Vulcanalia. The festival of the Roman God of fire. Those who heed not the voices of the Gods deserve to be their sacrifices. He watched them. Soft. No warriors these people. Merchants, fat from the produce of the volcanic soil surrounding the area. These people had no fire in them at all, but they reaped from his domain and grew fat and lazy. Spending their money on painted walls and golden trinkets. It amused him to dry up the wells. It amused him to shake the ground and hear them scream. But each time they ignored him and went back to their daily lives, he grew more angry.
I watched him breathe from the same vantage point across the water as Pliny the Younger, who's Uncle Pliny the Elder was at this moment on his way to his death, brought on by his curiosity of natural phenomena. The cloud formation described by Pliny the Younger in his letter to Tacitus was the final exhalation, Vulcan contained himself no longer. The pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius enveloped Pompeii and Herculaneum sealing the fate of thousands, and providing a time capsule that would not be opened for 1600 years.
