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Thread: Quinta Macedonica Legio - completed and retitled in honour.

  1. #601
    Ybbon's Avatar The Way of the Buffalo
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    damn it man, how do you manage to wring even more emotion out every time! I'm already wrung dry with this tale - or so I think, and you wring more!

  2. #602
    Diocle's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    ...This time I do not know what to say...I do not find suitable words for what I have just read....I can only confirm what said Lux....I do not find better words........sorry!.....but probably this scene require only my silence.


    EDIT: I resumed!....After the night....now in the sun I found the 'vis' to say that the last update is one of the best I read here! Great work Dominus!

    The Goddess was not Athena! I was wrong! But not completely o.c.! The Ancient wooden craving Imago of Athena, carried by Aeneas from Troy, was considered the most important Relic of Rome, if it had been destroyed the city would perish!

    Anyway, I want to give my image of the face of Roma, It is only my personal interpretation of the Urbs Aeterna, but I find it quite fascinating! Probably you'll find this image quite different from the idea of Roma that History has sculpted in our minds:

    Roma, She Wolf, 'Lupa', in ancient Italic Latin Language 'Lupa' had the meaning of 'whore'.
    Rome is light, but more intense is the light more dark is the shadow which covers Her eyes.
    Roma is Old and at the same time She is like a child. She is beauty but also horror.
    Roma is not Greece, Roma is an ancient village of Italic shepherds full of superstitions and magic.
    Roma is the city that Sigmund Freud wanted to visit but never had the courage to reach, so great was the attraction and repulsion that She exercised on his rational mind!

    So here my interpretation of Her face, the face of Roma, and the eyes which looked at Iulianus and now left him!

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

  3. #603
    SeniorBatavianHorse's Avatar Tribunus Vacans
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Quote Originally Posted by Luxchamp View Post
    enchanting... enthralling... idk... there's magic in your words.
    Thanks, Luxchamp - we are moving into the endgame now and so all the narrative threads are converging. This AAR will flower like the acanthus but its bloom will dark and beautiful . . .

    Quote Originally Posted by ybbon66 View Post
    damn it man, how do you manage to wring even more emotion out every time! I'm already wrung dry with this tale - or so I think, and you wring more!
    Wrung dry? Oh dear, I hope not. There's more to come!

    Quote Originally Posted by Diocle View Post
    ...This time I do not know what to say...I do not find suitable words for what I have just read....I can only confirm what said Lux....I do not find better words........sorry!.....but probably this scene require only my silence.


    EDIT: I resumed!....After the night....now in the sun I found the 'vis' to say that the last update is one of the best I read here! Great work Dominus!

    The Goddess was not Athena! I was wrong! But not completely o.c.! The Ancient wooden craving Imago of Athena, carried by Aeneas from Troy, was considered the most important Relic of Rome, if it had been destroyed the city would perish!

    Anyway, I want to give my image of the face of Roma, It is only my personal interpretation of the Urbs Aeterna, but I find it quite fascinating! Probably you'll find this image quite different from the idea of Roma that History has sculpted in our minds:

    Roma, She Wolf, 'Lupa', in ancient Italic Latin Language 'Lupa' had the meaning of 'whore'.
    Rome is light, but more intense is the light more dark is the shadow which covers Her eyes.
    Roma is Old and at the same time She is like a child. She is beauty but also horror.
    Roma is not Greece, Roma is an ancient village of Italic shepherds full of superstitions and magic.
    Roma is the city that Sigmund Freud wanted to visit but never had the courage to reach, so great was the attraction and repulsion that She exercised on his rational mind!

    So here my interpretation of Her face, the face of Roma, and the eyes which looked at Iulianus and now left him!

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    Ah at last I have found the Muse for my pen but alas Diocle it is a Muse as all true writers know who must be slain when the tale is told . . . you have just made it harder now for me to end this AAR and put her away!

  4. #604
    SeniorBatavianHorse's Avatar Tribunus Vacans
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    When Death Stands Between Twins, It Must Always Hesitate.


