A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

The trees thinned the nearer to the river he grew, and the light of the moon managed to break through. Beam glanced at it, noting that it was full. It radiated a golden light, whereas often it tended to appear silver.

Beam noted that too, wondering if an omen from the skies could allow his thoughts to transform, and send him in a new direction of thought, so that he might find that which he was looking for.

The river's water ran black as Beam neared it. Fast flowing, for the most part, aside from a small pocket of stillness where the rocky bank angled and the current could not penetrate. Listlessly, Beam put his hand in the water, allowing the strong current to take hold of it, dragging it along in its flow.

He noted the ripples along the current. Where the water sloshed over rocks and made bigger waves, each one different from the last. He felt the river's indomitable adaptive power as it ran, and he wondered if he could take anything from its strength and make it his own.

His hand soon grew cold as he left it there. With the sun gone, there was nothing to heat the chilly mountain water. It was a truly harsh temperature now, with them being so close to winter.

"Mm…" Beam twisted his lips, as no truly promising thoughts came to him, despite his urgent thinking. There didn't even seem to be any hope in them. No matter what angle he took it from, no idea came to him that promised the strength to defeat the Hobgoblin. "I need to think about this differently somehow…"

He hated the cold water. Ever since Dominus had started making him go into the cold rivers as part of his training, Beam had grown even more sure in that stance. Especially at this time of year – the cold was a level of suffering that he never quite grew used to. Even if he was able to spend slightly longer in there after weeks of doing it, the suffering remained all the same.

But from the cold, there always came a change in his mind. For hours afterwards, he would feel an indescribable calm, as though that ice had even managed to quiet his soul.

Tempted by such a thing, Beam took his shoes off, then coat, then his shirt, then his trousers, for the first time voluntarily confronting the cold.

Immediately, it took his breath away. His chest constricted as his body fought to gasp. But he controlled that urge, used to it by now. He steadied his breathing with a few short and sharp breaths, gradually accustoming himself to the cold. The water came up all the way to his neck, as he sat in the only still portion of the river, his toes just barely touching the cool rocks of the riverbed.

Once he had adjusted well enough, he ducked his head under and held his breath for a few long moments. Already, his perspective had changed. His body only wanted one thing: to escape the cold. Thoughts of the Hobgoblin were hard to cling to, and they came more calmly than they had just moments before, devoid of the franticness.

Sitting under water like that, in the dark, Beam felt an indescribable peace. He could hear the sounds of rushing water through his ears, but because he was not immediately part of it – as he now sat in the still pocket of water by the bank – it became a peaceful and soothing sound.

The water gave him a feeling of weightlessness, and with the darkness that came with it, he was hit by a feeling like he was floating through the void.

Rarely did Beam ever feel so open. Along with the calmness, he could feel a terrible anxiety clawing at him. 'So that's where the trouble lies,' a part of him murmured to himself. Yet the part that resisted confronting this terrible threat to his soul, that part still reigned supreme.

And rightly so, for it knew that to confront these foreign elements was the riskiest of all procedures, a danger worse than death, a danger of losing oneself entirely.

He resurfaced for a gasp of breath, before immediately going back under, drawn by the sensation. His thoughts faded entirely. They seemed lesser than this feeling, as though subordinate to it. In the stillness of that floating void, his body filled with peace, he allowed that feeling to take fully over and he surrendered to it, imagining for a moment that he was merely drifting through eternity.

With that sensation, the gears in his brain began turning of their own volition. He no longer had to force the thoughts or seek them out – they actively ran to him. They carried the scent of that which Dominus had spoken of. That which lay beyond perception. That which words failed to describe, so feeling did the work instead.

It did not offer the power he sought, but it offered just the tiniest shift in perception. Just the smallest poke of encouragement to allow the slightest creepings of what many would call madness to wiggle their way in.

He hardened his jaw and resurfaced the water, feeling as though he had attained the slightest bit of understanding. Like a tiny fleck of gold dust – just enough to tell him that it was barely real.

Doing his best to rid himself of that water that still clung to his skin, he hurriedly dressed himself, his body shivering all the while, desperately trying to restore heat to his body.

But even as the heat fought to return, the feeling did not fade. There, within it, Beam found both hope and he found melancholy. He found the hope that there existed a route to his victory, and he found the melancholy at having to abandon a part of himself in pursuit of that process.

The moon rose higher in the sky as Beam's considerations reached their zenith and his shivers pounded through his body. Its golden light shone on the dark mountain river, lighting the surface of the water that Beam had been swimming in just moments before, momentarily casting a light down into its depth.