Fame (Historical horror oneshot)

[all fictions]

Spoiler: Author's note

This was supposed to come out on Halloween, but I am used by now to not respect my own deadlines. I wanted to try my hand at horror, but I don't think I quite succeeded. Oh well, this makes for a weird piece at least.

Partly inspired by a prompt, "I may be but small, but I will die a colossus", from months ago that I failed to enter in time, partly (okay, a lot) inspired by Pinbacker from Sunshine.

Illa vero gloriae cupiditas sacrilega: inventus est enim qui Dianae Ephesiae templum incendere vellet, ut opere pulcherrimo consumpto nomen eius per totum terrarum orbem dissiceretur, quem quidem mentis furorem eculeo inpositus detexit. ac bene consuluerant Ephesii decreto memoriam taeterrimi hominis abolendo, nisi Theopompi magnae facundiae ingenium historiis eum suis conprehendisset.
—Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia​

In her dreams, she burned.

She was not sure why the Oneiroi sent her these same visions everytime she fell asleep. In her daily life, she had no fear of fire; a healthy caution when handling it, sure, but nothing that the average man or woman did not do. She had more fear about her children carelessly sticking their hands in it out of that fearless, curious stupidity all children seem to possess. She had done that herself once, or so she had been told by her mother; about how, at age five, she had thrust her whole arm in the flaming hearth trying to retrieve a lost doll, and cried the entire day afterwards. She did not remember that at all, probably due to her young age, and were it not for some scars on her right arm, she would have thought her mother was trying to scare her.

Perhaps that's where the dreams came from. Simply her forgotten memory of burning herself rising to the surface.

But in her nightmares, it was never just her arm.

Her entire body was set aflame. There was no context, no beginning to the dreams: she just burned. An immolation to the gods, perhaps, or a punishment by way of a burning bronze bull. It did not matter. In the throes of burning alive, nothing mattered more than the fire burning you. Burning. Blazing hot.

She could only scream at the unbearable pain. Scream as she felt her skin peeling from the intense heat, her body turning charred black. Her blood boiling, her bones cracking, everything within on fire. Her head itched painfully, accompanied by the crispy aroma of her hair starting to fry, being reduced to black flakes coming swirling down past her face like snow. Sometimes, one of her eyes bulged and popped out of its socket, and then split like a ripe, rotten fruit full of blood. And she invariably ended up choking from the smoke of her own flesh.

This always woke her up. Often in tears, but alive and unharmed, safe in her bed with her husband. In the first years of their marriage, this would wake him up and he would comfort her. He could be very sweet then, holding her throughout the night and rubbing her arms and back soothingly. Other times, he was less sweet, and sought more than an embrace, even as her nightmares definitely put her out of that sort of mood. But she always relented, as he was her husband and this was her duty. Besides, she liked to think he did this in part to distract her from her nightly terrors.

Nowadays, she could wake up screaming and he would barely budge, snoring and sleeping as deeply and peacefully as the dead. She could shake him all she wanted and not rouse him from sleep; even better, Poseidon, the old Earth-Shaker himself, could bellow so in anger that a score of the walls and buildings of the city crashed to the ground, her husband would probably sleep through all of it. Argos Panoptes he was not. She told herself it was the hard work day of a tektōn that exhausted him to the bones, and not him tiring of her.

And besides, this reaction was better than the alternative.

On some rare nights, when it was especially dark and silent, when she woke from her black dreams, he was awake, the white of his eyes the only thing visible in the dark as he was fixing her. He did not speak, even when she tried talking to him. He did not move. She did not even think he was breathing.

He was simply staring at her, with an intensity that made her uneasy. Fearful.

His eyes…

When she asked him about it the next day, he typically did not remember, or claimed not to. She didn't push. She did not want to start being afraid of her husband on top of her dreams. Sometimes, she could even convince herself that it had been part of her dream, a vision flitting through the gates of ivory.

She could ignore it that way. Even as it happened more and more frequently.

She should have taken heed. The gods can send dreams as warnings after all.

