Darkness. Muffled voices. Pain. The stench of offal and rot. The voices seemed to be yelling. Strange, he thought. He couldn't hear the clash of steel. Tired eyes opened and gazed at the shrivelled corpse of a lamprey-like horror. He held his breath for a moment before realizing it had left the mortal coil. He'd lost his helmet.<br/><br/>Titus pushed the body off and channeled healing energies through his ruined arm. Unimaginable pain flared in the fractured limb as he forced bone back into place and repaired the damage. Uncomfortable warmth spread through his body as he flash-burned fat to aid his regeneration. Staggering up onto his knees, the paladin donned his helmet, which lay on the dirt in arm's reach. He took in his surroundings. The dust still hadn't settled fully, leaving the field in a hazy twilight illuminated by torches and mass pyres. Flakes of ash drifted lazily like some macabre parody of the desert lotus petals showered on legionary celebrations. In the distance, exhausted Legion soldiers walked the field, prodding at corpses, hauling away wounded, and executing the few monsters that still stubbornly clung to life. Valerius, the Legion Centurion cadre, and the Ancient convened over a hastily-constructed planning table. He ran the numbers quickly in his head. If his calculations were correct, the Legion had lost about 300. Losses remained within acceptable parameters, then.<br/><br/>Spitting a wad of bloody plegm, the Optio retrieved a fallen spatha and tower shield, making his way back to the sorceror cabal's designated battle location. What happened? Incantation gone wrong? Interference with a ritual?<br/><br/>Several of the Legion's civilian hangers-on approached him, hawking wares. The Imperial Legions tended to attract a train of non-combatant "support personnel" like these. It was a term he used lightly, for their "support" was often of questionable value. Small-time peddlers, food vendors, whores, and the like plied their trades in the shadows of Legion tent cities.<br/><br/>'A knife? A knife, soldier boy? Lost yours, you did,' crowed an old man, his left eye covered by a black patch and his coat open to show various poorly-crafted imitations of the XIV's trademark shiv of choice.<br/><br/>'Pass, I know a quartermaster,' he said.<br/><br/>One of the myriad painted girls approached him, cooing poorly-rehearsed soft nothings into his ear.<br/><br/>'Your business pitch needs work,' he grunted as he pushed her away, ignoring her as she called his masculinity into question.<br/><br/>Scavengers and parasites, the lot of them, but they were as much a part of a Legion as the actual soldiers. It would be easier to pull a desert hook-fly from one's skin than it would to shoo away the squatters. Even before the dead had cooled, this rabble picked at the battlefield, eager to steal away some shiny keepsake or two before the Legionnaires beat them for dishonoring the dead.<br/><br/>He could barely see through the dusty fog blanketing the ground. Strange voices scratched at the borders of his senses. The veil was thin here. Restless spirits chattered and whispered in the darkness, suspended in the limbo between corpse and conduit. Something big had been disrupted here. Titus brandished the silver, sword-crossed sundisk of his order, whispering a brief prayer to soothe their pain. It was a language he hadn't used in a long time, one practiced by a dead desert tribe and used in the many Solar Temples of the old faith.<br/><br/>'O Shora,' he began, beseeching She who once dispensed justice and passage for the dead, She who now sleeps in the folds of heaven. It was a complicated language, one of harsh, monosyllabic words and curt sentences. The sundisk was suffused with a warm glow, a tiny glimmer of light in the perpetual night of the undercity. The spirits fell back, quieted, if only briefly. He would have a necromancer see to proper rites later.<br/><br/>Titus caught himself as he slipped on the viscera of a dead Deep One. Where the hell was Abso--<span style="font-style: italic">Movement!</span><br/><br/>Where? Where the hell was it? He'd seen something just a moment ago. He continued a few more paces before he spotted a silhouette. Two humans. One prone and clad in Legion leathers, another in armor which might have been Legion infantry kit. Something was wrong, he thought. Something was very, very wrong with the veil here. As he neared, he could make out his old friend's accoutrements. He looked like he was still breathing.  Good. Who was the other? Why had nobody else come to the aid of an asset as precious as a Legion spellcaster? And why couldn't Titus make out any of the legionnaire's features?