Song to enjoy while you read :) 

[Found among the Emperor's private papers, ink still wet, edges charred from flame]

The Kalends of Aprilis, Year I of the Resurgent Eagle

Elara,

Four years. The clerks tell me it has been four years since Garama fell, as if time were a thing that could be measured in revolutions of the sun rather than the wearing away of what makes a man human. Four years since the garden. Four years since I held nothing.

I built you a fountain today. Not you the memory of you. The ghost I carry. It stands in the Forum now, and already the people call it beautiful. They don't know it's the exact dimensions of our garden pool, where you'd trail your fingers while correcting my pronunciation of Berber poetry. They don't know each carved lily matches the ones you planted, stem by careful stem. They see civic beauty. I see a grave that gives water.

My hands shake as I write this. Always the left first you used to steady it when the tremor came, usually after the long council sessions. "Too much thinking," you'd tease, pressing my palm between yours until the shaking stopped. Now it never stops. It only hides, waiting for moments like this when I'm foolish enough to pretend you might read these words.

The empire grows, habibti. I've done what I promised over your body I've built a machine so perfect that what happened to us can never happen again. The Lex Familiaris passed last week. Any crime against a family in their home now carries the penalty of decimation. The senator who opposed it asked why the punishment was so severe. I couldn't tell him the truth: because when they came for you, I wasn't home. Because protection must be absolute or it is nothing at all.

Do you remember that night in Garama when the sandstorm came? You were seven months along with our son, and the world outside howled like the death of gods. You pressed my hand to your belly and said, "Feel he's dancing to the storm's music." I told you then that I'd build walls so high no storm could ever touch him.

I kept half that promise. The walls stand. Our son does not.

[Here the ink splutters, as if the hand holding the stylus convulsed]

I need to tell you about the pens. After. When they threw me in with the other provincial cattle, I couldn't stop thinking about that dance beneath your skin. How he moved like joy itself, like tomorrow was a certainty rather than a thing that could be stolen by men with documents and siege engines.

They fed us grain mixed with dirt. I ate it. Gagged it down with hands that had signed treaties, hands that had held you, hands that had failed to protect either treaty or wife. The other prisoners wept. Screamed. Pleaded to gods who'd clearly chosen sides.

I was silent.

Do you know why? Because I was counting. Every humiliation. Every degradation. Every moment they made me less than the man who'd loved you. I pressed each one like a flower between the pages of memory, building a herbarium of hate. The overseer who pissed on our water ration. The senator's son who visited to laugh at how the mighty prefect had fallen. The merchant who bought Garamanian silk stripped from our dead.

In the dark, when the others slept, I would whisper their names like a prayer. Not to any god what god permits a pregnant woman to die defending her home? I whispered to you. To our son. To the lilies ground beneath legion boots. I made you witnesses to what I was becoming.

The night I knew I would escape, kill, conquer, and rebuild it wasn't rage that drove me. It was the mathematical certainty that a world which could create such injustice was broken at its foundations. And I was the only one who understood the architecture well enough to tear it down and build it better.

"When you break," my grandmother once told me, "break toward purpose."

So I broke toward empire.

[The handwriting changes here, becomes sharper, more controlled]

They sing songs about the Jackal of the Red Sands now. The rebels who became legion, the provincial who became Caesar. They don't sing about the seventeen men I burned alive in their tents because they wore the insignia of the unit that breached Garama's walls. They don't sing about how I made Marcus Calvus remember him? The soft magistrate who stamped our death warrant? eat that warrant, ink and all, before I opened his throat.

You would not recognize the man I became in those years, ya ruhi. I wore cruelty like armor and necessity like a crown. Every atrocity perfectly calculated: how many must die to save ten times their number? How much fear must I instill to prevent greater slaughter? I turned myself into the monster they accused me of being, because monsters are what this world understands.

Cassian left me, in the end. Dear, loyal Cassian who'd carried you to safety in those last moments, who'd held your hand while... He said I'd become the very thing we'd fought against. He wasn't wrong. But he wasn't right either. I became worse than what we'd fought, because I became effective.

"This isn't justice," he said.

"No," I told him. "It's prevention."

