The Arctureia [Semi-Open]

THE ARCTUREIA
BOOK I
The Flight of the Last Light

Sing, O Muse, of bronze-bound men beneath ash-thick skies,
Of high Kylia sundered, her domes split under the battering of siege,
And of Arcturus Sygarii Arvenicca, the grim Legatus,
Last eagle of the North, who bore his oath through fire and salt,
Southward to shores unknown, where no Kylian had yet named the wind.

Kyliria burned.

Her temples—once lifted like spears to heaven—cracked beneath siege towers.
Marble colonnades folded like parchment.
The last banners—sun-laced, laurel-fringed—dragged low in blood-drenched courts.
On the fourth night, the gates split.
We saw them—
The giants from the east in soot-greaved bronze,
Howling the names of gods drowned before the flood,
Tearing infants from the arms of nurses,
While the Senate drank molten silver in wine-vaults deep with rot.

I, Arcturus, son of Sygarii,
Stood not in the Curia nor among the white-pillared halls.
I stood on the seawall,
Where the last of the warships groaned at anchor,
And men—
not conscripts, not farmers,
but soldiers—
waited at the edge of the world.

We bore no eagles. Smoke had taken them.
We bore fire on our cloaks, and silence in our mouths.
Ash painted our faces.
The sea clawed at our hulls like a beast.

"Board," I said.

No trumpets. No procession.
I said it with a tongue split by thirst,
With lips blackened by the fall of the forum.
They obeyed. Not out of love,
But because the thought of dying in city beds,
Under the weeping of women,
Curdled their hearts more than the ocean’s deep.

Sixty-two ships, with hulls crusted by old campaigns.
We filled them with pots, blades, oil, salt,
Children too small to hold shields, dogs with ribs like bows.
The wind took us. The sea opened its mouth.

Behind, Kyliria coughed flame into the stars.
Ahead, only black.

On the third day,
The sea tore a trireme open like bread.
The Oath of Terentius—her hull carved with the names of the Northern dead.
She cracked mid-chant.
Twenty-seven vanished.
No rites. No oil.
The sea bore them back north, limbs wide like supplicants,
Toward the smoke they had escaped.

I did not pray.

No gods worth breath.
Only hunger’s slow claw,
The slap of rope, the stink of fear,
And the wind—

Until that night—
When moon drowned in cloud
And the oarsmen snored in salt-stiff hammocks—
A light moved beneath the keel,
Green and pure, bright as molten gem,
Shaped like a man—
No torch, no fish, no fire.
It walked the ocean floor.

I saw it. I, Arcturus. No other.

I spoke nothing.

Not when the wind veered south-by-west,
Not when a current deeper than memory
Drew us beyond the compass rose,
As if some hand—unseen, unasked—had seized the rudder.

That was the first sign.

The next came with land—
but that, Muse, belongs to another song.

Inscription sealed under the Dome of the Three Arlons, preserved in the Custodial Register of the Founding Scrolls.

“Let it be known that upon the sixth turning of the Moon of Ashes, in the year following the Sundering of high Kylia, the first Legatus of the 9th Legion, of the House Sygarii, named Arcturus the Younger by his mother Tymea, and Arcturus the Iron-Star by his men, did depart from the smoldering shores of the Old World, bearing with him the standard of the Kylian-Epiphani flame, and crossed the Burning Sea to a land unknown, to strike a covenant with exile, iron, and fire, and to forge in blood a kingdom anew...”

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“Too many titles,” I muttered, setting down the stylus. The brass tip left a long, uncertain smear where “flame” was meant to end. I sucked my teeth, lifted the tablet, and wiped the smear with my thumb.

Across the tent, Cassan had already dozed off against the pillar, scroll still balanced across his lap like a sleeping child. I envied him. He snored like a clogged trumpet, but he had the peace of one who no longer worried if today would be the last time the sea rose too high or the bread ran too short.

I closed the wax slate, set it into its case, and stood. My back cracked with the movement. I pulled aside the flap and stepped into the wind.

