Ager Gallicus Region, Italy Battle of Sentium 295 B.C. I’ve not laid waste enough lives, Corinth,” the Roman cavalryman, Luccafarius, hotly spewed, his otherworldly laugh eerily dancing upon the sand-whipped winds of the battlefield. Thick oozes of crimson streamed from the horsehair plume of his Celt-Iberian helmet to the bronze Greek mythological-decorated muscle cuirass. The pungent sweat of his titanic, embattled foes coursed through his torn leather boots to the sand-blistered raw flesh of his tender feet. Salty winds coiled about the warriors, sand grinding against teeth, the blood of brothers spilling against the lulling tide. Clang . . . Iron clashing against bronze. Crackle . . . Wood splintering against its breakage. Warriors’ agonizing howls against the sea-thrashed winds touched upon innocent ears, the macabre shrieks warning of Death’s indiscriminate hunt. Hills abundant in velvety evergreen stood poised against the gold-laced Adriatic, crimson rivulets glazing their curves as angel shafts of Heaven’s Light danced across the blue deep. The battlefield glistened sharply of silver and black, the white-heat rays of new bronze blinding the warriors. The acrid stench of urine-soaked leather, death-borne excrement, iron-flamed blood, fume-choking scorched hair, and insect-infested flesh weakened the warriors not, for their senses were battle-hardened, their battle-weary instincts driving their thirst to kill, to survive. “Decius Mus commands you to cease, Luccafarius! We’ve defeated the Senones, their allies the Etruscans, the Lucanians, the Sabines, and the Umbrians never to revolt again. No women and children are to be taken in this battle and made slaves. It is done, Luccafarius. It is finished.” “Fool! It will never be finished! I, the finest warrior upon Earth’s soil, my strength unrivaled, yet you know not my true identity, do you, Roman soldier? Look into my eyes. Do you see anything human in them? My blood is not your blood, my flesh nothing so weak and pathetic as a fleshly creature with a soul!” Luccafarius turned on Corinth, his massive hand gripped on Corinth’s throat, squeezing the very breath from his being. He jerked him fiercely, knocking Corinth’s unventilated five-pound bronze helmet to the ground, as well making the young warrior lose hold of his double-grip bronze shield. “Take me to Decius Mus!” “Luccafarius!” his consul’s voice loftily boomed behind the bloodthirsty warrior. He dropped Corinth to the burning sands. His apple green eyes, spattered with blood, fixated upon the commanding consul. “We’ve victory once again. We Romans have victory, Luccafarius! Our power is rising to its zenith, our might becoming unparalleled, our numbers growing at an unequaled rate! We’ve now conquered the allied front. Nothing can defeat us now! We will not be vanquished, but will come to dominate the world. Nothing will stop the hungry lion from feasting upon its prey! But know when the killing is done, son of Rome. Know when victory lays at your feet!” Decius Mus bitingly commanded, boldly reaching to grip Luccafarius’s Olympian-sculpted shoulder. But Luccafarius moved away. “My loyalties belong not to Rome, to man, to country. You see, Decius Mus, you’ve failed, for you’ve yet to conquer your greatest enemy! Listen close, for I shall tell you: Victory is mine!” Luccafarius tumultuously challenged, his tongue barbed with rhetorical confutations. Decius Mus’ eyes widened with surprise at his deadliest warrior’s tongue-lashing. Nothing forewarned Decius Mus of Luccafarius’s falsehood, yet this renegade’s immortal appetite to wreak devastation upon friend and foe alike measured his unpredictability. Luccafarius let a lazy grin cross his face. “My spoils will not be treasure, land, horses, and women of the fallen. It will be your wife . . . your daughter . . . your son.” With lightning speed, Luccafarius yanked a heavy iron Celtic sword from the entrails of an Etruscan. Gazing admiringly at the powerful piece, Luccafarius mutinously sneered, “Made to break a Roman shield, correct, Consul Decius Mus?” Decius Mus stared in askance, his coup de grâce staring him in the face. Against Decius Mus’ ribs Luccafarius slashed the heavy weapon, slicing the commander in half. Corinth scrambled to his feet, and ran. Luccafarius now focused solely on him. Debate patiently raged within him. Spanish falcata or Macedonian pike? Retrieving the sabre-like silver-iron falcata from its framed scabbard, Luccafarius flung it, the blade severing Corinth’s Achilles tendon. A little girl watched from a distance. Corinth collapsed upon a mutilated Senone warrior and his wife, their bodies splayed over pillaged spoils. Shrills sounded from beneath them, startling Corinth, the frightened little girl hiding under her dead parents. Struggling to breathe, she found herself uncontrollably pinned due to Corinth’s added dead weight. Corinth looked back at her, but she wasn’t frightened of him, her colorless blue eyes not beset on him but on what slowly trudged toward them, her flesh prickling at his closeness, her little nose