievement and failure.
Transcendent, her perception reeling, attempting to wrap her mind about concepts and mysteries she could only just grasp a fringe of, Lucilla was losing her sense of Self.
She was soaring.
The interminable beat of wings swept her Vision across temporal distance, spanning geographical reaches, speeding her spirit across the great Sea of Grass. Viewing it the way a hawk, far above the earth sees the land—broad and limitless—stretching from the snow-capped heights of the Western ranges, bounded by the dense, virgin forests of the north, to invade the intractable deserts of the East.
The Sea of Grass, the steppe, where sky-father and earth-mother ruled the hearts and minds of nomadic humans and their beasts, subjected to the arid, merciless seering of parched summers, and the unforgiving lash of winter's bite.
Here, then, Vision slowed for a moment—endless moment. Within Lucilla's perception of being, images formed into sequential patterns of meaning, interspersed still, about that timeless tapestry of interwoven, silver threads, abstract thought refined into physical sight.
She watched.
She watched on a night when the wind carried harsh and cold, pure and stinging, rippling the grass like waves across a great, limitless ocean, undulating patterns beneath that diamond studded domain, stars scattered across the never-ending sky. Stars, falling to earth, final destination after a transit of celestial origin, crossing distances too great for mere human minds to comprehend. Stars, burning out in a twinkling flare, leaving a streak of after-light, a signal of divinity imprinted upon a nameless man's mind.
A man of ancient, shamanistic ritual, versed in the craft of metal and earth, shaping with hammer, molding, coaxing sky-alloy amidst the chant of holy words, a release of burning gases, and sputtering flame, heat that could make a man bleed. Molten lava, like earth's blood, glowed with infernal brilliance, heating with fire, cooling with water, reshaping and repeating—land, crust and sea had been so borne ageless millennia ago.
This too, was a birth of sorts, the holy words committing the object he shaped with his striking hammer, his blazing flame, and soothing water, to the original elements of creation. To the cycles of life and death--transformation.
Lucilla, her incorporeal presence hovering like a ghost, witness to a night lost in a web of the past, watched in voiceless puzzlement, the swift fall of a blade severing the noble head of equine royalty, king amongst the horses of heaven, sacrificed, and the blood collected into a bowl of glazed clay. Stallion-blood mixed with that of a maiden's first sanctified moon-flow, seething, bubbling over embers and coals, to meld with liquefied metal.
Transformation.
In a furious hiss of steam, the last flare of sparks from the falling hammer, the final wave of heat from this newly molded object dissipates in a flickering of after-glow, leaving in its darkened, cooling wake, the birth of a sword. Like the setting sun, this thing of sky-metal and iron smolders, blood and gold, a deadly scimitar borne, held aloft by the shaman-priest in triumph, a word hurled up to the sky from whence it came, a final consecration to an oath that only those worthy of its making should wield it. Deadly, beautiful scimitar, driven into the earth with which sky-metal was united, a final pledge this weapon of impenetrable luster, metallic power and brilliance will promise triumph to the wielder. A weapon, not of mindless war, but of justice—a tool of defense, a tenant of civilized people attempting to guard remnants of their existence.
Time progresses, and Vision changes.
Lucilla felt her inner-sense shift once more--the essence of a gull taking flight, or the knowledge of night changing to day at that moment when the sun rises just over a distant horizon.
A barrage of sound, the scream of horses and the tearing of wind on a storm-swept, thundercloud dark night invade Lucilla's expanded being. Images are blurred despite the awareness of motion, chaos somewhere in the background—a scene of horror as clarity asserts itself, and she views an inferno of burning buildings, destruction, embers and ash falling upon mud, the spilt blood of men and beast seeping into the ground, partners to the cold, driving rain.
Her perception, now, is centralized upon the Sword, her knowledge, that of the elements contained in its make-up--a hilt of finest ivory, plated with gold and lapis, bound by electrum. An awareness of waiting, of rest, belonging to this blade's metallic soul, through a timeless hibernation of stillness, a blade of iron and sky-metal imprisoned in the calm bedding of rock and hardened earth. Until…
Freedom! A warrior's hand, large, strong, thick-fingered, tearing the scimitar of sky-metal and earth-blood from its long-settled home of stone. She gasps at the power of the man vying against Sword, his downward push, a massive heave, and a snarl of enraged fury! A man exalting in his primordial war-cry, singing the Blade to a long awaited sweetness of completion, finally bound to its rightful wielder, in the midst of desperation, and that chaotic back-drop of lashing rain, thunder, and licking flames.
Scene and sense faded into darkness, and Lucilla could feel her being taking to flight yet again.
