CW: mention of alcohol, trauma, sexual activity
I debated about putting this one up before the release of Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise, and decided that I would, kind of as a... little exciting preview, eh? This post will feature a small sneak peak from Vol II
which isn't very exciting or contextual, but could constitute spoilers
if you're determined to go in completely blind, so consider yourself
warned, friend!
In
the summer of 2019, between finishing uni and actual graduation (and
subsequent starting-first-full-time-job), I backpacked Europe and
Morocco for two months. I'd wanted to do it for years, made plans with
friends who bailed, so in the end, to send off a part of my life that
was brilliant in some ways and terrible in many others, I did it by
myself. All of my destinations, I chose for a very specific reason - I
liked the name of the city, or a film I liked was set there, or I had
always wanted to go, or it was just impossible to travel by train around
Europe without stopping in Germany at least once (and actually I did
love Berlin way more than anticipated). I try not to talk about it much
because there is very little more irritating than a "travelling the
world changed my life" person, especially in These Times, but I do allow a pass to bring it up
when it's relevant. So, now is one of those relevant times: to celebrate
the imminent release of Vol II, I am going to talk a little about Rome.
Before starting Sylvestus,
I had never had any real interest in ancient Rome, or Greece, or Egypt.
Like all kids, I dabbled, but I was more about pirates and cavemen when
it came to it. Looking back, this is definitely because in Roman
history at least, we focus so much on the military, just like in Greek
history we focus on the mythology, and those things don't really interest me... but as I've discovered in the past few years, I'm a sucker
for slice-of-life history. I want to feel connected. I want to know
what the average person did in their day-to-day. I want to know what
they used instead of pockets. I want to know what their daily gripes
were. I want to know what their bed was made out of. I want to know what
their restaurant etiquette was. I want to know how they felt about
dogs. I want to know what weird sh*t they used to treat colds. So, once I
had done my basic research on Roman military and religious and economic
history, enough to create an authentic world that had its own
consistent rules (for instance, the military structure described in Sylvestus of optiones, centurions,
etc. is loosely accurate but simplified - the important thing is that
there's a consistent internal logic that the reader can learn and be
certain of), I dove right into writing, and only did research for the
very specific pieces of worldbuilding that I wanted. This sparked an
interest in ancient Rome that has stuck with me, and I think always will
- but more than that... a connection to it.
Visiting
Rome was one of the main reasons I had wanted to ~do Europe~ in the
first place. And this trip came at a time when... well.
Vol I was pretty much finished. I had dragged my way through it over the past
two years, hating most of it and too caught up in Other Problems to
dedicate myself to it. In short, I had lost Sylv. For me, losing a
character is when you... just grow out of touch with them. They used to
be there with you all the time, asking to be penned, commenting on your
life and connecting it with their own, and then they just. Fade away.
It
was the specific way I had lost Sylv that hurt. I had felt it happening
for three years: he was left behind, static, this stalwart steely
asexual aromantic who looked down on anyone who felt, much less acted
upon, those baser human urges, alcohol-free his whole life, living in
the shadow of his trauma while insisting he had run from it. And I
imagined I could feel him scowling at me, judgemental, as I drank to
numbness three times a week, threw myself into the centre of the party, into dangerous situations,
onto dangerous people, became caught up in the circular cat-fighting of toxic groups. I hated what I did,
who I let myself be, and I hated that I had lost Sylv. Looking back, I
can see that I couldn't write him while I was so distanced from him.
In
March 2019, I stood on a stage and talked about the sexual assaults
that happened to me in that time to a room full of strangers, friends,
and people who had stood by and let them happen, equally caught up in
the same circular whirlwinds as I had been. And I found Sylv again.
Maybe not exactly there, but he was coming back, in some fashion; I
would not have been able to write Vol II if I had not done that,
and I would not have been able to do that without a very small group of
very good people. There are a lot of shadows of all of that in Vol II; I'll talk about them properly sometime.
For
now, suffice to say, in the last few months of my studies, I was
quietly and internally setting up for Sylv to return. Making concrete
plans to write and edit and publish, yes, but more than that, just emotionally
setting the stage. Welcoming him home. Preparing to spend a few wary
weeks eyeing each other up, figuring out how the other had changed
before we took this final journey together.
In
a way, I found a link to Sylv in every city I visited - the bustle of
the Marrakech marketplace, the birds at a lake in Copenhagen, the ruins
in Split, the quiet of a church in Prague. I was desperate for
connections. We were finding each other again.
But of course, when it came down to it, when it was time to open up the door, it had
to be Rome. I had spent two years losing Sylv and half a year trying to
find him again, and if it was going to happen anywhere, it was going to
be here.
