Now, in the final book of the trilogy, the Twelfth Fulminata Legion is stranded deep in Armenia after the disaster at the Fortress of Desolation. Harried by the Armenians and Persians under Artashemeh, the survivors must embark on a perilous trek over the roof of the world to the distant safety of the Black Sea. Battered and alone, they must fight and claw their way across a forbidding landscape where betrayal, hunger, and desperation conspire to end them all.
However, the ancient trail marked by the Anabasis of Xenophon leads to more than the past or freedom or even the sea, for in it lies a fate as inexorable as it is bloody. It is a trail which sees the destiny of one Tribune of the Twelfth merge with that of another to leave the Janus Eagle broken but triumphant in its darkest battle yet; a battle where an ancient doom unwinds itself from the shadows to reveal the final fate of the Fulminata.