The messenger arrived without fanfare, slipping through the city gates of Constantinople in the gray hours before dawn, his threadbare cloak serving as a guise that made him appear no different from any common laborer. But beneath that cloak, sewn into the lining with careful hands, was a letter that could change everything.
He had carried it from the western front, where Emperor Constantine's forces struggled against the advancing Ottoman army. The generals feared what every soldier already knew — that Mehmed II intended to annihilate the Byzantine Empire completely, leaving no stone standing upon another.
The messenger found the imperial scribe hunched over his desk, squinting at maps through spectacles that barely corrected his terrible astigmatism. The old man held documents so close to his face that ink sometimes transferred to his nose, yet he never complained. He had served the empire for forty years.
When the scribe read the letter, his hands trembled. Constantinople would fall within the month. He folded the parchment carefully and opened a small wooden box on his desk. Inside lay a single bronze coin stamped with the face of Justinian, a memento from his own grandfather who had served this empire in better days.
He pressed the coin in his palm and felt its familiar weight.
"Then we do what we can," he murmured, and reached for fresh parchment to begin recording everything he knew — histories, laws, poems — so that something might survive whatever was coming.