    . . . one by one, his guards had scattered into the shouting and the melee, all the while the Augustus had forged on, hurling out encouragement to the collapsing lines along the strung-out column. He, Aemilianus, had remained, along with three others, desperate to protect him from the confusion and the chaos. Julian, Aemilianus and three other Candidati all alone amid battle and blood and falling bodies. It was then, as the Persian and the Saraceni lines wavered and the roar of the legions rose up renewed, that the emperor had forged deeper into those collapsing lines. This was the moment when Fortune turned her cloak inside out and the battle fell to the Romans. The barbarians stumbled backwards, the standards falling, the great mass of those dark behemoths screaming out in agony - and Julian had plunged his horse forwards into the enemy, to give them no respite, to avenge the fallen, to glut his sword finally in desperation and anger . . . He had plunged deep into the routing enemy even as his guard - what was left of it - struggled to remain with him, to envelop him with their shields, to shout out to him to retire to safety. He had ignored all of them - all except Aemilianus. To him alone, the emperor had turned his face for one moment and it was a face alien and distant - already gone, already riding across a distant field of golden wheat under a blue sky, already dead . . .

    ‘What happened next?’

    He looked at me for one long moment, the torchlight playing across his face, the smile fading a little. He shrugged then and resumed his tale.

    . . . A Saraceni rider recognised the emperor and shouted out savagely malchan! - the king! alerting others in the collapsing lines. That shout brought a few vengeful Saraceni about, wheeling their horses and attempting to pull Julian down. Two of the Candidati fell then, striving to hold them off - and then a lance arced in fast and low. In a heartbeat, Aemilianus had thrown his body forwards into its path and pain had flared up inside him. The lance had pierced his side on the right under the scales of his armour. In shock, he had wheeled his horse back onto its haunches - and in that act, he had exposed the emperor.

    The second lance did not miss. He remembered every detail vividly: the dark line of the lance sprouting suddenly from the side of Julian mirroring his own wound; both horses rising upright, his a head higher than the emperor’s; the riders arcing backwards in agony; the blood jetting forth, each a stream to the other; their cries of surprise and pain mingling together - and then he saw the Saraceni urge his own horse forwards into the press of bodies towards them both. And then, in that moment of frieze and tableaux, how that riderless horse of old Cato, the draconarius of the guards, careened past them all and fell upon that Saraceni, bowling both him and his horse to the ground, of how that unridden horse reared up and smote its hooves down upon the head of that Saraceni so that his brains splashed the dusty ground in a dark bouquet, how it stood there, neighing defiantly over the mangled body below it, checking the other Saraceni, causing them to tumble backwards in fear and superstition - even as that empty horse then plunged on after them, disappearing into the endless throng of the enemy, vanishing in their depths even as they turned to flee from this equine goddess who smote them to avenge the death of an emperor. That mare, its hooves flecked with blood, its bridle smeared with gore, its flanks all lathered, vanished and was never seen again . . .

    Aemilianus paused then and gazed out about him in the night. The hiss of the torches echoed his words and I felt the shiver of the night settle on us. Instinctively I pulled in the military cloak about me. I saw him shrug then and smile that easy smile of his.

    . . . He and the emperor were both borne back into the ranks of the legionaries. Guards and the higher officers of the empire clustered about them both. He remembered a hand pulling out the weapon in his side even as another did the same to Julian. Both of them had shouted out in a sort of grim agony to that act. Pain had swamped him and when he was finally able to refocus his eyes, they were both inside a large awning with medici and surgeons fussing over both of them. He remembered the emperor striving to rise, to shout for his amour, to be strapped into it so that he could ride again before his soldiers, but how his wound had forced him to lie back in agony. He remembered then how both of them had looked at each other above the wails of the eunuchs and the dark shouts of the officers and the notaries - how his eyes had locked with the emperor’s and it seemed as if they both lay alone bowered by confusion and desperate men but that those men and their actions seemed somehow below them; distant and of no concern. They had both smiled into each other’s face then with a sort of fatalism - a Gallic mood which leavened the pain. There was a sort of amused realisation that both of them lay there alike; gashed by fate, each speared by the enemy in the same place and that it was as if the gods mocked all human endeavour, to show us mortals that all was nothing but vanity and dust . . .

    ‘You were his shadow?’

