Imperator: Resurrection of an Empire

Guilliame de Tournelle's vision swam as he struggled to rise.

His breastplate was dented, his helm cracked along the cheek.

The cold bit at his hands as he reached for his sword, lying just inches beyond his grasp in the frostbitten grass.

Around him, the clash of steel echoed — muffled by the ringing in his ears and the thudding of his own heartbeat.

He could smell blood.

Not just his, but his men's, thick and hot and flooding the earth like wine from shattered barrels.

A strong hand grasped his arm.

"Lord!"

gasped one of his retainers — a boy of seventeen summers, face caked in dirt and blood.

"You must move. You have to—"

An arrow took the boy in the side of the throat mid-sentence.

He collapsed in silence, blood fountaining from his mouth as his eyes went wide before becoming still.

Guilliame stared.

Then, slowly, he grabbed his sword.

Around him, a dozen or so of his knights remained — the survivors of his personal guard.

Men he had known for years, men who had followed him across simple civil wars dealing with upstart nobility and border skirmishes when bandit lords were chased from one nation to another.

They were battered, bloodied, but standing.

And they were surrounded.

The Umbra had not pursued them — they had vanished again into the battlefield's edges like phantoms.

But now the real danger came. Cohorts of Romanus infantry — cold-eyed, shields drawn, moving with perfect discipline — began to encircle the scattered knights like wolves around a wounded stag.

There would be no retreat.

The trap had closed.

Guilliame planted his sword tip into the dirt and forced himself to his feet, teeth bared.

"We do not die crawling!"

he shouted hoarsely.

"Hold your line!"

His knights rallied to him, blades raised.

Not to win.

Not to survive.

But to buy seconds.

To prove something — to themselves, to their country, to the gods — that they had not died as sheep.

And then the Romans came.

From the north and south, cohorts tightened their crescent arc.

Pilum spears were thrown, aimed not to kill outright, but to cripple — to tear shields from hands, to break formations.

The Francian knights didn't wait.

They surged forward one last time.

Screams echoed.

Steel rang.

Guilliame parried a blow, then another, his limbs moving on instinct.

His blade caught a Roman's thigh and opened it, only to find a gladius stabbing toward his side.

He twisted away too slow, the steel scraping across his ribs, denting armor and splitting flesh.

Another came from behind.

He pivoted purely on instinct.

A spear drove through his shoulder.

He screamed, struck the haft away, turned and kept fighting.

One of his men — old Ser Roul — took three blades before falling, eyes unblinking as he collapsed with a dozen wounds.

Another was crushed beneath a tower shield.

And then it was just Guilliame.

Kneeling now.

Covered in blood.

Chest heaving.

His sword arm trembled as he leaned on the blade for support.

The Romanus ring had closed fully.

A dozen legionaries stood around him, shields raised, silent.

He coughed once — red splattered his lips.

Still, he raised his chin.

"Cowards,"

he rasped, voice broken and low.

"Come then. Claim your prize, take me prisoner for ransom already!"

The ring didn't move.

Not yet.

Then a soldier stepped forward.

Helmet off.

Eyes cold as the wind.

It was Sabellus.

"The Emperor sends his regards,"

he said simply while drawing his sword from its scabbard.

Guilliame's mouth twitched.

Raising his blade once more towards the new arrival, leaving plenty of gaps in his defence though not by choice, but due to exhaustion and pain.

Sabellus did not rise to the bait.

Instead, he quickly sidestepped the lord whose eyes looked unfocused, to Guilliame, Saebellus appeared to have simply been a hallucination who'd disappear the minute he blinked.

Only to feel pain on the back of his knee the next second, forcing him to kneel upon the ground, as Saebellus stood behind the kneeling lord.

Guilliame turned his head in an attempt to speak.

"I yie…"

Steel flashed.

His head dropped to the earth before the words left his lips.

~

Elsewhere on the Field

The Francian line had broken.

What was once a front had become a spiral — a mess of desperate men trying to flee, only to find Roman cohorts closing in on all sides.

The trap was complete.

What Guilliame had feared was now reality.

There was no rear.

The entire levy force was boxed in, pinned between three Romanus wedges and the Iron Cavalry who had encircled their southward flank.

It was no longer a battle.

It was a harvest.

Romanus shields pressed inward, a slow advance with no need for speed — just method.

For each step they took, another man fell.

And another.

And another.

The Roman strategy showed no glory.

No dramatics.

They fought like surgeons.

Each thrust went to a kill zone.

Each motion efficient, deliberate.

a true lesson in masterclass clinical fighting.

Cohorts rotated fresh lines forward in seamless transition.

Meanwhile, the Francian levies, tired and disorganized, could barely lift their arms.

A few tried to drop their weapons.

A few screamed surrender.

But the din of battle drowned them out.

And surrender did not always find mercy in war.

Sabellus returned to the command platform, wiping blood from his blade as he approached Julius.

"It's done,"

he said quietly.

"Their commander is dead."

Julius nodded, never taking his eyes from the field.

"Pull the leftmost cohorts back two lines. Give the center space to fold inward. Press from the eastern wedge."

The orders went out.

And still the machine turned.

~

Less Than An Hour Later

Smoke drifted across the plains as the sun dipped lower, painting the frost a dirty crimson, as fires crackled all around pyres piled high with bodies of the fallen Francians.

The field was still littered with battle debris, but nature was already starting to reclaim the land as fresh snows began to blanket the land covering the signs of battle, and spilt blood.

Nothing remained of the Francian host who'd rose against them, not a single prisoner was taken.

At the rear of the formation, the field surgeons worked in silence trying to focus, mending the wounds sustained in this engagement and ensuring the men that they would live to fight another day, those wounded badly enough were loaded into carts and taken back to the forts within Germania, to recouperate before returning, those lightly wounded were patched up and sent right back to their units.

And above it all, Julius stood.

Still on the ridge.

Still watching.

"Guilliame?"

he asked.

Sabellus gestured back toward a cart covered in a tarp.

"Dead, but as you've ordered we've kept the body and head. He fought like a knight in the battle. Fell like a fool in the end, and if his final words are any indication, a coward to the core as well."

Julius didn't smile.

"There was something in him. Not strength. But conviction. That kind of man could have ruled something, in another age. I think he'd just given up on his country but also was at an age where serving another lord was unthinkable, in its own way we gave him a glorious death, but at the end he realized life itself isn't all so bad... too bad, if only he'd been less stubborn from the beginning."

Sabellus said nothing.

Julius turned away.

"Send word to Bellenne. Inform them the territory lord has fallen, and that they are to send a message to the Francian court announcing the death of Guilliame, along with the defection of the baron, and fall of the numerous villages in the area, while reporting their own successful hold out against our advance... for now."

"And the knights?"

Julius's voice hardened.

"Display them."

Sabellus nodded.

The message was clear.

Let Francia see what defiance had earned them.

And let the rest of the kingdom tremble.

The road not yet travelled by the legion would have effigies like crusifix's lining the path, with the bodies of the slain knights strung up for all who passed to see, with a pair of banner implanted into the ground on either sides of the display, showing the flowing black and crimson with the golden eagle displayed proudly.

~

At the Battlefield's Edge

Beyond the blood-soaked field, beyond the clamor of carts and orders and cries of the wounded, stood a woman in grey.

Her eyes were dark beneath her hood.

She watched from the forest's edge.

Unmoving.

A breeze stirred her cloak causing it to whip around her figure.

And in her hand, she held a small gold coin fingers trembling a little

She turned it once.

Then again.

Before pocketing the coin and turning her back on the scene before her, fading into the trees