The Last cohort

A KNIFE IN THE DARK

The Drowned Men’s Barrow was a tomb of liquid darkness. Icy water, thick with the silt of centuries, rose to their chests as they waded inward, their movements slow and clumsy. The only light came from Morganna’s sword, a lone golden flame pushing back a suffocating gloom that seemed to swallow sound itself. The third Ogham shard pulsed ahead, a malevolent heartbeat in the deep.

The Drowned Men did not attack. They watched from the submerged niches in the walls, their milky eyes tracking the intruders, their pallid forms drifting like ghastly seaweed. It was a waiting game. A test of nerve.

Bran was falling apart. He trembled violently, from cold and from the effort of suppressing the power that writhed within him. His breaths came in ragged gasps. Every few steps, he would flinch, his head jerking towards a dark corner as if hearing a call.

“They are herding us,” Marcus murmured, his gladius held high, his eyes scanning the unmoving guardians. “They are not guarding the shard. They are guarding him.”

He was right. The narrow, water-filled corridor opened into a larger chamber. In the center, on a dry stone dais, sat the third Ogham shard. And kneeling before it, his back to them, was the wounded Disciple Bran had sensed. His dark robes were torn, and one arm hung at an unnatural angle. But his other hand was pressed against the shard, and he was chanting, his voice a low, feverish rasp. The silver light of the shard was laced with veins of sickly green.

“He is not just hiding,” Morganna realized, her grip tightening on her sword. “He is corrupting it! Turning it into a weapon!”

The Disciple heard them. He ceased his chant and slowly, painfully, rose to his feet, turning to face them. It was the same skeletal man from the plains, his face a mask of fanatical ecstasy and pain. “Too late,” he croaked. “The seed is planted. My life for the great work!”

He slammed his good hand onto the shard. A shockwave of corrupted energy erupted outwards. It did not strike them physically. It struck the barrow itself.

The walls groaned. The ancient bones of long-dead kings, stacked in niches above the waterline, began to rattle and shift. They reassembled themselves into skeletal warriors, clad in rusted bronze and wielding weapons of sharpened bone. Their empty eye sockets glowed with the same sickly green as the corrupted shard.

The Drowned Men in the water began to writhe, their bodies twisting, merging with the reeds and silt, forming monstrous, multi-limbed amalgamations of flesh and rot.

The trap was sprung. The Disciple had used his last moments to turn the entire barrow into a killing ground.

“Shield wall!” Marcus yelled, but the command was useless in the chest-deep water and confined space. The Britannic Cohort was instantly fighting for their lives in a chaotic, close-quarters melee. A Saxon warrior was dragged under by a Drowned Man amalgamation. A Roman’s gladius shattered against the bronze armor of a skeletal king.

Morganna fought towards the dais, her golden sword cleaving through bone and rot, but for every foe she unmade, two more rose. The corrupted shard pulsed, empowering them.

Hrothgar bellowed, his great axe shearing through a skeleton, but another took its place, its bone sword scoring a deep gash across his thigh. He roared in pain and fury.

Marcus found himself back-to-back with Bran. The Druid was pale, his eyes wide with terror—not of the enemy, but of the choice before him.

“Bran, we need you!” Marcus shouted, parrying a bone spear. “The shield! Something!”

“I can’t!” Bran cried, his voice cracking. “The only way… the blood magic… it’s screaming for me to use it! I can feel it… I could turn these bones to dust! I could boil the water in their veins!”

“Then do it!” a Roman soldier screamed as a skeletal claw tore open his shoulder.

“NO!” Morganna’s voice cut through the din, sharp and absolute. She stood her ground, deflecting attacks, her gaze locked on Bran. “We do not win this war by becoming them! Hold fast, Bran! That is an order from your Queen!”

It was the wrong thing to say. The word “order”,“command”—it was a trigger to the rebellious, prideful core of the exiled Druid. The fear in his eyes vanished, replaced by a cold, arrogant fury.

“You do not command this power,” Bran snarled, his voice dropping into that horrifying, multi-layered resonance. “You are just a child holding a shiny rock.”

He raised his bandaged hand. The blood from the plains had soaked through the linen, and now it glowed with a vile, green-black light.

“Bran, don’t!” Marcus yelled, but it was too late.

Bran didn’t attack the skeletons or the Drowned Men. He attacked the barrow’s foundation. He slammed his b****y hand against the wet stone wall.

The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. The same corrosive energy he had used on the plains erupted through the ancient stone. The walls didn’t just c***k; they dissolved. The ceiling shuddered, and massive blocks of stone began to crash down into the water. The magical energy sustaining the undead faltered. The skeletons collapsed into piles of bone. The Drowned Men amalgamations fell apart, their components sinking beneath the churning water.

He had won the battle. But he had brought the mountain down on top of them.

“Run!” Marcus roared.

The chamber was collapsing. They fought their way back through the crumbling corridor, dodging falling stone and cascading water. Hrothgar, despite his wounded leg, half-carried a dazed Silure warrior. Marcus grabbed Bran, who now looked dazed and utterly spent, and dragged him along.

Morganna was the last to leave. As she turned from the dais, she saw the Disciple, a look of triumphant horror on his face as a massive stone block crushed him and the corrupted Ogham shard together.

They burst out of the barrow entrance and into the fen, stumbling onto a muddy bank as the entire mound subsided into the water with a final, groaning roar. The third shard was gone, destroyed.

For a long moment, the only sound was their ragged breathing. They had survived. But they had failed.

Marcus rounded on Bran, shoving him hard in the chest. The Druid fell onto the mud, too weak to resist. “You fool! You could have killed us all! You lost the shard!”

Bran looked up, his face a mess of shame, exhaustion, and a flicker of that lingering arrogance. “I saved you,” he whispered.

“Did you?” Morganna’s voice was like ice. She stood over him, her golden sword still in her hand, its light a silent accusation. “Or did the power save its vessel? You were told to stand fast. You disobeyed. You let the traitor within take control.”

The other warriors gathered around, their expressions a mixture of relief and harsh judgment. The trust they had in the Druid had shattered as completely as the barrow.

Bran saw it in their eyes. The isolation he had felt as an exile was nothing compared to this. This was the isolation of a man who had become a danger to his own friends.

He lowered his head, the fight gone out of him. “The knife is in the dark,” he murmured, not to them, but to himself. “And I am the one holding it.”

They had survived the battle, but a deeper, more insidious wound had been inflicted. The quest for the shards continued, but now they marched with a new and terrible knowledge. Their most powerful weapon was also a loaded crossbow pointed at their own backs. And the finger on the trigger was losing its strength to resist the pull.