Building Rome without building Rome
Jerash, Jordan. A Roman city in the landscape I moved my empire toward. © Krista Boivie, 2016
For most of 2024 I could have told you what was blooming in my empire in the spring.
That is the kind of thing you find yourself doing at five in the morning, and it is roughly the tenth-most useful piece of research I did. The actual work was one decision I had to keep making: how much of Rome to use.
Here is roughly how it broke down.
What I kept
The architecture. Arches, columns, and marble gone slightly grey. An amphitheater with carved levels and an awning drawn across the top. Readers know this vocabulary, and every sentence I do not have to spend explaining the world is a sentence I get to spend on the people in it.
Latin, as a working language. Every invented name in my empire has a Latin root, chosen rather than allowed to arrive by ear. The rite you will meet further down this post is called Gloritas. The two years of trials a boy runs to qualify for it are the Proelium Civica. Latin does the work before anyone explains anything: it tells you this is a civilization that keeps archives. Every name had to be guessable from context. If you have to open Google Translate, I have failed at the actual job. Most of my titles belong to the temples, and those are getting their own post.
The military organization. How large a legion is. How many men under an officer, what that officer is called, and who he answers to when the general is away. How soldiers trained, with what, and what the drills looked like when nobody was watching. I kept this close to the record because armies are one of the few places where the real answer is more interesting than anything I would have invented.
Primary sources, for the sound of things. When I needed the cadence of an imperial decree, or a prophecy, I did not go to fantasy novels. I went to Cicero, and I read his speeches for rhythm rather than content, listening for how a sentence builds when it is designed to be heard instead of read.
Plants, birds, growing seasons, resources. I wanted to know what was in bloom in the month a scene takes place, what a farmer would be doing that week, what bird a character would hear without noticing she heard it, and what my empire could and could not get its hands on. This is the layer that makes a world feel like it existed before chapter one.
What I got wrong
I did all of that botanical and agricultural work against Roman geography. Mediterranean climate, Italian growing calendar, the flora of a peninsula. Months of it. Then I designed my map, and my empire came out hotter, drier, and considerably further east, with an inland sea rather than an outward-facing one.
I never went back and reconciled the two.
Some of it survives the move. Olives and vines and figs do fine in either place. Some of it does not, but I made my peace with it. The honest version is that I researched for accuracy and then changed the thing the accuracy was anchored to, and then decided not to sweat it, because it is a fantasy novel and I can move these rules without breaking anything.
I am telling you anyway, because writing about research usually turns into a highlight reel, and the highlight reel is a lie about how any of this works.
What I cut
The Senate. This was the largest structural decision I made.
By the time I started analyzing what my government system should be, my empire already had three temples, and the temples are not decorative. Lex owns the legal canon: judges, philosophers, the treatises, the courts. Drusus owns building, war, and scholarship. Estia owns healing, the hearth, and the flame that keeps the empire lit. These are institutions with real jurisdiction, real revenue, and centuries of precedent. They can say no.
Put a Senate on top of that and every decision in the book requires four bodies to agree before anything moves. That is arguably realistic, but I had zero interest in writing eighty pages of people debating. I already have enough council scenes for one book.
So the government went monolithic. One emperor, absolute in the sense that a decree binds everywhere once it is spoken, and constrained in the sense that tradition demands he listen to people who can make his life difficult. Seven provinces under governors he appoints himself, which is a satrapy in all but name and suits a landmass empire better than anything Rome did with its sea. There is a council, and it advises. It votes rarely. Most of the time it exists so the objection has to be said out loud without ever becoming a tally.
What I built
In figuring out an empire, I realized that culture and authenticity come from nuance and events. What are the rites of passage? How does the empire celebrate? What are the customs and traditions? I briefly considered incorporating gladiatorial games, but quickly realized that wouldn't work for the world I was building.
The real gladiatorial games ran on people who had no choice. Enslaved men, prisoners of war, condemned criminals, with a thin layer of free volunteers who had sold themselves into it. The spectacle was the point, the crowd was the judge, and the ultimate demonstration of power was one man in a box deciding whether another lived.
Gloritas is what I built in its place.
It happens on the spring equinox, in an amphitheater (inspired by the Colosseum), under an enchanted silk awning that can be drawn across the top to throw shadow down onto the floor. The people on that floor are boys. Fifteen and sixteen years old, non-magical, there by choice, having spent two years qualifying through a circuit of regional trials. They are somebody's sons, and nearly all of the empire's magistrates and generals once stood where they are standing.
So did my emperor. Book One opens fourteen years after Quintus ran his own Gloritas. He has spent those years trying to prove he earned it, and that it was not a token handed to the emperor's son.
Day One is physical: a shifting maze, an endurance gauntlet, bouts against arena veterans. Day Two is the part I care about. They deliver orations on an assigned virtue. Justice. Courage. Sacrifice. Wisdom. They are judged on clarity, on conviction, and on whether they understand what they are saying.
You can win the arena. You can win the forum. The award that actually matters goes to the boy who scores highest across both, and it comes with a career. Every competitor who finishes receives the same bronze medallion, which is the symbol of adulthood. Falling to injury carries no shame. Quitting without cause does.
There is one more piece of it I am fond of. No boy may compete without a house standing behind him, so orphans and unclaimed boys are adopted into families before the trials, under a rite that binds for life. A house that adopts a boy who goes on to finish earns enormous prestige. Sometimes the motive is pure and sometimes it is nakedly political.
Rome used the arena to display who held power. Valonia uses it to decide who deserves it, and then hands the winners the government.
A year ago I wrote that I chose fantasy because I did not want to check dates or cross-reference battles, that I wanted a world built to serve the story instead of the other way around.
Then I spent three years checking growing seasons, legion sizes, and what a man in that world would have thought worth carving onto a tomb.
What I actually wanted, it turns out, was to stop being accountable to history so that I could be accountable to myself, which saved me no time whatsoever.
The Emperor's Shadow, Book One of Empire of the Shattered Heavens, comes out October 12, 2026. The cover is up on the book page, along with the preorder link for the ebook. The paperback, audiobook, and hardcover are coming soon.