He moved secretly and in the dark to a higher perch for a better vantage from which to see the eternal city. The name was a mockery. A final pathetic painful joke told by those who never really knew her. She was not what she used to be. It was like looking at a well preserved corpse that drunken people tried to animate in their own horrific stupidity. An attempt to claim that life was still somehow within. But it was a corpse all the same and the people who lived in her were eating her alive…slowly decomposing her until there would be nothing left. Perhaps this was what continued to draw him back again and again…he could identify with her.

Roma had died a long time ago, betrayed by her own children and left to the ravishing hands of the Huns, Visigoths and Vandals. The rampaging darkness from the north had raped her and stolen her beauty while the strange exotic Mohamadians had stormed up from the south to finish her off. Together they washed away her children and left these lost vagabonds in control. There was only one true Roman left in all the world to mourn her death but there were no tears in him. He could stand here and look out over the pale moonlit bones of his mother and yearn for older days, better days…but they were not to be. Nothing was the same any more and he was as dead as she was…perhaps moreso.

In the pale moonlight he was cold stone; an empty statue doomed to non-existence forever it seemed. He was the golem of a dead Jewish carpenter, animated but empty and without words and when he began to doubt all that had happened and sought sunlight or the solace of the empty churches, the one would make himself known again in pain and the world would rush in and an aching 2,000 years of vagabond scraping proved that doubt was futile.

He could stand in this place for days…weeks even if it weren’t for the rising blight…life-giving sun that seemed only to destroy what little was left of his soul. He had done it before…taken to the catacombs after the invasions and laid in a grave nook for weeks; unmoving; neither cold nor warm…hoping perhaps that the gnawing emptiness would leave and he would some day simply feel the grace of fading away. Of course he had long since lost hope that his end would every come. So he waited, followed the rules and waited.

Longinus Marius Albinus, one-time centurion of Rome, stood unmoving on the topmost bones of the old imperial palace on Palatine Hill and studied the lights of the parasite that called herself Rome but was not. Below him was the Circus Maximus…a ghost now but once a place of life and laughter.

The herald of dawn, Aurora, was rising in the east in all her rosy hope-filled joy and with it shades of the sickness stirred within. It was time to crawl into the earth like the cockroach he was and await the coming gathering.

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There were dreams. One would think that the dead do not dream but they do…most vividly, and the dreams of the dead are not pleasant. Longinus remembered. In the sleep that was not sleep he saw the images of lost life and what once was. Flashes of life like colour in a black and white film rolled through his inner being. There was Sabina in all her glory…all that he ever wanted in life wrapped in skin the colour of Mediterranean sand and hair of honey. Lost to him because of duty. There was Aurelia who stood in his mind’s eye as his strongest accuser and his heart would burst with shame and sadness if he had one; if he could feel anything…