Chapter Two: The Wisdom Seeker
There were no additional books on the table the next morning. Mildly disappointed, Farah fell into her new routine of shelving texts, sweeping the floor, and reading voraciously through the library's histories. Aya had spoken truly in her letters; much of the work was new material or so obscure it had not found its way to the Great Library.
The town's first librarian, a man by the name of Deckard Cain, had done a great deal of his own writing. The Book of Cain was kept on a pedestal near the entrance. It had been referenced many times, if the dog-eared pages were any indication. Farah had yet to read more than a few pages as it was always in use by some curious researcher or another. Her initial perusal revealed it to be a collection of the same myths she read in the journals, only illustrated and presented in a coherent narrative.
"We enchanted it ages ago," one of the arcane specialists said, as he perused the shelves for a specific book. "It is falling apart, and many of the entries contain Cain's sketches. It is irreplaceable."
"Surely you could duplicate the general content?" Farah asked, taking a break from her work to eat one of the apples Aya had sent along.
"Oh yes. Several such copies exist in other locations. But the original was kept by Cain himself. Tyrael also works on a similar text and keeps it in his possession."
"He seems a kind man. It is fitting he is named after the Sahptev God of Justice."
He glanced at her strangely. "Tyrael has seen and sacrificed much for us. It is to his credit that he remains compassionate."
For us in Tristram? Or, who?
"Ah, here is the book I sought." He walked to the desk, filled out the card, and handed it to her. "I appreciate this system. Your sister is a notorious vanisher of texts. I am sure she uses them to wipe her arse."
"Aya has never been much for organization. Her tutors always complained."
"She does not need it to succeed. Few can match her raw ability. Li-Ming favours her to take over the arcane division, someday."
"Arcane…division?"
He looked at her as if she had sprouted a second head. "Curious. Did she really tell you nothing?"
"Nothing at all."
"Then I will not intrude on family matters. She has her reasons."
"They are terrible reasons," Farah called as the man walked to the door. "You can help me undo them!" She frowned as he left without answering. "Oh, Hellspawn."
Farah learned two things the next day.
Firstly, Aya's word commanded respect in Tristram; as rumour spread that Farah was intentionally being kept in the dark, the townsfolk good naturedly began avoiding certain topics around her.
Secondly, the library had a thief.
When she returned in the morning, she found her basket of fruit completely empty, when she distinctly recalled leaving two oranges and a pear in it. Pears were her favorite; she had intentionally set one aside to enjoy the next day. Lamenting that she had rushed and not eaten breakfast at home, Farah checked around the library in case the fruit had somehow rolled away.
They had not.
Incensed, she stalked to her stack of blank parchment, took a quill, and wrote a note. Then she took a nail, and a hammer, and emphatically attached it to the front door of the library.
Dear food thief: please return my fruit.
Farah suffered through several rounds of ribbing over the note, including from Aya herself, who broke into bemused tears when she read it. Undaunted, she completed her work for the day and waited impatiently for the sun to go down, immensely curious as to the honesty of the perpetrator.
The next morning, she found a basket containing several plums, apples, and an exotic melon sitting on her desk. Alongside it was a note in now-familiar handwriting:
Enjoyed already. Assumed apology for spelling corrections. Acceptable replacement?
Then, further down the note, in a much looser scrawl with intentional double punctuation:
Who are you?
Wonderful. A simple misunderstanding had given her a method of communicating with him.
"Make him speak." She selected a plum from the basket and bit into it. He was certainly more generous with his gift than Aya had been. "What shall I ask of you, my mystery patron?" Then, remembering he had asked her a question first, she retrieved a new parchment page and wrote him an answer.
Tyrael was awakened rudely in the deepest of the night, when the full moon was shining through the window. A loud bang echoed through the home, followed by the brisk steps of booted feet. His bedroom door slammed open.
"By the Burning Hells." He groaned and sat upright. "Tristram had best be on fire. I told you to be silent if you returned after midnight."
He flinched as a parchment roll hit him square in the face and fell to his lap. A shadow walked towards him and tipped its head to the side, as if staring.
"Brother," Tyrael said. "If you expect me to read this, then you had best wait until morning."
He was always impressed by how intense Malthael's glare was in total darkness; he felt it boring into his forehead. Then, the other man finally spoke.
"Who is she?"
"Who is who?"
The shadow pointed at the parchment, which was dimly visible on the bedsheets.
