lacta alea est.

The die is cast.

Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars

The tribesmen, the Picti, slipped through the summer darkness to gather in the pitch-black copse of trees. They had already visited the sacred stones on the summit of the Hill of Sacrifice a few miles further north, where their priest had made the blood offering, the heart of the Roman scout caught earlier in the day. They had watched the man, eyes drugged, face slack, being stripped, bound and laid on the altar stone. The high priest's obsidian knife had flashed in the setting sun and fell just as their chanting reached its climax. Afterwards the chieftain had massed the entire war band and they had swarmed here to recover what was theirs – or rather his – by right: the Golden Maid, taken by the Men of Iron, the Crested Ones, who hid behind their wall of stone. The chieftain, so determined on vengeance, had even brought his only son, a mere boy, the sacred insignia etched on his thigh, to his first blooding. The boy was now a member of the war band, hair plaited, face and body daubed in war paint.