Octavian
I rode deeper into the sellsword encampment, searching the gloom for any sign of Agrippa. As I neared the centre, the chaotic throngs of the possessed began to thin. The sudden lack of enemies was unnerving; such emptiness in a breached city usually meant something far more dangerous was lurking in the dark.
The sharp, rhythmic clang of clashing steel cut through the unnatural silence. I wheeled my warhorse toward the noise, pushing through the ruined tents until I reached a large pavilion bearing the banner of the Falling Stars. Standing before the flaps was a lone man, drenched head-to-toe in blood, continuously hacking and slashing at the shadowy husks surging toward him.
A veritable mound of butchered men and women lay heaped beneath his boots.
"Agrippa!" I bellowed over the din.
He swung his heavy broadsword in a brutal, two-handed arc, cleaving the last possessed attacker completely in two. He turned his gaze toward me, and I grimaced. The battle-madness was fully upon him. A savage grin split his face, and gore dripped heavily from his beard and hair, dying the strands a far deeper, wetter crimson than their natural auburn.
"Princeps," Agrippa greeted, his chest heaving as he wiped a heavy gauntlet across his face, smearing the muck. "It would seem we have encountered a slight resistance to our plans."
I dismounted, my boots sinking into the blood-soaked mud as I approached him. "Where is Lily?"
Agrippa shook his head, his grin fading slightly. "She was summoned to Eranis Manor just before the breach and left me a missive. Something catastrophic must have occurred for her to trigger the warding and summoning runes prematurely. The moment her array activated, the populace became possessed. They began swarming and attacking anyone not cloaked in those unnatural shadows. I was bogged down in the slaughter, unable to breach the gatehouse to let you in."
I let out a heavy sigh, the white mist of my breath curling in the freezing air. "It is fine, Agrippa. Plans more often than not fail upon first contact with the enemy. Come. We must command the legions, and you are far better suited for the vanguard than I. Lily will survive."
Agrippa's savage grin returned, his eyes glinting in the dark. "Ultimately, it became the total slaughter you so desperately wished to avoid, Dominus."
Another weary sigh escaped my lips. "Unfortunately. Yet I see you share none of my disinclination for the butcher's work."
I remounted my warhorse, and Agrippa fell into step beside me, his heavy, blood-caked armour clanking with every massive stride as we moved out.
We left the ruined sellsword camp behind, navigating the winding, claustrophobic streets toward the main thoroughfare where Claudius was holding the line. The shadow-possessed did not make it easy. They poured from the narrow alleyways and shattered doorways in eerie silence, their pitch-black eyes locked on us.
Agrippa was a terrifying force of nature. He did not bother with defensive parries; he simply waded into the mob, his greatsword shearing through limbs and torsos, showering the cobblestones in thick, dark ichor. Whenever a possessed citizen slipped past his lethal arc, I leaned from the saddle, my short sword taking them through the neck, or my ashwood wand snapping forward to blast them back with concussive force.
"Reducto," I muttered, shattering the chest cavity of a lunging blacksmith before trampling his corpse beneath my horse's hooves.
Up ahead, the terrifying roar of the Roman war machine grew louder. We rounded a wide bend and saw the vanguard. General Claudius had formed a massive, interlocking shield wall across the avenue. The legionaries were holding the line, methodically thrusting their short swords from behind the safety of their heavy red shields, grinding the endless tide of possessed citizens into bloody pulp.
We spurred forward to join the formation.
"Hold the line! Advance on my mark!" Claudius's voice boomed over the carnage.
But before we could reach the safety of the shields, a sound ripped through the sky that froze the blood in my veins.
It was a shrill, piercing, unearthly shriek that rattled the glass in the surrounding manses and forced the hardened legionaries to flinch behind their shields.
I hauled back on my reins, looking up at the bruised, swirling black clouds. The unnatural storm suddenly parted, violently displaced by a massive, serpentine silhouette.
A dragon.
Its scales were the colour of freshly spilled blood. Its neck was impossibly long, twisting and snapping like a rabid serpent as it plummeted out of the sky directly toward the crowded avenue.
"Testudo!" Claudius roared, his tactical instincts taking over. "Shields up!"
The legionaries instantly raised their shields, locking them together to form an impenetrable iron tortoise over the thoroughfare. But Imperial iron was forged to stop arrows and boiling oil, not the primordial fury of Old Valyria.
The Blood Wyrm opened its jaws, and the night was completely eradicated by a blinding, roaring torrent of fire.
The heat was instantaneous and apocalyptic. The column of flame slammed into the avenue with the force of a physical hammer. It washed over the mob of shadow-possessed, instantly incinerating their flesh and reducing the dark magic animating them to blowing ash.
But the dragon did not distinguish between us and the enemy. The torrent swept directly over the Roman vanguard.
The heavy iron testudo held for a fraction of a second before the sheer, magical temperature of the dragonfire compromised the metal. I watched in absolute horror as the heavy red shields warped and melted. Legionaries screamed, their flesh cooking instantly inside their steel breastplates. The front two rows of the immaculate Roman formation simply dissolved into a thrashing mass of burning, agonizing death.
A legionary, his armour entirely engulfed in roaring flames, stumbled blindly out of the formation, his melted sword dropping from his charred fingers.
"DRAGON!" the burning soldier shrieked, his voice cracking in sheer, primal terror before he collapsed onto the melted cobblestones. "DRAGON!"
Above us, the massive red beast pulled out of its dive, its colossal leathery wings beating against the hot air, sending a wave of blistering wind and ash over the broken Roman lines as it prepared to circle back for a second pass.
…