A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 332: The Birth of a Leader - Part 8

It was those same instincts that have given him all he had. To turn on them now would be to deny all that he was. No, he was not the sort of man to do that. He hardened his face, and closed his eyes.

The sword whipped mercifully straight through the neck, severing the head without causing any more pain than necessary.

The men surrounding the body still could not find it in themselves to relax, even as they saw the giant head fall from the giant neck. It took them a good few moments before they dared to remove the spears that pinned the man in place. Even dead, Gorm was a terrifying man.

"Luck to those that bare the darkness in our place," Gorm's last words, murmured in a foreign language, had caught the wind.

They didn't know what the giant had meant, nor what that greater instinct was that he was operating on, but still, even with that body lying flat in front of them, and all the Yarmdon bodies strewn around it, many a man could not bring himself to relax.

They were looking into the darkness for more. More enemies to be slain, more devils to be rooted out. But none came. They were left with nothing but pounding hearts and feelings of uncertainty.

"We won, right?" Judas said, carefully looking around. As he looked back, he could see that all the fighting in the village was done, and the stream of villagers that had begun to come their way had halted, when they'd seen too that their battle was over.

Tolsey answered that question on behalf of the others. "Aye, we won," he said firmly. "But at what cost?"

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His eyes were pointed towards the fort, where the rest of their allies lay, slain, in the blood-red mud.

"A lesser cost than we might have been allowed in other circumstances," Lombard said, casting a sidelong glance toward Beam. "Those villagers have it written on their faces – they look to celebrate."

Beam had noticed that too. There was a careful joy to the villager's movements. They were just as restrained as the soldiers, just as wary, as though they couldn't quite yet believe that they'd won. Most seemed to want to go and check on their family members before anything else. Nila was no exception.

"If they're gone, I'm going to look for Mother," Nila said, unable to keep the anxiousness out of her voice. She'd looked carefully to Lombard as she said such a thing – the Captain had been in the camp, after all, where her mother was supposed to have been. If something had happened to her, then he would have known. But the man remained quiet.

"I'll go with you," Beam offered. "We still don't know when the monsters will come back."

"Indeed – it seemed that everyone had forgotten. It's the monsters that a man truly fears. Men are just men, after all."

Many of the soldiers found themselves nodding in agreement at that comment, Judas included. "That's true," he said. "Give me a Yarmdon over one of those Titans any day of the week."

Even as he replied, he did not stop to think where the voice had come from.

There were only a handful of them that felt the hairs on the back of their neck raise, as though it had been brushed by a chilly northern wind.

Their muscles tensed, and their shoulders hunched, and they found their feet rooted in place.

The voice was dripping more malice than any of them had ever felt. It was crushing. Unnerving. Terribly sickening.

"Monsters… or Mages," Lombard said.

"Bingo."

With those words, it was like Lombard had cast a spell.

The village had been growing darker, as those burning houses burned their way through, and the flames found themselves without the fuel to keep their light casting. None of the villagers had found it in themselves yet to go grabbing torches. They were still highly uncertain, and for good reason.

A lazy man might have been pleased by that fact, for the torches were no longer necessary. Not now that the whole horizon was on fire.

As far as the eye could see there were flames. In a shudder at that realization, Beam turned to look behind him. And there, off in the distance, he could see them too. Flames burning like the hearth fires of the underworld. A whole ring of it.

They were flames of the darkest black, yet somehow, they gave off light. Or perhaps that was the incorrect term – for the world around them was still blackened, fully encased in shadow. Yet there was something about the fire that made the human eyes able to see everything that was around it.

It was as though it wished to deny the human mind the hope that light offered, but at the same time dismiss his ability to be willfully blind. In short, it seemed as though they existed purely for torment. These flames, running their ring around the whole village, all the way up to forest, and around the fort.

It was like a magic circle with a two-mile radius, possibly even more. Such a thing on such a scale, it was monstrous, and the pressure from the power it exerted was not to be sniffed at. It was as though the air was filled with smoke. Every breath that a man took was only half-satisfied.

The other of it, there came an irritation, like poison, forcing him to cough. So cough he would, only to recover, and find himself spluttering again a few moments later. Nila's hand went to her mouth, as she choked against the horrific air.

"What… is this..?" She croaked.

"Ah, finally, someone asked," that same voice from earlier said, gleefully. Beam couldn't see who it was that was speaking, yet it was as though the man was speaking right into his ear. For a few moments he'd been convinced it was Ingolsol, but from the looks on the faces of those around him, they could hear the voice too.

Beam shot Lombard a look. 'Is this a mage?' it seemed to say. Lombard nodded firmly back, his jaw tight, as he continued to clutch the bloodied bandages around the stump that remained of his sword arm.