My obsession with history, and with reimagining it, began when I first read The Sarantine Mosaic by G. G. Kay and Theodora by P. I. Wellman. The Byzantine Empire became my first historical love: brilliant, ambitious, contradictory, and impossible to forget. This website emerged almost fully formed in a matter of seconds. I built it purely for my own amusement: a forbidden archive from a timeline where Justinian's empire discovered the heavens before anyone else.

Every character is based on a real historical figure and the deeds for which history remembers them. Justinian remains the visionary, Theodora the force that refuses to yield, Belisarius the conqueror, and Tribonian the lawgiver. The people are unchanged. Only the frontier is different. In this version,  they do not conquer the Mediterranean. They conquer the stars. Or perhaps whatever lies beyond them. https://beyond-firmament.lovable.app