The Boy Who Lived Alone
Although after his death the First Emperor of Mars was panegyrized as a man whose will birthed a nation- whose cunning made his father's dream reality- he grew up a small and weak child. Little and lonely, he was born into a world he (like all) didn't understand and (like many) was only barely allowed to be a part of. In contrast to his later reputation as an inspiring orator, brilliant tactician, and gluttonous hedonist, his entire childhood was spent on thin ice, a tenuous tight-rope that would completely destroy an adult's psyche. But since he was a child, the child who would be Caesar Apollo, the First Emperor of Mars made do.
Not that the precariousness of his position didn't weigh on him. He was subject to near-nightly night-terrors. In dreams he was alone, yet horribly not alone. He would wander aimlessly among bighorner herds, or brahmin herds, or herds of fantastic animals with strange long noses and tall, thick legs, but all of them, all of them radiating an aura of silent menace. Or he'd wander through countless rows of colorful silk sheets hung out to dry, searching for whoever was whispering and never finding them. As a toddler he was isolated from the other children of his home, a pseudo-military compound-cum-temple. Even when he was not quarantined within the compound's medical ward as he was for his first few months of life, his mother still kept him from the other children, and out of the preschool and care programs every other child was enrolled in at birth. Instead of sharing a dormitory with the other children, he slept in a bunker with his mother and sometimes his Mama, who helped raise him. When his mother finally allowed him (or was perhaps coerced) to enroll in the compound's education system, the night-terrors didn't stop but merely changed. Now, he could see who was whispering, ominously, just out of sight. It was his entire generation, and all of them, except for him, whispered with one voice. They were all the Children of Hecate, Her Golden Children who were to rule the world. He was only his mother's child.
Through no fault of his own he was a heretic. Were it not for the intervention of his Mama he would have been a changeling at best, raised by some wasteland stranger in lieu of her own child. Her own child who through no fault of their own would have earned their place among the Golden Children by meeting Hecate's particular standards, the thousand-plus genetic markers that made up Her holy book. With Her guidance (and cutting-edge technology) the priestesses of Hecate reduced the varied and colorful people of the wasteland into four letters in endlessly repeating sequence, and then using incredible knowledge imparted by a hundred years old dead intelligence judged them, with the goal of producing the fittest, healthiest stock of humans the wasteland had ever seen. To that end, pregnancy was strictly controlled within Hecate's compound. Women and men were only allowed to mate if their offspring had a lower-than-average chance of developing disease and a higher-than-average chance of being tall. If their code was too damaged by radiation, they weren't allowed to procreate at all.
It wasn't an exact science. Plenty were born under Hecate's watch that didn't meet Her standards, but none save the future emperor were allowed to remain. Most were changelings, exchanged with infants from tribal communities (in what would become the Empire of Mars) that through sheer chance (and occasional matchmaking by Her missionaries) met the criteria to be Her chosen Golden Child. When there were no suitable candidates to make an exchange, babies that were judged unsuitable were exposed.
Instead of dying in the sun or raised by a stranger, the future Caesar Apollo was raised (with some exceptions) as though he were one of Hecate's Golden Children, the most privileged and least autonomous order of Ouroboros. By sheer coincidence he was born alongside a cohort of children conceived by Hecate's Daughters and Hounds (the men and women who worshiped Her, respectively) in observance of Her doctrine. They mated like clockwork, and only in approved configurations, ostensibly by Hecate and her priestesses, but as time passed the process of sorting acceptable genetic pairings became more and more automated, to the point that by the time the first generation of Golden Children were old enough to have their own offspring the process was entirely determined by algorithm, and the only human input was the tissue samples used to catalog every person born under Hecate's influence.
Curiously, and to no-ones knowledge, the emperor was not subject to cataloging. When his mother was brought to Hecate's temple, malnourished and only just beginning to show, she was provided with the best medical care a pregnant woman could ask for, from a bevy of pediatricians, gynecologists, obstetricians, neonatologists, oncologists, midwives, and doulas, all of whom assumed the other performed the sacred right of collecting DNA samples from the unborn emperor. Not that it mattered. He was marked as a heretic and interloper before he was born, the stigma would haunt him throughout his childhood whether it was confirmed or not. He was different in the way he dressed and acted and lived and even if he'd had all the right genes and been seven feet tall with broad shoulders and genius intelligence and stunning good looks it wouldn't matter; he'd still be different and therefore wrong.
For the first few years of his life he was sheltered from his otherness. The other children were raised by tutors and priestesses and, occasionally, a couple Mr. Handy variants designated "Mr. Nanny". The young emperor was raised by his mother and his Mama, as he called her. He and the two of them made an unconventional little family, unconventional for the old world, and unconventional in the new. In the old world, two women raising a child was seen as perverse. In Hecate's new world, a child being raised by even a single parent was unheard of, and possibly even a threat. Once again, the only reason they were allowed to defy Her was through the intervention of his Mama, who served as the second most powerful person in Hecate's cult, after Hecate Herself. Unfortunately for the young emperor, a personal relationship with the High Priestess of Hecate did not grant him any real privilege, as she was gone from his life for weeks or even months at a time. Even when she was around, the emperor's mother was uncomfortable at them having too intimate a relationship for a variety of reasons, not the least of which that his Mama was notoriously irresponsible and dangerous. Still, his love for his Mama and his Mama's love for him was one of his few saving graces growing up. She certainly tried her best to assimilate him into the culture.
