Atenia, men had renamed the most glorious of cities. The city had dominated the whole of North and South-Agenor, her neighbouring isles along with the lands of northern Ifriquya, for nigh five and a half centuries. And for nigh on half of one, the Principate as it had called itself, had become perilously close to collapse.

Corruption had increased, treachery had become the norm and most citizens of the once prosperous empire had come to regard their own protectors with thinly veiled fear and resentment. Only the Sixth Augustan Phoenix legion had continued to serve with distinction, and with fidelity towards the people. Where other legions had become mostly barbarian hordes with little loyalty or care for the empire, the Sixth had cared for them, had shielded them and had shed blood for them. Though, she had become no less barbarous in blood and heritage than some of the other lesser legions, she had never forgotten her roots. She was Romalian to the core, and it was she that had fought for the last of the Princeps, Emperor Veritian.

But at present, she had been chased away north after the betrayal of the final claimant to the Purple Throne. His son having taken the legion north, to flee across the sea to North-Agenor, where he hoped to find succour, and abandon Roma, or rather Atenia now to her fate.

For those in tune with the heavens Aurelia, this along with the celebration of the people in the city as they toppled the old gods, and sanctuaries that evoked panic.

Responsible for the old flame of the goddess Vesta, and having sworn herself to the gods she had prayed fervently for the victory of the city’s champion. All to no avail. Victory had favoured the forces of the new god, the sun-disk lord who considered himself above all others.

Forty days had passed since Atenius as the new Emperor called himself, had triumphed. He had put on a grand show, ere he led the parading troops who had fled before the Sixth and their allies up to the temple of the Aten. Hastily built two years prior when he first took the city, whilst Veritian had been in the east campaigning against the Magyon tribes, pushed them back.

Slain by treachery, by one of his tribunes before a battle could be properly fought betwixt Atenius and him, this had been the blow that had sealed the fate for Roma. In under a week after the news had arrived, the city had seen an exodus of all the remaining loyalists to Veritian, most of whom had preferred to flee the city for several of those more fortified in the north who clung to the name Roma.

The capital sickened towards their heritage, utterly full of self-loathing for the old gods, the old customs and the old histories had burnt and smashed what they could find. Utterly destroying the first of the Romalian Princeps, along with the tombs of the famous generals, infamous tyrants and of the most noble of ladies, in a fit of what can only be described as madness.

It was with this stench of mania that Aurelia had sought to remind the people when she could that once they had been proud, of how their ancestors had sacrificed all they had for them. Her words fell upon deaf ears.

Hardly alone in pleading with the people, she might well have been thrown down and violated, by those she had once happily served were it not for old Pompianus. It had been he who had torn her off her feet at the time, and swept away from the Forum, down the alleyways of the city before doubling back via others, to the temple where he served the god Pluton.

“‘Twas foolish to shriek at them in that manner,” He had scolded her, though not without a certain worry and gentility in his voice.

She had had hot words for him in that moment. But later she had good reason to reflect on her own words, when he was thrown down from the highest rock of the city, to his doom upon the orders of Atenius.

His dying cries and warnings against this act and the burning of the great temple of Roma Optima Maxima, which had dominated the city throughout the whole of the history of the city, and of how such a misdeed would doom them all. His words went unheeded as the city was soon destroyed, and the statue of the goddess felled and defiled, to the horror of all those who remained faithful to her.

With the echo of his words and shouts haunting her ears, especially in the dead of night, when she could not sleep, for fear of those visions and dreams that had haunted her since the day after the news of Veritian’s fall.

The dreams she struggled against, night after night for forty nights left her wearied and hardly of a calm mind as she became ever more frantic, and stricken for her people. The deeper they fell into madness, into tearing down their history, their old emblems and all that they had once loved, the deeper was the hole of despair and exhaustion she fell into.

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Some visions were of simple black crows overtaking the fields outside the city. What proceeded the night after, was that of black dogs entering into every single one of the houses of the city, to tear at the people, only for the next vision to be one of a storm overtaking them all. It happened that she also dreamt of ravens, vultures and worms devouring the people, on another night, then there were dreams of flames, of thunder and on another night of all the children being snuffed out in a single night.

That is to say those that some of the followers of Aten did not sacrifice, such was the fanaticism that had overtaken the maddened crowds.

