The Eagle’s Shadow

Dr. Alistair Finch was a man out of time. A brilliant but disillusioned historical strategist, he spent his life analyzing the fall of great empires from the sterile comfort of a university office. He believed he could have saved them all, if only he’d been there. After a fatal accident, he gets his chance.

He awakens in the cold, mud-caked reality of 4th century Britain, a land on the bleeding edge of a dying Roman Empire. He is no emperor or general, but the young, untested son of a local Romano-British chieftain, a man named Artorius, whose small hillfort of Dunum is directly in the path of a savage Pictish invasion. His people are doomed by history, a forgotten footnote in the empire’s collapse.

Armed with two millennia of strategic knowledge but trapped in a body that barely knows how to hold a sword, Alistair—now Artorius—must race against time. He must introduce concepts of sanitation to prevent disease, rally demoralized warriors with tactics from Sun Tzu, and forge alliances with bitter rivals using political gambits from a future they cannot imagine.

He is an eagle’s shadow, a glimpse of a future that might have been, fighting to prevent the coming of the Dark Ages for his small corner of the world. But changing history carries a heavy price, and the gears of fate, once shifted, can grind nations to dust.