Yes, I am with thee, Mycroft. I come to have my patience tried again. Abuse it not. Thou canst not fool me. The two weeks of thy rampage are thy most salient memory, whose abominable details thou hast so often inflicted upon me: the thumping of thy sadist heart, Apollo’s blood upon thy tongue. That atrocious fortnight, not the seven days of thy first history, is the true centerpiece of thy distorted memory.

Innocent master, your error proves again your goodness. Horrors like mine are so remote from your imagining that you believe they could become memories, recorded by the brain like common trials and griefs. No, reader. My two weeks are not salient letters etched deep to withstand assaults of wind and tempest in the battered graveyard of my mind. My two weeks are the storm.

“Caesar, this is Achilles.”

I could not forget this. The Major was the first man I had ever seen enter the citadel of Alexandria without pausing for that tremor of awe which we owe ancient monuments, as we remember the mountainsides that gave their hearts to form these sky-rivaling columns, the thousand dead hands that hewed those rocky hearts, and the great chain of people running from deep antiquity through ourselves to generations yet unborn who will stand here and tremble. Achilles did pause on MASON’s threshold, but it was a different pause, not awe but the slow, saturated study men give to sunsets, trees in blossom, laughing children, brief things we like to linger on before they vanish. I wonder whether it was Ilium that taught Achilles not to mistake kings’ wonders for eternal things, or whether, by his essence, he has always known. “I’m told you need me to teach you how to have a war.”

“So Mycroft thinks,” the Emperor answered.

It was a bright but dark-walled chamber. MASON’s throne of blood-purple porphyry stood in the center of a reflecting pool, fed by channels of flowing spring water which braided through the marble floor like a thousand rivers gathering toward Ocean. Cornel MASON was not on his throne, but stood by one wall, gazing at the carved web of archaic symbols which covered the room’s stone walls like lace. Even standing on the same floor as his guests and guards, so imperious was Caesar’s stance that my mind insists he held a scepter in his hand, though I believe it was, in fact, an apple.

“You think Mycroft is wrong? That there won’t be war?” Achilles asked.

“I think there may or may not be a war,” MASON answered, turning. “I think the engine of human civilization is not so track-bound that it cannot be steered, even at this point.” The Emperor spoke slowly to Achilles, his inner engines churning as he studied the impossible creature he had heard me rant so much about. “You disagree, I trust?”