A/N: There is fanart to go with this chapter! You can see it by visiting my tumblr blog at mal-likes-biscuits. Also, the playlist for this chapter is "Sound of Silence" by Disturbed. Thanks all who have been reading and along for the ride. It's been a fun one so far.
Chapter Three: Light and Dark
Malthael stumbled from the monastery into the streets. Townsfolk shouted as he pushed through the crowd, gait unsteady, his vision impaired by the fracturing in his mind. The blades grew heavier as he ran, though whether from fatigue or spiritual influence he did not know. He wanted to escape, but the exit he sought was not a physical one.
Time blurred into stuttering frames. He was at Salvos' gate; then, on the worn road outside; finally, he fell against a gnarled tree in a towering forest. His throat and lungs ached from running.
"We were naïve before. As are you, now."
"We?" Malthael gasped, breathless. "We are nothing alike."
"To truly understand the Light, you must embrace the dark. We are the same, you and I. Accept it, and the inevitability of what is to come."
A shadow passed over the forest. He searched for the source but saw nothing. It was too early in the evening for such ebony blackness. He pondered the spirit's words, tried to fit them into what he had read and intrinsically understood about the divine. It made little sense.
"If you are of the Light," he said, as the shadow crossed again, "then you could never touch the Hells. That is what separates angels and demons. Their nature is distinct and pure. What you are, spirit, is corrupted."
"I am death, which is the end of things regardless of their composition. I have brought enlightenment to all beings."
"No. You have not. All beings struggle against you. As they did in Westmarch. And as I do here, now. I see your sickness for what it is."
Dark tar seeped from the ground, rose upward, and coalesced into a fallen angel. It unfolded its wings, which were broken shards of spirit-bones. It stepped methodically towards him, raising its blades.
"The blood on your hands is equal to my own."
"Then I will atone. Will you?"
"Enough. I have spoken more this day than I have in a millennium. This will end, and I will regain what is rightfully mine."
Malthael stood, still clutching the wrapped bundle in his arms. He thought of those who had been kind to him, regardless of the immense darkness his soul contained. Of Talm's words, naïve, yet now a fundamental part of his being. Wise words, though perhaps inaccurate in the past; he would make them true going forward.
You are a good man. And someday, you will remember that.
He unwrapped the blades, hefted them into his hands. Shotels, he realized; not harvesting sickles, but simple weapons of the highest craftsmanship. They were weightless, as if made from light itself, and cut through the air effortlessly. Runes carved into the blades glowed as intensely as the spirit's shotels seeped shadow. Not the weapons from his dream or those wielded by his foe, but pure blades, untainted.
These were not crafted from darkness. I wielded them before, and I will do so again.
Malthael raised one at the spirit, and its curved edge shimmered a brilliant amethyst. Fiery warmth ran through his fingers and up his arm. Instead of fighting the sensation, he let it proceed, until the power subsumed him, and he and the blades became one and the same.
The spirit howled and swept forward, a billowing cloud of icy mist trailing in its wake. Its motions were sluggish, as though it moved through water. It towered over Malthael and swung its blades downward.
He was quicker. He sidestepped instinctively, eyes narrowing as the shadow shotels cut a gruesome trench in the dirt. The fallen angel was slow, but Malthael knew if it so much as brushed him, he would be dead. He pivoted and swung behind it, raking his blades' tips towards its back. They passed through the cloak as if it were smoke.
It did not exist, he realized. The spirit was an illusion, born from his soul, though no less menacing than if it had physical form. He glanced back to the scar in the ground, wondering, briefly, if that was also unreal. If he wasn't even moving, but instead collapsed on the ground, lost within his subconscious. Not that death of the mind would be any less permanent.
The spirt lunged again. He felt the shotels swing before he saw them. A change in the wind, a hissing sound as they travelled. He brought his weapons up and hooked them around the others, deflecting them into a tree. The wood shattered.
The moment the blades touched, Malthael felt something return to him. A fragment of his greater whole.
"Brother, we require your consul. Only Chalad'ar can show us the end to the conflict. Only you can bring us the Chalice's wisdom."
He had a duty, once. Ages ago. He had searched. Learned. Led, even.
The spirit flinched, its form sweeping backwards across the ragged ground. It snapped its blades back and stared at Malthael, as if it was able to hear his thoughts and was astounded.
"They cared not for our wisdom," it growled.
"Perhaps Chalad'ar is not clouded, but enrichened. We will give you the time you require to see clearly again. Even Fate cannot determine the future, so entwined it is with these new mortals. Brother, we need your wisdom. Do not fail us."
Chalad'ar…the Chalice. It had been his, before. In a realm far in the sky, where beings of light tread marble hallways. They had asked an angel to peer into the souls of mortals and find knowledge. An angelic being, composed of the holiest spirit, who could neither comprehend nor defend against the internal darkness humans were capable of wielding.
