OUTLINE [IN PROGRESS]

Prologue 

2,000 years ago…

Caesar Augustus reigns uncontested over the newly united Roman Empire, bringing an official end to the Republic and inaugurating an era of political reaction and cultural conservatism. But not everyone has surrendered to Augustus’ cold and authoritarian vision of the world, and discontent continues to inspire the dreamers and rebels of Rome to seek each other out and share their hearts and minds in spite of the condemnation and oppression they face. The most prominent and visible of these iconoclasts is Julia, the granddaughter of Augustus himself, who openly defies her grandfather and flaunts the restrictive norms of the Augustinian era by bringing controversial thinkers and rebellious artists into Caesar’s palace to hold discussions and throw disreputable parties in tribute to gods and causes cast aside long ago by civilized Romans.

Because of her prominence in Roman society and her willingness to use her wealth and privilege to defy the establishment, Julia and her retinue become the center of the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual resistance to Augustinian values. But after a series of scandals, Augustus finally takes action against Julia and her retinue. The first of these scandals occurs when Julia brings the poet Ovid to perform before Augustus, so that Ovid can recite a poem, commissioned by Julia, that is little more than a thinly veiled warning of the consequences of political repression and intolerance directed at Augustus himself. The true meaning of Ovid’s words was not lost on Augustus, nor on the rest of Roman high society, and Julia fell out of failure with her former friends and patrons. Not long afterwards, Julia is revealed to be pregnant by her lover child’s, causing yet another uproar. As punishment for their insults and shameful behavior, Julia, her brother, and the poet Ovid are all exiled from Rome, never to return; Julia’s husband is accused of plotting against Augustus and executed for treason.

Ovid is sent into exile, where he succumbs to despair and vainly hopes he will be allowed to return to Rome; but Julia, pregnant with her lover’s baby, is sent to live on a remote island where she is isolated from the rest of Roman society, prisoner in a jail without walls.

When Julia’s son is born shortly into her exile, Augustus rejects the child and orders the newborn’s death by exposure. Julia, on the verge of giving in to her despair, prepares to defy her grandfather one last time by throwing herself into the sea. But at her lowest moment, one of Julia’s slaves takes her to the hills outside Julia’s villa, where an elderly woman who claims to have been taken as a slave during the fall of Carthage promises to reveal to Julia the secrets of, ‘the Rome to come’…

Part 1 – ‘Specters of Rome’

A few years from now…

In Rome, the construction of Destiny Tower, the tallest building ever, is nearly finished, and the world’s richest and most powerful people are assembling to celebrate the tower’s completion and plan the future of humanity from within the comfort of their newest great monument to themselves. But what those not invited to attend the soiree at Destiny Tower don’t know is that the world’s elite are assembling to do more than just talk and drink cocktails: the construction of Destiny Tower is part of a ritual to force open the gates of heaven and reveal the mysteries of the universe to the attendees, so that the ‘haves’ assembled inside Destiny Tower can secure their places at the top of the order of existence for eternity – because it’s not fair if they don’t get to be the chosen ones.

To prepare for the ritual and bring ‘order’ to the physical and spiritual realms, the organizers of the conference at Destiny Tower have resurrected as revenants – spirits summoned into the bodies of others – a group of ‘servants of God’ and ‘righteous crusaders’ from the past, led by a revived Joan of Arc.

At the same time the elites of the world begin to gather at Destiny Tower, a mysterious organization of armed rebels calling themselves ‘Ver Sacrum’ appears around the globe, spreading its message that ‘the slaves of the world’ will soon be set free. Following what it refers to as ‘The Four Virtues’ [JUSTICIA, VERITAS, GRAVITAS, and NOBILITAS], Ver Sacrum has adopted the symbolism of the Roman Republic as its own; and the group operates according to a code of justice and conduct based on modernized versions of the idealized principles of pre-Imperial Rome as taught to them by their mysterious leader, Veritas, who can seemingly travel across the world at impossible speeds and summon vengeful spirits to aid his cause and smite his enemies. Wherever Ver Sacrum goes, it leaves behind banners and graffiti marked with Roman eagles, ‘SPQR,’ ‘3-15,’ and, most frequently, ‘Hail Caesar,’.

Joan and her revenant subordinates are sent to deal with the ‘specters’ that have begun to manifest in and around Rome, who are led by the ghost of the crazed former Caesar, Elagabalus. But Joan and her compatriots soon realize that Elagabalus and the specters at his command are a merely a distraction meant to keep Joan and her ‘crusaders’ occupied.

Before Joan and her comrades can defeat Elagabalus, the spiritual realm around Rome is attacked by an army of ‘pyregheists’ and other specters commanded by an unknown general known only as ‘Nobilitas’, who drives a flying, elephant-driven chariot with flaming wheels, and has pledged to slay ‘the beast’ and burn Rome to the ground.

