For thirty nights the Roman castra beside the Rhine ford became a tomb that still breathed.
Every night, without fail, death came in two forms.
The first was silent.
A centurion would be found at dawn with a heavy quarrel through the eye, still in his tent, blankets undisturbed. A tribune's throat opened so cleanly that the blood had pooled beneath him before anyone noticed. Sometimes no one important died — only sentries at the rampart, throats slit, bodies left sitting upright against the palisade as if still on watch. No footprints. No broken stakes. No alarm raised. Just one more corpse and the growing whisper that spread through the ranks like plague:
"The boy comes when he wants. The forest has learned to walk."
The Romans sent entire centuries into the trees to hunt. They burned clearings, set trip-lines, posted dogs. They found nothing. Not a single track, not a broken branch, not even a discarded quarrel. The forest swallowed every trace.
The second death was louder.
Every night, for exactly two hours after full dark, the sky itself attacked.
On the first night of the terror — the night the new acting commander, Prefect Decimus Rufus, had tripled the watch and ordered every man to sleep in armor — the bombardment began.
Six trebuchets, hidden deep in the forest on the eastern ridge, spoke at once.
The first stones were simple — fifty-pound boulders that smashed through tents and crushed men in their sleep. Then came the clay pots.
Some burst with black-powder thunder, spraying iron scraps and pottery shards in a twenty-pace radius. Men screamed as fragments tore through mail and flesh. Others landed and belched thick white smoke laced with ground pepper and wet leaves — the teargas Seigmer had perfected. Legionaries dropped weapons, clawed at their eyes, vomited, choked. The smoke clung low, turning the camp into a coughing, blind hell.
And then the tar pots.
Seigmer had ordered them filled with rendered pine tar mixed with sulfur. They burst on impact and burned with sticky, clinging flames that water could not quench. Tents ignited. Shields caught. Men rolled screaming on the ground as fire ate through wool and flesh.
For two hours the sky rained death.
Then silence.
The trebuchets fell quiet. The forest went still.
The Romans charged out with torches and dogs, screaming for blood.
They found nothing.
The next night it happened again. And the next. And the next.
After seven nights the casualty count was horrific.
Over two hundred dead or crippled.
Another hundred blinded or burned so badly they would never fight again.
Desertions began on the ninth night — men slipping away toward the Rhine ford under cover of darkness, preferring to risk drowning or barbarian spears over another night of invisible death.
By the fifteenth night the camp was a husk.
Men refused night watch unless chained to their posts. Prefect Rufus had to execute three soldiers for cowardice in front of the entire cohort, but it only made the fear worse. The surviving officers slept in shifts inside the praetorium, surrounded by stacked shields and loaded crossbows they barely knew how to use.
Every morning the Romans woke to new horror.
Another high-ranking officer dead in his tent — pincushioned by three or four heavy bolts.
Another message carved into a tent pole in perfect Latin:
"Sleep lightly. I am always watching."
The forest had become the enemy. Trees were cut down for a hundred paces around the camp, but it made no difference. The death continued.
On the twenty-third night Prefect Rufus stood on the rampart, eyes hollow, staring into the black wall of trees.
"They are not men," he whispered to his second. "No mortal army fights like this."
His second — a veteran who had served on the Danube — only shook his head.
"They are led by that boy. The one the survivors spoke of. The one who hanged Marcus Flavius Severus in the old legatus's tent. He is turning us into ghosts before we even fight."
On the thirtieth night the bombardment was lighter — only stones and a few teargas pots. Just enough to remind them.
When the two hours ended, the forest fell silent once more.
Prefect Rufus stood among the smoking ruins of his camp, surrounded by broken men.
He had lost almost half his effective strength without a single pitched battle.
And still no one had seen the enemy.
In the deep forest, five miles away, Seigmer stood on the ridge beside his six trebuchets, watching the distant glow of the Roman fires.
His men — the twelve who had become his personal Tier-1 unit — waited in perfect silence around him.
No one cheered. No one boasted.
They simply cleaned their crossbows and waited for the next order.
Seigmer looked at the distant camp and spoke quietly, almost to himself.
"One month. They have learned fear."
He turned to Ingvar.
"Tomorrow we rest. The night after… we take the fort itself."
Ingvar's grin was small and sharp.
"And then?"
Seigmer's eyes reflected the distant flames.
"Then Rome learns that the war has a name."
Behind them, in the hidden sheds of the Forge, fifty kilograms of gunpowder waited in sealed jars — more than enough for what came next.
The Month of Ghosts was over.
The Season of Breaking had begun.