Shift, and image pervaded her mind—momentary. Time passes, communicated by an impression of winter snows melting into puddles, warmed by the emerging strength of the turning year. Watery warmth heralds the death of icicles encasing a tree branch, and frees frozen streams, the insistence of an approaching spring. Her Vision again takes that of the spirit-sight, broad and encompassing, the eagle, flying high above a wind-bitten barren plain, snow covered hills of grey rock and dead moss.
The pallor of winter upon the terrain casts a lurid glow over a swarm of men vying for supremacy against their foes, covering a distance wider than three Coliseums. Spears fall with a hail of arrows; the heavy clash of sword upon shield detectable whilst the mortal screams of pain and anguish—the cries of the fallen—echo harsh and wrenching, lost upon the deaf ear of a lingering, chilly twilight.
All are warriors, blood-spattered, battle torn and weary, scattered across that field, struggling for their lives. And each warrior--for one beat of a pounding heart, one heaving gasp of exhaustion, one moment stolen to wipe sweat, blood and tears from a brow, and clear vision--pauses, caught like statues of flesh and armor turned to stone-- Perseus' fabled companions.
From the western hills where the setting sun glows blood-red, the thunder of an approaching tempest resounds, low at first, but growing distinctly louder with each rumbling beat.
The bane of the gods, born of emblazoned sunlight thrown across the white blanket of the hills, they emerge, a galloping rush of men and horse. Gallant war-steeds spilling down the hillside—bronze scaled bardings cloak the horses' bodies, their leather chamfrons, adorned with gold-studded eye-pieces, glitter impending vengeance, catching the fading rays of invernal light. The riders are armored to the fullest, bedecked in gilt-plated iron breast-plates, iron-scaled thigh-guards, helms of hardest steel, lances extended horizontally—weapons thirsting for the taste of man-flesh and bone, their oval shields painted in tones of red, blue and gold, depicting feats of battle-craft from ages past.
The breakneck pace of horses and men galloping down the hillside never falters, their leader mounted on a jet-black stallion—warrior and beast rippling like speeding river water. His visored helmet sports the shimmering emblem of a roaring lion, and he is followed closely by another of his warriors, carrying the silver-cast standard of a snarling dragon-head, mouth opened in eternal rage, a dazzling, frozen image of fury. Evidence of the host's speeding assault echoes across the field, the tail of a silken windsock whips out from behind the dragon's head.
A curse and salvation, the invading cavalry cuts a swath through the confusion of struggling men, this serpentine line of impenetrable invincibility, and all are victim to the onslaught of spearing lances, slashing swords and trampling war-mounts.
A flash, like the quick emergence of sun behind cloud, and Lucilla's soaring vision takes in the scene of that doomed plain, awash in gore, fallen bodies, scattered limbs and blood, the silence of winter's hush over those moors filled with cries of terror and death, the sound of horses screaming amidst the melee of warring men. At one end of that plain, a man is unhorsed, the midnight-steed a rearing terror of lashing hooves, aiding his rider who has lost his lion-embossed helm. His black hair is long, like the barbarian warrior he fights, coming out of its thong and matted with blood. Eyes the color of amber beads seethe a promise of death, hacking a desperate defense with sword and reflex, against a monstrous, axe-brandishing, blue-painted warrior, garbed in a tunic of leather skin and cross-gartered, woolen trousers.
A momentary blur allows her Vision to angle upon another vantage—a mass of overturned chariots, a knot of infantry Lucilla recognizes as Roman-troops, some who are caught, lying forever still in the collection of mangled war-vehicles. The survivors of the collision are being backed, slowly, and not without a furious resistance, toward a river emptying from between the hills, by a greater force of leather-clad warriors whose long-swords hack through breastplates and shoulder-guards, bossed-shields, with a fatal accuracy.
Hail falls and a furious wind sweeps the scent of blood and death through the air.
The Sword, gilt-red and silver-bright, drives up, in that instant, from beneath the weight of fallen soldiers and armored warriors forced back toward the opaque river, a beacon of promise and resolve, the man who brandishes its flashing, deadly beauty, a blur of motion in a flurry of slashing weapons and flailing limbs. Shock, then, like the whipping wind, a sudden gale-blast, gift of the wide-open sea, slices its way into her being, her spirit-sight soaring—helpless witness—as the struggle of soldier vying against soldier plays on into winter's dusk—a horrid, grisly scene from Tartarus' wasteland. Breath is sucked out of her body, perception, once encompassed with that of Sword, then of Soaring, jars against the Otherness pervading her soul.
Maximus! Comes her voiceless cry.
No more, echoes the response of Other.