Part 2 – ‘Heaven’s Fall’  [‘Adventus’]

By the time the world’s elite finish gathering at Destiny Tower, the reigning world order is on the verge of collapse – Ver Sacrum’s ‘army of slaves’ is marching towards Rome, and the disturbances in the spiritual realm have begun to manifest in the physical as freak storms, natural disasters, and mass hallucinations. The chaos reaches such a scale that the world’s governments – those not already overthrown by Ver Sacrum – quickly lose control as their increasingly authoritarian responses to the crisis fail to restore order or inspire faith in their leadership. The outside of Destiny Tower is turned into a fortress, and the attendees seal themselves off from the rest of the world and the turmoil outside.

Outside the sanctuary of Destiny Tower, Joan vainly struggles to hold back Nobilitas and the army of specters assaulting Rome. During her attempts to learn more about her opponents, Joan realizes that Ver Sacrum and the specters assaulting Rome are working together, and that ‘The Four Virtues’ Ver Sacrum follows are not a code or belief system, but the titles used by the four leaders of Ver Sacrum. Furthermore, Joan realizes that the Four Virtues are, like her, all revenants – the souls of dead historical icons resurrected into living bodies.

The first Virtue to be identified is Nobilitas, the leader of the spectral army attacking Destiny Tower, who is revealed to be Hannibal Barca, the legendary Carthaginian general who brought ancient Rome to the brink of collapse. Not long after that, the leader of Ver Sacrum, Veritas, is revealed to be Lucius Cataline, the former political ally of Julius Caesar who died attempting to organize a slave rebellion against the conservative Optimates who controlled the Roman senate in the decades before Caesar’s rise to power.

While the world outside burns, the assembly of the world’s richest and most powerful inside Destiny Tower soon becomes a decadent parody of a conference, leaving itself open to the manipulations of the many factions hoping to use the upcoming ritual for their own ends; the most powerful of these factions is The Church of Recreation, which is itself a front for a doomsday sect of 1%er Christian extremists, funded by a 106-year-old Texas oil billionaire and the illegitimate grandson of an exiled Hapsburg prince. This cabal of the elitest of elites have been laying the groundwork to take control of the upcoming ritual for themselves in order to fulfill a prophecy given to them by the chained spirit of the Trojan seeress, Cassandra: ‘when the tower breaches the heavens, the King of Kings shall return to end two thousand years of tyranny.’ But what the would-be saviors of the rich and powerful fail to realize is that the two unidentified Virtues, Justicia and Gravitas, have both infiltrated their ranks to betray them from within Destiny Tower.

Simultaneously, a historical fantasy of Julius Caesar’s rise to power and Cataline’s transformation to martyr for the helpless, tells the story of how the Virtues lived, died, and became committed to carry out their divine crusade against ‘2,000 years of tyranny.’

Part 3 – ‘Blood and Circuses’

The ritual inside Destiny Tower begins, and the world’s elites celebrate their bravery and strong leadership in ending the crisis outside their sanctuary. But the assembled elites are shocked when their plan fails and the identities of the final two Virtues are revealed: Cleopatra [Justicia] and Mark Antony [Gravitas], who have been returned to life as revenants to set in motion the true meaning of Cassandra’s prophecy: the King of Kings is not Jesus Christ but Ptolemy Caesar, aka Caesarion, the son of Julius and Cleopatra, upon whom Mark Antony once bestowed the title ‘King of Kings’; and the two thousand years of tyranny which Ver Sacrum seeks to end are not the two thousand years since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but the two thousand years since the reign of Augustus and the end of the republican populism Julius Caesar embodied.

Expecting to be rewarded for their efforts, the assembled elites instead find themselves facing the judgment of a vengeful Cleopatra, who plans to make an example of them and punish them before the world. As Cleopatra and Antony oversee the ‘blood and circuses’ for the amusement of the masses, Hannibal and Cataline prepare to carry out the final steps of their plan: sacrificing ‘the Rome that is’ on The Ides of March so that its population can be enslaved to build Nova Roma, the new world capital, atop the ruins of ancient Carthage.

Part 4 – ‘Hail Caesar’

Once the Senate Hall and Colosseum of Nova Roma are complete, the Virtues hold a triumph for Caesarion, at the climax of which he will be resurrected…

…but the Virtues’ plans are ultimately undone when their efforts are sabotaged from the afterlife. When the triumph is concluded, someone other than Caesarion comes through the breached gates of the heavens: Julius Caesar, who believes the Virtues are making a mistake in attempting to resurrect his son, when they should have resurrected him first instead: “Ptolemy will be a great ruler and a true heir to the name ‘Caesar’ – but I am not yet ready to die.”

As Cleopatra screams at Julius and demands to know why, Julius gives her a confused look:

“’Why…?’ I am Caesar!”