Sorin couldn’t believe what he was seeing. What was Lilliana Vess doing here? And what motive did she have to attack Thraben? Sorin didn’t sit to ponder the question. Instead he started running down the hill toward the hoard of zombies, skeletons and other manners of undead, preparing to protect the human city known as Thraben.
The vampire didn’t get very far however, as a huge lumbering mass of muscle and armor suddenly ran into Sorin, launching him backwards into a rock he had passed just a moment before. The blow would have probably killed a human, as it was, Sorin could feel several broken bones, including one or two vertebrae. Nothing a little spell and some blood wouldn’t fix.
“Dam!” Sorin muttered. “What the hell are you doing here Garruk?”
Garruk, the big monster of a human, looked up. He looked even more horrible than his usual wild madness. His face looked….old. His face had a sickly green color in it, giving away the reason for his problem.
“Well you can’t be feeling all that good.” Sorin said, laughing as he got on his feet. His bones already mended, though still aching. “It appears you’ve been cursed.”
Garruk looked Sorin over, then turned and started walking towards the undead hoard that was just about at Thraben’s gates. Sorin ran up beside him. He wasn’t at all interested in what Garruk was doing on his home plane, but he was hoping to get the human’s help, for it appeared Garruk was after the same thing as him. The necromancer, Lilliana Vess. Sorin had no doubt that she had been the one who cursed the human.
“What do you want?” Garruk growled. Sorin noticed his voice was strained and raspy, unlike his usual boom.
“I believe we have similar motives. The necromancer. She did that to you, am I right?” He finished with a gesture toward Garruk’s face.
“What did she do to you?”
“Not so much what she has done to me, but more what she is planning to do.”
“Huh?”
“You see that city? That is one of the only remaining human settlements on Innistrad. I have spent the majority of my life trying to keep it safe.”
Garruk raised an eyebrow, from the way he grimaced Sorin was guessing it created a lot of pain. “Why would you bother protecting a single city on this world? Most of the humans are already dead anyway.”
“That’s my point!” Sorin exclaimed.
“What’s your point?” Garruk asked, still confused.
“I set up a system to keep all the humans on Innistrad safe. This was not just for the humans, but also for the vampires, for they cannot survive without humans. The angel Avacyn was a creation of mine. I traveled the multiverse looking for a solution to this,” Sorin gestured to the zombie horde slowly approaching the city. “And I found one. Avacyn was not originally an archangel. She was a spirit guide. Before I bit her.”
Those last words caught Garruk by surprise. “You bit an angel? What would that have done? Angels are immune to vampire venom.”
“That they are. But what about the venom of a vampire with a planeswalker spark, and the agreement of the angel herself?”
“You convinced an angel to become a vampire?”
“Yes, but it was for the good of all the humans on Innistrad. Avacyn was understanding. I needed a vessel of power to control the darkness, but light was not enough. How about both light and dark fighting it back? That was my thought process, and it worked better than I had imagined.”
They had reached Thraben’s walls and the zombie hoard was coming toward us.
“We’ll have to finish this conversation later.”
“Agreed.”