    He told me that it was more than that. It was a sense of divine humour - that each gazed upon the other and saw himself reflected and thus diminished. The blood flowed from the same wound in each of them. It fell onto the dust even as the same pair of hands attempted to staunch the flow, even as identical men laboured over each of them, shouting, sweating, to save their lives knowing it was all futile. And in all that manic labour, each of them remained gazing upon each other smiling at the absurdity of it all. An emperor had been dealt a mortal blow in exactly the same moment and manner as a mere man, a guard, had been struck - and in both fates were not the gods revealing how futile glory and posterity were? How indeed we were all nothing but shadows, a sort of painted glory, a sham with no more depth than a thin portrait on a wooden leaf? They had laughed then amongst the chaos and the blood and the sweating men. Laughed apart and above it all even as those around them cursed in anger and bafflement. Even as that great physician, Oribasius, had arrived and ushered all the clumsy men out of that awning in harsh Greek words. Oribasius, the personal surgeon to the emperor, a close friend, a man who brooked no amateurishness in those about him. He had removed all the weeping men, all the baffled guards and officers, and finally all the clumsy army medici, until that awning saw only the three of them under its roof. In that stillness then this Oribasius probed and studied the emperor’s wound even as the latter bade him examine the other identical wound. And his pronouncement was final . . .

    ‘The wounds were mortal,’ I said, into the silence which followed.

    Aemilianus shrugged then. ‘One was. One was not.’

    He told me that as a physician Oribasius stated that he could heal one of the wounds but not the other. Time was of the essence - too much blood had been lost and more was bubbling out even as he spoke. If he moved with alacrity, he could save one soul but not the other. In the time it took him to bind and staunch one wound, the other would bleed out and doom its owner. It was the final trick fate had held deep in the folds of her shawl.

    I looked upon Aemilianus then and wondered on that scene in that awning, of the two bodies wracked out together, each caught up in the same curse, and each bound upon with a doom like no other. Here, now, in the oasis, surrounded by those torches which pegged us in a flaming square, the night brittle and cold above us, those trees rising up all alabaster and endless, I felt as if I were in some dark mirror on the other side of which lay this scene with two dying men and that Greek physician between them, placing an awful burden upon both. I saw as if dimly the cots they lay in, the blood dripping into the dust below them, their hands pressing into the side, the linen wraps flowering with a crimson bud that grew without let. The night about me swirled with an oily blackness as it were fluid, insubstantial, and all I had to do was step through it to be inside that awning, among those doomed characters, now so far away in another desert, and under a different sky. Aemilianus reached out then and gripped my shoulder sensing the fey mood in me.

    ‘Can you imagine the despair in his eyes then, Felix? The horror of that final jest played upon him by Roma?’

    I did not need to imagine it. I saw it as if distantly in that mirror of the night. I saw Julian writhing on that cot, the blood seeping through his fingers, his face pallid and weak but his eyes glittering with fever and a sort of hot despair, his golden hair plastered about his forehead. He looked over to Aemilianus who was equally prone and I heard what they said to each other then. I heard their words as if they were there in those dark folds before me, the night all misty and mercurial about me, and what they said brought tears into my eyes. The wind rustled high above among the ivory pillars and inscribed in them were short words, swift words that brooked no denial, and those words fell down upon me in all their harsh and final weight, words which dared fate and hatched a scheme so bold that it made Oribasius baulk in the night - and I saw this Greek nod then and bind up that one wound as the other bled out. I saw him in the darkness of my night struggle, his eyes narrowed and his mouth drawn tight into a thin line, his fingers unshaken and deft as he probed and sutured among the blood and gristle, even as another by him groaned and twisted in agony, even as this other struggled with his shade as it departed his broken body. And this other twisted alone on his cot, running his smeared hands through his hair so that became a crown of blood. And I saw this Greek weep as he had never wept before, wiping a hand over his brow so that it, too, lay stained with crimson, those tears falling softly onto the wound below. He wept and laboured while beside him another bled out and died forlorn, his face contorted in agony, his hands arching in spasms - and not once did the tear-stained eyes of Oribasius dare to face this dying man on that tiny cot. I stood in that dark, imprisoned by the torches, while beyond I saw the final scene as if on a distant and misty stage; the scene of a dying soul gifting life to another and of the soft words which allowed a lost soul its freedom. All the while that Greek stood and wept . . . And it was this Greek, this Oribasius, who bundled that survivor out into the night under a blood-stained cloak, the guards stepping back in surprise, the notaries and officers pushing past him to flock before their dead emperor, even as Oribasius slunk into the night, a man hidden in a cloak of blood under his arm, even as the wails rose up behind him that their Augustus was dead and that they were all alone, abandoned in a deep desert and now at the mercy of a massing enemy in the night. Oribasius stumbled into the night, that burden under his arm, his face frozen with the shock of what he had done - and for one mad moment I thought he would stumble past me into the torches and the square, such was that illusion. I stood back almost in surprise to receive him and his wounded burden - before recovering and realising it was all nothing but my fevered imagination.

