The silence of the sunken city was a tomb sealing them in. The climb back up the cliff was a slow, painful ordeal. Legate Servilius, a shell of a man, had to be half carried, his mind shattered by decades of servitude to a drowned nightmare. Bran was little better, leaning heavily on Marcus, his breathing a shallow rasp. The green-black corruption had receded from his neck, but it had left him gaunt, his eyes sunken in a face that looked twenty years older.
When they finally collapsed onto the windswept headland, the grey daylight felt like a blessing. But the victory was ash in their mouths. They had the fourth shard, a smooth, cool stone in Morganna’s palm, but they had nearly lost a Druid to the darkness within and retrieved a broken ghost of a Roman.
The journey back to Caer Leon was
