Chapter 209: Clock Tower
Greece had long since become a province under Roman rule, yet its closeness to the Aegean Sea and its convenient distance from Rome kept it prosperous.
Athens, in particular, remained a center of trade and culture, a city where wealth and ideas circulated as naturally as breath.
Even so, after a thousand years without setting foot in the present world, the one who had always belonged to Athens still felt a faint sense of alienation.
The buildings on both sides of the street retained the bones of classical Greece, but their height and structure carried methods Athena had never seen. The roads followed old lines, yet the wind did not flow the same way. The water did not run with the same rhythm. Even the faces of the people had changed.
Time had rewritten too much.
And yet.
"I have already sensed your return, Rowe."
The silver haired goddess smiled, crimson lips curving. On the bustling street, no one looked her way.
The Age of Gods had ended. Gods could no longer manifest openly in their true forms.
So Athena did not walk the same path as Mars, who climbed back toward divinity by reclaiming a machina god body.
Mars pursued the past.
Athena pursued the future.
When many Greek gods chose to remain in Rome as new deities, Athena led the goddess pantheon under her authority into the Sea of Stars. There, within the planetary core that linked infinite world lines, she watched futures branch and die, bloom and collapse.
A thousand years of observation became a thousand years of insight.
What she manifested now was not a divine shell.
It was spirit.
A body of the soul, closer to the true nature of consciousness than any ornate divinity.
Even as spirit, it still required a shape. A projection of her spiritual core.
Her plain white dress swayed. Her fair form moved forward under the setting sun, silent and steady.
Descending as a soul meant she would gradually solidify here, becoming heavier, more real, more bound to the human world.
That was the conclusion she reached in the Sea of Stars.
She had spent a millennium turning the Authority of Wisdom over countless world lines, filtering information, stripping away noise, forcing convergence, pushing toward a power that brushed the edge of the Root.
It was an unfinished magecraft.
But it carried a clear direction.
With it, she would step down from godhood and step into humanity.
Not by discarding divinity, but by letting both exist in one vessel.
The state she sought had been the same as Rowe's a thousand years ago.
A coexistence.
Her divine name was Athena.
Her human name was Einzbern, a magus born at the beginning of this century.
To seek higher wisdom.
To seek the one who carried wisdom.
"Rowe," she whispered.
"The wise one, beloved by the Goddess of Wisdom."
She would stand alongside wisdom.
More than that, she would stand alongside him again.
To share intimacy again.
Einzbern's tongue touched her lips. A faint blush rose for a reason she did not bother to deny.
---
"Heh. This time you really should thank me, Your Majesty of the Wild Hunt."
In the Roman Palace, in a wide room where curtains shifted with moonlight, Rowe stood by the window and watched the quiet night outside.
Behind him, Merlin sat in a chair that seemed far too comfortable for someone who claimed to live on dreams. Bare feet pressed into the soft carpet. Her body was wrapped in a downy white robe, her posture languid, her vermilion eyes half narrowed with amused satisfaction.
She leaned forward, chin resting on her palm, elbows braced on her knees. Black stocking clad legs crossed lightly, her entire presence a deliberate invitation to distraction.
Rowe did not turn.
Merlin made a pleased, almost cooing sound.
"Humans are laughably fleeting, but the things they build can be surprisingly comfortable."
She smiled, then spoke to the room as if addressing invisible guests.
"What do you all think?"
"The human world really is different from Paradise."
"Filthy."
"Chaotic."
"But I like it," another voice said, bright and greedy. "There are joyful things here."
The voices layered over one another, drifting through the air like dust stirred by the curtains.
Rowe glanced at what looked, to any ordinary eye, like an empty room. Only he and Merlin were there.
And yet he saw them.
Shadows.
Faint outlines, hazy silhouettes that crowded the space without truly occupying it.
Fairies.
Merlin had gone into Paradise, the realm beyond the Sea of Stars, and returned with them.
In the present world, where the Age of Gods had passed, such beings were inherently illusory. Their existence could only be sustained by what humans produced.
