It drank up trees, and summoned up monsters, enriching the landscape in despair. It drank it all in, all that life, all that potential, and then it offered all of it to Ingolsol... Only for it in turn to all get drawn towards Beam.
He did not understand how it had happened, Francis did not. For there was no precedent set for such things. No historical records. Man was not made to resist the will of the Gods. But such a thing was happening in front of him, and he was not one to deny reality, not when it stood in the way of his plans.
He knew the intentions of his Dark Lord better than anyone. The realization of such a thing brought a gleeful smile to his lips.
"Of course... Of course... I had merely need pop him like a balloon," he said. "And then Ingolsol will come pouring down, manifested more purely than he ever has been in history."
He sang to himself, as he stumbled upon another realization. What had seemed just moments before like a terrible stretch of unfortunateness, now it seemed to be the height of luck. Even if he'd tried, he'd never have been able to contain the Dark energy so densely. Not to the degree it was now, inside Beam's body, as it continued to go there.
At best, it would have been like the smoke off a burning house, but now they had the potential for much more, far beyond what he had expected before.
There was the stench of Claudia on him too – the boy was living proof that the two could be bound together. Claudia's essence could be made into Ingolsol's. That there was a discovery worth ten years of research. If Francis had known such a thing, he would have attacked the Academy five years earlier – he never would have waited.
He would have seized the weakest of the newly blessed nights and torn their power away from him.
They hadn't been organized at all, not from the start. Ever since the Yarmdon attack, they had been nothing more than a rabble. None of them had the tools to confront magic with a plan immediately, especially not the tools to counter a mage like Francis, who'd spent so much time laying such an extensive trap.
In truth, still none of them knew the full extent of the situation they were in. It was as though they'd shifted to another world entirely, under completely new laws. Of course, such things were intended – it was meant to be shocking, it was meant to be a dramatic shift. It was meant to break them.
But it didn't manage to. Not yet. It didn't manage to snatch at those spirits that it sought, to fuel the summoning of the Lord of Despair. It had failed in that, but succeeded completely in everything else.
They were tossed about like a tiny ship on a stormy sea. The chaos of the situation was unfathomable. Even now, not a single one of them held a coherent goal in their minds. There was nothing obvious for them to do, aside from kill that which was in front of them.
There was nothing obvious they should be doing – yet they were here. They were by his side. They weren't warriors, but now it was as though they clung to that warrior honour. Old men, young women, farmhands and shepherds and bakers – not a single one of them was without blood. As the monsters tore into them, the fire in their eyes did not fade.
Beam didn't understand it. He didn't understand them, he didn't understand himself. He only understood the need for violence. He couldn't see where victory lay. They were at the bottom of a murky swamp. They were truly in a demon's domain.
It seemed to be that the only choice on the cards for them was to die – that seemed to be the only eventuality. Another thirty seconds, and those other three armies would be near them, and they'd buckle and shatter like a tiny glass house.