Diablo: The Order by Nate Kenyon

Author:Nate Kenyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Tristram’s End

Deckard Cain clutched like a drowning man at the slippery bars that stood between him and oblivion. The cage rocked gently in a hot wind, bringing the smell of charred wood and scorched human flesh. Shame and horror twisted like a knife in his guts, and he moaned in sorrow at the memory of all the pain and bloodshed he had seen, and all he had lost.

Everything that had ever meant anything to him was gone. Aidan, the king’s eldest son, whom Cain had tutored so long ago, and who had slain Diablo and emerged from the catacombs a hero, had disappeared in the night, and Hell had come back to Tristram.

“My Aidan,” he whispered through cracked lips, and then gasped a plea that fell away into emptiness. “My Tristram. Please, no more. No more…”

His limbs shook with exhaustion, his body near collapse. He had not eaten in days. He peered with watery eyes at the last of the flames guttering among the remains of his town. They had come with little warning, returning to finish the survivors, who had barely had the chance to breathe after the Diablo’s reign of terror. The people had fought valiantly with the last of their strength and taken a few of the damned with them; a bloodied goatman lay sprawled across a pathway with an axe in its chest, and the head of an imp stared vacantly back at Cain from the edge of the well, its eyes like half-lidded, foggy windows to hell.

But the people of Tristram had paid dearly for their efforts. The ground was soaked with blood; human limbs and chunks of bodies ripped and bitten littered the space where the town’s bonfire had been built not long ago.

One of the limbs lying closest to him was recognizable by the jagged, half-healed bite marks along the forearm: Farnham, the drunken father of three who had emerged from the catacombs a ruin of his former self.

Deckard Cain’s beloved home was gone forever.

The old man screamed, shaking the bars, his voice ragged. The horrible, crushing weight of his sins was too much. He could not live any longer with the knowledge that Aidan was lost, consumed by the spirit of the evil that he had fought against. This slaughter could have been avoided, if only Cain had been the man his mother had always wished him to be. Was this penance for his earlier transgressions? Had he brought this upon them all? He couldn’t bear the thought.

“Come back for me, you filthy, murdering cowards! Come do your dirty work! I am WAITING!”

As if in answer, something moved from the shadows behind the smoking rubble of the old pub.

A man lurched into sight, dragging his right leg. He stopped, cocked his head as if listening, then lurched forward again, directly toward the square where Cain had been hung inside his iron cage and left to die.

It was Griswold, the town blacksmith. But something was wrong with him. Cain’s faint hope and shout

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