Page 57 of We Were Eternal Once

You just leave.

I hesitate a moment longer to gaze over the walls of the temple I built. The tapestries that will moth and decay, revealing the ancient words underneath them. The sand and dust and rain that will come in through the open roof, claiming the temple for nature.

Or perhaps the other faction will take it and dance on the ashes of their old friends.

You are out the door, and I do not dare stay much longer.

I cast one last glance at the temple and accept the fact I will never know the truth.

PART THREE

Interlude

Alexandria - 1770 Paris

Paris…

(“So many centuries forgotten, are they not important?”)

No.

In the moment, they might have felt important. The Antonine Plague, the political instability, the Crisis of the Third Century, and the fracture of Rome. Once the most powerful force in the known world, it shriveled and died before our eyes.

Then came the Christians.

Perhaps this was the most pivotal of all. A powerful man had a dream that a cross upon his shield would lead him to greatness, so he turned slaves into priests.

The Christians destroyed everything they touched. Temples defaced and defiled, ancient knowledge thrown into the sea. Had your temple survived that fateful morning, it would have fallen now.

Or would it have gained favor first?

I will never know, and you never bring up Alexandria or the cult formed in your image. You never cry or speak their names or lament their loss.

We move through the world with its new religion.

They sack Rome.

They try to build it again from the ashes when another plague hits.

You and I walk through villages of dead. It is easy during this period, no one wants to be seen. For a blissful decade, we drop our bodies into rolling carts, passed off as a dead relative. We linger in abandoned homes, we collect the treasures they thought would bring them meaning.

Yet they died, and their treasures become ours.

It is much like in the early days, when we’d clear temples to pay for our housing and transport.

“Why do we not just coerce?” I asked you once.

“One day there may be a barrier,” you say. “A reason for our gift not to work. We must always be prepared.”

Prepared.

Prepared as I was for the other faction to find us and dispatch of us, like they did the acolytes. Prepared for Theon to not truly be dead, but biding his time so he might torture me as I did him.

Another religion rises and conquers northern Africa and Spain, and then Alexandria. The city burned, the libraries destroyed, its center of knowledge little more than ash.

The world expands and shrinks, the continent as we know it ever-changing.

We head north until the Vikings raid.