3rd Week of June, 1460
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Alexios’s hands were joined together in prayer, mirroring Damianus’s own, though he could see the tremor in the young man’s fingers even through the gloom.
“Forgive him, Father, for he has sinned," Damianus’s voice was little more than a whisper, yet it seemed to travel strangely far, carried along by the cold breath of air that moved through Mangup’s lower chambers, "but has nothing to hide before You.”
Down here, in its bowels, it felt older than men, a place of echoes that turned every word into something more haunting than it had any right to.
“My thoughts have been dark,” Alexios said. His voice rasped faintly, as if he had been speaking to himself for hours before Damianus arrived. “As dark as the chamber I find myself in.”
He hesitated before continuing, his throat bobbing with thirst and nervousness in equal measure.
Damianus recognized the telltale sign, the Principe had been suffering his episodes again. It was no surprise, locked away in this pit and left alone for days on end with nothing but his own mind for company. It was as cruel a punishment as could be devised for a man already besieged from within, and crueler still for having been ordered by his own father.
“Have you been taking your supper, my child?” Damianus asked, keeping his tone hushed.
He was not supposed to be here. Meeting with the former figurehead of the rebellion, puppet though the boy might have been, was dangerous.
But Damianus had taken up this charge long ago. In all his years, through all the turbulence that had shaken the Divine Faith in recent decades, he had made many terrible decisions, some of which still sat heavily upon his soul when he knelt in prayer. Yet never once had he willingly forsaken one of his flock.
“No matter what food I take into myself, Father, it cannot fill the dark hole in my heart that eats away at me,” the Principe said calmly. A small, satisfied smile touched his mouth, as if he had stumbled upon some private revelation. “So I have stopped taking it.”
To Damianus, he sounded like someone who had just given up on living.
“To commit suicide is a sin, my child,” Damianus cautioned. “Do not dress temptation in the robes of wisdom.”
Alexios was quiet for a long pause, aware that he had been seen through. When he spoke again, the calmness had thinned. “How can I not, Father? When our faith stands on the precipice of annihilation?”
Damianus had never heard the Principe so defeated.
He could understand it. Since the fall of the holy city in 1453, the Orthodox clergy had lived as refugees under a foreign ruler. There was no great eastern Christian power holding Hagia Sophia now. After more than nine centuries beneath Roman rule, the seat of the Orthodox faith lay now in the hands of infidels.
Worse still, the Sultan, in the ultimate act of arrogance, had restored the Ecumenical Patriarchate beneath his own authority and sat over it a puppet dressed in green and crimson robes.
That left the Metropolitanate of Gottia with an impossible decision. Should it still follow the ancient seat of Constantinople, which held authority over the greater part of the Orthodox faithful, even if that authority now passed through Ottoman hands? Or should it break away into autocephaly, as their brethren in Muscovy had long been tempted to do, preserving purity at the cost of unity and threat of a Turk invasion?
Damianus did not know the answer, and God hadn’t seen fit to give him any. No matter how much he pleaded in his prayers.
“I will repent for the sins I have committed in this life in the next one,” Alexios said. “It is all I have left.”
There was a finality in his tone that frightened Damianus more than the words themselves. Men spoke like that when they had already stepped away from the world in their hearts and were merely waiting for the body to follow.
“I sense your faith is shaken,” Damianus said softly.
“Why do you say so, Father?” Alexios asked, though he could not hide the tremor moving through his voice.
“Because you did not say it as a statement,” Damianus replied. “You said it as a prayer you wished to be true.”
There was no chastisement in his tone. There did not need to be. The boy had always been more than capable of scourging himself with his own thoughts, and in this place, with nothing but darkness and silence for company, Damianus feared those thoughts had become even crueler.
“I...” Alexios swallowed, his chained hands tightening together. “I am unsure of His plan for me.”
Damianus was so utterly shocked that he could not keep it from his expression. It was a mercy, he supposed, that the boy was blind now, for Alexios had never once shown anything but unshakable faith in the God-Creator. Even after every tragedy that had been laid upon him, the Principe had clung to faith as though it were a pillar rising from the flood.
“Our holy mission is over,” Alexios went on, stumbling through the words almost awkwardly. “We have lost. I am left alone in this pit, unseeing.”
There was naked pain in that last word. A hurt only a man whose life's work has been suddenly rendered useless can feel.
