At sunrise Dionysios ordered Alexios outside, explaining that it was time to learn and teach.

“Teaching and learning,” Dionysios said. “Learning and teaching.”

“What about breakfast?” Alexios said.

“They barely even do breakfast around here,” Dionysios said. “We’ll pick something up along the way. Now come on!”

Alexios stumbled down the stairs, out the heavy clanking wooden door, and into the cool humid light outside, shaking off his fatigue faster than might have been expected. After dinner last night he had slept for many dreamless hours, as unmoving and unconscious as a stone, kept alive by the gentle beating of his heart and the faint breaths wheezing through his nostrils. So many days without even a molecule of caffeine (aside from Dionysios’s Seran cha), the exhaustion from so much grueling physical labor, and the lack of electric lighting in the evening had all combined to knock him out each night as though he’d been struck by a boulder. Consequently he woke feeling more rested and refreshed than he ever had back in the outside world. The voice confirmed that his stamina was almost fully recharged.

Clutching a water flask, Dionysios guided Alexios to the nearby heart of the City, where they found the Church of Holy Wisdom, the Hippodrome, and the Imperial Palace all facing each other across a great square decorated with flowers so vibrant in the dawn their colors hurt Alexios’s eyes. The tall narrow cypresses were almost like burning torches of greenery, and the monumental buildings here were painted with deep colors, and glinting everywhere with gold. Alexios recalled that the buildings in big cities from his past life were bigger, but he thought that the structures here somehow possessed a different kind of weight. Thousands of people had quarried, carved, and dragged these stones across the world, fitting them into place using simple machines and basic mathematics. As a result, the structures had a different feeling to them—a different aura, if that was the right word.

Buildings here served a different purpose from those in the outer world. The Church of Holy Wisdom—Earth’s tallest manmade structure—was consecrated to God and humming with the songs of priests and monks and what might have even been pipe organs at this early hour. It was almost like a nuclear reactor of prayer, one which pleaded with God to have mercy on all his millions of children. This immense structure cost money, but the investment paid indirect dividends, in that its beauty helped chain millions to religion. As long as people believed, they would keep laboring for Rome.

“All criticism starts with criticism of religion,” Dionysios said. “In Romanía people worship the saints and the trinity. In our time, people worship ideas like greed or the market or technology or culture, which in their minds are no different from gods—changeless, all-powerful, impossible to oppose, acting upon the universe but never being acted upon by it. These modern religious fanatics denigrate humanity, while at the same time fetishizing commodities.”

Alexios was still too groggy to answer. Dionysios wasn’t hung over at all.

In the middle of the flowery square, an enormous four-sided marble arch called the Milion marked Romanía’s center. From here all distances were measured; every milestone referenced this spot. As Alexios looked around, he spotted the Great Palace’s complicated rooftops, the tiles glinting with gold. He stared into its tall dark windows. Was Herakleia staring back?

Then came the carriages drawn by horses and oxen piled with mountains of fruit and vegetables and sacks and barrels and jars of meat, fish, grain, wine, and cheese. These carriages were already creaking and groaning all over the square, guided by drowsy farmers who had come to feed the City’s insatiable gullet. Alexios’s own stomach grumbled, but no taverns or fast food vendors were open yet.

“You told me there’d be food,” Alexios grumbled.

“I’m working on it,” Dionysios said. “We need to train in a relatively private place. That means heading outside the Land Walls.”

Starting at the Milion, they moved westward along the Mese, a paved road as wide as a highway from the old world. After about half an hour of brisk walking, the Mese took them through the massive paved Forums of Konstantinos and Theodosios, past countless churches, apartments, and markets. The street was lined with porticos and decorated with painted marble statues of muscular, armor-clad Emperors hailing the people with outstretched hands. Pagan demigods clutched Medusa heads writhing with snakes, and griffins snarled while galloping their muscular legs and flapping their huge batwings.

Konstantinos the Great had wrested these sculptures from cities around the Inland Sea to decorate his new capital. Art was everywhere. The city was like a giant open-air museum.