scenting an unnatural blood and sweat drenching the mass of muscle caked in sparkling gold-black granules. “A Senone lives,” balked Luccafarius as he leaned over Corinth, peering at the dirty-faced, bloodied little blue-eyed innocent. Never had a child looked at him the way this one did. It was as if she knew. “God keep me,” the little girl pleaded in repetitive whispers to the empyrean realm above, the soft circles of her eyes reddening. Luccafarius stepped back, his face becoming pale hues of grey. He cravenly peered at her, his apple greens cutting, intensely studying her as if she were some ethereal being sent by the Heavens to destroy him. Luccafarius lumbered forward, his burning eyes never leaving her. Daring and dark, he thrust a broken spear beneath the rectangular leather strips of Corinth’s armor, burying neither the iron tip nor the bronze butt but the broken wood into the soft tissue gripping the femoral artery. Turning and twisting the splintered edge in deliberate random motions, Luccafarius further ripped muscle and artery, removing any chance of Corinth miraculously surviving. But he forgot one thing: God’s divine plan being greater than any devastation Luccafarius could wreak upon the world. Corinth’s screeching howls faded into silence, Death awaiting his final bloodletting. Luccafarius squatted over Corinth, his feet resting upon the child’s parents as his mind pondered the most delicious way to petrify such precious innocence . . . to petrify to death. “Sweet, sweet beloved child, what dost thou fear with thine angel so close? Know ye not that I was there, in the fourth century, when Gallic tribes of your Celtic blood despoiled Rome and burned her people, forcing Rome’s citizens to ransom their own souls with gold, the heavy weights of the Celts tipping just so before they left Rome and its coffers empty, its lands scorched, its newborns bled soulless? This last humiliating rape of Rome became an ever burning sword in its heart, a burning sword to end all Senones.” The child squirmed, her body twisting and turning beneath the crushing armor, her face looking away from him. Meanwhile, a child’s voice, so very near, scathingly confuted, “Prince of Lies, know ye not that Rome betrayed international law by the militant actions of her ambassadors, the Fabii brothers, when the immigrant Senones sought only peace and land to settle from the Roman-dominated Etruscans? Did not the Senones seek the Roman Senate in an attempt to obtain an apology from the Senate and its noble patrician Fabii? The Senate disregarded such a peaceful request as they dispensed with the matter by delegating it to the people, which applauded the Fabii measures against the Senones and commendably granted the Fabii position of military tribunes, champions of Rome and her Etruscan subjects, the Fabii bestowed further with extended consular powers. By Rome’s ruthless, pitiless principles, my Celtic tribe’s retribution is tame, disciplined. But God will seek His vengeance upon you, Prince of Darkness.” Her soft, sweaty palms gripped the armor at the sound of her twin’s voice, the hairs along her neck prickling as she absorbed its comforting sound, her instinct warning her not to speak. Die for her, she would. Luccafarius, indignant at her reprisal, knew not that she hadn’t spoken a word. Confounded, he pondered, How could such a small child speak such things, and so eloquently and knowledgably? She couldn’t be flesh and bone. “Child, lest ye forget, I do not take sides!” Hot, acrid sweat snaked down his flushed cheeks and dripped onto her black, silky locks. “Turn to me! Mark the eyes of your executioner!” Brutally twisting her frail body to face him, he clenched her rosy cheeks between his hands, slowly crushing her little face with viselike force. Fuming and trembling, his expelling hot breath and spit against her flustered, tender cheeks, Luccafarius looked upon a face so angelic, her lips so full and cherry red as if kissed by the flaming swords of the Cherubs. The soul of this extraordinary child God sent to be born of flesh, blood, and bone, her mission Luccafarius knew not. None other of natural blood had ever seen him for what he is. He looked to the sky, raising his fist in defiance, “I now have her.” The little one screamed as Luccafarius’s head soared across the horizon. “Run, li-little Senone, r-run!” Corinth stammered as he struggled to set her free. But she remained, her hands tightly wound about his as she desperately tried pulling him away from Luccafarius. Corinth labored against the pile of carnage and embraced her, one arm constricting her against him as he crept against the fiery sands, each granule abrasively milling into his femoral wound until . . . Scarred, knobby hands snatched her, her twin’s voice screaming for her as she disappeared into the fray. Many long and weary years have I waited, yearned, to tell my tale, but have withheld such words for fear he will find me once again. My civilization ancient, the Senones branching away from their brotherhood north of the Great Alps, the Celtic race