The old man’s fire still burned brightly when Kain returned to the central hall, fed fresh bits of wood and twig every now and then from the old man’s own hand. Exactly where he was getting this fuel from was of momentary interest to Kain as there were few if any trees on this high plateau, all rock ice and snow.
Ezekiel didn’t even look up as Kain approached; prodding the embers of his fire with a stick to keep it burning. The warmth was pleasant against the cold and if the old man kept a place warm for them while they where there he was doing something useful.
In human form, Ewoden was crouched by the fire and far closer trying to keep warm with a lack of garments. He had a woollen cloak wrapped around him, perhaps given our of the old man’s packs and he had his hands out towards the flames. The emissary looked up at the vampire when he drew near and gave him a sharp nod, indicating that he had encountered something worth speaking about during his patrol but nothing so urgent that he needed to speak of it immediately.
Kain nodded back in grim satisfaction, interrupting it as meaning they were alone on the mountain and not likely to be disturbed.  The Bastion had hidden secrets he would need time to uncover.
The old man was the first of them to break the silence.
“Your friend here tells me you came by Coorhagen.” He said, gesturing briefly at Ewoden before poking at the fire again. “How is the old hamlet these days?”
Kain glanced from the lycanthrope to the old man and back.
“It’s seen better times.” He replied, sitting down on a rock and rubbing his hands together to put some warmth back into them. Vampires could tolerate more extremes of temperature then humans but they were not impervious to the elements.
Ezekiel chucked and rolled his shoulders, bone creaking audibly, to resettle his cloak.
“Hasn’t it just?” He asked rhetorically. “Used to down live there myself.” He added, but with a certain amount of distaste. “Not out of any desire to but because I was needed.”
Kain looked up at him sharply and narrowed his eyes. He was no fool and had spent enough time dealing with Moebius’ clever wordplay that he knew something was being held back.
“For what purpose?” He asked intently.
The old man ran his fingers through his beard, pulling out a snarled tangle of hair and gave him a soft yet pained smile.
“Duty, Vampire.” He said and he sounded tired.  “I suspect even your kind know about that.”
Kain briefly wondered if perhaps he was being obscurely mocked.  It was difficult to know how to address the old man, neither a servant nor a hindrance nor a spy nor an enemy.  Ezekiel seemed to be something else entirely, something new... and anything new put Kain ever so slightly on edge.
“If I might cut in...” Ewoden said, looking at the once vampire emperor rather pointedly, clearly unwilling to wait any longer. Kain turned to look at him directly. “I have come across something I think you ought to see.”
Very willing to distract himself from his present trail of thought, Kain frowned at the Lycanthrope and his mouth parted at one side.
“What?” He asked.
Ewoden paused to consider and then shook his head with a disgruntled expression.
“Hard to explain, I’ve not seen its like before.” He said and stood up, keeping the wool cloak tight to him. “I’ll just show you.”
Kain nodded in agreement and the emissary led him out of the main hall and into the snowy courtyard. The snowfall has lessened by only a little, allowing small pinpricks of starlight to chin through the clouds. Ezekiel said nothing to them as they left, continuing to poke and prod at his fire in a disinterested sort of manner but Kain felt the old man’s eyes on him as they left.
The cold wind howled overhead, a high pitched screeching noise with a echo to it that seemed to linger a little too long amongst the ruins of the Bastion.
Ewoden stopped and cocked his head to one side, listening.
“Danger?” Kain asked him. The emissary did not immediately reply but pressed his lips together.
“No.” He finally concluded and shuddered. “But this place... it seems to carry memories embedded in the very air around it, dark memories of horrible deeds.”
Kain snorted.
“I’d be more surprised if it didn’t.” He said as they carried on. “This castle was built as a monument to pain.”
They passed through a jagged archway of blackened stone and into a corridor that lead deeper into the castle complex. The floor and walls were coated with patched of thick ice and icicles hung along the crevices, thick and wet with fresh snow blown in by the wind. 
“By who?” Ewoden asked, his voice echoing down the corridor.
“His name was Malek.” Kain replied, hearing his own voice echo. “The Sarafan Paladin, leader of their holy order and sentinel of the Circle of Nine.”
“Grand titles.” The lycanthrope said, glancing past him down the corridor to where the rusted remains of one of the Paladin’s booby traps lay in wait, plain for them to see with many spikes and curved blades now frozen with brown ice.
“He was also the Guardian of the Pillar of Balance.” Kain added and Ewoden looked at him sharply, eyes wide.
“He was human?”
“Essentially.” Kain replied.
“Then Moebius was telling the truth.” He mused. “Cursed and unable to bare live children, rights of Guardianship passed from Vampires to humans.”
Kain’s expression turned flat and unfriendly. He had heard an abridged version of the emissary’s history briefly from Raziel, although mention had been cut that Moebius had been involved; knowing Raziel probably to save time.
“I suppose he thought it of paramount importance.” He queried. Ewoden nodded, leading the way in through a larger doorway into a wider corridor.
“He came to preach of nearly nothing else.” He replied and then affected a puffed up, self important ranting sort of tone. “The age of men dawns for we are chosen by fate to rise up to providence!” He said, imitating a speech made perhaps eons ago.
Kain chuckled at the mockery.
“Ages come and ages go.” He said. “One rises and another falls. Foolish is the one who thinks his age lasts forever.”
His words proved to have deeper meaning then he intended as Ewoden came up to a set of shut double doors at the end of the wide corridor. The vampire had a momentary sense of powerful déjà vu that became certainty when the doors were pushed open. He had been here before, in a bygone age that had fallen away.
.
