"Mr. Fiero the Gladiator Pt: I"

"Mr. Fiero the Gladiator Pt: I"

A lone traveler through the corridors of eternity, Mr. Fiero carries the scars of time upon his very soul. With the mysterious Keystone device clutched in hand, he stands between order and chaos, hunted by those who would shatter the past and enslave the future. Once a man of quiet study, now a wanderer across centuries, Fiero wrestles with the lingering toll of his journeys, his mind frayed by the twisting currents of time, his body marked by unseen forces that no mortal was meant to endure. Yet when the hour is darkest, and the hands of time themselves splinter and fall, it is Fiero who rises to confront the storm. Allies may falter, enemies may scheme, but Mr. Fiero presses on, driven by duty, haunted by memory, and propelled ever forward into the perilous unknown.

Mr. Fiero…
He walked the town roads at sunrise, nodded to the old-timers outside the diner, on Main street he talked to hardware store clerks about nothing at all, watched fog move between the hollers like ghosts returning home. He found peace in the simple truth that Appalachia never rushed for anyone. Time, here, obeyed the mountains. Spending time in a place called Jackson park, just sitting there on a bench, enjoying solace.

One night, while sitting on the porch with Lady Jane, he whispered, “No more jumps. No more battles. No more time wars.”
She leaned against him. “We paid our dues.”
He exhaled slowly. “Then this is our last chapter, babe.”

But fate never respects retirement.

His phone rang.

A number no one had used in months.
Johnny Skinner.

Fiero hesitated. Lady Jane looked at him, her eyes asking and warning all at once.

He answered.

Johnny’s voice was low, steady… but carrying the tremble of a man who had seen something he did not understand.

“Fiero… are you ready for more?”

Fiero’s heart sank. “Johnny… what happened?”
A long silence. Too long.

Then Johnny breathed three words that froze the mountains colder than winter.
“Guess what happened…”

Mr. Fiero looked at Lady Jane.

"You can't join me on this one Mary"
Her eyes widened.

Somewhere far away, another evil storm had started, again.
Mr. Fiero got up, walking through the mist.

Then reappearing as a halo around a nighttime rain drop, the mist withdrew as if obeying an ancient command.

Stone replaced cloud beneath his boots, worn marble polished by centuries of sandals and ambition. Mr. Fiero stood at the edge of a Roman forum that breathed with life. Senators gathered in murmuring knots. Lictors struck their fasces against the ground, calling order. Above them all rose banners crimson and gold, snapping beneath a Mediterranean wind.

Time locked into place with a dull ache behind Fiero’s eyes.

Johnny Skinner materialized a step behind him, cloak drawn tight, eyes scanning rooftops and alleys as if expecting history itself to lunge from the shadows.
“We’re late,” Johnny whispered.

“No,” Fiero replied. “We’re precisely where Father Time wants us to be.”

Across the forum, Julius Caesar ascended the steps of the Curia. Not the marble statue of legend, but a living force. Sharp-eyed. Calculating. Power wrapped in flesh. Every movement carried the weight of a future that still balanced on a knife’s edge.

Fiero felt the Keystone Device thrum. Not loudly. Not urgently. Like a heartbeat that knew it was being watched.

Father Time was near.

They moved with the crowd, unseen yet unhidden, cloaked by the Keystone’s subtle distortion. Rome accepted them as it accepted all things that belonged to destiny, without question, without mercy.

Johnny leaned close. “The Van Zant ship is secure. Alpine ridge north of the city. Shielded and cold. No one followed us through.”

“That worries me,” Fiero answered. “When Father Time is confident, he does not chase. He waits.”

Caesar paused before the doors of the Senate. His gaze drifted, lingering for half a breath too long in their direction. Fiero stiffened.

Then Caesar smiled faintly, a man smiling at a future only he believed he controlled, and disappeared inside.

The air shifted.

Fiero’s vision fractured into overlapping moments. Rome burning. Rome ruling the world. Rome falling. Timelines stacked like broken mirrors. At the center of them all stood a figure robed in ash and light, a face blurred as if reality refused to remember it.

Father Time spoke without sound.

You protect decay, traveler. I offer release.

Fiero’s knees buckled. Johnny caught him.