This time, her sleep had been actually free of any dreams, and when she woke up, warm and sweating and out of breath, it was due to the sounds of loud voices outside the house. In her sleep-addled state, it took her a moment to recognize the noises as frantic and panicked shouts and yellings, and it took her longer to recognize the voices of her neighbors, shouting warnings and cries for help. That immediately removed the last dregs of sleep, her heart beating faster at the hint of danger and the adrenaline shaking the sleep out of her.

The first thing she noticed was that she was alone in bed, an empty space where her husband had left her side. This only made her more alert: whatever was happening, he must have left to check or help. The second thing she noticed, and the most worrying, was a most acrid, but familiar, smell, one that made her eyes prickle and her nose feel dry.

It was the smell of sharp, acrid smoke. Not of the gentle hearth braziers, but of the flames of destruction of a raging fire.

Burning. Blazing hot.

This realization fully woke her up, and she quickly threw her blanket and got out of bed. She would normally feel cold out of bed since she slept in the nude, but her choice was driven by the summer heat usually making her feel sweaty. If anything, she felt even hotter now: the season had manifestly erupted with feverish intent, just like when wet and foggy Notus gusted from the land of the Ethiopians to bring even more sweltering heat, heat so dense it felt as if the air itself had become solid enough to physically touch. She felt dry and wet at the same time, intensely aware of every hair on her skin. She tried to ignore it and threw on the first peplos she grabbed out of her clothing trunk, even though she felt disgust at wearing the dress over her sweaty skin. Her husband left her alone because he trusted her to take care of the house and the kids in his absence, so she made to move to their room.

But when her eye fell on the entrance of the house, she saw that her children had already been awake. They were standing on the door's threshold, their eyes turned towards Boreas where the fire was raging and whatever else was happening. Her youngest was holding the hand of her older brother, either in fear or so she could be stopped from running off, and was rubbing her eyes reddened with smoke and tears. Her son was little better, his cheeks wet with tears, but he was admirably refraining from rubbing his eyes, probably out of misplaced childish pride only a ten year old boy could display when fearing being seen as weak.

She gently but firmly brought them back inside the house and ushered them to their rooms. She dressed them, but instructed them to stay put: she would go outside to check what was going on and quickly come back. Depending on the severity of the situation, she would tell them to go back to bed or tell them to pack and prepare to leave the city for a fun trip.

Her children were obedient enough that she did not think they would disobey, but a part of her, the anxious, scared part of her who remembered burning every night, whispered that in the worst case scenario, it was already too late to do any of her plans, and she was just delaying the inevitable. On these grim thoughts, she stepped out and closed the door behind her.

As soon as she set foot outside, she was smacked by the intense heat reminiscent of the feeling of entering a blacksmith's forge. The wind blew, but it was hot, so hot, singeing the skin on her arms and face. It was worse than it had been inside the house, and soon her eyes were not just watering but fully crying, flowing tears streaming down her cheeks which she had no power to stop.

Outside was chaos. It seemed as though all of Ephesos had woken up, the night turned into a strange new day, the fire a second sun introducing the citizens to a new and panicked strange routine. Men came out of houses and ran in the direction of the blaze to assist in quenching it, some with buckets or jars of water she doubted would be of much help. Some women acted the same, but most stayed on the porch of their homes just like her, with many holding their children with fierce protectiveness and whispering reassurances in their ears. Many teenage boys and girls, bolstered by the folly of their youth, were heading towards the fire at a more measured, relaxed pace, like it was an outing, most likely going to satisfy their curiosity than to be of any help. Everywhere everyone was shouting or screaming loudly over the noise, mainly in Greek, but she could hear Lydian, Aramaic, and even some Persian.

Above it all, the flames rising up had turned a large portion of the night sky into a strange, dreadful red color, the black smoke serving as its clouds, the flying embers as its stars. The river Kaystros, flowing through the city, was the reflection of the firmament, its surface a distorted mirror, making the waters look bloody, polluted, corrupted. The view was so alien, so incongruent, so overwhelming, she felt dizzy looking at it and unsteady on her feet. I am still dreaming, she thought, I must. The gods must have changed her terrible visions of her fiery death to the fiery death of the world itself.

