The Lost Horadrim (Diablo IV)

Chapter One

Lorath felt the rage within him stir—a beast awakening in its lair. They had come too late, and the village before them stood empty. No voices answered their calls. No smoke rose from cookfires. The foul air of the surrounding marshland smelled of rot and the tang of rust, and the moss-draped trees trembled with the distant shrieks of vile things. The settlers had built their huts up on a low hump of grassy earth in the midst of ancient stone ruins, perhaps hoping the fallen walls and broken arches of a dead city would offer some meager protection.

“Looks abandoned,” said Donan. The young man smacked a biting fly from his cheek as he peered ahead.

“No,” said Lorath. “Not abandoned. Not by choice, at least. Something happened here.”

“Perhaps,” said Tyrael. The former angel’s armor glinted in the wetland gloom, and a slick of sweat covered his dark brow. “Let us find out.”

The three men pressed forward, familiar with the dangers of the terrain through which they had trekked for the past several days. The Blood Marsh, which lay beyond the forests outside the city of Westmarch, was a treacherous expanse of bog and fen through which too few of the ancient roads remained above water. Monstrous creatures slithered, swam, and prowled through its twisted trees and fetid pools. In elder days, the great city of Corvus had towered there, but the marsh had torn it down with time and patience. It was now an inhospitable place, keeping out all but the most daring, desperate, or foolish. Lorath and his companions had come here following a trail of blood and rumors, hunting evil. According to the terrorized people living at the edge of the wetlands, a vicious new cult had established an enclave somewhere deep in the marshes. Lorath had hoped to learn more from the residents of this now-empty village.

They climbed the grassy rise, then halted as they approached the settlement’s boundary, watching and listening from behind a crumbling wall covered in lichen and threaded with vines. The muggy air moved a little at that height, and somewhere in the village, it set a scrap of dangling metal ringing against a wall. From somewhere else, hollow wooden chimes rattled like bones. Otherwise, Lorath heard nothing. Saw nothing.

“Let us separate and learn what we can,” Tyrael said. “Stay vigilant. Call for aid if you encounter trouble.”

He climbed over the wall and pushed straight ahead, directly into the heart of the village. Donan looked at Lorath and tipped his head to the left, and Lorath nodded. The younger man crept away in that direction, armed with his staff. Lorath proceeded to the right, polearm at the ready, toward a section of the village more heavily encroached upon by bramble and trees.

The settlers had built their humble huts out of rough-hewn wooden beams and marsh reeds daubed with red clay. Lorath poked his head through the open door of the first one he came to and found disorder within. The furniture had all been overturned and broken. Flies buzzed over dried bloodstains on the packed-dirt floor, but he saw no other remains. He found the same in the next hut, and the one after—indications of struggle and violence, but no dead.

Then he heard voices. They spoke no intelligible words but grunted and chattered like animals.

Lorath raised the blade of his polearm, quietly making his way toward the sounds. He soon discovered their source in a muddy paddock near the edge of the village, where a pack of bogans picked over the corpse of a mule. Most of the beasts—half a dozen or more—were smaller, hunched and simian, with knuckles that touched the ground, but there was a brute among them, twice the size and three times as aggressive. Tusks the length of scythes jutted from its slavering maw, and it bristled with crude armor fashioned from antlers, fur, and bone. Bogans were feeble-minded and debased creatures but not necessarily evil by nature. Whatever had happened to the village, they had not caused it, though they were dangerous all the same, and a threat to any that might return there. Lorath adjusted his stance to attack, but then one of the beasts grunted an alarm, snout raised to the wind. They had caught his scent. He had to act quickly.

He leapt out from his hiding place and advanced. The boggit chattering ceased in momentary surprise, then turned to shrill howls as they leapt into a frenzy, thrashing and pounding their fists into the mud. The brute turned its thick shoulders to face Lorath and let out a spittle-flecked roar. Then it charged him with such thunderous speed and ferocity it nearly caught him off guard. He raised his polearm in time to make a thrust, which the bogan easily shoved aside using the bracer and hide of one forearm, even as it swung the other fist. The blow caught Lorath in the chest and sent him flying, gasping for breath.

The bogan roared and charged again. Lorath hadn’t yet gained his footing and could only roll out of the way. Then he sprang to his feet and slashed low—not a killing stroke, but he managed to clip the beast’s thigh.

The boggits had now surrounded him, and he risked being overwhelmed by their number. He swung his polearm around in a wide arc to keep them at bay, and he succeeded for a few moments. But the brute suddenly snatched up a startled boggit and hurled the screaming creature at Lorath like a living missile. The beast ended up impaled and wriggling on Lorath’s polearm before he tossed it aside in disgust.

Seeing this, the other boggits now scrambled away from the brute as desperately as they did from Lorath’s weapon, but they did not yet flee the fight.

The brute pounded its chest and slammed its fists into the ground, preparing to leap at him. Lorath checked his footing and braced his weapon, but before he had cause to use it, a gleaming streak severed the brute’s head from its shoulders, and its body collapsed in a fountain of its own blood. At that, the remaining boggits finally lost all morale and scattered, shrieking through the trees in retreat.

Tyrael stood over the fallen brute holding El’druin and used his cloak to wipe the angelic sword clean. “I told you to call for aid,” he said.

Lorath leaned on his polearm. “I needed no aid—”

“That is not the point!”

For a fleeting moment, Lorath thought he glimpsed a shadow of the frightening power the former angel had given up when he renounced his divine nature; at such times, Lorath found the man’s towering presence unnerving.

Tyrael inhaled, eyes closed, then sighed. “We are Horadrim, Lorath. You are Horadrim. You are sworn to a greater purpose than fighting skirmishes for the sake of your pride. We are still too few in number for you to take such needless risks.” He glanced around the paddock and the village. “We should end this hunt and move on to more important labors.”

“More important?” Lorath said. “Have you not looked inside these dwellings? Some evil has happened here.”

“That may be,” said Tyrael, “and normally, of course I would help anyone who needed it. But we have no reason to believe they need it, and we are on a more important mission.”

“Then you might want to come with me,” Donan said, having arrived from elsewhere in the village. He stood outside the paddock, raised an eyebrow at the corpses of the two bogans, then added, “I found something interesting,” before marching away.

After glancing at each other, Lorath and Tyrael followed. They traversed the village, passing under the ancient ruins and through a silent plaza where spiky grasses grew between the paving stones. They reached the far side of the settlement and came to a circular colonnade, which the settlers had apparently been using as a place of worship. Lorath noticed a large altar flanked by two braziers, each containing the ashen remains of offerings. Sigils and symbols had been chiseled into the columns, recent enough that they had not been weathered by time.

Donan pointed at the markings and said, “Pagan symbols . . . not unlike those seen in old Sharval.”

Tyrael glanced around. “I still see no sign of demonic activity here.”

“Look behind the altar,” Donan said.

Lorath and Tyrael did as he suggested and found a grisly display at odds with all that they had seen thus far. Someone had used blood to draw a ritual circle on the ground, and in its center rested what appeared at first to be a small bowl. Then Lorath realized it was the top of a human skull.

“Blood magic,” he said. “That could be demonic.”

Tyrael frowned but said nothing.