Episode 6.a

>The Caucasus / Rome, mythic time, after<

When you finish speaking, Prometheus looks at you for a long time. The wind moves across the ledge, and still he doesn't answer.

Then something changes in his hands. The falx shudders once, and light runs along the curved blade from the handle to the tip. He opens his fingers, and the sickle vanishes before it can touch the stone, gone back to where it belongs: to the very beginning, to Tellus and to Saturn's hand.

Prometheus looks down at his empty hands. A link of chain forms around his left wrist, pale iron, cold and real, and then another around his right. He doesn't fight it. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, you can see both relief and grief in his face.

He looks at you one last time. "Go," he says. "Go and be what I made you to be."

The flame in your hand blazes up, brighter than the forge, brighter than Tellus's chamber, brighter than anything you have ever carried. Light fills the whole mountain, and the ledge drops 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 stretches all the way to the horizon. You see red tile roofs and white stone, straight roads running out toward every corner of the world, green gardens, and the flash of water flowing into the city through long stone channels from the mountains. In the middle of it all, in an open square, stands a round temple, and inside it a fire is burning. You know that fire. You have been carrying it.

This is Rome, whole and real and full of people.

Quintus stands beside you. For a while he says nothing and lets you look. When he does speak, his voice is warm and steady and a little rough around the edges.

"There it is," he says. "That's what the flame became, and you're the ones who kept it alive." He turns to face you. "Before we go, I want to hear it from you. All of it: what you saw, what you did, what you learned, and what it all means. Tell me the story of this journey, from the broken chains all the way to here."

Prompt: Quintus has asked you to tell the story of your journey, from the Caucasus to this hill above Rome. Tell it out loud, together. Name the people you met, the places you went, and the choices you made, and say what you understand now that you didn't understand at the start.