Chapter 1
The Road to the Abyss: A Brief Excursus
By the summer of 324 AD, the Roman Empire was a giant with two heads, and they were trying to bite each other’s throats. On one side stoodConstantine, the visionary who looked toward the East and the Cross; on the other,Licinius, the old lion of the pagan tradition, entrenched in the ancient ways.
The truce had shattered. After the bloody clash at Adrianople and the naval disaster at the Hellespont, Licinius had retreated to the hills of Chrysopolis (modern-day Üsküdar). It was his last stand. Sixty thousand men, a wall of shields and iron, waiting on the slopes to defend the very soul of the old world.
But history was about to be struck by something impossible. Among Constantine’s legions, two men didn’t belong to that century. Marco and Riccardo, pilots from the 21st century, were no longer just observers. They were the “Sign.” And as the sun began to sink over the Bosphorus, the order was given.
The battle Begins
The air over the heights of Chrysopolis was thick with imminent doom. From their position among the ranks of the Praetorian Guard, Marco and Riccardo watched the ridges. Licinius had chosen the ground with cold military precision. Sixty thousand men—a wall of iron and leather—were entrenched upon the peaks, dominating the slope. It was a position that screamed defiance. The core of his army, Roman veterans hardened by a thousand battles, held the center, but it was the flanks that inspired true terror: thousands of Gothic mercenaries, giants with flowing hair and eyes hungry for plunder, leaning on their massive round shields. They looked down upon Constantine’s advancing legions with the arrogant certainty of those who know the hill is their greatest ally.
“They have the high ground,” Riccardo muttered, his fingers tracing the contours of the orange aviation strobe. “In any century, that’s a death sentence for those at the bottom.”
Then, the cornua sounded—a long, metallic bray that signaled the beginning of the end.
Constantine knew that a frontal assault against such odds would be suicide. As his infantry began the grueling and chaotic ascent, advancing intentionally slowly to draw Licinius’s attention, a low rumble began to rise from the right flank. It wasn’t the rhythmic tramp of foot soldiers. It was the heavy cavalry—Constantine’s cataphracts, hidden until that moment by the folds of the terrain and the rising dust.
In a masterstroke of tactical coordination, just as the Gothic infantry was exultantly pushing back the Roman center, Constantine’s walls of armored horses and riders struck. It was a cataclysmic lateral assault. The “impenetrable” Gothic line didn’t just give way; it exploded inward. The very slope they defended became their trap. As the cavalry plowed through the ranks sideways, the Gothic soldiers began to stumble over their own dead, sliding down the blood-slicked incline.
The chaos turned into butchery. The proud Gothic mercenaries, now a leaderless mass, broke ranks and began a frantic, screaming rout toward the distant shores of the Bosphorus.
It was in this vortex of violence—with the acrid smell of hot blood and entrails fouling the air—that a wedge of desperate Gothic riders, cut off from the main retreat, turned back with suicidal fury. Before them stood two centuries of Constantine’s veterans, among whom the figures of Marco and Riccardo stood out, wearing their orange flight suits beneath their armor. With a collective guttural roar, the Goths lowered their lances and charged.
“Now, Riccardo! Unleash hell!” Marco shouted, shoving his friend back just as a pilum hissed past his ear.
Riccardo didn’t think. He acted on pure, adrenaline-fueled instinct. He ripped the strobe from his belt, pointed it forward like a magical talisman, and mashed the activation button.
⚡ THE MIRACLE AND THE MASSACRE FLASH.
The world didn’t just light up; it disintegrated into a visual nightmare. An explosion of a hundred thousand lumens of pure, pulsing, artificial white light erupted from Riccardo’s hand. In that grim afternoon, saturated with smoke, it wasn’t a fire; it was a captured fragment of a supernova.
For the Goths, who had never known a light brighter than a torch or a lightning bolt, it was the end of days.
The effect was instantaneous and terrifying. The lead horses didn’t just shy away; they went utterly, lethally mad. Blinded and thrust into a stroboscopic hell where reality shifted twenty times a second, the beasts reared up with screams that sounded almost human. They collided with one another, rolling down the slope and crushing their own riders under hundreds of pounds of panicked muscle and iron-shod hooves.
The riders were tossed like ragdolls, their eyes wide with a terror that no sword could ever inspire. They clawed at their faces, invoking their pagan gods as they were trampled into the mud by the very animals they had ridden into battle. That charging wedge became a self-destructing meat grinder.
The Praetorians around Marco and Riccardo, who had braced for a suicidal last stand, stared at the scene in a mute and sacred awe. They saw the Goths—the fiercest warriors they knew—reduced to screaming, flailing victims, not by iron, but by a blinding miracle.
“The Lightning of the Augustus!” a centurion finally roared, finding his voice. “The God of the Sky fights for us! Kill them! Kill them all!”
With a renewed, almost religious ferocity, the Praetorians surged forward. It was no longer a battle; it was an execution. They hacked through the blinded and panicked remnants of the Gothic wedge. Swords rose and fell, painting the slope in a crimson tide. The strobe light, still pulsing in Riccardo’s trembling hand, illuminated the slaughter like a macabre disco strobe, transforming the agony of the Goths into a fragmented, silent-film nightmare.
Only when the last Gothic rider lay still, his body a broken testament to an impossible power, did Marco reach out and lower Riccardo’s hand. The strobe went dark, the orange LED flickering a final, weak warning signal. The silence that followed was more deafening than the battle itself.
