Livia survived the night.

Arthur learned that from Lucius shortly after sunrise, though "learned" was a generous word. The old physician stepped out of the room where she had been sleeping, pointed at the floor, then raised one hand in a calming gesture. After that, he said several words Arthur did not know.

Still, the meaning was clear enough.

She was alive.

For the first time in hours, Arthur felt his shoulders loosen.

Marcus had not returned.

That worried him more than he wanted to admit. The soldier had gone after the attacker at sunset. Now the sun was rising, and there was still no sign of him. Arthur told himself that Marcus knew the city, that he was a veteran, that he had survived worse than one knife-wielding coward in an alley.

None of that helped much.

Lucius seemed less concerned. He gave Arthur a cup of watered wine, said something that sounded like an order, and pointed toward the courtyard. Apparently, his medical advice included sitting down and getting out of the way.

Arthur obeyed.

He sat on a low stone bench in the courtyard behind Lucius’s house and stared at the cup in his hands. For a while, he did nothing. No records. No investigation. No gestures. No trying to guess what people were saying from three half-understood words and a facial expression.

Just silence.

It should have been peaceful.

Instead, it gave his mind room to move.

And once it started moving, it went straight to the one thought he had been avoiding since the moment he woke up.

He was in Rome.

Not near Roman ruins.

Not inside a museum.

Not walking through a reconstructed street built for tourists.

Rome.

The actual city.

The living one.

Arthur laughed quietly.

It came out stranger than he expected. Part disbelief, part exhaustion, part hysteria. A few days ago, he had been a doctoral student buried under notes, deadlines, and coffee. Now he was sitting in a Roman courtyard with blood under his fingernails, wearing another man’s body, while a wounded clerk slept in the next room.

His supervisor would have questions.

The thought almost made him laugh again.

He stood before he could think better of it.

Lucius was busy with Livia. Marcus was still gone. Nobody had told Arthur to stay, and even if they had, he probably would not have understood. So he stepped out of the house and into the morning street.

He did not go far at first.

He simply walked.

For once, he was not chasing a clue. He was not following Marcus. He was not being dragged from one confusing disaster to the next. He was just moving through the city and letting himself look.

Rome was already awake.

Shopkeepers raised wooden shutters. Bakers pulled bread from ovens. A man led two goats through the street while arguing with someone Arthur could not see. Children ran past him, nearly knocking into a woman carrying a basket. She shouted after them with enough force to make Arthur step aside out of instinct.

Everything smelled terrible.

That had not changed.

Smoke, sweat, animals, drains, hot bread, oil, old stone, and far too many people packed into far too little space. Books had never captured the smell. They had also failed to capture the noise. Rome did not speak. It roared.

And Arthur loved it.

Not all of it. Not the filth. Not the danger. Not the fact that half the people he met could probably have him arrested, beaten, or stabbed if the day went badly.

But the city itself?

He could not look away.

For years, Rome had been fragments. A paragraph in a source. A broken inscription. A foundation line in an excavation report. A debate between scholars who had been dead for a century.

Now the fragments had color.

A fruit seller shouted prices. A customer accused him of lying. Two men argued beside a cart loaded with amphorae. A little girl sat near a doorway feeding crumbs to a dog. An old woman poured water from an upper window without checking who stood below.

A man cursed loudly as the water hit him.

Arthur laughed before he could stop himself.

The man glared.

Arthur looked away quickly.

"Sorry," he muttered. "Historical appreciation."

The man continued glaring.

Arthur decided not to translate.

He kept walking until the streets widened and the buildings grew grander. Columns appeared. Painted walls. Carved stone. Statues that people passed without a second glance.

That bothered him in a way he had not expected.

They did not look at any of it.

Of course they didn’t. To them it was ordinary. A temple was just where you went to pray or complain or make an offering because your neighbor had stolen a goat. A statue was just a statue. A road was just a road.

Arthur stopped near a public fountain and watched people draw water.

No famous speech. No emperor. No battle.

Just life.

Ordinary life.

That was what hit him hardest.

History books loved wars, laws, emperors, disasters. They skipped the man filling a jug before work. They skipped the bored child waiting for his mother. They skipped the clerk late to the office and the baker yelling at a customer over the price of bread.

Yet those people were Rome too.

Maybe more than the emperors were.

He moved on and soon saw something rising above the roofs in the distance.

An aqueduct.

Arthur stopped dead.

The structure cut across the skyline with quiet confidence, as if it had always been there and always would be. He had seen drawings, models, photographs of ruins. None of them had prepared him for seeing one alive, carrying water into the city as naturally as veins carried blood through a body.

A passing merchant bumped into him and snapped something impatient.

Arthur barely noticed.

"That’s an actual aqueduct," he whispered.

The merchant looked at him as if he were simple and walked away.

Arthur could not blame him.

To a Roman, it probably sounded like someone standing in modern London and whispering, That’s an actual bus.

Still.

He stood there for longer than was reasonable.

Only when a second person cursed at him for blocking the way did he force himself to move.

The city pulled him onward.

He did not know exactly where he was going, but some part of Gaius’s memory seemed to understand the streets better than he did. Not clearly. Not in words. More like a faint pressure in the back of his mind. Turn here. Avoid that lane. This road opens into something important.

Then the street opened.

Arthur stopped again.

This time, he forgot to breathe.

The Forum.

He knew it before his mind finished putting the pieces together. The shape of the space. The buildings. The flow of people. The monuments that had existed in his world only as ruins and reconstructions.

The Forum stood before him.

Not broken.

Not silent.

Alive.

Men debated near steps. Clients followed patrons. Officials crossed the square with documents tucked under their arms. Priests moved near a temple. People bought, sold, argued, prayed, lied, promised, and probably cheated each other within sight of monuments that would one day be studied by people who could only guess at the life that had filled them.

Arthur’s chest tightened.

He had spent years reading about this place.

Years.

And now he was standing in it.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to grab the nearest Roman and explain that in two thousand years people would travel across the world just to see broken pieces of what they ignored every day.

Instead, he stood quietly.

For once, silence felt right. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

He did not know how long he remained there. Long enough for the sun to rise higher. Long enough for the square to grow busier. Long enough for the fear and confusion of the past days to loosen, just a little.

For the first time since waking up, Arthur understood something important.

He did not just want to survive Rome.

He wanted to see it.

That was dangerous.

Attachment always was.

Eventually, he returned to Lucius’s house, though part of him wanted to keep walking until nightfall. When he entered the courtyard, he found Marcus sitting beneath the shade of a rough awning.

The soldier looked terrible.

Dust covered his clothes. One cheek was bruised. His lower lip was split. There was dried blood on his knuckles, though Arthur could not tell if it was his.

Arthur stopped.

Marcus looked up.

For a moment, neither man spoke.

Then Arthur pointed at Marcus’s face and raised an eyebrow.

Marcus shrugged.

Arthur understood the gesture perfectly.

Trouble had happened.

Possibly a lot of trouble.

Marcus reached beneath his cloak and placed something on the small table beside him.

A ring.

Plain metal. Not especially pretty. Not even expensive-looking.

Arthur picked it up.

There was an engraving on the face.

A seal.

Official, not decorative.

Arthur looked at Marcus.

The soldier nodded once.

The message was clear.

He had not caught the attacker.

But he had taken something from him.

Arthur sat down slowly, the wonder of the Forum still fresh in his mind and the cold weight of the ring now resting in his palm.

Rome was beautiful.

Rome was alive.

And somewhere inside it, someone was willing to kill to keep a few records buried.