Marius lived ten more years.

  No one expected it. His limbs had grown thin, his voice weaker than a reed in the wind—but still, he endured, despite the plagues, despite the wars, despite the famines, despite the pain.

  The monks had found him. Now, he lived in a small monastery on a hill above the city he’d once lived in. He sometimes helped in the transcribing of their old texts, his memory as good as the written page, despite his advanced years. The city below had been deserted during the war, but they were rebuilding it. Or at least, trying.

  The brothers made room for him in a sunlit cell. They brought him soup, rubbed salve into his joints, and spoke to him in Latin that sounded increasingly uncertain. Latin learned from books rather than mothers. Rather than being a comfort, it only reminded him of how far things had gone from the world he once knew.

  He rarely spoke anymore, except to himself. Or to the past.

  Sometimes, they’d find him muttering old speeches, half-reciting Virgil or Cicero with eyes closed, the lines running together like prayer. He wondered, when he died, if anyone would be left to remember.

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  As spring crept in through the window slats and the banners of the Eastern Empire snapped above the city, Marius stirred from his cot and looked at the world through rheumy eyes. If the light struck the broken stones just right, for a moment, he could imagine it as it had been before—whole, clean, living.

  A dream that had once been. Rome Eternal.

  He smiled faintly. The flame had flickered and not gone back.

  “You were wrong, father. But being wrong is not always a bad thing.”

  “What is that, elder?”

  One of the monks had paused. Through his blurred vision, it could have almost been his son.

  “My eyes,” Marius said, “may be the last to remember the rhythm of Rome. Not its stones, not its temples, not its plenty or its promise or its certainty...but its heartbeat. It’s lost, now. All gone, except in memory.”

  The young monk sitting nearby paused, unsure if he should respond. But Marius was already drifting elsewhere—into thought, or dream.

  The sun moved slowly across the wall.

  Outside below the hill, the city lived on—part Roman, part Gothic, part something new that had yet to be named. Children played in alleys paved by emperors they’d never know. Bells rang in strange cadences. A world still turned, too busy surviving to remember.

  And in the quiet of his cell, Marius watched the light fade. He thought of his long-dead wife, his son who had disappeared, all his family and friends, dozens of faces and names only he remembered.

  As far as he knew, he was the last one left.

  Not for much longer, though. Marius closed his eyes.

  He did not open them again.