Emotion.
Dreams.
The nourishment of the intangible.
That was the principle that allowed a Nightmare to feed.
And it was the same principle that allowed these fairies to linger.
In the Age of Gods, fairies could condense forms through true Aether. Now, they could not.
Merlin lifted a hand and brushed her hair back, lips curling.
"Not all fairies are like me. I am a hybrid, half fairy and half human. I can walk the present world and travel through Paradise."
She tilted her head toward Rowe.
"How about it? The ones I brought are the closest to humanity among Paradise's residents."
Close enough to listen.
Close enough to be shaped.
Rowe raised an eyebrow.
"You are proactive."
Merlin's eyes glinted.
"I want the curtain lifted quickly."
"Tragedy or comedy, either is fine."
"I can feel it. This will be a good show."
"A good show?" A fairy voice chimed in, lively. "Will it bring me joy?"
Merlin chuckled, breath warm and sweet.
"Who knows? But human stories are worth watching."
She was about to add more, to feed them ideas, to stir them toward conflict for her own entertainment.
Then she froze.
Because a presence surfaced beside Rowe.
Melusine.
Silver hair swayed as she leaned forward, face hidden beneath her mask and eyepatch, but her posture alone carried a glare sharp enough to cut.
Merlin was not afraid. The girl was made from a fragment of the Albion Dragon's remains, shaped into a disciple. She was strong, but outside Britannia she did not carry that Primordial weight that transcended levels of existence.
Merlin could not win.
But she could leave.
She simply did not want to be chased again.
Melusine lifted her chin slightly.
"A shame," she said, voice cool. "You are sensible, Nightmare."
Rowe rubbed Melusine's head once, an absent gesture that made her posture soften by a fraction.
Then he clapped his hands, drawing the room's attention.
"Since you are already here, Merlin has likely told you what you will do."
"I know," a red fairy voice burst out at once, bouncing like a spark. The figure was only an outline, but its enthusiasm was unmistakable. "Seek joy."
"No," another voice argued, sharper. "Find the strong. Fight."
They had misunderstood completely.
Rowe smiled anyway.
"It is fine if you did not understand. You will, soon."
"But before that, we sign a contract."
He extended his hand.
"This is your contract with me."
"And more importantly, it is your contract with this era."
"With humanity."
Rowe was not trying to reshape a single city. He was reshaping the Roman Empire of this age, the human world of this moment.
He wanted to carve an eternal mark into the human spirit, and wear that mark as his crown.
Not a contract bound to a person.
A contract bound to a civilization.
A spiritual foundation.
A way for beings like fairies to manifest through spirit rather than through vanished Aether.
It matched their essence perfectly.
"I will grant you a spiritual foundation that lets you walk freely in the present world," Rowe said.
"I will permit you to seek the meaning of your own existence."
"But you will listen to what I say."
His tone stayed calm. That made it heavier.
"I require that you do not bully humans at will."
"I require that you do not display power recklessly."
"I want you to observe humanity."
"I want you to understand the greatness of human continuation."
The fairies fell silent.
Their playful voices stopped. Their auras tightened.
They did not understand, not truly, but the weight of his words pressed them into stillness.
A tall golden fairy spoke concisely.
"In short, we listen."
The red fairy chimed in, careless as flame.
"I do not care about the rest. I just want joy."
One after another, the fairies gave assent.
Merlin's smile widened. Her eyes narrowed with anticipation.
"I am getting more and more excited."
Rowe nodded once.
"Then we begin."
There were eleven fairies present.
Plus Melusine, born from the Albion Dragon and remade into his first disciple.
Twelve.
The Son of God would have twelve Apostles.
Yahweh would have twelve angels.
They would replace the Senate, which refused to cooperate, and become the hands that drove change through the Empire.
To force transformation through beings too pure to be bribed, yet close enough to humanity to be anchored.
"The contract is made," Rowe said quietly.
"Now we begin the transformation of the world."
He smiled.