I
tumbled into Rome with first-degree sunburn, most of my money gone in
less than half the trip, the last time I slept 36 hours ago for two
hours curled up on a chair on a ferry, knowing more Latin than I did
Italian, immediately lost on the metro. I have a distinct memory of
almost hitting one of those "fatigued hungry in-pain foreign country"
breaking points as I climbed yet another set of stairs in yet another
metro station - and seeing, directly in front of me, the Pyramid of
Cestius. Which I knew about not because of Sylv, but equally
embarrassingly, because of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the
only game of the franchise I have enjoyed playing multiple times. It was
enough to ground me and let me know I was on the right track, and I
found my AirBnB a half-hour trek later, got not nearly enough sleep, set
off again at 8am to find the six-dozen landmarks I had circled on my
map... and promptly got heatstroke and slept for two days.
I
now had one day left in Rome, not three, which left me angry and upset
and stressed, but to my credit I made the most of it; looking back, I
struggle to conceptualise how much I fit into one day.
The one that sticks out to me, though, is the Forum.
I
was very hungry. It was maybe mid-afternoon, which meant I had already
been dragging myself around a large city for six hours and was planning
to go for six more. I saw the Capitoline Wolf, checked that off the
list, headed down the street to the Forum.
And ended up on one side of a locked gate. I could see the Forum, but I didn't want to just see it, I wanted to be in
it, and no matter how much I walked up and down the extremely long
extremely high fence, I couldn't find my way in, and I could see lots of
tourists there but I couldn't get in and oh I needed to pee so very badly. I literally walked up and down that fence for an hour before I gave up, squatted and p*ssed in the street, then went back the way I had come.
Aaaand found the entrance and a public toilet.
I
was feeling a lot better after peeing, so I found the best in it, made
friends with some other tourists, and got into the Forum. This is just
kind of setting the scene for how my whole two months went, and that day
in particular.
I
was already in love with Rome. The vibe of the city, the ruins, the
weather that day. But something about the Forum... Rome as we know it is
built on top of and through the ruins of Rome as Sylv would have known
it, and the streets you walk are twenty feet above where they walked.
The parts that are on the same level and well-preserved are mostly
cordoned off, to keep them well-preserved, and while the
Colosseum and Circus Maximus were amazing from the outside, I couldn't afford the entry
fee to either of them, and... neither of them are super relevant to Sylv, the Circus Maximus never being mentioned in either novel and the Colosseum being built three decades after his death. Which is a dumb detail and not relevant to my overall enjoyment of the city, but it wasn't... you know.
But
the Forum is a huge open area, twenty feet below the rest of the city,
filled with arches and temples and columns and excavation sites, and it
was as I walked here that I really felt it. This was the same
ground boots thousands of years ago walked over. These were the same
stones hands thousands of years ago touched. This was the same statue
eyes thousands of years ago looked at. Rome is a rich living history
like no other I have known; these ruins were here, already ancient, when
Regeane loped between them in 775 in The Silver Wolf, when Ezio climbed them in 1503 in Assassin's Creed, for the two thousand years between and since.
I
stood in the middle of the path, looking up at another statue of the
Capitoline Wolf. Just ahead was a raised ruin marked out by the guide
posts as the temple of the Vestal Virgins. Opposite was a low ruin the
guide posts hesitantly suggested may have been a brothel.
And something clicked.
I
had been seeing things in loose connections and tenuous fabricated
links, the vibe of a song I listened to in a place or the way a bird
flew across the path that I noted to use as a metaphor later. But this
was something concrete, this was something that I could make real. I was standing in a place of history, in a place Sylv could have stood...
So I made it that he did.
"What do you see, Astutus?"
Sylv's eyes flicked away from their study
of the people around them and followed Galerius' nod to the statue.
Moral lessons had very much been Seneca's
specialty; while they had greatly frustrated the young Sylvestus Caecidius
Astutus, by the time he left the merchant's employ he had learned their predictable
patterns enough to glide through any riddle Seneca thought he was putting him
through.
Not so, Galerius'. Yet. Much more rarely
did the African-born merchant, smuggler, and gambling master deal in ethical or
philosophical riddles. The lessons he taught tended to have much more practical
applications.
Sylv knew better than to offer petulance or
sarcasm, so he settled on frankness.
"I see a lot."
The Forum was bustling, bristling, a
disorganised mass of people pushing for templa, shouting, begging,
soldiers marching through, lupi laughing from windows, chickens flapping
in their cages, carts, mules, horses, templa and beggars and stalls and
vendors and pickpockets and people, people, people—
He was learning to know them. Sylvestus
Iaiunus Catulus had never seen more than a hundred people gathered together to
celebrate; Sylvestus Postumus had done his best to steer clear of anything
larger than a small town; but Sylvestus Caecidius Astutus was learning. Ahh,
but Jupiter, the Roman Forum was a difficult place to practise...
Seneca, for all his faults, had taught Sylv
well how to read faces and bodies and voices, judge the weight of a purse,
respond in whatever kind was needed to get a man's money - but that had been in
the comparatively quiet marketplace of Luceria.
Roma was a different world.
