A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

He held the box up over his head ceremoniously, so that the crowd could see. Then he brought it back down again, flicked open its lid, and withdrew its contents. The serving girl took the box from him, and he raised what he'd retrieved up over his head once more.

"The heart of a prize bull – seized before it could mate and we could make use of its offspring," the Elder declared. A droplet of clotted blood dripped from one of the heart's open arteries, catching the boy in the face. It slapped against his forehead with a dull sound, and began to slide down his cheek.

Not a thing was said from the crowd, as the boy stood there, his face ghostly pale, and his eyes unfocused from nausea. The Elder eventually reached down from his platform to pluck the sacrifice from the boy's hands, before he once more held it up for the crowd to admire, and he tossed it onto the bonfire to burn.

As soon as that first sacrifice hit the flames, Beam could feel a change in the air. He looked up in alarm, not quite sure what he was looking up for. His fingers reached for his sword. 'What was that?' he thought to himself. Something had happened. But it was as though he was the only one who could feel it.

It was like the night had suddenly gotten darker. Accompanied by it, there was this awful ache beginning to rise up in his heart. He grasped at his chest.

"Sacrifice," the Elder said once more. And once more, a child stepped forward. A little girl this time, looking just as pale as the boy before her. She opened up her box, and held her sacrifice high above her head.

"The brain of a lamb taken before its meat could mature," he declared. Once more clotted blood ran down the girl's forearm, and she was forced to endure until the Elder took the brain off her and threw it into the flames.

Another wave passed through the air. A wave that Beam could only describe as darkness. He looked at the sky. It didn't seem to be getting any darker, but it certainly felt much darker than it had before. What was this terrible foreboding that he felt? He glanced around, struggling to retain his cool.

Why was no one else reacting? What was this terrible wrongness?

He saw Lombard glancing at the sky as well. The Captain's eyes met his. Beam was sure, in that moment, that he should have been feeling it too.

"Sacrifice," the Elder said once again. "The feet of a prized rooster, left to suffer in its death."

Once more the meat was added to the fire, and once more the darkness amplified. He felt it strongly in his chest now, as though there was oil in his heart, and someone had lit fire to it. The air was thick with darkness. It felt hard to breathe it. And yet the ceremony continued, with the villagers oblivious.

"The lesser sacrifices have now concluded," the Elder declared. "Ingolsol now walks among us! We have his attention, now we must declare our loyalty."

He reached down and pulled up a package of his own. Beam had no idea where on the platform he'd been hiding it, for it was a huge thing. About the size of a child. In fact, wrapped in black cloth as it was, that was exactly what it looked like the body of a child, wrapped before cremation.

"The effigy of the child," the Elder declared, before tossing it onto the flames.

Beam felt a hand grasp his, as Nila reached for him in alarm. "Beam…" she murmured, her eyes looking to his, desperately. With their suspicions against the Elder, knowing what they thought they did, he imagined that this symbolic sacrifice of the child seemed a lot different now, given the circumstances. Even if it happened every year, it was impossible to set from the mind just how eerie it was.

With it being a supposedly symbolic sacrifice, Beam had expected it to be wood. But It certainly did not sound like wood, or look like wood, as it was tossed in those flames. The wrapped bundle folded, distinctly like flesh. Beam could only hope that it was the meat of an animal, rather than the body of a child.

"It can't be," he reassured her, shaking his head, squeezing her hand back, but even he wasn't sure.

All at once, that weighted darkness in the air thickened, even more suddenly than it had before. Beam shivered. He was struck by the distinct feeling of being put in a cage. A cage that he couldn't see the limits of, but a cage that he felt nonetheless.

His heart was on fire now. He could even swear that he could hear laughter now too. A deep and throaty laughter, tinged by madness. He looked to Lombard once more, his eyes searching. The Captain's hand was on the hilt of his sword, as though in debate, but as of yet, he was not moving. He could not move – for like Beam, he knew too little.

"The symbolic sacrifice of the child, for those that the cold of winter will claim, we hope that these symbolic sacrifices will appease you instead, o' Dark Lord Ingolsol," the Elder said once again, before throwing a different wrapped bundle onto the fire, this one slightly different in size than the rest, just as they would be had they truly been children's bodies.

Beam could feel Nila's nails digging into his hands, as she fought to restrain herself. She seemed convinced that her fears were entirely irrational, and that she was merely seeing things that weren't there. Her mother wasn't reacting, after all. For she'd seen this festival many times before – it had lost its effect on her.

Fighting to keep himself calm, even as the pressure within himself continued to boil with every new load that Ingolsol put onto the fire, Beam did his best to reassure her, as he squeezed his hand back. "It's not Stephanie. We will find her," he said, as much for his sake as hers, as he fought to keep his mind on something.

And then the Elder threw the final symbolic sacrifice onto the fire, declaring it again for Ingolsol.

The flames flashed and expanded, as though someone had poured oil on them. The laughter was even louder now, so much louder. It was no longer in Beams' head, but across the sky, and distant, like the groaning of thunder.