existing thousands of years before the divine prophecy of the King of kings to come to the hallowed land resting along the eastern shore of The Great Sea; this bejeweled land the place of my birth. The blood race of my fallen father is a thriving force of muscle and mastery, his Celtica blood ever conquering sleeping serpents such as Rome. But one sleeping basiliscus stirred when I was but a small child, the dragon regaining her strength to bleed my people, the Senones, at the Battle of Sentium. Such the innocence of a child forever lost when in the midst of man slaughtering man. A child’s lasting memory: The crisp yet heavy thud of sword against flesh like a cleaver to fresh greens, the searing blade freckled with marbled muscle meandering against the sweet crimson life, the blade’s blinding glare reflecting the dying souls of its master’s enemies; the death throes of the child’s parents, their anguished faces contorted in flesh-seizing agony as the ebbing flow of fevered blood liberates their souls; eyes set upon quivering lips never to be kissed again; trembling voices begging release from life yet pleading this not be the last caress of their child; the eyes of the fallen souls mirroring the hatred of the enemy, the fallen desperately clinging to what timeless seconds no longer remain. Few Senones survived, their new journey beset with fear and danger as they warily pass through foreign lands, souls weary, flesh bare to the elements, blistered and cut feet slogging through rocky, steep, snowcapped mountains, dark Alpine forests, deep gorges, flat, blade-sharp grassy plains, and lush valleys of cold rivers to a new tribal territory where the Gallic Belgae flourish. A new beginning, a new peace, a new tribe. The Drakkii. And my destiny that blood-borne day? An old woman swept me away from sure death at Sentium. My sister, my parents, gone forever. My sister’s voice is forever seared into my memory, her screams an ever haunting echo in my dreams. More than sixteen years later, the old woman’s murder. A man draped in black robes, his face covered save his eyes, his scent unmistakable, her blood eternally marked upon his hands . . . the hands of my husband. That same scent wafted into my soul that one blood-bathed day upon the battlefield at Sentium. How could I ever forget? How could I’ve not known it to be him as I spoke such sacred vows one blissful day? A master of disguise, a master of all things deceitful. Nothing less than a miracle, I escaped him once again, my silks left in shreds in the hands of such the whoreson husband, the blood of other nations spilled by his empire, the sands of my home forever scarlet. And so he hunts me. To my tribe I safely returned, their new home, virgin lands, more blessed than I’d ever dreamed possible. My people’s way of life prospered, their souls rich, never a want not met by the Light of Israel. But my husband, dark and dead, roiled against the Light. He scented fresh blood, new life blossoming within the Light. He plagued my life on that battle-weary day of the ruby sun. He murdered my last precious gift upon The Sea’s golden lands of burning sands touched lush by the Master’s hands. He tempted God. By his sacrilegious ways, he challenged Him, foolishly promised Him, that he could destroy this tiny mustard seed thriving within the heart of the limestone-cragged, forested stag lands, his thirst like a Pharaoh to spill my blood, to play brotherhood Gallic tribes against the Drakkii, to pit beast against beast. And now I fear he has found me in the pale mountains of my tribe’s new home. And so he stalks and lumbers dispiritedly, crestfallen yet relentlessly seeking his victory. My senses ever sharpened, I await him. I remember that warring day, begging my God never to let me see, never to let me know such evil to plague the Celts again, never to let me feel his presence again. A child of innocence, little did I know he’d seek me and destroy those protecting me. To give my life, I would . . . But the Master proved His plans for me. Now I am the last of the Drakkii tribe, my womb full with child of which I know not the father: My king or my husband. This I know: Of his powers, no earthly blood can survive, or conquer. These words belong to my bloodlines, a warning of what will hunt my child’s children and their generations. Of what will put ungodly fear into the souls my holy ancestral tribe touches. For the mouth of Hell will yawn in its weary rest, yearn to open its blood rose for all Fallen Angels to pass from within the deafening silence of their crumbling chasmal tombs, their nightmarish incubus slumber disturbed by their master, reawakening their hunger to . . . Break and smite this sacred blood until such heavenly creatures breathe no more . . . until I breathe no more. For I am what it wants. I, a tiny mustard seed, of delicate female flesh, am its greatest threat on Earth. And so to this I scribe the omen in my king’s blood, upon finest goatskin, as I travel far to the West on this ancient ship, to the misty isle of pearls and gold. . . . H., the Bride Saint