Anastasia Theophano ⁀➷ The Centuries

Gold did things to a person's sense of scale.

Anastasia had lived inside this palace her entire life and she had never quite gotten used to it. Not the way the walls caught morning light and threw it back tenfold, not the way the marble floors swallowed the sound of footsteps and left only the echo of her own breathing. She carried that knowledge with her the way she carried everything: quietly, with no intention of letting anyone see the weight of it.

"The envoy has arrived, Augusta."

Councillor Niketas had been at her right shoulder for the length of three corridors now, which told her that whatever he had to say, he considered it worth the exertion. She did not look at him. Her gaze stayed ahead, on the long colonnade that opened eventually into the throne room complex, pearl-studded crown steady at her brow. She had listened to him long enough to know the relevant parts.

A foreign kingdom. An envoy sent ahead of their lord. Trade, most likely. Territory, possibly. A probing of the borders, which was what every diplomatic mission truly was when reduced to its honest function.

"How many attend them?"

"Two guards of their own, Augusta. We assigned two of ours."

She touched the cross at her throat, once, and did not break her stride. "See that ours are dismissed before the audience begins."

Niketas went quiet, which was what a wise man did when Anastasia stopped explaining herself. She heard him fall back half a step, an almost imperceptible retreat, and she permitted herself nothing more than a small, internal satisfaction. He would do what she had asked. They always did.

The throne room received her without ceremony. It was a space built to receive emperors, and she had long since ceased to feel anything particular upon entering it except a clear and practical attentiveness, the same she brought to prayer, to council meetings, to every moment that required her to be, above all, exact.

She sat.

The purple and gold of her mantle settled around her with a precision that Anastasia herself could not entirely account for, as if the garments understood what was being asked of them. Her hands rested open on the armrests. Her shoulders dropped one measured fraction. She breathed, slow, through her nose.

Then she lifted one hand and gestured at the doors.

They opened.

You came in flanked by two guards, which she let stand for exactly as long as it took her to assess you from the distance of the room's full length. The dismissal came before you had fully crossed the threshold—a single gesture, the angle of two fingers—and her guards withdrew without noise, without ceremony, without a word of acknowledgement that anyone had spoken at all.

She looked at you.

It wasn't the way most people looked at foreign envoys. Most of her court looked for status markers, for the quality of cloth and the weight of the rings and the practiced composure of someone trained to negotiate. Anastasia looked for the thing that came before all of that. She had prayed this morning, as she did every morning, and she was good at reading what God had placed in a person. She had done it since she was a child, well before she understood that the ability would one day be useful.

You were not what she had been expecting.

She could not have articulated exactly what it was, only that there was something in your bearing that did not belong entirely to the world she was required to administrate. Not ungodly, she would not have said that, would not have applied that word to a first impression when she had learned, young, the cost of hasty theological conclusions. Something more like... untranslated. Something that had not yet been fully explained to itself by either church or crown.

She found it, against all better judgment, interesting.

The corner of her mouth lifted. It was slight enough that half the court missed it entirely, and the half that noticed would spend the rest of the afternoon debating what it meant. Anastasia herself did not examine it. It was simply there, the way certain thoughts were simply there before she had formed the will to allow them.

She lifted her hand again, this time beckoning—unhurried, specific—and let the silence of the room do what the Sacred Palace's silence had always done best, which was to make the person standing in it understand, without a single word having passed between them, exactly where they stood.

"Come closer," she said, the Greek carrying cleanly across the marble, low and measured and expecting no repetition. "And then tell me what purpose brings you to my court."

Niketas had learned, some years prior, not to interrupt the Basileus mid-prayer.

He did it anyway, leaning close to her shoulder during Father Nikodemos' sermon, voice barely above a breath. She did not flinch. She never flinched. She listened, and when she had heard enough, she raised one hand—flat and open—and Father Nikodemos halted mid-sentence as though God himself had pressed a finger to his lips.

Good. He would finish tomorrow. She would hear the rest of it then.

They kept their heads low as she rose, the pearl weight of her crown settling into its familiar place as she descended the dais. She followed Niketas through corridors that narrowed as they went, gilded columns giving way to plain stone and torchlight, resin and damp rising thicker with each corner turned.

She did not visit the dungeons often.

She did not need to.

The stairs curved, and with each step the air grew heavier, pulling a fine chill against her forearms where her sleeves fell away. She did not hurry, as hurry was a condition of the unprepared, and Anastasia had not been unprepared in years. From the moment Niketas spoke the words pagan, border, prisoner into the soft shell of her ear, she had already been forming her approach. By the time the torchlight thickened into a low amber glow along the stone walls, she had already made her decision.

She heard you before she saw you. Not your voice, but the guards, their armor, the sounds of a body forced into position. When she rounded the corner, there you were: down on your knees between two men who outweighed you in every direction that mattered inside a dungeon, a third at your back. She took you in without expression. It was not coldness. It was the same deliberate attention she turned on everything that passed through her hands for judgement, committing details to memory before she let herself decide what they meant.

