Diablo:
Demonsbane -- Excerpt
Copyright 2000 Blizzard
Entertainment, posted with permission
Chapter
I: The Night of Souls
And the hosts of Hell looked upon man, and swore
vengeance for their defeat by the Vizjerei.
“No more will these creatures deny us,” swore the Prime Evils, “for we
are greater than they.” And thus began
the Sin War.
—
The Holy Scriptures of Zakarum
Siggard startled awake, the sounds of battle still ringing in his ears, as though he had just been in the midst of the bloodshed.
Exhausted,
he lay on the bank of a road, the trees on both sides obscured by a light mist
illuminated by moonlight. He tried to
sit up, only to have his back explode in pain.
For a moment he rubbed the sore muscles and kidneys, and then he
struggled to his knees.
Blinking,
he wondered where he was and how he had gotten there. The road did not look familiar at all, and there were no visible
landmarks. He scratched his head,
trying to think, and winced for a moment when his fingernails ran over a tender
spot.
Siggard was
a large man, well grown, with a full brown beard. But now his usually placid gray eyes were haggard and his beard
was in a tangle. He shook his head; he
knew he had been at the field of Blackmarch, a shield-man in the army of Earl
Edgewulf. And they had been fighting
someone, but who he could not say.
Groaning,
Siggard gained his feet. He would first
have to find his way to the battlefield and try to rejoin the army, but what he
truly wished was to rejoin his family in Bear’s Hill. That would have to wait until the fighting was done, though.
Taking
stock of his gear, he noticed his sword was rather more notched than the last
time he remembered, and his leather jerkin and trousers were ragged but
intact. Where his coat of mail had
gotten to, he had no idea. His wide
shield was also missing.
Cloaked in
a mist drawn eerie in the moonlight, Siggard tried to get his bearings, but no
matter which way he turned, he couldn’t tell where Blackmarch might lie. Finally, he picked a direction and began
walking.
How long he
walked before he reached the gallows, Siggard could not say, though it seemed
hours. Regardless, he found himself
facing a fork in the road. To one side
of the road there was a three-way sign, but it was too dark to read it. On the other side stood a gibbet, a decaying
corpse dangling from it by a worn hemp rope.
Unbidden,
the words of one of his comrades in arms came back to him. “Hanged men have angry souls, you know,” old
Banagar had said. “That’s why they
hoist them at crossroads. That way they
can’t find their way back for vengeance.”
Banagar had always been rather morbid, he reflected.
Siggard
shook his head, trying to ignore the stench of putrefying flesh. The road had to lead to a town somewhere,
even if it was in the twice-damned underworld itself. So all he had to do was pick a direction and follow it.
He looked
up at the corpse and smiled. “I don’t
suppose you’d know the way to Blackmarch, eh?”
The
corpse’s rotting head turned and glared at him.
Siggard
leapt back in shock, drawing his sword and staring at the gibbet. The body dangled, lifeless, as it had before
Siggard had spoken, and as it no doubt had long before the soldier had even
arrived.
Siggard
felt a chill go down his spine as he looked at the corpse. He prayed silently to the gods to let him
see his family again, just one more time.
He didn’t want to die here, trapped among lost spirits.
His sword
still drawn, Siggard backed down one of the paths, finally turning once the
gibbet had vanished in the mist. The
ethereal fog curled around him as he walked, Siggard mouthing a silent prayer
with every step.
The path
twisted and turned among the trees, and the dirt crunched under Siggard’s
boots. For a moment he wondered if he
wasn’t in some endless forest of the damned, forced to wander a haunted woodland
for all eternity. He shook his head; if
he was to find his way out, he would have to stop thinking like that.
Faint
shapes appeared in the mist ahead of him, and for a moment Siggard could make
out a horse and rider, standing under a large oak tree. He blinked hard, but the figure
remained. He pursed his lips; whatever
it was, it wasn’t a figment of his imagination, though it did seem ghostly.
As he
walked forward, he saw another figure appear in the mist. The newcomer drew a blade and, before
Siggard had a chance to shout a warning, plunged it into the rider. Siggard rushed forward, his sword at the
ready, praying he would not have to fight, yet as he ran the two figures faded
into the swirling fog. Finally, he
stood under the oak, but not even a footprint suggested that anybody else had
been there that night.
“If this
keeps up much longer, I’ll go mad,” Siggard muttered. “I might even start talking to myself.”
He moved away until he had a respectful distance between himself and the oak, and then began to gather deadwood. After a bit of work, he reclined under an ancient elm, watching the flames dance on his small fire until he drifted to sleep.