45 Results in the "Bear House Serials" category
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Chapter
XVI – The Month of Honey III
Twenty-two days find them at Gades, where the narrowest waterway divides the northern isle of Eritheia from its southern sister, Kothinusa. A patchwork of linen canopies spread with barely a sliver between them while trade and circumstance carry on loud enough to rouse the dead. The air carries a disgusting mix of shit and saltwater, but Aedan inhales deeply with his face in the sun. His captor tugs at the sinew cord, irritating his neck; it’s a shameful use of his mother’s blessing but a suitable…-
112.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XV – The Month of Honey II
Strong fingers tighten around his spindly arm, dragging him until his feet remember their function. Such rough handling sweetens the pot, as does every grope, grasp, and growl. A new timber jetty stretches to the Krokodilo, who wears a reptilian eye on each side of her keel. Weather-worn triangular teeth line her narrow battering ram, and two banks of oars dangle from her sides, the long overhanging the short. Aedan counts twenty-five, meaning a total rowing complement of fifty. All make way for the…-
112.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XIX – The Month of Honey VI
The northern road bends east, avoiding another of Saturn’s lost stones. They enter Clastidium, an unremarkable collection of stables, eateries, and toilets catering to a daily procession of riverboats and bridge-crossers. “You’re selling water,” Planus scolds the teenage merchant, “when the Padus flows just eighty paces away,” “It flows, awight,” says the young man, unable to articulate his ‘R’s,’ “With the shit, piss, and spunk of evewy pewson living hew,” Titus hands the…-
112.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XIV – The Month of Honey – I
The Bucarati kips upon glossy mudflats. The vessel resembles a timber beetle with its tightly bound sales and dangling oars. It slumbers as men till the wet sands beneath its rudder, digging that will ensure the incoming tide washes her away. Alps-born Romans crowd her surface planks. They wear fur over their shoulders and wool on their extremities. None are clean-shaven, not even their newly minted leader, Lucius Scipio Servius, whose beard shines golden like the short coils on his head. His noble…-
112.5 K • Ongoing
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Lucius Vitus Servius once said that rivalry within ranks festers like flesh rot, and if a general ignores it, he’ll lose a man as quickly as a leg. Julius recalls his old friend’s observation as he watches the murdered man’s son scowl at Kombius, a prince of the continental Atrebates. The more concerning bit of flesh rot, however, is Titus Labienus, who listens with jowls tight in resentment as the noble speaks of his time as an Ancalite prisoner. Before their first campaign on the island,…
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112.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XII – The Graticule
Bloody waters run deep where the Stour meets the Lug. Two hefty rafts cut a path within pink foaming shallows, where intestines wobble as hungry fish peck at their undersides. The well-adorned passengers bring tightly woven rags to their noses, anything to quell the stench. Slimy crimson sand sucks at Aedan’s feet, but what awaits him beyond the trees makes the discomfort worth it. Flies gather like black rain over a dining table made of human bones. Half-skulls sit upon its gruesome ribcage,…-
112.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
XI – The Tamesa Encounter
Roman horses smell more of their kind across the river as tension shrinks their nerves. A towering palisade stands along the opposite bank, where an elderly man, favoring his staff, stands on a rampart behind it. Wind lashes at his long white hair, exposing facial cracks that prove him the oldest man on this island. “This is as far as you go, Rome!” Ostin the Ageless shows his grasp of Latin. Caesar, the battle king these natives call Kaiser, yells back, “There will be no turning…-
112.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
X – The Price of Pain
One calculates a citizen's measure by grading their empathy, benevolence, and financial worth. One measures a soldier’s value by the skill of his kills, his labor, and years in service. Sadly, no rubric exists for a citizen who is also a soldier. Planus ruminates on such things in the shadow of Skipio’s recent brutality, all the while haunted by memories of rescuing him from the sea. That day, Caesar, his leader and kin, sent Planus on a routine inspection of the merchant ships harvesting chalk from…-
112.5 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
Welletrix the Veragros
Welletrix of the VeragriiAge 32 | He/Him | Helvetian Celt Wellet is an educated Celt of Veragrī lineage captured during the battle at Bibracte. He served at Villa Servi as a slave overseeing the household staff. He is a bastard son of the wealthy noble Orgetorix, making him important to the Gauls living in the Servian village. Though pursued by men and women in the past, Wellet has no desire for such…-
1.3 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
Villa Servi
I made a cornball map of Villa Servi, a unique structure built in the years following Hannibal's failed invasion (when Rome amplified the colonization of the Alps). Magnus Servius came to the Leontine's to oversee his grandfather's immature walnut grove and father's apple orchards. He spent most of his adult life adding a second-story to the farmhouse, and planting pears alongside the first orchard. His son, Rufus never left, marrying a Cisalpine Gaul, be began selling their crops to Rome proper. His…-
645 • Ongoing
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