“You must trust in God, child,” Damianus said. “You know we cannot always understand the trials He places before us.”
“How can I trust in such a thing?” Alexios cut him off, his voice rising. “It was not God who sent me down here. It was that vile fiend.” He gnashed the thought through clenched teeth.
Damianus had never heard, in their private conversations, the Principe call the Prince a father to him.
“My only companionship is the darkness that whispers in my thoughts,” Alexios said, shaking now. “The only freedom I have is in chains.”
He lifted his bound hands, iron links clinking dully. Even here, in the most secure cell Mangup could offer, they had not allowed the Principe to remain unrestrained.
“All that I see is darkness now,” Alexios rasped. “All that I see is Him. His dark red eyes. His jagged smile.”
His breaths came quick and ragged, each one scraping through his chest as if it cost him dearly. Damianus felt a chill crawl along his spine. He went to hold out his hand, but hesitated, remembering the last times when Alexios had shattered it in a fit of rage.
But as it always did when he hesitated before this child, Damianus remembered this was his duty, and it was not a duty he could abandon.
Alexios caught his hand with desperate force, clutching it as though the old priest were the last solid thing remaining in the world.
“He haunted my dreams before,” Alexios said, his voice brittle and terrified. “But now he haunts my life in a never-ending nightmare, Father. I cannot even open my eyes to wake up!”
His eyelids opened to reveal a horror.
Beneath them lay no eyes, only ruined dark-red masses set within a cradle of charred flesh and scar.
“Please,” Alexios whispered.
He bent down to his knees before Damianus, chains dragging against the floor, his hands still gripping the old man’s as if prayer and plea had become the same thing.
“I just want it to stop, Father,” he wailed. “P-please. I cannot even do it myself. Please, Father, kill me.”
Tears streamed down his face, brown and tainted, carrying flecks of crust like old rust through the tracks they cut across his cheeks.
It was such a heartbreaking sight that Damianus began to weep as well. He wept for the child kneeling before him, and for the answer he had to give.
“I cannot,” Damianus said, bowing his head in defeat. “Your life is a gift too precious to throw away.”
Damianus had been skeptical of such claims of children touched by God, not because he dismissed the divine, but because men too easily mistook their own hunger for finding holiness within touching distance. Yet Alexios was different. Damianus knew it in his bones. He had seen it with his own eyes, had watched impossible things gather around the boy.
That was why he had stayed with him through the years, through every turbulence and mistake, through every compromise that had led them to this miserable chamber beneath Mangup.
And that was why he could not let the boy go.
Not yet.
“Tell me what your dreams have shown you,” Damianus whispered.
This was the contract that bound them together.
Alexios’s prophetic dreams had allowed Damianus to guide his flock and his Church through Rome’s fall, when by all earthly accounts it should have already ceased to exist.
Alexios lay still, unmoving, as if he were coming to terms with the fact that this was to be his new existence. Not even Father Damianus would grant him respite.
“I still hear thunder in my dreams, Father,” Alexios spoke like a puppet bereft of its strings, his voice flattened into something hollow and distant. “The coming wave has not diminished. It has only swelled close to inevitably. And there is nothing we can do to stop it, not from here.”
Whatever ember of hope had once lived in him had been smothered beneath the weight of the black wrapped around him.
“And I see something else now,” he continued. “Something I had not seen before, hidden beneath the devil’s gaze.”
His tone changed as he spoke, growing haunted, the words shrinking until they seemed to creep out of him against their will. Damianus leaned forward, his attention sharpening so completely that even his fear fell quiet for a moment.
There was more?
“Is it something new?” Damianus asked. “How much time do we have?”
It was rare for the boy to see more than one thing at once. His premonitions often reached decades into the future, so Damianus tried not to let alarm seize him too quickly. Nothing could be worse than the apocalyptic tide already bearing down upon them. At least, that was what he thought.
Alexios smiled.
It was a terrible, broken thing.
“It is not so much something new, Father, but as though the future changed itself of its own accord.”
Damianus went still.
“That is why we lost, Father,” Alexios whispered. “Because History is waging a battle against itself. And somehow, it is losing.”
The air inside the cell seemed to sharpen around the words. The damp cold became heavy, pressing against Damianus’s lungs. He felt that familiar immutable touch around the boy, an awful nearness of something beyond man.
