34 Results with the "MM Fiction" genre
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Chapter
XXIII – The Major Domo
The tarn beside Villa Servi is a typical alpine splash, its airless depths never mingling with the surface water, yet Lady Vita insists it shimmers like the Adriatic when the sun is just right. Welletrix the Veragros knows nothing of the sea, let alone one named Adriatic, but he’s seen his share of lifeless lakes. Caeso and Optio laze on the front porch until he disrupts their tranquility with an authoritative bark. The house cats laying with them are immune, their laziness forgiven after nightly…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XXII – The Lady of the House
In the populous list of ills women must endure, shame comes written in the darkest ink. Lucia Vita Servia is a petite sort with wide hips and an ample bosom. Her large eyes, far too blue for Roman tastes, stem from ages-old Gallic blood, the kind tainting many a provincial household in the Alps. Welletrix, a reedy Helvetian sent home by her brother some years past, stands at the threshold of her room holding a steaming mug. “May I come in?” he asks, and when she nods, he enters and places the mulled…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XXI – The Spectator
Aedan wakes to a gentle song of slapping water. Household goods and jars surround him, but they restrict less than the tight ropes binding his legs. He tugs at the manacles around his wrists and, with a caterpillar’s skill, gets to his feet. His toes warm in the small band of light cast from a narrow slit above the door. Hopping toward it, he gets as close as his chains allow and presses his forehead to the opening. Mossy fish stink tickles his nose, and looking down reveals a wheel motionless on…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XIX – The Month of Honey VI
The northern road bends east, avoiding another of Saturn’s lost stones. They enter Clastidium, an unremarkable collection of stables, eateries, and toilets catering to a daily procession of riverboats and bridge-crossers. “You’re selling water,” Planus scolds the teenage merchant, “when the Padus flows just eighty paces away,” “It flows, awight,” says the young man, unable to articulate his ‘R’s,’ “With the shit, piss, and spunk of evewy pewson living hew,” Titus hands the…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XVIII – The Month of Honey V
Farewells are the worst things. Sometimes. His cage’s wooden walls lay in a stack, and the oars, upright in bronze brackets, rest without their rowers. Even the desk and its stool sit alone, with no sign of the well-dressed supervisor. A shadow on the ramp becomes his Roman—the red-comb helmet under his arm shimmering in a lone ray of sun. A thicker tunic peeks out from his modest breastplate, and wool leggings run from its leather skirt to his boots. “Let’s go, A-Dawn.” He tosses a xanthous…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XVII – The Month of Honey IV
Malaca shows her Phoenician roots with an overabundance of stone and the absence of timber. Roman horses trot over her rocky jetty, each eager for a roomy stable with ample feed and fresher water. Scipio comes ashore with Planus and Titus to heave their ship into dry-dock. Much lighter without her cargo of men, horses, and grain, the Portuna Harena floats along a man-made canal. Her destination is a massive shed with concrete colonnades capped by a double-thatched roof. Two hundred Romans strip down and…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XVI – The Month of Honey III
Twenty-two days find them at Gades, where the narrowest waterway divides the northern isle of Eritheia from its southern sister, Kothinusa. A patchwork of linen canopies spread with barely a sliver between them while trade and circumstance carry on loud enough to rouse the dead. The air carries a disgusting mix of shit and saltwater, but Aedan inhales deeply with his face in the sun. His captor tugs at the sinew cord, irritating his neck; it’s a shameful use of his mother’s blessing but a suitable…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XV – The Month of Honey II
Strong fingers tighten around his spindly arm, dragging him until his feet remember their function. Such rough handling sweetens the pot, as does every grope, grasp, and growl. A new timber jetty stretches to the Krokodilo, who wears a reptilian eye on each side of her keel. Weather-worn triangular teeth line her narrow battering ram, and two banks of oars dangle from her sides, the long overhanging the short. Aedan counts twenty-five, meaning a total rowing complement of fifty. All make way for the…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XIV – The Month of Honey – I
The Bucarati kips upon glossy mudflats. The vessel resembles a timber beetle with its tightly bound sales and dangling oars. It slumbers as men till the wet sands beneath its rudder, digging that will ensure the incoming tide washes her away. Alps-born legionaries crowd her surface planks. They wear fur over their shoulders and wool on their extremities. None are clean-shaven, not even their newly minted leader, Lucius Scipio Servius, whose beard shines golden like the short coils on his head. His…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XIII – The Ancalite Wedding
Lucius Vitus Servius once said that rivalry within ranks festers like flesh rot, and if a general ignores it, he’ll lose a man as quickly as a leg. Julius recalls his old friend’s observation as he watches the murdered man’s son glower at Kombius, a prince of the continental Atrebates. The more concerning bit of flesh rot, however, is Titus Labienus, who listens with jowls tight in resentment as the noble speaks of his time as an Ancalite prisoner. Before their first campaign on the island,…-
109.5 K • Ongoing
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