Daily writing exercise, 750words.com
Backstory for one of the characters I play in Diablo 3.
fiction by Jason Edwards
Hather, Crusader, born of the unholy union between an Angel and the human woman he seduced. Ludicrous to say he. It fell from the sky, a casualty of war, and destroyed a farm in its falling. A young girl came across the body, not alive but possessed of never-dead, and she was taken by its utter beauty, that touch of God, a shred, a figment, and for itself her sudden awe struck it, too, as a mirror is struck, a wicked kind of incest, rendered it a he in her emerging lust and they locked, she becoming a woman even as it became a man, and for a moment they were as one, and a child was conceived. Nephalem. Of course, the woman was a girl once more and died in child birth.
But before she died she was outcast, of course, and the baby was to be given away, sold, for slavery, for wolf food, for ballast in the dark art of some necromancer’s spell. But the baby was half angel, half possessed of the never-dead, and lived. And grew. Taller and stronger than those around her. Beautiful in a terrible way. Only the blindest of lust merchants were too soul-blackened to be afraid, and they for their efforts wound up broken, sometime in half.
When the Crusade came through on a march from one holy place to the next, she joined them. Despite their strict forbidding. She attached herself to a knight, himself a sad and brooding man having lost his wife and child in a fire, having only joined the Crusade because he was too cowardly to work his own death himself. He barely noticed her, ignored utterly the whispers and gossip that ran through the army and its baggage.
She watched his every move, in camp, in battle, and soon she too took up arms. her size and strength lent themselves well to combat, and when the camp was assailed one night by brigands, it was Hather who stood triumphant over the bloody bodies. Alas, one of these was her master, who had finally won his hard-sought reward.
Hather dressed herself in his armor, took his name, and carried his standard in the wars. After a time, few remembered where she’d come from or that there was even a knight before her. And her deeds in fighting were glorious. This army of holy knights beat back infidels in every dark corner of the globe, their leader taking them deeper and deeper into lands long forsaken for their demonic influence.
The deeper they went, the harder she fought, and though they always won the day, pyrrhic victories whittled the crusader’s forces. The fought devils, demons, hellspawn, and slew them all, until the company was but a dozen men and Hather herself, each of them hardened and honed by surviving terrible engagements to be evil’s greatest fear.
Their leader was possessed of a holy zeal, bordering on the unnatural, and he found passage to some of the most terrible places in existence. The fought the damned’s lieutenants, entire legions of evil incarnate, cutting a swath through hell until they came finally to Lucifer’s throne, Pandamonium, where they faced Diablo himself.
Ludicrous to say himself. Diablo, it, the Prime Evil, fifteen feet tall, razor sharp claws of steel, a mouth full of fangs dripping with poison, eyes of fire, and horns drenched in the gore of those judged wicked. Hather was numb-struck, for all the prime evils have that same shred, that figment of God, but in the devils, corrupted, turned in on itself, a rip in the fabric of God’s universal existence.
In all her years of battle and warfare, Hather had only ever fought through skill of arms and triumphed by virtue of her might and strength. But on this day she found herself ovecome with rage-lust. She flung herself at Diablo and locked with him in terrible combat. As Diablo called his minions around him, the last of the Crusade’s company fell, as did the devil spawn, until only the Prime Evil and Hather remained.
They fought for days, Pandamonium falling down around them. Hather’s sword flashed, her shield slammed against Diablo’s attacks, which grew more and more feeble as the fight raged, and though Hather, too, received grievous wounds, they only made her swing her sword faster, until Diablo’s body was cut in two.
Hather stood over the Prime Evil’s body, and knew that this was only the beginning. For evil never really dies. Hell melted away around her, and she was left standing on a plateau at the foot of Sanctuary. In the distance, a star fell from the sky, a sign that her journey must begin again. And so she rode, this time alone.
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