And a word…Artos, whispers through her sense, rolling like the waves of the ocean retreating back out to sea.
Vision melted away slowly, like snow retreating from warming sunlight, the upheaval of shifting mirage blanketing, once more, to a singular awareness of pulse. Her own heart beat mirrored that of the world's, she who was Mother of Romans, caught up in the primordial soul-threads of creation, sensing the gentle swishing of astral wings cradled about her being, guiding her to a place of impenetrable dimness--ocean depths where sunlight never penetrated.
For a time Lucilla was lulled simply by enfolding darkness, thinking this must be how the fetus feels, wrapped in the security of its mother's womb, hearing only the constant thrum of mother's heart, the shush of mother's lungs.
Voice invaded, though, abrupt, beautiful and terrible, clear as her thoughts, yet not of her own design.
Now, my daughter, do you understand? All-enveloping, it was the screech of the hawk falling upon its prey, the rip-tide of a gale-wind, and the heart-wrenching, lonely cry of the wolf.
Lucilla's awareness awoke in a fresh realization of her loss and grief, swelling into thought and becoming word—not spoken in the human capacity—but cognition and concept all the same.
No, I do not understand! I only know what has been taken from me, and what can never be restored!
Silence followed initially--contemplative, a struggle for understanding on the part of Other, probing the mortal woman's mind.
A timeless moment in this place of cavernous infinity, while Vision returned, encased in memory, episodes in her life when Duty had triumphed over Dream and Idea. She witnessed, again, that long ago night in Syria, a younger Maximus storming out of her room in voiceless, hurt fury, struggling to disguise the sensitivity of his nature. The pain scrawled across his features, immediate reaction to the new knowledge of her marriage, all the more crippling to her conscience.
Another night filtered through her inner-eye--her father, dead, papery skin already sinking into the corporeal evidence of natural decay, still as stone, lying upon a bed from which he would never again rise. Herself, sitting in a corner of that room, weeping silent tears as she watched Commodus instill final orders upon Quintus—unable to condemn her brother's actions verbally, raise dissent against him in time to save Maximus or his family—adding one more sin to that scale she would gladly answer for if it safeguarded the life of her son.
AM I NOT MERCIFUL! Everything blurred, the words shattering through her soul, sharpening her Vision in the way of a swimmer surfacing from underwater, to find Commodus clutching her chin with iron strength, his eyes blazing wrath.
Why do you show me these things, she cried out in aggrieved rage. These memories which only make me relive my failures!
So that you might See, daughter, that truth exists within Possibility, decisions born from choices sporting so many sides a mathematician might weep. That the actions of the past may impact your life, those around you, in the Present, but the future still remains a blank slate, full of further Possibility, and every Choice always has an alternative. Truth, like Time, is a many-cycled, many-branching path, sometimes following one straight road, at other times, forking, like the limbs of a tree, growing in ways we may never have anticipated. Now, do you understand?
Lucilla's response was an almost laughable stubbornness to refuse any acknowledgment of the Other's question—hopeless frustration in this place of cavernous infinity where her spirit was tossed about, no more substantial than a ball of string in kitten's paws.
Good, praised the Voice after a moment. A moment Lucilla experienced, in this void absent of basic human perception, as the joyous freshness of a spring breeze dancing over tree-tops, thinking the stimulus akin to laughter. You show wisdom marking the shortcomings of human comprehension. The feeling of pleased approval was short-lived, the Other's emotion shading to a remembered regret. Had I but possessed that same ounce of wisdom long ago, I would have known to ask for youth and beauty, not only years as numerous as the grains in a pile of sand.
Youth? Are you not immortal, as the gods are, Lucilla queried, her puzzlement belying her sorrowful memories for an instant.
Again, leaves rustling over the heights of a forest in brisk wind--a chuckle. Immortal, the voice responded with incredulous humor. Nearly. A god, not even close. I am the Voice of Cumae, once promised the love of a god, and deceived into this present… state—the echo of wind's whisper, the dying away of the raven's screech. At times I take shape between twilight and full night, not dead, but…hardly living.
For so long, I think I have slept, wandering, mindless, in these ruins which used to rise above Lake Avernus, forgetting. The mournful essence of the Voice, like the keening wail of the dead, full of bitter grief, made Lucilla, in her mind, want to retreat from this harrowing eternal resentment.
Forgetting I was still alive, I still existed. Until you, Mother of Romans, the Voice falling away to a whispering echo, not so benign as before.
Lucilla's transient psyche, struggling to grasp concepts composing the fluid-consistency of reality, hadn't felt, up to this moment of her soul-journey, any threat of endangerment. She had forgotten she was no god either.
