The history books of 2026 painted Rome as the cradle of civilization, a city of white marble, philosophy, and light.
When Bilal was dragged from the dark hull of the ship into the port of Ostia, he saw the brutal, rotting truth of the 11th century. The marble of the Colosseum had been stripped away by greedy warlords. The aqueducts were broken, spilling stagnant water into the streets. And the economy of the "Holy City" was entirely fueled by human flesh.
Bilal was thrown into a holding pen with fifty other slaves. There were Slavs captured from the East, Africans taken from the Mediterranean, and Anglo-Saxons sold by their own lords.
In Axiomra, Bilal had made a law: A man's labor buys his freedom.
Here, labor was a death sentence.
The slaves were stripped naked, their bodies inspected like livestock. Guards with whips made of braided ox-hide struck anyone who moved too slowly. The stench of dysentery, fear, and infected wounds was suffocating.
Bilal sat in the corner, his white hair matted with dirt, his once-massive 105kg frame reduced to eighty kilograms of hollowed-out bone and stringy muscle. He stared at the dirt floor, trapped in his own depression, waiting for the executioner.
Then, a sharp crack echoed through the pen.
A Roman guard was whipping an older Slavic man. The man had a broken ankle and couldn't stand up fast enough for the morning inspection. The guard raised the heavy leather whip again, screaming in Latin.
Bilal's mind was shattered. His will to live was gone. He believed he was a failure who had gotten eight hundred of his people killed.
"Let it go," the depression whispered in his brain. "It is not your city. He is not your citizen. Close your eyes."
But Bilal was not a Viking. He was not a Roman. He was a modern man who had spent twenty-six years protecting the weak. His brain was broken, but his reflexes were governed by his soul.
As the whip came down for the third strike, a massive, scarred, bony hand reached out and caught the leather mid-air.
The guard froze. He looked down.
The Giant had moved. Bilal didn't stand up. He was still sitting in the dirt. But his fist was wrapped around the whip, holding it with a grip so terrifyingly tight the leather groaned.
Bilal slowly looked up. His face was gaunt, his cheeks hollow, his skin bruised. But his dark eyes were no longer blank. They were burning with the cold, dead fire of the Northern Winter.
He didn't speak a word of Latin. He just stared into the guard's soul.
The guard felt a primal, shivering terror run down his spine. He realized he wasn't looking at a slave. He was looking at a dormant volcano. The guard dropped the handle of the whip and took three steps back.
Bilal let the whip fall to the dirt. He reached over, pulled the shivering, bleeding Slavic man closer to him to share his body heat, and went back to staring at the floor.
He was broken. But the readers, and the slaves in that pen, knew the truth: The Giant was still in there...