Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Four 2026

During the eighth year of Justinian the Great’s reign, a young girl spends her final hours painting in a giant cathedral, not yet named. Her name was Prisca, a small flitter of syllables easily erased in the wash of history, as is usually the norm with cases like these. But nevertheless, I will tell you her name and will not begrudge you for forgetting it. 

She makes a haunting figure in this half-constructed part of the church; her thin frame hanging precariously from a ladder, a paintbrush held in hands stained by crimson pigment as she works upon an enormous female figure draped in holy robes, face painted completely red. Young Prisca paints with fervour, her eyes sparked and her hair wild. She does not know that this day will end in her death, but she does know she will die. She’s been having dreams, dreams that make her question things. A red-faced goddess emerges before her, as if having been drowned in her own blood. She whispers to her. 

You will be robbed, sister of Wisdom. You will be drowned in red and forgotten. 

For the first few nights, Prisca had awoken shaking in fear, sure that she had been possessed by the Devil. She had prayed to the Lord, her hands moving again and again in the sign of the cross. She had begged His forgiveness. And yet the Goddess kept coming. 

At first, she had thought the Goddess was an angry scion of the Devil, because her rage made her shake, and the redness of her skin made her appear as though she burned like a furnace. But, despite her anger, the Goddess never hurt her. She did not lay a hand upon her, did not seek to strike her down, did not even take a singular step towards her. She simply repeated that one phrase in her stormy voice, which shook Prisca to the bone, the way all old stories do. And then she would disappear. 

But her words never left. At night, they bloomed their truth inside of Prisca: a vengeful red. She thought of her father passing over her at the dinner table, placing the best cuts of meat to her younger brothers, ignoring that the food placed upon them was the product of none other than Prisca herself. She thought of her silent mother bent over patchy clothes, washing fabrics, cooking, endlessly completing the thankless maintenance of their lives. She thought of all the silent mothers, of the daughters they once were, of the sons they could have been. She thought about the two guards who supervised her paintings, who fell asleep at their posts because they looked at her and saw a frail, little girl: nothing close to a threat. She realised that men forgot about women by dismissing them; that to men, women were less than a presence, more an absence of significance. She realised that even goddesses could be forgotten in this way, that when one has no images or words to describe a thing, then it ceases to exist. 

The death of a goddess. An idea so atrocious that it sparked something inside Prisca, made her slip past her sleeping guards into half-built parts of the church, heart thumping, blood burning. She began painting the Goddess from her dreams, building her image. The project took its toll. In the way of all rulers with grandiose architectural ambitions, Emperor Justinian’s desire for his legacy to be encased in stone superseded the health of his workers. She was overworked, underpaid and underfed. As a girl, she was allotted strange working hours in the middle of the

night so as not to distract her male counterparts. Without sleep, Prisca’s body was quickly breaking down, an effect heightened by the anxiety of being caught. She knew that her rebellion would only end in one way: discovery, a stoning on the streets, her bones smashed to dust. And yet she painted anyway, feverish, arms straining, muscles clenching, feeling as though she would burn away. 

On the worst days, she did not paint alone. The Goddess emerged; the weak flames of torches hung on the walls, sending long shadows over her face. Outside of Prisca’s dreams, she was even larger, towering above her despite the height of the ladder. She would look down at the girl, her bottomless eyes vibrating with ancient power. Her presence felt like a spark, the bubbling of a fiery torrent. She would repeat the same line the way she did in the dreams. 

You will be robbed, sister of Wisdom. You will be drowned in red and forgotten. 

So when the Goddess emerges in Prisca’s waning hours, she feels neither surprise nor fear; she lets herself sit upon the rungs of her ladder and looks up. Girl and Goddess look upon each other, the silence only broken by the girl’s soft, wheezing breaths. As Prisca continues staring, she finds she cannot grasp the Goddess’s features: they seem to swirl and eddy and shift. Sometimes she swears her own face looks back out at her. Prisca can feel the blood pumping in her veins, slow and sluggish, each new beat an effort. I am dying, she thinks, I wonder if she knows. But if the Goddess can hear her thoughts, she makes no sign of it. Her large eyes simply blink: once, twice. 