Is that how I fell from grace, Malthael wondered. I know, now. I was not mortal. Is that how you fell, as well, spirit? Were you my brother in those eternal halls?
"I need neither your mistaken insight nor your judgement!"
Enraged, the shadow dove at him and swept the shotels in a horizontal strike meant to cleave him through the chest. Malthael felt, again, the blades as they moved. Like the dust and the wind, they were patterns in a greater whole, a part of the totality of existence that he—they—had once glimpsed within shimmering Light.
He met the weapons with his own, diverting the blow and ripping one of the shotels from the spirit's hands with a twist of his wrists. It landed a short distance away, where it continued to leak grainy smoke. Enraged, the spirit struck at him again, its remaining blade moving faster, leaving him little time to defend. The shotels clashed loudly, and each time they struck, he was overwhelmed with floods of memory.
"Brother, the Worldstone is lost. We do not fully understand the consequences as of yet, but—Brother? Brother, you are stiller than I have ever seen. I—I will leave you to your thoughts, then. We will discuss more, later."
Do not leave, Malthael begged the memory. He—I could not speak because we could not describe what we had lost. You left us. You left me to drown in a sea of souls.
The spirit momentarily hunched as if in pain. It attacked again, but its movements were slowed. Malthael saw it clearly now, as if its form were sharpened and impressed against the rest of the world. He parried the single shotel, sliding the blade along his own and driving the creature back. The impact threw the spirit into an outcropping, his blade embedding deeply into the rock and pinning its arm to the surface.
"Silence is Malthael's way, as you would expect. You would be blessed to hear him speak twice, if at all. We leave him to his studies, as he prefers. And when he chooses to speak, we listen."
But I could not speak. And you could not understand such imperfection, and thus never imagined I was in pain.
The loss he had been unable to feel before now ripped into his soul, bringing him to his knees. He remembered the moment the Chalice had clouded, to be filled with the faces of millions, their voices shouting simultaneously. How the pristine silence of the Pools had been altered forever. Enrichened, as his brothers and sisters said, yet forever out of his reach as a being born only of Light.
He remembered the moment he had lost hope. When he first walked the Halls of Pandemonium. When the sound took him, bringing promises of escape that ended only in darkness.
"Brother, why?"
And the moment he betrayed them all.
He had been swept away and left to drown in a pool of madness, where he had, eventually, succumbed to a single desire—to silence the voices torturing him. He dimly remembered there being a logic to his actions. It did not matter. It had never been about mortal life. He had squandered them, excused his actions via the Eternal Conflict, and in doing so had become the very thing he had sought to defeat.
The dead in Westmarch had risen at his biding. He had reaped souls, razed the city to ashes with the essence of the dying. He had been no lieutenant at arms, or a compatriot fallen from Heaven.
He was the fallen angel trapped against the rock, laughing and reaching its free hand his direction.
"Finally, you understand. In your limited, mortal wisdom."
The shotels wavered in his hands as the full realization struck him. His soul felt ill, tainted.
"How did you do this?" He staggered towards the angel, pressing the blades against its neck. "This dark magic! How did you bring us here, if we were slain twenty years ago?"
"You assume much. I would rather suffer an eternity of agony than walk as a mortal. Fate is cruel."
"Then how?"
"Find your own truths," it rasped, the voice no longer overwhelming but instead a dull reflection of Malthael's own. "Spare me your humanity and end this."
Relief was too kind a gift for the creature. For himself. There was no forgiveness to be had for crimes so great. Regardless of how he had come to be there, burdened with forgotten darkness, he saw no just path forward.
"We were born of the High Heavens," he said, voice breaking. "And we betrayed all it stands for. We should be left to rot."
That was the way of his brothers and sisters. He imagined they would have abandoned him there, both his light and his dark, bound to the forest and the stone, until time itself passed away and his fractured soul remained. Alone.
As they had before.
It was the angelic way.
He blinked away tears. The shotels, suddenly heavy, strained his muscles, and he understood the gravity of what he needed to do. The spirit made no move to fight.
"We do not deserve this mercy," Malthael whispered. "For regardless of our past and our intent, we have sinned gravely. But the beings we have wronged often grant mercies that are not deserved. They ask for reparations instead of suffering. That is the mortal way. And it will be my way."
This time, the shotels cleaved cloth and armor cleanly; the angel's body broke apart and drifted, piece by piece, until the breeze took it, and like all other things in the world, it became dust. He watched it vanish and felt a strange release, as if a persistent scream in his mind fell silent.
Then Malthael, once the Archangel of Wisdom and the Angel of Death, awoke and remembered.
Everything.
