Redsand Canyon perseco

germanicus felt he had said the story of his origins multiple times.

but fennec was his wife and therefore he would not only recite the surface telling.

"i was born to the emperor of editum, gaius drusus. my mother was his wife agrippina. i was one of six. three sons and two daughters. cato, tiberius, servanus, julia, and livilla." his voice remained even but his eyes remembered, and his mind brought their faces into stark relief, though it had been the better part of a decade since he had seen any of them.

"the practice was that you kept one son back to train as heir and put the other into the military. but my father put both tiberius and i there, when we could only just stand." that was the part the eagle always left unsaid: that the captain of his father's guard had received two half-weaned infants that day.

he cleared his throat. "the centurion who trained us, patrocles, was harsh but skilled. the other soldiers helped to wean tiberius and i with chewed meat and water and herbs. it was all i knew. i scarcely remember my mother now." it seemed that he had lived such a foreign life from the one he now led. "when tiberius and i were seven months of age, editum's enemy attacked. they were repelled by my father's army, for patrocles was a great general."

his dark jawline tensed, his words cooling. "tiberius did not live to see our victory that day. we pulled him from beneath other dead. patrocles looked at his face, to ensure that it was the king's son. we sent him home to be buried." germanicus could not convey the horror of war, the churned and bloody earth, the gasping soldiers. you could scarcely see in front of you half the time, and the other half was spent realizing that your enemy was little more than a rabble of boys itself.

"after that i never went home. i stayed with the army. i rose in the ranks. patrocles fell in battle a year later and the men urged me to take his place. within less than another i was tribunis laticlavis. and when my father died, and my brother cato became emperor, he made me legatus legionis over all the army. i did not even return for our father's funeral. my promotion was sent in a message."

one son for the throne. one son for the battlefield. 

germanicus had never regretted it.