Chapter 3: The Ash-Flower of Vesuvius
The first century of Cassian's second life was a masterclass in profound loneliness. By the year 60 AD, the novelty of being a "walking god" had soured into a cold, clinical observation of humanity. He had spent decades wandering the rim of the Mediterranean, watching the Roman Empire expand like a bloodstain across the map. He was stronger than he had been in Greece—significantly so. His skin had taken on a subtle, marble-like density, and his reflexes had sharpened to the point where the world often seemed to move in slow motion, a frantic dance of mayflies.
He had resolved to never touch the lives of mortals. He was a fixed point; they were smoke. To love one was to invite a grief that would last longer than their entire ancestral line.
Then came Pompeii. And then came Livia.
The Meeting at the Forum
Cassian hadn't intended to stay in the coastal city. He was passing through on his way to Neapolis, seeking a quiet life as a stone-cutter—a trade that allowed him to vent his terrifying physical strength into something productive.
He met her in the Macellum, the great provision market. The sun was high, and the air smelled of fermented fish sauce, expensive incense, and the salt of the Tyrrhenian Sea. A merchant was berating a young woman, accusing her of passing a counterfeit denarius. The crowd was beginning to jeer, the casual cruelty of the Roman mob sensing easy prey.
Cassian usually ignored such trifles. But as he passed, he caught the woman's eyes. They weren't filled with the frantic terror he expected. They were filled with a weary, sharp-edged defiance. She looked like a person who had been fighting the world since the day she was born and was simply tired of the noise.
"The coin is good, Marcus," she said, her voice steady. "Your eyes are just failing as fast as your character."
The merchant raised a meaty hand to strike her.
Cassian didn't think. He didn't move with the supernatural speed he usually kept suppressed; he simply stepped between them. The merchant's fist hit Cassian's chest.
There was a sickening crack. It wasn't Cassian's ribs that broke. The merchant howled, clutching a hand with three shattered knuckles. He looked at Cassian as if he had just punched a bronze statue of Mars.
"The coin is good," Cassian said, his voice low, vibrating with the subterranean power of a century's growth.
The merchant fled. The crowd dispersed, muttering about "the giant."
The woman, Livia, didn't thank him immediately. She adjusted her palla, picked up her basket of figs, and looked him up and down. "You have very hard bones, stranger," she remarked dryly. "Or a very thick tunic."
"I'm just sturdy," Cassian replied.
"Sturdy is for walls," she said, a small, genuine smile breaking through her exhaustion. "You look like a mountain that decided to go for a walk."
Cassian stayed in Pompeii for her. He told himself it was the stone-cutting work, but it was the way Livia looked at him. She was a widow of a Roman soldier, living in a small, sun-drenched house near the Herculaneum Gate. She was literate, sharp-tongued, and entirely unimpressed by the grandiosity of the world.
He chose to marry her because, for the first time in a hundred years, he felt seen but not worshipped. To the Travelers, he was an omen. To the Romans, he was a freak of nature. To Livia, he was just Cassian—a man who worked too hard, spoke too little, and had a strange, comforting warmth that radiated from his skin even in the dead of winter.
He told her he was "blessed by the gods" with long life, a common enough myth in an era of superstition. She accepted it with a shrug. "As long as you're around to fix the roof, I don't care which god gave you the gift," she'd said.
They spent fifteen years together. For Cassian, it was a blink. For Livia, it was the autumn of her life. He watched the fine lines gather at the corners of her eyes. He watched her hair turn from the color of toasted chestnuts to a soft, smoky grey.
He loved her with a desperate, quiet intensity. He used his growing power to make her life a paradise. He could sense a storm coming from fifty miles away, ensuring she was never caught in the rain. He could carry barrels of wine that would take four men to lift, laughing as she called him her "clumsy titan."
But the "Weight" was always there. As the years passed, Cassian felt himself becoming denser. He had to be careful when he held her; his grip could unintentionally bruise her ripening skin. He felt like a star trying to inhabit a house made of glass.
The Tremors of the Mountain
In August of 79 AD, the earth began to speak.
The locals were used to tremors, but Cassian felt them differently. He could feel the magma shifting miles beneath the crust. He could feel the tectonic tension building like a coiled snake. To his heightened senses, the mountain—Vesuvius—wasn't just a hill. It was a pressure cooker on the verge of exploding.
"We have to leave, Livia," he said one morning. The air was unnaturally still. The birds had stopped singing.
Livia was kneeling in her garden, her hands stained with soil. She was sixty now, her movements slower, her breath a bit more labored. "The grapes are almost ready, Cassian. And my knees aren't fit for a journey to Neapolis."