    I stood back - and found myself alone in that square. Aemilianus was gone as if he never existed. His weapons and amour had vanished too. All that remained were those torches rammed into the sand and the light which flared up from them. I spun about but could not see him. I was alone in the oasis. The vision which had possessed me had gone and with it that strange feeling of being elsewhere, of seeing into the past, and hearing that doom and release in which one man died and another lived. I stood alone in the cold night framed by a light I did not feel and which gave me no true illumination. I was destitute from the world of Aemilianus and Julian and for one long moment I simply stood there alone and hesitating . . .

    It was then that I saw it. A slight flutter of movement up against one of those dead cracked palm trees. It fluttered as though pinned to the bark and on an impulse I walked over to it and picked it up. It was the rag of cloth he had used to wipe the sweat from his face after the armatura. I picked it up and laughed then, up into the night and the cold stars far above. I laughed at how fate had been tricked and how a hunt begun on the battlefield of Samarra for Roma remained alive though She knew it not. I laughed at the idea that two men thwarted the destiny of the gods and that now one of them paced himself deep among the lowest dregs of Rome to seek that which had walked away, veiling Her head. I laughed for in the end I knew now what it was that I think I always knew but had not dared speak.

    That rag of cloth was soaked in sweat and in its slight folds lay a red smear like dye - and there as if presented on a cradle of blood lay a single fillet of gold hair . . .
    Last edited by SeniorBatavianHorse; May 04, 2012 at 08:06 AM.

  5. #605
    McScottish's Avatar The Scribbling Scotsman
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Dun...dun...DUUUUUUN! Tune in, for the next exciting episode of "The No-WHERE LEEEEEEEEEEEGION!"

    More seriously though, I have nothing to add to my earlier comment. Like a peak-climbing, Scottish incarnation of Homer.

  6. #606
    Diocle's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    ......What a tragic and terrible story! McScottish is right: This is not an AAR nor a novel, this is an Epic Tale, like a Saga!!!
    The last updates will remain sculpted in my memory! Monumental work SBH!!.....whorty of Roma!...

    I'm very happy if the image of Roma, that beautiful and terrible girl, will contribute to make it more difficult for you ending this wonderful work!!!....So I'll hope She will be able to exercise on you all Her charm.......I hate when a good reading comes to an end!!!...

    P.S.: Don't worry fellow readers and friends, if SBH will be successful in getting rid of the influence of Her beautiful face and Her magic eyes..........I've a secret weapon!...It would be a dangerous one...but....it could be resolutive! ....In fact She has not only a beautiful face ......but She has also a wonderful body!!..

  7. #607
    SeniorBatavianHorse's Avatar Tribunus Vacans
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Thanks, guys - alas She may Will but the end must arrive . . .

  8. #608
    Diocle's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Yes o.c.! I know that the end must arrive, it is sad but necessary,.....But I know that the end will be great as the whole work!
    And I think that 'The Nowere Legion' will remain well sculpted in the minds of the people who have read it, for a long, long time!!!....Thanks for this masterpiece!

  9. #609

    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    i'm thinking of copy/pasting your episodes & printing them - if i have your permission to do so.
    "Siehst du in des Waldes Grün feindlicher Gewehrmaschin?"
    - Peronje

    "Der NKWD in Russland, der SD im Deutschland des Dritten Reiches und alle anderen Geheimpolizeiorganisationen ähnlicher Art sind Spielwiesen für Psychopathen, für Usurpatoren illegaler Macht über Millionen.
    Dort liegen die Krebsherde der modernen Gesellschaft."


    aus "Holt Hartmann vom Himmel" Motorbuch Verlag Spezial 2007

  10. #610
    SeniorBatavianHorse's Avatar Tribunus Vacans
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Of course, Luxchamp. You could also download them as Book I, II, III, and IV here at Smashwords. I can PM you a code so that you can download them for free (all I ask is that you write an honest review on the site!).

  11. #611
    SeniorBatavianHorse's Avatar Tribunus Vacans
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion


    Echoes That Reverberate, Also Mock . . .

