Episode 4.3.b
>In the TSTT, Troy, Bronze Age<
Aeneas does not give in easily. He argues back, and the argument has the particular quality of a man who knows, somewhere underneath the anger, that he is going to lose it. He wants to stay. He wants to fight. The city is burning and his king is dead and every instinct he has says that a soldier stands his ground, and you are asking him to walk away from all of it. His hand stays near his sword and his expression stays closed for a long time.
Then something in him settles, not peacefully, but with the exhausted finality of a man who has run out of ground to stand on. He picks up his father and does not look back.
Time moves strangely in the TSTT. The fight is behind you now, and you are moving with a column of Trojan survivors out through the lower city toward the hills, the fires still visible above the rooftops, the smoke lit orange against the dark. The people around you are quiet with the particular quiet of those who have lost too much too recently to speak about it.
Behind you, a group of slaves is hauling something heavy on a makeshift sledge, using timber dragged from collapsed houses. The stone on the sledge is large and dense and it is glowing, faintly but unmistakably, with a light that does not come from the fires.
Eadem lūx. īdem Lapis.
One of the slaves stumbles, catches himself, and lets out a long, ragged groan. He looks up at you, sweat on his face and fury in his eyes, the kind of fury that has nowhere useful to go and lands on whoever is closest.
"You," he says. "This stone weighs more than anything I have ever moved. Aeneas keeps talking about the gods and destiny and I don't know what else, but I'm the one pulling it. Why? What is this thing even for?"
Sextus, walking just beside you, watches the slaves with an expression of genuine sympathy and just as genuine amusement. "Yes, it's ridiculous to have them pulling the stone that way," he says quietly. "But is it any more ridiculous than claiming you're descended from a Trojan refugee who washed up on the shores of Italy?"
Prompt: Help the slaves pull the Lapis. Try to explain to them their part in Roman history. Multiple LP for any awareness you can show that the Aeneid is not a true story.