Abruptly, the thought came unbidden in her mind: this was no longer Ephesos. They were in Tartaros, or at least what she imagined Tartaros looked like. Hundreds of the damned screaming in fear in all the tongues of men, running towards the ever burning river Phlegethon, and the yawning, dark abyss of Tartaros beyond, its swirling, sightless vortex full of the crawling chaos from before creation and nameless things before the light and the dark had names.

She felt a pressure rising in her throat, and she suddenly bent forward for a series of violent hacking coughs she couldn't stop. His body jerked with every spasm, saliva running from her open mouth, as she gasped desperately trying to find air again, but only letting in more smoke making her cough more. She tried to stop it by pressing an arm over her mouth and nose but it hardly helped. The smoke was so thick and acrid she could hardly draw a breath. Her legs felt like lead, her throat burned, and her head ached. It got difficult to concentrate, and the world began to blur.

I am choking on my own cooking flesh.

Just as she worried she would hack up her lungs, she felt a hand on her back, running it back and forth to help her calm down. As the coughing fit began to subside somewhat, she gratefully sipped the water from a goblet that her benefactor held to her. They followed by putting a damp cloth on her mouth and nose, and she could feel herself breathing slightly easier. She raised her head to see through her tears that her helper had been her next-door neighbor, a fifty something woman from Thrace who fished at dawn in the river the fish her husband would later sell in the agora during the day.

"Thank you," she wheezed. Her neighbor only nodded, not fully fluent in Greek, so she took the time to regain her breath and her composure. Once she felt sure enough of herself, she addressed her. "Do you know what is going on?" she asked. A dark thought filled her with dread. "Are we under attack? Is it war?"

She had heard rumors that a war was brewing in Boeotia between the Phocians and the Thebans, but that was far away, on the other side of the sea. Had they brought their war to their shores?

The Thracian woman shook her head. "I do not know," she said with her usual thick accent, and it made her feel bad for all the times her husband had mocked her behind her back. She is not civilized, listen to her speak. Bar bar bar is all I hear. She had laughed then, which only deepened her guilt.

She shook her head and tried to ignore it. "Have you seen my husband? Did he go help fight the fire perhaps?"

The woman hesitated a moment, then pointed. She had expected her to point towards the blaze, but instead, her calloused finger pointed slightly above her, or rather, above their house.

She felt stupid. Of course he was on their roof, it was the best place to see the entire city and assess the situation before rushing in. She should have checked there in the first place. But it was a relief: she wouldn't have to go too far to get him in case they needed to flee the city.
After thanking her neighbor, she used their wooden ladder leaning against one of the house's walls to climb up to the roof. The ladder was old and rickety, and half-way up one of the rungs always seemed to be too giving, and she always had a moment of apprehension putting any weight on it. Fortunately, it held on once more, and she quickly reached the flat roof giving a panoramic view of much of the city.

She did not see her husband. But from up here, under the terrible red sky, she could see where the vivid sunrise burning over the city came from, and that feeling, that sense that the world wasn't right, came back with even more force.

The Artemision, the temple of Ephesian Artemis, was burning.

Burning. Blazing hot.

In the distance, visible from everywhere as the heart of the city, the house of the Lady of Ephesos was now at the heart of an inferno. The black smoke, billowing to the heavens like gigantic shape-shifting monsters, was so heavy and so thick that she could just barely see the roaring orange glow of the ardent fire from within the depths of the darkness. She could see long, high, intense flames moving slowly as if alive around the white marble building. Licking viciously, purposefully, burning the temple, moving inside, up the walls. She could see distant figures, their features troubled from the distance and the smoke, moving towards it, Ephesians trying to save the temple. She could see how futile it was, how the destruction had progressed too far for there to be anything to save.

