A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

The sky crackled with lightning from his presence. A great gust of wind began to blow.

So much power, in one place. The closest a God had ever come to walking on the Earth, and already the ground creaked beneath his feet, unable to sustain him. The air thinned and became harder to breathe. When he swung his sword testingly, the lightning ran from the sky, towards its tip, as nature itself kneeled before the mighty.

And this was only a single drop of Ingolsol's blood.

"Ahhh, to be mortal," Ingolsol grinned. "You play so eagerly in the divine, and look what it gets you."

In a single moment, all that Francis had worked for, it had been seized from him. All that power – enough power, he was sure, to overthrow the Kingdom, and all its Generals – and it had been taken from him with a single impulse from Ingolsol.

But with the taking of Francis' life, there came the return of Beam's. His chest closed up in front of his, as did some of his most minor wounds. He was even able to open his eyes just a crack, as he attempted to look at the world around him.

That brought an incredible amount of pain with it. Not just pain of the body – for on the surface, all his wounds had been healed – but a scorching pain in his mind, and in his soul. He felt as though he was holding everything that he was together by his fingertips. He had to grit his teeth to contain himself.

"Beam!" Nila cried out, seeing his eyes open.

The villagers did not stir at her cry. They were transfixed by Ingolsol's aura, frozen in place. They were smitten by the sudden desire to kneel, and the desire to give their hearts away. It wasn't despair, not this time, for despair had abandoned them long ago. It was a simple acknowledgement.

Even as that desire to knee flooded through them, they did not move. Only a handful were able to.

"He's alive?" Greeves asked, cautiously, a mere two steps away, but those steps felt like a journey of a thousand miles amidst that crackling atmosphere. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind.

"Awake, boy?" Dominus asked, sparing a brief glance over his shoulder. His face was calm, even as the poison ravaged it. All Beam could manage in return was a nod. "Then watch, and see what it is that I have learned. I make it a gift to you, by way of apology for my lateness."

Ingolsol smiled a wry smile. "You stand before a God," he said. Casual words, spoken without any apparent anger, but the will in them was clear. The pressure that the observers were already feeling increased twofold. The villagers collapse to their knees, one by one, overcome by the need to prostrate themselves before the mighty. "And yet you take up such casual conversation.

So the boy lives, does he? Quite the cunning trick you've played, Dominus."

"You will not get at him again," Dominus said. The clear threat in his tone made Ingolsol's smile widen.

"Relax. I have no intention of it. The game has already been played out. If the boy lives, all the better… Though, from the looks of it, he's teetering on the edge there, is he not?" Ingolsol pointed out. "That looks like a fractured soul to me. I wonder if he even knows where we are, mm?"

"I know… you…" Beam said. The voice from his lips made Lombard's head whip round, as he narrowed his eyes, studying him. Tolsey followed the look, similarly disturbed. Beam did not notice, he could not. From the pain, it was all he had in him to stay awake.

Dominus could not deny himself the satisfaction of a smile, as Ingolsol raised an eyebrow. "Now that there," the Dark God said, returning Dominus' smile, but for an entirely different reason, "that there will be a problem. You're quite sure you want to gamble on letting that live, are you?"

"Quite sure," Dominus said, icily. "I will free you from that body towards that end," he pointed his sword, making his intention of starting clear.

"…Why?" Ingolsol couldn't help but ask, holding up his hand for a brief moment of pause. "It is mere curiosity, oh dog of mine enemy – but still, why? Why did you go to such efforts? How did you know that he would turn out to be interesting."

That gave Dominus a moment of pause, before he realized something in surprise. "You weren't able to tell?"

Ingolsol did not answer him. "Hm. Well, I suppose that intuition might be a part of what makes you mortals interesting. Although I can say now, quite confidently, it's the wrong choice. The boy is broken. There isn't a step forward from this."

Ingolsol's reasoning then – he was not to know – would soon match the same reasons the scholars would give, when they tried to explain the sudden rise of the Dark Hero Beam.

Within Ingolsol's words there contained two points, beyond just the fractured state of Beam's soul, after being blazed by the divine fire that Ingolsol had wrenched through him. He pointed to the boy's lack of reality. There were no steps forward for him.

He'd crawled in the dirt for years after surviving his enslavement, and his near-fatal wounding. He'd continued to exist with the curse of Ingolsol on his shoulders. He knew nothing but filth, and labour, and struggle. All the life he knew was at the bottom of the very darkest pits.

And then, as though to scorn him, his path forward was not a natural one. His progress, and his opportunities, were almost as maddening as what Francis had sought to conjure. For a master, the boy had been given the strongest man in the country.

For his first battle, the boy had warred against the Yarmdon elite, and he had led a contingent of three hundred villagers towards that cause.