The greatest warning ought to have been the heat that overtook Atenia, the night of Yule. Renaming the celebration ‘The Day of the Aten’, so that it might be more palatable in their eyes, with the proclamation that all territories and provinces of the Empire had to follow the new customs, Atenius had declared the old faith a thing of the past.

Though, she had sworn to never abandon the temple of Vesta, she was almost chased out a number of times (for her own good, they said) so that she had taken refuge in the deepest bowels of the temple of Vesta.

“You ought to take thy leave, Aurelia,” the matriarch had told her on the day of Yule, as she sweated through the warmest and most malarial Yule ever experienced in the history of Tirreinia.

“I shan’t, someone Matriarch, must preserve the hearth fire of the goddess,” Aurelia had insisted. Later she was wont to think that mayhaps the older woman had been correct, in fleeing the city when she had.

It was as she lay down to rest the night before the new year that it came. The worst of all the visions that came to her spirit did so that night. It was in poor spirits that she had gone to sleep, thereon the floor by the hearth that was lit all throughout the history of Roma, from the earliest days of her ancestress priestesses up to her own era. By this time, the flames had been extinguished in what was one of the worst acts of vandalism, by the depraved mobs, bent on the destruction of their own civilisation.

With nary a bedroll to rest upon, or even a mouse for company for even the mice had fled the city that had sunk to the deepest abyss of foolishness, Aurelia was thus, reduced to living as a beggar. Her faith all that sustained her, and all that kept her from trading her body, or otherwise fleeing for her own life.

Well she might have done to have done either of those things, if only to make her life all the easier over the course of the past, forty days. It happened though that she as she slumbered fitfully, she bore witness to the fate intended for her beloved city.

The last of the faithful, last of the true Romalians still within the city-walls, she it was who saw the walls torn asunder. What she also saw was the highest spires of the city, the great temples of Roma built over half a millennia. The great temple of Roma, already laid low was at last reduced to rubble, the founding stones first lain thereupon the Quintirian Hill were swallowed up by the earth.

The great tombs of the Princeps built up five centuries after the great temple and three and a half centuries or so, before Aurelia’s own time, was likewise reduced to naught. So that in this way the final resting place of the greatest rulers of Roma, along with some of the foulest were devoured and reduced to dust.

At the same time that the souls of those of the city were dragged down, deep below the bowels of the earth, screaming and shrieking even as they were crushed and devoured first by the earth. The few survivors were overtaken by the sea, as it rushed into the broken remains where once there was a city.

It was thence that young Aurelia awoke.

Trembling and frightened, at the beginning she longed to believe it was but a dream. It was as she glanced about sleepily that the earth began to shake.

It was in that moment she knew the truth. It had not simply been any other dream, but as with all those she had had in the past forty days. It was a warning.

The trembling of the earth did not stop there. But rather, was to overtake all of the land, even as darkness fell throughout it. Never before had such darkness blighted the earth, as the twin suns of Midgard failed to arise upon the horizon.

Great was the panic of the people, as they gaped, screamed and cried out. Their madness now had just cause, with none seeing clearly or knowing where to turn to. Atenius most of all was stricken even as he commanded the gods to bring up the suns, and for Aten to rise. In his madness he served only to further enrage those gods who dominated, the world since time immemorial.

As to Aurelia, she alone could see clearly through the tainted air, and yet she ran as one possessed,

Her long legs took her across the city, faster than she had ever been. The screams of the people, the doom of her city hardly noticed by Aurelia, who tore a path through the city even as the earth tore open and the river surged up alongside the sea to the west, began to rage at the highest points of the city walls.

Thus, did Atenia the most wicked and self-righteous of empires fell below the waves, torn asunder by the gods, who hewed it down from below and from the sea. It was in this manner that the whole of the empire that had fallen into disrepair at this time, was at last laid low. Only those who had betrayed Veritian who had not sworn themselves to Atenius, or stayed leal and faithful to the Princeps, and those who foresaw what was to come survived.

What became of Aurelia you might ask? Once outside of the city, her visions broken and her horror at the destruction of the city plunged her into despair. From there, she was happened upon by a brigand, one of barbarian descent who took her against her will, as his concubine. Years afterwards, she was to escape with her son, whom she named Remus…