    . . . I imagine, old friend, that you are pausing now and re-reading these words - perhaps I am in the background, port in my hand - standing against the mantle of that log fire you are so proud of in that tenement flat - or am I outside in the garden gazing up into the sun, smiling slightly, knowing what it is that you are reading? I do wonder on that - on that moment when you read those words just read and what will run through you - excitement, perhaps? I would imagine so, yes. Disbelief? Naturally, naturally, of course. Something else, though, eh, Escher? Fear, perhaps, or horror? Horror that all our received truths are no longer valid. That History itself conspires to mock us and all our known tenets. I know I experienced those feelings, as I knelt in that lost Egyptian desert, even as the dusk fell upon me with that suddenness only the deserts can know . . .

    You know, I found again that old pamphlet on the Harra, you remember the one? That cracked and worn little book all lost on a shelf in the Mitchell Library? Do you remember it, my old friend? Of course you do - it fell into our hands unbidden and we poured over it with delight. It inspired us to travel there. We saved up our meagre grant money and journeyed east into Palestine and Syria and charted that old plane to fly over the very ground that pamphlet revealed to us. Do you remember its map - that yellowed page scrawled with the black marks of the desert - the hills, the oases, the drifting tracks - and over it the red snake of the itinerary of that old intrepid wanderer we called ‘Old Froggy’ - Cyril C Graham, Esq., F.R.G.S., &c. To us it was a mythic map - a map drawn in 1856 over a much older map. How it fascinated us! How it changed both our lives forever - for it launched us into the Harra on fragile wings, with that pentax spotmatic clicking away like an insect’s jaws! It drew us in and propelled us out onto a new road in life. ‘Old Froggy’ reached out of his grave and inscribed upon us a new life and here we are now. Everything we are is as a result of that chance encounter in the Mitchell Library. An old pamphlet fell unexpectedly into our hands and marked us with fate. As does this one now again.

    Who would have know all those years ago that far in the future in an obscure dig deep in Egypt I would again fall into the cracked yellow of an ancient parchment and see again the Harra? Walk again over its treacherous trails? Stumble at the last on a truth never before suspected? I sat in that dusk, that parchment trembling with horror in my hands and wondered that you were not there with me as you had been for that first time. That is why I hoard all this now, my old friend, I hoard it only to reveal it you in all its glorious incomplete mess so that when you read it as you are doing now you will in some way experience what I experienced there in the dusk as it fell on me. Forgive me that I am doing this - forgive me that I did not include you from the beginning - I have held this back only so that you may touch my shoulder with the same trepidation that I felt then. Indulge me, as always, eh?

    ‘Old Froggy’ would have been proud, I suspect. What he uncovered in that quaint ‘Empire’ mind of his, we revealed as archaeologists. What he experienced as a Traveller in that old sense of the word, we documented as researchers. What he felt on that ground perhaps untrod by a European, we opened up to the world. I wonder if he ever suspected that his quaint words would one day reveal a deeper hidden truth and so resurrect out of that desert a lost man, a dead man, walking hidden in shadows and all lost to his own honour and destiny? I suspect not - but it is amusing to wonder nonetheless!

    If you look up now and see me, a glass in hand, perhaps, or a newspaper on my lap, and find that I am staring back at you, a slight frown on my face, indulge me, eh? Read on and hold what thoughts you have - what questions and queries are in you now - hold them and wait until this is over. I will answer anything then - but not now. Not while you still need to read on; to delve and uncover as we have always done - for is that not the legacy ‘Old Froggy’ bequeathed to us, though he know it not, eh?

    And as for that eunuch Valerianus lost in this same papyrus, shimmering now in that digital soup we call a computer, allow him a few moments of solitude, too. His world is crumbling forever though he knows it not. Shouts and bafflement encase him but as of yet they echo outside only while he sits and reads, icy fingers crawling up his spine, that dark man, Zeno, gazing on him with all the implacability of a god judging the lowest of mortals. He sits and shivers, finding in that papyrus a solace perhaps from something he knows which is coming in the night outside but which he fears to confront. He, too, hides in the past no doubt as we have done on more than one occasion, eh? Allow him that mercy for now, eh? He falls into a cracked thing as did I in a desert as you do before a glowing screen.

