Eighty-Seven Before Dawn

The first scream came from the camp's northern perimeter, where the torchlight thinned and the darkness pressed closest.

A sentry — a young hoplite named Theodoros who had joined the army seeking glory and had found instead a four-day march through hostile terrain — died without understanding what killed him. One moment he stood at his post, shield raised, spear ready, eyes straining against blackness that revealed nothing. The next, something struck him from an angle his training had not prepared him to defend, and teeth closed around his throat before he could raise his voice in warning.

His shield crashed against the ground as his body fell. That sound — bronze on stone, unmistakable — carried across the camp and woke men who had been sleeping in their armour.

Nikandros was on his feet before the echoes faded, his commander's instincts translating sound into assessment. An attack at the perimeter. Single casualty, based on the sound. The Scots probing their defences, perhaps, testing for weaknesses before withdrawing.

The second scream disabused him of that interpretation.

It came from the camp's eastern edge, nearly opposite the first attack, and it was not cut short by killing efficiency. This soldier had time to cry out, time to communicate terror before whatever attacked him finished its work. The sound that emerged from his throat was not a word or a warning but something more primal — the voice of a man facing something his mind could not process.

Then the third attack, from the south. Then the fourth, from an angle between the first two.

Four points of assault, nearly simultaneous, from directions that could not be covered by repositioning forces without abandoning other positions. This was not harassment. This was hunting.

Nikandros bellowed orders that training made automatic. Form up. Shields overlapping. Spears outward. The phalanx drill that had been drilled into his men since childhood, the response to any threat that offered itself for engagement.

But nothing offered itself. The attackers struck and withdrew, vanishing into darkness before the soldiers they attacked could even identify what was killing them. Shields that should have blocked blows found nothing to block. Spears that should have found flesh struck only air. The torchlight that defined the Theopolitan's world ended in sharp lines beyond which nothing was visible, and from beyond those lines death came without warning or pattern.

The screaming multiplied as panic began to spread through a force that had never encountered anything like this. Professional soldiers who had trained to face human enemies, whose discipline was built on understanding what they fought and how to defeat it, found themselves facing something their training had not addressed. The darkness was not empty. It held predators that moved faster than thought, struck harder than any human enemy, and disappeared before retaliation was possible.

Nikandros managed to establish a defensive formation near the camp's centre, pulling his forces inward, sacrificing the perimeter positions to concentrate his strength. The torches burned in a ring around this contracted position, their light creating a barrier that the attackers seemed unwilling to cross. For a long moment, the assault paused. The screaming faded. The darkness held its breath.

Then a torch at the formation's edge guttered and died, knocked from its bracket by something that moved too fast to see, and the barrier of light developed a gap.

The shadow panther that exploited that gap was the pack's alpha — a male whose scars spoke of years surviving in territory where survival was never guaranteed. He had hunted humans before, knew their weaknesses, understood how their formations depended on the light they could not do without. His pack had been following this army since it entered their range, watching, waiting, learning the patterns of sentries and the rhythm of their movements. The blood from the Scots' harassment had drawn them closer. The stationary camp had provided the opportunity they needed.

He struck through the gap in the torchlight, taking a hoplite whose shield was turned the wrong direction, killing with the efficiency that three thousand years of evolution had refined. The soldier beside the fallen man thrust with his spear, but the alpha had already moved, flowing through the formation like water through cracks in stone, exploiting the confusion his presence created.

Nikandros saw the creature for the first time as it passed through the torchlight — a shape of pure black, larger than any predator he had encountered, its eyes reflecting flame with a luminescence that seemed wrong, impossible. It was beautiful in the way that death was beautiful, all purpose and economy, and it was killing his men with contemptuous ease.

He thrust with his spear, the reflexes of forty years' training guiding his arm. The strike should have skewered the creature through its side. Instead, it twisted away from the thrust with speed that made his movements seem sluggish, and its counterstrike raked claws across his shield arm, opening wounds that began immediately to bleed.

The strategos fell back, his guard raised, his mind racing through options that his experience could not provide. He had fought men. He had fought formations and siege engines and the thousand variations of human warfare. He had never fought something like this.

The alpha did not press the attack. It withdrew through another gap in the torchlight, vanishing into darkness that swallowed it completely. Nikandros stood bleeding among his men, staring at the space where the creature had been, understanding for the first time that this night held enemies beyond the Scots who defended the plateau above.

The attacks continued through the hours that followed, never sustained long enough for the Theopolitans to organise effective response, never pressing hard enough to offer the decisive engagement that might have allowed the phalanx to demonstrate its power. The pack hunted as packs hunted — coordinating without visible communication, exploiting gaps and weaknesses, withdrawing before response could be organised.

By the time the eastern sky began to lighten with the first suggestion of approaching dawn, Nikandros had lost eighty-seven men to the shadow creatures — nearly as many as the Scottish harassment had cost, and far more terrifying in their manner of dying. His army remained formidable, still vastly outnumbering the defenders above, but its discipline had been shaken by a night of fighting enemies they could not see or understand.

The strategos gathered his officers as dawn approached, his wounded arm bound with cloth that was already soaking through with blood. The assault on the plateau would proceed as planned. The barbarians remained the primary enemy, the objective that his army had marched to achieve. Whatever creatures inhabited this darkness, they had withdrawn as light returned. They were threats of night, not day.

What Nikandros did not know — could not know — was that the Hunters had been watching the panther attacks from positions on the plateau above. They had seen how the Theopolitans responded to the creatures, had noted the weaknesses in their defensive formations, had identified the gaps that allowed the pack to strike repeatedly without sustaining casualties.

And they had begun planning how to exploit those same weaknesses when the Theopolitans advanced.

The dawn brought light that pushed back the darkness and its terrors. It brought the Theopolitan army, diminished but still overwhelming, forming for the assault that would determine New Edinburgh's fate.

It brought the battle that would define Caledonia for generations to come.