The stars were already out. Thin silver specks scattered across the ink-black dome, clearer than I had seen them in months. Somewhere out there, my birth city still smoldered under enemy banners. Somewhere out there, gods we once named had turned their faces and names away.

But here, the sea lay quiet, black and brined with memory. Our ships, little more than patched husks of war-barges and merchant hulls, swayed in the crescent bay below. The Ninth, what remained of it, lay strewn like driftwood on the sand—some still armored, most not, all asleep, or trying.

None of us were legionaries anymore. Not really. Not by rank or rite.

I still wore the red mantle. They still called me Legatus.

But we were no longer Kylian.

We were something else.

---

The Burning Sea

The first night we turned from the continent, the wind roared with a voice I swear was human. It screamed in Kylian, though none would admit it. The old chants of the Standard Bearers, twisted and broken by the salt squall.

We fled on sixty-two ships. Sixty-two. One for each Legion eagle left unslain. Now we're left with thirty-odd.

I stood at the stern of the Victrix, hands frozen to the tiller, watching the torchlights on the cliffs behind us vanish like the eyes of extinguished gods.

Cassan clung to the hull midship, dry-heaving bile into his helmet. No one mocked him. We all tasted the end in our throats. Each wave bucked like a dying horse; the oars snapped from their locks; the prow of the Victrix shattered when it struck a drifting corpse of some behemoth fish with war-scarred skin and ribs of black iron. They said it had a face carved like a lion’s.

The sea offered us no peace. It was a threshing basin for the proud.

Every night we recited the Tessera Mortis, though none believed it anymore. We no longer invoked the gods. We invoked memory.

“By blood in oath, by oath in fire.
No brother lies alone beneath the tide.
The flame remains.”

But it was memory, not faith, that kept the men’s hands on the ropes. It was vengeance. It was fear.

We drifted for nine days. On the tenth, the waters turned still. The horizon glowed with a strange, copper-green haze, and the men whispered about the Djharans, those rumored demons of the deep south who drank sea-rot and sang men to drown with gold in their eyes.

The haze thickened by morning. Birds we could not name flew above our mast. Spiked wings. Crooked tails. No song.

And on the twenty-eighth day, we saw land.

Not the wild cliffs of this Southern Reach, where old maps had scribbled dragons in warning. This was a stony plain, wind-swept and copper-colored. A great black tree stood on the first hill, alone. Around it, the bones of a shipwreck like fingers stretched in supplication.

I ordered the landing. The men were too tired to argue. We pulled ashore at dusk. No drums. No chant. Just the creak of sandals in sand and the scraping of armor dragged by survivors.

I stepped onto the shore last.

The sand burned beneath my feet.

It was not welcome.

It was not home.

It was simply not death.

That would be enough.

Journal of Arcturus, son of Sygarii of Kyliria, formerly of the Ninth Legion, recorded in the second month after the Fall.
I have buried three men today. Varro, Kestin, Lyo. Varro died of the rot—his leg never healed from the spear wound at Therpos. Kestin drowned pulling the prowline free of the reef. Lyo hung himself from the black tree. Left no note. Just his old uniform laid beside him, rank badge pinned to the center like a confession.
The men look to me. They call me “Legatus Legionis,” though I’ve claimed nothing. Cassan carved a new standard yesterday—three blades crossed over a shield, mounted on the prow of the largest barge. I told him to burn it. He refused. Said we already bled too much for symbols.

We do not know where we are. But we live. And that is enough for now.

But I feel something in the stone beneath this shore. Not gods. Not demons. Something old. Something watching.

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Journal of Arcturus, son of Sygarii of Kyliria, formerly of the Ninth Legion, recorded in the second week after the Landing.
Eighth day since landing. We are not alone here.
Cassan claims he saw lights on the ridge. Blue, like witch-flame.
And Kessa found stone steps beneath the sand, half-buried. Too regular to be natural. No carvings, but the stones were scored as if by claws—or tools. No mortar. Fitted so tight you cannot slip a knife between. They lead down. We do not know how far.

