The Story Continues ... My Nephew the Crusader

[Occhidiangela]

We last saw Angeleyes leaving Haragoth as the world began to tremble with the end of Baal and Tyrael's decision to destroy the Worldstone. She headed out of town with one mule, her nephew and a badly wounded Gulzar in tow. I have tried to piece together what happened for the next 20 years, and will cover some of that in Chapter II of the Prologue. The fate of Orthas and Aliza probably needs to be wrapped up. I have included what I know of the Crusader class to try and fit it into Mikal's story. The opening chapter of the Reaper of Souls phase in the life of the Rogue with a Heart (turned Mage Slayer). Her dismay and feeling of deja vu as regards Diablo, Lord of Terror, will become apparent as the story grows.

Prologue Part I --

Moving westward across a stony field, two figures leading horses emerge through the thin, misty gloom of an early autumn afternoon as they follow an overgrown wagon trail.
They stop abruptly.
The shorter of the two kneels, placing both hands on the cold, damp ground.
"The ley lines are still here, but they have weakened" she says, in the clear voice of a woman. "The standing stones should be due west of here."
The broad shouldered figure next to her nods, remaining silent.

They resume walking. The mist and the overcast sky lend a dreary air to their journey.
Both figures wear cloaks and hoods, presumably to keep out the cool, damp air. Hers is a nondescript gray/green weave of wool and something else, spattered with bits of mud and turf around the hem. Her traveling companion’s cloak was once a shade of white, but is now stained green, brown, and red with alternating splotches of grass, mud, and dried blood. Below the filthy cloak, iron shod boots, heavy and spurred, dig into the turf with each lengthy stride. Her light tan, un-soled footwear seems to barely touch the ground as she glides forward.
An odd couple, this pair.

Abruptly, she stops and raises a hand.
"There.”
She now points and looks directly at him, a trace of challenge in her tone as she states, ‘’There are the standing stones."
A baritone voice rolls out of her companion.
"I never lost faith in your memory, only in your sense of direction. Let's have a look at these stones."

As the two move closer, the looming shapes resolve into five obelisks, roughly three times the height of a tall man, sunk into the earth in ages past.
Closer inspection reveals the layout – the five stones are arranged as the points of a perfect pentagon, or a pentagram. At the center is a barren spot where no grass grows. Otherwise the vicinity of the stone monument is unremarkable. A few score paces to the west of the stones, a similarly sized obelisk lies on its side, covered in moss.

The man pulls back his hood to reveal broad cheekbones, a strong jaw, gray-green eyes, and a shaven head. The outline of a suit of armor is poorly hidden by his stained cloak. The cloak’s left breast sports a symbol that looks like a badly drawn pitchfork stitched in a deep shade of red. He is above average in height, taller than his companion. The horse he leads is large, a draft horse or war hose. He moves with a powerful, purposeful stride.

The contrast with his companion is striking as she lets her hood drop back to her shoulders. Tall and lean, she leads a courser and moves with a light gait. Her cropped white hair is held out of her eyes by a narrow band of gray silk. Her face shows signs of approaching middle age, her eyes show deep and hard experience. For most of her life, those two gray green eyes held a barely concealed twinkle. Now, these eyes give her face an unsettling aspect above perfect cheekbones, a medium sized nose, and a slightly wider than average mouth.
This mouth, set in a slight frown, bursts into a smile that transforms her face into a visage unrecognizable from the instant before.

"Nephew, you should know better than to doubt my lead in this part of the world.”
A sly, needling tone creeps into her voice as she finishes. “As you like to say ... have some faith."
Her eyebrows raise slightly as she awaits his riposte.

