For Flavia, religion was not ceremony—it was memory

The Last Fires of Vesta

A Short Story in Three Parts

Part I: The Parents’ Golden Years

Rome had changed, but in the courtyards of the Marcus household, the gods still lived.

The year was 370. The city still hummed with festivals, processions, sacrifices. Imperial edicts against sacrifice were already whispered, but here in the garden of Lucius Marcus—a senator and priest of Sol Invictus—wine still poured freely before the family altar. Statues of Apollo, Venus, and Fortuna gleamed in niches. His wife, Flavia, led the household women in prayers at dawn, her hair braided in the old style, her voice rising clear as if nothing in the empire had shifted.

Their children—Gaius, Publius, Severina, and the youngest, Julia—grew up amid the richness of that memory. They heard stories of the great days when emperors still bowed before the pontiffs, when processions filled the streets with flowers, and when Vestal Virgins commanded the respect of the Senate.

Lucius himself told those stories by lamplight:

“How the temple of Jupiter shone when I was a boy. How we brought sacrifices on the Kalends, how senators argued fiercely in the Curia but bowed together at the Capitoline.”

The children listened, wide-eyed. To them, their father was not only a man of dignity but a living witness to a vanished world. The Christian bishops were growing louder in the Forum, yes. Some neighbors had torn down shrines in their atriums. But here, in this household, the old order lived on, unbroken.

For Flavia, religion was not ceremony—it was memory. Her mother had carried her as a child to the Festival of Flora, showered with blossoms. She remembered the warmth of torchlight in the night when the streets filled with music to honor Bacchus. To her, every edict against sacrifice was an erasure, a theft of the joy she had once known.

But the empire was tilting. The emperors—first Constantine, then his sons, then Theodosius—moved steadily toward the one God. The old priesthoods were losing their stipends, their authority, their meaning. Lucius Marcus, still loyal to the Senate’s dignity, grew quieter in his duties. His children noticed.

The golden years were not so much a present life as a lingering afterglow. They shone in memory, in household ritual, in whispered defiance.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc.