Last year, in April, I participated in an “A to Z” 30 day blogging challenge. One of the posts I wrote while working on that challenge was titled L is for Leah. In it, I briefly went over some of Leah’s backstory. I left a lot out in order to avoid massive “spoilers”.
Today, I decided to go ahead and put together Leah’s family tree. It’s something that’s been in my head for a while. It turned out that her family tree includes characters that one might not expect.
To be honest, Leah is among my favorite Diablo III characters. She’s a tragic figure, and her story is heartbreaking. I cannot help but wonder about what Leah would have become if she was a normal child (and not a vessel for Diablo). Would she have opened that little inn she talked about? Her family tree shows that she was the granddaughter of wealthy people. Leah’s life could have been one of comfort and luxury, if it wasn’t for a series of tragedies that happened.
Today, I took the time to quickly draw out Leah’s family tree. The format is easy to read, but probably isn’t exactly how a real genealogist would have put it together. I think there’s supposed to be one kind of connecting line for married couples, and a different kind for unmarried ones. That being said, a real genealogy chart wouldn’t work well anyway because Leah has two biological dads.
Leah’s mother is Adria. Anyone who played through Story Mode of the original Diablo III (the part before the Reaper of Souls expansion) already knows this. The game makes it pretty obvious. There’s the part where Leah accompanies the player to Adria’s Hut (and finds her mother’s journal). There’s the part later in the game where Adria returns and is a part of Leah’s life for the first time.
Adria’s father was Sevrin. He came from a long line of merchants and had a lot of money. One day, he lost a fortune when some ships that his goods were on sank. Sevrin was described as “unstable” and was prone to sudden acts of violence. In his rage over losing a fortune, he strangled Adria’s mother to death.
Adria was a little girl at the time. She knew her mother, had lived with both her mother and father, in what must have been a large home. One of her journals mentions paintings on the walls.
For whatever reason, Blizzard chose not to give Adria’s mother a name. I find this strange, because it wouldn’t have taken more than a minute or two for them to pick a name for that character. I’m certain that Sevrin knew his wife’s name, and that Adria knew her mother’s name. Was Adria named after her mother? We’ll never know!
Adria killed her father when she was still a young girl. She set the house in fire, with him in it. This means that if things went differently, and Adria decided to raise her daughter herself, Leah would have never known her grandparents.
One of Leah’s fathers was Aiden, and the other was Diablo. She’s got two biological dads, and one biological mom, and not one of them stuck around long enough to raise her. One could argue that Diablo was always with her – but he wasn’t actually in a position to raise her, and he didn’t let her know that he was around.
How did this happen? Long story short, Aiden jammed a cracked soulstone into his forehead in an effort to keep Diablo trapped within that stone. In doing so, his physical form held both Aiden and Diablo at the same time. Adria had sex with Aiden/Diablo mostly because she had previously made a pact with Diablo. The result was Leah, who was intended to become a vessel for Diablo long before she was even conceived.
Aiden was the son of King Leoric and Queen Asylla. That makes him a Prince. He undoubtedly would have had a very nice life if his father didn’t happen to go insane after being corrupted by evil. Play through Act I in Diablo III, and you end up going through what can be described as Leoric’s torture chamber (which leads you to the fight with The Butcher). King Leoric had his wife, Queen Asylla imprisoned – and then beheaded.
What if Aiden and Adria got together before he slammed a cracked soulstone that contained Diablo into his head? I know, I know, this scenario doesn’t work at all with the lore of the game, but play along anyway. I already pointed out that Leah would never have known her grandparents on her mother’s side. She also would never have known her grandparents on her father’s side.
Diablo, being a demon, didn’t come from a mother and a father. He came from Tathamet, a seven headed dragon that was the embodiment of all evil. Tathamet came from Anu, who was the original being in the “Diablo universe”. Anu existed in a single, perfect, pearl, and was all things. In short, Anu was both good and evil.
Eventually, Anu decided to cast out all of the evil within him. The evil formed into Tathamet. Anu and Tathamet fought against each other, while still within the pearl, for millennia. The end of the fight resulted in sort of a “big bang” that brought the “Diablo universe” into existence.
In short, Leah is the daughter of Adria and Aiden/Diablo. She is related to King Leoric/The Skeleton King, Queen Asylla, Sevrin, and Sevrin’s unnamed wife. She’s also distantly related to Tathamet, and even more distantly related to Anu. It could be argued that the entire “Diablo universe” is related to both Tathamet and Anu. However, Leah has a more direct connection to Tathamet than any other human character does.