Despite her best efforts, though, upon joining the other children in school the young emperor was behind, and he struggled to catch up. Every Child of Hecate that lived at Ouroboros, Her compound-cum-temple, was provided with a comprehensive education, as good as any other in the wasteland and much much better than most. Hecate Herself assured Her Chosen access to more knowledge than She allowed any tribe that worshiped Her, although Her Golden Children were absolutely not taught to love Her any less. Children as young as four years old in Ouroboros knew how to read, how to add and subtract, and the basics of gun safety. Even when the young emperor was caught up, there were still discrepancies between his achievement and that of his peers. Not every Golden Child was good at everything, but none were as consistently mediocre as the young emperor.
He fell behind in every subject. He was the worst student in his grade at reading and writing, he was hopeless at math. In history and geography he was decent, but certainly not the top of his class. Physically he was pathetic. The Golden Children were as radiant and gold as their name. He was sickly and pale, the color of milkweed sap. He was picked last for sports, first out in competition. In his night-terrors the Golden Children had long sharp teeth, more like deathclaws than people. Forced to compete with them just like in waking life, but unlike when he was awake when he was asleep they'd skin him and eat him alive when he fell behind. He'd wake up every night screaming.
There was no way to tell whether his academic discrepancies was the result of inferior genetics or simply the perception of inferior genetics. Although the official policy was to ignore the fact that he lived outside of the Goddess's rules there was certainly no way to hide it. In his first year of school he was the only student that didn't know every other student by name. Many of his peers thought he was a myth until he showed up for math one day. The Boy Who Lived Alone. He was a villain, he was a hero, he was incredible, he was a lie, he captured the Golden Children's imagination. They weren't allowed to talk about him, so they discussed him all the time. A girl his age, Zeven, saw him once when his Mama was trying to teach him how to fire a gun (before his mother forbid him from guns) and milked the story for all it was worth. With each retelling of The Time She Saw The Boy Who Lived Alone he changed, to the point where the boy she described and the actual boy were nothing alike, such that when the actual Boy Who Lived Alone joined her class, no-one recognized him. They knew, naturally, that he was a weird transplant, but they couldn't reconcile him with the subject of their myth and therefore The Boy Who Lived Alone became someone else who still secretly lived somewhere in the compound, and he became Julius, the weird kid no-one liked. Not even his instructors seemed to like him, devoted worshipers of Hecate that they were. To their credit they didn't try to treat him differently or worse, and in their own minds they absolutely didn't, but it was unlikely. Notably, anytime his Mama served as instructor for the Golden Children, his performance improved considerably. He wouldn't rise to the top of his class, but still, whenever his Mama taught, he did better.
She was painfully aware of his status as an outcast and underachiever. To her, he was just another child in a town full of them, not any greater or lesser than any other, regardless of propaganda or dogma. For a High Priestess, she wasn't particularly devout. When she taught Julius, she didn't find him particularly intelligent, no, but she did notice he asked more questions than the other children, and for that she loved him. So much so, that when she developed a scheme to usurp Caesar's Legion, he was her first and only nominee for the first Emperor. Who better, in her mind, to serve as the figurehead of a glorious new empire than her own pseudo-son? No other person would do.
Naturally, the Emperor was not interested. Fed a steady diet of Hecate's propaganda alongside his peers, he not only hated Caesar and his Legion but was deeply, deeply afraid of them. If the children in his class were monsters in his dreams, the Legion were the monsters in his reality. A slavering horde of demons, swords at the ready, barbed cocks dangling out of their leather skirts, raping and pillaging and slaving across the wasteland while they worshiped their false god Caesar. The Legion was the most feared and hated army in the world as far as was known to the Children of Hecate. Creatures of pure malice. There was no chance these things would ever look at him, a scrawny, scared child, and see anything but food.
Both his mother and his Mama, who had actually met the Legion before, were united, though. For possibly the first time ever, the Emperor's mother agreed with her partner's plan for her son, to her son's dismay. Though the root of all his stress, his mother coddled him, sheltered him from the vicious iniquities of the wider world. For his night-terrors she drugged him, to shield him from bullying she kept him at home and complained to his teachers. She saved him from learning how to shoot a gun, she only cooked him the foods he wanted to eat, she made sure he had plenty of toys to play with and a soft bed to sleep in and his own room. When even she, too, turned on him, and expected him to perform and achieve, to embrace a scary new world out from the shadow of Hecate's temple, he had no choice but to go along with his Mama's plan. His first act as Emperor-to-be was to throw a temper tantrum about how he didn't want to be Emperor. He was eight years old.
As time passed, though, he became more comfortable with the idea of being Emperor. He actually encountered the Legion, a scared group of scarred boys dressed in ridiculous costumes. To his surprise, they did indeed look to him for guidance, as his Mama said they would. And, as it became more and more apparent that his job had little to do with the actual management of an army, protecting people, or actually any responsibility at all, and more to do with being a figurehead, to serve as the supposed scion of Edward Sallow (the "first" Caesar) and that any actual duties of running and managing an empire would be taken up gleefully by the temple and his mother, Caesar Apollo began to embrace his new name and his new title. It wasn't long before a scared, sad little boy started to actually feel like the most powerful person in the wasteland. The seduction of power and privilege metamorphosed Julius, The Boy Who Lived Alone into Caesar Apollo, The First Emperor Of Mars, Son Of Caesar, King Of The Wasteland. He reigned unchallenged until his death.