Hero of Rome

Pliny the Elder wanders the foggy Fields of Asphodel, desperately searching for anything worth documenting, but all he finds is an endless sea of boredom—hardly the natural wonders he once chronicled.

I was prepared to puke as my lips locked with the beautiful, auburn haired lamia. Surprisingly, her lips tasted sweet. It was like an explosion of strawberries in my mouth as I took the lamia by surprise, her eyes widening with shock. From the corner of my eye, I could see Camilla and Marcus both looking at me with similar confusion.

The lamia hesitated, as if wanting more, her lips trembling with nervous energy as she leaned in, pulling me closer by grabbing my hair. Totally not what I expected.

Better yet, the time loop shattered. I was free again.

As delicious as my brief encounter was with a seductive monster, she was not my wife and nor would it ever work out. The other lamia chasing after us in this hellish ring only paused for a brief moment, similarly taken aback. All hissing stopped.

The lamia kissing me looked like she wanted to say something as her eyes squinted with desire. Whatever she was about to say I would never hear, as I both pulled away and followed up with a golden oar smack to her lovely face.

That did it.

“Let’s go!” I shouted, jumping away from the lamia and helping Marcus to his feet. I tossed the Dual Fangs to Camilla as a weapon, since bone swords wouldn’t do the trick here.

“Heresy!” the lamia I kissed screamed, thrashing her golden tail at us as we sprinted away.

“Care to explain?” Camilla said, an edge of humor to her question. She had to maneuver several times to avoid the wiggling sea of serpent tails trying to trip us. She opted many times to stab them with the Dual Fangs.

“Maybe later!” I said, trying to focus on not falling into burning tombs or running into a lamia as the futures continued to whirl in my mind.

In my Historical Insight, I tried to rewrite the whole “kissing a demon” scene, but it wouldn’t budge. It was effectively locked in place, although I could adjust events before or after. While still amazingly powerful, my enhanced ability to control my futures came at a cost of unpredictable and uncontrollable events.

And I was very, very conflicted about kissing that lamia. It felt wrong to have enjoyed it.

Seeing the futures, I was able to chart a path of least resistance for the three of us as we continued our descent into hell. Ahead of us was a sheer drop of probably one hundred feet. It’s what separated us from the next ring of hell. Only, there was no way to get down and the lamia cornered us on all sides. If we tried to stand our ground, they would whack us off the cliff and we would plummet to our second deaths. I never much enjoyed heights, and the experience of falling to my doom really sucked.

“Thoughts on how to get down?” I asked Marcus, who was slowing from exhaustion. Although he could barely breathe from the exertion of running for his life, he could utter one word of wisdom.

“Tails!” he wheezed.

“Like a rope!” Camilla said, guessing his meaning.

“Let’s take down that one!” I said, pointing to the lamia closest to the edge who was too busy torturing her victim. Her long torso, like all of the other lamia, lay tangled together in a mess on the desert floor.

From the burning tomb which the lamia squeezed with her long golden tail, I could hear the cries of the man inside.

“But man is the measure of all things!” he screamed, only for the lamia to chuckle.

“Poor Protagoras,” she hissed, lunging down to bite him with her wicked fangs, completely oblivious to us.

Now was the time.

“Grab onto her tail and do not let go!” I said, preparing to swing. “Camilla, let him use one of the fangs as an anchor.”

“Got it,” she said, giving him one.

“Hey ugly!” I shouted, drawing the attention of the lamia. She rose from her burning victim to look at me. She didn’t have enough time to react to my baseball bat swing with my golden oar.

My strike was so hard that it launched her over the edge.

“Jump!” I said, leaping after her torso.

Camilla and Marcus did the same, plunging their fang daggers into the golden skin which thankfully penetrated. As for me, I caught up with the lamia whose descent slowed from her long tail snagging on the other tails above. I hugged her torso as her face returned to normal from the golden effect.

She hissed with ferocity, baring her fangs. “You—”

I whacked her again with my golden oar, turning her gold again. That was the last of my stamina.

“C’mon, c’mon!” I said, the two seconds flying by extremely fast. We were still slowing in our descent, but not by a lot. The landing was going to hurt.

The lamia resumed her non-golden state seconds later.

“I will destroy you!” she screamed, preparing to rip out my throat. If I did nothing, she would do exactly that. My exposed neck and chest were easy targets for those golden fangs. She would sink them into my soft flesh and rip me to shreds in seconds.

Unless…

For the second time in my life, I made out with a monster.

This lamia was taken aback like the first one, but she was not as eager to continue. Her golden eyes went from shock to pleasure to rage all in one breath. Her mouth opened wide on mine, about to gorge her fangs on my lips.

I pushed back at the last moment as her head smashed into the ground of the seventh ring. The force of my fall was still great, resulting in me colliding with her corpse. I had to retry my angle a few times because if I slammed too directly into her face, her fangs would find a home in my brain. Upon the fifth try I got it. The wind still knocked out of me from the fall, along with most of my health as I rolled onto the ground.

