The noonday sun beat down on the marble courtyard of the Boukoleon Palace, but the Emperor Theophilos stood in the shadow of a colonnade, his simple, dark-green tunic a stark contrast to the gilded opulence surrounding him. At his side, the Patriarch John the Grammarian, clad in somber black, watched with a hawk's intensity.

You, with a tunic frayed and dusted with the chalk of the quarries, was shoved forward by a guardsman. Youfell to his knees, not in reverence, but from sheer exhaustion.

"Rise," Theophilos's voice was not loud, but it carried, crisp and clear. "The law sees men on their feet, not their knees."