The man grimaces as he touches each of the obelisks in turn.
"Faith or not, Aunt, I feel no power, no Light, no life in these stones. You told me that they would offer a portal to Tristram, as they did in my father's day."
He pauses, waving his right hand around in a slow half circle.
"I see no portal. These stones are as dead as that tree you took me to in that dark wood. Another failed lead, Aunt, with no leaves, no fruit, and no life ... just an old tree rotting with age in a barren county."
Her smile fades. Muttering something about serpents’ teeth and children, she turns from him and moves quickly to touch each stone in sequence. She pauses, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing does.
She moves again, touching each stone in a different order.
Nothing.

Eyes narrowing, she reaches up on the easternmost stone, fingers feeling for and then tracing the worn impression of a rune in the inner face of the obelisk. Approaching each stone in turn, she does the same four more times. All she feels is the cold rock under her finger tips. There is no hint of the old blue glow that once greeted those who knew the stones’ secrets -- secrets that would open a shimmering blue portal.

Sensing that she is lost in memory, he walks to the horses. He turns to watch her, holding both sets of reins lightly. She continues her little ritual. After numerous attempts at the circle of stones, in each case reaching up to the runes in a different order, she stops, stills herself, and sits at the very center of the stone circle -- the bare spot -- legs crossed and hands on her knees, eyes closed.

The man reaches up to his horse, and loosens a large wrapped bundle.
"We may be more successful in solving your mystery in the light of a new dawn, Aunt. We can make a camp here.
I see little evidence of Kazrah in these parts, but I need you to set a few snares just in case. One can't be too careful in the wilds. The ambush in the marshes cost me – cost us -- dearly.”
His jaw sets for a moment.
“The ley lines didn't help us there, nor did the shelter of a ruined tower."

The woman remains silent as he drops the bundle to the ground and begins to untie the rope holding it together.
She raises a hand, eyes still closed, when she hears him fiddling with the rope.
"Stop. We have some daylight left. I know where the old travel point is from here. The old ley lines will allow us to travel via other means."

The young man shakes his head, the restraint of patience heavy in his words.
"Aunt, we haven't traveled by other than foot, boat, or horse since you took us through that portal into Harogath when I was a boy – twenty years ago. The Sisters at the Monastery could not activate the old energy fields when we came west through the mountain pass. They told you, and I believe them, that the nature of the Worldforce has changed forever with the Worldstone's destruction.”
He sighs and continues, trying to sound less exasperated.
“I don't begrudge you the miles of this journey. I am young and have traveled far since my apprenticeship began. My quest, my mission, requires me to range far and wide."
He pauses, searching for the right words.
"Forgive me for saying this, please, but you may have lost the talent for traveling the ley lines when you let go of the shadow."

Her eyes flash open, her nostrils flare, and she leaps up from sitting.
She spins to face him, a move that charges the air with energy.
Then her hands go to her mouth, covering it.
Whatever she was going to say dies behind her fingers.
Her hands fall.
She breaths out. In. Out. In. Out.

"These stones point to the old ley line intersection, Mikal. Put that back on your horse and follow me. It isn't me that does the way-traveling, nor the wayward power of shadow. The Horadrim harnessed the power of the world itself. The original Monastery in Tristram was built by the Horadrim when their power waxed. So too the Cathedral it grew into."

With a grunt he pauses, and stops untying the rope.
The near display of temper is a danger sign. He hasn't seen that flash in her eyes since before she'd permitted him to apprentice with that Crusader: Miklanjou.

His memory takes him back to that look, and the heel of her hand striking the face of a man who was too forward with her in that tavern in the mountains, back in the town of Orehold, the mining settlement they called home for most of his youth. In vivid recall, he hears again the crack of her hand hitting that bearded face. He sees the man's head snap sharply to the right, the eyes glaze, then the body sagging and collapsing to the ground.
His aunt hung up and forsook the blade talons of the Viz Jaq Taar -- Mage Slayers -- long ago, but her hands are still formidable weapons. The pile of dead goatmen recently left to the scavenger birds of the marsh was testimony to that.