Tyrael sighed, grabbed the paper, and held it to the moonlight coming through the window. "The librarian? Malthael." He pronounced the syllables of his name distinctly, growing more aggravated with each. "You awakened me to ask about the librarian? Has she sprouted four heads and is spewing acidic pools? Or what is the emergency?"
"Where is Edgar?"
"Edgar passed into the Light four months ago, shortly after you left. We gave him a burial fit for the High Heavens and then sought another librarian. She arrived two weeks ago."
"I was…unaware."
"If you graced me with your presence during the daylight hours more often, I would have told you sooner." Tyrael's tone softened; he found it difficult to be properly angry at Malthael regarding such matters. "Brother, truly. You needn't creep about any longer. No one will judge you."
"Because that is your domain. The others made their wants clear. I will honour them."
Tyrael did not argue. He disagreed, but it was not his place to question the other man's interactions with the Nephalem. Regardless of the trust he placed in his brother, he could not control others' perception of him. Nor could he erase his past sins, however they may have come about.
"I angered her," Malthael said, interrupting his thoughts.
"I find that hard to believe. She struck me as rather good-natured." Wishing the conversation would end so he could return to sleep, Tyrael lay down and rolled over. Still, curiosity nagged at him. "What did you do?"
"I…mistook her meal for a peace offering."
The revelation struck him like a bucket of cold water. "You were the fruit thief she was fretting about all day?"
"Likely."
"Malthael."
"Yes?"
"By the Hells and the Heavens and everything in between. Take yourself away, go to sleep, and we can discuss your idiocy more in the morning."
His brother paused, tilted his head further than Tyrael thought possible, then disappeared, closing the door quietly behind him—leaving Tyrael to stare at the wall, wide awake and cursing, not for the first time, that his brother's exasperating oddness had not been cured by his mortality.
Over time, Farah gradually came to know the inhabitants of Tristram and what they studied in the library. Also, who they pined for, the foods they preferred, the monsters they feared, and their favorite drinking songs. She saw more magic than she had ever before, a realization that worked away at the stubbornness inside her. She also continued her own reading, looking for the nugget of fact that would turn her sister's stories from tales into truth.
And each night, after closing the library, she made sure to leave a note on her desk. Aya had been right about the stranger. He was brief when possible, and sometimes Farah only garnered a word or two in reply, particularly when she tried to engage in social pleasantries; they were not his forte.
How do you like Tristram? Did you have a good day yesterday?
Adequately.
Other questions, however, earned more in-depth replies, in the vein of the journals she had taken to curling up with each morning before the patrons arrived.
How are you and Tyrael brothers, when my sister claims you don't look alike?
Tyrael and I are brothers by form and calling.
By profession, then; perhaps the same as other organizations, such as the Sahptev monks or the Crusaders.
Sometimes, he left several new texts for her after she did not hear from him for weeks. Farah assumed he was travelling and researching. A great deal of his work revolved around myth and religion, and he was quickly compiling a collection of angelic and demonic stories from across the realm. It was a noble venture. Many of her former compatriots at the Great Library had become fixated on the here-and-now, of local politics and stories, and had neglected legend.
But she knew all to well how the past informed the future. Her family came from a long line of arcane masters; her father had not inherited the gift. Instead of learning about those who came before him, he had chosen to fear arcane practitioners, including his youngest daughter, and focused his attention on his work with the city's courts. That was decades in the past, but Farah would have been foolish to ignore how it had shaped her and Aya.
Aya, who was more vibrant and alive in Tristram than Farah ever remembered from their childhood. Something truly spectacular was occurring in the town, a confluence of power that spilled over into everyday life, including Farah's own work. She had handled countless arcane texts in the Great Library and was familiar with the dangers they entailed. And from what Farah knew of Edgar, she assumed the magical inventory had been beyond his capacity to control. But her experience did not make managing that aspect of the library any less challenging. The library's collection was also not static.
Her mysterious friend occasionally left more intriguing artefacts than travel-worn journals, always with detailed instructions about their dangers. One morning she found a leather-bound book encrusted with jewels, whose pages if read in the wrong order would subject the reader to most ill-fated emotional experiences. Another time, he left her a set of scrolls whose signets described them as instructions on how to scroll-craft, but which were written in an unintelligible script. Later, there was a text that forced the unfortunate reader to continue reading until the tale was concluded. She found it with a note scrawled in particularly annoyed-looking handwriting: Do not read. Narrative execution vastly overrated.
