BAM!
Beam's boot collided with the door once more, this time bending the middle hinge of the door, nearly snapping it. The door was beginning to cave inwards on the left, though it was still held in place firmly by the bolted lock on one side.
'If you cared about the children, would you not have waited until they were gone?' A voice of doubt asked him, as he drew his boot back once more. He couldn't tell whether that voice was his own. He only knew that he didn't know.
He wrinkled his nose, as he tried to steady his blurring vision. It had been a while since the dizziness had hit him quite so strongly.
"You alright, boy?" The sergeant asked, noticing him stagger, and noticing the strained look on his face.
Beam didn't answer. He brought his boot back once again, and put all his uncertainty into a single forceful kick.
BAM!
The door finally caved completely on the left side. Not enough that it yet completely revealed what was inside, but enough that Beam could force the door back with his hands, and step through.
Before he went, he gave a look to the sergeant. The sergeant seemed to know what he meant, for he came forward with the torch, and shined it through the gap where Beam was heading.
The point of it was facing outwards, though, and Beam saw the partially shattered remains of a boar skull, that he assumed had been making use of the stake before the Elder.
Now, the stakes in his hands – those were certainly hammered in. It was their blunt points that faced outwards. It was as though an artist had taken inspiration from an accidental, or even natural occurrence, and merely added to it.
But again, it was hard to tell quite what had killed him. For there was that stake through his throat, and those stakes through his hands – but there was also a massive gaping hole where his stomach had been.
The sergeant's torch cowered for only a moment, hesitant to reveal the corpse in all its horrific glory. But then his experience took over, as the veteran of many battlefields, who had seen men mangled and maimed in more ways than he could count.
With the torch held closer, it was hard not to spot the strange state of the wound that the Elder bore. "...It's been charred closed," the sergeant noted, both awed and horrified.
A few of his lower ribs had been removed, along with all his intestines, his kidneys, and half his liver. A hole the size of a picture frame – that's what he'd been left with. And yet not a drop of blood stained his clothes. Nor did anything leave its perfect position. It was as though the wound had been instantly charred, closed the moment that it had happened.
Neither Beam nor the sergeant was particularly well-versed in such things. There was only one word that seemed fitting for it. "Magic," Beam muttered. The sergeant nodded along with him. It was just as evil a thing as he had been led to believe. To the sergeant, the remnants of that magic seemed to explain the haunting evil that still sat in the air.
They turned away from the corpse, to acknowledge the carnage that had taken place in the rest of the room.
The man that they'd labelled guilty, long before even discovering his body, he was now dead. It was difficult to say just what sort of role he'd played in the abduction of the children – whether he was merely the whipped dog of someone else, forced to do everything that he did. Or whether he was part of a more give-and-take relationship, one that had gone wrong.