01
The Consular Candidate
The summons came at the third hour. Lucius Valerius Catullus, junior consular secretary, received it from a Praetorian who didn't meet his eyes.
Every published story, newest first.
The summons came at the third hour. Lucius Valerius Catullus, junior consular secretary, received it from a Praetorian who didn't meet his eyes.
Marcus found the creek by following the deer trail downslope. The dogs were ranging ahead—Kara and Bell, his tracking pair—and they'd stopped at the water's edge, ears forward, tails low.
Niccolò Polo learned the war had reached the Volga from a spice merchant who would not meet his eyes.
Marco Lombardi had been working the Genoa docks for twelve years when the galleys came back from Caffa.
The delegation arrived at the sixth hour, when Sulla was reviewing execution lists.
Young survey assistant Marcus Finlay has been mapping Bengal for six months when his instruments begin to contradict his guide. Both are right. That is what makes it a problem.
Juan Espinosa survived the defeat at Tenochtitlan. He has been writing his account for three months. He cannot finish it because he has not yet written the thing he actually saw.
Six months after Hoffmann dissolved the last monastery on his list, a letter arrives from a monk he can't remember. It says only: I have found what you were looking for.
After Emperor Joseph dissolves the monastery, Brother Anselm stays behind to oversee the inventory. Three days alone with a library that is learning to look back.
The Vienna cataloguer received forty-three manuscripts from the dissolved monasteries of Lower Austria. He catalogued them correctly. He understood every one. That was the problem.
Paolo unloaded the ships that came into Genoa in October of 1347, and he remembered, later, that the gulls would not land on the masts.
They brought the old man into the room at noon and sat him across from Tribune Casca, who had been asking questions about Cicero's death for three days and had not yet received an answer that satisfied anyone.
The entity had been waiting in Processing Room 7 for three hours when Clerk Venn finally looked up from his terminal and said, 'I'm going to need you to fill out Form 27-B.'
Dr. Sarah Chen had been listening to the signal from Kepler-442 for eight months when she realized she didn't want to decode it.
Thomas Brennan sits in a jail cell three hours before his execution, watching Apache scouts position themselves for tomorrow's attack on Millfield. His telegraph skills revealed the threat—but also make him the outlaw no one will believe.
Genealogist Sarah Kellerman's nightmares of the London Blitz feel disturbingly real—until she discovers they might be her grandmother's memories bleeding through seventy-five years of death.
Commander Elena Vasquez is the last person alive who remembers Earth—and the only one who knows their generation ship is heading toward the wrong planet. But how do you convince a crew that thinks Earth is mythology?
Captain Maria Santos sits in a negotiation tent between American and Taliban forces, holding the power to prevent or enable a massacre through her choice of which words to translate accurately.
Detective Ray Castellanos has spent 22 years learning that justice and law aren't the same thing. When a child killer is about to walk free on a technicality, Ray faces a choice that will define what kind of cop he really is.
Marcus Junius Brutus faces the impossible choice between personal loyalty to Caesar and ancestral duty to the Republic in the days before the Ides of March assassination.
Cicero faces his final confrontation with Mark Antony, choosing martyrdom over exile as he delivers one last defense of the dying Roman Republic.
King Priam risks everything in a midnight journey to enemy camp to ransom his son Hector's body from Achilles, discovering that shared grief transcends hatred.
Tribune Cassius Chaerea endures months of humiliation from Emperor Caligula through deliberately effeminate passwords. His professional patience and accumulated evidence lead to the assassination that ended the reign of a mad god.
Dr. Sarah Chen designed the triage protocols that decide who gets life-saving medicine during a pandemic. But when her eight-year-old daughter is dying, even the expert who created the system discovers that some choices destroy the chooser.
Dr. Sarah Chen discovers that her revolutionary neural cartography technology has been used for systematic memory editing, forcing her to choose between exposing the program and destroying thousands of lives built on false memories.
Dr. Marcus Webb counsels families choosing consciousness preservation technology, discovering that immortality systematically destroys the emotional architecture that defines humanity.
First contact translator Elena Vasquez discovers that alien consciousness merger technology offers perfect understanding at the cost of individual human identity.
At the Rubicon River in 49 BCE, Julius Caesar faces the choice that will define not only his fate, but the future of Rome itself. In our history, he crossed. But what if the greatest general of his age chose to be his father's son instead?
In 82 BCE, the dictator Sulla faces a decision that will reshape Roman history: whether to execute the young Julius Caesar or spare the one person he knows will undo his life's work.
Alcibiades swore by the gods to help the Spartan ambassadors. By evening, he had destroyed them with their own words. In Athens, oaths were just another weapon of war.
In 30 BCE Alexandria, Augustus faces the brutal arithmetic of empire: which of Antony's children live and which die, and why mercy sometimes defies all political logic.
When forensic archaeologist Dr. Elena Vasquez discovers evidence that could rewrite human history, she faces a choice between truth and the peace that comes from not knowing.
When the Ninth Legion Hispana vanished beyond Hadrian's Wall in 120 CE, Tribune Marcus Flavius Tertius was tasked with investigating their fate. The testimonies he collected reveal a choice between conquest and guardianship that echoes across the centuries.
Young Julius Caesar, captured by pirates who demand twenty talents for his freedom, laughs in their faces and insists he's worth at least fifty. They think it's arrogance. They don't understand it's a promise.
When Washington asked for a volunteer to spy on the British, the old French sergeant knew better. 'I do not feel willing to go among them to be hung up like a dog.' But Nathan Hale was twenty-one, and twenty-one has never understood the wisdom of staying alive.
In 2157, consciousness archaeologist Dr. Elena Vasquez discovers technology that allows her to inhabit the minds of historical figures. When she downloads the consciousness of Marcus Aurelius during his final plague-ridden days, she triggers an ancient Roman transformation curse that begins reshaping her body—and her reality.
In 1610, young Marco learns that Galileo's telescope reveals more than Jupiter's moons. As the Inquisition closes in, he must choose between cosmic truth and earthly survival.
In the dying light of three alien suns, a Germanic space-warrior faces the choice between honor and survival when kindness to a seemingly worthless creature reveals the key to preventing an inevitable cosmic war.
He had mapped three continents, survived two shipwrecks, and catalogued the ruins of empires no one else believed had existed. What he could not map was the silence that followed him home.
An elderly baker whose bread won't rise discovers that the secret ingredient is community when a traveling musician and regular customers help him rediscover the joy of his craft.
Thank you. Matthias reads every message and will reply when he can.