The most dangerous enemy isn't the one who wants you dead, but the one who wants you to be a god.
A week after the Colosseum, the wound in Marcus's side was a dull, healing ache. The wound in his mind, however, was still raw. He needed to see the city for himself, to feel its pulse. He donned a simple, dark tunic and a hooded cloak, a disguise that made him just another face in Rome's endless crowd. With Crixus, similarly dressed, shadowing his every step, he walked the bustling streets of the Subura.
He saw something that made his blood run cold.
On a street corner, a man stood on a crate, his arms outstretched, his voice hoarse with passion. He was preaching to a rapt crowd of laborers, beggars, and slaves. But he wasn't preaching about Jupiter, Mithras, or any of the old gods.
He was preaching about him.
"And the beast Narcissus, a giant forged in the fires of the arena, raised his sword to strike down the son of Aurelius!" the man cried, his eyes wild with fervor. "But Caesar an-Marcius, the Merciful, did not raise his shield! He raised his hand, and the giant's rage was silenced! He touched the gladiator's wounds, and they were healed!"
It was a lie. A grotesque exaggeration of what had happened. He hadn't healed Narcissus; he had broken the man's arm.
The crowd was eating it up, their faces filled with a desperate, hungry belief. He saw people in the crowd wearing small, crudely carved wooden eagles, hung around their necks on leather thongs. The symbol of the legions, twisted into a new, personal sigil. His act of mercy, his one true moment of defiance against the ghost of Commodus, had mutated. It had become a miracle. It had become a religion.
He had accidentally started a cult.
He saw a young mother in the crowd press a small wooden eagle pendant to her sick child's forehead. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer, not to Apollo, the god of healing, but to the name of her Emperor. The sight made him feel sick to his stomach.
"We need to know who is behind this," Marcus muttered to Crixus, pulling his hood lower and turning away.
Crixus's Vigiles were efficient. Within a day, they had a name. The cult, which called itself the Children of the Merciful Eagle, was spreading like wildfire through the city's poor, desperate districts.
Its leader, its high priest, was a charismatic, escaped Thracian slave named Lycomedes. A former gladiator who had fought in the provincial arenas, he was a man who understood spectacle and suffering.
"He's a true believer," Crixus reported, his face grim. They stood in the war room, the maps of Germania momentarily forgotten. "He was in the Colosseum that day. He saw what you did. He believes your mercy was a sign. A sign that the old, cruel gods are dead, and that a new, benevolent god has come to deliver the oppressed from their masters."
Lycomedes wasn't a con man. He was a zealot. And his doctrine was dangerously revolutionary. He preached that the Merciful Caesar would soon usher in a new age. An age of equality, where all slaves would be freed, all debts forgiven, and the corrupt, aristocratic Senate dissolved.
He was tapping into the deep, festering resentment of the Roman underclass, and he was using Marcus's name as his torch.
The new Praetorian Prefect, a stern, loyal veteran named Maximus whom Marcus had promoted after Saoterus's death, brought more bad news.
"This 'Cult of the Merciful' is becoming a problem, Caesar," Maximus said, his voice stiff with disapproval. "They are causing unrest. There have been clashes with the priests of Jupiter. Worse, they are telling their followers not to pay taxes to the 'unworthy' Senate, claiming their only duty is to their 'God-Emperor.'"
They were a destabilizing force, a private army of fanatics acting in his name, and he had no control over them.
In the midst of this new crisis, a message arrived. A secret message, delivered by a hooded servant who slipped into the palace like a ghost and vanished just as quickly.
The scroll was sealed with the broken, unofficial seal of the House of Antoninus. Lucilla's seal.
The message was brief, and the words were poisonously sweet. She claimed she had proof, undeniable proof, that the cult leader Lycomedes was not just a preacher. He was planning to "purify" Rome by leading his followers in an attack to slaughter the entire Senate during the next session.
I have made terrible mistakes, brother, she wrote. I see that now. This monster, Lycomedes, is a threat to all of us, to the very fabric of Rome. I am terrified of what he will do. I can help you stop him. Meet me, alone, at the Temple of Vesta at midnight. We can end this threat together.
Marcus read the message to Marcia and Crixus in the privacy of his chambers.
"It's a trap," Crixus said immediately, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. "The most obvious trap in the history of Rome."
"I know," Marcus replied, his eyes fixed on the scroll.
"She's using the real danger of this cult as bait to lure you into her own ambush," Crixus warned, his voice low and urgent. "You walk in there alone, and you die."
Marcus looked up, a slow, cold smile touching his lips. It was a smile that held the cunning of Marcus Holt and the arrogance of Commodus. "She thinks I'll walk in alone and vulnerable," he said softly. "She's expecting the Merciful Caesar."
He paused. "She doesn't know I have a god in my head and a squad of killers at my command."
He would spring her trap. But he would do it on his own terms.
That night, he went to the Mausoleum. The weight of it all—the cult, Lucilla's trap, the coming war in the north, the constant, grinding battle against the ghost in his own mind—was immense.
Marcia found him there, sitting in the darkness, the laptop closed on the sarcophagus beside him. She saw the deep, soul-crushing exhaustion in his eyes.
"You don't have to carry it all alone," she said softly.
He looked at her, at the one person who had stood by him, who had seen his weakness and his fear and had not run. He couldn't keep lying to her. Not anymore. He owed her the truth. All of it.
"My name is Marcus Holt," he began, his voice barely a whisper in the silent tomb.
He told her everything. The accident in the year 2035. The neural-AI interface. Waking up in the body of a tyrant. He told her about the city of steel and glass he came from, about a world without gods or emperors. He explained that he wasn't Commodus at all, but a ghost from the future, a man impossibly out of time.
He expected her to recoil, to scream, to call him a demon, a monster.
She just listened, her expression unreadable in the dim light. When he finally finished, the impossible story hanging in the air between them, there was a long, heavy silence.
Then, she knelt before him. She gently took his hand, the one that still bore the faint, ghost-like tracing of the word Mine. She ran her thumb over it.
"I knew," she whispered, her voice thick with an emotion he couldn't name. "I didn't know the details. The future. But I always knew you weren't him. The man I serve, the man I trust… he was never the Emperor."
Her complete, unquestioning acceptance was a profound, grounding relief. It was like a drowning man finally finding solid ground. Their relationship was no longer based on a shared secret, but on a shared, impossible truth.
He looked from her trusting face to the closed laptop. A new resolve hardened in his gut. He was done reacting. He was done hiding.
"JARVIS," he said, his voice filled with a new, cold purpose. "Tomorrow, Lucilla is expecting to trap an Emperor." He smiled, a true, dangerous smile. "Let's give her the man from the future instead."