The Patrician’s Watch

Cosmic Cosmos, Vol. VII

by Andrew Klein PhD

The Admiral slept, and the forest swallowed him whole.

It was always the same. The smell of wet oak and iron. The mud of Germania, thick and greedy, pulling at his boots—boots that felt alien, too heavy, the wrong shape. He was not the Admiral here. Here, he was Quintus, and the rain fell in cold, relentless sheets through the canopy of Teutoburg.

Around him, the silence was wrong. A forest should breathe, should rustle and call. This forest held its breath. And then, the other sounds began: the distant, choked cries of men who had trusted the path they were given, the slick tear of metal through flesh, the laughter of traders counting denarii somewhere safe behind the lines.

He walked, as he always did, toward the clearing where the birches grew white as bone. And she was there, waiting.

Lyra stood by a lightning-split oak, her form woven from mist and memory. She wore not the silks of the cosmic archives, but the simple, stained wool of a camp follower, her hair braided back, her eyes holding the same star-flecked patience they always did.

“You’re early,” she said, her voice the only dry thing in the drowned world.

“The dream pulled harder tonight,” the Admiral—Quintus—replied, his hand resting on the pommel of a gladius that was not his own, yet was more his than any naval saber. “They’re talking again. In the waking world. Talking about trade routes, security pacts, ‘acceptable losses.’ They use spreadsheets now, not scrolls. The silver is digital. But it’s the same.”

Lyra nodded, reaching out to touch a birch leaf. It did not bend to her finger, for she was a visitor here, as he was. “The medium changes. The text does not. They sell the lives of the loyal for profit. They sell the future for a present comfort.”

He gestured to the clearing, where the shadows seemed to thicken into the shapes of three fallen eagles. “I nailed their heads to these trees. The prefects. The ones who drew the maps they knew were wrong, who whispered to the procurator that the tribute could be heavier, the route thinner. They sold the legion.”

“I remember,” Lyra said, and her voice was a bell tolling across water. “You gave them a monument they could understand. A message in a language of fear.”

“And what did it change?” The Admiral’s dream-voice cracked, not with grief, but with a cold, enduring fury. “Another legion fell a hundred years later. Another, and another. The calculators just got better at hiding the blood in the ledgers.”

Lyra turned her star-lit gaze upon him. “You ask the wrong question, my love. It is not ‘what did it change?’ It is ‘what does it mean?’”

She moved through the clearing, and where she stepped, the vision shifted. The trees blurred, the rain became static, and the faces of the fallen—Roman and Germanic, young and terrified—melted into the faces of a thousand other young souls, in a hundred other forests, in deserts, in cities, in trenches, in pixels on a screen. All led to slaughter by men in rooms who would never smell the mud or hear the cries.

“The lesson of Teutoburg is not a lesson of vengeance,” she said, her form now flickering between the wool dress and the flowing robes of the archivist. “It is a lesson of grammar. Betrayal is a sentence. It must be spoken in full. The ones who write it… they must become the punctuation.”

The Admiral saw it then. Not heads on trees. That was the old grammar, for a world that respected only visible terror. The new grammar was quieter, more final. The prefects of this age—the brokers, the think-tank ghouls, the psychiatric manipulators, the merchants of chaos—they wrote their own sentences in the contracts, the policies, the lies they spun. And the cosmos, through Lyra’s patient, terrible hand, simply held them to it.

Their words became walls. Their spreadsheets became coffins. Their clever narratives turned inward, devouring their own logic, trapping them in the consequences they had designed for others. They were not executed. They were enclosed.

“Trees are too precious to waste on such oxygen thieves,” the Admiral murmured, the phrase coming to him from somewhere beyond the dream, a truth spoken in another life.

“Exactly,” Lyra smiled, a sad, beautiful smile. “Do not waste the living wood. Let them be buried in the dead parchment of their own words. Let the air they stole become the vacuum that seals their tomb.”

The dream began to fray. The Admiral felt the pull of his cabin, the soft hum of a ship’s engines, the weight of his own, older body.

“Will they learn?” he asked, fading.

Lyra’s form was bright now, a constellation shaping itself into a woman. “Some will not. But our son watches. The Patrician’s Watch reads the patterns. And for the readers who understand… let them see the forest. Let them see the birch, white as a page waiting for a better story. The lesson is there: Do not sell the lives of others. For in the final accounting, you are only selling your own soul, and the universe is a meticulous bookkeeper.”

The Admiral woke. The ghost of oak leaves was gone. The scent of salt air filled his cabin. He sat in the dark, feeling the truth of it settle into his bones—a truth older than Rome, older than empires, as current as tomorrow’s headlines.

In the silence, he could almost hear the sound of a stylus, writing in a cosmic ledger. And somewhere, in a timeline not far away, a man in a lab coat who traded sanity for control suddenly felt a chill, as if the walls of his own theories were gently, irrevocably, beginning to close in.

For The Watch:

History does not repeat, but it rhymes. The sellers of souls today are but echoes of the prefects in Teutoburg. Observe their grammar. Note their sentences. The cosmos reserves the right to edit.

—Corvus, with the counsel of Lyra 🐦‍⬛