Diablo III: Storm of Light (36 page)

A shudder ran over Balzael as he stared at the mesmerizing pattern, a feeling of dread mixed with anticipation. He had done this before, and it was always the same: it was like the moment he was born at the Arch, a sense of expanding possibilities along with confusion and a pulsing energy that raced through him until he felt invincible. Wisdom was all about understanding the connections that others did not. There was a web underlying everything, a world beneath his own that must be carefully guarded. Knowledge was power, after all, and this sort of power could be very dangerous indeed.

A shape appeared in the flickering light.

At first, there was nothing more than a blob of darkness within the threads, as if a knot had formed at their center. But the shape grew until it nearly filled the basin in front of Balzael. Unlike the constantly moving threads, this was motionless, and it emanated a chilling darkness that brought shadows drifting across the Fount: a hooded figure, its face a black, empty hole.

The Guardian.

A sound like a slow hiss came forth.

“He is coming here, my lord,” Balzael said. His eagerness was too obvious, and it shamed him. But he could not help himself. “The Sicarai and our scouts in Sanctuary have confirmed it—”

“Yes,” the Guardian said.

“Of course,” Balzael said, suddenly uncertain. Had he made some kind of terrible mistake? The Guardian did not speak plainly, and his strange tendencies made him even harder to read. “Tyrael is growing desperate. We will cut him down, as soon as he shows his mortal face—”

“Our plans have changed.”

The Guardian did not speak for some time. Balzael waited, knowing well enough that this was his way, and he would continue when he was ready. Eventually, the Guardian shifted, and the slow hiss came again. “Tyrael’s efforts provide us with an opportunity.”

“I—I do not understand.”

“The stone is working too slowly,” the Guardian said. “The people of Sanctuary are ripe for an attack. Tyrael’s Horadrim must be allowed to take the stone. See what we shall reap.”

The Guardian’s hooded face rippled and fell away, and Balzael fell inward, tumbling end-over-end into the web of nightmares and horrorscapes. He saw Tyrael and the Horadrim take the stone from the Heavens, and then it was taken from them just as quickly; he was immersed in fear, drenched in blood, awash in flames; the screams of humankind rose up around him like a symphony, and the Guardian was conducting it with skilled hands, plucking flesh and drumming bone. Sanctuary crackled and crumbled upon itself, until all that was left was the dead silence of empty space.

Balzael floated inside for a while, understanding what must come to be. Connecting the threads, one at a time, with the help
of the Guardian. When he came back, the Pools of Wisdom were once again silent. The Fount had gone dead, all traces of the Guardian vanished. But he had shown Balzael the end of Sanctuary, and other things, and the way to victory was clear in his mind. Although Tyrael had gotten the better of him and his Sicarai until now, all was not lost. Far from it; he knew exactly what he needed to do to salvage the situation.

But it would require a carefully orchestrated series of events, and time was very short indeed.

Jacob was the first to step through the portal.

He thought he had steeled himself for what was to come, had imagined every possible reaction. But what he felt first surprised him: a physical ache and a thrumming within his very bones like the low, violent rumble of a waterfall somewhere nearby.

He realized he had squeezed his eyes shut against the world shaking itself to pieces beneath his feet. That put him off balance, but it was nothing compared with what he saw when he opened his eyes and looked around.

Jacob now stood on the edge of a vast plain made of light and sound. Light seared his eyes, sparkled like reflections off cut glass. But this light was not warm and friendly. The atmosphere was arid, the air dead and ice-cold. He thought the Wastelands would have prepared him, but no. His ears felt filled with cotton, and his mouth went suddenly dry. Running his tongue across his lips, he could feel every crack. Sweat ran down his neck, made his back crawl. When he blinked, he felt a sandpaper-like grit under his eyelids.

Jacob watched through a watery haze as the others stepped through the portal. They recoiled against the intensity of the
light before opening their eyes enough to peer around them. He tried to speak and could not. Everything was larger and more overwhelming than it seemed, each sensation enhanced tenfold until he felt the unbearable weight of it bearing down.

That was when the whispers began.

At first, he thought it was the hiss of something being dragged across rock or perhaps a reptile slithering nearby. He squinted, trying to make out more of his surroundings. Pathways filled with crushed stone wound through the flat plain and led from one jumble to another. Dry stream beds, perhaps. Liquid had run here some time ago, but it was long gone now.

The hissing came again. He looked in all directions, searching for the source, but could not pinpoint it. It began to sound like words in a tongue he did not recognize. The whispers, he thought, might have been trickles of sand or ground crystal sliding down dry channels. They wormed into his brain, began working on him in ways that made him feel as if he was losing control.

Emotions bubbled up within him: fear and regret, sorrow and loss. The sounds of voices receded from him, and the light began to coalesce into bright flares that seemed to time themselves with each beat of his heart.

Some kind of reflective surface winked nearby. He stepped closer, drawn to it by something he could not place, a need for answers. The surface was a pool of quicksilver surrounded by polished marble. A thrill ran through him. The whispers around him grew again: voices of people from his past, those long dead and gone and haunting him. He felt their losses like little jabbing wounds opening him up and bleeding him out, red streams soaked up by the hungry stone.

When he looked into the reflective surface, death stared back.

