Once upon a time, in a land far, far away - far removed from the stories which would one day be told about it - the story began as it always did: with twins, with destiny, with the quiet certainty that one of them would be remembered and the other would not.
Every twin knew that was how the story had to go.
Remus grew up with that certainty. He could feel it in the way people looked past him to his brother - in the way Romulus always stood just a little bit straighter when names were spoken aloud. They were said to be equal, to be bound by blood and fate; but even as boys Remus learned that equality was a story people told themselves after the choice had already been made.
Romulus was the one bound to be remembered. Remus may as well have already been forgotten.
The augurs watched the sky. The elders murmured. The land waited.
Romulus stood confidently at the apex of the Palatine Hill, surrounded by a crowd of strong men. Some looked up at the white, Roman sky (although it wasn't called 'Roman' yet) while others looked up at the man they would follow anywhere.
Remus waited, with fewer allies, at the peak of the Aventine Hill. Some men scanned the sky with trepidation. None looked up at him.
The decision may as well have already been made.
It was explained as a necessity: a city must have a beginning, and beginnings require lines. Someone takes a tool and rakes it through the dirt, slow and deliberate, forming a shallow furrow where there had been nothing only moments earlier. It wasn't impressive. It wasn't high. And it would take just one careless foot to erase it.
"This is the boundary," a confident voice boomed, and the words did the work the dirt alone could not.
Remus moved close enough to see the unevenness of it - the imperfect clumps of earth, the places where the line wavered, where the strong hand drawing it had hesitated. He thought, not for the first time, how strange it was that something so fragilely human could suddenly carry the weight of the law.
Romulus did not hesitate. He stepped away from the furrow as though it had already become a wall. His posture changed - straightened. The men noticed, like they always did.
The city was conjured up in future tense. What it will be - what it must be. What can never be allowed to cross its borders. Remus listened, trying to hear where the growing story might leave room for questions, but there were none. The line was no longer just dirt. It was a promise... and a warning.
He looked at Romulus, at the crowd of excited men, at the mark in the soil. He thought of how many stories began this way - with brothers, with twins, with borders, with boundaries, with the insistence that order must be defended.
He did not yet know how the story will end - how the story must end - but he knew that who he was allowed to be had already been written.
Eventually, Remus would be accused of mockery. The story would insist that he laughed, that he leaped the boundary to show how little it mattered. A neat explanation that would travel well.
But standing there, with the dirt loose beneath his feet, Remus did not feel contempt. He felt disbelief.
The line did not look like law. It looked like an arbitrary gesture - a suggestion. Something that was meant to become solid later, once enough people agreed to treat it as something real. He wondered - dangerously, he knew - whether the city existed at all yet, or whether everyone was simply pretending.
He remembered games from childhood - scratching lines in the dirt to mark territories no-one ever really owned. How a single smudge or redrawing could shift them. How they were crossed without consequence. The furrow felt the same... except the people were men, not boys, and somehow that meant there was meaning now.
Remus stepped closer. He heard someone inhale sharply. He heard a voice murmur his name - not a warning, but recognition; the saviour's younger brother must be here to see the grand design. He did not think he was challenging anything.
The jump, when it came... was small. Two or three digiti, at the most.
Later, it would be described as an act of the defiance, but in the moment it felt more like curiosity. A question Remus asked with his body when words would have been unwelcome. The dirt gave way easily; nothing resisted him. The line did not rise up to stop him - no magical line of stones erupted to bar his way. It remained what it was.
... and for an instant, nothing happened.
Remus stood on the other side, expecting laughter, or correction, or nothing at all. He turned back, ready to cross the line again... but around him, the air had changed. The silence was no longer waiting. It was listening.
Someone said his name.
It was not shouted. It was not a command. It was almost gentle, as though someone had been trying to remember his name and it had just come back to them.
He turned fully toward the voice and saw Romulus - not as a figure set apart, not as the future city made flesh, the way other men saw him. He saw only his brother, standing very still. For a moment, Remus thought Romulus might speak - might even laugh.