“We were not meant to lose our crusade,” Alexios said. “History has changed. Twisted away from even His grasp.”
The pressure deepened until Damianus tried to pull back, but Alexios’s hand clamped around his with desperate strength, holding him in place. The old priest’s breath caught. The boy’s ruined face tilted toward him, blind and seeing all at once.
“A few years is a boon we do not have,” Alexios said, though his voice no longer sounded entirely like his own. It seemed dredged up from somewhere deep beneath the earth. “Before the cracks in the Dragon’s heart break apart.”
A primal fear opened inside Damianus, older than doctrine, older than words. It crawled up his spine and emptied the strength from his limbs.
“Please, God, forgive me,” he whispered.
He could not stop himself from shivering as he signed the cross, then stumbled and fell hard to the floor, gasping as though he had been dragged from deep water.
The pressure vanished in a heartbeat.
Damianus scrambled backward, robes tangling around his legs, and threw himself out of the cell’s reach with a wheezing breath, one hand braced against the old rock.
Behind him, Alexios was left spent and broken in the darkness, muttering deliriously to the walls.
“We will all perish, Father,” he said. “We might as well do it now.”
Damianus hurried away from the cell, each harried breath scraping against his chest.
He had felt it again, that power which had first shown itself in the boy when Alexios had heard Ottoman cannons on the horizon before any mortal ear could have known they were there.
Damianus knew it was otherworldly.
He just did not know if it was God who stood behind the boy.
Or if it was the Devil.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Enough.”
Prince John’s voice cut through the useless noise filling the council chamber, ending the discussion with a single word. They had gone around in circles over the usual petty concerns for the better part of the hour. Men who had fattened themselves on his court’s favor now spoke of caution, procedure, and noble privilege as though those phrases were shields strong enough to stand between thought and action.
John had long since exhausted his patience for vipers pretending to be advisers.
“But, my lord-” one of the perfumed fops who served as his council member began, rising halfway from his seat with indignation already arranging itself across his face.
John turned his gaze on him, and the protest died in the man’s throat.
“The time for buts has ended,” Prince John thundered, palm striking the chamber's table hard enough to still even the mutters at its edges. “I have sat through three full days of your nonsense, listening to every reason you can conjure for why I should not do this. I have heard enough. It will be done. There will be no more ifs, buts, or cowardly maybes dressed up as prudence.”
The nobleman who had tried to speak seemed to collapse inward beneath the rebuke, sinking back into his chair. Since the failed rebellion had been crushed, the great men of Theodoro had learned, at long last, obedience. Their whispers died quicker now. Their protests came softer.
In hindsight, perhaps the rebellion had been a blessing after all.
Now, finally, John could get things done.
“My lord,” old Trifon said, his voice rasping from age, “the prospect of rebuilding our fortresses and establishing strongholds across the mountainside has merit, I will concede that at least,”
John could tell he was leading up to a retort, so he cut him off with a raised hand, though he did not turn the full force of his temper upon the steward. Trifon had served him for decades with humility and distinction, and more importantly, he had remained loyal. There were few men in this chamber of whom John could say the same.
“It will leave us far better prepared for the invasions that may come from every side,” John said, taking the argument for himself. “A matter which has proven especially crucial, given how unruly my subjects seem to become when left too comfortable.”
His gaze swept over the gathered nobles. Several lowered their eyes at once, afraid to even meet it. John allowed himself a moment to appreciate the sight. Fear was not love, but it was far more reliable.
“But the sheer number of strongholds you propose, my lord,” Trifon continued carefully, choosing each word as though setting stones across a river, “is no small undertaking. It will consume nearly all the coin secured from the Genoese peace over the course of several years.”
“We do not have several years,” Prince John proclaimed. “I want it done in two.”
Exhaustion and dismay seemed to move around the table through the councilors, and John’s mouth tightened at the sight. They had grown too accustomed to easy duties, and problems set aside for the next season and then the next.
“My lord,” Spiros said, speaking up from the side of the chamber.
Spiros was another whose loyalty had proven solid enough to be of use, and John had noticed that such men had become the most willing to speak in council now. His own camp was filling the silence left by the cowed nobles, and for that, at least, he was grateful.
As his gaze moved, it passed over Father Damianus.
