The villa was grand, yet cold. Her master, Lucius Marcellus, a Roman senator, barely looked at her when
assigning her to work as a handmaiden. But the women of the house, and worse—Lucius' brother Gaius
Marcellus and his grown son Tiberius Marcellus—treated Aurelia like a toy.
She endured their presence, their entitled stares, the silent threats behind every gesture. The touches came
when no one was watching. The words they said to her weren't commands—they were claims. She found
herself shrinking into silence, her dignity buried under obedience.
At night, she wrote small prayers on the ground with a stick: "Dionysus, Artemis, let me vanish like mist."