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It was like being in the labyrinth back in Pompeii, using a torch to scour every hall and corridor for signs, becoming increasingly frightened and frantic when she couldn’t find anyone.

She was not in the palace she knew any more but a shadowy, parallel version of it. The murals were darker, more sinister than she remembered, full of winged creatures and spiky vines. The busts of the emperors all seemed to scream in silent torment as she passed, their mouths wide in horror, as if sculpted at the moment of their deaths.

As Claudia continued along the long hall, filmy spectres popped into being at her side, re-enacting their deaths. Every emperor lived and died before her eyes, including, at the end of the row, her father.

Canicula, he whispered.

Claudia fled, turning back on herself.

In the main hall, pillars were crumbling, the mosaic-laid floor full of missing pieces. In the throne room, the roots and branches of dark trees had broken through the bricks. The palace seemed to be deteriorating before her eyes, dust streaming from the roof. She darted from place to place, but the palace was collapsing around her.

Outside was even more decayed and shapeless. Howling dark clouds blotted out the pale sky. The earth burned reddish beneath the surface as rivers of fire snaked through mounds of bones. They formed familiar sights, taking the shapes of the Pantheon, the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, the palace… all made of mortal remains.

Claudia realized she was no longer in Rome but its underworld inverse. A morbid, macabre mirror of the city.

She was dead.

Claudia waited for the terrible epiphany to hit her. She should be crying, screaming, wracked with grief, but she was none of those things.

Dead? No, it couldn’t be so. Minerva would not allow it.

Claudia told herself that she was dreaming, that she would soon wake and leave this place. Still, she didn’t dare to leave the palace, so she made her way to the temple, where the statues of the gods surrounded her.

She sought the image of Minerva so she could call to her for help, but Minerva wasn’t there. The statues too were not the same. They were made of strange, shiny black stone, with burning red jewels for eyes. They were not the deities she remembered. They were not the Twelve Harmonious Gods, as they were supposed to be.

Instead of Jupiter, there was Pluto or Dis Pater, distinguishable from his brother by his straggly hair and the keys on his belt. Instead of Juno, there was the ever-young, flower-crowned Proserpina, who bore a forced smile. Pluto had stolen her from her mother and made her his bride, forced her to serve as his Dread Queen of the Dead.

Underworld deities.

Their faces morphed into sinister grimaces before her eyes.

She was definitely dead. Claudia tried again to feel something – rage or sorrow maybe, but still nothing came. She, too, was just a shade of herself, a hollow shell.

She ventured out into the garden, watching as dark creatures sailed through the clouds above. Winged, humanoid creatures with sharp talons, they swooped down like owls, snatching up the few lost souls who roamed the city and carried them away.

Afraid that she might join them, she slowly backed off.

‘Poor little creature,’ came a voice.

Claudia shrieked and spun around to see two women – no, not women: two goddesses.

‘Who… who are you?’ she gasped.

‘She’s all alone.’

‘It’s very tragic for her to be so unexpectedly deceased.’

They circled her like wolves, toying with her hair and riffling her clothes without touching her as she shrank away from them.

Minerva, Diana and Venus were golden-eyed with a sheen to their marbled skin, but these goddesses were black-eyed and greyish, matte and faded, as if they had never seen the sun.

One had a sunken face and a tangle of twisted curls made of black snakes. Her robes were tied with a long, blood-red ribbon and her sockets were bruised like eyeshadow. She clasped her hands together in glee.

The other was sickly pale, almost snow white, with the clawed hands of a harpy and the same serpentine hair, a snake curled around her shoulders like a necklace. She had a permanent scowl upon her face, even when she smiled, as if everything in existence vexed her.

Claudia searched her memory for their names, trying to identify them by appearance, but she was certain they had no statues in Rome, that they were not depicted in any palace murals.

‘I’m Discordia,’ said the wide-eyed one, as if she could hear Claudia’s thoughts. ‘Eris to the Greeks. This is my sister, Invidia, otherwise known as Nemesis.’