A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

The being that was Beam was deeper than both. It was the silent longing of the wind, as it swam towards the unreachable mountain tops. It was the hope of the stream, as it ran towards the sea.

The gates opened, and a vast city, burning in flame was revealed. The heat hit Dominus all at once. He braced himself. He felt his fingers burning, and his flesh melting, but he did not pause as he attempted to drink it all in.

"Dominus…" Lombard muttered, unnerved by the silence. Even he could sense a change in the air, despite his lack of ability in controlling mana.

Even the villagers could tell something had happened, as Dominus stood crouched over the boy, his eyes closed in concentration.

After a few moments more, he slowly removed himself. His hand came out of Beam's chest, leaving a trail of blood with it. The man stood. The body of the boy did not move. No one dared to say a word.

Dominus glanced over his shoulder, towards the mage. Lombard caught a glimpse of his face, a sight enough to force a sharp intake of breath. The poison had spread. It had spread terribly. All but a single circle around his right eye was dyed purple.

"Is it done?" Lombard asked.

"Not entirely," Dominus said. "That mage must be dealt with, before he acrews more power."

Francis felt Dominus gaze on him, and grit his teeth so hard that they might have shattered. Hatred filled his eyes, hatred for that man. Francis didn't know exactly what he did – in fact, as far as his eyes could tell, nothing was happening. The divine energy had merely ceased to move. It went no further than that.

Even without evidence of it, Francis felt it, on an intuitive level, that something had changed. Even if he could not see it yet, he wound the power that was still left in his body, and he sought to bring an end to that man, before he could bring about any further change.

The mana within Francis had finally begun to stabilize. He regained control of it. He gathered it at his fingertips, where he knew how best to use it. With those fingers, he pointed towards Dominus, and began to gather up a storm of his fury.

"I had better move, lest our battle affect the boy," Dominus said. With those words, he slowly began to make his way out of the crater.

The battlefield was silent. Only dull eyes met his words, dull eyes and a vague lack of understanding. They looked for Dominus, and then back to the boy, who was still lying just as still as he was earlier – only now there was a hole running straight through his chest.

Nila – being closest to him – reached out with shaky fingers, to touch his head, and then his neck, to feel for a pulse. She could feel nothing. It was hard not to look at the horrific wound as she worked.

The others looked at her, a question written on their faces, but she shook her head, mildly, as exhausted as the rest of them.

But then she saw her fingers, and where they were placed, gently cradling Beam's cheek. It was not the embarrassment of the gesture that astounded her – but the lack of heat. She looked up sharply, realizing that, but Dominus had already strode too far away for her to notice the question.

"Do you require assistance, Dominus?" Lombard asked.

"None," Dominus said. Though, even if he had wanted it, there would not have been a firey audience waiting for him. The heart and will that they had all displayed earlier, it was long gone. All that was left was a dismal void, and a field full of corpses.

The moment the fighting had stopped, their bodies had begun reminding them of the rest that they craved. Many found themselves crouched on a knee, in the cold slushy snow, their legs hardly able to support them.

The want and will had gone from them. It had been too long. Too much striving. Fields of battle, grand emotion – there was nothing left. They'd burned through a lifetime of drama within a few hours. They were nothing more than empty shells now.

And so it would be so, for Dominus. Even when there was an audience, finally gathered to watch him as he performed his grandest feat, that audience was not receptive to it. That audience could hardly hold their eyes open. They did not even have the energy to feel anxiety anymore. Theirs were the bodies of the mother moose, after days upon days of being chased by wolves, shielding her young from them.

There was no more energy to resist. Only rest, even if that rest meant death.

Dominus' sword appeared at his side. None could have said when it appeared there. His movements had long since been magical, even before he discovered mana. His trick was simple speed, but for the human eyes, they were all the same.

It was a curved blade, large in his hand. His was an unremarkable body. A man of average height, dressed no differently than a peasant, his clothes wide and billowing, and ragged from long use, his straw hat obscuring his face, so they could not even dimly remember he that would have the courage to save him.

When the first wave of magic hit, Dominus was already far away from them.

It was ice again. Ice was what Francis felt himself most connected to. Ice for his frozen life, and his frozen heart, a past that he would never be able to move on from, and choices that he would never be able to undo.

The ice came down in pillars from the sky. Before, his spells had merely been icy spears, pointed enough to shatter houses – but these were the size of mammoths, and pointed just as deadly as the rest had been. They plummeted from the sky like rain, a dozen of them, all channelled towards the same spot.

If any of the observers had had the energy, they would have noticed that Francis' clones had disappeared, along with those other towers. It was unlikely that even Francis knew that they had been cancelled. Such was his intent as he burst forward with all his might at Dominus. He knew it on an instinctual level – this here was a dangerous man, one that demanded his whole attention.

Perhaps even more than that.

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