Food is low. The salt-pork has turned. The sailors say the fish avoid our nets. Most of the men have stopped drinking the riverwater—those who didn’t learned quickly. A fog grows over its surface by night. I’ve started boiling it twice.

Still no word from the scouts sent east, and only the sea remains behind us.

The tree on the hill—how still it stands. No rot. No birds. Even the wind moves around it.

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---

The Ridge

The fire wouldn’t catch. The wind shifted in jerks, like it couldn’t decide whether to howl or whisper. Cassan swore and struck the flint again. Sparks danced uselessly over the damp reeds. I didn’t speak. Just watched the slope.

Five men had climbed that ridge. Only two came back.

Gareth stumbled first—his arm was broken, bent inward like it had tried to curl away from something. His tongue was black. When he opened his mouth to speak, he spat teeth into the sand.

Then came Tevan, walking slow, eyes wide. He didn’t blink. He just walked down the slope like a rope had pulled him, past the camp, past the men calling his name. Straight into the surf. Didn’t stop until the waves covered him.

I’d ordered them not to be followed.

Cassan managed to light the fire just as the last sunlit edge disappeared behind the hills. The flame threw shadows across the ring of lean-tos and makeshift tents. No fewer than a hundred-odd still breathed under my command and there was too many to starve and too few to build.

“Rations again,” Cassan said, tossing a pouch at my feet. It was hard bread. Sea-dried. Hard enough to crack molars. I took it anyway.

“They went too far,” he added. “Tevan, Gareth. They said the stone kept going. Down and down. Steps that bent like a spiral.”

“And?”

“They heard voices.”

I didn’t ask whose.

Instead, I turned to the dark slope where the ridge climbed toward the strange, narrow plateau. From below, it looked almost like a road. The stars didn’t shine above it. A line of black sky split from the rest, like a wound.

“There was something carved on the rock,” Cassan said. “Gareth tried to draw it before his mouth went… wrong.”

He held out a scrap of linen. I took it.

Three symbols. Like tridents, but twisted, serpentine. The lines bent inward, not out. A fourth symbol was smeared beneath them—just a black stroke, jagged and abrupt.

“I don’t know this writing,” Cassan muttered.

“I do.”

He looked at me. I kept my eyes on the cloth.

“It’s not script. Not words.”

“Then what?”

“It’s a map.”

Cassan frowned. “To where?”

I didn’t answer. I stood, tucked the cloth into my satchel, and crossed the camp to where the wounded lay beneath canvas.

Lyo’s cloak had been hung from the side of the tent. His boots placed neatly below. No one had touched them. Some feared he’d cursed them.

Inside, Varro’s corpse was gone. Burned that morning. The others watched me as I stepped inside—Jorek, Rinan, and old Bersa, who hadn’t moved from his cot since the second storm. His left foot was gangrened to the shin.

“We ride at first light,” I said. “Northwest, toward the inland spring. We’ll leave a signal at the shore.”

Jorek sat upright. “You mean to leave the sea?”

“Can’t drink it. Can’t fish it. Can’t pray to it.”

He didn’t answer. Just nodded once, slowly.

As I turned to go, Bersa whispered. His voice rasped like bark peeled from wet wood.

“You saw it too, didn’t you, Legatus?”

I paused. “Saw what?”

“The flame.”

I said nothing.

He laughed, low and sharp. “We’re not the first. The sand remembers. That’s why the tree doesn’t rot.”

“Sleep, Bersa.”

“I tried.” His eyes gleamed in the half-light. “I dreamed instead.”

Outside, the wind rose again.

Unwritten Nights – The Walls

The dream returned as it always did—without mercy, without beginning.

I stood once more atop the Second Ring. The stone beneath my greaves was wet with rain and blood. Beneath us, the hills seethed—a living tapestry of torches, banners, and siege towers heaving into position with the stuttering rhythm of beasts in labor.

The green-white of the Old Faith flew above their ranks. Their horns sounded from the pinewood lines—three short, one long. Infantry, moving up in column. My ears knew the signal before my eyes found the banners. They were bringing up their war-priests again. The screaming ones with the white ash smeared across their faces.