The old Metropolitan sat unusually quiet, his hands folded into his sleeves, his lined face carrying a pallor John did not remember seeing before. Perhaps he was finally realizing that consequences were coming for him as well.
John would not soon forget how readily the old priest had hovered near his idiot son. Damianus and the Church had never openly rebelled, but John would not put it past the old man to have had some hand in the uprising, or at least to have nurtured the delusions that made it possible.
God knew Alexios did not have the wit or initiative to bind himself to Philemon Makris and conceal such treachery for as long as he had. At least, he should, given how often the zealous fool spoke to the Father on high.
“It is not just the countryside fortifications,” Sir Spiros said, drawing John’s attention back to the present with the cautious firmness of a man who knew he was stepping onto brittle ground. “This plan to rebuild Eski Kermen… it is beyond ruinous. The site has been a ruin since the Mongol ransacking centuries ago, and there is a reason it has not been restored in all the years since. Attempts were made, my lord, yet they failed because the fortress was not merely damaged. It was gutted more thoroughly than even Mangup had been.”
He looked down at the documents spread before him. Spiros bore the dark circlets of a man who had spent the last few nights hunched over such records, searching for arguments that might pierce John’s determination.
“Crucially, the main culprit appears to have been the great man-made cistern system, the one that drew water from deep reservoirs beneath the bedrock. Mangup’s miraculous stone holds rainwater within itself, feeding our reservoirs when the heavens are generous, so this was never a concern. But for Eski Kermen to function, its water has to come from below. The Roman architects who built it were geniuses; they made an ingenious system that carves up several dozen feet vertically through the rock. But that only makes the site all the harder to repair. We no longer possess the knowledge to repair such a massive well. Not even the Great Alexios the First dared attempt it.”
The name brought a quiet over the gathered men, as if someone had opened a crypt beneath the council chamber, such was the weight carried by that name.
“Do not utter that name again in my presence,” Prince John’s tone was absolutely frigid, and he made sure to let his gaze move through every man in the chamber.
“Just because something is difficult does not mean it is impossible,” he said, placing both hands upon the table. “Do not forget that the Genoese have agreed to provide sizable quantities of construction material for works undertaken within our territory. A large portion of the coin you keep fretting over would have been spent on timber, tools, and transport, which is granted to us by the treaty.”
Several noblemen blinked at that, startled as they only now realized what one of the clauses was for. Fools, the lot of them. John wondered if they’d even bothered to read the damn parchment before they agreed to it.
“If there is one thing this Principality has always possessed in abundance, it is skill in earthworks and engineering,” John continued. “Our traditions since the great Alexios have been steeped in it. I am quite convinced our engineers can study the well, dismantle where needed, and rebuild it. They will have full access to the old library records for the endeavour, including every survey, tax account, and repair note that mentions the fortress.”
He saw uncertainty still lingering on their faces, so he allowed himself the faintest smile.
“And there is another detail you do not yet know. Our good subjects in the north have struck an agreement with our Genoese partners to revive the old Roman style of concrete, a recipe preserved in mainland Italia.”
The effect was immediate, astonishment moving around the table. John cherished the sight. It was indeed a miraculous little scheme engineered by the Sideris brat.
It was not lost on him how cleverly the boy had used knowledge of John’s reconstruction efforts to carve a tidy business for himself in the north. He had even managed to draw a generous little food package from John as part of the arrangement, the whelp.
“It will be cheaper, more durable, and perfectly suited to aiding our reconstruction efforts,” John said. “Walls, foundations, cistern linings, retaining works, repairs to fortresses thought half-lost to time. All of it can be done at a cost below what these projects would otherwise demand.”
“If that is true, my lord, then the price is greatly reduced,” Trifon said cautiously.
Even the old steward had not known this particular detail. That pleased John more than he cared to show.
“But to accomplish both projects within the two years you require will still mean an expenditure more than what we currently hold in the treasury.” Trifon went on, his raspy voice insistent, “ While materials will help, labour must be paid, animals fed, and work crews protected. We do not have the coin.”
“Do not trouble yourself over that.” Prince John said, a self-satisfied smile spreading across his face.
His gaze crossed with Panagiotis’s, who had spent most of the meeting seated back in his chair, observing the proceedings in his usual silence.
“We soon will,” John’s tone turned the words from promise into decree.
“Darling?”