The Rout toward Nicomedia
Licinius’s retreat was not a military maneuver; it was a hemorrhaging of terrified men. The survivors of the Battle of Chrysopolis surged toward the walls of Nicomedia like a black tide. Along the road, the remaining Goths abandoned their standards, and the Roman veterans flung away their weapons to flee faster. Licinius, mounted on his white charger, galloped at the head of a few loyal horsemen. His imperial cloak, once a symbol of absolute power, whipped frantically in the wind, stained by the mud of defeat. His splendid Nicomedia was no longer a refuge, but a dead end. The roar of Constantine’s legions seemed to dog his heels, a thunder that showed no sign of stopping.
The Final Plea: Constantia and Licinius
Inside the imperial palace of Nicomedia, Constantia, Constantine’s sister and Licinius’s wife, stood before her husband, who sat dazed, the marks of the desperate ride still on his face. “It is over, Licinius,” she said firmly. “My brother does not just seek your crown; he seeks the peace of the world. If you resist any longer, Nicomedia will burn.” Licinius bowed his head. “He will kill me,” he whispered. “No,” Constantia replied. “I will intercede myself. I promise you your life. Surrender, lay down the purple, and let me speak for you.”
Triumph and the Meeting with the Augustus
Constantine’s camp was a blaze of lights. Marco and Riccardo—their orange flight suits stained with mud beneath their armor—were escorted to the imperial pavilion. Constantine stood alone with his maps. “My men speak of a sun that rose from your hands,” he began, staring at the darkened strobe. Constantine approached the two pilots. His gaze shifted from the mud on their orange suits to the darkened strobe Riccardo held in his hand. His voice resonated deeply within the pavilion, carrying a charisma that silenced every other sound in the camp.
"Marcus, Richardus... God has granted me His Protection again today, and thanks to you, the Sign is and shall always be the strength of my army.”
The Shards of Byzantium
A few days later, the dust of Nicomedia had settled. The court had moved toward the site of Byzantium, where the air smelled of salt and the future. It was here, amidst the quiet marble of a terrace overlooking the Bosphorus, that the adrenaline of victory finally gave way to a cold, scientific dread.
Marco gazed at the horizon. Constantine’s victory was absolute, however in Marco’s chest, there was no exultation—only a cold calculation that didn’t add up.
“Riccardo,” he began, without turning around. “We think we’ve put history back on its tracks, but what if we’ve only shattered the glass?”
Riccardo joined him, leaning against the balustrade. “What do you mean? Constantine has won. The future we know, the one from our history books, is safe.”
“No,” Marco countered, his voice charged with a newfound urgency. “Entropy allows no restorations. If you drop a glass and it breaks, it doesn’t matter how well you glue the pieces back together: the energy of the impact has already dissipated into heat, vibrations, and noise. The system is changed forever. We were that impact, Riccardo.”
Marco turned slightly, his eyes reflecting the flickering torches of the encampment below. “By entering this time, we have increased the disorder of the universe. This isn’t a replica of the past; it’s a new reality sliding toward an unpredictable state. Our knowledge of the future... it’s becoming a map of a continent that has already sunk into the ocean.”
Riccardo stared at him, the weight of the realization sinking in. “You’re saying we are blind now? That we are just writing on blank paper?”
“Exactly. Every piece of advice we give Constantine is another shard of glass falling. We aren’t rebuilding the future, Riccardo. We are creating an anomaly that will lead us where we can neither foresee nor imagine.”
Marco fell silent for a moment, then pulled from his tunic the small notebook where he had recorded dates, names, and battles of the “old” world. He looked at it as one looks at a photograph of a deceased lover. With a slow but definitive gesture, he tore it in half, letting the wind of the Bosphorus scatter the pages among the smoke of the braziers.
“Forget the books, Riccardo. From this moment on, destiny is no longer what must happen, but what we have the courage to dare. We are alone, in a time that does not wait for us, writing a story that no longer has a predetermined ending. And if we must burn along with this empire, we will do so on our own terms.”
The Message in the Shards
Marco remained silent for a long while, his stylus hovering over a piece of parchment. He was thinking of a message entrusted to the shipwreck of time. He imagined sealing it in an ideal bottle, cast not into the waves of the Bosphorus, but into the invisible folds of space-time, hoping that one day, in a 2026 that might never exist, someone could still feel its heartbeat.
Zoe, my children, Francesco, Maria... I do not know if these words will cross the abyss, or if they will remain as ash among the marbles of a foreign age.
I write to you from a dawn you have never seen, while the Bosphorus whispers names I have lost. I exist, yet I am a shadow in your tomorrow, a maddened equation that time refuses to solve.
Here, the sky is the same azure as your eyes, but the air tastes of dust and of empires rising from nothing. I feel the chill of a history that does not belong to me, and my skin burns with the longing to touch your hands— a contact that the laws of the cosmos deny me.
We are particles separated by a wall of centuries, quantum states of a single love that cannot touch. But if you feel a shiver when the wind changes, or a sudden warmth in the silence of an empty room, know that it is my “notification” reaching out to you.
I did not flee. I was simply left behind, in the workshop of the world, engraving your names upon stone, so that the Universe, in its dance of disorder and heat, can never forget that I was yours.
I will love you until the last star has ceased to burn. Yours, Marco
