The Ghost Player

The game started right after Nero’s suicide in AD 68, and his death was part of the game. He’d been tricked by the other players into taking his own life, opening the race, the free-for-all to seize power in Rome. What ensued went down in History as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’. But from the start the rivals vying for the top prize discovered that Nero had a half-sister, eighteen-year-old Antonia, the daughter of Claudius and Agrippina, and using her as a pawn became part of the game. Only, she didn’t want to be used—or eliminated—and managed to thwart them so well that in the end they called her ‘the ghost player’. Then Antonia went back to being Desiderata, married and mother of three, a Christian, and a ‘Seeker of Justice’ by trade. Until one day, in AD 86, her old enemy Numa Manlius tried to revive the game, and Desi had to take up one more challenge.