The cheap airline headphones did little to drown out the drone of the engines. Alex Carter squeezed his eyes shut, his knuckles white where he gripped the armrests. He was not a good flyer. Never had been. The sensation of being suspended seven miles above the earth in a vibrating metal tube felt fundamentally wrong, a violation of some primal law of nature.
To distract himself, he focused on the voice in his ears. It was the smooth, academic tone of Dr. Alistair Finch, host of the Echoes of Empire podcast. "...and so, as Marcus Aurelius lay dying in his campaign tent at Vindobona," Finch narrated, his voice a soothing balm against the cabin's hum, "the fate of the known world rested on a terrifying question: could his son, Commodus, live up to the immense legacy of the last of the Five Good Emperors?"
Alex snorted softly. A rhetorical question, really. Anyone with a passing interest in history knew the answer was a resounding no. Commodus had been a disaster—a narcissistic, gladiatorial-obsessed tyrant whose reign marked the beginning of Rome's long, slow, agonizing decline. A project manager by trade, Alex appreciated systems, and the Roman Empire was the ultimate, sprawling, inefficient, and utterly fascinating system. He managed software developers and marketing teams, not legions and provinces, but the core principles of managing difficult people and limited resources felt oddly universal. Commodus, he mused, had been the ultimate bad manager.
A sudden, violent lurch of the aircraft threw him against his seatbelt. The seatbelt sign, already on, chimed with a fresh, insistent urgency. A few nervous gasps rippled through the cabin.
"Just a bit of chop, folks," the captain's voice crackled over the intercom, a little too casual to be entirely convincing. "We're just skirting the edge of a storm system over the Atlantic. Should be smooth sailing again in a few minutes."
Alex's stomach climbed into his throat. He hated this part. The feeling of powerlessness, of surrendering his fate to the pilot, the weather, the groaning mechanics of the Airbus A350. He fumbled in his carry-on for a water bottle, his hand brushing against the hard shell of his laptop. His lifeline. His entire professional life was on that ruggedized little machine, along with his personal AI, Lyra. At least she wouldn't get airsick.
The turbulence didn't subside. It grew worse. The plane began to buck and shudder not like it was moving through air, but like a dog shaking a rat. A piece of overhead luggage bin popped open, spilling a jacket into the aisle. A flight attendant, her face a pale mask of professionalism, stumbled as she tried to secure it.
Then the lights went out.
The sudden, absolute darkness was punctuated by a handful of shrieks. For a terrifying second, the only sound was the roar of the engines and the creaking of the airframe. Then, through the window, a light bloomed. It wasn't lightning. It was a sickening, silent, purple-green aurora that pulsed against the fuselage, painting the clouds in colors that felt deeply, fundamentally wrong.
Alex's training in logic and project management evaporated, replaced by raw, animal fear. This was not a storm. He had a sudden, irrational thought—a temporal anomaly, a wormhole, something from the sci-fi novels he devoured in his downtime. It was a stupid, panicked idea, but it was the only thing that fit the impossible sight outside.
A sound followed, a low-frequency hum that vibrated through the very bones of the aircraft, rising in pitch until it was a deafening shriek. It wasn't the sound of failing engines; it was the sound of reality tearing at the seams. Alex felt an immense, crushing pressure, as if the entire ocean were bearing down on him. His vision tunneled, the edges darkening. He caught a final, fleeting image of the green-purple light engulfing the wing, the metal seeming to warp and dissolve into the glow.
His last coherent thought was not of project deadlines or stock options. It was of his mother's face, of his sister's laughter. Then, nothing.
Alex awoke with a gasp, his lungs burning as if he'd been pulled from an icy lake. The air was frigid, thick with the alien smells of woodsmoke, damp canvas, and oiled leather. The steady vibration of the jet was gone. The silence was absolute, broken only by a distant, rhythmic clang… clang… clang of metal on metal and the faint sound of men shouting in a language he couldn't quite place.
He was lying on his side, not in the cramped embrace of an economy-class seat, but on a narrow cot. A coarse wool blanket and a heavy, pungent fur pelt were thrown over him. He pushed them aside, his body aching as if he'd been in a car crash. He sat up, his head swimming.
He was in a large tent. The canvas walls were supported by thick wooden poles, and the floor was covered with rough-sawn planks. A single lantern cast a flickering, golden glow over the spartan interior: a simple wooden table, a couple of stools, and a large, locked chest. Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the edges of his consciousness. Had the plane crashed? Was this some sort of field hospital?
He swung his legs over the side of the cot and stood, his bare feet meeting the cold wood. And that's when he felt it. The wrongness. His own body was… different. He'd always been on the lanky side, a typical thirty-two-year-old whose main form of exercise was walking to the coffee machine. This body felt shorter, more compact, but coiled with a wiry strength he'd never possessed. He held his hands up in the lantern light. They weren't his. His were the hands of a man who typed for a living—slender, with neatly trimmed nails. These hands were youthful, broad, the knuckles and palms thick with calluses. The hands of a fighter.
His heart began to hammer against his ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. He looked around the tent, his eyes wide and searching, and spotted it—a large, round shield of polished bronze, leaning against the wooden chest. Its surface was distorted, but it would serve as a mirror.
Moving as if in a dream, he crossed the tent in three strides. He knelt, his breath catching in his throat, and stared at his reflection.
The face that stared back was not his.
It was the face of a stranger, a young man no older than eighteen or nineteen. Dark, curly hair fell across a broad forehead. The jaw was strong, the nose aquiline, the mouth set in a natural expression of arrogant disdain. It was a handsome face, a powerful face, but it was also the face of a spoiled princeling. Alex reached up and touched his own cheek; the reflection did the same. This was him. This impossible, terrifying new face was his.
The canvas flap of the tent was pushed aside, and a man entered, ducking his head to clear the entrance. He was immense, built like a side of beef, and clad in the segmented armor and leather skirt of a Roman legionary. His face was weathered, a thick beard covering his jaw. He saw Alex and immediately dropped to one knee, bowing his head.
"Dominus Noster," the soldier rumbled, his voice a low gravel. The language was Latin. Harsh, formal, but unmistakably Latin. Alex's podcast-level knowledge kicked in, recognizing the honorific. Our Lord.
The soldier continued, his voice thick with a genuine, sorrowful reverence. "The generals await your word. All mourn the passing of your divine father, Marcus Aurelius."
The name hit Alex with the force of a physical blow. Marcus Aurelius. The philosopher king. The dying emperor from the podcast. His mind raced, connecting the impossible dots.
The soldier looked up, his gaze meeting Alex's. "We await your command, Caesar Commodus."
Commodus.
The world tilted on its axis. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a hallucination. He was here. Vindobona. 180 AD. He was trapped in the body of the boy who would become one of history's greatest monsters. The boy who would be betrayed, poisoned, and finally, strangled to death in his own bath.
A wave of pure, unadulterated terror washed over him, so potent it almost buckled his knees. He was going to die here. But as his wild eyes darted around the tent, searching for an escape, for anything that made sense, they snagged on something impossible. Something that didn't belong.
Half-hidden under a pile of furs in the corner, almost perfectly camouflaged in the dim light, was the distinct, angular shape of his black tactical carry-on bag. A single, solitary artifact of the 21st century, sitting silently in the heart of the Roman Empire.