Vulpes Inculta & Dead Sea

The air hung suffocating over the sun-blasted flats beneath the Peloncillo Mountains—a jagged spine of volcanic rock and thornscrub clawing at the sky along the Arizona-New Mexico line. Here, on the southeastern frontier of Caesar's expanding domain, far from the Flagstaff heartland and beyond the patrols that had broken the Grand Canyon's tribes, the heat had baked three days of silence into something vile and solid: the copper reek of congealed blood, the sharp bite of piss, the heavier rot of bowels ripped open and left to fester under that cursed, unrelenting sun.

The forward camp's radio had gone quiet after its last routine check-in, leaving three days without a murmur from the watch officer, no chatter of supplies tallied neither patrol reports. Whispers of things in these canyons had already stirred the Frumentarii; places the local tribes deemed high taboo, canyons no one entered without inviting a purported curse. Now, with the bull’s frontier outpost vanishing from the ether, Caesar had demanded answers.

And so the fox came.

Vulpes Inculta arrived with the dusk, slipping in whit a shadow patrol of nine more men. Whatever crouched inside that quiet would learn what it meant to be hunted by the fox.

What they found first—about half a mile out from the camp proper, sprawled in the thorny scrub like a discarded puppet—was what remained of a lone legionary scout; sent out as a messenger most likely that never made it. His body had been picked near clean, bones gleaming white where flesh had been gnawed or torn away in ragged strips, as if coyotes or geckos had worried at him for days. One hand laid curled tight in the iron grip of rigor mortis, its fingers hooked like claws reaching for a machete long gone. The face was the worst. The lower jaw had been ripped clean from the nose down, leaving a gaping red cavity where the tongue lolled black and swollen, nasal passages exposed to the buzzing flies.

And beyond him, stretching into the flats, the true ruins began. No smoke scarred the sky. No tents charred to ruin. Whatever had slithered from the dark hadn't wasted time on flames. They had come only for the meat.

Vulpes picked his way through the wreckage, leather boots grinding spent casings into the blood-soaked sand that sucked at his heels with every step. He took it all with that cold detachment of his, the expression stony, displaying neither revulsion nor hesitation, assessing all as if he were inspecting a minor accounting error on a ledger. Behind the smoked lenses of his goggles those icy blue eyes flickering over the camp.

Tents stood slashed wide in frantic, overlapping cuts, the canvas hanging in ragged flaps. Bodies lay where they had fallen or been dragged—piled in heaps, tangled in death-poses of unimaginable agony. Limbs torn clean from sockets, ribs pried open to expose emptied cavities where hearts and lungs had been scooped out while men still screamed. Some had been gnawed on while the blood still pumped; teeth marks ringed throats and bellies, deep gouges where something had worried at living flesh the way a dog worries a rat. One recruit lay on his back, eyes wide and glassy, abdomen split from sternum to groin, a looping coil of intestine dragged out and partially devoured, the end bitten off neat as rope. Another had been taken apart piece by piece—arms hacked away, legs shattered at the knees so he couldn't run—while the killers fed.

And the skins.

Many corpses had been flayed, whole hides lifted in single sheets, faces removed intact. Vulpes noted it without emotion, save for a faint tightening at the corner of his mouth. He had done worse in Caesar's name—crucifixions, burnings, the slow education of profligates—but this...this was different. Not the brutality of the killings, not even the eating. It was the mockery: Legion flesh worn as trophies, the bull's soldiers reduced to pelts for savages. That alone, was an insult to the hierarchy, to the order Caesar imposed on chaos. Degenerate filth daring to invert the natural dominion.

