It began to snow towards midnight, if Raziel was any judge of time, thick white flakes drifting down from a sky that had become overcast obscuring the moon and stars. It didn’t settle on the ground as the earth under his feet was too full of moisture but it quickly managed to coat the surrounding forest’s pine trees in a carpet of white.
Raziel had to keep shaking himself to cast off the snow that settled on his head and shoulders as he walked.
Beyond the gate of Willendorf he had entered the kingdom proper, dotted with small settlements and villages. Unlike those he had left behind most of them were not deserted although their population seemed strangely diminished.
One village Raziel past, heading steadily downhill into a valley, was almost abandoned apart from the central tavern building. Lights still shone from inside but the door had been intensely barricaded. Had the entire village locked themselves in the tavern for the night? What bizarre circumstance would prompt such strange behaviour?
This entire country seemed to rot under a cloud of perpetual fear, afraid of even the dark and the hidden things in the night.
Not long after passing the place, Raziel surmounted a short cliff that jutted out from the hillside. From this vantage point he could see the body of water he had observed earlier but now in far greater detail. It was a large lake, shaped like a crescent moon that curved south and east. This was the Lake of Serenity, so named for its calm almost undisturbed waters; rivers feeding into it from underground caves.
On the near bank was the township, a large walled settlement with many buildings in neat rows with flickering torches here and there to show signs of activity.
There was an island in the middle of the lake, joined to the town by a long stone bridge. Sitting upon this island was a rising citadel, a castle town with many walls protecting the fort at the top. Even from this distance the fluttering banners of the Lion Kingdom were visible.
.
“Here I beheld the capital of the lion kingdom of Willendorf. From here the proud dynasty of the Ottmar bloodline had ruled a nation renowned for justice, charity and fairness. Beholding it now it was clear that fairy tale dream had shattered, falling to the inevitable force of dark reality.”
.
For all its chivalric reputation, the city of Willendorf was hardly the impressive harbour of goodness its proponents claimed it to be. Built on the bank of a river it was surrounded by muddy fields and tall seas of rotten grass and reeds. The entire area seemed to be turning into a swamp and Raziel could see where several outlying buildings had been lost to rising floods.
The sense of Ariel’s presence had been growing steadily stronger all night and as he looked out over the scene, she seemed to pass some necessary point of restoration and slowly but surely her image seemed to manifest itself beside him. She looked drawn and weary, her long golden hair draped down over half her face so he could not whether or not she wore her corrupted or purified visage.
“Raziel?” She breathed, turning to look at him. He looked back at her and did a poor job of hiding his concern.
 “Are you well?” He asked. It was admittedly a stupid question considering she was dead he realised the moment after he had asked it.
“I am recovered.” She said apparently either not noticing. Raziel narrowed one eye at her manner. She was disconnected and dispassionate, as if the joy had been taken out of existence and she was merely drifting in it. He had not seen her so dejected since he had first encountered her, an eon’s long prisoner of the Pillars.
“Is something the matter?” He asked. Ariel looked at him and then quickly away.
“No.” She replied but Raziel stared her down.
“Ariel, you are not in a position where lying is possible.” He said. As they were bounded he could also feel her distress, seeping from her soul to hiss like water from a sponge.
Realising this Ariel turned back sharply to look at him, her hair drifting enough so he could see that she was wearing his corrupted face; one eye a skull’s empty socket. The other eye was full of doubt, confusion and regret so strong it made Raziel momentary flinch.
 “I am… troubled.” She admitted after a long moment of silence. “I understand now why it was necessary for him to live on and that my entrapment at the Pillars was an unintended side effect.” From her tone Raziel gathered that this was not easy for her admit.
He realised that she has been disturbed by the presence of Kain when they had finally caught up with back in Fanum-Divus. The former Balance Guardian seemed at war with herself, torn in her own mind between what she seemed to think was right and what she saw was correct.
Drifting she hovered over empty air of the edge of the cliff, a faint image through which snow was falling.
“But I spent eons hating him with every fibre of my being.” She admitted.  “One does not cast away such animosity easily.”
Raziel blew out air through his nose and shook his head, not for her sentiment but for understanding it.
“That I know all too well.” He said, thinking of his own experience with his vampiric father. Ariel looked at him sadly then.
“But it’s worse then even that.” She told him. Raziel looked at her with a question eyebrow raised. She went on, explaining.
“Having being bound to you and seen what you have seen I understand now, in clear and bitter retrospect, that I am the one who damned myself.” She claimed and her tone was self mocking. “When Kain failed to defeat the paladin, Malek, he came to me to seek a means of destroying him. I told him to find the Oracle of Nosgoth and beseech him for aid.”
With a faint glow, her face restored itself to her purified form; whole and complete. She shut both her eyes and turned her face heavenward. The blue wraith could see the thick snowflakes falling through her insubstantial body.
“I knew all along that the Oracle was Moebius and I directed Kain to him anyway.” Her admission was almost a whisper. She brought her hands to her face, holding them there to cover it.
“Of course Kain would not sacrifice myself on my behalf!” The ghost of the former balance guardian stated. “Why should he? I helped in tricking him into being the catalyst of the genocide of his race.”
Raziel was silent, quietly pondering. Could she be right and this compliance of hers was what ultimately drove Kain to his decision to damn the Pillars? The mere possibility of it being true must have occurred to her before but she had kept such thoughts suppressed by thousands upon thousands of years of hate for Kain for condemning her along with them.
“I thought that perhaps Kain might be motivated by love of Nosgoth to do the right thing.” Ariel said and there was an edge of laughter in her voice for such naivety.
The blue wraith cocked his head at her.
“As you said, you never gave him a reason to.”  He agreed with her. What else could he do? He would not lie to her and pretend that it wasn’t her fault. Everything she was admitting to was completely correct and he would not absolve her of the blame. All he could do for her was help her to accept it and move on.
“And do you know what’s truly pathetic?” She asked him with a self loathing catch to her voice. When he didn’t answer she turned, her hair twirling, to stare out across and past the city of Willendorf towards the distant horizon.
“Despite knowing this, despite realizing that it was just as much my fault as it was Kain’s…. I still can’t forgive him.”
Raziel looked up at her back and then sighed. Perhaps she had not come as far as she could. Admitting her own fault was a step in the right direction and it gave some hope to him that if he helped her, he could help free her from her own doubts and guilt. At the mention of Kain he was reminded that they had still not found him.
A fine thing this was, to find Kain returned from the dead once more only to simply loose track of him. There had been no sign of Ewoden either so if either of them were turned to Nosgoth as well he supposed they could be anyway.
Briefly he wondered if they had even been dumped in the same era and he inhabited.
“It will be dark soon, perhaps he merely waits for the sun to go down for better hunting.” He said, turning his head to look at the city. If Kain was as depleted of energies as the blue wraith had been upon his return he would need blood. A city such as this would provide ample sustenance.
“Perhaps.” Ariel agreed and her form softly faded, her projection vanishing and returning to her existence as a presence within his own soul.
He held here there within his spirit as he made his way towards the walls of the city, the falling snow helping to mask his approach.
Up across one large supporting stone buttress was enough of a series of hand holds to allow the blue wraith to haul himself up, scaling the wall as slowly and as quietly as possible as to not alert anyone who might be patrolling the walls.
Reaching the top he paused to glance over either way. The snow was really coming down heavily now and a bellowing wind turned the fall into a blizzard, obscuring his view of anything for a few feet in either direction.
While the cold did not bother him as a wraith, it did make him more sluggish and the snow kept getting into his eyes.
The blue wraith leapt from the top of the cities wall to a rooftop he could barely see through the snow, running along it before leaping to the next roof.
He could still not locate Kain within the scope of his heightened senses and in this storm it was not going to be easy for him to look for him by sight. It would probably be wiser to find somewhere to wait out the bad weather.
Obviously he could not just knock on a door and ask for a bed for the night.  He would have to find somewhere sheltered but isolated and hidden, preferably with a good view of the township.
The answer came to him when he reached the edge of a long sloping tile roof. Across the street to his left was a tall building with a spire that pointed sharply up. Even through the snow Raziel recognised the shape of a chapel. Its windows were dark, perhaps indicating that nobody was inside. How ironic would it be if a building dedicated to god provided ‘sanctuary’ to the enemies of heaven.
A short glide from the roof top and Raziel sank his talons into the stone, swinging in the strong wind for a moment before slowly pulling himself up. The blue wraith climbed higher and higher until his talons found the edge of a window and he pulled himself up. He had reached the bell tower, with its four sides open to the elements at regular intervals.
