Disclaimer
Diablo 2: Resurrected Flash-Fan-Fiction Anthology is unofficial Fan Content not approved/endorsed by Activision Blizzard, Inc. Portions of the materials used (names, images, dialogue, etc.) are property of Activision Blizzard, Inc.
Other Reading Locations
The anthology can also be read at…
Index
Chapter 1: He Who is Guided by Faith
Chapter 2: He Who Raises the Buried
Chapter 3: He Who Descends with Nature’s Fury
Chapter 4: He Who Rages for the Long Forgotten
Chapter 5: She Who Avenges Fallen Sisters
Chapter 6: She Who Snares from the Shadows
Chapter 7: She Who Burns Away the Chill
Foreword
Like many gamers of a certain age, I spent a significant—embarrassingly so—amount of my early and mid-teen years slaying imps, goatmen, and axe-wielding cows in Diablo II. Why? Because they dropped multi-colored shinies! And also because I got to spend time playing the game with friends. Tris runs and Baal runs were mindless exercises that I could do while chatting with friends over TeamSpeak or Ventrillo. It was a fun way to spend out-of-school hours—of which you have many when you are twelve. Diablo II was also my introduction to dark fantasy/horror fantasy, and it became the benchmark I judged other such forms of fiction in those genres against.
As I did—and still do!—with all the fiction-based entertainment I consumed back then, I daydreamed stories set in the Diablo world. I created backstories for the various classes in the game; crafted conversations between the characters and NPCs; narrated the bloody, back-and-forth battles against Diablo’s minions in the Chaos Sanctuary. Short, tiny narratives that only ever existed in my head. None of them ever made it to the page.
As most often happens, my friends and I eventually moved on from Diablo II to other games (though we occasionally snuck back into the world of Sanctuary from time-to-time). I eventually climbed out of my teens and into my twenties, going on an adventure through college and then into professional life. I occasionally thought back to those halcyon days of shattering demons with orbs of frozen ice or bashing in monster skulls with concentrated blows from a warhammer.
Then in early summer of 2021, Activision-Blizzard announced Diablo 2: Resurrected. And suddenly, all those old memories started resurfacing. All those old, short stories I used to make up in my head returned. Unlike before, where I had never written a single sentence of fiction down on paper, I had been spending the last two-and-a-half years doing just that, having taken up creative writing as a hobby starting in January 2019. As these narratives of yore came flooding back, I began seeing ways to improve them, ways to make them more interesting, ways to make them a reality.
This time I put the stories to paper.
For the last three months, I have worked on this short anthology of Diablo 2 flash fan fiction tales. Each story takes place from the perspective of one of the character classes in the game and each occurs in a specific location in Act 1. For longtime fans of the game, you should easily recognize these locales and the dialogue spoken by the characters—though I have added a touch of original dialogue to add a little extra spice. For those who are new to the game, I hope these stories can serve as an introduction of sorts to the lore and tone of Diablo and get you excited to play the remastered version of the game.
This was a labor of love for me, a way to express my deep fondness for the Diablo franchise. I very much enjoyed crafting these narratives. I hope you enjoy reading them. Catch you later, probably somewhere near the Throne of Destruction trying to grab that shiny before you do. ^_^
Ken Barnett
September 2021
Cybernook 