Verulamium thrived under the organised formal structures & institutions of a Roman provincial city, its streets tidily set with pale stone flags, glinting in the morning sun, while the odours of bakeries and ironworks curled upwards like offerings to the gods - or perhaps the tax collectors. Villas, boasted their wealth in shining mosaics — accounts of Neptune’s steeds and winged triumphs that gleamed like caged light on damp floors. Legionary discipline ran through the forum, where magistrates were already in conference with the town council — which, of course, meant that much was said and little was done — and the measured clink of a blacksmith’s hammer tolled like a metronome to the hum of early business. But beneath this forceful Roman rule, there was still the scent of old country: wet ground and hawthorn, the faint quiver of wild woods across the ramparts. 

The breath of old Britain seemed to fill every crack & crevice of the stonework — through the moss that forced between paving stones and the night winds rushing down from chalk downs. The Roman ideals can shout dominion, but the island’s primaeval spirits slept in ambush, murmuring in the rustle of oak leaves and the chattering of brooks — amused, perhaps, at the hubris of the empire. It was from this meeting of order and untamed that Alban was conceived — a child of two legacies, Roman by law but Briton by birth. His father, Marcus Varian, a veteran of the legions, wore his scars and his Roman citizenship in the unspoken pride of a man who had marched behind the Eagle and would remind you of that, if you pushed him. 

Service in the legion had purchased him land and the privileges of Rome; discipline clung to him like the iron of his old armour and nearly with the same good humour. 

Marcus believed in the promise of the empire: of roads that reached distant places, of law that imposed order on chaos, of power that endured. To him, every word, every gesture, every glance was a rehearsal for the grander stage of Rome’s eternity. He instructed Alban in the discipline of the legions from the moment the boy took his first steps. The clang of gladius on practice wooden swords became the morning symphony of his life, and sometimes even the evening too. Marcus taught the slow enunciation of Latin, the importance of bearing, posture, and unyielding gazes. 

“A citizen must speak clearly and stand firmly,” he’d say, his voice as hard and unyielding as the stride of a soldier. “Strength and reason — these are the pillars of Rome.” Alban generally suspected a third pillar: punctuality. The villa on the town’s outskirts bore witness to Marcus’s faith in Roman order: a square courtyard, a modest mosaic of a dolphin leaping in blue tesserae, and an open atrium to the sky where rainwater accumulated in a shallow pool. It was neither tawdry nor poor, but like its owner, robust, practical, and sturdily built to last. The only thing that ever flourished there without restraint was Alban. Eira, his mother, was of an elder story and a more poetic one. She was of ancient Catuvellauni tribal stock and carried in her bearing the grave dignity of the island’s earliest lords. Her voice was rich as rivers and stones, and when she had spoken, the cadence of the old language wrapped about her son like a half-remembered hymn. 

Her world was not made up of streets and courts, of orders and armies, but of rhythm and tale and remembrance, and she preferred them in that order. 

She led Alban through forests, demonstrating the way to read the wind in the leaves, the way to hear the gentle whisper of streams, and the way to read the tracks of beasts as messages from the earth itself. Where Marcus had talked of empire and law, Eira talked of cycles and patience. 

“The earth remembers what Rome does not know,” she breathed with twilight falling over the fields, her eyes echoing the hearth-fire’s dance. “And the earth will outlast the roads.” Marcus, hearing such remarks, generally took a drink of red wine and grumbled about drainage.  


Her stories were entwined with mystery: spectres who guarded the brooks, deities older than Jupiter who demanded not sacrifice, but respect. She carried a sprig of rowan when she read these stories, tracing designs in the air as if sculpting invisible runes. In Alban’s experience, they were older than the empire’s marble and bronze, and considerably less polished. He wandered often, slipping past Marcus’s watchful eye into the fringe of the forest — an act of rebellion so gentle it almost looked like contemplation. 


At other times, the opposition of his parents clashed rudely like waves on rocks. Marcus dismissed the old myths as “shadows of superstition,” demanding that law and authority only ruled the world. Eira, unrelenting, had told him that Rome’s gods were just as hungry for offerings, but the ground under their feet remembered another kind of ordering. 

“Rome forgets what cannot be counted,” she said one night, while Alban stood gazing at the river twisting in the twilight. “But the rivers remember. The trees remember, and one day, perhaps, you will remember too.” Marcus snarled that trees were poor soldiers, also, and turned his attention to taxes.   

Their squabbling never became harsh, but it was like distant thunder, a reminder that two worlds met in their son. Alban sipped these tensions with subdued curiosity. He loved the cold precision of Roman order — the stepped discipline of troops, the asphyxiating geometry of the forum, the lawlike precision. But the woods called to him on a sibilant strand he could not break. In that whisper, he felt something broader than the laws of the empire, something that required patience, listening, and a moral sense that could not be created through discipline. 


But his parents’ disagreements never turned bitter; instead, they were the gentle, familiar sparring of two people deeply secure in each other’s company. Theirs was the comfort of a strong marriage where differences could be aired without fear, and where every debate was underpinned by affection and mutual respect. Their bickering was less a sign of discord and more a testament to the trust and ease that comes from years of shared life, each argument a thread woven into the fabric of their enduring partnership.