Once again she was struck by a powerful sense of dislocation. If she looked at the fuming, burning temple too long, it appeared to be melting, sagging out of the right angles and straight lines designed by Chersiphron, and bending, not into curves but into strange unhallowed arcs that hurt her eyes. One of the Seven Wonders built by Man was now undergoing a transformation, changing itself into shapes no human hands could fashion, no human minds could imagine. The world was spinning, growing hazy, and when she staggered, it felt to her as if her sandals made odd smooching sounds, like the roof beneath them was growing soft.

That was when she saw him. Her husband was on a corner of the roof, back turned to her and looking at the blaze. Through the haze of her dizziness and the smoke, he appeared strangely blurred, the shape of a man as vague as that of a dead shade in Hades. This unnerved her.

"Herostratos?" she asked in a choked, halting voice.

At first, she thought he did not hear her. It would have been better if he didn't.

"Wife."

He answered in a strange voice. If asked, she would have not been able to explain why it was strange, only that it was. Like fire trying to speak by crackling was what came into her mind, but that made no sense. How could fire talk? And how was she supposed to know what that was like? It was a drunk's thought, a result of her dizziness.

And yet it was the only thing that seemed to even get close to what her husband's voice sounded like.

She ignored it.

Her voice hurt, abominably so, but she made herself speak. "Beloved, the temple is burning. What if it is an enemy attack? What should we do?"

He didn't answer immediately again, and in the following seconds, it suddenly dawned on her.

The light is wrong. That was what was wrong with what she was seeing. Even with the smoke, even with her vertigo clouding her mind, the light from the fire should have illuminated everything on the roof in its glow. The entire space should have been completely illuminated by the horrid fiery red sky, and yet she could not see her husband. Not well, at least, out of focus.

When he replied, in his cracked, smoky voice, it was like he truly didn't hear her. "Do you hear it? Do you see it? This moment of uncreation…it's beautiful."

At the same moment, a leaping, roaring conflagration exploded out of the temple, the sudden, sharp concussion pressing uncomfortably against her eardrums. It illuminated the roof, the look of it was like the look of lightning, pale, dazzling, without warmth or comfort, showing each smallest thing with fierce distinctness, and burning into her retina.

In the sudden conflagration, his face was illuminated.

And just like in her dreams, she could only scream, in unison with the rest of the screams in the city.

Her husband, Herostratos, had been burned alive, same as her.

Fire had cooked his flesh. She would have almost thought he had gotten a bad sunburn, his lips livid and bloody, and his reddened face and neck blistered in places, being the result of a long day in the desert. But the skin on the left side of his neck had been a smoky, bubbly red, and the lobe of his ear on that side had melted a little. His cheeks had blackened and peeled away, revealing tender, raw baby-pink flesh beneath. His facial hair, hairline, eyebrows, eyelashes had been seared away. The skin on one of his arms was torn off, seeming like rags hanging from it. One of his eyes bulged out of its socket, colored a violent pink and the pupil inert, seeing nothing. The other was mad, feverish, fixing her with a familiar intensity, the same intensity he looked at her with on some nights when she dreamed of her immolation.

Without thinking about it—she no longer could think—she said, "It was you. You burned the temple."

The enormity, the impiety of those words, hit her like a punch.

At some point just below the place where her conscious mind seemed able to go, some instinct had realized it before she could. If Herostratos had sustained those burns fighting the fire at the temple, he would have been brought to a physician to treat them, and she wouldn't have found him on the roof at all. Someone would have warned her.

He had left before the first helpers had even gotten there. The very worksite where he spent his days as a builder renovating the Artemision.

At her words, he smiled. She had seen him smile countless times before, and this one looked like no smile her husband ever made. It was as though he were smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, his red, blistered face, and his melted eyes, and his blackened skin, and his maddened smile.

It was the smile of a stranger, and the face of a monster.

He replied to her, his crispy voice still sounding like it came out of a burning tree, "It was me. I burned the temple," he parrotted back to her. He picked bits of skin off his face. "This would not have been allowed were it not for the gods' will."

The blasphemy of his words shocked her. "By the gods... Herostratos! Do you realize what you are saying? What you have done?"

