He saw his brother’s face on every corpse he walked by on the way back. As if seeing him in his dreams wasn’t enough. In a way, he was just the same as any other bastard he’d buried. They all amounted to sacrifices, blocks of stone on his ladder to godhood.

Roman looked away from the pale faces poking from the mud. I won, he tried to calm himself. I won.

For if he hadn’t, that pile of corpses would have been justified. A loss would have meant that he could’ve spent his life with them. He could have stood with his brother, side by side against the imperials and the machinations of the nobles. He could’ve spared all his men, all his comrades, and spent fewer nights tormented by his conscience. Maybe he could’ve been with her too.

But his whole existence was based on the belief that happiness and ambition were incompatible. Oh, and how glad he was that he turned out right. It wasn’t about land or money or even power that he did it. Wars rarely change anything. With some luck, you might move the border to the next river and collect taxes from a handful more villagers who couldn’t care less who stole their money every year.

No, he didn’t want more dirt. Every man on this earth wanted to leave something behind so his life wouldn’t have been for nothing. Poor men leave kids. Rulers leave unfinished ambitions. His ancestors wanted more than the world had given them. A patch of land first, then water next to it, then the stone peaks that reached the sky. And it was never enough. Neither of them ever achieved their dreams, so they handed them down generation by generation. He was left to look for immortality. Told to have his name etched so deep in history that the gods themselves couldn’t scratch it off if they wanted to. He was told to leave a broken statue in the mud as the ancients did in a time long forgotten.

That pile of bodies he stepped on to reach godhood was ten generations deep. But now that he’s done, his son won’t have to keep adding to it.