I was promised immortality, Mother of Romans! The words hissed through her perception, the licking tongue of the serpent, causing Lucilla to shrink away from this putrid thing trying to suffocate her life-force.
The ponderous regularity of that pulse, always in the back of her awareness, a beat she had come to realize was her own heart, was beginning to slow, falter, skipping now and again. Each time it happened, there was a disconcerting breathlessness, a feeling of underwater submergence, and the air was crushed from her lungs.
In the infinite darkness, a sinister aura was reaching out with that Voice, dragging at Lucilla's awareness, sucking her into a quagmire of smothering, vile rot.
I was promised my Voice would not die! And you, who wish to die, shall be my vehicle to the world!
No! Lucilla's panicked. Not like this!
She fought to keep the flitting vibrancy of her life-force from being quashed by this great maw of suffocating evil, pulse shuddering through her veins, rushing blood to an organic mind too ready to shut down, forcing instinct to take over, forcing breath.
Forcing her Voice.
Infuriated and desperate, Lucilla's breath became physical sound, a primordial cry of terror and defiance.
Forcing Life.
For one brief, beautiful instant, the drowning bog was pushed back, but she was losing, the material strength of her lungs failing, her conscious thought purged with the jabbering, shrieking voices of the Eumenides, their grasping, slime-mopped fingers binding her fast, drawing her ever further down, into this place of gloom, shadow, and darkening decay.
I shall be heard! The abominable Voice proclaimed again. The Eumenides promised this!
Lucilla screamed once more, futile as her struggle to remember--in this final moment--breath, beat, vision, sense, sound. Humanity.
The dark was winning. She was dying.
And then…
Into the void, an anchor thrown out to a sea-swept unfortunate, a new voice.
"Lucilla!"
Another's voice, muffled at first, but growing stronger with each syllabic repetition.
"Lucilla!"
It echoed in her staggering mind--Lucilla, Lucilla--not pushing back the overwhelming night, but cleaving through it, offering direction to her blinded soul.
Touch broke through with Voice this time. "Lucilla!"--hands gripping her shoulders, shaking her slightly.
Sweet and clear, strong as the grip on her physical form, this new Voice set her free with a final utterance. "Three times I call thee, and three times I bind thee to earth and matter. Lucilla, awaken!" As bidden, the daughter of Marcus Aurelius reached out toward that guiding command.
Awaken. Breathe--Such simple actions. She gasped, suddenly, for with each inhalation returned Scent, like a needle pricking her skin, pungent and sharp, disintegrating the gloom of her mind, prompting her to further orient through the engulfing void, toward the low, soothing tones of that Voice.
A gloom which did not quite release her, despite the acrid odor of garlic, basil oil, peppermint, and rock salt, pervading her lungs, and she retched, forcing a powerful expulsion of air in a raging fit of coughing.
You are not finished with your duty, Mother of Romans! The gloom wavered with that desperate, screeching pronouncement lost to the forgotten halls once abiding above the heights of Avernus, the crumbling ruins of Cumae.
Vision blazed into her mind, branding Lucilla's inner-eye with divine brilliance, coalescing upon a scene filled with the charred remains of a fort, smoking in the aftermath of invasion. The grey light of dawn fell upon a throng of onlookers--mostly soldiers of the Praetorian Guard--armored for battle, all of them caped and cloaked against an ice-cold, whipping wind, despite the wood beyond the fort bearing the verdant traces of spring growth. A season which should have brought the promise of new life, yet the scene all about spoke of devastation, destruction—bodies scattered about the wet mud, a gruesome sight of mangled, hacked arms and legs, severed heads, the signs of a great fire recently consuming the surrounding structures of an officer's barracks, soldier compounds. Vision, centering lastly upon herself, standing tall and proud, amid that scene of death, garbed in a gown of blood-scarlet, swathed with gold ribbons of silk, molding to her slender body in wake of a gusting wind, her cloak affording little protection from the icy-blast, her unbound hair blowing about her face in tangles of chestnut waves. Standing like a guardian spirit over the prone form of—anguish purged her soul—Maximus, who was struggling to rise, writhing in pain upon the rain-soaked ground. And she, at an impasse, meeting the black gaze of a man whose image—Virius—encompassed all she hated. In her eyes was a look of dispassionate fury, her hands clenched about Virius' wrist, wresting a long-bladed dagger away from the throat of Maximus.
"Lady…Lady, please," that smooth, low voice entreated, feeling her physical form being shaken, eliciting a gasping choke from her lungs while trying to succor air, and the scene shattered like glass within the womb of her inner-eye.