Once inside he was sheltered from the worst of the wind and snow, dropping down onto a wooden ledge and backing into a corner. It wasn’t exactly cosy but it did keep him dry.
Time began to drag on, the wind howling around the tower and making the ropes that made the bells ring gently sway; the clappers hitting the bells with a soft tinkle. Raziel’s thoughts wandered randomly, skittering from place to place as he considered things that had no logical connection.
He thought about the Pillars and how Kain might intend to restore them now that they had crumbled completely to dust. Then without any connecting thought to the next topic he wondered about the evolution of the Rahabim and what possible use those hoods on the adult vampires had been to them underwater.
He was purposely letting his thoughts drift his way so he would not brood on another thought just waiting to sink in. What would he do if he couldn’t find Kain again?
“Raziel?” Ariel’s voice brought him out of his wandering musings. He blinked and sat up straight. She had not manifested herself and her voice had been a harsh intense whisper.
“Yes?” He asked, alert now.
“Something is outside.” Raziel leaned back against the stone wall and slowly turned his head to the right, looking out the large arched window he had climbed through. It was still snowing outside but the wind had died down.
“What is it?” He asked, edging towards it slowly and cautiously. Ariel seemed to shiver in revolution within the confines of his soul.
“I don’t know… but it feels wrong, like the smell of rancid meat.”
The blue wraith turned his head partly around the corner to look out, taking in the street below in a glance, following it up along to a central town square.
.
“The being I observed was an ethereal entity, ghostly but physically real. I watched almost memorized as it floated over the rooftops, barley setting one foot down as it travelled. The flute it held to its lips piped out a sickly sweet sirens’ song.”
.
It was like no creature Raziel had ever seen. It was humanoid but with a skeletal build, arms and legs stick things with clothes hanging loosely on the wiry frame. The garment it wore was a bright horrid violet coat with tails and long sleeves and overly large cuffs, out the end of which came long spidery fingertips. The shoes on its feet curved back from the toes forming a spiral, hanging from the end of which was a small silver bell that tinkled with each movement the strange being made.
The flute it held, arms arched up so the instrument was always right before its face, was made of bone with chiselled holes down its length.
The head was perhaps the strangest part of the creature. The skull was elongated, sloping back over the shoulders with four spikes of bone curving back almost like a frill, covered in a thin and stretched skin that seemed to have turned blue with decomposition.
Its face was horrific, barely human with sketched skin being pulled back by the extra bone underneath. The nose was pulled sharply down, and the stretched skin outlined the eye sockets and cheekbones of the skull beneath. The cheeks were pulled back giving the creatures a gruesome sort of preserve smile.
The creature danced across the rooftops, skipping back and forth in a jovial manner the tails of its coat flapping.
Raziel watched, haunted by the strange compelling melody. As he watched, one by one the doors below opened; shafts of golden light spilling out into the night. Out into the falling snow came human children; walking out some even barefoot and swaying back and forth with their arms tight to their sides. Their ages alternated, some of them were in their early teens and others were little more then toddlers with ages ranging in between. There seemed to be about twenty in all, gathering in the middle of the square in a tight group.
The strange creature dropped down in front of them, still blowing its siren song on its pipe. As the being swayed, the children swayed with it and Raziel understood instantly that it had them all under its control.
The creature twirled about in a satisfactory manner and holding its bone flute to one side, marched off down the street. The children obediently followed their faces blank and uncomprehending.
.
“I didn’t know why this creature sought to ensnare human children in this way or why I reacted as I did. Logically I knew I should have remained hidden and observed until I was certain it was no threat to me. But some deep instinct inside, a relic of both my vampire and human instincts, told me to save the children.”
.
The blue wraith was moving even before he knew it, leaping from the top of the chapel and propelling himself into mid air with his legs.
His lunge carried him up, arching in a dive before he came down towards the strange being.
It must have sensed his attack as it looked up in surprise, its song stopping in that moment. It was too late to avoid the attack however and Raziel caught it across the head with his talons, scraping it down to the jaw.
In the instant of the blow, whatever hold it had on the children snapped like a taught string. They all swayed back, staggering as they regained their free will.
Raziel turned to look back at them but when they all looked at him and saw his face, dozens of them began screaming and as one they turned and ran for the dubious safety of their homes.
The blue wraith ignored them and tuned to confront the ‘Piper’ as it recovered, holding one hand to the wound across its face.