He carefully reties the bundle, takes it back to his horse, and then fastens it behind the saddle. He mounts and sits patiently until she finally jogs to her courser and leaps lightly into the saddle.
She walks her courser up to one of the stones, and then directly to the stone across circle and to the right.
"Follow me." Her voice is flat, the command unmistakable.
Gently kicking her horse in the ribs, she urges it into a trot.

Mikal follows, marveling once again at how self-confident his aunt could be when she wasn't feeling the sorrow of the sins and errors of her past. Give her a purpose, or give her a mission, and you could watch twenty years and a mountain of pain, pain that would crush a yeti like a small bug, fall from her like snow from an evergreen.

It had been a hard argument to make to his Master, an argument in contradiction to his vow to let go of his past. Traveling into the unknown (to them) West, they had needed a guide to New Tristram. By chance or by Fate, they met Auntie Ange in Lut Gholein. Once the shock of reunion had faded, his needs focused on the practical.

He had proposed to include in his quest the only blood kin left to him in the world, the woman who had allowed him to apprentice to a Crusader. This woman was the loving, demanding aunt who had shed the bitter tears of the abandoned when he walked into his future as a man, into the Light, nine years ago.
He had argued to his Master that she had always served the Light, as an acolyte of the Sightless Eye, then as Mage Slayer in pursuit of Vizjeri demon summoners. She was no less a servant of the Light as a Sister of the Thousand Eyes, the hands and feet of Ytar.

He had argued with vehemence that the woman who had buried her blade talons into the brains of Tal Rasha, the wizard possessed by the demonlord Baal, deserved an exception to the rules so strictly followed by those who followed the True Light. How could one who had helped end the reign of destruction Baal had wrought all over Sanctuary not be worthy of their trust?

He got what he asked for: his Master’s acquiescence and a guide to New Tristram.
His Master had once warned him: “Be careful of what you wish for, Mikal, for you will surely get it.”

He had argued himself into losing his Master in combat with the horde of enchanted Kazrah warriors, a foe who rose out of the Khanduran marshes from nowhere. The stench of demonic sorcery had burned his nostrils as they fought and smashed the horned demons with the desperation of the doomed and surrounded.
Should he regret his choice?
Should Mikal have charged the bloated goat shaman and his guard of champions?
Should his target have been the demon surrounded in bands of glowing energy, rather than the pack of Kazrah surrounding their guide -- his flesh and blood? She'd been beset by a second wave of goatmen after the initial skirmish had pushed the ambushers back.
Had the Light led him to save the right life?
Had the Light led him to a brief salvation?
Only the Light knew, and the Light had not yet revealed that mystery … as with much else.

Mikal was spared the mortal burns that seared the flesh from his Master's body and ripped the limbs from his powerful torso, spraying the landscape with shattered armor, body parts, and the fragments of his holy shield.

Rubbing his left hand with his right, he feels the damaged nerves on the back of his wrist where the explosion of arcane power had burned through his gauntlet with a combined sensation of cold, heat, and lightning. The blast came when his Master caved in the Shaman's skull with his flail. It had spelled his own doom, and had knocked all combatants, kazrah or human, off their feet. Killing off the remaining goatmen had seemed easier after the shaman fell, but it was hard to be sure: in combat, time and space sometimes warp and fool normal perception.

His Master's voice returns, in his mind, the memory both bitter and sweet.
"The calm of battle is within you, Mikal, while the fury of combat is without. Never mistake one for the other. Never let the fury of your blows contaminate the peace of your purpose, nor your inner resolve. What others see as our holy wrath and battle fury is born in the stillness of pure Light."

Had his master died calmly? Mikal’s lips move in the archaic prayer, udpaksvenzend, hoping that such was his Master’s fate.

Less than half an hour later, his guide abruptly reins in her horse and dismounts. Feeling about in the ground, under the grass, she drops to all fours and crawls around for a few minutes in ever widening circles around her mount.