“Malek’s throne room, a fairly useless chamber for he could not use the throne himself. Reclining upon it still, frozen and preserved was the corpse the Paladin had claimed as his own.”
.
The corpse, covered even thicker in ice then before, hardly resembled a human being anymore. Even frozen so in this cold ice it was slowly rotting away. All that remained of the Paladin’s body was a pale white skeleton with ice and snow for muscle and skin. This body and perhaps a few scraps of torn armour that might still exist in the tower of Dark Eden were the only physical remains of the last Guardian of Conflict.
Ewoden walked right up to the throne.
“I have seen the body before.” Kain remarked, wondering if Ewoden had taken him all this way for a corpse. The lycanthrope shook his head.
“No, not that.” He replied and stepped to one side of the metallic seat, gesturing for Kain to follow him. “Here.”
Kain lifted an eyebrow quizzically but followed. He had noticed nothing special about this room when he had pursued the Paladin during his fledgling quests and at first glance, nothing about seemed different now.
Ewoden stepped aside to let him get close but pointed with a finger at the spot he was indicating. The throne was backed up against the far wall of the chamber but there was space enough for the vampire to see in between. There was an indentation in the wall, although too dark for them to make out exactly what.
More importantly however as Kain moved his hand in between the throne and the wall, he could feel moving air travel over his skin.
There was another hidden passage here, hidden by the throne of the Paladin itself.  Kain turned to look at the lycanthrope emissary.
“I found it when I came in here to check for more squatters like that old man.” Ewoden explained at the vampire’s look.
“I could smell the air coming through.”
Kain nodded and quickly set his talons against the side of the throne. He did not want to use his telekinesis to move the obstacle and risk damaging the entrance, so instead he set himself to the metal throne and pushed.
Slowly the chair and its corpse moved aside, groaning and creaking in violent protest with every step. The ice holding the corpse in place began to creak and crack in places as the throne moved and then with a final shove, Kain pushed it completely out of the way.
In the space where the throne had been, there was a door. There was no other word then a door for it was rectangular with a clear divide down the middle. Engraved into its surface was a pictogram depicting a creature that could only be a Hylden, with that sweeping crest on the skull. This specific Hylden was familiar however for it was the same Hylden Kain had seen before in that other hidden chamber.
.
“Again here was another image of the Hylden nobleman, in the exact same position as before only the orb he had once held had gone astray.  This was more than chance.”
.
In the other image, this nobleman Hylden had been holding some orb of importance. In this image that orb was missing an in its place was a deep indentation shaped like an egg.
Kain and Ewoden stared at the picture, before they both as one turned their heads to look down at the Nexus Stone attached to the armour on Kain’s arm.
Kain met the lycanthropes eyes, it was clear they were both thinking the same thing. The Nexus Stone disconnected from Kain’s arm with a soft click and the vampire held it in front of him, his eyes flickering back and forth between the stone and the slot in the wall.
Nodding once in decision he lifted the artefact and pressed it to the crevice.
.
“The Nexus Stone fitted so perfectly into the slot that it could only have been deliberately intended.”
.
As the artefact sit inside, the wall itself seemed to emit a loud click, followed by three increasingly loud clunking noises. The third one resonated ominously throughout the entire chamber and Ewoden took an involuntary step backwards in alarm. Small clouds of dust began to float up into the air, disturbed from cracks in the barrier where they had previous rested undisturbed. Hidden gears and machinery that had lain dormant for a long time without use churned into life, groaning like an old man rising from his bed.
The image on the door suddenly seemed to move, the head of the nobleman Hylden twisting up to look Kain full in the face. The image was not a relief cast but a statue, set into the hidden doorway itself.
The vampire stared back into that face without blinking, ready to any sort of surprise attack to be thrown at him. But the statuette, with a loud groaning of stone on stone, swung its head to the left and the door moved with it.
The grind of stone set the vampires teeth on edge but eventually the door was fully open, leaving the Nexus Stone set to one side still in the hole Kain had inserted it into.
As the dust resettled Kain looked into the passageway now revealed to him, shaped with metal walls unlike those of the bastion around him.
So Malek guarded the secret of his bastion with his own throne, for this passageway seemed to go down a very long way; perhaps to go deep into the mountainside upon which the fortress stood.
And what to make of the stone now, which had clearly been the key needed to open this door. Kain had seen enough in this place to confirm his already firm suspicion that the Nexus Stone was of Hylden origin and make, perhaps even created here.
“Is this what you came here to find?” Ewoden asked somewhat sceptically.
Kain stared on down the passageway for a long moment before turned and removing the Nexus Stone from the slot in the door. The mechanism seemed satisfied with its already being open and did not immediately swing the door back in front of the passageway entrance.
“Apparently it is.” Kain said but with a dubious tone in his own voice. The Nexus Stone itself had led him hear with not the clear intention of directing him to uncover these lost secrets, but stones are inanimate objects and do nothing by themselves. There was some guiding force behind, in or through the stone that was at work here.
He could not guess at this force’s motive for guiding him here but his intuition told him not to trust it, to seek out its intent and expose it before it came to fruition. He would not wander this fortress unlocked secrets blindly, waiting to fall into some trap built by some would be successor to Moebius.
He started towards the now open doorway.
“I will watch your back.” The lycanthrope remarked, stopping him momentarily. “I do not like this.” Kain managed a whimsical sort of smile in response.
.
“And thus I was granted access to the hidden fortress, a realm of Hylden science hidden and jealously guarded by the Paladin’s grim fort. I had come where the Nexus Stone had directed me and for better or worse, I could undercover its secrets.”