He laughed incredulously, and shook his head. Whatever remained of his hair came down from the movement as black flecks drifted in the air like rising dust. Then he took a step forward, and suddenly he was before her, and her nostrils were assaulted by the smell of smoke and burnt lamb and cooking pig. It was so abrupt, she stumbled, her feet smooching and now actually seeming to stick a little at each step, and fell. And for an atrocious floating second, she believed she would fall off the roof and break her neck.

She didn't, she simply fell on her rear. She stared at her husband, standing above her now, another wave of dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a moment he wasn't even in focus but was just a blur standing there, and she had the idea that he had walked up to her all right, but had come from nowhere before that. When he next spoke, it seemed to her as if his voice grew in volume. Not like he was screaming, but as if he were incredibly loud from far away and ran towards her until he just now arrived right in front of her, the intensity of the voice rising as he got closer.

"No. Not your gods. Mine!"

Looking up at him, she felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at the sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the moment, make it all right again. But she could only feel a scorching heat from his body.

Burning. Blazing hot.

Madness.

"Yes, my god has no need for temples of stone or woods. You call your goddess Light-Bringer, but she is laughable. A wooden thing in the likeness of the inferior female sex, with no eyes to see, no ears to listen, no mouth to speak, and no hands to touch. What fool would worship that?"

Desecrator. Blasphemer. Monster in human skin. "She's your god as well," she insisted. "And when you die, you will be judged harshly down in Hades for your act of sacrilege. You will spend eternity damned in dim Tartaros alongside Salmoneus, Tantalos, Sisyphos, and other impious men!"

"When I die?" he said, cocking his head in incomprehension. His melted skin, sagging like a thick glob of spit, oozed at the movement, like wax dripping from a burning candle. He sounded like an actor or an orator in the Great Theater, declaring something important. But he spoke too loudly and it was as if he were speaking to someone behind her. "Wife, I will never die. Fire is my God, and It walks with me, and It is old, far older than your gods, far older than life and death and time. This world, no one gods or men has made, but it always was and will always be an ever-living Fire, it is becoming all things and all things return to it—this is the game eternity plays with itself. When the world began, the first light was a Fire, the aether. When it ends, it will be through Fire, in ekpyrosis. When Fire is on this scale, how could its Instrument die? Was Achilles not named Pyrisous because his divine mother burned away his mortality, making him immortal? Are the heroes of old not remembered for eternity by being placed in the ever-burning stars?"

He smiled, so broadly lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. Not just there, creases extended all over his red face, and his one good eye became a slit, the skin stretched like poorly distended leather. And he said, in his gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, "I will have my place in the stars, woman. I have torn down a temple, and in return, the destroyer of men is born. My deeds will make me immortal, for who sacrifices unto Fire with fuel in his hand is given happiness. My name shall still be known for centuries to come: who will remember yours?"

For an halting, terrifying moment, she forgot who she was. For a moment, she forgot her name. She thought for the first time in her life that her name was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a word for this body that wasn't really hers either.

Her ears burned, from his words or from the heat, she couldn't tell. She didn't like her husband's voice, she didn't like what that voice was saying (the destroyer of men is born... what in the names of the gods was that supposed to mean?), and most of all she didn't like the background sounds to his voice, the horrid dry crackling sounds of flames trying to speak.

"You are mad, Herostratos," was all she could manage to faintly say.

"Mad?" he asked, and this at last was in a different voice. It was a little flatter, as if the heat was finally getting to him. "Mad? MAD!? Nothing mad about me, woman, I have only seen the light of the true Light-Bearer. Fire is salvation, Fire is life and death," he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if he were running through all the words he knew in all the tongues of men but was no longer sure which of them communicated his thoughts, then rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed. "Fire reduces spirit to matter, controlling Fire brought mankind dominion over nature, birthed civilization. The burning and unburning Fire is beneficent, it is affection, it is happiness, it is swift, it is holy. The burning bush speaks, the pillar of Fire guides, the fiery chariot ascends, the tongues of Fire bless. The ordeal by Fire proves the guilt and the innocence. Everything is on Fire, all senses are burning. Seven steps around the Fire for love. Fire is the destroyer in war, and the light of a thousand suns will end Man in Its radiance."

