The barbarian’s journey ended not with death beneath open skies but with iron biting his wrists and the jeering roar of a foreign city, for treachery and numbers dragged him down where steel had failed, and he awoke in the bowels of a vast colosseum whose stones were slick with old blood and older screams; there, beneath banners snapping in hot wind, he was cast into the arena like a chained beast, measured not by honor but by spectacle, and told in blunt tongues that freedom lay only beyond a mountain of slain challengers, each bout a toll paid in sweat and slaughter; yet as he strode onto the sand—scarred, unbowed, eyes burning with the savage will of untamed lands—he felt no fear, only the cold clarity of battle, for kings and crowds were nothing to him, and if destiny demanded corpses for his release, then the arena would learn what manner of doom it had imprisoned.