An effeminate voice came from the chamber door, and a fall of golden hair peeked around the edge of the doorway, followed by a pair of emerald eyes that glanced inside with playful mischief.
Prince John’s gaze moved to the guards stationed at the entrance. They had been placed under strict orders to allow no one inside until the meeting ended. Judging by their beet-red faces and rigid posture, he could well imagine how those orders had been persuaded into flexibility.
“Will you be long?” Princess Euphrosyne purred, shaping the question into something very near a childish pout, giving him a devilish little wink. John was struck with the irresistible urge to end the meeting immediately.
“Not at all, my princess, we were just wrapping up.” He let his eyes pass meaningfully over the men gathered around the council table, who recognized the dismissal clearly.
“Wait outside, please,” John told Euphrosyne.
She disappeared with a lilting ‘tataa”, leaving behind a faint trace of perfume and uncomfortably silent men.
“That will be all, gentlemen,” Prince John announced, reclaiming the room. “Begin evaluating the order of operations and the initial costs. I want a plan that can be acted upon, not another stack of excuses bound in wax.”
Chairs scraped softly against the floor as the nobles began to file out with the stiffness of men told to do the impossible, and to have it done yesterday. The Doux held John’s gaze for a moment before rising as well.
John watched the iron-straight line of his back as he departed.
Another figure followed after him, far more stooped with age.
“Father Damianus.”
John caught the bedazzled old man just as he was rising ponderously from his seat, his eyes fixed upon the floor as if the boards were a matter of urgent theological interest. The Metropolitan looked up almost startled, a stark departure from his usual calm, and John felt a private flicker of satisfaction at the sight.
It pleased him greatly to think the old priest was finally afraid of his wrath.
How he had missed wielding power like this. Not the hollow, ornamental authority of a prince surrounded by men who smiled while they hid knives behind their backs, but the kind that made men think before speaking and bow before hesitating. Fear, he thought, was a cleaner sort of weapon than love. No messy webs of favour and authority, cultivating relationships with men whose intentions hid behind curved smiles and quaint perfume. Fear was simple. And fear was absolute.
“I will require you in my study at the soonest available time,” John said.
The Metropolitan held his eyes for a brief moment. Thinking. Contemplating.
“Of course, my liege,” he said, cutting a careful bow before excusing himself.
Prince John watched him leave with a dangerous smile touching his mouth.
Not even Prince Alexios, who had rebuilt Mangup from the ground up and constructed the entire tradition upon which the Principality had endured, had dared attempt the conquest of Eski Kermen. The fortress had sat broken for centuries, a wound left upon the mountain by an old catastrophe and older fear.
John could be the first to reclaim something so spectacular since the Great himself. Perhaps he might even become one himself.
John the Great, now that had a pleasant ring to it, did it not?
…
Father Damianus entered Prince John’s study like prey stepping willingly into a predator’s den.
His eyes moved first to the walls, then to the closed door behind him, as though measuring the bars of the cage he was trapped in. The study was not large, but it was heavy with authority. Filled with shelves dark with old records, and sealed letters stacked beside iron weights. At its centre stood John’s desk, an elaborately carved slab of wood scarred by years of use, its surface marred with nicks, grooves, and old dents that no polishing could fully hide.
Damianus sat in the chair opposite him, on the far side of that imposing desk, watching John’s elbows pinned to the hard wood.
“My Prince,” he said, giving a shallow bow.
Prince John eyed the maneuver critically. The title as well.
“Do you know why I have called you here?” John asked.
It was not truly a question. It was a test, and both of them knew it.
The priest took his time before answering. Of all the things John had learned from working with Father Damianus over the years, the one he held the most admiration for was the old man’s ability to lie.
He had never known anyone so thoroughly engrossed in his own performance of piety that he had managed to fool even himself.
That was what had made Damianus so dangerous. Ordinary liars left seams in the cloth. Damianus had no such weaknesses because he genuinely believed that he embodied the God he claimed to serve and commune with. His performance was so complete that there were no breaks, no lapses, no place where the mask ended.
“I could only hazard a guess,” Damianus said. “Certainty is something only God can truly possess.”
“Then guess,” John said.
It was not a request. And it made the temperature in the room drop in an instant.
“It is about the Principe.” To his credit, Damianus did not look away. Perhaps he thought himself sheltered by some divine force watching from on high. It was the only explanation John could find for the man's gall to admit such a thing openly and to his face. To not show the slightest hint of remorse, even a faked one.
