The air changed before we saw them.
It thickened—like old breath pressed against stone. The kind of pressure you feel in catacombs, when bones have spent centuries waiting to be noticed. I raised a hand, and the men behind me halted. No whispers. No steel drawn. Just the sound of dripping water and a silence that felt personal.
Kesseph stepped beside me, slow and deliberate, his curved blade glinting in the torchlight. The tunnel was narrow—Persian-cut, just like I'd remembered from a lifetime ago—but widened here, near a split in the stone. Natural, maybe. Or shaped.
"Laelia said these aqueducts were abandoned since the Greeks," Kesseph murmured, voice barely a breath. "But this looks… cleared."
"It is," I said.
He didn't ask how I knew. That was the part I'd begun to value in him—not the trust, but the restraint.
I crouched near the edge of the opening, where the tunnel yawned wider. A hollow bowl of darkness curved downward. Scraps of boot prints. Grease-streaks. Not Roman.
"They're nesting," I said. "Mercenaries. Maybe Carthaginian. Maybe deserters."
Behind us, one of the Umbra Cohors shifted his weight. The sound was faint—leather against leather—but in the dark, it echoed like thunder. I turned.
"Quiet," I said, softly. Not anger. Just warning.
They listened. They always did.
Because they'd seen what happens when I don't speak first.
We moved down, torches guttering. The passage was slick, sweat-slick, and every breath brought dust and damp rot. I led. Not from pride, but necessity. In close places like this, you don't command from behind.
A sound drifted ahead. Not speech. Not footsteps.
Scraping.
Like bone against iron.
Kesseph tensed. I saw his fingers flex, the way a veteran reads vibrations instead of voices.
"How many?" he asked.
"Three ahead. Two flanking. One… waiting."
"Waiting?"
I nodded. "For us. Or for someone worse."
At the next bend, I paused again. Felt the stone with my hand. The angle was too clean.
"Trap," I said.
Kesseph didn't flinch. He signaled two men to fan wide and climb above the split—silent, spider-like, trained since Salso. The ones who lived long in the Cohors weren't the loudest. They were the ones who already knew how to die.
The first man stepped forward, then dropped. A wire caught his ankle—primitive, but smart. Rusted blades swept from the stone slit beside him, cutting empty air.
The others watched. One smirked.
I didn't.
"Reset the blades," I said.
"Why?" the youngest asked.
"So we can send them back through it."
Minutes passed like breaths before drowning. Then—
A flicker.
Torchlight—not ours. From deeper ahead.
I held up two fingers. Kesseph nodded.
We moved like ghosts.
The first man we reached was pissing into a crack in the stone, humming something Punic. He never saw Kesseph's blade. Just collapsed mid-stream, like the gods had tugged his thread. The second turned, too late. I caught him before he shouted—hand over mouth, blade in the hollow beneath his jaw.
His blood was hot.
It always is.
There were five more.
We let two escape—on purpose.
They'd run back to report. Carry the scent of death with them. Spread it like plague.
The others? We folded into the dark behind them. Shadows on stone. Umbra.
When the last screamed, it was short-lived.
Pain is a whisper down here.
And gods don't need to roar when men already believe in them.
After, in the half-light of the collapse tunnel, Kesseph exhaled slow.
"You didn't kill the runner."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because the next ones who come will come afraid."
He didn't reply.
But I saw it in his eyes.
He understood.
As we ascended back into the perimeter tunnel, the others waiting above stepped aside without being asked. Laelia stood among them, torch in hand. She looked at me—eyes flicking to the blood on my boots, the soot on my knuckles, the men behind me who returned without a word.
"Is it done?" she asked.
"No," I said. "It's begun."
She nodded once. "They'll report the tunnels are haunted."
"Let them."
I passed her without pausing.
"Let them fear the dark."
Marcus Atilius Ruso
The ink would not dry.
It beaded along the edge of the scroll like blood refusing to clot, stubborn and alive. Marcus Atilius Ruso frowned, holding the stylus just above the parchment, and let the Sicilian wind fret through the flap of his command tent.
Eight enemy scouts slain in the aqueduct tunnels. Two more unaccounted for. One cohort returned with no casualties.
The handwriting felt dishonest.