“Who are you, Goddess?” Prisca calls, “Please, tell me your name.” 

It is the first time she has ever spoken to the Goddess, and in the chasmic silence that follows, Prisca is sure she has done something wrong. Yet she does not break her gaze, shaking with fatigue. The Goddess’s mouth opens. 

I am the one born alongside the Creator, the Thinker of the World. I am the Thought that is Forgotten, The Knowledge Razed. I am the Ghost of Truth, the Dying Shadow. I am the Blood that builds, that doesn’t forget. I am Wisdom. 

In those final hours, the girl finds that language seems to slip and merge, taking new forms. As she gazes upon Wisdom, she realises the Goddess was not angry at all. That the redness was a mirror, a reflection of the rage of millennia, of those forgotten. 

“Hagia Sophia,” Prisca breathes, “Holy Wisdom.” 

The Goddess’s eyes soften. She leans closer to the small girl, who clutches the ladder. Her lips slowly stretch into a smile. Her proximity fills Prisca with ease, washing over her in waves. She closes her eyes. 

I am here, sister.

*** 

During the eighth year of Emperor Justinian I’s reign, a young girl wandered out of the grand cathedral, the one still without a name. She made a ghostly figure, her clothes, hands, face entirely dipped in red, as though she had drowned herself in blood. She stumbled through the streets of Byzantine, fading into the shadows. 

*** 

Over centuries, the Byzantine empire would rise and fall. Emperor Justinian I would become one of many kings, no more or no less remarkable. History is strange in this way. Rulers, sultans and kings, the so-called pinnacles of greatness, are made ordinary when placed against each other in a line, their ambitions and dreams ironically becoming the things that rob them of their individuality. Of most rulers, we can say for certain: he wished to be the largest in the world, for everyone to know of his greatness. He wished for power and riches and dominance. He made himself a palace, a villa, a temple, a cathedral, a shrine, a statue. He was only a fraction as important as he believed himself to be. 

You may think that if this is all that can be said of all these great men, of whom there are endless records, poems, dedications, eulogies… then what can be said about everyone else? About the hundreds of artisans, builders and carpenters that slaved away for Justinian I’s grand cathedral? About the young girl who, in her dying hours, painted her rage and spoke to a goddess? It is easy to believe that if someone is erased from history, their story doesn’t exist—their lives don’t matter. But what if, instead, we took absence as an opportunity? If writing down a man as great makes him ordinary, then not writing down a person at all makes them much, much more. 

Let us think again of Emperor Justinian I. Imagine him standing before a congregation of his people at the grand unveiling of his cathedral. He stands proud and tall in his ceremonial robes in front of the magnificent architectural feat he had orchestrated. He appears to be, in every part, the heavenly-appointed ruler of an empire entering greatness—someone who undoubtedly would be remembered forever. No one would ever know that the great Emperor had been having nightmares, sent from the Devil himself. It had started a year ago, when he had awoken to a young girl, blood dripping from her clothes, standing over his bed. She had been singing something in her breathy, haunting voice: two words repeated again and again, slipping out between crimson-stained teeth. An emperor was no good when filled with fear, when he was haunted and afflicted by strange demons. Justinian I had only just begun his reign, and his grand ambitions would not stop at a singular building. For greatness, he would sacrifice anything, would even appease the Devil if it meant he would be remembered. He spreads his arms wide. 

“On this day, I present my greatest dedication to the Lord, the Hagia Sophia. Let us all remember to live eternally in Holy Wisdom.”

The crowd’s cheers envelop him, and Justinian I is drowned in relief. The cheers rumble through the church’s foundations, the bricks and stones and murals made by those ordinary, fleeting spirits. Deep in the shadows, a dying goddess looks at her image, destroyed and mutilated. She hears her name chanted, shaking the stones at her feet, rising through the air. Her red skin pulses once, brightening the shadowed hallway, blowing out the torches. She burns like the sun.