“Form a testudo on the southwestern breach!” I shouted. “Second cohort, extend the line two towers north. I want pila volleys on my command.”

The words came to me as they had that night, raw in the throat, cut by the cold. My body moved—my voice, my sword, my hands directing each turn like I was conducting a final chorus.

We were still holding then.

The wall shuddered under a stone impact two towers south. Dust spat from the mortar seams. I stepped toward the edge, peered over. Their siege rams were rolling up with mantlets—low and braced with wet hides. Fire wouldn’t touch them.

Behind me, the horns of my own camp rang back, relaying my commands. The engineers had begun heating oil two hours before dusk. They knew what would come.

When the ladders came, they came in dozens. Light frames, ash-wood and iron-runged, carried by half-naked zealots whose screams turned shrill when they saw our javelins crest the air.

“Pila!” I cried.

The sky darkened with steel. My arm stung from the throw—good weight, full extension. One ladder split in half under the impact of two pila lodging in its supports. Others tilted and fell. Still more landed true. They began to climb.

My shield caught the first man just below the rim. I heard the bones in his face break, felt the crack run up my elbow. I stabbed downward—not overhand, not under. Straight through. No flair. No mercy. Blade in, twist, pull.

Next to me, Stephanos held the center post with two others. His shield was half-splintered but his stance never broke. Wide, firm—like the old manuals taught. Step forward, stab, shield-push, retreat. The same four beats drilled into us before we were men.

A horn blared behind us—an urgent call. The east bastion was faltering.

I turned. “Aurelian! Take the first century, reinforce the bastion. Run them there.”

He saluted. “Shall we rotate the wall?”

“No. We hold here. That’s the hinge.” I pointed toward the southwestern breach. “If they fold that, they’ll have the tier. We fall back to the second.”

He hesitated. “And if the third gives?”

“Then we take to the seas.”

---

I remember the moment my right flank broke. Not in the dream—in the night itself. The ones with the tall shields and the bronze masks came then. Silent, disciplined. Not zealots. Veterans.

I don’t know where they trained. Not in our lands.

They used tower shields, but not in testudo. They came up the ladders three at a time, their blades angled low to slash at ankles and knees. Our line bent under them. We killed them, yes, but not fast enough. For every one we threw back, another climbed behind him.

One of them took out Publius. Cut his hamstring clean, then slit his throat before his body hit the parapet.

We began to stagger—not rout, but stagger. One step back for every two forward. Each man bleeding from somewhere. The line grew too thin.

I had to call it.

“Fall to the second tier!” I roared.

They looked at me—some disbelieving. But no one disobeyed. They began the withdrawal. Shieldline still formed, still facing front. Each cohort fell back in turns. Covering the others. I made sure I was the last off that wall.

---

I remember gripping the railing of the third tier tower, watching the walls we had held for weeks now under their banners. I saw them plant their false standard above the breach gate.

They had no horns this time. No music. Just the low chant of their war-priests as they marched into our Agora, step by step.

Stephanos stood beside me. Blood caked down one side of his face.

“Do we try again?” he asked.

I looked at our line—bent, panting, bleeding men. Half their shields gone. Quarter without helms. More captains than soldiers.

“No.”

That night, we burned the buildings behind us. The last twenty wagons of salt and grain we couldn’t carry went into the cisterns. Better ash than theirs.

That night, I wrote the order: Evacuate the fleet. Prepare for full embarkation.

I wrote it in my own hand. Sealed it with the blood of my ring finger. Gave it to the quartermaster.

Then I turned back to the city.

And waited for the final dream—the night of the Burning Sea.

---

“All aboard. Cut the lines. We sail now.”

They did. Not one argued.

I felt the wooden boards under my boots shift as the ship pulled from dock and saw the black water churn behind them. I saw the city fall away. Then:

The docks shattered in flame.

The ridge flared white.

And the harbor burst like a struck drum, flame rushing across the water.

The sea had caught fire.