[A long space here, as if the writer paused]

Yesterday, a woman came to petition for her son's life. He'd stolen bread a capital offense under the old laws. As she knelt before the throne, her hands moved to her belly in unconscious protection, and I saw she was with child. The same gesture you made that night in the sandstorm.

I pardoned the boy. More I made him a ward of the state, guaranteed his education. The senators called it weakness. They don't understand that every pregnant woman I see is you. Every child who might starve is ours. Every law I write is trying to save people who are already dead.

I'm building you the Rome you believed in, the one we'd sketch out in bed while the desert moon painted silver through our window. Where merit matters more than blood remember how you laughed at the senators who couldn't tell barley from wheat but owned a thousand farms? Where the law protects the weak from the strong you said once that true civilization meant the powerful feared consequences. Where no man must choose between loyalty to the state and love for his family.

But here's what I've learned, what I could never have told that young prefect sharing dreams with his pregnant wife: you cannot build paradise with human materials. Every perfect law is interpreted by imperfect men. Every ideal is implemented by those who've never had their ideals tested by loss.

So I've become inhuman. The machine at the heart of the machine. I feel nothing I tell myself I feel nothing except the inexorable grinding of justice delayed but no longer denied.

[The ink here is watered, as if diluted by drops of something]

Except.

Except when I sign a law protecting families, my hand remembers the weight of yours.

Except when I review building plans, I still leave space for gardens.

Except when they call me Augustus "the increaser," I think of all I've decreased to earn it. A husband to a widower. A father to a childless man. A believer in humanity to an architect of necessary cruelties.

Except in moments like this, when the palace sleeps and I let myself remember what it felt like to be yours.

Do you know what the cruelest part is? It worked. My transformation, my brutality, my cold mathematics of power it all worked. SPQA rises. The provinces prosper. Children play in streets that would have run with blood. Families sleep secure in the knowledge that the law stands between them and chaos.

I won. I took it all.

And it tastes like dust.

[The final section is written in a different ink, as if added later]

Dawn comes. In an hour, I'll sit in judgment again. Pass laws. Review legions. Play the part of the emperor so completely that sometimes I forget it's a performance. But right now, in this letter I'll burn before the sun fully rises, I can tell you the truth:

I am not building an empire. I am building a tomb vast enough to hold my grief. Every stone is a day I survived without you. Every law is a prayer to a god I no longer believe in. Every reform is an apology to a ghost who cannot hear it.

They will write histories of me, I think. Call me the great reformer. The architect of ages. The emperor who broke the old world and forged the new. They will make my pain into poetry and my loss into legend.

They will not write about how I still set two cups at my private meals.

They will not write about the lilies I had planted in the deepest vault, where I go to breathe their scent and remember.

They will not write about these letters, burned before dawn, where an emperor tells his dead wife about the empire he built because he could not save her life.

Find me, Elara. When madness finally takes me and it will, for no man can live forever as a blade find me. But I will not stop. Cannot stop. I've made myself into the instrument that carves order from chaos, and instruments have no right to rest. When they plant me in the earth and they will, eventually, for even architects of empire are temporary I hope they bury me in Garama. In our garden. Where the lilies once grew wild and a young prefect believed the world could be reasoned with.

Find me there, when your shade is finally free to wander. Find me and tell me if it was worth it. Tell me if the empire I built on our ashes was payment enough for the life we lost. Tell me if our son, in whatever realm unbaptized souls wander, can forgive his father for becoming what he became.

I know you can't answer. Know these words dissolve into nothing the moment the ink dries. But I write them anyway, the way I pass laws and judge cases and pretend the emptiness doesn't echo with your absence.

Four years, they tell me.

It feels like yesterday.

It feels like never.

It feels like forever.

Ya habibti, ya ruhi, ya noor el-aini.

My beloved. My soul. Light of my eyes.

I am what remains when love is burned away purpose without joy, power without peace, tomorrow without you.

I am your Marcellus, who loved you more than virtue and became vicious to honor it.

I am the ghost who rules an empire, building your monument from the bones of our enemies.

I am tired, and I am yours, and I am nothing.

Until the lilies bloom again..

Marcellus L.

[Here the parchment is scorched, as if held to flame, then pulled back. The letter was found among ashes, only partially destroyed, as if even in destruction, he could not fully let go]