Cain clenched his fists. “Bigger things? The Horadrim are all gone, so you became a storyteller to fill the emptiness. But the people of Tristram are laughing at you. Look around you, Mother! Where are your angels, your demons? Where are your heroes? The Horadrim are long dead, and the town’s no different for it!”
He stood up and went to the tiny window, his entire body trembling. You are the last of a proud line. He wanted nothing to do with that nonsense, not anymore. He wanted to be left alone to read his own books.
The night was heavy and moist, and the fog had grown thicker. He could see it pooling under the lights hung on posts, obscuring the muddy ground. He heard his mother get up, but he did not turn around at first. Only when he heard the crackle of flame did he whirl to find Aderes with his book in her hand, holding it against the open lantern as the brittle, dry pages caught fire, his mother’s eyes like pools of orange and yellow that reflected the heat back at him.
With a gasp he leaped forward and grabbed it from her, beating it against his chest until the heat seared him and he dropped it to the dirt floor and stomped it out, then stood there, chest heaving. “What have you done?”
“This one is not part of your destiny,” she said. “Your proper texts are with Jered’s belongings, when you choose to read them. I kept them for you.”
He stared at the remains of the book on Westmarch. The pages were seared and blackened, beyond saving. A rage built up and caught in Deckard’s throat. “Your demons live inside you, Mother, and nowhere else. I promise you that. If they’re coming, as you say, let them come. Why don’t they show themselves, if such things exist?”
A strangled cry escaped his mother’s mouth, and she clasped her hand to her lips. She took a stumbling step backward. “Be careful what you wish for, Deckard. You don’t know what you are asking for with this—”
“Let them come!”
The sound of his shriek filled the night, echoed back to him, then died away. For a moment the world seemed to cease its motion, and Deckard felt a draft circle his bare legs like an ice-cold caress. His body tingled with equal parts excitement and fear, a momentary longing for something to change, anything that would take him away from this place. He knew that if it did not, he would end up like his father, working in the tannery or selling meat to the occasional wanderer who still came to gape wide-eyed at the old Horadric monastery as it settled into ruin. He would die here, and his bones would sink into the earth and nobody would remember when he had lived or perished.
“I want to believe,” he said, suddenly very tired. “But I can’t.”
His mother shook her head. “Then I cannot help you,” she said. “You are already lost.” A sob caught in her throat. She turned and fumbled with the door, leaving the lantern on the table as she walked out of his room.
Part of him wanted to go after her and tell her he was sorry, that he hadn’t meant those things he had said, but his legs remained rooted to the spot. Perhaps he had meant to say them, after all. The lantern flickered, as if the breath of an unseen presence had touched it. Shadows danced upon the wall, and for a moment he thought he heard a whisper: Deckaaaard . . .
He spun to face the little window again, open to the night. The air coming through it was icy and seemed much colder than it should have been. He went to it and peered out, squinting to see more clearly. There was nothing outside at first but the dark and the fog, and then movement came from the direction of the fields. He flinched as a stray dog slunk quickly away with a soft whine, looking for scraps, disappearing on its way toward a cluster of houses.
Cain looked up the hill at the old monastery that loomed over the town like an ancient, empty husk, something used up and abandoned. He gathered his tunic around him and shivered, momentarily in awe of his own hubris. In his heart, he prayed for something to happen that would derail him from the path he saw clearly open to him, but he knew that it would not. Real life was not like those myths.
He picked up the pages of the book on Westmarch, and the blackened edges crumbled to dust in his hands.
Let them come.
It would take another fifty years, but Deckard Cain’s wish would be fulfilled.
Part One
Gathering Shadows
1
Ruins of the Vizjerei Secret Repository, the Borderlands, 1272
In the great, dark depths of what followed, there would be little time to reflect on the moment when the crumbling of the line between this world and the next began to accelerate out of control; the explosion on the mountain was like two warriors rushing toward their doom, swords flashing by in the blink of an eye, seeming to emerge unscathed until they began to stumble, bloody mouths opening, mortal wounds bringing them to their knees.
But perhaps that moment was here, held within the endless, baking heat of the Borderlands, with the ruins hovering just out of sight. When the two travelers neared the top of the final dune, they might have heard a ringing, like a piece of metal struck with a hammer and vibrating at a pitch just out of hearing range that set their teeth on edge.
The pair paused for a drink of water. Sunlight shimmered off the endless sands, baking their skin. The younger one, a proud knight of Westmarch, wearing golden armor and bearing a red shield, spat a yellow stream and wiped his shining face with a rag, then drank deeply from the canteen before handing it to his companion.
The older man, who wore a gray, hooded tunic belted around his waist and a rucksack across his back, shifted his walking staff to his other hand to accept it and took his fill. The belt was etched with strange designs the color of dried blood. He was thin enough to blow away in the wind, and his wild, white hair and long beard made him appear slightly mad, but there was a strength to him that had grown more apparent the longer they traveled together. He walked slowly but at a steady pace, no matter the time of day or night, and the young man had often found himself scrambling to keep up.
The old man pointed to their right, where the sand held a slight depression that ran in a line for about twenty feet before disappearing again. “That marks a place where a thresher surfaced to feed,” he said. “They become more aggressive as evening falls. We must be very careful.”
The end of the slight depression was speckled with dark red spots. Blood. The young man had heard about the threshers, terrible beasts like dragons with monstrous teeth and claws that could tear a man apart. He could fight with his sword against anything made of flesh; it was the creatures not of this realm that posed a far greater threat, he thought, although he had never met one in person. But looking at the old man and knowing something about the scars he carried, the young man thought his companion might be able to hold his own against those just as well.
After a moment’s pause, they continued on, and at the top of the very next rise, they found what they had been seeking.
Twin columns rose up out of the sand in the distance like jagged teeth, their tops ending abruptly as if snapped off by something inhuman. That could be so, Deckard Cain thought, if this was in fact the entrance to the ancient ruins of the Vizjerei repository. He could only imagine what sort of horrors might have visited this place in years past, looking for sorcerers’ blood.
They had been traveling for days and had left their mules at the last town to continue the final part of their journey on foot. Mules would be of little use on this shifting sand base. The location Cain and his companion sought was remote. He had no doubt that these ruins would have remained well hidden for many years more if this young warrior had not brought him the obscure Zakarum texts now safely nestled in his rucksack. The Ancient Repositories of the Vizjerei in Caldeum were far larger and better known among mages, but this one, if it did indeed exist, could be even more important.