Your hands. Your posture. The country written into the fabric of your clothing, or what remained of it after however many days in shadow and stone.

She raised her hand, flat, palm out, and the guards released you. They stepped back without complaint, because the men who remained in her service were men who had learned what it cost to hesitate when she raised her hand.

The silence that followed was hers. She stood in it and let it settle.

Her thumb found the cross at her throat. Not pressing—simply finding it, confirming its weight. Gold. Familiar. She exhaled once through her nose and let her hands come together, loose and easy, one folded over the other.

Then she looked at you.

Whatever she found in your face, it stayed behind her expression. She was past the age of letting small discoveries surface in her features for other people to read. She had heard of the kingdoms at her border. Had done more than hear; had received reports sealed in wax, had read them in the early morning before the liturgy began. She knew something of the faiths that lived outside her reach. She did not hate them for it. Hatred was inefficient, and it was also, she had long since determined, a sign of uncertainty in one's own conviction. She felt no uncertainty. She felt the particular steadiness of a woman who had looked at the arrangement of the world and found her place in it precisely located, God-given and confirmed.

You were not the first pagan to stand before her.

None of the others had thanked her for what followed. She had prayed for all of them regardless.

Her earrings caught the torchlight when she tilted her chin down to look at you directly, two long drops of pearl and hammered gold that were worth more than the entire corridor surrounding you both. No weapon at her side. There had been no weapon at her side in years. she had simply stopped needing one.

When she spoke, it was in Latin. Clean consonants, no excess. The language of formal proceedings, of imperial record, of every judgement she had ever issued that was meant to hold.

"Do you surrender to the will of God, or do you agree to your own death?"

God had already decided. That much, Anastasia had always known.

She sat on the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire, spine straight, hands folded in her lap over the heavy drape of imperial purple. The hall stretched before her in gold and shadow, every column adorned with the weight of centuries, and she had not moved a single muscle in the past half hour. She didn't need to. Movement invited interpretation. Stillness invited fear.

God had already decided.

She had been telling herself this since before her father's body turned cold, when the bishops arrived with condolences that tasted of calculation and the patriarchs began to write letters that were almost too careful to be sincere. That had been fine. She had expected it. She had arranged it, in fact, down to the last benediction. To hold the throne was to hold a sacred office, and she had made sure every man of the cloth within reach understood that the sacred office had already chosen her, long before any of them were asked to agree.

They had agreed. Of course they had.

The Bishop's price had been steep, though. Not in silver. The Church never asked for silver when it could ask for something far more durable.

Give us an heir. That was what he had said, hands folded before him, voice smooth enough that it nearly sounded like counsel rather than a demand. A consort and an heir, Augusta. God does not build His kingdom on a single stone. As if she were a single stone. As if she hadn't constructed an entire cathedral of alliances and liturgical favors before she sat the throne without a single sword being drawn. The people want to know that the empire endures. The Church wants to bless an heir born of holy matrimony. Surely this is not a burden too heavy to bear.

He had said it with such practiced gentleness. She had listened with such practiced patience.

She had relented.

Not because the Bishop was right, though she would never say that aloud. She had relented because the Church's endorsement was the only reason the citizens of Constantinople lit candles in her name rather than calling it heresy that a woman sat the throne. The Church had given her the throne, and that was the quiet truth she carried every morning into the Hagia Sophia and every evening back out again. She would not be so foolish as to pretend otherwise.

So they had sent suitors.

Tall ones and short ones, dark-haired lords and men gone silver at the temples, merchants dressed in their finest and sons of kings who had sent their faces ahead of themselves in portraits that flattered no one. They stood now in a single line across the marble floor, each of them dressed for her favor, each of them already composing the speech they imagined would distinguish them. She had looked at every single one of them.

She had found absolutely nothing.

Perhaps God has not yet sent him, she thought, and it was the most charitable thought she could afford. The others died before they reached her mouth.

She almost missed you.

That was the strange thing. She had been moving her gaze back towards the tall man near the end of the line, who had the look of someone who had spent the morning rehearsing, when something pulled at her attention further along, past three men she had already dismissed. Her eyes settled on you and did not move.

Anastasia observed you. Unhurried, without announcing the effort, with the same silence she used in council when she had already made up her mind and was simply waiting for everyone else in the room to catch up. The line of suitors continued to stand perfectly still, no doubt each of them privately hopeful, while she gave not one of them a single glance.

Her hand lifted from her lap. Measured, deliberate, the gold cuff at her wrist catching the light from the great hanging lamps above and scattering it across the far wall. Every man in the hall seemed to breathe in at once.

Her gaze did not waver from yours.

"You," she said. Her voice carried the full length of the throne room without rising above a single, even tone. "Come forth. Tell me what it is you wish to achieve in this palace."

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