“Say it,” Johnny exclaimed. “Say where he’s breaking it.”

“The Ides,” Fiero gasped. “Not the murder. The aftermath. He wants Caesar alive.”

Johnny went still.

A living Caesar meant no vacuum, no civil war, no Augustus, no empire shaped by fracture and reform. A single, unbroken dominion extending through centuries, calcified and cruel. Innovation strangled. Faith delayed. Liberty never born.
The Western world would suffocate in marble certainty.
And eventually, the Earth with it.

Father Time’s laughter echoed through the columns.

Fiero forced himself upright. “We cannot warn Caesar.”
Johnny exhaled slowly. “History won’t forgive that.”
“History will not survive the alternative.”

The Keystone Device burned now, lines of impossible geometry unfolding across its surface. Time resisted them. Rome resisted them. Father Time pressed from every angle, tightening the corridors of eternity into a vice.

Far away, unseen and unaware, Lady Jane Farmer stood in another era, feeling an absence she could not name.

In the Senate, a decision older than destiny prepared to be unmade.
Mr. Fiero stepped forward.

Caesar did not grant audiences lightly, yet Mr. Fiero stood before him as if summoned by destiny itself.

The chamber was quiet. Marble walls swallowed sound. Only the measured breath of Rome’s most dangerous man filled the space. Julius Caesar studied Fiero with a commander’s patience, weighing muscle, mind, and threat in a single glance.

“You come without tribute,” Caesar said calmly. “Without rank. Without fear.”
Fiero stepped forward and opened his hand.

The Keystone Device awakened.

Light folded inward upon itself, geometry impossible to the Roman eye. The air bent, time hesitated, and for one stolen heartbeat the chamber existed in two moments at once. Caesar’s shadow split across the floor, then rejoined as the device dimmed.

Caesar did not recoil.

Instead, he smiled.

“So,” Caesar murmured, “the gods have finally sent me an honest man.”

“I serve neither gods nor men,” Fiero replied. “Only balance.”

Friendship, when forged between powerful men, is not born of trust but of utility. Caesar understood at once. Fiero would not kneel. He would prove himself.
Within days, word spread through Rome of the foreigner who volunteered for the arena.

They chained him, stripped him of rank, dressed him as a slave, and brought him before the Colosseum. Tens of thousands rose in hunger and bloodlust. Rome had come to watch a mystery die.

The first opponent was the largest man Caesar could offer. A veteran killer with arms like sculpted stone. He charged.

The match ended before the crowd could inhale.

Fiero moved once. A strike precise, economic, devastating. Bone failed. Breath ceased. The Roman fell as if time itself had abandoned him.

The crowd fell silent.

The second lasted no longer.

Nor the third.

Steel shattered. Shields buckled. Men trained for violence learned fear in seconds. Fiero did not fight with rage. He fought as a man who understood inevitability.

Then the gates opened.
Lions. Bears. Creatures dragged from the edge of the known world and starved for spectacle. Roars shook the stones.

The animals never reached him.

They lunged. They fell. Precision again. Speed not born of strength but of knowledge. The beasts were silenced one by one, their bodies still before their momentum faded.

Rome erupted.

Caesar stood.

He raised his hand.

Victory was declared.

That night, beneath the roar of the city, Caesar ordered Fiero released into the underworks below the arena. Not as a prisoner, but as an agent.

Beneath Rome lay an older world. Earth carved by forgotten hands. Corridors gnawed through stone long before empire. Fiero descended alone, the Keystone humming softly, guiding him deeper, past layers of history pressed like sediment.
Father Time’s presence grew heavier the farther he walked. The minute hand had been here.

At the deepest fault of the bedrock, Fiero found it.

A stone that did not belong to Earth.

It pulsed faintly, aligned not to geography but to the sky itself. When his hand closed around it, the Keystone responded instantly. Two forces recognized each other across epochs.

The Starstone was born.

Light bent again, not inward, but outward, as if the universe adjusted its posture. Above Rome, unseen by human eyes, stars shifted imperceptibly into corrected alignment. Planets eased back into their rightful paths.

The pressure of Father Time’s manipulation weakened.

Not undone. But wounded.

Fiero exhaled.

The war for time had entered a new phase.

And Rome, unknowingly, stood at its center.

To be continued.