The crowd moved first.
The space tightened. The men who had been witnesses became something else altogether. Remus quickly became aware of how many eyes were on him, how many expectations were suddenly fixated on the spot where his foot scraped the earth. The line behind him felt different, then. Not quite so fragile.
It had been just a line in the dirt.
Romulus did not step forward, and that would matter - to some people, in the end.
When the blow came, it was quick. Not ceremonial. Not clean. There was no announcement, no invocation of the law, no appeal to the gods. Someone acted because the story demanded an ending, and endings always require someone to act.
Remus stumbled, and tasted dirt. The ground felt harder than it should - less like dirt and more like stone. The world narrowed to only his feelings: the sensation of breath being forced from his abdomen, the sound of sandals shifting in the dust, the weight of sturdy bodies stirring nearby, itching to interfere.
There was no omen in the sky, but the augurs continued to watch. They wanted to know how the story would unfold. All they needed to do was look down.
As he lay there, Remus understood something with terrifying clarity: the acts - the leap, the fatal blow - would matter less than how the story would be told. He crossed the line, a nothing - but the response would give that crossing meaning.
The story was already forming around him. A warning must be justified. A boundary must be safeguarded. Someone must be wrong - a fact much more vital than anyone being right.
That, Remus realised, was how a line could become a wall.
Remus did not hear the story as it was first told.
By the time any words reached him, they had already taken a different shape. The men spoke quietly at first, testing phrases the same way Remus had tested his footing on uneven ground. None of the men lied outright - they just adjusted, smoothed, and removed what did not help.
Someone said he mocked the line - and another man repeated it, with greater certainty.
The jump became a gesture instead of a question. Curiosity was sharpened into defiance. Silence was reframed as laughter. The furrow, so shallow it could have been erased by a breeze, suddenly became sacred ground. Fragility was an inconvenient motif; strength sounded better.
Romulus' stillness was translated into resolve. Hesitation became mercy. The blow was no longer a reaction - but a necessity. What happened must have been inevitable, the augurs saw it coming - because inevitability would absolve everyone.
The city grew, and the story grew with it. Straight, sturdy walls were raised where the line once wavered. Stone replaced soil. Each level laid made the memory firmer, less flexible. Children were taught where the city began, and how it could not have begun any other way.
No-one asked what Remus thought. That question would have no function.
The tale became simpler as it travelled. Details fell away, leaving only what was useful: a warning against disorder, a lesson about boundaries, a justification which could be recited whenever a wall must be defended.
In time, even the story forgot how it started.
Much later, the child heard the story as it was meant to be heard.
It was told beneath stone walls that had always been there. The teacher's voice did not waver. The names were familiar, rehearsed, the story told so many times that no-one telling it could even remember someone who remembered someone who was there. Romulus: the founder. Remus: the warning. The line in the dirt became a wall, tall and inevitable, a clear boundary only a defiant devil would dare to breach.
The child learned how the city began. The child learned why order matters. The child learned why boundaries must be respected. The lesson was clear enough, and easy to remember.
Later, walking along the wall, the child traced the stone with their fingers. They tried to imagine the first line, the one that came before the wall. Dirt which must have been there before any stone could be laid. A mark so fragile it could have been erased by the rain... or even a breeze.
The story said Remus laughed. The story said he mocked the boundary. The child repeated this, because repetition is what makes stories, like walls, strong.
But something troubled them: the story never said what Remus thought.
Not even once.
The child wondered - briefly, silently - what it would mean if the story had begun somewhere else. If the crossing had been a question rather than a challenge - if the men had seen the line as a door to be opened before it became a wall to contain.
They never asked, at least not aloud, whether the wall needed the story more than the story needed the wall.
The story was told as it always was: with destiny, with the quiet certainty that one man was right and the other was wrong; one man a resolute hero, the other a malefactor.
Every child knew that was how the story had to go.
This story was first published on Reedsy in Contest #334, and written in response to the following prompt:
Write a story that includes the phrase “once upon a time…”, “in a land far, far away…”, or “happily ever after…”