Episode 6

>The Caucasus / Rome, mythic time, after<

He looks at you for a long time after you finish speaking. The wind moves across the ledge. He does not answer right away.

Then something changes in his hands. The falx shudders, once, and light runs along the curved blade from hilt to tip. He opens his fingers and the sickle is gone. It does not clatter to the stone; it has simply gone back to where it belongs, to the beginning, to Tellus and Saturn and the first correction, as though it had been waiting for permission.

Prometheus watches his empty hands. The first link of chain forms around his left wrist, pale iron, cold, real. Then the right. He does not fight it. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again the look on his face is something you will not forget: relief and grief together, the expression of someone who has chosen the harder thing.

He looks at you once more. "Go," he says. "Go and be what I made you to be."

The flame in your hand blazes. Brighter than the forge, brighter than Tellus's chamber at its peak, brighter than anything you have carried. The Caucasus fills with light and the ledge falls away beneath you.

When you can see again, you are somewhere else entirely.

You are standing on a hill in warm air, and below you a city spreads to the horizon. Terracotta roofs and white stone; roads running straight as drawn lines toward every edge of the world; the green of gardens; the flash of water moving through long stone channels from the mountains. At the center of it all, in a square of open ground, a round temple stands, and inside it a fire burns. You know that fire. You have been carrying it.

Rome. Whole, and real, and full of people.

Quintus stands beside you. He is quiet for a while, letting you look. When he speaks, his voice is warm and steady and a little rough at the edges.

"There it is," he says. "Everything the flame became. Everything you kept alive." He turns to face you. "I want to hear it from you, before we go. All of it. What you saw, what you did, what you learned, and what it means. Tell me the story of this journey, from the broken chains to here."

Prompt: Quintus has asked you to tell the story of your journey. Speak it aloud, together, from the Caucasus to this hill above Rome. Name the people you met, the places you went, the choices you made, and what you understand now that you did not understand at the beginning.