Apostolos (1344 - 1364)

It's been 669 years since I was born into this Earth, and I still think of myself as a Roman. Maybe it's right for me to do so, or perhaps I'm just a bit stubborn. It wouldn't be the first thing I've clung to so stubbornly. Call me a Greek if you must, but only if you're ready for fisticuffs.

I was born at a farmhouse outside of Demotika, Thrace, in the Gregorian year 1344. I'm unsure of my exact birth date, but I was baptised on the first day of summer in that year. From the perspective of the eternals I've met or heard of who were born in Constantinople itself - and there are many, though I never saw her myself until after the Empire's demise - that makes me an upstart provincial or a bumpkin farmer's boy. For what it's worth, they're highfaluting city folk in my eyes.

I was born in the midst of the Empire's long decline, during the early “reign” of John V Palaiologos, who was still in a regency under his mother and some other powerful figures. It was a time wracked by civil war, the rising Turkish menace, and, in my second year, the plague. None of my family died in those years, but when I was still but a toddler, I took ill from the plague and nearly died. My survival was an astonishment to everybody, hailed as a miracle.

When I was 8, John Kantakouzenos sent 10,000 mercenary Turks to Demotika to fight Stephan Drusan's Serbians, who had come to aid John V in the ongoing civil war. The city was never harmed directly in the fighting, but it wouldn't be the last time that the Turks would come to the area.

I spent my youth on the farm, helping my father, but eventually I decided to join the night watch in the city, learning how to wield a sword all the while. My parents weren't entirely pleased that I had little interest in maintaining the family farm, but were ultimately supportive of my choice. I would still visit often, enduring their suggestions that I settle down to raise a family of my own. I always thought such an endeavor to be a waste of my time, unaware of just how little time here I would have left.

In the same campaign which had seen the Turks under the employ of Kantakouzenos, they had seized the fortress of Kallipolis on the Sea of Marmara, their first foothold in Europe. From there, in my 19th and 20th years, they launched the campaign which would rob much of Thrace, including my home, from Imperial rule. Our resistance was spirited, but in the end, we only had untrained militia to face the invaders. In the third day of the assault on Demotika, the position that my fellows and I defended came under direct attack, and I took a Turkish scimitar to the heart. In a sane and rational world, that would have been the end of things so far as I go, but as we all know pretty well, this world we live in is neither.

I awoke days later, pained but alive, with my family gone and my childhood home occupied by the Turks. Briefly driven mad by the loss of everything I had known, and by my second “miraculous” survival, I fled north, past Adrianople and into the Danubian hinterlands.

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