He glanced across the dimly lit space to where General Megellus stood hunched over a war-map, eyes narrowed at pin-marked roads and ghost paths traced along the cliffs near Agrigentum.
"They returned without injury," Ruso said. "In tunnels a man can't stand upright in. Against Carthaginian irregulars armed with curved blades and kill orders."
Megellus didn't look up. "You sound disappointed."
"I sound skeptical."
"Then write it as such. Add: 'All accounted for, but explanation unsatisfactory.' The Senate likes their skepticism wrapped in submission."
A courier stepped in, face pale and helmet tucked under one arm.
"Sir," he said. "Word spreads from the siege wall. The men are… whispering."
Megellus straightened. "Whispering what?"
The boy hesitated. "That the enemy bled before they were touched. That shadows moved before the blades. That he walked through the rock like a shade."
No name spoken. Just he.
Megellus exhaled through his nose. Not quite contempt. Not quite reverence.
Ruso leaned forward, voice low. "You've loosed something into this campaign. A thing you do not own. A myth given steel."
Megellus smiled, dry as parchment. "No, Tribune. Rome loosed it. I only pointed."
They stood in silence as the tent flap shivered again. Far off, beneath the city's walls, a dull roar sounded—either thunder or collapsed stonework. Perhaps both.
Ruso stepped back from the scroll. His knuckles had gone white around the stylus. He hadn't noticed.
"Permission to revise the official record?" he asked.
"Granted," said Megellus.
Ruso took up the stylus again.
"Umbra Cohors returned at twilight. No wounded. No witness. When asked how many they faced, the commander replied: 'Enough to be remembered.'"
He let the ink dry this time. But not before he caught his hand trembling.
He clenched it beneath the table. The name rose in his throat, unspoken.
He would not say it. Not yet. Not out loud.
Lucius Varro
They said the shadows moved wrong near the southern trench.
Lucius Varro didn't believe in spirits—not the way the priests meant—but he had seen enough slaughter to know when a place refused the sun. He stood at the lip of the half-finished tunnel, sweat clinging to the hollow of his back despite the spring chill.
It was the silence that had changed.
Not the absence of sound.
The absence of echo.
A soldier nearby—one of the line-rats from the XIII Legion—stamped out his torch and muttered, "I'm not going down there again. Not with that smell."
"What smell?"
"Burned bone. And wet iron."
Varro sniffed. He smelled nothing but limestone and damp leather.
"You're imagining it," he said.
The soldier didn't argue. He just crossed himself in the Sabine way, fingers touching wrist, brow, then shoulder.
"They say the tunnels bled last night," the boy muttered. "And not just theirs. One of ours wandered too close. Came back with black on his hands. Not red. Black."
Varro waved him off and descended alone.
Halfway down the cut, he found it.
A line drawn in old mortar, smudged but deliberate—like a child's glyph carved into wet clay, but older somehow. And burned into it, scorched from torch soot or something more… permanent:
A sun. Ringed in black.
No words. Just symbol.
He stared.
Then he reached out, hand hovering. Touched it.
The stone throbbed—once. Faint. Like a heartbeat, or memory dislodged.
He pulled away sharply. His breath quickened, but he said nothing.
He wouldn't report it. He wasn't paid to see omens.
But as he turned to leave, he noticed something else.
Dust on the floor moved. Slightly. Against the direction of his steps. Upward.
He left fast.
And for three nights after, he didn't go near the tunnel mouth.
Hamilcar Barca's Scribe
The dispatch came wrapped in oiled hide, stitched shut with goatgut. The Carthaginian commander slit it open with a bronze blade—old-fashioned, but ritual mattered.
Inside: a torn sleeve marked with Roman stitching, stiff with blood.
And a single scrap of parchment:
"He walks below."
No seal. No name. No demand.
Hamilcar said nothing for a long while.
Then, to his scribe:
"Tell the men we face a commander who believes in nothing."
The scribe frowned. "Nothing?"
Hamilcar's eyes didn't blink.
"Not gods. Not death. Not fate."
A pause.
"Only outcomes."
The scribe nodded, but hesitated. "Do we know who he is?"
Hamilcar looked toward the east wall—where the trench lines curled like teeth.
"We do," he said softly. "We just haven't named him yet."