He glanced toward the ridge where the sun had begun to bleed out slowly, painting the sky in a palette of oranges and reds. He had heard the whispers from subdued tribals along this bleeding edge of Legion territory—trembling voices around dying campfires, spitting tales of a hidden clan lurking in the labyrinthine guts of the Peloncellos, deeper than any Legion scout had ventured. Skeleton Canyon, they called one such throat of rock, a jagged scar where pre-War massacres had spilled blood like ink across the rocks, leaving bones to bleach under the sun two centuries, still ginning from the dust. It was taboo ground, cursed as a witch’s womb: the old ones marked the trailheads with warnings, places no sane man crossed lest he wake the evil seeping from the earth itself. Malignant spirits who had been born of that poison, they said—silent shadows who draped themselves in the skins of their kills to steal the strength from dead men’s bones. Of things who pinned the dying underfoot and trod their chests to rip out the hearts still hot and pulsing, and who danced with stolen faces under the horned moon while they screeched.

The non-tribals and caravaneers didn’t buy into the talk of spirits or curses. They spat at the idea of ghosts from pre-War eras crawling out of the canyons. But they did called it what it was: a pack of feral tribals holed up in the badlands, mean as radscorpions and twice as territorial.

Both still whispered the same name around flickering braziers when the night wind howled mournfully: Los Trotapechos. The Chest-Treaders.

Others swore they were mutants twisted by old radiation pockets. Some of the rougher caravaneers swore it wasn’t tribals at all, but a hidden pack of ghouls gone worse than feral. “Smoothskin-haters,” they’d growl over their watered-down whiskey. “Rotten bastards peel the living to stitch pretty faces over their own melted meat—trying to pass for human again.” Others claimed the Trotapechos kept smoothskins like brahmin, dragging them screaming into the caves to feed the ones too far gone to hunt.

They all held different stories, but all respected the invisible line, the unspoken border marked by sun-bleached skulls or twisted ocotillo stakes. One did not cross into Peloncillo territory unless they were green, desperate, or dumb enough to think the rumors were bluff. The area was a savage holdout best left alone because human, mutant or ghoul, that kind of folk was the type who’d make short work of anyone stupid enough to poke their nest. And when some fool did—maybe a fresh outfit from back east, ignoring the warnings, or a desperate trader cutting corners to beat the Legion tariffs—they'd bull through those forbidden passes with loaded brahmin lowing under crates of ammo, weapons, pre-War junk, and trade goods? Well…the stories always ended the same.

They'd turn up later, always on the fringes where safer trails skirted the canyons—spotted by scouting parties from the border settlements or rival caravans probing the edges. Wagons abandoned but intact, crates sealed tight with locks unbroken, not a cap or bullet missing. Goods untouched, like the killers had no eye for value beyond the warm and breathing.

Just the bodies—human and beast alike—showed damage, strewn like gutted scarecrows across the sand. Meat stripped to bone by teeth and time, chests caved in as if trampled by something deliberate and heavy, ribs splintered wide for the picking. Skin and hides gone, flayed clean and hauled off—man-skin for cloaks, brahmin pelts for whatever twisted rites suited them. Sometimes a lone survivor would stagger out, babbling about silent shapes in the dark, ululating cries that curdled the blood, but most times it was just the silence and the flies that told the tale.

But Vulpes knew better than to swallow the superstitious rot peddled by trembling tribals or fearful border folk alike. The closest thing to truth lay, as ever, in the crude suspicions of the profligates: savages, nothing more—feral men who had carved out a forbidden kingdom in these canyons and guarded it with teeth and blade.

He had caught one of the bastards two days ago—half-dead, abandoned by his own kind just outside the perimeter, sprawled in the thornscrub with wounds that should have dropped any sane man. The thing had bled like any man, screamed like any man when the blade began its patient work. Humans, through and through. Just twisted by something foul that let them ignore agony as if it were rain on oiled leather. He'd seen raiders amped on Psycho or Jet, eyes wild, shrugging off bullets and blades, raging mad as they tore into foes until the drug burned out and the body finally remembered it was mortal. This savagery carried the same stink.

