The First had happened among His own people, beginning with fall of the demigod warriors and ending with the establishment of an eternal celebration of the natural abilities of man: the Olympic Games. Now the Second would happen among the people of a city that is also eternal, those great inheritors of kingdoms of Ilion who brought the civilized world under its banners in less than six hundred years on their march from kingdom to republic to empire. They subdued their neighbors. They conquered their enemies. And they crushed those who lived in His land, the descendants of the children of Herakleis, absorbing the wonders of the purified civilization that had arisen there--including its pantheon of gods. Myths were fused together and reinvigorated, and the history of His Tribe enjoyed a kind of renaissance during a golden age of newborn empire. Perhaps it started there--men reaching back into the past in quest of something exotic, unprepared for what lay past the darkness of the First.
If the objective of the First had been to teach His Tribe a lesson, that of the Second was to drive remembrance of Them forever from the minds of men. And the vehicle was eagerly presenting itself. The worship of the ancient pantheon came to contest with that of a new religious sect, a faith centered upon one who was born under the star that gives Him His fire, and in praise of whom would in its time be written the prayers that would give Him His Name. A so-called holy emperor relocated his capital in the East when this city proved resistant to his conversion, and a so-called apostate emperor proved that until the old religion could be purged from the earth, man's capacity to overreach himself remained an ever-present danger, even if in the name of intellectual pursuit. The Healer's job was by no means done. But to cleanse a sickness completely, one must attack it where it lives. For the world to live, Babylon must fall.
Thus the Averter of Evil turned his all-seeing eyes towards the city of the Romans.
How many times did this once-proud city open her gates to the Gothic hordes, buying her stay of execution with gold and land and places of honor within her courts? How many barbarians exerted their will upon the throne that once ruled the world, shifting politics and population and creating instability throughout the disparate regions of the western empire? Eventually, the Odoacer the Ostrogoth sent purple of the West itself back to the Hellenic East, to the emperor Zeno at Konstantinopolis. The barbarians preferred to remake Italia and the other western territories in their own image, and they had little desire to humor the Roman's delicate sensibilities. The power vacuum in the city itself lasted just long enough for the desperate Romans to fill it with the one figurehead left--the Bishop of Roma, first among the Christian Patriarchs, now regent not only of a mystical society but also of an earthly one, with all the pomp and ceremony it required.
The last vestiges of His Tribe passed into obscurity, never to pose a direct threat to humanity again. And in Their sleep They are tormented day and night forever.
![[linked image]](http://hrdtdr.homestead.com/files/Cathedra.jpg)