He lay face down in the snow, his eyes completely shut. When she turned him, she saw the blood streaming out of his ears and eyes, and running out of his nose. He was hot to the touch. Not just feverishly hot, but painfully hot.
"What happened?" Greeves shouted urgently, using the brief lull in combat to dash towards them. As far as he was concerned, Beam was the most important person on that battlefield. He'd seen him work miracle after miracle. He was in a situation where he didn't know what to think, as such, he clung to that which was most likely to free him, and he did so with the desperation of a younger man.
But despite his speed, the battle was already beginning to resume. The villagers were looking over to them too, with wide and fearful eyes. That fearlessness that they had exhibited up until a moment ago, it had suddenly vanished, like steam to a cold breeze. Many of their tools slipped from their hands, as weakness overran them, and the spell was broken.
Lombard could only spare the boy's body a look out of the corner of his eye, for now, two Konbreakers were closing in on him, and with only one arm, they were proving more difficult than they otherwise might be.
He found himself tutting, and muttering under his breath. "Damn it Dominus, where are you?"
He'd thought he understood his old battlefield friend, after seeing Beam himself. He'd thought he'd understood the desire to mentor something that special, to watch it grow, to allow it to be set loose on the world to do great things. He felt it firmly in his chest that he'd be willing to die for that cause.
With such a feeling, he'd also understood Dominus, and that which he'd surely seen in the boy, that which was beyond Lombard's own foresight.
And yet the boy's master was nowhere to be seen. Even straining his senses to the maximum, Lombard could pick up no hint of him. He could pick up no hint of anything past the confines of the dark dome that had sprung up around them. With each minute that passed, that dome hardened into something more glasslike, more physical, more impenetrable.
But before the monster could get within touching distance, its arm exploded in a mess of blood, drenching Beam's two defenders.
They both looked in horror at the mage, thinking him to be a sick man, even sicker than they'd expected, that he'd torment them so, even at the cost of the lives of his own men. But Francis was frozen in place, he had no part in what had just happened.
"Impossible..." He said again, his eyes widening further. "Impossible! IMPOSSIBLE!"
He could see it. At the centre of that darkness, there was still a tiny will, struggling to survive, like a single blue flame, it held it all together, stopping the being that was Beam from merely disintegrating, soul and all, into a burst of energy.
He held the slightest sway over it. Francis could see that. Enough to swat away that Hobgoblin attack, as though through a will that eclipsed consciousness, without even seeing the creature before him, he hated the Hobgoblin with the same ferocity that the monster hated him.
A moment later, Beam's leg kicked behind him, as the Hobgoblin's green blood poured all over him for its missing arm. Then, following that, his fingers began to curl, grasping the red slushy dirt between them.
An eye opened a moment later. An eye stained purely by gold. These were no longer flecks. These were the eyes of a cat – golden all the way through. Golden enough for a banker to lust after them.
The Hobgoblin burst into black flames upon meeting his gaze, and then it began to turn around, and charge through the ranks, swatting at the monsters to either side of it, bursting them into black flame as well.