The Last cohort

THE EAGLE AND THE DRAGON

The southern coast was a shattered jawbone of black cliffs and furious sea. Salt spray stung their faces, and the wind howled a constant, mournful dirge. The fourth Ogham shard did not just call to Bran now; it screamed, a psychic siren of anguish and ancient rage that made his teeth ache and the corruption in his blood writhe in sympathy. The Sunken City was not a myth. It was a wound in the world, and it was festering.

They stood on a windswept headland, looking down into a chasm where the sea boiled against jagged rocks. Below the surface, glimpsed through the churning foam, were the outlines of impossible architecture—towers of green stone, arches that defied gravity, streets that coiled like serpents. This was the city of the Drowned God, a place that should not be.

“The shard is deep,” Bran shouted over the gale, his knuckles white on his staff. “At the heart of the central spire. But the city… it is awake. The god is not dead. It is dreaming, and its dreams are poison.”

The plan was simple madness. They would descend the cliff, find an entrance, and navigate the submerged labyrinth to the spire. Roman engineering, Silure agility, and Saxon stubbornness would have to suffice where magic feared to tread.

Marcus oversaw the securing of ropes, his mind already calculating angles of descent and tidal patterns. Hrothgar tested the lines with his massive weight, his practical sea sense a counterpoint to the supernatural dread of the place. Morganna stood at the cliff’s edge, the wind whipping her hair, her gaze fixed on the submerged city. The Sword of Britannia was silent at her hip, its light banked, waiting.

The descent was a nightmare of slippery rock and biting wind. They reached a narrow ledge just above the waterline, where a cavern mouth yawned open, exhaling air that was cold, dry, and smelled of deep salt and long death. It was an air pocket, a gateway into the drowned world.

They entered single file. The cavern tunnel sloped downward, the sound of the storm fading behind them, replaced by an eerie, dripping silence. The walls were not natural stone, but fitted blocks of the same green stone as the city below, carved with depictions of a race of slender, amphibious humanoids with large, black eyes—the builders of this place.

The tunnel opened onto a gallery overlooking a breathtaking and terrifying vista. They stood inside a giant air bubble, a dome held in place by some forgotten magic, looking out into the sunken city. The water began just beyond a carved balustrade, clear and impossibly deep, the drowned towers and streets stretching away into a blue green gloom. Pale, bioluminescent algae provided a ghostly light. And things moved in the depths—shadows that were too large, too sinuous.

“By the gods,” Marcus breathed, his military discipline shaken by the sheer scale of the unreal.

Bran pointed a trembling finger. Across the vast submerged canyon, the central spire rose, its peak lost in the dark water above. And at its base, visible through a grand, arched entrance, pulsed the silver light of the Ogham shard.

“There,” he said. “We swim.”

It was then that the Drowned God’s guardians arrived. They did not come from the water. They emerged from side passages in the gallery—the amphibious humanoids from the carvings, but desiccated and skeletal, their flesh clinging to bone, their black eyes glowing with a malevolent green light. They were the city’s former inhabitants, raised as eternal sentinels. In their bony hands, they held tridents of sharpened coral that hummed with energy.

The fight was immediate and brutal. The gallery was wide, but there was no room for grand tactics.

“Shield wall!” Marcus yelled, but the order was useless against foes that moved with unnatural speed and could strike from the floor, the walls, the ceiling.

Hrothgar fought with roaring fury, his axe smashing skeletal forms, but the tridents scored his armor, leaving streaks of sizzling green acid. “Their weapons bite!”

Morganna’s sword flared to life, its golden light a shock in the gloom. Where it touched the skeletons, they did not just break; they calcified, turning to brittle stone and crumbling to dust. But there were dozens of them, swarming from the dark.

Bran did not use blood magic. He fought with elemental force, blasting the creatures with concussive waves of air, shattering them against the walls. But each spell cost him. He was pale, sweating, the green-black stain of corruption visibly pulsing up the veins in his neck.

“I cannot hold them all!” he gasped.

Marcus saw their chance. A narrow, ornate bridge of the same green stone spanned the chasm, connecting their gallery to the central spire’s entrance. It was their only path.

“Morganna, clear the bridge! Hrothgar, with her! Bran and I will hold the rear!”

The queen and the Saxon chieftain broke for the bridge. Morganna’s sword became a whirlwind of golden light, unmaking the skeletal guardians that tried to block their path. Hrothgar was a battering ram of muscle and steel, his axe clearing the space around her.

Marcus and Bran fought a desperate rearguard action, back to back. A trident scraped across Marcus’s lorica, the acid eating through the steel and searing his skin beneath. He grunted in pain, his gladius flickering out to decapitate the attacker.

“Bran, now!” he shouted as the last of the guardians on the bridge fell.

They turned and ran. The skeletal horde pursued, a clicking, bone white tide.

They were halfway across the bridge when the Drowned God truly awoke.

The water in the chasm below them did not just stir. It convulsed. A presence, vast and ancient, pressed against their minds. It was not a thought, but a feeling—the crushing weight of the abyss, the loneliness of millennia, the cold rage of a forgotten divinity.

The central spire trembled. From the grand entrance ahead, a figure emerged. It was the source of the Ogham shard’s pulse. It was a man, or had been. He wore the tattered remnants of a Roman officer’s uniform, the eagle crest on his cuirass still visible. His skin was bleached white, and his eyes were solid orbs of the same silver light as the shard, which was fused to his chest. He was the Fourth Disciple, the anchor of the Fomorii’s power here. And he had been a Roman.

“Legate Servilius,” Marcus whispered, recognizing the insignia of a lost legion. “They didn’t just corrupt him. They made him a god’s prison warden.”

The Disciple raised a hand, and the very bridge beneath them shuddered. Cracks appeared in the green stone. The skeletal horde behind them halted, their glowing eyes fixed on their master.

“The Eagle of Rome is rust,” the Disciple spoke, his voice the sound of grinding stone and drowning waves. “The Dragon of Britannia will drown. This city is my cathedral. You are the sacrifice.”

He gestured, and from the dark water below, massive tentacles of pure water, thick as tree trunks and impossibly strong, erupted. They slammed into the bridge, seeking to pluck them from their perch.

The final battle for the fourth shard was not on land or in a fort, but on a crumbling bridge over an abyss, against a corrupted Roman and the waking nightmare of a drowned god.

The Eagle of Rome faced the Dragon of Britannia, not as conqueror and conquered, but as two damned souls fighting over the soul of the world itself. And the Drowned God watched, and it hungered.