CHAPTER 6: The Cobble Road

The first breath Markos took in Yaegrafane was cold—not the biting chill of winter air, but the kind of ancient cold that clung to stone and ruin more colder that he was in the black sea, one that made him remember his old campaign as old bones ache and new ones wary. His fingers dug into the black soil beneath him, gritty and loose, and when he finally forced his eyes open, he saw a sky too pale for comfort, a horizon of jagged hills and crooked trees twisted by some foreign wind. There was no sun, only a silver haze beyond the clouds.

He rose slowly, his joints stiff from whatever passage had brought him here. His lamellar armor, burnished bronze tinged with soot and cracked blood, creaked with each motion. The spathion at his hip was still sheathed, and his fingers instinctively touched the pommel. It grounded him. Markos looked around. There was no sign of the Varangian barracks, no sound of Constantinople's chaos. Just wind, silence, and a path of broken stones that cut through sparse woodlands like a scar.

His memory was fragmented or shattered. Faces, fires, cries—he remembered the Varangian last stand, the final desperate clash beneath the shattered dome, the cries of mourning women, and then… nothing. Only that voice— her voice.

"Come back to me, my love… You've strayed long enough. This time, I won't let you go—not even death will take you from me again."

He had dreamed that voice many times during the siege. A woman's voice, soft yet deep, soaked in longing and sorrow. Now it echoed in his skull, and he could not tell if it was real or part of whatever curse brought him here.

As he took his first cautious steps onto the cracked stone road, something fluttered past his shoulder. A crow. Then another. Soon a group of them had gathered in the bare branches above, watching in silence, heads cocked. Their presence was unnatural and almost orchestrated. They did not caw, did not scatter. They followed as he walked.

Westward, the land seemed more hospitable. Though the skies remained dim, the road led to faint signs of habitation: fences overgrown with ivy, burned-out farmhouses Markos knew that a raid has happened not too long ago in this region. Moss-covered statues of forgotten saints—or gods. And it was there, near a crossroads marked by a toppled stone obelisk, that he first encountered her.

A woman in red cloak.

She was not the demonic vision from his dreams. She looked human—young, perhaps in her early twenties, though there was something timeless in her bearing. Her cloak was deep crimson, tattered at the edges, the hood shadowing her features. She walked with a staff, tall and gnarled with runes Markos did not recognize. And the crows bowed their heads as she passed.

He hid behind a ruined cart, instincts of a soldier taking over, watching as she paused at the obelisk and placed a hand upon it. The stone flared faintly red. Her lips moved in a chant he could not hear.

Before he could make sense of her actions, another noise interrupted the wind—the gruff voices of armed men, cruel and drunken. He followed their shouts past the hill crest to find a group of highwaymen—seven, maybe eight—surrounding a caravan of merchants. The traders, three men and a veiled woman, were unarmed and terrified. One of the brigands had already drawn blood.

Markos did not hesitate. He slid down the hill in silence, knees bending low with practiced form, and unsheathed his spathion. The curved blade whispered free like a serpent. His shield remained slung, but he gripped it tightly.

The first highwayman never saw him coming. Markos drove the blade through his back with clean precision, silencing him before the others turned.

"What the—"

He was upon the next with the force of a charging cataphract, his blade cleaving through bone and sinew. Two of the brigands fell back, screaming for help. Markos dropped low, sweeping one man's feet and smashing his shield into the face of another. Blood sprayed, and panic erupted.

"It's one of the knights!"

"Back! Fall back!"

They scattered. One fled into the woods, only to be tackled by an unnatural shadow—a crow that shifted into a vaguely human form for a split second, wings becoming claws. Markos stared, breath heavy.

When it was over, he turned to the merchants. They cowered. He knelt and removed his helmet, revealing sweat-matted hair and pale skin.

"Are you hurt?"

The woman stepped forward. "No. No, you… you saved us."

He looked over his shoulder. The woman he saw stood at the crest, watching, silent as stone. Her eyes, when they met his, were unreadable. But when he turned to ask the merchants about her, she was gone. They looked at him with confusion.

Markos turned back to ask the merchants, "Did you see her? The woman in red?"

"There was no one there, milord."

They exchanged confused glances. "What woman, sir? We saw no one but you."

Markos was confused by how the locals spoke. When he first communicated with the merchants in Greek, the words came out strangely—some syllables clipped too short, others drawn out in ways he had never heard. It wasn't that their language was entirely foreign—it was Greek, but with peculiar modifications. The inflections were wrong, some endings were dropped, and some words felt like they had been blended with another tongue.

That night, Markos camped alone by a hollow of trees. He started a small fire, hunted a lean hare with a thrown dagger, and cooked the meat with a soldier's pragmatism. He remembered laws about poaching from his time in the Empire—some things never changed. But food was food. He would apologize later if needed. The crows still watched him, and he kept his sword unsheathed as he slept.

The next morning brought a clearer road and the distant sound of bells. By noon, he arrived at a village nestled in a riverbend beneath a weathered stone castle. A wooden gate bore the name in angular script: SCOLATII.

As he entered, guards with iron caps and spears approached. One raised a hand. "Nomen tuum, viator."

Markos blinked. The tongue was foreign, but not unfamiliar—Latin, or something descended from it and good thing Markos knew some Latin because of his time as a kentarchos for the varangians and also quite educated by monks. He raised his hands slowly and responded in Greek. "Εἰρήνη. Εἰμὶ Μάρκος, στρατιώτης τῆς Κωνσταντινουπόλεως."

The guards looked at one another, confused but curious. One of them, an older man with a hawkish face, tried again in a thick, clipped dialect. "Marcus? Roma?"

