Your real mother was a woman named Adria . . .
No. Leah clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palms as fear, frustration, and anger ripped up through her and exploded. She was just a little girl; there was no real way for her mind to process such a thing. A scream tore itself from her throat, expanding into the night, building ever larger until it seemed to overwhelm everything else, and her vision was filled with floating spots of light as she tripped and fell headlong to the ground.
The scream echoed back to her as something huge cracked and groaned nearby, and a great, thundering crash shook the earth. Leah clutched her hands to her head and curled herself into a tight ball, but the world seemed to be imploding around her as her entire body tingled and the pain made her scream again.
Dimly, she heard someone calling her name, then more words spoken aloud in a commanding voice, and the noise and the shuddering thunder ceased all at once.
11
Dreams of Tristram
I dreamt of the death wail of a small child tonight. It tore up from the depths, shattering the windows of the decrepit cathedral. As I started awake, it became apparent that it was actually the shriek of Diablo’s tortured end. Unable to return to sleep after such an unsettling cry, I ventured outdoors to await the warrior’s return. He finally emerged, covered in blood—much his own, much his enemies’. I am greatly relieved that he survived the ordeal, and that these horrible events are now in our past. But my mind is troubled, for could this not have been avoided if I had not dismissed my legacy so lightly?
Deckard Cain looked up from the pages of his journal, and the passage he had written just days before. He sat at his old desk in his mother’s house, the room empty and still, the ghosts that had haunted him finally silent for now. The sun had come up over Tristram for the first time in what felt like weeks.
He considered how to continue. The next journal entry should have been joyful. Outside, those few who had survived the carnage still celebrated, their hoarse shouts cutting through the thin morning air. I should be out there with them, Cain thought. Diablo has been defeated, Aidan has emerged victorious from the catacombs, and the demons that had been vomited up from the depths of the Hells have scattered. I should be rejoicing over the end of the plague that has consumed us for so long.
Yet he could not. The town was in shambles, the streets splashed with blood. The devastation overwhelmed and saddened him. Fire had torn through a portion of the properties, leaving smoking ruins behind, and some of the buildings closest to the cathedral had been ripped from their very foundations, their wooden walls jumbled like a pile of matchsticks.
The town might never recover. And all of it was his fault. Worse than that, doubts had begun to nag at him once again. He was terribly afraid that this was not the end, after all.
Cain sighed, and rubbed his aching eyes. The last remaining citizens of Tristram might not want to admit it, but deep shadows still darkened this place. The ground was cursed, and it would be better to burn it away completely like a cancerous growth, rather than let it spread. He looked around the little room at his piles of old books, memories of days long past: most of them histories of Sanctuary and its people, or attempts at scientific method, dry accounts of the bare facts, and none of the real truth that lived behind the veil. But there were other books here as well, those he had gathered more recently from the Zakarum cathedral. These books recounted a far different history: angels and demons in Sanctuary, their very blood mingling and changing over centuries, all mortals descended from them. Some of these legends were similar to those his mother had told him, years ago. Others he had never heard before.
There was no denying the evil they had faced here, not anymore. But could he believe all the rest as well, everything in these books? Was it all true? If so, he was a scholar who had focused on the wrong things for all these years. His entire life had been a lie.
He could not breathe in the little room. He needed space. There was something he must do, and it could not wait any longer.
Abruptly, Cain pushed away from the desk and stood, avoiding his more familiar staff and grabbing another that leaned in the corner. Evil seemed to pulse from it like a festering wound, and the old man held it away from him as he shuffled to the front door and out into the sunshine.
From the direction of the center of town, a wisp of smoke twirled upward into the blue sky. He could not tell whether it was from the celebration or from a fire that burned unchecked. Either way, the flames would help him accomplish what he needed.
Someone was playing a flute, and others were singing. Instead of a light and joyful song, Cain thought, the sound was like the mournful cry of a forgotten dove, its lover dead and gone.
He made his way forward, past his neighbors’ homes. Pepin’s house was dark, the door leaning half open. A single, bloody handprint marked the entrance. He did not look inside, afraid of what he might see. As the town’s only healer, Pepin had done so much for the people of Tristram. The saddest story was of Wirt, a boy who had been abducted by demons and nearly killed before the blacksmith Griswold had rescued him, but not without a terrible cost. Wirt had been badly wounded, and Pepin had been forced to amputate his leg and install a peg leg in its place.
Wirt’s mother had died of grief before he had been found, and Wirt himself had grown bitter and withdrawn. His unspoken crush on Gillian did not help matters, either; she had been blind to his affections, and his heart was broken. Cain was not sure what had happened to the child, but he feared the worst. A boy with a bad leg had little chance of outrunning the things that wanted to claim him.
He approached the center of town. The remaining citizens had built a bonfire in the center of the street, and several men were piling more wood upon the flames, coaxing them higher. Cain counted perhaps fifteen or twenty people, most of them older or infirm, those who had had no choice but to barricade themselves in their homes and try to wait out the storm. Ironically, besides a few other brave fighters, they were the ones who had survived.
Farnham, the father who had lost his daughter to the Butcher, sat apart from the others, his face red, eyes bleary from drink. Dark bloodstains still speckled his shirt. He looked up as Cain passed him, grunted once, and took a swig from a bottle of something amber-colored and foul.
Cain approached the fire, and the others parted to let him pass. Several of them eyed what he held, and shrank back, as if witnessing a snake charmer with a deadly cobra. He spotted Aidan on the other side of the flames, huddled motionless and watching from within the shadows between two buildings. He had changed from the armor he had worn in battle and had long since washed away the blood that had caked his skin after he had returned from the catacombs. But the weight of what he had done was still heavy around his neck. A more permanent mark from the battle had scarred his formerly smooth forehead like a brand.
Cain’s heart sank at the sight. Aidan had emerged victorious, but that victory had taken a severe toll on him. He was a different man than he had been before. His own brother, Albrecht, had been possessed and deformed by Diablo himself. Albrecht had been only a child. Cain knew that his terribly mutated body would have returned to its original form upon his death. Although Aidan had spoken little of it since, witnessing his brother lying there on the bloody ground, killed by his own hand, must have been worse than fighting any demon.
Cain remembered tutoring Aidan in the king’s quarters, a slight, dark-headed youth full of life and promise, although Cain hadn’t appreciated it then, as self-absorbed as he had been. At the thought of those days, a darker, far more terrible secret tried to push its way back in. He fought it back with effort, and focused on the present.