"Livia, listen to me," he said, kneeling beside her. He took her hands in his. He felt the fragility of her bones, the papery thinness of her skin. The contrast to his own indestructible form had never been more painful. "The mountain is going to wake. It's going to scream."
She looked at him, and for the first time, she saw the true depth of the "Something Else" inside him. She saw the old soul trapped in the 25-year-old face.
"You aren't just 'blessed,' are you?" she whispered.
"No," he said.
"Will you be okay?" she asked. Not 'Will we be okay?' She knew.
"I cannot be hurt," he said, the truth tasting like ash in his mouth.
She smiled, a sad, beautiful thing. "Then I suppose I can survive a little walk to the harbor."
They never made it to the harbor.
At noon, the top of Vesuvius didn't just erupt; it disintegrated. A pillar of ash and pumice shot twelve miles into the sky, turning day into a bruised, sickly twilight. The sound was a physical blow, a roar that shattered the eardrums of half the city.
Cassian reacted instantly. As the first rain of stones began to fall, he scooped Livia into his arms. She was light—too light.
"Close your eyes! Don't breathe the dust!" he commanded.
He began to run. In his desperation, he stopped holding back. Every stride tore up the paving stones of the Via dell'Abbondanza. He was a blur of motion, weaving through the screaming crowds. People were being crushed by falling roof tiles; the air was thick with the sulfurous stench of the underworld.
He made it to the city walls when the first pyroclastic surge hit. It wasn't a flow of lava; it was a wall of superheated gas and ash traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. It was a wave of three hundred degrees Celsius.
Cassian saw it coming. There was no shelter.
He dropped to his knees, tucked Livia beneath him, and curled his body into a protective vault. He braced his hands and feet into the earth, anchoring himself like a mountain.
The surge hit.
It was like being sandblasted by the sun. The heat was enough to turn the blood of a mortal to steam instantly. Cassian felt the skin of his back sear—not because he was burning, but because the air itself was trying to find a way to consume him. His clothes vanished in a heartbeat, charred to nothing.
But his body held. His "Growth" had given him a durability that defied physics. He was a heat-sink. He drew the thermal energy into his core, his internal battery glowing with the sheer intake of power. He felt himself becoming even more indestructible in the heart of the catastrophe.
"Livia," he choked out, his voice muffled by the roaring wind of the surge. "Hold on. I have you. I have you."
He stayed like that for hours, a statue of living flesh amidst a whirlwind of death. He felt the ash pile up around them, burying them in a tomb of grey powder. He felt the secondary surges, the earthquakes that leveled the villas around them. He didn't move. He was the anchor.
When the air finally cooled and the roaring stopped, the world was silent. The city of Pompeii was gone, replaced by a wasteland of undulating grey ash.
Cassian pushed upward. The hardened ash over him cracked like a shell. He rose from the ground, naked, coated in soot, but completely unscarred. The heat that had melted the silver coins in the pockets of the dead had done nothing but make him feel "heavy" with new energy.
He looked down at what he was holding.
Livia was still in the pose of someone being protected. But she was gone.
She hadn't burned—Cassian's body had absorbed the heat. She hadn't been crushed—his strength had held the weight of the city. But the air... the air had been fire. The first breath of the surge had scorched her lungs before he could even tuck her head away. She had died in the first second of the impact, her heart stopping from the sheer shock of the pressure wave.
She looked peaceful, like a charcoal sketch of the woman he loved.
Cassian sat in the middle of the wasteland, cradling her. He didn't scream. He didn't rail against the gods. He simply felt the horrific, exponential growth of his own power. He was stronger now than he had been yesterday—the heat of the volcano had "charged" him, making his skin harder, his senses sharper, his life more permanent.
And that was the cruelty of it. Every tragedy made him more of a god. Every loss fueled the very thing that separated him from the people he loved.
He spent the night digging. He didn't need a shovel; he tore through the hardened volcanic flow with his bare fingers as if it were wet clay. He buried Livia deep, beneath the ash and the stone, in the place where her garden used to be.
As the sun rose over the ruined horizon, Cassian stood up. He felt the world pulling at him, the gravity of his own existence feeling slightly more pronounced. He was 179 years old. He was the most powerful being in the Roman Empire, and he was utterly alone.
He turned his back on the buried city and began to walk. He didn't look back. He had 1,900 years to go, and he had finally learned the most important lesson of his immortality:
To live forever is not to triumph over death; it is to become a graveyard for everyone you have ever known.