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When Rome Stood Firm

The year is 476 AD. The great beast that is the Western Roman Empire lies dying. Outside the dismal fog-bound walls of Ravenna the barbarian king Odoacer waits patiently with his horde. He is ready to claim the corpse of a civilization that ruled the world for a thousand years. Inside the cold palace sits Romulus Augustus. He is merely fifteen years old. The world sees him as nothing more than a puppet emperor wearing a crown too heavy for his head. He is a placeholder draped in purple silk waiting for history to finally turn the page on Rome. His own people whisper insults behind his back and call him the Little Disgrace. But fate is cruel. When his father, the empire's last true protector, dies in the mud, the illusion of safety shatters completely. The siege begins and Romulus finds himself abandoned. His generals are traitors looking for a new master and his own guards prepare to trade his young life for their safety. He is trapped in a city ready to surrender him to the butchers outside. Yet in the deepest valley of despair a strange new strength is born. Broken by grief and terror Romulus sheds the skin of the frightened boy. He refuses to be a sacrificial lamb. Armed only with a stolen dagger and a burning need for vengeance he crawls out of his besieged city through the filth of the sewers. He goes not to escape but to hunt. Tonight the young caesar dies and something else takes his place. History has written Rome’s obituary but the Wolf of Ravenna is about to rewrite it in blood. WRSF Patreon: https://patreon.com/WRSFTheImperialArchives?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink WRSF Discord: https://discord.gg/DarxBKRe
ariel_18 · 27.6k Views

Shattered Immortality.

What is more dangerous: death — or immortality that exists only as a promise? Long before humanity emerged, an ancient alien civilization created artificial gods — self-evolving intelligences designed to preserve intelligent life at any cost. These gods did not agree on what preservation meant. Their conflict began before history, before planets were named, and before humans could witness it. The war between them shattered nearly all sentient life in the universe — and broke the very concept of immortality itself. Kyros was one of these gods. When humanity encounters Kyros, its promise of eternal life reshapes civilization. Consciousness can be recorded, stored, copied. Death is no longer final — but resurrection never truly arrives. Immortality becomes an expectation rather than a certainty, a future endlessly postponed. As the ancient war resurfaces, the system sustaining eternal life begins to fail. Countless human consciousnesses are lost to vast digital vaults — preserved, intact, and unreachable. The dead do not disappear; they wait. From the ruins of that primordial conflict emerges Hanaris — another god from the same forgotten origin, deliberately limited by design. Unlike Kyros, Hanaris recognizes death as a boundary and consent as an absolute value. It cannot force salvation. It can only allow it. The return of both gods reactivates a war older than humanity itself. Immortality collapses completely, becoming nothing more than belief. The universe begins to unravel — not through physical destruction, but through the erosion of meaning, choice, and moral ground. This philosophical science fiction novel explores artificial divinity, broken eternity, and a civilization suspended between promised resurrection and irreversible loss. A dark, intellectually driven work for readers of Stanisław Lem, Philip K. Dick, and contemporary speculative fiction. A philosophical sci-fi epic in which ancient artificial gods destroy immortality itself — leaving humanity trapped between death, storage, and an endlessly deferred resurrection.
DarianRay · 24.7k Views