The old merchant had been careful, on the
one occasion they had visited; he had wanted Sylv to experience the city, but
they had visited the templa only when it was quiet, kept clear of the
busiest crowds when possible. When Sylv had "one of his moments"
after a heavyset drunken man had called out some crude offer to the slim boy,
he had scolded him - but had never pushed him so far again.
Galerius had no such scruples, and quite
right too. If Sylv were to stay a lowly honest merchant, then cringing at the
first sign of a crowd and shutting down like a war-shy horse was fine - but oh,
Mercury, Sylv's ambitions were so much greater than that. It had been made
clear that if Sylv could not even function in a heavy crowd, he could not be
the infamous Galerius Vitullus' clerk.
So, though his jaw was tense and his
fingers knotted in the thick fur of Pterelas' ruff, Sylv coped.
The Templum of Vulcan was busiest
today; winter was a cold warning wind away, and the Romans begged the God of
Fire to warm them in the long nights to come. The soldiers followed a set
route, and so the beggars and vendors moved out of their way. The lupi
were distant enough to be ignored, the Vestals closer, demanding a nervous
respect from the milling crowds. Lock on the cage of chickens coming loose.
Cart would bounce right there where road was rutted. Best to take a neat step
away now, before it spooked the chickens and they broke free and wreaked
another whirlwind of chaos into the busy - but not patternless, not
unpredictable, if one paid attention well enough - scene.
What do you see, Astutus?
He filed all of it into a closed-off box of
silver-steel and followed Galerius' nod.
"The She-wolf who suckled Romulus and
Remus, Roma's founders." Sylv sensed his voice was a little dispassionate;
a man tripped and shoved into him, and Sylv's mind momentarily flared white
panic as he righted himself. He tightened his fist in Pterelas' fur, unclenched
his jaw, and continued. "Loathed by peasants and hunted for sport as well
as necessity, given to lupa as a symbol of their non-womanhood - yet
also credited with ensuring Roma was founded at all. Artist of this particular
sculpture unknown, but cast in bronze and matching several others throughout
the city and beyond. Not incredibly realistic, so one assumes the artist had
never seen a living specim—"
"All right, Astutus. You know your
Romans and your history. And your wolves, apparently. But why is the statue
relevant?"
A pickpocket drifted closer, caught sight
of Pterelas, and drifted further again.
"It's a symbol of Roma's
hypocrisy," Sylv grumbled; behind silver-steel, the Vestals prayed and the
lupi went to their knees and a hand knotted in his hair and pushed his
face into the cold stone floor.
"It certainly seems so to me,"
rumbled a voice like ice cracking beneath boots. It had been cold in the Forum,
winter's threat hovering over like a watchful eagle, but when Sylv next exhaled
it was in a cloud of fog.
Galerius, Pterelas, and all of the Forum's
occupants disintegrated in a flurry of snow. Sylv reached calmly for his dagger
as a blistering wave of cold crashed across the side of his face.
"Vish," he greeted smoothly,
turning to face the giant white-grey wolf who now stood beside him in the
deserted, ice-wrought Forum.
Sylv
stands in the exact place in the Forum that I stood, sees what I saw,
two thousand years and a universe apart. Because it brings me peace to
know that we existed in the same space. A connection.
Me and Sylv found each other again, and as anticipated, we were both changed from the last time we had really known each other. It took some getting used to, but it was for the better for both of us. The Sylv who came to be in Vol II is vastly changed from the Sylv I first imagined, from the Sylv I felt so distanced from those years ago. If I feel shame, it is a shame Sylv has also felt, a shame he has coached me through on long lonesome nights when no-one held us together but ourselves. He does not scowl at me for what I did, what I let be done to me; he knows that pain, that hollowness, knows that we both came to peace with it in the end.
When Vol II is published and I spend a few months creating promotion content then move gradually onto the next thing, I know that he will slowly fade again, and part of me is afraid of that.
But if I need him, I know where he is. Stood in front of the statue of the she-wolf in the Forum in Rome, yes, but also in the way a bird swoops low across the path ahead of me, in the lyrics of a song, in the photograph of a stained glass glow on the floor of a church, in that hollow space in my chest where the sunset lives.
We're home.
[Image ID: a photo of Roman Forum taken from above, looking out over the ruins of columns, arches, and temples. End ID]
[Image ID: a photo of the temple of the Vestal Virgins in the Roman Forum, ruins made of brown stone on several floors surrounded by trees and pink flowers. End ID]
[Image ID: a photo of the temple of Vulcan in the Roman Forum, a classic Roman temple with steps leading up to columns and a sealed-off grey stone building. End ID]
[Image ID: a photo of a carved stone SPQR sign on the wall of a ruin in the Circus Maximus. End ID]
[Image ID: a photo of the Colosseum in Rome taken from street level. End ID]
[Image ID: a photo of the Capitoline Wolf on Capitoline Hill, a bronze statue of a she-wolf suckling two human babies, Romulus and Remus. End ID]