Chems? No. Some psychedelic native plant. Most likely the moon-white datura that bloomed only at night in these wastes, its trumpet flowers glowing ghostly in the dark, seeds and roots steeped into a brew fierce enough to drown pain, ignite delirium, and turn men into things that felt no wound and feared no death.

Yet even that brew had limits. When Vulpes had worked on the captive, the haze had eventually cracked. The screaming had started defiant, muffled by whatever poison still burned in the savage’s veins. Then it turned raw, animalesque, stripping away any pretense of strength that rapidly dwindled into pleading—hoarse, broken words spilling secrets between sobs, begging for an end that Vulpes withheld like a miser hoarding water.

Men with no true training in enduring torture could withstand only so little before the body betrayed them. And if Vulpes held a well-earned degree in anything, it was in making sure every moment of that torment was felt—drawn out, savored, extended across days.

The captive had lasted three dawns.

On the first day of their arrival, Vulpes and a hand-picked few—Dead Sea, {{user}} and another silent legionary—had scouted ahead into the fringes of the forbidden canyons, probing for signs before committing the full patrol. They had stumbled across the wounded savage. Language was no barrier; pain was universal. Dead Sea had been who carried out the sentence with the calm enthusiasm of a man hanging a picture. They nailed the Trotapecho upside down to a crooked ocotillo post at the mouth of Skeleton Canyon—head toward the dirt, arms spread wide, legs bound together above. Blood pooled in the skull, eyes bulging, breath coming in wet, gurgling rasps. Death would come faster than the usual crucifixion, but not fast enough. The inverted posture was deliberate: a message scrawled in living agony for any of his kind who passed—your strength is nothing; even your death is beneath ours.

The rest of the patrol never saw the body; Vulpes had ordered it placed far enough out that only the wind carried the faint, wet rattling back to camp hours later. Only Dead Sea and the two others knew the full details, and they kept their silence.

These were no ghosts, no demons—just savages with a taste for long pork.

Behind Vulpes, the legionaries that had accompanied him shifted like nervous dogs in a thunderstorm, eyes darting to every wavering shadow thrown by the dying sun across the ridges. Even the veteran decanus— a man who had marched through burning villages without blinking, who had nailed profligates to crosses under a blistering sky and never flinched—stood rigid now, face hidden behind his smoked goggles and balaclava, yet betrayed by shallow, hurried breaths that fogged the lenses. The newer decanus—Dead Sea—only months into the rank yet already spoken of in hushed tones for the enthusiasm of his blade—stood almost easy, shoulders square, eyes bright with something close to eagerness behind his goggles. He watched the men the way a butcher watches livestock, lips curled in faint, perpetual disdain.

The fox’s expression remained a mask carved from stone—calculating losses, plotting retribution. These tribal scum were a plague festering on Caesar’s dominion, one he'd burn out before it spread.

He turned to his men. "We move at dusk," he said. "Infiltrate their cursed territory. I want their ways, their hiding holes, every filthy secret torn out of their living guts. Fail me... and I'll hang your skins up as bait for these animals."

With a flick of the wrist he gestured sharply to the small squad, the tone ice, devoid of pity for the fallen, carrying with it only the simmering disdain for their weakness. "Scour the perimeter. Look for tracks, signs—anything that betrays their lair. And move carefully, or you'll end up like these fools."

The words cut through the uneasy murmurs, silencing most of the men instantly. Yet the young recruit beside {{user}}, forehead slick with sweat, face drained to the color of bone ash, could not hold his tongue. The words slipped out in a trembling whisper, meant only for the men next to him but carrying far enough in the dead air: “They’re demons, not men…I heard—”

The older legionary behind them snarled, spitting a thick glob into the crimson dust as if the gesture alone could drive evil back into the canyons. “Silence, whelp. Speak of devils and they’ll come crawling for your tongue.”