Undaunted, Farah took it upon herself to find a place for each in the library's archives, making additional notes for reader safety and ensuring the most perilous texts did not fall into unwary hands. It was immersive, satisfying work, particularly since she was the materials' sole custodian. Gradually, the library's extended collection began to attain a structure she found acceptable.
And as it did, a very unexpected thing began to occur.
Other items began appearing on her desk alongside the books. Once, she found a basket of fruit and vegetables, carefully wrapped for travel and clearly from a destination far from Tristram. Another time he left her a lovely silk zala, inlaid with gold thread.
Did you visit Caldeum? she wrote, after expressing her genuine thanks for the gift, as her current scarf had begun to show wear in Tristram's rainier climate. It was my home for a very long time. I miss it, often. The heat and the tea. No one grows the spices necessary for the drink, here. I finished my last a month ago. Have you ever tried it?
Initially, she was concerned when she received no reply. But then, several weeks later, a small leather bundle appeared on her desk, tied carefully with twine and imbued with the scent of cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon she knew so well.
Merchant in Kingsport imports periodically, he wrote.
That evening, she left a large cloth satchel of pastries on her desk, alongside a smaller, carefully partitioned bag of the tea he had brought her. Best shared with friends. All my gratitude.
He replied in the language she had spoken for many years, until the common tongue had taken over commerce and trade in Caldeum and she been forced to learn it for the sake of the library patrons.
Chukrān.
It meant, simply, thank you.
Finally, months later, Farah brought herself to ask the question she had wanted to from the beginning.
Tell me. You write at length about angels and demons. Do they exist? Are they real?
Verily.
She lowered the parchment as the word echoed in her mind. I brought far more questions than it answered. At the bottom of the page, she wrote: What is the nature of your evidence?
And then, a day later, she received the strangest answer.
Personal.
"You could speak to him, you know," Aya said, over a mug of steaming tea. They sat outside the tavern at a wooden table, which the bartender Bron had dragged outside during the warm summer months.
"You said he was impossible to find."
"That was before you acquired his attention. Malthael is like a cat, baina. He avoids people whenever possible, until he finds you interesting, after which you cannot escape him."
"Malthael." She was slightly embarrassed that she hadn't asked his name in all the months they had spoken. But he had never offered it, and she had never wanted to pry. Even through letters his preference for privacy was obvious. She respected that. "It is…not entirely what I expected."
"Animal comparisons?"
"No, his name." It was elegant, like his writing. She had half-expected something mundane. It was also familiar, but she could not immediately place from where. "He said what he knows is personal."
"Hmmm." Aya took a long swig of tea and held the cup to her chin. "That is one of the more profoundly accurate things he has said."
"He lies, then?"
"Lies? No, hardly. Malthael will provide you with whatever truth you require. Sometimes your query is wrong. You must have asked him the right question."
Mulling that over, Farah considered the town square. It was a quiet day, and aside from the distant squeal of children, the only sound was the wind. "You have also been right about many things," she said, eventually. "Perhaps I did not want to see that because it contradicts much of what I was taught."
"Change can be difficult."
"Not change. I wanted to believe that Father, wherever he rests in death, had at least a shred of credibility about him. That our biggest concerns were mortal, and that the arcane circumnavigated the proper social and political process and was to be controlled wherever possible. But here in the heart of it all I see vivid life and an abundance of mystery."
"It was not your fault," Aya said softly, setting her mug on the table and reaching to grasp Farah's hand. "You are not responsible for what he believed."
"No. But I am responsible for my own beliefs. Which were wrong."
"Yet, you came here when I offered. You wanted to change. And you are. I have seen it the past few months. It is never too late to grow."
No, Farah thought. And not in the ways she had expected. "Things seem brighter here. The arcane is everywhere. I never felt its flow strongly, before. But I do now."
"Will you join me and become a wizard?" Aya teased.
"Who would keep up the library? Besides, I'd rather not wear those garish outfits." She trailed off as a yawn overtook her.
"Don't tell me you've acquired the habits of the evening patrons."
"Hardly. I have been having disruptive dreams. Places I have never visited, but that feel very real. They are not good for sleep."
Aya's eyes widened. "Tell me."
