Aetius and the welllspring

 The emperor had escaped the chaos of the continent.
He lived like a monk in the cellar of a huge castle,
on an island.
His days were filled with venturing into the lower abandoned levels of the castles to forage food.
finding a nearby slat between stones where sun would burst through for an hour to get enough light. And traveling down into the tunnels of the castle hundreds of meters below the last floor of the cellar to get water from an underground creek.
The monotonous years went on for years and years, yet his skin didn´t age.
And his hair didn´t grey.
He spent three hundred years like that, he knew the weekends because lords would come and celebrate there every weekend. every two years a drunk lord would stumble down into the lower levels of the cellar looking for wine, in this case the emperor would attack him with sharp wood and drink the lord´s blood, inebriating himself in the process. He would dispose of the body by carrying deep underground, where he carried all things dead he encountered.
There rats and other creatures would nibble on it until it all invariably ended up as bones which the emperor used to fashion things like chairs and bed supports, that made his existence a little more comfortable.
Over three hundred years the emperor had developed such insane habits to keep himself alive that he had been growing as if the underbelly of the castle was actually some kind lab with just the right conditions to provoke him into getting healthier and bigger.
His hearing and eyesight became so sharp he could watch the land from the narrow slat in the wall and hear almost everything that was happening.
Many conflicts and strange events would pass....
Today spanish had invaded the island and were now on the island, playing with their new matchlock gunpowder arquebuses. He could here the rattling of it stirring up from the beaches. The sicilians ran scared as hell. The spanish were the big boys of the mediterranean now and their fierce reputation followed them everywhere they went. 
The emperor could hear their bragging and their yelling on the plains below the castle now, hauling their flags and cannons up to take the castle.
The emperor kept his ear against the slat to hear everything, it must have been a tough day because their camp was silent by midnight.
All the nobles had departed yesterday for Ragusa, inland they believed they´d be safe.
He stood in the dim moon light 150 meters from their camp, rats nodding up and down jumping in and out of the creek as if baptising themselves before the battle.
A stream of ants spiders and scorpions slowly streamed out of the tunnel emulating the water that followed them all out of the mouth of the rock beneath the castle, this torrent of hideous and venomous vermin flowed directly toward the sleeping spanish camp.
All of the emperors little deadly friends, he recognized their movements and could imitate them exactly with his hands, the creatures seemed to understand and would strangely play to the whims of the emperor.
Aetius(the emperor) raised an axe he had fashioned out of human bones and cage steel. walking slowly and silently toward the camp, it was his very first experience outside of the castle. The air was perfect a slight mist that caressed long beard and forehead. leaving a calm moisture The smell of it was like fresh rain and newly harvested wheat.
By the time he came upon the camp spanish soldiers were throwing off their armour and dancing to keep themselves from being stung or bitten as literally millions of spiders, ants and scorpions lurched onto them and proceeded to get into their undergarments to find soft warm flesh to bite and sting.
Aetius kicked some of the men back down to the ground and the hoard of creatures seemed to go into frantic rapture. He raised his axe and took out any of the soldiers that seemed to look semi organized in the tumult.

By morning the camp was annihilated in a most dreadful manner. Not one dead insect, spider or rat surrounded the camp, just swollen bodies cooking in the sicilian morning sun.
Aetius threw on a helmet and spanish armour cut his brow on a cutlass and made his way to the caravela. Spring was here.