John found his composure irritating.
“Yes. About your support of my son,” John’s tone was sharp, “the traitor who nearly plunged this Principality into destruction.”
“I am only his spiritual advisor. You know your child is very pious-”
John cut him off with a harsh flick of his hand.
“He is no child of mine.”
The priest fell silent at the weight behind the declaration.
“He never was,” John said, his voice lower now. “Though it took me time to see that.”
“What do you mean by that?” Damianus asked.
“He is a spawn of the Devil,” John stated the simple fact.
“He is lost,” There was a faint heat beneath Damianus’s restraint. Smouldering anger, perhaps. “And he needs guidance.”
“Of which I gave plenty.” John found it sickening that the priest would dare reserve such feelings for the creature who had betrayed his own blood.
“Through screams and threats,” the priest challenged, the words leaving him before caution could strangle them. “What child can flourish beneath his parent’s hatred?”
“Do not lecture me on how to raise my son,” John thundered, rising halfway from his chair before he caught himself. The desk between them seemed suddenly too narrow a thing. “You do not know what he is capable of. You do not know the evil that lies within him.”
His voice trailed into something quieter, pulled unwillingly toward memories he had no desire to touch.
“But I do,” Damianus replied, his tone hushed as if uttering a prayer. “I had to rescue him from it. Because no one else would.”
John stared at him with wide eyes, lips parting slightly.
A great many things made sense now.
Alexios’s madness had never seemed to wither, no matter how harshly John tried to starve it. Someone had been feeding the flame all along, cupping it in their hands and calling the blaze holy.
“And now no one ever will,” John declared.
The anger in his tone cracked in a way he disliked, a weakness made audible, and that only enraged him further.
“You included. Your secret little visits to his cell will not repeat themselves.” He narrowed his eyes.
“Yes, my Prince,” Damianus received the command without fear. If anything, he looked burdened by a weary acceptance, as though he had always known he would be caught and had merely hoped it might be delayed.
“Additionally,” John continued, unrelenting, “you will provide the necessary funds for the coming reconstruction efforts.”
For the first time since entering the study, Damianus almost lost the careful command of his face. His brows drew together, and his hands shifted within his sleeves.
“What do you mean?”
John pulled open a drawer with a rasp of wood against wood and withdrew an ornate dagger from within. The blade was old, its edge notched and pitted despite generations of care, but the pommel remained beautiful. A purple amethyst sat in its setting like a drop of captured dusk.
“It is said,” John began, stepping slowly around the desk, “that when Alexios first attempted to build Mangup, his advisors came to him with much the same talk I heard today. It could not be done. The cost was too great. The mountain too difficult.”
Damianus followed him with his gaze, frowning, but did not move.
“In response, he cut his palm.” John held up the dagger. “He spilled his blood upon the first stone that would rebuild Mangup into what it is today and said, ‘I will lay down my life for this barren rock. If I cannot build a sanctuary for my people here, I will slit my own throat upon it.’”
It was no exaggeration to say this small knife was among the most valuable possessions held by the Princes of Theodoro. It was a relic of rule more than war, a reminder that dominion was not inherited through ceremony alone, but seized through resolve intense enough men would call it madness.
“That is the resolve a ruler must have to see great things through,” John said. “Do you not find it curious, Father, that through all the struggles of princely rule, through every raid, tax, famine, and siege, it is the Church that has grown fattest from our suffering?”
“The dues we collect are God’s, not ours.” Damianus doled out the common sermon used to justify their theft for decades,
“While rulers have sacrificed their bodies, their lives, their minds for our people, the Church has not sacrificed anything. Only gained from our suffering.” John continued, uncaring for the priest's flimsy excuses, “It is time to see how faithful the Church is not only to its God, but to its ruler.”
“The faithful nourish us of their own free will, not because we demand it so. My Prince, you must surely see that.” Damianus’s expression darkened. “You cannot seize what we hold without just cause. To do so would be to steal from God.”
“I can, and I will,” John said. “Our faith stands on the brink, and you sit upon silver, gold, and holy ornaments while the world crumbles around us. I will melt down all your precious little silver icons and fanciful gold engravings and be hailed as a saviour of our faith for the trouble."
Damianus looked at him as though the words had struck him harder than any blow.