When Alexios and Dionysios were nearing the Golden Gate in the Land Walls, they grabbed some fast food—a couple of hot chicken gyros with toasted pita bread sprinkled with basil—devouring it as they walked. To Alexios’s surprise, the City’s suburbs began before they reached the walls, as the crowded apartments petered out into country houses and then farmland.

“It’s actually a pretty green motherfucking city,” Dionysios said. “There’s trees and gardens and farms and shit all over the place. They also recycle almost everything. And they don’t produce much pollution, either, aside from methane from all the people and animal farts, and there’s also carbon from the cooking fires I guess. The wind's always blowing in from the sea, so the smells aren't too bad, and they've got plumbing and running water from those huge aqueducts and cisterns, too. They even pick up all the horse shit and use it as fertilizer. Almost nothing goes to waste—at least outside the palaces and mansions, anyway. And although the emperor and the dynatoi are pretty powerful, there’s only so much you can do when you live in a city with hundreds of thousands of people like this, and all you’ve got for protection is basically a bunch of dudes with swords and bows and arrows. There’s no machine guns or tear gas. The leaders aren’t democratically elected, but they’ll be in deep shit if they ignore the people.”

“So what you’re saying is, it’s a progressive medieval city,” Alexios said.

“I’m not sure I’d go that far. But modernity, you know, the world we came from, it’s one step forward, two steps back.”

“‘Reject modernity, return to tradition,’” Alexios said.

“What was that?”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“It’s just some joke people said before I came here.”

“Well, I don’t agree with that sentiment. We need to take the best of both worlds as we move forward into the future. Take the good shit, get rid of the bad shit, even if it’s all kind of bound together in a way. Things can change and can’t change at the same time, if you follow.”

“I don’t.”

“Give it some time. Green city—yes. Rich folk stealing from poor folk—no. See what I mean?”

“I guess?”

“You’ve got to remember that, in case we actually beat the fucking game.”

“Won’t I get sent back home?” Alexios said.

“Yeah, of course, but you can also come back if you choose. We beat Basil and Diogenes and got our guy on the throne for awhile—my buddy Anastasios, the good Emperor, remember? The game let me go back to the 1950s, right where I left off, and I didn’t tell you, but I stayed there for awhile. The empire wasn’t destroyed, but I guess the game voice thought I’d done enough. I finished school, got a job, and what happened? I lived through the sixties and seventies. I watched the promise of a better world just fall apart. People kept saying things would get better, but everything kept getting worse. All the coolest people were assassinated, imprisoned, or driven into exile. Either that, or they sold out, which is no different from dying—spiritual death, the murder of your conscience. That sucked. I had a family, but I could never make enough money to provide. I was never there. My kids, they hated me, and I don’t blame them. I had to watch them drift into the cities in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, just in time to get hooked on all the drugs the CIA was pumping in. It was like the Opium Wars in China, using drugs to destroy an entire generation.”

Dionysios stopped for a moment. He was crying, but he wiped his tears away.

“Nothing we did made any difference,” Dionysios said. “We were swimming against the tide. Voting, protesting peacefully, never striking with poor people inside our borders or outside—what a load of bullshit. You think that would have worked against Hitler?”

“No, of course not, but—”

“They’re just as fucking bad,” Dionysios said. “The people in charge back there with all their money from centuries of slavery and genocide and imperialism. Fuck ‘em. The trouble is, they’re way stronger than Hitler ever was. They’re smarter, too. They have all kinds of ways of keeping people down. Not just guns or nukes, either, but media—newspapers, magazines, movies, TV shows—all convincing people things might not be perfect where they live, but they’re way better than everywhere else. ‘Think about ABC—Anything But Class. Class is too simplistic. The world is more complex! More complex than bourgeoisie versus proletariat, than settler versus indigenous. We use class analysis when we talk about medieval Europe or ancient Rome, because there’s no other way to understand history—aside from Great Man Theory, eugenics, or 'God did it'—but we can’t use dialectical materialism to understand anything happening in modernity. As soon as the bourgeoisie seizes power in history, everything becomes too complex to understand scientifically.’ It was insidious. And it worked. When you talked with people about it, they thought you were a conspiracy theorist—the idea that newspapers owned by rich pieces of shit could emphasize certain points favorable to their agenda without the proper context, how ridiculous! We could never get enough people together to make a difference. It’s like trying to organize against Nazi Germany from the inside.”

