A Message from the Gods

A strange humming sound drew Caecilius out of his dreams. It was soft, yet powerful--laced with many tones high and low underneath the main purr droning from outside.

Caecilius opened his eyelids to pallid grey darkness. The smallest tinge of light shown from the window, a mere hint that the sun was nearing the horizon. The paintings on the walls of Roman heroes winning great battles had been morphed into shadowy figures that seemed to stare at Caecilius. They mocked him for what he had done, pinning him to his bed with the full force of his mistakes.

He turned his head to his still-snoring wife. A tangle of black hair lay atop her face, though Caecilius would not have been able to see it in the darkness anyways. I’m sorry, Julia, he thought. I’ve dragged you into this. You and the children...

Wait. The humming had not stopped.

Caecilius had thought the sound a remnant of his dream, but it still purred near his window. Blood drained from his face as he thought of what terrible beast could produce a sound which, though soft, filled his body with a low rumbling. He rose from his bed and stepped to the window, careful to place his bare feet softly on the tiles.

Vivid images of nightmarish creatures invaded Caecilius's mind. Could it be a descendent of the great she-wolf that had mothered Romulus and Remus? Or maybe a cyclopes peering in with its one eye?

What in Jupiter's name is that?

Outside the window was a mass of impossibly smooth material, curved, and the height of a tall man. A mere foot from the bars, the cylinder spanned the width of the alley. Caecilius could not see the thing well in the low light of dusk, featureless but for the brilliant reflections on the... was that metal? He had never seen such polished steel.

The hum emanated off it, pouring out like a slow river. A faint, high-pitched tinge--almost a whine--pierced into his soul.

Caecilius stared at the metal, not knowing what to think. Is it from the gods? He had never seen such a material, so the possibility it had come from Olympus was undeniable.

A loud knock came from the atrium door. Caecilius spun around to face it, Julia still snoring in the depths of sleep a few paces away. He glanced back to the purring thing, heart thundering in his chest. For all his reluctance to leave it, the thing seemed harmless, so when the knock came frantic once more, Caecilius spun back around and hurried to the door.

He opened it to an empty street and a sky starting to bloom with the smallest shade of light. He glanced to the sides, finding a figure walking in the direction of the metal cylinder.

Caecilius stepped to follow, but his foot caught on something placed in front of the door. The figure rounded the corner to the alley. Caecilius wanted to follow, but he caught a glimpse of the thing he had stumbled on: a small box of wood with dozens of coins glittering faintly inside.

He bent and picked up one of the coins, bringing it into the low light. Was that gold? It was hard to tell, but if it was true, there was more wealth in that box than he had saved up over the past decade.

What is happening? He seriously considered the possibility he was still dreaming.

A powerful boom reverberated in Caecilius's skull as a flash of purple light exploded from the alleyway. His head rung for several heartbeats before subsiding to pure silence. The humming had stopped, leaving an emptiness in its wake.

He ran to the alley, afraid of what the godly object might have done. Have I done something to anger the gods? he thought, horrified. He reached the corner, and saw… nothing. The cylinder of strange metal had disappeared. Only its memory remained.

Caecilius placed a hand to his temple and shook his head in a vain attempt to dull his confusion. It was clear to him that he had been visited by some god, but uncertainty still pervaded his thoughts. Did they bring me a gift? He had done nothing glorious to deserve the gold that sat by his door.

But who was he to deny the gods?

Sounds of motion came from other houses--people rising from their beds to see what in Olympus had happened outside. Caecilius felt a sudden urge to bring his treasure into his house, to hide it from prying, hungry eyes. He jogged back to the box and bent to lift it up.

Though the box’s material looked like wood in the dim light, it felt far too pliable, like thick parchment that held under the weight of the gold. The man had no time to ponder what it could be--he simply brought the box into his atrium and softly closed the door.

He grabbed an oil lamp from another room, and rushed back over to illuminate his gift. The glittering inside the box confirmed his suspicion of gold, but he spotted something curious below the coins, made of some sort of black substance.

After he had set the gold aside, having counted the total number of coins twice, he lifted out a strange object: a stack of delicate parchment sheets encased on several sides by what appeared to be black leather. He found he could open it, and within saw impossibly straight horizontal lines on the sheets.

As he wondered what the thing could be, he flipped to the beginning and saw words written in black ink.

Vesuvius will erupt in ten days, the words said in Latin. Heed this warning, and use the money to buy passage out of Pompeii. Save yourself and your family.

Caecilius stared down at the parchment, shocked at what he had read. The mountain would erupt? Were the gods angry with the citizens of Pompeii? One would be foolish to ignore a message from the gods, though, so he pushed away his uncertainty.

There was a glaring problem, though. Even with the money that lay before him, he did not have enough to pay off his debts.

If I leave Flavius will follow me. He’ll follow me to the ends of the known world to get his debt paid.

But I can’t leave my family here to die either.

He saw only one choice.

*****

Daniel stepped out of the purring machine he had built, and looked from an empty street into the exhibit of an ancient Pompeiian domus. He had chosen to return in the middle of the night, when no tourists would be crowding around the house.

He ignored everything except the form of a man on the floor, curled up in the same position he had been in when the pyroclastic flow of Vesuvius had washed over him. For as harrowing a sight as it was, Daniel found himself overjoyed, for when he had last been at the site, the bodies of a woman and two children had been among the man’s.

The experiment had, in theory, solely been to see if he could change the past, but he was not made of stone. The man had stayed behind for some strange reason, but even so, Daniel had saved three lives.

Tears came to his eyes.