The rain had not stopped since Caerwyn. Each morning it slicked the cobblestones of the fort. washing dust and ash into the gutters, as though Rome cleanse itself of guilt.
Praefect Drax Stormborne stood beneath the awning of the garrison, watching the centurions drill in the yard below. The sound of shields and iron echoed against the mist, rhythmic, hollow, and far too familiar.
“Word from the coast?” he asked without looking.
His aide the same grey-eyed veteran who had once served under him at Cannock stepped ahead. “None yet, sir. But reports spread through the camps. They say a ship found half-burned near the cliffs. No bodies. Just marks on the hull.”
“Marks?”
The man nodded. “A spiral carved deep into the wood. Like a storm-ring.”
Drax’s hand tightened around the railing. The symbol of the old clan. The one Rome had forbidden.
Behind him came the sound of boots lighter, hesitant. His second son, Maren, saluted awkwardly. “Father, the magistrate awaits. There’s unrest in the lower wards. They want judgment from the lawman.”
“The lawman,” Drax murmured. “Tell them the law doesn’t bend to whispers.”
“But it bends to Rome,” Maren said quietly.
Drax turned, eyes hard. “Careful, boy.”
The silence between them held the weight of unspoken things of oaths broken and storms returning. Drax looked at the lad and saw both his past and his punishment.
Finally, he exhaled. “Your uncle stirs the seas. I’ll not have him stir the streets as well. We hold the line.”
Maren hesitated, then stepped closer. “And if he calls us brother, not enemy?”
Drax looked past him, toward the horizon where thunder still rolled over the coast. “Then I’ll answer him as both.”
A horn sounded from the walls. Another patrol missing along the northern road.
Drax drew his cloak, the Roman crimson dulled by rain. “Have the riders ready by dusk,” he said. “We go to Pennocrucium The Empire claim the law but the storm still knows my name.”
The thunder rolled again, closer this time, shaking the banners loose from their poles. The banners of Pennocrucium hung limp in the rain Rome’s edge of order against the wild heart of Pennocrucium .”
The rain eased to a whisper by dawn. Mist lay low over the road, a grey ribbon winding north through the pines.
Drax rode at the front of the column, his cloak heavy with last night’s storm. The standards of Rome sagged in the wet, crimson turned dull and earth-brown.
Behind him, twenty riders moved in silence. Men who had followed him through three campaigns and would follow him into a fourth. Even if none of them knew whose banner they truly served anymore.
The track narrowed as they neared the Chase. Crows wheeled above, their cries lost in the fog. Somewhere beyond the mist lay Pennocrucium the old land, the hill once sacred to his kin. Before Rome built its roads through the heart of it.
At his side, Maren broke the quiet. “They say the woods here are haunted.”
“They are,” Drax said. “By memory.”
The boy frowned, unsure if it was jest or truth.
By noon, they reached the stone marker where the Roman paving gave way to mud and root. There Drax reined in, eyes narrowing at the shape half-buried in the verge. An old shield, blackened by time, its boss marked with the faint spiral of the Stormborne ring.
“Leave it,” Drax murmured as one of the soldiers bent to lift it. “The dead have earned their ground.”
From the treeline came the sound of a horn low, distant, old.
Not Roman.
The men stiffened. Maren’s hand went to his blade.
Drax only listened. The tone carried memory, not threat a call. One he had not heard since he was young enough to run barefoot across the Chase. A day when he named the wind his brother.
He turned to his son. “We camp here. No fires. No noise.”
“Sir?”
“They’ll come to us,” Drax said. “The Black Shields never forgot the way home.”
As the mist thickened, he dismounted and placed a hand on the wet earth. Beneath his palm, the ground hummed faintly the old song of the storm returning.
“If Taranis walks these woods,” he whispered, “then I’ll find him before Rome does.”
Thunder rolled somewhere far off not from the sea this time, but from the hills.
Thank you for reading.© 2025 Emma Hewitt / StormborneLore. All rights reserved.Unauthorized copying or reproduction of this content is prohibited.
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If you want to read more about Drax please see The Chronicles of Drax
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