    If I am there now as you read, look away from me and remain here instead as he does also. As did I. How will you ever understand him otherwise? Darkness engulfs us all in the end and all we ever do is struggle to prolong its eventual arrival. Nothing more. It was why perhaps he reads despite the cries outside. It was why I read as the dusk fell. It is why you will read on now - for in those little marks across whatever page they stand on - papyrus, parchment, even this screen now, they open a doorway to elsewhere - which is perhaps the only escape all of us can ever know from death and oblivion and that darkness which scratches at all our lives.

    Forgive me, Escher, forgive my pessimism, do. Forgive it and read on - and as a little consolation I append here that dusty old map, eh? Look again on an ancient map even as you read on about a far deeper map - of action, of death, and finally of a dark truth History alone knows of . . .

    Who could have known that there on this map marks an ancient legacy filled with so much blood and betrayal? I know we never did.




    Last edited by SeniorBatavianHorse; May 02, 2012 at 03:06 PM.

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  13. #613
    Boustrophedon's Avatar Grote Smurf
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Quote Originally Posted by McScottish View Post
    Est-ce la fin...?
    I'm wondering the same thing myself

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    Ybbon's Avatar The Way of the Buffalo
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Some books/articles one reads, you feel as if you are there, so well written are they, indeed this is such, but more that I really feel a desire to take a trip to the Harra, to stand breathing in the dry desert air trying to see shadows of Legions marching past. Not sure my wife would be too happy with that so I'll just reread this and get some more depth

    It deserves so much bigger an audience than the few of us who read it here, let's hope somehow it gets picked up and seen by more - I've read many a novel that was a poor shadow of this.

  15. #615
    Diocle's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    If my English is not in a so despearate condition, the words 'read on' mean there is still something to read! Or I'm again wrong.....
    Waiting for SBH with great trepidation!.................Anyway, wonderful reading! Nowhere Legion = Masterpiece!!

  16. #616
    Ybbon's Avatar The Way of the Buffalo
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    You do yourself a disservice my Friend, your English is fine - your desire to use full-stops is a little, hmm, enthusiastic - but your English is fine.

    Indeed it does say read on, and after all, the Macedonica is just setting out towards the East, so more to tell. Felix's journey back, or the scroll's journey back to the fort on the Danube (Oesculus?) is probably a tale in itself too.

  17. #617
    Diocle's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Thanks ybb! Your words are a great consolation for me. I officialy propose to nominate ybb saint patron of the readers!

  18. #618
    SeniorBatavianHorse's Avatar Tribunus Vacans
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Quote Originally Posted by McScottish View Post
    Est-ce la fin...?
    Non!

    This is merely Holbein allowing the events of that night when Felix encountered Aemilianus in the oasis to settle in Escher. He knows that that revelation is a startling one and felt the need to allow Escher time to absorb what he was reading. It is an apologia from Holbein to Escher, no more!

    Fear not, we have only started Book V, the last Book, of The Nowhere legion!

  19. #619
    Diocle's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    These are good news!!

    And I have to admit that, like the poor Hesher, also I had to absorb what I was reading, as SBH knows, I have my heretic toughts and opinions about the last moments of the life of Iulianus, so........a little time to absorb the revelation was useful!

    Thanks SBH! as any good writer you know well when the readers need some relif or comfort!!......

  20. #620
    SeniorBatavianHorse's Avatar Tribunus Vacans
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    Default Re: IB SAI AAR - The Nowhere Legion

    Quote Originally Posted by ybbon66 View Post
    Some books/articles one reads, you feel as if you are there, so well written are they, indeed this is such, but more that I really feel a desire to take a trip to the Harra, to stand breathing in the dry desert air trying to see shadows of Legions marching past. Not sure my wife would be too happy with that so I'll just reread this and get some more depth

    It deserves so much bigger an audience than the few of us who read it here, let's hope somehow it gets picked up and seen by more - I've read many a novel that was a poor shadow of this.
    Wonderful words of praise, ybbon66! Thank you so much for them- response like that really does inspire me to keep writing even though I know the end is coming and these characters will all fade soon like shades into the dust of the Harra!

    Quote Originally Posted by Diocle View Post
    These are good news!!

    And I have to admit that, like the poor Hesher, also I had to absorb what I was reading, as SBH knows, I have my heretic toughts and opinions about the last moments of the life of Iulianus, so........a little time to absorb the revelation was useful!

    Thanks SBH! as any good writer you know well when the readers need some relif or comfort!!......
    I fear this may be the last relief or comfort for some while, Diocle!

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