Emotional Clarity — Echo of Marcus Aurelius (Part 6/12)

Three letters burned before dawn—each one written from a rage that Marcus Aurelius must trace to its roots before he can write the fourth.

A trusted advisor has betrayed Marcus to a rival faction, and the rage that follows resists every Stoic technique he knows. With Rusticus's help, he dissects the emotion thread by thread—discovering that his suffering comes not from the betrayal itself, but from judgments about what he was owed, what he should have known, and what the betrayal means about him. When those false beliefs fall away, what remains is not numbness but clarity.

~154 AD. Marcus Aurelius is 33. Rome.

Created in human–AI collaboration. Narrated with an AI voice.