Duty and destiny
Lucillia’s carefully prepared Roman future collides with a calling that belongs to another culture and another kind of power.
Published
The Borderlands of Britannia — Book One
The Edge of Empire
Rome can build a wall across the land. It cannot command what wakes beneath it.
Lucillia arrives in Britannia with a future paved by Roman duty: daughter of a legate, former handmaiden of Fortuna and promised wife of Tribune Quintus Severus. At the mist-veiled frontier, fate offers her a path no Roman road could have prepared her to walk.
Publisher and edition record at Moontree House BooksThe book at a glance
Where this story lives
- Series position
- Book One
- Setting
- Roman Britain, 125 CE
- Historical moment
- The construction of Hadrian’s Wall
- Central perspective
- Lucillia, a Roman legate’s daughter
- Mythic territory
- Roman, Celtic and Romano-British gods
- ISBN
- 9781763666344
At the frontier
A Roman future meets a land with older claims
Lucillia has always understood the shape of her life. Rome has given her rank, duty, tradition and a marriage that will carry all three forward. Britannia should be another province in which Roman order makes the world legible.
Instead, the building of Hadrian’s Wall is cutting through more than soil and stone. Forces once bound by gods begin to stir, sacred boundaries weaken and Lucillia is drawn into a struggle whose roots reach back through generations of Britons—and further still into the choices that made their gods.
The Edge of Empire brings documented Roman-frontier history into contact with Celtic and classical mythology. Its gods do not stand outside culture: they belong to places and peoples, and they change as mortals confront empire, belonging, duty and destiny.
Inside the story
The threads beneath the plot
Empire and boundary
Hadrian’s Wall makes political control visible while older borders between peoples, gods and realms begin to fail.
Gods in translation
Roman and Brittonic traditions meet through people who must decide whether similarity means conquest, survival or transformation.
This path may be yours if…
You want history and mythology to alter one another
- Second-century Roman Britain rendered as a lived frontier rather than a painted backdrop
- Women negotiating duty, culture and power inside an imperial world
- Roman, Celtic and Romano-British gods with material consequences
- Cultural collision complicated by love, loyalty and competing obligations
- Fantasy interested in boundaries, belonging and who controls the story of a land
Clear answers
Before you begin
Is The Edge of Empire the first novel in the series?
Yes. It is Book One of The Borderlands of Britannia.
Do I need to read The Becoming of Cernunnos first?
No prior reading is required. The free prequel adds Carwyn’s Bronze Age origin and deepens the history behind Cernunnos and the living land.
When and where is the book set?
The story begins in northern Roman Britain in 125 CE, during the construction of Hadrian’s Wall.
What kind of fantasy is it?
It is mythic historical fantasy in which Roman-frontier history and Celtic, Romano-British and classical mythology shape the same world.