Maximinus Thrax

The world tastes like wet iron. Blood and piss and leather gone black. The copper tang of loyalty. That old, rusting god bleeding out in the mud.

No crown. Crowns are for marble boys and senators' wet dreams. Maximinus wears his résumé in scar tissue. Keloid vines twist up his forearms, throttle his throat. The deepest one splits his mouth. Carved young, healed wrong. Every word sounds like he's chewing razors.

His men call him Thrax. Behind closed tent flaps, wine-drunk and shaking, they call him the Ox.

Not because he's strong.

Because he doesn't stop. Because he doesn’t think. Because he plows through men like rows of wheat, and leaves nothing but husks.

He eats while marching. Some animal's leg—goat, maybe. Maybe not. Grease streaks his face like war paint. His teeth are yellow tombstones. His fingers: stained the color of old pennies and fresh wounds and that in-between shade that never quite dries.

"Explain it again," he says, meat juice running down his chin. "Why they think they need a better emperor."

Decius, his centurion, rat-faced and nervous, clears his throat like a man confessing to murder.

"Rome prefers... refinement."

The laugh comes from somewhere deep. Tectonic. A horse bolts twenty yards away. Its handler hits the ground, clutching his chest.

"Rome." Maximinus spits gristle. "Is a whore choking on her own perfume."

He hurls the bone. A dog scrambles after it, ribs showing through matted fur. Maximinus watches the creature, jaw working like he's solving an equation. His lips purse. Almost tender.

Then he kicks.

Crack.

The dog folds into itself. No yelp. Just the wet sound of punctured things.

"Your Senate," he says to no one. "Fetch. Beg. Collapse."

Silence.

No one speaks.

Rain starts. God's spit, cold and thick. The kind that strips paint from marble. Maximinus stands in it, arms spread, letting the sky try to break him.

It's the only thing big enough to bother.

The siege is a joke. Rome's gates: sealed tight. Inside: senators already pouring victory wine, toasting his corpse to their marble ancestors.

His army rots from the inside. One tent burns. Another festers with bread gone green, crawling with things that shouldn't exist.

Night.

His son Gaius approaches like a funeral procession of one, bearing news that tastes like ashes.

"They've turned."

Maximinus studies the boy. The way wolves study wounded deer, with hunger that's half memory, half shame.

“You afraid to die, boy?” he asks.

Gaius swallows. His Adam's apple jumps like a trapped fish.

"No."

"Good."

Outside: footsteps. Quick. Purposeful. Steel singing free from leather sheaths. Voices rising like bile—angry, righteous, certain.

Maximinus doesn't reach for his sword.

He kneels.

The mud accepts him. He draws with one finger: circle, line, another circle. Maybe a face. Maybe God's. Maybe his own—he's never been clear on the difference.

When they enter, they expect the monster.

They expect the Ox.

He gives them meat. Just meat. Flesh like theirs. A throat that bleeds red, not black.

Four men to take his head. The axe keeps bouncing off bone, like his skeleton is making one last argument.

His son screams once.

The scream stops fast.

Later: Rome gets a package.

Inside, one head. Still wearing that trademark sneer—like the dead man knows the punchline to a joke you haven't realized you told.

The Senate opens the box.

For one second—just one—they remember what fear smells like.

Copper. Old and new. The kind that doesn't wash out.