My days were simple, as a tutor to the children of a patrician family, trying to pass myself off as one of the citizens. But I was not one of them. No! The secret of my origin, the echo of a distant time to which I would never return, weighed on me like a burden. I had shared with no one the truth of where I had come from, nor how a simple fragment of terra sigillata had been the portal that would lead me from Spain, in the 20th century, to the shadows of this imperial city.

And it was then, in that instant of apparent calm, that tragedy struck my consciousness. It began with murmurs on street corners, whispers of horror that swept through the streets like a wind that chilled our blood. Lucius Flavius, a young patrician belonging to the gens Flavia, the family of Emperor Vespasian, had been murdered in an unspeakable act. His blood stained not only the floor of Marcus Varius' home, but the honour of his family and that of the whole of Pompeii. His corpse lay in the peristȳlum of the house. His body stripped of life by the blade of a short sword, it would mark the beginning of a chain of events that would overwhelm all attempts at human comprehension, even my own.

I had come to this moment attracted by curiosity, but what unfolded before my eyes was a much darker enigma. I knew that this crime was not just a matter of local hatreds and disputes; the roots went much deeper, touching on aspects of the human soul and the complex web of alliances and power that dominated life in Rome. A crime of this magnitude, involving families close to the emperor, could not easily be hushed up.

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Image of Pompeii Source: pompeii-tickets.com