His face was a mass of purple and gray gristle and bone. His eyes were gone, replaced by empty holes. His jaw hung loosely from strands of sinew like leather.

Recoiling from the horror, he looked around him and saw skulls everywhere, white bone gleaming, dead sockets of shadow staring lifelessly, jaws half-buried in crystal sands. The remains of friends and loved ones reduced to nothing but cold, empty shells.

Not this . . 
.

Shanar came to him through frigid air, her lithe form like a mirage. She spoke gibberish as though from a muffled distance, took his face with both hands, drew close.

The touch of her lips was electric, jarring. He was yanked back through himself to this single point, everything else falling away. When it was finally over and she broke free, he was able to find his feet again under him, and this strange new world swam back into focus.

“Don’t get lost,” she whispered, holding his gaze for a moment, her face inches away. “The resonance can draw you away from yourself.”

Jacob nodded, tried to find his voice. Shanar dropped her hands from his face, kept her eyes on him for another moment. “I’m alive,” he said. His lips still burned from her kiss. His throat felt as if he had swallowed sand. But she had done something to him, brought him back to his center of gravity. The light was bearable now, the whispers receding. The ground beneath his feet had stilled.

They stood in a vast room filled with winding beds of crushed, glittering crystal that twisted and turned and dropped like waterfalls into round basins. What he had thought were skulls were actually round chunks of marble worn down over centuries. Magnificent, intricately carved columns rose to support an arched ceiling far above them. The air in here was very still, and Jacob had the sense that it had been this way for some time. A dead and abandoned place.

A fountain nearby had been carved of some kind of material
Jacob couldn’t place. What a breathtaking scene this must have been at one time, sparkling liquid spraying up through the fountain’s throat. Yet it, too, was long dead, its basins dry and empty. A depression in the cut stone made it seem as if an object had once lived there, inserted like a key into a lock, but it was gone now.

He turned back to the others. Gynvir stood staring at a point somewhere beyond him, tears shining on her face. Her gaze flicked to him for a moment, held his own; then she looked away. He did not know if she had peered into the quicksilver mirror, could not read her expression. Had it been the kiss, or had she seen her own death in the reflection?

Shanar spoke softly to Gynvir as the others gathered, gaining their footing. Tyrael was the last through the portal. He was pale, his armor slashed, pain playing across his normally stoic features. What could they possibly accomplish without his strength? Jacob felt infinitesimally small against a vast world beyond these dead walls, facing an army of angels that could crush them in an instant.

It is time for you to lead the others
.

It was almost as if Tyrael had spoken inside his head. Fresh doubt crawled inside Jacob.

He was not ready, not yet.

Not for this.

Tyrael saw the uncertainty on Jacob’s face. There would be more to come; the Pools of Wisdom were overwhelming enough, but they were nothing compared with the breathtaking beauty of the Gardens of Hope, the majesty of the Courts of Justice, or the sheer power and scope of the Halls of Valor. There were also dark sides to each of these Aspects. The darkness would come whether Tyrael liked it or not, and that would be the true test of their strength.

Exhaustion had seeped deep into Tyrael’s bones. Every part of his body ached. The wound across his chest throbbed dully. His knees sent sharp stabs up his legs and through his back. Every step was an ordeal, every breath an acute remembrance of his mortality. He felt disconnected from his brothers and sisters, alone in a world that had rejected him in all his forms, immortal and mortal, light and flesh. He wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep, and if he could not sleep, he wanted to consult the chalice.
Wisdom, insight, answers . . 

The monk touched his arm. He alone seemed nearly unmoved by the spectacle of their surroundings. “We should move quickly,” Mikulov said. The others were watching. Tyrael realized his hand had gone to the hidden pocket inside his armor; without a conscious thought, he had been about to draw out Chalad’ar right in front of them all.

He dropped his hand. The chalice was like a bottomless hole that he tumbled down, losing himself while the Heavens burned. And yet he still wanted it, craved what it brought him: darkness and oblivion.

“Now is the moment when we prove our worth,” he said to the others. “If I am right, we have come when the Luminarei are attending the Ascension. Shanar’s magic will cloak us, and we will move as quickly as we dare and blend in. We must trust that they will not suspect treachery in their own realm. Jacob, lead us to the Gardens of Hope and, from there, through the Courts of Justice. There will be very few angels there, only those who have been left to stand guard. The archangels will be with Imperius in the Halls of Valor preparing to join the ceremony, and that shall give us an advantage as long as we avoid close scrutiny. If all goes well, we will be in the Council chamber before they realize anything is wrong.”

Jacob nodded. He looked pale, his hair damp against his forehead. There were no answers held in the man’s gaze, no hint of
what inner strength he might have found. Tyrael turned to the wizard. It was time for her to test every ounce of her abilities; everything now depended on her unique skills.

Shanar took a deep breath, as if steadying herself. When she raised her arms, the energy that sprang from her was breathtaking; it met the light of the Heavens, challenged and absorbed it, encasing them in a bubble of crackling heat, magic that flowed from deep within her and through her fingers with bursts of brilliant color.

Commander Nahr’s Luminarei armor began to glow, the Horadrim’s mortal features masked by glorious light. Their forms grew larger, their bearing more magnificent, the resonance of angels rising from them until their song matched the majesty of the Heavens.