Go on, check your glass is it empty? Refill it if you need to, because we’re about to dive into the deep end of the pool, and you're going to need a proper drink for this part. Tell me, are you enjoying that wine? There is absolutely nothing on this earth like a true, dark Roman wine, is there? Taste that rich, velvety sweetness, the hint of sun-drenched Italian grapes and aged oak. It’s smooth, it’s comforting, and it warms you from the inside out.
Enjoy every single sip of it. Because the story I’m about to tell you? It is anything but smooth.
Let me ask you something that might shake you up a bit, and don't give me that polite, easy answer: Have you ever felt a pull so massive, so terrifyingly heavy, that it felt like an invisible hand reached into your chest, grabbed your ribs, and violently started dragging you in a direction you never wanted to go?
Let's call it a calling.
But what is that, really? When a calling pulls you in, when it takes hold of your shirt collars and drags you toward the edge of a cliff, what do you do? Do you follow it? Do you ignore it and try to order another round of this delicious wine? Because let me tell you, ignoring it is like trying to hold back the ocean with a wooden spoon. It ruins your sleep. It poisons your comfort. It turns your beautiful, expensive life into ash until you finally look up and say, Fine. You win.
And look, let’s be honest. Before the pirates took me, I didn't care about anything spiritual. At all. I thought all that talk about the divine, or angels, or some unseen creator was just a grand, expensive theater my father played along with to keep his political job. I was sixteen, rich, and entirely full of myself. If you had told me back then that some cosmic, invisible power had a specific blueprint for a spoiled teenager a literal plan just for Patrick I would have laughed, poured another cup of wine, and gone back to avoiding my tutors.
But that’s the thing about a calling: it doesn't wait for your permission before it decides to absolutely hijack your life.
For three years after my escape, I tried my absolute best to ignore it. I tried to play the part of the good Roman aristocrat again. I wore the clean white togas, ate the fancy food, and smiled at the elegant dinner parties. But I was a counterfeit coin. I’d wake up on the hard stone floor beneath my window, feeling entirely hollow, while my peers gossiped about politics and the theater. My body was in Britain, but my soul was still wandering the Irish bogs. I was torn completely in half.
And then, that calling slammed into me like a rogue wave.
It happened on a night when the storm was violently lashing against my window. I was asleep, but this wasn't a normal dream. If you’ve ever had this kind of presence enter your sleep, you know it doesn’t feel like a memory it feels more real than the chair you’re sitting in right now.
In the dead of the dark, a man named Victoricus appeared. He looked weathered by the western winds, and he was carrying a massive leather sack bursting with thousands of parchment letters. He walked right up to me, looked into my soul, and handed me a single scroll.
I unrolled it, my hands shaking in the dream. The heading read, in stark, dark ink: The Voice of the Irish.
And the second my eyes hit that text, the room didn't just vanish it exploded with sound. It wasn't one voice. It was the collective, agonizing, piercing cry of thousands of people. It was the families of the very men who had chained me. It was the youth of the western forests, the savages who had stolen my youth and thrown me into human trafficking. I could feel this terrifying, beautiful presence weaving their desperation directly into my own lungs. They were screaming across the sea, their voices echoing off the waves, begging me.
“We appeal to you, holy youth,” they cried out in that rolling, musical Gaelic tongue, “come and walk among us once more.”
I woke up gasping for breath, hyperventilating on the floor. I wasn't just crying; I was sobbing so hard my chest felt like it was going to crack open. And right there, in the pitch black of my room, I felt it. This massive, undeniable weight in the air. It wasn't a voice in my ear anymore; it was an internal wildfire roaring inside my actual ribs, groaning within my own chest, demanding that I move.
The irony is absolutely wild, isn't it? The very people who broke my life were now begging me to save theirs. If you told the teenage version of me that I would willingly sail back to my captors, I’d have told you to go sleep it off. But when that calling shakes you at your core, your own plans don't matter anymore.
I knew right then, with every ounce of my being, that I couldn't just sit in this villa. I had to go back to that island. But how? I was a runaway slave. I had no money, no ships, and no army.
I was just a kid with a scar on his leg and a terrifying noise in his head.
So, I did the only thing a desperate man could do. I went to the only people in Britain who claimed to speak for the unseen world: The leaders of the Roman Church.
I thought they would understand. I thought they would look at the fire in my eyes and help me find a way back across the sea. But look across at me what do you think those senior bishops saw when a high-society dropout walked into their grand cathedral?
They didn't see a man with a holy vision. They saw a rustic nobody who had missed six crucial years of Latin grammar school because he was busy chasing sheep on a barbarian mountain. To them, my Latin was clumsy, stiff, and heavily infected with a thick Irish accent.
I’ll never forget standing before the council of senior bishops. They were sitting on elevated stone thrones, wrapped in heavy, gold-embroidered silk vestments, looking down their long Roman noses at me.
"You wish to lead a mission to the edge of the known world, Patricius?" the senior bishop asked, his voice dripping with condescension. He flicked a speck of dust off his expensive sleeve. "You can barely construct a proper sentence in the holy language. You are unlearned. The Irish are lawless pagans, animals who do not even possess a written alphabet. Why throw pearls before swine?"
"Because those swine are crying out," I said, my voice steady, though my knuckles were turning white around my staff. "And something is telling me I am the only one who can answer."
A low murmur of refined laughter rippled through the assembly.
"They are barbarians," another bishop sneered, leaning forward, his gold rings catching the light. "They took your freedom. They slaughtered your family's servants. And you wish to give them your life? You are a complete fool."
They officially rejected me. They slammed the heavy oak doors right in my face, even digging up a petty mistake from my youth that a "friend" had betrayed to the council just to keep me small. They wanted me to stay in Britain, play the part of a quiet, wealthy aristocrat, and leave the grand work to the educated elite.
They thought they could break my spirit with a few harsh words and a locked door, forgetting that I had already been broken by the best in the business.
I didn't pack my bags and go home to cry. I walked straight past my father's estate, went down to the stormy docks, and watched the gray waves crashing against the wooden hulls of the merchant ships.
What do you think was actually happening to me in those quiet moments by the water? Was I just a stubborn kid chasing a ghost, or was there a real mastermind behind the curtain pulling my strings? How do you think a guy like me rejected, uneducated, and completely alone is supposed to answer a cosmic calling when the whole world tells him no?
Chapter 7