“We will call it a temporary measure,” John continued, his voice steady now, almost conversational. “A necessary contribution for the defense of Orthodoxy, encroached upon by Latin customs from one side and Muslim dominion from the other. I am not stealing coin from the Church. You are donating it to preserve Christianity.”
The rhetoric was flawless, and worse, there was precedent behind it. In times of mortal crisis, the Church was expected to contribute to the survival of the faithful, and rulers could and had demanded as such from the clergy.
John had always been cautious about moving against a Church that had grown dangerously powerful in recent decades under Damianus’s careful hand, but the rebellion had changed all of that. It had given him necessity, and necessity was the finest cloak tyranny could ever wear.
Damianus seemed to realize it in the same moment. His quiet support of the Principe, combined with the uniquely precarious position of the Principality, had given John the exact circumstances needed to justify an act this drastic.
“Do not do this, my Prince, you will blacken your soul beyond redemption.” There was an undercurrent of desperation behind his plea. Both men knew how pathethic an attempt this was. But the Metropolitan had nothing left, not after involving himself with a failed rebellion that flirted with catholic heathens of all things.
“That is the fourth time you have referred to me as your Prince,” John said, almost offhandedly.
The comment threw Damianus from his rhythm. “What do you mean?” he asked, confusion and desperation mingling in his voice.
“Before the rebellion, I was merely ‘Prince John,’ if I recall correctly.” John twirled the dagger between his fingers with casual ease, letting the amethyst catch the lamplight. “You behaved as though we stood on the same level. When I once asked you about this, you claimed that God stands above us all.”
The Metropolitan’s face tightened. Fear had finally broken through the layers of age, piety, and practiced serenity. John enjoyed the sight more than he should have, but it was the first honest respect the old man had shown him in years.
“Priests like to pretend all men are created equal,” John said, his voice darkening as he leaned forward, the lamplight cutting hollows beneath his eyes. “They call themselves shepherds, as though the rest of us are sheep to be led by soft words. But God is just, Father, and men are not created equal for a reason. Some are born to kneel, to obey,” he leaned in close enough to be uncomfortable. He could smell the sweet scent of fear on the Metropolitan, “and some are born with the power needed to lead.”
He brought the dagger down against the desk.
The point bit into the wood with a sharp crack, adding another scar to the old grain. There were many marks there already, quiet remnants of other conversations, other threats, and other moments when men had needed to be reminded what rule truly meant.
“That power is mine,” John whispered. “Not the Church’s, and certainly not yours.”
Damianus had gone very still.
“You exist because I permit you to exist,” John said. “You will hand over your wealth, and you will do so gladly, with gratitude and smiles, because that is the role I require you to play before the people. Or I will do to you what I did to that son of mine.”
The priest swallowed.
“I will take your eyes and throw you into his cell,” John said, his voice something almost intimate, “where you may guide him for the rest of your life.”
That thought, despite Damianus’s defense of Alexios only moments before, seemed to terrify him more than anything John had said so far. The old priest’s composure finally cracked.
“Y-yes, my liege,” Damianus stammered, utterly defeated.
John withdrew the dagger from the wood and eased back into his chair as though nothing of consequence had happened. “Good. You may leave now.”
The great spiritual shepherd of Gottia rose with unsteady dignity and bowed. He walked to the door without haste, but John could see the effort it took not to flee. Only when it closed behind him did John allow himself a smile.
The Church possessed wealth equal to the Genoese payment if one counted its hidden hoards, precious icons, jeweled vessels, and the rich gifts left by generations of terrified sinners hoping to buy mercy. That treasure would allow him to carry out the reconstruction efforts he had envisioned, and still leave enough to satisfy the Crimean and Turks with their annual tributes. Just as importantly, it would cripple the Church and bind it to his will, cementing princely authority as it should have been from the beginning.
His smile faded when memory returned to the other part of the conversation. To his son.
John looked down at the dagger still resting in his hand, then placed it carefully back inside the drawer. After a moment, his fingers lingered there and drew out a pendant instead. It held a stone of the same family as the dagger’s amethyst, though this one was a deep blue, dark as twilight over the sea.
He bowed his head and pressed his forehead to it, the hardness of the gem cool against his skin.
There was more than one reason why he couldn’t fail. More than one ghost who would bar his gate to the afterlife if he gave up now.