"Here it is, Mikal. I can feel the pulse of the ley lines. Come, help me tear up some of this turf and we'll find the runes."
He dismounts and helps her rip up clumps of earth, his strength making short work of the damp dirt and grass. They stand up and step back to behold a square, flat stone imbedded in the ground. It measures about three strides per side.

Deeply etched into the tan stone, though partially filled with mud and pebbles, is a circle perfectly quartered by two crossed lines that run from corner to corner. All around the edge of the stone are cut runes. The woman pulls a water skin from her saddle bag and kneels by the stone, working her way around the edge of the square. Using water and a corner of her cloak, she clears the dirt out of the inscribed marks.
He watches her, impassively.
He feels the mist thicken slightly, and then notices that it has turned to a fine rain.
She stops her latest chore. Her spirits seem to have risen, if the tone of her voice is any indication.

"I have found life in a few of the runes, with something west indicated by the aura.”
Looking at him, her voice takes on the unmistakable tone of command.
“Get the horses, Mikal, and shield their eyes. Horses get nervous when the ground hums, right before the travel force comes alive"
She restores the water skin to the saddlebag.

He wipes the dirt from his hands and knees. Gripping both sets of reins, he leads the two horses to the center of the square and unfastens his cloak. Tossing it over their heads, he ducks under the impromptu shelter against the small drops of rain.

He doesn't see her move from rune to rune, but he feels her move next to him and stamp her foot once. He feels a swell of power pulse into the bottom of his feet. Muttering softly to the two horses, an old poem his grandfather taught him, he smells the intense scent of energy. He is barely surprised to feel once again the unique collapse of the air around him, and its release as his feet sense the warm power surging through them all.
Then the sensation stops.
The horses keep pulling at him, and then slowly calm down, his poem never quite finished -- as usual. That is doubtless a good thing, he muses, given that his grandfather knew only bawdy sailors’ shanties and ribald poetry. He realizes that she has moved away, and that he is standing by himself with the horses.

"You can come out now, Mikal, we're here." There is a trace of joy in her voice.
"New Tristram, Aunt?" he asks, removing his cloak from covering himself and the horses.

He looks around and sees nothing resembling human dwelling, but notes the white haired woman walking south from him toward a lump in the ground.
The rain here is steadier than where they were moments before.
"No, Mikal, the old rogue camp: Kashya's last stand against the army of Terror."

She lightly hops from lump to lump, making a circle, before grinning at him in triumph. Again, the transformation in her face makes her seem a different woman.
"This is Cain's old fire pit." She sweeps her arms wide, parallel to the ground.
"The wooden palisade was from here to there. Asheara’s tent was over there. You can see where the wooden gate posts were if you look at the ground with more care."
She points east. "Take the horses to the stream, they could use some water."

As he walks the horses in the direction of her pointing finger, he makes out the shape of an old stone bridge and hears the sound of running water. Taking the horses down the bank on the north side of the stone bridge, he shakes his head and speaks to himself, or maybe to an old friend not present.

"She promised to escort me to New Tristram, to seek the falling star and the demons it has awakened.
I get instead a trip down her path of memories, memories of stories she never told to me.
I have sworn to leave my past behind me and pursue the purity of the Light.
How does this diversion aid my quest?
Master, is your death the price I pay for letting my past back into my life?
Have I failed in my quest already?
Have I tainted my vow to the Light?"
He stops.
There is no answer beyond the sound of two horses drinking water and the stream flowing steadily south. Mikal loosens the saddle belts on both horses, and rubs their necks.

After they have finished drinking, he takes two water skins from the saddlesand fills them both. Before plugging the openings, he makes a small gesture with his right hand and whispers - eksloks pooritahz -- words in an old tongue from the other side of the world. A faint glow emanates from the water skins, briefly, before fading out. He pushes in the corks and hangs the skins on his saddle horn.

"Whatever you are up to, Auntie Ange, it had better be in service to the Light. My quest is about securing our future, not your tortured past."
He walks slowly back to the old encampment, certain that this time he’ll be able to set up the tent without interruption.
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To be continued.