"When I first arrived, I dreamt of a hideous shadow in a field. It called me Nephalem. Taunted me. Silly, I know, but that was the start. The next I remember was of a long-haired man carrying curved swords standing at a crossroads. In the distance was a burning city. And just last night, I dreamt of marble halls and a glimmering sky. There was a glowing archway that sang until it darkened and crumbled, its light spilling into the sky."
The wind rustled harder. Aya's face grew serene. "Our grandmother had the Sight. Not strongly, but she saw visions much as you do."
"They were dreams."
"Baina, the man you described with the long hair and the blades, that is Malthael."
Farah's pulse pounded in her fingertips. In a corner of her mind that was forgotten during the day, ghost-like voices whispered. She could not discern their words, but they chilled her even as they immediately faded away into nothingness.
"And the marble halls," Aya continued, "those are the High Heavens. The archway is the Crystal Arch, where angels are born. I have not seen either in person, but I know of them."
The Question and the Answer returned to her, unbidden:
You write about angels and demons. Do they exist? Are they real?
Verily.
She swayed as the true summation of reality crashed into her. "I saw the Heavens fall."
"Yes, you did."
"Then we must do something! I know what I claimed before, but…" She struggled to find the words. "It felt so real. The air and the glow. It was as though I were looking through a window into another world. It will happen. I know it will."
Aya shook her head. "Prophecy is hard to translate. Cain compiled a prophecy of the End of Days once, from many sources, that only made sense in retrospect."
"This was not confusing at all."
"But when? That is the question. It could be today. It could have been yesterday, for all we know. It could be a thousand years hence." Her voice softened. "Grandmother saw our mother's death. But she could not say when or how. And Father never forgave her."
Another truth, unexpected. The answer to a question she'd always had but had never wanted to ask: why she had never seen their grandmother after their mother's passing, even when she had begged her father for otherwise.
"We must tell someone," Farah said, shaking herself from memory. "Even if we don't know when it will occur, or how. Someone who would help us understand."
"Then we will go to the source of wisdom. Have a nap. We'll be awake tonight."
Her world was darkness and shadow. Farah knew she was dreaming, but unlike previous ones, it swept her like a current, nearly drowning her. She struggled unsuccessfully against the flow and was soon buried in its tangibility.
She stood, formless, under a quarter moon. Worn fields stretched before her, tread many times with feet or hooves. A short distance away a fire dwindled, its coals smoking. Next to the fire lay a travel pack, a worn bedroll, and the same man from her previous dreams. To his side were the curved weapons; engraved runes glowed faintly on the blades. He slept soundly, undisturbed by the wind and the calls of the night.
"Him," the voices whispered. "This man walks the crossroads. One path leads to ruin. The other, survival."
Their words were overcome by a growing gale. As Farah watched, many figures materialized from the darkness. They gathered about him and silently raised their weapons.
Then she tasted blood on her tongue and awoke.
"Aya!" Farah stumbled into the great room; her hair was askew, and her eyes were uncharacteristically wide. "We must go. Now."
"You have plenty of time to sleep," Aya said, attempting to quell the unease rising in her gut. She had also been unable to sleep, but she attributed it to the excitement of adventure rather than concern. "It is not as if the library is far. He is not due to return until later tonight, regardless."
"Not the library. Elsewhere."
Realization dawned. "What did you see?"
"A field, under a quarter moon as it is now. They are going to find him and kill him. We must get Tyrael."
"Tyrael is not here. He is travelling with the Horadrim and will not be back until the morning." Aya almost told her to return to bed, but the vivid panic colouring her face told her otherwise; inexperienced as Farah was with the Sight, her sister was certain this was real. They could not risk ignoring it. She gestured at the door. "Let me gather my things. I will accompany you."
A/N: Dear readers, have a (hint of a series) plot! What would a Diablo story be without prophecy, after all? Malthael certainly does a lot of travelling. He's been very busy in the approx. 5 years since the ending of In All Things Light and Dark. Perhaps a bit obsessively. (Because that's never gone poorly in the past. Never.)
One can never claim that he doesn't appreciate a well-organized reference section, though. Someone has to manage all of his research. I have a small head-canon that this was Urzael's job before he became a giant flesh-behemoth-of-smashy. Them books are heavy. Farah is up to the challenge. Just don't steal her fruit.
Tune-in next week for the conclusion of Arcane and Apples. I'm actively working on edits for Act 3, as well, for a few weeks later. Thanks for reading!