A scripture like cadence flowed through his thoughts, a quote that would later be rewritten and worshiped by people who never understood its origin.
The Lord called twelve saints and said they were the promised angels.
They would descend.
They would carry the gospel of humanity.
---
At the beginning of the Common Era, the Roman Empire underwent a transformation that later ages called a miracle.
Legends claimed a King from Heaven summoned angels to prevent the stubborn Senate from blocking reform.
That Adjutant, revered by later generations as a Lord of spirit, forced the Empire's stagnation into reverse. His mysterious power pushed Rome forward, and his policies dragged knowledge down to the hands of common people.
He was praised as a reformer.
He was feared as the source of a higher mystery that surpassed Solomon.
If Solomon's Seventy Two Demon Gods were the branching limbs of magecraft, then Rowe's twelve angels were the main trunks that rose above them.
The Seventy Two embodied inheritance, continuation, survival.
The twelve embodied change after decline, the flourishing that followed rot.
So later ages wrote.
So later ages believed.
---
Afterward, everything moved according to plan.
Rowe placed Martha in charge of education.
Her learning was not vast, but she had traveled widely before she met Rowe. She understood local reality. She understood hunger, distance, fear, and the small cruelties that ruined good policies.
She could adapt plans to regions instead of forcing regions to bow to plans.
In a short time, schools funded by imperial power began to spread across Rome.
They were open to all.
Most tuition was covered by the Empire.
But every student swore loyalty to the Emperor beneath the imperial banner.
In the same period, Rowe established an organization called the Fairy Eye.
It was composed of those eleven fairies and managed by them.
He also recruited wandering magi and practitioners, assembling a specialized department that sat outside the ordinary political structure.
It was housed in a tall tower in Rome, a tower that held a giant clock.
So it gained another name.
The Clock Tower.
Whether called Fairy Eye or Clock Tower, it remained hidden within the shadows of the human world.
It was not widely known.
Rowe used it to oversee the Empire.
He used it to dismiss redundant officials and elevate those with true talent.
A purge, conducted with clinical precision.
A replacement of rot with function.
---
The Senate noticed.
"Our people embedded across the provinces are running low."
"Even the provinces still under Senate jurisdiction are being infiltrated."
In the same elegant room as before, firelight painting walls in orange, the elderly nobles who had chosen noncooperation seethed.
They had assumed that by casting them aside, the Emperor and her Adjutant would become helpless.
Reality mocked them.
Rome's provincial system meant not all provinces were directly ruled by the First Consul. Several remained under the Senate's jurisdiction.
And now Rowe's reach extended even there.
If it continued.
"The Senate's power will disappear."
"They used the power of fairies," one spat, unable to hide disgust. "Now, even if we step forward, we cannot stop them."
"But why do the gods not intervene?"
"Have the gods been bewitched too?"
"Rowe," someone hissed. "That man."
Another voice cut in, lower.
"It is said he will tour the provinces with His Majesty soon."
"Should we try?"
"Assassination?" A third snapped, horrified. "Are you insane? If he truly is a descendant of the great wise man who founded Rome…"
Arguments rose, collided, broke apart.
In the end, they all turned to the same person.
The President of the Senate Council.
White hair. White beard. A face worn down by decades of compromise.
He spoke one sentence, in a foreign tongue that sounded like a prayer and a curse at once.
"Am fost in nor, iar apoi spatele este atat un abis."
We are already in the clouds. One step back is an abyss.
Silence fell.
Everyone there was an elder of the Senate, but outside this room, behind them, were forces even more tangled.
Interests intertwined. Threats unspoken. Obligations inherited like disease.
Some things they did not want to fight.
Some things they did not dare to do.
But the people below them, the structures that fed on them, would force their hands anyway.
They had been placed above the clouds long ago.
There was no retreat.
The fire had already been lit.
If the decaying wood of the old era did not want to become fuel, then it could only throw itself into the flames to smother them.
And those who had built their lives in darkness could not simply walk into light.
Not when the people beneath them had already fallen into the abyss.
How could they be allowed to escape?
.....
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