Diablo III: Morbed by Micky Neilson

CHAPTER ONE

    One by one they set foot on the island, six weary souls battered for days by the storming Great Ocean.
    The sea was calm now and the shore was solid, but to Morbed it felt as though the ship still pitched and swayed beneath him. The sharp, salty breeze buffeted his ears and flapped strands of walnut hair over his pale blue eyes. He glanced farther down the beach, where the skeleton of some long-dead whale, each rib bone twice the height of a full-grown man, shone in the dull sunlight. With a shiver he lifted the hood of his wool capote.
    â€œWhich way, fisherman?” Jaharra was the most restless of the band. Morbed mused that patience must not factor highly in the training of a sorceress—no, wizard , he corrected himself. Jaharra bore the title as a coat of arms.
    She huffed indignantly, haversack pushed to one side, eyebrows lifted, awaiting a response. Morbed’s thoughts wandered to the shapely figure beneath her mixture of cloth and plate vestments. Jaharra’s eyes caught Morbed’s. He wondered if she was capable of reading his mind, hoped she couldn’t, and quickly looked away to the fisherman.
    With one hand the seaman tugged at his ill-fitting sheepskin coat. With the other he reached up over his gray-streaked beard and stroked the sharp, jutting bridge of his nose. He turned inland, dark eyes darting nervously over the dense coniferous forest and high peaks beyond. Finally he nodded toward the northeast. “That way.”
    â€œHow far?” the wizard asked.
    â€œLess than a day,” the peculiar man answered, scanning the woods as if expecting some howling army of savages to break from the tree line at any instant. His gaze flickered to Jaharra, whose own twinkling eyes burrowed into him, weighing and assessing.
    â€œVery well,” she said. “Marching order—”
    â€œJust a wild suspicion.” A husky voice broke in around a mouthful of bread, as Aedus, a druid from the distant wilderness of Scosglen, stepped up next to Morbed. “We’re trekking into woodland, so you’ll want me in front with the fisherman. And since our good thief here treads lightly, you’ll want him next.”
    â€œFormer thief. And I say the holy man should take a turn in front,” Morbed replied.
    Aedus picked crumbs from his ruddy beard as he clapped Morbed on the shoulder. “Nonsense,” Aedus said. “No chance of a silent approach with that armored mountain stomping before us.”
    Morbed and the druid turned to regard the hulking figure of the crusader, Clovis. The man stood like a fortress, girded for war. To his right side he held a thick wood-and-iron shield, more than half his height, which bore on its face the carved head of a mighty dragon. Massive, intricately crafted lion-mane spaulders flared from his shoulders. Tucked under his left arm was a great helm, and in that hand was a two-headed flail. The symbol of Clovis’s order, a design resembling a small upright pitchfork, was emblazoned on a tabard across his barrel chest.
    Excepting the fisherman, Clovis was the last to join their circle. For the flaxen-haired easterner, it was an alliance of convenience. For Morbed, it was also convenient—convenient that much of the ribbing normally leveled at him was now aimed at the crusader.
    Clovis gazed back at the two of them with quiet stoicism.
    Jaharra was set to respond, when a long, deafening peal shook the trees.
    The earsplitting tumult blared from the woods, rolled out over the water, and left a persistent ring in the air. It took several breaths for those gathered to recognize the sound as an outcry—the terrifying bellow of something perhaps primal and most certainly immense. Morbed’s hand instinctively hovered near the six-inch blade sheathed at his side.
    Aedus swallowed. “What manner of creature inhabits this isle? That wasn’t the roar of any animal I know.”
    The druid called to the fisherman,