"Constantinople," Markos said. He tapped his chest. "Ῥωμαῖος."

It was enough. They lowered their weapons and motioned him forward. Inside the village, he was met with wary stares—his armor and blade made him look like a ghost of old wars.

He was taken to a local reeve, a man named Herran, who spoke the language with more clarity. Herran explained he was in the Duchy of Scolacium, a borderland where the old gods were still feared and the Church had only partial sway. Their Latin was not that of the Pope or the scholars of Rome—it was hard, peasant Latin, mixed with something older.

Markos raised his hand in a half-greeting and spoke in Greek, his voice calm but formal. "Εἰμί Μάρκος. Οὐκ ἔχω κακίαν. Ζητῶ καταφύγιον." ("I am Markos. I mean no harm. I seek refuge.")

The man tilted his head, confused at first, then responded slowly in a dialect that sounded hauntingly like Latin. "Haec sunt terras Ducatus Scolacii. Omnia verba non capio... sed ... peregrinus es, annon es?"

Markos caught enough of it—"Lands of the.. Duchy of Scolacium… don't understand… foreigner?"—to nod. He switched to broken Latin, leaning on what he remembered from catechism and Varangian commands. "Ego… miles sum. Abest patria mea. Veni ex oriente."

The reeve's expression shifted, curiosity now overtaking suspicion. "Miles… ex Oriente? Hm. Tu… servisti? Quo imperatore?"

"Alexius… tertius. Constantinopolis," Markos replied, enunciating clearly.

The reeve motioned for him to follow. "Erus miles? Ignosce. Nostri homines te videre debes."

As Markos followed, he passed through the cobbled streets of Scolatii. The architecture differed from Constantinople's domes and marbled colonnades—these were timber-framed homes with high, peaked roofs and red tiles, symbols etched into the stone lintels above each door. Carvings of twin headed lions and serpents. Even the shrines here were different.

Markos, who once thought Latin dead, found himself understanding fragments. He learned quickly by watching expressions, gestures, and pointing.

He learned that the people of Scolatii did not ride horses as nobles did in the Empire, but used heavy ox-carts. Their noble class lived in isolation within the stone castle above, rarely descending to speak with commoners. Markos noticed that the villagers wore iron amulets in strange shapes—sigils meant to ward off spirits. When asked, a blacksmith muttered, "For the forest does not forgive."

They asked him if he had come from the Hollow Sea. He replied in Greek again, "Ἐγὼ ἀπὸ Κωνσταντινούπολιν." They looked puzzled, then simply called him a "knight from beyond the mists."

Children followed him at a distance, whispering about his bronze armor. An old woman offered him a charm of red thread. "To keep your soul from vanishing," she said in her tongue.

Markos thanked her the only way he could—with a soft nod and a soldier's solemnity. But deep inside, he felt a growing unease. The world was too strange, the people too cautious, and the language too warped to truly feel like home. And yet… it mirrored his Rome just enough to torment him.

And in the corners of each room he entered, a crow perched.

Markos awoke the next morning to the distant tolling of bells from the hilltop castle of Scolatii. Smoke drifted lazily from the chimneys of the village below, curling into the pale morning sky like tendrils of memory. He descended from the woods where he'd made his discreet camp, having feasted the night before on a hare he'd trapped—fully aware that hunting without leave might be a crime in these lands. Still, the meat had kept the cold at bay and his strength intact.

As he entered the village proper, people gave him wary looks. Children peered from behind laundry lines and stone thresholds, while elders muttered in hushed tones. Markos wore his battered Roman lamellar and still bore the curved spathion at his hip. Though he had wiped it clean of blood, it still shone faintly in the morning light, a relic of a world now long behind him.

He was led to the village temple—not dedicated to Christ Pantokrator, but to a deity known as "Veltrana." The temple was a circular structure with no images of saints, only painted scenes of war, harvest, and sacrifice. Markos saw people preparing for some kind of ceremony. A pig, bound and wreathed in flowers, was led to a central stone altar.

Markos spoke softly to a local beside him. "Quid est?" he asked.

The reeve answered in his thick dialect, mixing gesture with word. "Veltrana ... vetus Astonicum dea est. cludit autumnus. sollemne habebimus."

Roughly, Markos gathered that Veltrana was a old goddess and that this was some kind of seasonal closing ritual—possibly linked to harvest and the end of martial campaigns. The villagers sang in an old tongue that echoed with cadence like Latin prayers, but their melody had a wild, ancient rhythm, accompanied by bone flutes and hollow drums.

The pig was sacrificed with a single strike from a bronze axe. Blood flowed into a stone channel that ran along the temple's floor, guided toward a central fire. The people watched with solemn eyes, crossing their chests with two fingers, not three.

Markos felt displaced, and not just by distance. Their god demanded blood for the land, not prayer for the soul. These people knelt not in reverence but in ancestral obligation, a pact with forces older and harsher than the God of Constantinople. The rite was followed by shared bread, mead, and quiet celebration, during which Markos was offered a wooden cup. He accepted, bowing in thanks.

A young woman, perhaps a priestess or noble daughter, asked him where he hailed from.

"Constantinople," he answered.

"That is a name from legend," she replied. "Our ancestors spoke of a marble city from the sea. But that was in the days when Veltrana is still walking in Yaegrafane."

Markos said nothing yet now he knows the name of this continent that he was in and he will rememeber that. The distance between their worlds was wider than he could fathom.

Yet here he stood, sharing drink with strangers beneath a god he did not know, welcomed in ritual he could barely comprehend, but needing its shelter all the same.

Somewhere, hidden behind smoke and shadow, A woman watched him from afar. Or perhaps it was that demoness again. The crows knew.

They always knew.