Health: 4/50

Stamina: 1/50

I couldn’t breathe as Camilla and Marcus landed roughly beside me.

“Get him out of the way!” Camilla barked. With haste, she and Marcus dragged me away from the lamia whose tail plummeted around her corpse for the next ten seconds. Had I not been moved, I would have been squashed.

Camilla and Marcus dragged me a short distance away and set me up alongside the cliff wall so I could breathe. I tried to say thank you with my eyes since my wheezing made it impossible to talk.

At the same time, we received a notification for the next ring.

Location Discovered: Fields of Punishment (7/9)

The next ring did not look appealing in the slightest. Not far ahead was a boiling river of blood where centaurs gleefully shot everyone who tried to raise themselves out of it. There were countless souls screaming to get out, only to receive an arrow in the face and fall back under. Just beyond the river was a dark, colorless forest. There were thousands of objects swinging from the branches which harpies repeatedly picked at. Those objects screamed.

If I remembered correctly, there would be a third ring to this circle of hell. I shuddered at the thought of facing it now.

As my breath returned and I ceased my Historical Insight, I proposed an idea.

“Let’s let our health and stamina recharge,” I said. “This next ring will not be any fun.”

Marcus smiled with his eyes as he sat down next to me and Camilla.

“That is wise, Max,” Marcus said. “You have my thanks for saving me. I… I do not remember a time when I was not tortured in that burning tomb. It feels like I have been burning for an eternity.”

“You do not deserve that fate,” I said. “Did Cerberus take you there?”

Marcus nodded. “I was waiting a century to pay Charon. I’m not sure how much time has passed since we’ve last spoken. That beast never paid any attention to me when it would sweep through the recently deceased. It was as if he’d been ordered to.”

“There’s a lot to catch you up on,” Camilla said, catching his eye.

“Including who you really are, Camillus?” he said, a hint of humor in his smile.

Not seeing any pressing danger, we took the next hour to catch him up to date on everything that had happened since Camilla’s betrayal and his execution by Commodus. The wise man showed no emotion when I told him I took out his son Commodus in the gladiator tournament. He hardly blinked. It made me wonder what he thought about him now. We then caught him up on the Orb of Morpheus, the civil war, the Cult of Eternal Night, and my sudden betrayal.

“And now we’re here,” I finished. “We plan to beat death and return to life.”

Marcus turned away from us as he let the words sink in. He didn’t speak for several minutes. I looked at Camilla, who shrugged.

His next question threw me out of left field.

“You’ve retained your Historical Insight, I assume, since you made such a bold move to kiss a lamia?” he said, making me blush.

“Yes,” I said. “My powers have altered since drinking the Tears of Mnemosyne. Before I could see everything and then relive those futures. Now, I can experience them in the present, changing and retrying futures until I get the best one without having to do it all over again. Only, my power will randomly freeze itself in a time loop, as it did with the lamia. I had to do something I would never have imagined to break it.”

“Ah,” Camilla said, smirking. “I was getting worried for you there.”

Marcus chuckled.

“What?” I said.

“It seems you rely too much on controlling your future, Max. It has led to your death, and now, it has warped your ability to see. You have read all of the books of the world, yet I fear you still haven’t learned it, that death is inevitable. I say this to you as a friend, Max. You have yet to accept that you cannot control death, but that we must all embrace it. It is the same for this Cleopatra of yours. Her fate is not yours to decide nor change.

“Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.”

His words were a millstone around my heart. This was not what I wanted to hear. Not now. Not after everything I had suffered since being forced against my will to survive in Antiquitus. And out of all people, Cleopatra was the least deserving to die. She and our twin sons, Romulus and Remus, deserved to live.

That is what should be. That is what could be.

Yet as his words buried themselves in my soul, I found I couldn't find the words to say. Somewhere, deep down, I knew his words to hold some truth. That often times good people died early and the wicked lived long. And that no matter how hard one pushed, death would always have the final say.

But if that were ultimately true, what was even the point?

Depression, a black cloud of misery, suffocated all hope and joy within me. I had no reason to even get up. All was pointless if Cleopatra could not be saved, if she was truly destined to die.

“We can find a way,” Camilla said, pulling me briefly out of the abyss of my thoughts. On her face was staunch determination. “The least we can do is push forward. My sister is stuck in Tartarus, and there’s a chance we can beat Pluto to get out of here, at the very least to Elysium. Let’s go Max, we’ve wasted enough time.”

Camilla reached out and pulled me to my feet without waiting for me. Marcus sighed and stood also.

“Max,” he said, “I do not mean to destroy your hope. I only offer insight as to what I have painfully learned too many times.”

“I appreciate it, truly,” I said, trying my best to smile before turning to look at the next ring of hell. Tears stung my eyes as I held them back.

My soul, completely bleak and empty from the bitter truth, would have to submit to reason. I took a deep, shaking breath in, squeezing Camilla’s hand who smiled. Together, we began walking towards the boiling river of blood and murderous centaurs.