Chapter 12

Syracuse — Southern Walls, Late 263 BCE

We never raised a ram.

Never lit a fire for siege.

Syracuse opened its gates.

The legates claimed it was diplomacy. That Hiero of Syracuse had wisely chosen survival. But I saw the real reason — forty thousand Roman soldiers at his doorstep, bronze gleaming like a sea of gods.

Bloodless victories still bleed somewhere.

The camp sprawled beyond the olive terraces — tents in perfect rows, latrines dug by the hour. The men didn't celebrate the peace. They sharpened blades and waited for the next city to say no.

Kesseph stood beside me, watching the eastern road.

"No one ever opens the gates for mercy," he said.

"Only to choose who kills them."

Campfire – Days Later

We had quiet time.

Time to count what was gone.

Of the forty thousand who landed at Messana, we'd lost close to six thousand in the Salso ambush and its aftermath. That number included a full cohort whose commander, Marcus Fabius Numitor, had died when an elephant crushed his command tent in the rout.

His remaining men — sixty-three survivors, disoriented, leaderless — were merged into my command.

My Umbra Cohors now numbered one hundred and thirty-one.

And they were watching me.

They wanted more than drills.

They needed something to belong to which is what I was giving them.

We made the banner on the third night.

A dozen men sat around the fire, cutting and stitching between shifts. Kesseph brought dyed cloth from a scribe's pack. Gaius carved the pole from a broken spear haft.

"What do we put on it?" Tullius asked.

"Not your face," someone muttered.

They laughed.

I didn't.

"We don't need wolves or gods," I said. "We need truth."

Kesseph looked at me.

"What's true about us?"

I answered without thinking.

"That we go where light does not dare."

The banner bore a black sun on red, ringed in iron thread.

No name.

No motto.

Just the symbol of dusk.

The last light before blood.

Command Tent

Two new consuls arrived with polished greaves and words shaped like razors.

Lucius Postumius Megellus and Quintus Mamilius Vitulus — both ambitious, both young enough to want glory.

Agrigentum was the next target. Carthage's stronghold in western Sicily. A fortified city, well-supplied, guarded by local allies and Carthaginian troops under General Hannibal Gisco.

"We march in six days," Megellus said.

"We carry all siege equipment," added Vitulus. "We starve them if we can. Break them if we must."

"Who leads the initial assault?" a tribune asked.

Silence.

Then Megellus's eyes turned to me.

"Your cohort will scout the southern aqueducts," he said.

"We're siege scouts now?" I asked.

"You move like like as if surrounded by fog. That's what they say."

Laelia Scaura – Four Days Earlier

She had been waiting in the city barracks since her statement.

The Roman scribe, thin and sun-burned, had thanked her once. Then vanished.

She thought her life would return to olives and stifled marriage.

But then the letters arrived.

From Syracuse's grain stores.

From her uncle's caravan accounts.

Her handwriting, copied. Proof of lies. Of under-the-table deals with Carthaginian agents.

The Romans would used them.

And when Hiero's council read them

They opened the gates, because now they had another thing to offer the romans

Laelia was not thanked.

But she was watched.

Now, she was being escorted west, part of a supply detachment helping the legions.

She didn't know why but didn't mind since it was a bit of an adventure in a way.

she heard one of the commanders talking behind her whispering.

"Give the woman to the Umbra centurion after a few days. Let him decide if she's useful."

The fire cracked, but no one looked up.

Not at first.

You could always tell when a cohort had seen death up close. The silence wasn't calm. It was thick, heavy, pressing into the bones. Like the silence after a scream that no one admits hearing.

I walked the rows slowly. No armour now—just a tunic and scars.

The men sat in half-circles, hands around cups or dice or blades they'd already cleaned twice. There were 131 of them. I knew each by name. Some only by how they screamed in their sleep.

They called themselves Umbra now.

But I remembered what they used to be—farmers, thieves, sons.

Now? They were becoming something else.

Kesseph met me at the edge of the camp.

He held a red cloth in one hand, our banner, stiff with dry dye. His eyes flicked down the hill, toward the lights of the Roman command tents.

"We should have kept marching," he said.

"You want another valley full of dead?"

"No. I want to stop waiting."

I took the cloth. Stared at it. The fibers were rough, cut from a supply wagon's sail. The dye came from boiled roots and charcoal. Someone had stitched a black shape at the center.

A sun. Black and ringed.

Not rising. Not falling.

Just watching.

"This is ours." I said

Kesseph exhaled through his nose, the closest thing to a laugh he ever gave.

"They'll follow it," he said. "Because they're too afraid not to."

"And you?"

"I follow you because I choose to."

Later, I sat alone.

The banner hung above the tent.

The wind pulled at it gently, like it didn't want to offend.

I thought about Rome. About the way men like Megellus and Vitulus looked at me now—not like a soldier, not even like a threat. More like something sharp they hadn't chosen to hold but couldn't put down.

Gaius, one of the older legionaries from the merged cohort, stepped into the firelight.

He scratched his beard like it itched with old blood.

"You mind if I speak freely, sir?"

"No one else here does."

"You scare the piss out of half the camp."

"Just half?"

"I've been in the legions eighteen years. Fought Celts. Samnites. Put a blade through a man whose guts fell into my boot."

"I'm not impressed yet."

"I saw you slit a man's throat while smiling."

"He begged to live."

"And?"

I looked at him.

