"What you seek is seeking you."

In the middle of the Roman Forum is a hole.

It’s paved over at the moment, hidden beneath a lovely marble terrace adjoining the Temple of Saturn, newly restored after the War. And under that, layer upon layer of the dust of the ancient city itself, washed down from the hills of Rome with the rain. So you can't actually see the hole. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

It has always been there.

The founder of Rome, Romulus himself, hated the hole. He thought it was creepy, having been told by the people he stole the land from that it had a name—the Mundus, “the World,” or, perhaps, the Mundus Cereis, “Ceres’ World”—so difficult to understand these stupid, peaceful farmers, choking on their lifeblood as they died. But something mysterious anyway and a bit disturbing too, about it not really being a hole, but a door to the world of the ancient gods under the earth.

A passageway.

Anyhoo, creepy. So Romulus decided to fix it by filling it up. First by commanding every newly-minted citizen of Rome to throw a fistful of dirt from their original homeland into it. And when that failed, to toss in the first fruits of the harvests, and precious things, and blood sacrifices.

But the hole was never filled up and it was never filled in, because it isn’t, and never was, just a hole.

Romulus never got that. In many ways Romulus was an idiot in addition to being a brute; a man who killed his own brother and a great many of his neighbors besides, a man who stole anything that wasn't nailed down, up to and including your mum, the moment your back was turned. And worse, he wasn’t even technically a man but a vampire, newly made and as greedy as all his kind to carve out an empire in which to spend his eternity on earth. And he succeeded, too, in the end; bashing together Urbs Aeterna, “the Eternal City” out of war and mud, murder and plunder. Not to mention copious amounts of blood-sucking.

But back to the hole. After centuries, after everyone had forgotten its name and what it was supposed to be for, the hole was still annoyingly present in the middle of the forum. So the Romans finally threw up their hands and built a nice marble structure on top of it and renamed it the Umbilicus Urbis Romae, the “Navel of Rome”—the connecting place between sky and earth, between the city of Rome and the universe itself—and caused their roads to lead exactly to that point and none other from all their far-flung empire.

And much later Augustus came along and slapped up a bunch of gold leaf all over it and renamed it the Milliarium Aureum, the “Golden Milestone.” So Augustus.

And thus it remained, falling gently into ruin and passing out of memory, disguised and harmless. But just because the Romans forgot about it doesn’t mean the hole isn’t still there. Waiting. Wanting.

Hoping, always hoping, for someone to open the door.

Follow me.