#mal plays d4

[mal-likes-biscuits]

Mal is having a night. He almost froze to death, then he helped a village with their demon problem, then they fucking drugged him (after getting him drunk) and force fed him blood petals.

He didn't wake up on the wrong side of the AU to deal with this shit. Hells be damned.

[mal-likes-biscuits]

I gotta ask - did u give D4 Mal-insert black hair as a nod to Lore Things? ~🐟

It's a nod to where his character would start again, predominately. When I was doing character creation I was thinking a lot about why Mal would be there, beyond me just wanting to have fun walking around a necro that looks like him.

Because Sanctuary in D4 is understandably very different from the Sanctuary Mal is from. I genuinely like the setting and appreciate why some things were retconned from D3 -- notably the damage Malthael actually did in the world.

Mal fucked up pretty bad, where he's from. Him and the reapers flattened Westmarch. They did notable damage in other major cities, and had the Nephalem not stopped them, they would have proceeded to walk over every other mortal on the planet. But the majority of his forces were in Westmarch, because that is where the Nephalem began to oppose him, so that's where more of the reapers went.

It's pretty clear at the end of D3 that Malthael didn't do any sort of world-level devastation to Sanctuary. But in D4, we've been told by the developers that 90% of the world's population has died since D3 50 years prior, predominately killed off by the reapers.

It's no wonder Sanctuary is so rough. The entire world has been trying to survive and rebuild while being assaulted by anything threatening left. Toss in Lilith and Inarius' forces to the mix, and it's a (not legit) miracle anyone is alive.

What would bring Mal there? Mal ends up back on Sanctuary in all my stories because the sound of mortals is louder than the Arch. (The Arch has been corrupted and is failing, after all, whether it's obvious how bad at the time or not.) Particularly, he hears the sound of mortals trying so desperately to live and survive, just like he wants to do. There's a large amount of them .... near Westmarch, where the survivors of his attack settled.

You see how this happened, there?

Who knows the state of the Arch in D4. Would he hear it? Would he even exist to hear mortals? One thing remains common though, between the two worlds, and that there's no shortage of people trying to live.

I'm not sure where he wakes up in Sanctuary, exactly. Or how long he wanders. But it's not the Mal we know. This is Malthael. Possibly sane, possibly not. And he is surrounded by the breathtaking scope of just how badly he's ruined this world.

And that's how we start back right at the beginning. Black hair with flecks of growing silver, as he gradually is dragged back into the Eternal Conflict whether he wants it or not.

This is not a happy story. There's no Nephalem cultural capital, no explosive growth from darkness. No librarian.

But it would still be a very Diablo story, because at its heart, D4 is about what mortals do to survive. They're all heroes in their own story. Broken, dirty, caked in blood, but alive in spite of everything's attempts to write their epilogue.