I turned away. A boy—one of the new ones, nameless, salt-crusted—cried out and pointed to the sails. They were burning.

I reached for a bucket. Found nothing. Reached again. Nothing.

Then silence.

Not even the crackling.

The world turned ash, and wind, and oil.

Morning on the Shore

The sea had gone still in the night. At dawn, it lay flat and colourless as cooled metal, the waves only murmuring where they slid over stones.

I woke without knowing how long I'd slept. My cloak was damp at the edges, and the salt wind had set a crust of sweat on my skin. For a moment, I heard the sound of war drums beneath the waves—but it was only my pulse.

Stephanos stood already, silhouetted against the grey, sharpening his sword with slow, deliberate strokes. Others moved in the half-light, armour creaking, boots crunching on pebbles. No orders yet—just the slow, ritual rhythm of readiness.

I sat up. My back protested. My right shoulder throbbed where the ligaments still hadn't healed from the tower-fall. The sea had spared us, but not gently.

Down the beach, our engineers were checking the carts. What remained of our siege gear had been disassembled for travel—axles removed, ropes wound tight, nails sorted by size and boxed into crates marked with legionary seals. Two oxen teams lowed in protest as the handlers adjusted their harnesses.

"Legatus." Centurion Aurelian stood before me, helmet tucked under one arm, the other held behind his back like he was holding a secret. His cloak was still fastened with the silver clasp of his old command—two dolphins chasing a wheel.

"Report."

"We've counted twenty centuriae at full strength and able-bodied. About three hundred-odd wounded, thirty-six seriously. Rations for three days if we stretch. Water for two." His jaw moved, clenched. "No sign of locals. There is no smoke inland. Not yet."

I nodded. "Scouts?"

"Rufianus and Kelbek took the eastern ridge at first light. They'll signal if they find a pass."

I rose, unbuckling my breastplate and adjusting the belt hook. The plates had shifted again. Too loose, I thought to myself. I'd lost weight. We all had.

Over the rocks to the west, a stream cut down toward the coast. Near it, the new standard of the Ninth had been planted—three blades crossed over a shield—just high enough to catch the wind. The gold eagle gleamed above it under the morning sun, motionless as a corpse. We had flown it too many years for it to carry the weight it once did.

I walked to where Stephanos stood, still grinding the whetstone.

"Sharp enough?" I asked.

"When they come, it won't be the edge that fails us."

"They might not come."

He grunted. "Then we'll rot like spoiled olives."

I looked inland. The hills rose steep, green-gray and furrowed. Beyond them, the ridges folded into themselves, a long spine of stone that vanished into the pale morning mist.

This was Djharan land, though none of us knew it yet. Not the boundaries, not the names. Somewhere beyond those hills lay cities with painted harbours and old gods whose altars still smoked. I knew that. But the land gave no sign. Only wind and the smell of fennel and brine.

"I want the men moving in an hour," I said. "No full formations. Scattered column. Spear front. Archers center. Engineers and carts rear. Get the men to conceal their weapons as much as possible. A number our size would look threatening to anybody with a discerning eye, armed or not."

Stephanos spat. "You want to look like a caravan?"

"I want to look like we're not an army. At least not from the onset. Not yet."

He gave a curt nod but said nothing.

Behind us, the quartermasters were breaking open the ration crates. The smell of hardbread and dried lentils drifted in the air. It wasn't the scent of survival. It was the scent of delay.

The sun crested the ridge behind us. The ocean turned silver, then white. Our shadows stretched long across the shingle.

"Legatus!" A voice—high, urgent. One of the scouts. Kelbek, boots kicking loose stones as he ran down the slope.

"Ridge forked east—narrow pass. Old road, paved. Milestones with a script—foreign, but cut clean. Looks like city work."

Stephanos looked at me.

"A road," I said, "means people."

He nodded. "And people means food. Steel. Politics."

I gave the order.

"Break camp. March light. I want us gone before the tide changes."

Behind me, the Ninth stirred.

They would follow. Because we had nowhere left to run.