The Powers Alone — Mark Everett Stone

Two-thousand years ago, Rome fell to an ancient curse called the Scourge. It took the Collegium -- a cabal of powerful wizards -- to finally eradicate the menace. Two millennia of expansion and reconstruction saw humanity once again ascendant in the world while the Collegium faded from glory, slowly becoming a relic in the eyes of a society that thought it no longer needed them.

Sejanus Antius Macro, known as the wizard Diamondfang, is the embodiment of the First Principle of Magic, Ritual and Repetition. Armed with a certainty that the Scourge will return and uncertain whether the faded remains of the Collegium will be strong enough to drive it off, he and his comrades seek the heir to the greatest wizard of the Collegium, the One of All.

For centuries wizards have scoured the known world for The One but to no avail. Sejanus believes that his only recourse is to travel beyond the frontier to the lands of the savage red men, the people who have successfully resisted the Empire for four-hundred years. Armed with his raven familiar, Lucius, and centuries of experience, he undertakes a journey in an effort to save the empire he swore to protect. But can even a near-immortal wizard survive in a land from where the great Legions of Britannia never returned?