From her head to her toes, Livia is a child of the Roman Empire. Someone looking at her would see a woman in her mid-twenties, her dark, curling hair bound into a coiled braid. She wears the typical garments of a married woman--a long tunic that falls to her ankles, with a stola worn over it, a palla worn over that. She was born into a patrician family, and has rarely known a day of hunger in her life.

Her eyes are dark and lively, and her face appealingly round, making her look a little younger than her years. She has the long nose so common to the Romans, but everything else about her is rounded, even her gestures.

She was raised in a mostly traditional household. Her mother unstintingly educated all of her children, even her daughters. Livia was the youngest of five children, and had three brothers and a sister. Today, only one of her sisters still lives--her youngest brother was killed by a childhood illness, the other two as decorated officers of the legion on one of the occasional bloody battles that break out between the Roman Empire and the Sassenid Empire to the east. Her father died when she was twenty, but her mother is still alive. Livia, along with her siblings, learned reading and writing, philosophy, sciences, maths, and many other subjects. Her father often grumbled about the expense of educating daughters who would never put the learning to use, but her mother just smiled in response.

Her mother's gamble paid off handsomely. Livia was married when she was eighteen to the only son of the Nerius family, a family close to the emperor Constantine. Sextus, Livia's husband, had become close friends with the middle son Constantius, and when Constantine died and Constantius and his two brothers became regents for the Roman empire, the fortunes of the Nerius family rose along with Constantius. Sextus became a senator and then Constantius' first advisor--the man that the regent trusted over everyone in the world.

Livia and Sextus were a fortunate match. Sextus appreciated Livia's quick mind and careless beauty, and Livia, much to her surprise, at first respected and then fell in love with her husband. Sextus was a man of an even, affable temperament, and he and Livia would often debate passionately as a prelude to other, more intimate discourse.

Unfortunately, Livia was unsuited as a wife in one respect--she has quite a bit of difficulty carrying children. She carried her first pregnancy to term, resulting in her daughter Optata, but all of the subsequent times she caught a child, the pregnancy ended around the third or fourth month.

Livia is a politician born and raised, taught at her mother's knee to have the political will to play the game of politics either on her own behalf or for her family. She carries the mantle of the traditional Roman woman with pride, ruling over the affairs of her household with a watchful eye, and until he died Sextus constantly discussed his affairs and dealings with the important men of Constantinople with her. She has an eye for detail, excellent instincts, and a stubbornly practical and quite active nature. She can't stand to sit still unless she truly has to.

And when Sextus is killed by a demon, her world is shattered. Because she finds out that her husband was not who she thought he was, and in order to move on with her life, she'll have to find out who he was and what he was doing...and finish the work he was doing.