"He didn't mean it."

Gaius chewed his lip. Then nodded.

"I just want to know one thing."

"Ask."

"You going to get us all killed?"

I didn't blink.

"No," I said. "But I'm going to make damn sure they remember us."

He stood there a moment longer. Then turned.

As he walked away, I realized something.

I didn't believe my own answer.

The next morning, the courier came.

"March orders," he said, handing me a waxed tablet.

I broke the seal. The letters were stiff, scratched by a rushed hand.

Agrigentum. Two weeks. All cohorts assemble. Siege to begin upon arrival.

We were on the move again.

And this time, it wouldn't be whispers.

It would be walls, and gates, and fire.

In the silhouette of the banner, I called the cohort to formation.

They didn't shout. They didn't cheer.

They just stood.

As if they'd been waiting for war to begin properly.

As if everything until now had just been rehearsal.

"From this point," I said, "we don't break."

"We don't retreat."

"We move like shadows. Strike like dusk."

"What do they call us?"

They didn't answer with words.

They raised their fists.

And the banner behind me rippled like a silent answer.

Somewhere down the supply line, a woman named Laelia Scaura rode in the dust behind a caravan of grain carts and mule shit.

She didn't know it yet, but the orders sealed in the crate beneath her feet bore the crest of my cohort.

Not a name.

Just a black sun on red.

And soon, her life would bend toward it like a seed toward light.

Or flame.

One Day's March from Agrigentum – 262 BCE

The dust just never left your mouth.

We were less than a day's march from Agrigentum, and the road had turned from a line into a question. Every stone we passed had been turned, every tree half-burned and crooked.

This wasn't a road it was a warning and yet we marched.

Cohorts of the legions in disciplined lines, eyes forward, faces sun-cracked and closed. Our wagons carried timber, nails, sling-stones, earthworks tools. Roman war was a machine that fed on men and silence.

I walked at the front of the Umbra Cohors.

131 strong. Not the best. Not the worst.

Just mine.

"What's the city like?" Kesseph asked as we crossed a rise.

"Older than it looks. Strong walls. Sharp corners. Grain stored beneath the southern plaza, if it's still there."

"You've been?"

"Once. Maybe twice."

"In this life?"

"No."

He didn't ask more, Kesseph knew now when to let the ghosts talk on their own, Tenebris had told him what he is.

We saw Agrigentum before we smelled it.

A fat city carved into the cliffs, wrapped in ancient stone and red banners. The Carthaginian standard flapped above the northern gate like a mouth mid-scream. Defensive towers bristled with scorpions and bowmen.

They were waiting.

Siege Preparations – Two Days Later

Ditches. Ramparts. Towers. Palisades.

The earth itself became our first weapon.

Roman engineers, sweating like oxen, drove stakes into the soil while their apprentices measured angles and poured lime into trenches.

"Build to last," one of them grunted. "This won't be over by Saturnalia."

Siege towers were constructed in parts. Wrapped in wet hides to resist fire. My cohort was assigned to guard the forward slope—where scouts had reported an abandoned well that might connect to the city's underbelly.

"You think they left it by accident?" Kesseph asked.

"No," I said. "Which means it's important."

"Then what do we do?"

I knelt beside the stones. Ran my fingers across the dried moss and broken rope.

"We go under."

I requisitioned canvas, twine, and two dozen digging tools from the quartermaster. He looked at me like I was mad.

"You're not an engineer."

"No."

"Then what in Pluto's shithole do you need shovels for?"

"I want to collapse the Carthaginian morale," I said.

He blinked.

"Fine," he said, finally. "But if this becomes another Salso, I'm putting your name on the letter to the Senate."

"Spell it right," I told him.

We started tunnelling at night.

Six men at a time.

We lined the walls with woven branches, reinforced with soaked hide.

"This isn't Roman," Kesseph said.

"No," I agreed. "It's Persian. Learned it near Babylon. During a different war. In a different skin."

"You really remember all of it?"

"Only the parts that hurt."

Three nights in, we struck air.

A cavern—part of the city's old waterworks. Dry now, but connected.

And someone had been here.

Fresh footprints.

Ash.

Whispers in the dark that didn't belong to wind.

"We're not alone," I told them.

"What do we do?" Gaius asked.

"We make sure they never walk back out."

Laelia Scaura 

She hadn't meant to stay.

But the officers had a different plan.

"You are able to read grain manifests," the supply chief said. "You can count. Write. Organize a list without pissing yourself."

"Yes."

"Then you're worth more here than on some farm."

She was assigned to the Umbra Cohors' forward supply. Mostly grain tallies, water checks, and field distribution.

They didn't tell her what the cohort was.

All she did was deliver supply reports to the tent with the black sun stitched on red.

Never saw who read them.

But once—just once—when she turned from the flap, she caught sight of the one they didn't name.

Not with lips.

Only fear.

He stood barefoot in the mud, sleeves rolled, arms streaked with scars.

He didn't look at her.

But something behind his eyes did.

"Who is he?" she asked Kesseph the next morning.

They were checking wine casks. The older man hadn't spoken to her before.

Now he just grunted.

"He's the one who makes sure you don't get a knife in your throat while sleeping."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I'll give."

"He's not just a soldier."

"No."

"Then what is he?"

Kesseph looked at her, and for the first time, she saw fear in someone who wasn't running.

"A memory," he said. "That keeps waking up."