“So you checked out,” Alexios said.

“Yeah. I remembered this old game, found it buried under all kinds of junk, opened it up, and here I am, not sure I ever want to go back.”

“You couldn’t deal with the real world.”

“How is this not the real world?” Dionysios gestured to the farmland they were walking past, the mist rising into the dawn. “It’s real enough for me. That last place, it’s just a wasteland. What did I have to look forward to back there? Work my ass off for fucking peanuts, only to get murdered by some pig? No fucking thank you. Here I can be somebody. That’s why I came back to the game. I came back because I can actually do things.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Alexios sighed in memory of his time on the farm with Eugenios, Eudokia, and the other villagers.

“I can make a difference,” Dionysios said. “And these people here, they appreciate it. The good ones do, anyway. They’re just as real as you or me, as far as I can tell. It’s almost like—did you ever read The Magician’s Nephew?”

“Nope.”

“That’s like this prequel novel for The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Basically the magic wardrobe that transports those kids to Narnia—you know that story, right?”

“Yeah.”

“The wardrobe was made from like the pomegranate trees in the Garden of Eden or something,” Dionysios said. “That’s how the magic wardrobe could, like, transport them to Narnia or whatever. Something like that must be going on with this game. Sometimes I think we’re not actually inside the game board. I think we were teleported to some kind of alternative reality.”

“What about the game voice?” Alexios said.

“Must be the voice of God,” Dionysios said. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at the sky: “Hey, game voice! Who the hell are you?”

No answer came.

Dionysios shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it seems to make slightly more sense than the idea that we’re inside a fucking board game.”

“What about this scar, then?” Alexios showed him the B-shaped mark on his forearm.

“Different universe, different rules.”

As they walked through the Golden Gate, Alexios stumbled over the ruts in the pavement. These must have been gouged out of the road over the centuries by all the passing wheels—which Dionysios and Alexios still needed to avoid, as a long train of carriages was continuing its march inside the city.

After nodding to a trio of hungover Germanic guards who were leaning on their spears as they checked the traffic entering the City, Dionysios and Alexios stepped outside the massive walls, crossed the bridge over the empty moat, and faced the rolling green countryside which stretched into hills and haze on the horizon, all as beautiful as ever, the paved Via Egnatia cutting past farmland, little towns, and sumptuous palaces. The sun had come up and was burning the mist away and shining rainbows into the dewdrops glimmering on the leaves and grass. A swarm of chattering swifts were streaming across the entire sky, so thick that they obscured the morning light like a storm of dust.

Just off the road and past the first milestone, they found a row of cypresses which obscured the view from the Land Walls. Here was a fallow field Dionysios and Alexios could work with, though neither had any interest in messing up the farmers’ crops. The teacher and student sat against a cypress to rest from their walk, drinking water from Dionysios’s flask.

“Alright.” He wiped the sweat from his brow. “So do you remember all that shit I told you back in the myrminki colony?”

“Everything is connected,” Alexios said. “Breathe deep. Worship your yoni. Hippy stuff, basically.”

“No, it’s not hippy stuff. Hippy stuff is what happens when you don’t read theory—when you think you can save the world by living on a farm and dropping acid and complaining about authoritarianism whenever anyone tells you to take a shower more than once a year. That’s not how it works. We can only achieve liberation collectively.”

“Said by a dude who was literally living as a hermit.”

“Hey, that house back there is just where I rest in between adventures. I don’t actually spend a lot of time there.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

Dionysios laughed, then stood and drew his katana, Adhana. “Alright, wise guy. It’s time to fight.”