Page 1 of I Will Always Find You
ITALIA 1st Century CE
POMPEII
ASthe young Romani witch dug his hands into the earth of Mount Vesuvius, a torrent of rage coursed through his veins. Each gritty handful he grasped was a manifestation of his fury. He felt nothing but hate—hate for the ones who had taken his great love from him, those villains who deemed the two lovers unnatural and sought their destruction.
And they had destroyed them—by killing his Aeneas. Beautiful Aeneas, with his flowing red locks and chiselled features, as finely crafted by the gods as if they had constructed him of marble and made it flesh. The name Aeneas meant “a god inhabiting a mortal body;” it could not have fit the magnificence of his beloved more perfectly.
But none of the trappings of beauty and resplendence mattered anymore.
Nothing mattered—except revenge.
“Bastards!” the Romani witch hissed, the word barely escaping his lips as he gnashed his teeth, the tension palpable in his jaw.Hot tears cascaded down his cheeks, staining his flushed, tawny skin. As his thick, coarse black hair matted to his sweaty brow, his face contorted in a mask of bitterness, reflecting the depth of his enmity towards those who had wronged him.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, quietly invoking the spirits of his ancestors, seeking their strength and guidance to empower him.
Channelling his will, his very soul into his hands, now immersed in the rich, black earth, a soil nourished through the ages by layers of volcanic ash and the remnants of ancient lava flows, the Romani witch felt the ground’s deep warmth welcome him. As righteous anger suffused every fibre of his being, he spoke ancient words, their resonance lingering in the air like a whisper of secret lore.
“Ira.” [“Wrath.”] “Mons.” [“Mountain.”] “Erumpere.” [“Burst forth.”]
There were other words, more arcane and powerful, in a long-forgotten language that his grandmother had taught him—dangerous words she had hoped he would never need to utter. She was a wise and cunning woman with strong magic—stronger than his, he feared—but she was dead and could not aid him.
No one from the Romani witch’s bloodline remained; his family had been slaughtered not long ago by members of Rome’s Praetorian Guard. His family’s vardo had been inconveniently in the way of the army’s march toward Britannia, but they were not asked to move their small wheeled home, which could have been done quickly with their horse. Instead, they were moved by impatience and cruelty! Innocent Roma blood soon thickly coated Roman steel.
The Romani witch had longed believed that the goddess Fortuna was watching over him on that horrid day, and, sadly, had chosen to protect only him with her divine magic: the power of luck.
He was the sole survivor of the slaughter, having been foraging in the forest when the Romans arrived, hidden by the thick, shadowy embrace of the woods as the chaos unfolded. While concealed among the trees and undergrowth, the harrowing sounds of conflict eventually echoed through the air, and sharp cries of terror soon resonated in his ears.
His heart had raced with desperation and dread as he sprinted toward the boundary where the trees stood like ancient sentinels. Upon reaching the clearing, a horrifying scene unfolded before him: a brutal massacre that stole the breath from his lungs.
Crouching in the shadows of the great trees, he watched his loved ones fall victim to brutality, one after another.
An overwhelming wave of terror stifled the magic within him that day—power that flowed through him alone, now that his grandmother was gone. And it might have saved his family. In that past moment of despair, he cursed himself for surrendering to a paralysis born of darkness and fear. For that, he would feel eternal shame; he had vowed that day never to let fear control him again.
And so, being entirely alone now, for his beloved Aeneas was gone, he needed to make the magic happen himself. And it had to work! Vengeance demanded it!
Justice demanded it.
For countless hours, the Romani witch sat on the ground, knees drawn to his chest, his hands buried within Vesuvius’ earthen flesh, in a feverish trance, chanting the spell for devastation over and over. He summoned the ancient power with each intonation, urging the ground beneath him to tremble and the mighty mountain to release its pent-up fury.
Once high in the azure sky, the god Apollo’s brilliant radiance gradually surrendered its dominance to the goddess Nox—light giving way to darkness, as was expected daily. The Romani witchbarely noticed the celestial golden orb ceding to the creeping shadows of dusk.
He called upon Mother Earth herself, Terra, the Titan-goddess of nature, imploring her to shatter the mountain’s lofty peak. As the earth quaked in response to his fervent pleas, he envisioned the cataclysmic eruption, with molten rock cascading down the slopes and fiery ash descending like an angry rain upon the city of Pompeii and its wicked people.
The Romani witch prayed to Terra to empower his spellwork to produce a fiery deluge of retribution that would engulf all in its path, striking terror into the hearts of the witch-killers before ending their miserable, murderous lives.
All those who were guilty would pay. The Romani witch would punish the ones who had beaten his beloved, the gentle, kind Aeneas, nearly to death, mutilated his handsome face, and then left him to die in the centre of the city, bleeding out, as birds pecked at his flesh and clawed at his hollow eyes, once the most vibrant jade green. He would make the people who spat upon a dying, pained, innocent young man, laughing at his wretched fate, pay.
The price for heresy, for practicing an ancient Egyptian religion and performing even benign mystic rites or spells of a foreign craft in the Roman city of Pompeii, was death by crucifixion. That was sweet Aeneas’ crime.
Those who remained silent, choosing not to intervene, who walked away and averted their gaze from the anguish endured by his beloved as he hung from the wood by large metal nails would also face the consequences of their indifference—or cowardice.
And so, everyone in Pompeii would pay.
It was while the young Romani witch had been travelling outside the city walls for a few days, among those the Romans called “gypsies,”his people, trading for fabrics, food, spices, andeven mystical objects, that the Roman witchfinders took his beloved.
The citizens of Pompeii had long feared Aeneas, the half-breed, with the Roman father and Egyptian mother, with his sensuous mouth, foreign-looking eyes, molten-bronze skin, broader, less aquiline nose, and the wild, shimmering red hair that many superstitious fools believed to be a sign of witchcraft, of devilry, of Jinn-kind.
The top of Pompeii’s social hierarchy, the Senatorial Elite, gripped by a growing aversion to foreigners, had declared with fervent conviction that the practices of ancestral magic and the enigmatic rites of Romani mysticism were directly opposed to the will of the revered Olympian Pantheon. Whispers of impending wrath echoed through the streets as all feared that the gods Venus and Bacchus, the patron deities of their city, would unleash their fury upon Pompeii for its perceived heresies, blatant disrespect, and wavering loyalty.
