A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 343: The Will of Men, The Will of Gods - Part 4

He had monsters to the left of him, and to the right, their breath fogging in the cold air, and their spittle flowing freely down their chins, as they pawed at the earth impatiently, twisting and turning against the invisible command bindings that held them in place.

He had his followers as well. Men and women with souls as black as his, as craving in power as he was. He'd promised to teach them the secrets of magic. In the meantime, they made rather effective tools. Their swords glowed in the green fire that Francis had made his calling card, ever since he set his mother's head upon a stick, and lit it with the power that Ingolsol had given him.

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"You've grown silent, mage," Lombard said. "This standoff makes me uncomfortable. Could it be that you've given way to cowardice? Has some shred of sanity shone its light through your broken mind? Surrender, then, and you have my word as a Knight of Stormfront that your death will be quick and painless."

"Painless?" Beam repeated, quietly, but Francis heard it. He saw the hunger in his eyes, a hatred.

"Strange eyes…" Francis noted. He held up his palm, out of curiosity, and a tendril of vines erupted from it.

Within the span of half a second, those vines erupted into a giant tree – the most giant of all trees. Though, this tree was on its side, and it was moving as twisting like the limb of an octopus, as its branches wound around itself, compressing itself into something singular, and grasping for a single target.

Beam's sword was free of his scabbard before the tree hit him. He slashed at it, as though it was flesh. His blade bit in for half an inch, and then stopped, as Francis' tree limb grew around it, as smoothly as liquid, rooting itself in place.

The vines began to extend up Beam's forearm, and then around his shoulder, and then around his waist. Half a second more, and he was lifted off his feet, his body given speed, as the vines began to retract at an incredible rate.

An arrow came at Francis from the corner of his vision. He noted it with an annoyed tut, and carefully stepped out of the way of it. He looked at the girl who had shot it, and gave her a look of distance. When he turned his attention back to Beam, the tree limb that he had extended from his arm was already falling into ash. Magic required a great deal of concentration, after all.

As the magic disappeared, Beam was dropped with it. He was not especially high up – it was the speed that he'd been travelling at that was more of a problem. He landed with a thud in the snow, and then went skidding for a dozen yards, before the snow finally pilled up enough to slow him fully.

Francis didn't find himself feeling particularly irritated by the disintegration of his spell. In fact, he was rather pleased with the results.

Half of the joy of all the preparation that he'd put in was this intense magnifying of his power. Extending a tree like that for over half a mile was something he could never have hoped to do, had he not set up such a powerful magic circle, and littered it with fitting sacrifices.

Seeing the boy – or knight, as Francis thought him to be – crumble like that in the snow, he was struck by the sudden desire to merely torture all three of the knights like that.

Why not, after all? As long as they retained the slightest fragment of vitality, they'd continue to live. It would give him something to do, while he focused on breaking the rest of them.

But his armies were growing restless, all four of them. The other three versions of him, his shadows, they were rather restless as well.

They attempted to cast the same spell that he had, but the mana burden appeared to be too much for them. They couldn't handle anything more mana-hungry than a few ice lances, or so it seemed. Francis noted that. He was not the only one.

"The real one is the Eastern one," Lombard said quietly. "Now we know."

"And what can we do with that information?" Tolsey found himself asking in a hoarse voice.

Lombard looked at his Vice-Captain. He looked as bad as Lombard felt. He wanted to offer him a plan, but he could do nothing more than keep his expression as stony-faced as it usually was. Even that was growing difficult by now.

Slowly, Beam rose up from the snow, with a fresh trail of blood running from the side of his face. Unlike Lombard, his face was not stony. His anger was unmistakable. An anger that he had not even managed to summon up for the Yarmdon, it wracked every fibre of his being.

Francis looked up from his thinking, sensing a change in the air. Finally, something had evoked the attention of Ingolsol. There was an increase in Darkness. He held up his hands in joy. "Lord Ingolsol! You reveal yourself!

Please, eat until your heart's content, these sacrifices are yours. If you would make them dance before I can tug their strings, then by all means, allow yourself it."

His hope, with as dense a Domain of Darkness as Francis had managed to create, was to offer Ingolsol the chance to manifest himself as a physical entity.

He'd read in a tome – he'd done a lot of reading lately, from old and dark tomes – that there had been several occasions of Ingolsol manifesting himself – or at least a fragment of himself – when there were particularly severe cases of the Cursed.

Some Cursed managed to last years undetected, their powers steadily increasing all the while. They'd hunt in the night, like common murderers, but with each life that they took, their powers grew, and in turn, they lost more and more of their sanity.

With such reading, Francis had formed a hypothesis that, if the density of Despair was dense enough, then the Dark Lord might choose to manifest himself. He'd assumed such a thing to be desirable to Ingolsol.