Imperator: Resurrection of an Empire

It was a place without a name.

A black tent pitched far from the clamor of the Romanus war camps, surrounded by a thicket of twisted pine and hidden by design.

Guards in unmarked cloaks stood silent at its edge, motionless as statues, their helms devoid of insignia, their spears etched only with small, curling script: rooted, we remember.

Inside, the air was colder than outside — unnaturally so.

Not from climate.

From presence.

The fire in the central brazier barely crackled.

Instead, it hummed low, unnatural, casting shadows that stretched too far and flickered without pattern.

The scent was of blood and ash, of ancient oils and burning sage.

Here, the Five Leaves of the Root did their work.

Agents of secrets.

Keepers of the unseen truth.

And in front of them, the fifty Francian prisoners — bound, kneeling, eyes glazed from exhaustion and loss — waited for what they did not yet understand.

Leaf Second, known only as Veyne, stepped forward.

A woman cloaked in deep indigo, her face hidden beneath a porcelain mask painted with the curling lines of tree branches in winter.

She did not raise her voice.

She didn't need to.

"You are here because your commander failed,"

she said softly, her voice clear but devoid of anger.

"You were sent to die. Some of you were merely slower to do it than others."

No one answered.

Good.

They knew their silence would not protect them.

"Tonight,"

she continued, walking slowly past the line of prisoners,

"you will tell us your names. Your officers. Your orders. Your camps. Your gods. And by dawn… you will have forgotten you ever held them sacred."

She stopped before a pale, shivering young man with blood-stiffened hair.

"Name?"

He clenched his jaw.

"Darius, of House Vol–"

She pressed two fingers to his forehead.

There was no incantation, no flash of light.

Only silence.

Then Darius screamed.

It was not pain that drove it.

Not yet.

It was memory — unspooling, too fast, too clear, too much.

He collapsed forward, gasping, his body seizing like a man drowning on dry land.

Veyne turned to the others.

"You will break,"

she said.

"But you will not shatter. We will see to that."

From the corners of the tent, the other Leaves stepped forward in unison — Five in total, each having completed the roots intensive training program and being able to use the organizations mana arts.

Each would take a group.

Each had their own method.

None had names.

In the far left of the tent, Leaf Fourth, used stories.

He offered wine.

Asked questions as if they were old friends seated around a hearth in the middle of a siege — casual, warm, even humorous.

"Did your captain falter before he gave the order? I find commanders often do,"

he mused to one terrified cavalryman, pouring him a second cup.

"You don't have the look of a man who believed in this raid. Did you speak against it?"

The soldier shook his head.

But the tear that slid down his cheek told the truth.

Leaf Fourth smiled, then wrote something into a small book bound in human hide.

"Good. Keep remembering. It helps. The forgetting comes later."

Meanwhile, Leaf Third, the tallest of the five and wrapped in black bandages from neck to foot, used pain.

But not the kind they expected.

He asked each prisoner only a single question.

Then he placed a mirror before them and repeated their words back in their own voice, but twisted, cracked, and strange — like a nightmare remembering itself.

"Why did you follow him?"

"Why did you follow him?"

"Why did you…"

And when the prisoner screamed, begged, or wept, Leaf Third said only,

"Then you understand now."

Then he moved on to the next.

By midnight, the prisoners had all begun to fracture.

One confessed to being a royal courier.

Another, a nobleman's bastard serving under Amaury directly.

Several broke entirely, whispering tactical routes, reinforcement schedules, food shortages.

One spoke of a Saint Joan.

"She has no army,"

he gasped, blood on his lips.

"She walks with the villagers. They follow her like sheep. But they follow. No orders. Just faith."

Leaf Second paused at that.

"Faith,"

she said.

It was not a word she liked.

Nor one she feared.

But it bore watching.

She scribbled a new mark on her ledger — a single line bisecting a circle.

A name would be added later.

By the time the moons had passed their zenith, forty-nine of the fifty had spoken.

The last — a man with a broken jaw and one eye — had refused all questioning.

He had bitten off his own tongue.

They admired that, in their way.

But Root did not deal in finalities.

Leaf Fifth, the silent one with a crown of knotted thorns around his brow, took him aside.

He did not use words.

He did not use blades.

Only silence, and a single dark vial from beneath his robe.

When the sun rose hours later, the man was awake, lucid, and weeping.

He spoke before the first question was asked.

At dawn, the five Leaves emerged from the tent.

Their work was done.

The information had been extracted, recorded, and passed into the Root's coded chains.

March routes, courier lines, weak commanders, old loyalties — the hidden lattice of Francia's outer defense had been revealed.

Leaf Second approached Julius's senior courier near the main camp and handed over a wax-sealed scroll.

"Your war will move faster now,"

she said simply.

And then, like smoke, the Leaves vanished back into the mists of the trees — faceless, quiet, and forgotten.

They would rejoin the army later, in shadow.

They always did.

For now, they left behind fifty men.

Some alive.

Some not.

But all broken.

And somewhere deep beneath the surface of the Romanus advance, roots began to curl into Francian soil.

Unseen.

But growing.

Always growing.

As the war in the shadows marched on in darkness as Julius own forces would march and fight during the day.