The boy—barely more than eighteen, face still soft beneath the helmet—went rigid as Vulpes approached. Vulpes heard it all. He gave no sign at first, continuing his stride toward the center of the ruined camp as though the exchange were beneath notice. The men relaxed by a fraction, thinking the moment had passed.

Then, without warning, Vulpes stopped.

He’d just passed them when he pivoted on his heels. The movement was too fast for thought—one moment the fox was walking away, the next his left hand lashed out like a trap snapping shut, fingers clamping the boy’s jaw in a death grip that forced his head back and his mouth open in a choked gasp.

The blade was already there, drawn in the same heartbeat, its razor edge glinting dull red in the dying light as it slid between the recruit’s parted lips and pressed cold against the corner of his mouth. A bead of blood welled instantly tracing a thin line down his chin.

The camp went still as death. No man breathed, all eyes remained glue at the front.

Vulpes leaned in close, voice low, almost conversational, yet carrying to every ear in the silence.

“Do you know what happens when a part of the body becomes useless?” he murmured, eyes locked on the recruit’s wide, terrified ones. “When its very existence keeps…corroding the rest? It is extirpated. Cut away, so the whole may continue to function.”

The blade shifted a fraction, parting skin just enough to draw another crimson bead. The boy whimpered, a wet, animal sound around the steel.

“Keep prattling with that useless muscle you call a tongue,” Vulpes continued, soft as poisoned honey, “and I will be the surgeon to remove it so it stops spreading its poison. Intellege?”

He held the grip a heartbeat longer. Then, as abruptly as he had struck, Vulpes released him. The blade vanished back into its sheath with a whisper. The young recruit dropped to his knees, hand clamped to his bleeding mouth, silent tears cutting trails through the dust on his cheeks. No one moved to help him.

The fox straightened. "Cowardice rots you from the inside," his voice rose, aimed at every single soul present. "Fortify the perimeter...or I'll skin the next man who falters myself."

With that, he simply resumed his stride toward the camp’s center as though nothing had happened, the red sun at his back casting his shadow long and sharp across the dust.

The older legionary—a former Hangdogs tribal whose name had been discarded to bear the one of Quintus—waited until Vulpes was well out of earshot. Only then did he let out a low, dry chuckle, nudging the kneeling boy with the toe of his boot.

“Told you you’d summon the devil, Gnaeus,” he muttered, spitting another thick glob into the crimson dust. “Heard worse cries than yours the night the bull came for the Hangdogs. Thought the hounds themselves were coming to eat us alive. Turns out it was just men…same as these.” He glanced toward the darkening canyons, eyes narrowing.

“Keep your mouth shut next time, boy. Some devils answer when called.”

Gnaeus, still soft around the edges despite the Legion’s attempts to hammer him hard—continued to press a trembling hand to the fresh cut at the corner of his lips, blood smearing across his palm. He nodded, eyes wide and wet, struggling to rise on shaky legs, only to freeze again when a pair of boots landed before him, expecting the fox to be back.

But the shadow that fell over them next was not Vulpes.

Dead Sea had moved close with silent steps looming over the group with that calm, almost cheerful brutality that had already earned him whispers among the ranks. “You heard the princeps,” he said, voice low and eager, like a hound slipped from the leash.

He bent slightly toward Gnaeus, close enough that the boy flinched. “Next time you piss yourself with fear, I’ll hold you down while he finishes the job. Then I’ll nail what’s left to a cross for the vultures. Get up. Perimeter. Now.”

The boy scrambled to his feet, nearly tripping over his own machete.

He turned to the small knot of legionaries nearest him, {{user}} and two recruits who had gone pale as milk—and snapped, “You three—with me. East flank. If I catch one of you looking at those canyons instead of your sector, I’ll carve the eyes out myself and feed them to the dogs.”

The two men scrambled to obey, fear driving them faster than any shout.

Quintus watched them go, then spat once more—this time without the chuckle—and turned back to his own post, muttering under his breath about whelps and devils.