It was not even a question that he would help her. She smiled at him, and he looked into her beautiful, dark eyes, seeing her hope, seeing her need.

The last time he’d seen her, her eyes had been changed into something quite different.

He promised then to do her bidding, and he did it willingly. How could he not? Nicolaus hadn’t been the first man to sacrifice his own life for hers, but he had also sacrificed the lives of countless others. For more than fifty years now, he’d watched helplessly as the prophecies came to pass, knowing she’d scarcely begun.

He’d seen the future in his emperor’s eyes. The ruler, in delirium, sleepless and haunted, had confided his visions to Nicolaus, swearing him to secrecy, but there was no point in it now. The emperor Augustus, he who had controlled the world, or thought he had, was dead, and Nicolaus was soon to follow.

The scholar shuddered, feeling frost skittering over his bones. His scar throbbed. Fatale monstrum, the Romans had called her. “Fatal omen.” Or, if one were to think of the double meaning of the word, and this had certainly been the intention, “fatal monster.”

Mistress of the end of the world.

And yet he knew her. Her heart had not always been dark. Perhaps it was not wholly dark even now.

Nicolaus wished that he’d died years before, knowing nothing of the things he was bound to tell today. His life had been long, and his memory remained perfect. This was his particular punishment.

Now he was the only one left who knew the truth. The only one, save her. Though it was sacrilege, though it was foolhardy to set down the words, he had to give warning to the world to come. To leave this life without doing so would be an irredeemable act, and his soul was already weighted with sins. They’d know more in the future. They’d learn. Perhaps they would learn enough to save themselves from the monster that Nicolaus, in his idiotic youth, had helped release into the world.

He looked into the sky above Avernus for a moment. The sun hung at the horizon, a fiery orb, and above it, the gathering clouds glowed copper and violet. Lightning slashed through one of them. The moon rose, yellow and ominous, even as the sun fell, struggling against the night and thunder.

Everything was at stake.

The people of the future would not know what was coming for them, not unless Nicolaus told this story. They’d have no defense. He thought for a moment of that world, the world he’d never see. It was a future so distant that almost nothing would remain of the things he had loved. Augustus had told him of his visions: buildings crumbling, cities disappearing beneath the waves, wars and bloodshed. Strange and shining machines, and untongued masses, all speaking the languages of barbarians.

The emperor had seen the future, and she was in it.

Fatale monstrum, Nicolaus repeated silently. Her name and her destiny. He would be gone by the time it came to pass, and yet he had a part still to play.