The words rose to his lips with ardent vigor, with igneous ardor. In his eye, she saw ecstatic rapture. By the end, he was almost screaming. She did not understand a word of his nonsense, but every word filled her with dread, like their meaning would shatter what little remained of her mind.

She did not know what possessed her to move. She had been hollow with what had once been fear but was now just an emptiness. Her terrifying husband had robbed her of her will. Her mind was still hazy. But perhaps her body recognized the danger on its own; that, if she were to stay with him any further, his words would scorch her, burn her to a crisp, a punishment by the gods for listening to him.

And so she stood, the ground now steady beneath her feet. She watched herself run and jump down from the roof, watching this body moving out from where Herostratos waited under a sky all red, under the watch of his hungry god.


The authorities quickly apprehended him the next day. It helped that Herostratos made no secret of it and proclaimed loudly to those who would hear him that he was the one to set the Artemision on fire. He was publicly executed before the eyes of every Ephesians, still ranting and raving about fire making immortal.

After having been made aware of his motives, it was declared that, to not give him satisfaction from beyond the grave, his name would not be mentioned ever again, under penalty of death. His name was stricken from all official records, even those of his own execution, and Ephesians were instructed to strike him from their mouths and their minds as well.

Still, later, she would hear the rumor that he couldn't have acted alone. That he couldn't possibly have accessed the temple, set it on fire, and gotten away discreetly when it was full of guards and custodians. And so the rumor went that the fire had been deliberately and covertly set by the temple's administrators, using the destruction to move the temple elsewhere after it was found that its foundations were sinking, which they would not have been able to do otherwise due to religious constraints. And that her husband had been set up to take the fall as a convenient scapegoat. She did not know the truth of it. It might even be possible. But what he had told her on the roof had been from him alone: there was no unwilling participant or victim that night.

As for her, she got lucky. She took a bad fall jumping off the roof, and could no longer walk without the help of a cane, but the pain was worth whatever would have happened to her otherwise. The Ephesian government took pity on her and her children, and did not allow the punishment to unwittingly affect them too. The family moved back to her parents' house, and her children took on the name of her father. She spent the remainder of her life as a widow, and eventually people only remembered her as if she had always been a widow, not who her husband had been.

Sometimes she had nightmares, quite often, in fact. Almost every night, in fact. But she rarely remembered them when she woke up. It was a mercy. Her sole fear had been to whisper his name in her sleep and getting killed for it, but it never happened.

Years later, a king came from beyond the sea, out of Macedon, a conqueror called Alexander, who warred the Persians and thought of himself as the future ruler of all of Asia. She did not care for him, not even when he offered to pay for the temple's rebuilding. But when she heard he called himself a "new Achilles" and was told to have been born the same day he burned down the temple, she had felt cold all over and nauseated deep in the pit of her belly. She did not want to hear anymore and did not want to even glimpse the man.

The destroyer of men is born. She still did not know what it meant, and she refused to acknowledge the thought. It brought to her mind the smell of overcooked flesh.

She did end up developing a fear of fire after all. She could tend to the hearth for a time, but the color of the fire sickened her if she stared at it too long. Same for the colors of the rising and the setting sun: the yellow deepening into orange turning into blood red made her want to scream. It reminded her of the fire, but none of its warmth, leaving nothing but the terror of its approach.

Hopefully she did not die in a fire. It is impossible to know: like most Ephesians of her class, she was buried in a nameless grave, where she followed her parents, and her children and their children would follow.

Her name would be forgotten. But none would forget the name of Herostratos.

The itch for fame is impious. For there was found a man who wished to set fire to Ephesian Diana's temple, in order that by the destruction of a most beautiful building his name might be bruited throughout the entire world. Put on the rack he confessed this madness of mind. And well had the citizens of Ephesus voted by decree to wipe out the memory of this most foul fellow, except that the grandiloquent genius of Theopompus included him in his histories.
—Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings​