Quinta Macedonica Legio - completed and retitled in honour.

[ReD_OcToBeR]

That was one of the best "gloomy" updates ive ever read on here. Hands down. You could feel the dread, mystery, death.. etc.. Just amazing.

[Knonfoda]

Excellent! I had no idea the forts looked like that in game, that is amazing! Also, what a dark dark chapter! Really good, eager to see where this leads!

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

Thanks - I hope it isn't too depressing! I need to set up the situation in some detail though as what follows in time will all be tied to this lonely 'fort of oblivion'.

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

Fortune Delivers But Never Enough

The first supply annonae arrived three days later, hauled out of the west by sweating oxen on low rumbling carts and lashed onwards through the Black Desert by slaves and a few limitanei soldiers from Bosana. The Centenarius in command was a scrawny man with a livid scar along his cheek. Superstition rested in his eyes and we could all see that he murmured some obscure charm as he drove those wagons into Nasranum, under the shadow of the burnt western portus.

The Tribune, Angelus, had not left us idle in those three days.

Century by century, we had rotated in-between repair details and the first of several patrols into the Harra about the castellum. Rubbish was cleared away. The wrecked buildings were demolished and used as firewood. Pits were dug for latrine and refuse collection. The main and only water-hole was re-opened and shored up with fresh wood. For three days we sweated and heaved the fort into some semblance of military order. The bastion towers were supplied with sheaves of missiles and all along the parapet men were stationed on rotation to walk along and guard the fort – from what no one knew as the desert remained empty and desolate; nothing but a carpet of black rock and glittering bone.

The patrols always returned with the same report: nothing. Nothing but dust and sand and the broken land of the Harra. Even the usual desert nomads tending a few goats were absent. All that disturbed the landscape was an occasional low wind which seemed to sigh among the rocks like the lament of a lost lover . . .

The arrival of the supply annonae from Bosana was a welcome diversion on that third morning. I was sitting on my canvas stool outside the tent at the head of the rest of the Second Maniple’s row of low ‘butterfly’ tents compiling a duty roster for the next day, when I heard the sharp bark of the parapet sentries and the dull bronzen squeal of a tuba. We first saw them as a low cloud of dust on the horizon and then an advance rider galloped up to the portus to announce its arrival. It was a dozen low carts strung out like some grotesque funereal procession – the slaves were weak and covered in sores, the oxen of low-grade stock, and the carts themselves only a few nails and bolts away from collapse and rot. However, it was a break in the monotony and annonae always meant wine, if nothing else.

After much squealing and shoving – not to mention more than a few curses and the cracks of whips – the carts were marshalled in the centre of the fort in a small circle outside the main principia campaign tents and a report was delivered to our Tribune and his staff officers. Word soon spread that the annonae was below regulation orders – grain, olives, wine, meat, all were low – but the Centenarius in command of the supply train had merely shrugged and stroked his scar when questioned about it. His orders were to deliver it – he knew nothing more.



Barko, myself and the Frank Arbuto were milling around the wagons when this Centenarius emerged from the Tribune’s large tent, all scowls and low curses in a mongrel Syriac. I pulled him up with a sharp command and asked him when the next delivery was due – and he looked at me as if I had asked him an impossible question. Only the presence of Arbuto with his large frame and barbaric hair gave him pause. He relented then and told us in a quiet sly way, again stroking that scar along his cheek, that Bosana was dry now of annonae and only the gods knew where the next wagons were coming from. He pointed then at the west gateway and murmured something under his breath before spitting into the dust at his feet and pulling away from us.

Arbuto shook his head at the man’s obstinacy, his blue eyes uncomprehending, but Barko swore in that curious mixture of Latin and Coptic and looked west, his eyes lingering on the burnt portal through which the supply wagons had come.

‘Barko?’ I asked.

The little Aegyptian shrugged then in his usual fatalistic way. ‘He called it the Negra Porta, my friend, the Negra Porta . . .’

The Black Gate.

By early evening, the wagons and slaves and limitanei were gone back into the west and its purple shroud of dusk, despite the Tribune’s offer of a night of rest in the fort. I wondered then as the last of carts vanished when we would see another supply train. Behind me, the fort was the usual routine of men working, hammering, shovelling, shouting and cursing in Latin and a few other languages – Gothic, Syriac, Aramiac, Greek – sentries moved slowly along the parapets, watchwords were echoed out, the vexillum flags of the centuries mingled with the draco standards of the maniples at the head of each double row of tents, while in the centre around the principia tents stood the proud eagle of the Quinta Macedonica, that flower of Rome which had never known defeat or retreat before the enemies of the respublica. Small fires blossomed in the braziers outside some of the tents and trails of pale smoke ascended up into the dusk above the fort. Men mingled off-duty playing dice or games on the little boards and occasionally I could hear rough shouts of anger or cursing as wagers were won or lost. Far out, on the wide flat ground to the north of the fort, a detail was pacing through some formations under the watchful eye of a centenarius – who I could not see – and I admired their precision and cohesion. All was well in Nasranum and the fort was slowly transforming from a ruin into a Roman military station on the limes – and yet as I glanced over to the western gateway I wondered on why I shivered and wrapped myself deeper into the sagum cloak as if I were on some lonely watch in the far north of the empire where tattooed barbarians lurked in the mist and the snow . . .

The next morning we found the corpse hanging from the Porta Negra, his eyes gouged out and his lips sewn shut. His genitals were missing and it did not take a diviner to know where they were.

[ReD_OcToBeR]

dun dun dun....more!

[Boustrophedon]

Did you get your inspiration from this little beauty? Great chapter again! Some rep is on the way ^^

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

A writer does not reveal his sources! My lips are sealed . . . Lovely pic by the way!

[Ybbon]

I must read my thesaurus, I'm running out of superlatives for this.

super, awesome, magnificent, dark work of genius, or a work of dark genius?

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

Oh dear, ybbon66, you are making me blush!

[Diomede]

Your lips are sealed... but where are your genitals?

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

In The Fallen Lies Only A Void

It was the scar along his cheek which allowed the legionaries who found the body on the Black Gate that morning to identify the corpse. They cut him down and laid him out in the dust and the charred soil. Someone threw an old military cloak over his torso to hide the face and its grim mask from view even as an angry Angelus strode up still wiping the remains of a breakfast away, his personal slave following him with a towel in hand.

We crowded around him and his staff officers, myself, Barko, Arbuto, Sebastianus, Silvanus and Magnus, all mute and expectant. A nervous Centenarius waited under the shadow of this Negra Porta – a small olive-faced man from the century in the Fourth Maniple, under Arbuto – and who had been in command of the detachment last night which had been detailed to patrol the western parapets and the gate itself. I almost smelled his fear as the Tribune carelessly threw aside the old cloak and gazed coldly down on that mangled and stitched mask. For one moment, I thought I caught a flash of deep anger in his dark eyes and then it was gone and only his sardonic face remained. His lifted up that face then and gazed for a long while out past the charred remains of the gateway into the western desert and that field of black rocks; into the haze and dull bronzen shimmer of an endless horizon – then he spun about and snapped out a curt order to Arbuto almost as an afterthought.

He strode past us all as if we didn’t exist then and signalled to his slave to follow him back to his campaign tent. Deep under the shadow of the portus, the nervous Centenarius breathed a sigh of relief knowing a stoning or at best a flogging was no longer his lot.

An hour later Arbuto and the legionaries of the Fourth Maniple, in open order, filed out of the Black Gate, laden with water skins and two days’ rations of biscuit and hard tack. I saw with some amusement that Arbuto, with a grim humour typical of the northern races, had detailed that Centenarius to move ahead with a small detachment of tent-mates to form an advance guard moving at double time . . .




The last I saw of him was as he tramped past that broken charred gateway strapping his helmet over his blond shock of hair, his blue eyes dancing with a morbid humour, an old talisman carved from amber around his neck and resting above his scarf. The men of his Maniple moved around him with precision and confidence if a little anger at their punishment – and I remembered thinking then that our Tribune had been unusually lenient on those who had guarded that gateway in the night and allowed a nameless presence to intrude into it and string up a corpse under their noses . . . Legionaries had been decimated for less on many occasions . . .

Only later did I realise how prudent he had been that morning and how every man we had in the Quinta and who stood at arms under the flower of the acanthus would be needed in the hard days and nights to come in which red ruin would fall upon us all and the brittle stars above would shine down upon us in pitiless amusement . . .

The corpse of the limitanei Centenarius was interred without ceremony later that day among the ruins of the Nabatean tower. It lay a few stades north of Nasranum on a low mound of black rock. Once it had been a proud high tower but it was little more than a broken mound of rubble now hollowed into chambers and small alcoves. It was told that after the original garrison of the castellum here had fallen to slaughter, monks had settled among these ruins and made a small community all bound together by fasting and desert solitude. Both the Saraceni and the Persians, it was told, had ignored these fathers of the desert, respecting their holy vows – and then one night all had fallen to a nameless enemy who had left their bodies upon the rocks all slashed and despoiled like wineskins torn apart in a frenzy. Now the Nabatean tower was shunned by all – even those who devoted their lives to pilgrimages to the martyred places – and it remained a dull obstinate stain upon the Black Desert, riven with maze-like cells and empty holes like the sockets of a skull.

A few of us protested at his internment after the Christian fashion, stating that he wore charms about his person and had been seen to mumble invocations after the old fashion of the gods – but Angelus overrode us and stated that this was the new order now of Rome and that our fallen would lie in the ground and rot into the earth – and some among us murmured then ‘like dogs’ – but he silenced them with a hard glance and we watched as a hole was excavated in the black ground and his body tipped into it after the slaves had washed it. No one had had the courage to unstitch that mask and disinter its contents and so it seemed to me that we disposed of him not as a soldier of Rome in the old manner but as some vagrant actor in one of the comedies popular now in the theatres of the east.

He was nothing more than a poor frontier legionary left in a neglected town on a border no one really cared to remember – a thin man in rags and old armour and weapons – and yet in that small moment I had stopped him outside the Tribune’s tent, I saw that scar along his cheek and realised that it was a mark of battle; a cut suffered in the defence of Rome – and that behind it lay an unknown tale of war and death and perhaps honour.

His shade fell into that Christian tomb and with it his life and his ancestry – and I for one grieved at his passing.

It was why later in the night and under a thin sliver of a moon I returned to that grave by the dark mound of the Nabatean tower and scooped away the fresh black dust, unwrapped the cloth about his frozen mask, and placed two siliqua coins in the sockets where his eyes had been.

Only when I had finished covering up his corpse again and rose to return to Nasranum did I find Angelus behind me, silent and wrapped up hard against the cold desert night. For a moment he seemed to gaze unknowingly upon me and then he reached out suddenly and placed a silver coin in my hand and then was gone back into the night as if he had never been – and I knew then that he too mourned this man in the old fashion and yet could not show it.

Arbuto and the legionaries of the Fourth Maniple returned at daybreak after a hard night’s march with the news that the supply convoy lay massacred some twelve miles west – everything had been butchered: soldiers, slaves, even the oxen. The few remains of battle indicated mounted raiders had swept in on them without warning and that the carts had been overrun before they had even had the chance to form a circle in the Gothic manner for defence.The look on the faces of the legionaries as they had marched back in through the Negra Porta was grim and angry – and I turned to Barko, remarking that I was not sure now who was the punitive force and who was the punished. He laughed at that but beneath his humour I knew he thought the same dark thoughts I did . . .

[Diomede]

I'm gonna stop reading this (if I can) and just copy+paste a few updates into a word doc or something. Bumper-update!

[chaplain118]

This is fantastic, just read the whole thing through in one go!

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

That Time Which Brings No Solace

(Do you remember, my old friend, all those years ago when we first flew over the Harra? That endless black stony expanse rolling forever beneath us like a dark carpet, an obsidian wave? The Harra – that desolate place the ancients called the Auranitis, ‘the land of broken stone’; the high volcanic plateau which cemented that lost land between the old cities of the Mediterranean and the hinterland of Syrian, Arabian and Persian myth like a scar – and we alone in that little twin prop plane flying low and startling the herds of goats and the odd nomad . . . And you ran out of film on that old pentax spotmatic you always used. Remember?

And what did we see as we gazed down into that desolation? Ruins – ancient ruins in all the shapes Man can devise – old forts, crumbling towers, and those endless strange runs of low stone like alien patterns in the black desert – and we laughed at the unexpected joy of that discovery like children in a sweetshop. A year later we published our paper complete with your fuzzy black and white photographs and we had arrived on the stage where historians and archaeologists commingle in uneasy hospitality.

The Harra – it gifted us academic acclaim. It was our birthing in a way, old friend. Can you imagine then how my fingers trembled as I crouched in that uneasy Egyptian sand and read again of the Auranitis and the tiny men who toiled now in its primeval womb? My eyes could not believe what I was reading and only the smallest part of me was aware of the sounds of pick and hammer around me, the shouts of the labourers, and the tiny whir of the diesel generator. I swear, old friend, I almost had tears in my eyes!

We flew laughing over a lost world of archaeology, the engines sputtering, an unnamed sandstorm on the far horizon, and in all the years since in which we have toiled amid broken stone and fallen archways have we ever been happier, I ask?

Now after reading these tiny Latin words penned so fastidiously (and I use that word aware of the hidden pun in its depths) I hear that laughter of ours as only mocking echoes that the gods may have rained down upon the men of the Quinta. Do you imagine time may have echoes and foreshadowing? That what we do today can echo backwards in some strange way?

I do wonder that now – and perhaps I see that innocence as we flew like young gods over the Harra as arrogance now. Perhaps.

I will leave you to edit all this of course – as you always do! Do you still have that camera, I wonder? Perhaps the sand of the Harra is in it still?)

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

This is fantastic, just read the whole thing through in one go!

Thanks, chaplain118 - I hope the read in one go didn't tax you too much!


I'm gonna stop reading this (if I can) and just copy+paste a few updates into a word doc or something. Bumper-update!

Diomede - you want me to write shorter updates? Really?!

[Ybbon]

So when you publish this, can you make sure there is a Kindle edition

[McScottish]

So when you publish this, can you make sure there is a Kindle edition

I agree entirely, just make certain you have hardback and paperback first!

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

No need for kindle - all the publishing space I need is here!

(Although I wonder if there is an idea here - perhaps a collected anthology of the best AARs in a pdf or kindle format published by the TWC?)

[Ybbon]

That's not a bad idea, not sure how you'd do it, and it would have to be for story based AAR's instead of image based ones.

Woohoo, 1000 posts!

[SeniorBatavianHorse]

In Eternity Alone Resides Truth

With some regret I pulled my eyes away from that curt Latin which marched over the worn and cracked papyrus - endless, regimented, each sharp flick of ink and angular curlicue a minor figure in an unseen army – I pulled up my eyes and frowned in annoyance. Outside in the dark night and ruin that was the castellum of Oescus a ‘babble’ arose and deep in its inconstant noise I detected the unusual concern of my Isaurian guard. I looked up and the dark shadows of this tiny principium surrounded me like the shades of the forgotten. There hanging in the dark lay that blank face of the Tribune Zeno, the last of the Macedonica, his dark eyes fastened on mine like talons, the light in them inscrutable and liquid. His hand played with the flesh of the acanthus, his fingers gliding among the petals almost as a lover plays with the fingers of his betrothed.


I shivered, the words of this Felix falling from me, that desert fort fading from my mind, and wondered then on what was provoking the surprise of my men, those mountain warriors who always remained aloof from the soft luxuries of Rome, the Isaurians, brigands always in their blood, and it struck me that Balbiscus, my Centenarius in command of these my bucullati, had not returned since he had left this small broken room to investigate what the others had found outside. For one moment I remembered his mocking scorn as we had rode into this last remnant of a forgotten Roman fort to find the lamented men who had remained to guard the Danube here while all the rest of Rome had forgone them – of how he had laughed and called them ‘vagrants!’ in their rags and patchwork armour – and now I heard that voice of his deep in the endless night outside rise above the concern of the Isaurians – it rose cracked and shrill and buried in its depths were oaths to the dim and hoary gods that rested still in the mountains of Isauria whose blood and fire were forged long ere Christ placed his calming hands upon us all . . .


Balbiscus shouted deep in the night of Oescus amid the cacophony of my men and his words were riven with an elemental fear I had never heard in his kind before –


But – may Christ shrive my soul – I remained gazing deep into that hanging face of the Tribune, white, crepuscular, shimmering as if from a light within, and I almost seemed to fall within the black orbs of his eyes. Fall and bow my head then again to the Latin of Felix, that Ducenarius, that poor man who wrote of the Quinta all alone in the Black Desert, in the fort drenched in the blood of Pagan and Christian, cut adrift into a solitary doom beyond the frontier of Rome . . .


And at my back, words fell upon the walls in fear and surprise . . .


(Forgive, do. I throw all this upon you to edit. Of course I do – and you will. You will. That is why we work so well together and always will, my old friend. All I ask is that you forbear in this until you too find yourself all alone with our Valerianus here in the ancient deserts of Egypt amid these crumbing ruins and then you will understand.)