This is a partial story and account of a long lived man residing below the the killing embrace of Vesuvius at story's beginning. It is a full life of a man soon coming too an end, one that began in the formative years of the Roman Empire. Memoirs finished just as Vesuvius destroys his estate.

Two millennia later, a thief of antiquities, a grave robbing nighthawk, discovers the near perfectly preserved manuscripts portraying this man's life and begins to write them up.