Usem fought before Augustus, his own sword flashing in the moonlight, bloodied, guarding the emperor’s position.

Cleopatra was still too far from him to shoot, but as he watched, the Romans gained slight traction. The lines were broken and men were fighting blindly, but the animals, though savage, were not strategists. He watched three men heave a screaming lion into the crater, watched his army clutching poisonous snakes and throwing them back at the other side. They were brave, even in the face of an unprecedented melee. Augustus felt a strange pride along with his terror at the monstrous scene before him. This was not Rome, nor was it empire. This was a battle from the lands of myth, a story.

Everything is true, the priest of Apollo had said. Everything.

This was a story told to him in darkness, a story to bring sleep, and at the end of stories like this, the Romans conquered the savages.

Yet it was here before him. Blood flew through the air, and the screams of the dying and the raging echoed over the water. Augustus moved his hand where it clutched the bow of Hercules, feeling the smoothness of the wood and metal, the place worn in the weapon where it had been held by heroes far greater than himself.

He was a hero. He swore it to himself. If he was not a hero, then what was he?

He would save Rome from this monstrous thing, from this woman. Despoina, the sibyls had called her, but she would not be mistress of the end of the world. Augustus would stop her.

Cleopatra kept moving toward him, her face calm and collected, her hands rising in the air and commanding her creatures.

The sound of marching was suddenly upon them, and with the marching, a chanting cry.

“Thank the gods,” Augustus breathed, and Agrippa nodded tightly at him.

Augustus looked up to greet his relief armies cresting the hill and instead saw an army at odds with his own. They held a flag, and it was not emblazoned with Rome’s eagle but with a snake.

A group of elderly senators, with their bald pates and white togas fresh from the fullers, marched onto the hilltop with their army and massed with Cleopatra and her army of wild animals. Augustus looked up and saw a senator across the battlefield, smiling directly, triumphantly into his face.

Augustus felt Agrippa seize with fury beside him.

“Romans!” he shouted. “I am Marcus Agrippa, your commander! I am he who summoned you here!”

Augustus straightened the laurels on his head and leapt atop a rock to address the crowd.

“I am your emperor!” he screamed. “You will serve Rome or you will be declared traitors!”

This was his empire, his world. The senators would not win against him, and he would have them killed when this was finished. He would save Rome from all these traitors. He would save his people.

“Surrender!” Cleopatra yelled back from across the battlefield. A loyal soldier ran at her, his sword poised to slice through her body.