Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

A little over three thousand years ago, the civilized world of the eastern Mediterranean came to a sudden and catastrophic end. For centuries a brilliant, interconnected order of great powers had flourished — the mighty Hittite empire of Anatolia, the palace kingdoms of Mycenaean Greece, the wealthy cities of the Levantine coast, the New Kingdom of Egypt at its height, all bound together by trade, diplomacy, and the shared splendor of the Late Bronze Age. And then, within the span of a few decades around the year 1200 before the common era, nearly all of it collapsed. Great cities were burned to the ground and never rebuilt. Whole kingdoms vanished from the map. Writing systems were forgotten, trade routes severed, populations scattered, and a darkness fell across the region that would last for generations. At the center of the destruction, in the fragmentary records that survive, appears a mysterious and terrifying enemy — a coalition of raiders and migrants that the Egyptians called...

Among the mysteries that history keeps, few are as strange as the disappearance not of a single person but of an entire army. The Ninth Legion of Rome — the Legio IX Hispana, a body of some five thousand trained fighting men with their officers, their eagle standard, their engineers and clerks and long, proud record of service — marched across the pages of the ancient world for well over a century, and then simply vanished from them. There is no account of its final battle, no record of its disbanding, no monument to its dead. At one moment the Ninth is present in the histories and the inscriptions, a real and formidable force garrisoning the northern frontier of Britain; at the next it is gone, and the sources fall silent, as though five thousand men had walked off the edge of the known world. What became of the lost Ninth Legion has been argued for centuries, and no one can say with certainty to this day. An Eagle on the Northern Frontier The Ninth was an old and distinguished leg...