Morwen of the Silures
(They called her the last ember.)
The first time I saw her, she was kneeling in the ashes of her home, her fingers black with soot and blood, tracing the name of her father—Caradoc—into the dirt. The Romans had hanged him from the branches of the Sacred Oak, and his body still swung there, a pendulum of defiance.
She looked at me, and I felt the weight of every scroll I’d ever filled with Roman lies. Her eyes were two coals from the funeral pyres of her people, and when she smiled, it was not with joy, but with the knowledge that she had already won.
"You will tell them we were savages," she said.
"Tell them," she whispered, pressing a blackthorn thorn into my palm, "that we were free."
Then she walked into the river—the same river the Romans had poisoned with their salt—and let the current take her.
And I?
I wrote nothing.
For some truths drown the ink.


"THE SILURES’ LAST SONG"
(Inspired by Celtic oral tradition and the resistance of Caratacus)
I.
The legions march with steel and script,
but we are the roots beneath the road.
You build your walls with mortar and lies,
we grow through the cracks, wild and unbowed.
II.
They hung my father from the Sacred Oak,
his shadow longer than the empire’s reach.
I carved his name in river clay and smoke,
so the land would speak when I could not.
III.
You call us barbarians with your Latin tongue,
but barbarian is the hand that steals a child from her mother’s arms.
You call it conquest – we call it theft.
And thieves, in the end, always lose the count.
IV.
So take your eagles, take your laws,
take the names we will not say.
But you cannot take the wind in the reeds,
or the way the stones still weep for Caradoc’s blade.
V.
One day, the tide will turn.
One day, the waves will remember they were once free.
And on that day, the last of the Silures
will rise from the sea.


Blackthorn in her hand –
the legion’s shadow stretches long.
She does not kneel.


River runs with blood,
but the stones still sing his name –
Caradoc, Caradoc.


Mist swallows the fort.
Only the wind remembers
where the free men walked.