Ravenna was supposed to be the impregnable jewel of the West. Surrounded by deep marshes and towering brick walls, it had been chosen as the imperial capital by past emperors because it was a fortress.
But as Odoacer rode his massive destrier through the Porta Aurea—the Golden Gate—he saw no jewel. He saw a rotting corpse waiting to be buried.
After ten months of freezing on the northern frontier, the warlord had finally brought his army south. Ten thousand starving foederati were currently making camp in the marshes outside the walls, while Odoacer led a vanguard of three hundred elite Heruli and Scirii veterans into the inner districts to confront General Orestes and his puppet Emperor.
They marched in perfect, eerie silence, their heavy iron-hobnailed boots splashing through the filthy, flooded cobblestones.
The public reaction to the barbarian vanguard was immediate, absolute terror.
The plebs—the common citizens—shrank back into the shadowed alleyways, pulling their threadbare cloaks over the faces of their starving children. The streets reeked of open sewage and rotting cabbage. The grand aqueducts, once the pride of Roman engineering, were cracked and leaking, turning the lower districts into stagnant swamps breeding malaria.
Odoacer looked at the hollowed-out faces of the Roman citizens. Men with no flesh on their bones were huddled over small, smoking fires, boiling leather scraps just to have something to chew.
These are the people who call me a savage, Odoacer thought, a bitter sneer touching his scarred lips. They build palaces of porphyry and marble, yet they let their own children starve in the mud while the patricians drink wine spiced with cinnamon.
"They look like walking corpses, Dominus," Tufa muttered, riding close to Odoacer. The massive Scirian chieftain gripped his iron spatha, his eyes darting toward the rooftops, expecting an ambush. "There is no glory here. The rot is too deep."
"The rot is at the top, Tufa," Odoacer replied, his guttural voice low and dangerous. "Orestes has bled this city dry to pay for his own vanity. Today, we take what is ours. We demand one-third of their estates, or we burn the rest of it to ash."
As the column approached the Macellum—the central market district that sat in the shadow of the imperial Palatium—the column was forced to halt.
A detachment of the Vigiles, the city watchmen, had formed a hasty barricade across the market square using overturned fruit carts and broken wooden crates. There were perhaps forty of them guarding the final road to the palace. Their armor was polished, their crimson tunics clean, but their hands were shaking. They were city guards who broke up tavern brawls; they had never fought a real war.
Behind Odoacer, three hundred hardened barbarians stopped as one, resting their hands on their weapons. The silence was deafening.
From the center of the barricade, a single Roman soldier stepped forward.
He was young—barely eighteen. He wore the horsehair-plumed helmet of a junior officer, and his lorica segmentata armor fit him poorly, likely passed down from a dead father. He held a heavy wooden scutum shield and a drawn gladius.
His knees were visibly trembling, but his chin was raised in desperate, foolish defiance.
"Halt!" the young soldier's voice cracked, echoing across the empty, terrified market. He pointed his short sword directly at Odoacer. "By order of the Senatus, no foederati warbands are permitted to approach the Palatium! Turn back, barbarian, or we will strike you down!"
Tufa let out a harsh, barking laugh. He drew his massive two-handed blade, the iron hissing in the morning air. "Let me take his head, Commander. I will mount it on his own shield."
"No," Odoacer said calmly. He swung his heavy, fur-draped leg over his saddle and dropped to the cobblestones with a heavy thud.
The young Roman soldier swallowed hard as the giant warlord walked slowly toward him. Odoacer didn't draw his sword. He didn't even unbuckle the leather strap holding his weapon in its scabbard. He just walked, his massive, scarred frame dwarfing the boy.
"I have come to collect a debt from Orestes," Odoacer rumbled, stopping three paces from the boy's sword tip. "Move your men aside, boy."
"You are a beast coming to sack our homes!" the young soldier shouted, his knuckles turning white around his sword hilt. "I swore a sacrament to Rome! I will not let you pass!"
With a terrifying, explosive burst of speed, the young guard lunged.
He thrust the gladius perfectly, aiming right for the gap in Odoacer’s furs at his throat. It was a textbook Roman strike.
But Odoacer wasn't a textbook. He was a survivor of the freezing mud.
The warlord didn't step back. He stepped in. Odoacer slapped the flat of the boy's blade away with a heavy, armored forearm, the metal ringing sharply. Before the young guard could recover, Odoacer’s massive hand shot out, grabbing the rim of the boy's heavy wooden shield.
With a brutal roar, Odoacer ripped the scutum right off the boy's arm, dislocating his shoulder with a sickening pop.
The young soldier screamed, dropping his sword.
Odoacer slammed the heavy wooden shield directly into the boy's chest. The impact threw the young guard backward into the mud, the wind violently knocked out of his lungs. He gasped, spitting dirty water, scrambling frantically backward into the filth.
The other Roman guards at the barricade immediately dropped their spears and broke rank, fleeing into the alleyways in sheer terror, leaving the path to the palace wide open.
The young officer was left completely alone, trembling in the mud, clutching his ruined shoulder. He looked up at the giant warlord standing over him, waiting for the killing blow.
Odoacer tossed the Roman shield onto the cobblestones. He looked down at the boy, his expression unreadable.
"You have courage, little Roman," Odoacer said, his guttural voice echoing in the dead silence of the market. "But courage without strength is just a fancy way to commit suicide."
Odoacer leaned down, grabbing the boy by his crimson tunic, and violently hauled him to his feet. He shoved the boy's uninjured shoulder, pushing him toward the alleyway where his men had fled.
"Go find a healer to set your arm," Odoacer growled. "And when you learn how to hold a sword without shaking, come find my camp. I will teach you how to actually fight."
The young soldier stared at the barbarian in utter shock. Then, clutching his arm, he stumbled away into the shadows.
Odoacer watched him go, then turned his gaze up toward the towering marble columns of the imperial palace looming ahead.
"Clear this garbage from the street," Odoacer ordered Tufa, kicking the broken barricade. "It is time to see how much blood Orestes is willing to spill to keep his gold