A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 261: A Counterattack - Part 13

One thing was for sure – there was a mage afoot. Dominus had warned Beam of such men. He had warned him that they were one in ten thousand. That they could eviscerate a village with a single click of their fingers. That the discovery of mana was such a maddening pursuit – that one would see no progress, no results, until the moment of overwhelming victory – and it created only the vilest of people.

Beam wasn't sure why such a mage would be operating so stealthily, whilst clinging to the shadows, if he had the sort of power that Dominus had told him that even the worst of mages had. But along those same lines, Beam wasn't sure whether he could truly understand the motives of a madman to begin with.

The remnants of the room, after all, they thoroughly reeked of madness.

There was a circular desk, in one corner of the room, with all sorts of papers strewn across it. But unlike the papers that Beam had found upstairs, he was quite sure that they weren't accounting ledgers. He could see the occult symbols strewn all over them, even from a distance.

But had he not wanted to look that far, there was another such symbol strewn at his feet, right in front of where the Elder's body lay.

It was composed of a triangle, with each point of the triangle yielding a circle. It was drawn in a blue ink, that glowed even in the darkness, and there were the remnants of a candle in each of those circles, along with something in the centre, that Beam could only assume was blood, from its deep purple redness.

"Seems as though they were doing some sort of ritual," the sergeant noted. From the book that was cast aside on the floor, Beam could only assume the same. It had managed to avoid the pool of blood, but there was a scorch mark on its leather cover.

"…" He flicked through the pages, but no matter where he turned, there was nothing. Nothing except blank pages. That – and the crest on the inside of the cover. A boar's head standing atop a wooden stake that had been driven into the ground – and then the whole thing was encapsulated in flame.

Beam pointed out the sigil to the sergeant. The man squinted at it, and rubbed the stubble of his chin, before looking back towards where the Elder's body had been. "Certainly are some similarities there," he mused.

Around the rest of the room, there were similar such oddities. A rusted old dagger with an ornately curved handle. It looked like some sort of ritual instrument. Then there was a purple dust that caught Beam's attention, as it sat underneath some of the papers atop the desk. He reached out a hand to touch it, but hesitated, unsure whether such a thing would be dangerous.

The purple powder reminded him of those crystals that he had seen in the forest, but with no knowledge of magic to go by, he couldn't be overly certain.

Only once they had thoroughly inspected the rest of the room did they finally turn their attention to the remaining two bodies – and even then they did it somewhat begrudgingly, having more than had their fill of corpses for the day.

The two bodies were all but perfectly hidden by the black cloaks that they wore. They seemed to be of similar build, with one collapsed on the ground, with its head against the wall, and the other laying face down in one corner of the room.

"I think it's fair to say that one's dead," the sergeant noted, as he pointed at the corpse that was face down. The legs had been cut away from the torso, and a pool of blood gathered around the whole gruesome picture.

Beam pulled the hood back, to reveal one of the Elder's strange servants. Even in death, the woman had a thoroughly unsettling sort of beauty to her. The symmetry of her face was perfect, yet the unsettling aura that seemed to seep out from her very pores still remained, even as her pale face and lips were covered in blood.

He replaced the hood, after confirming she was dead. A frown sat on his lips. Those women had always unsettled him. And now one of them was dead. He wasn't sure how to feel about that.

He approached the other corpse, expecting to find the twin. This one didn't have a pool of blood around its feet – there was a red splatter against the wall instead, around the head. As though someone had taken her head, and slammed it with great force.

Hesitantly, Beam once more removed the hood, to confirm the death of the woman.

Just as he had expected, black hair spilt out, and he was met with a near-identical copy of the woman that he had just seen dead on the other side of the room. A person would be hard-pressed to find a single point of difference on those faces of theirs – or at least, they would have been in the past.

Now it was more than obvious where the differences lay, for one side of the woman's face had been ravaged beyond recognition.

Her cheekbone had been shattered, and protruded through her cheek, as the eye on her right side hung loosely, just out of the socket.

Even after all that he had seen that day, Beam found himself flinching at the sight. The woman had been rendered truly monstrous. The sergeant found himself looking away as well. Beam moved to put the hood back on, turning away as he did so.

Yet his want to get out of that room as soon as possible was stifled, as a cold hand grasped his, harsh fingernails digging into his skin. He turned back towards the corpse with violence, his fist readied upon instinct, as fear pumped through his heart. His fearful gaze was met by a single unblinking blue eye, that had flickered back to life.

A lip curled, in what seemed to be an attempt at a smile. Beam wished more than anything that she hadn't bothered. He'd seen the twins smile once before. He'd thought the sight to be unsettling. But this… This went beyond unsettling. Fresh blood dripped from her jaw at the movement.