Kain found himself halfway across the chamber towards the pedestal before he was even aware of his own bodies motion. He blinked and forced himself to stop, a strange dislocation affect in his mind. From his perspective one second he had been at the door and the next he was almost to the centre of the room. The five bronze heads around him loomed up large, the light from the Nexus Stone’s glow reflecting off of their polished surfaces. The entire chamber seemed to be holding its breath, as if the moment it had waited for was about to transpire.
Kain kept his eyes locked on the pedestal before him the beam of light from the stone urging him onwards towards it. The pull was so strong Kain felt as if the Stone might leap out of his grip and go flying there all by itself. It will was palpable and clear.
A hand caught his arm and glancing back he saw Ewoden standing there, brows brought together in a grim frown.
 “Is this wise?” He asked, eyes casting back and forth looking at each of the heads around them with apprehension. “We have no idea what this...” Then his eyes moved to the centre pedestal. “...this device can do.”
That was perfectly true, Kain supposed. He could no more understand this room and its intertwining device then the purpose and nature of the stone in his hand. It was of a technology and philosophy totally alien to him. There was now no doubt in his mind that this is where the Stone had been created and to here, it, or some force within, had directed him. The sensation was similar to the pull he had felt when he had come into direct sight of one of Ba’al’s tablets of prophecy although far more distinctly, as if it were his own will and not another’s super imposed upon his.
“I feel I must take the risk.” He said and Ewoden, with a somewhat surprised expression, let his arm drop from Kain’s arm. The vampire looked over at the pedestal again. “There is some purpose to this stone. It directed me here.”
With very slow footsteps he began to move towards centre of the room once more.
“It wanted to be here.” He breathed. Reaching the pedestal, he lifted the stone up and then brought it forward.  “It wants to be unlocked.”
The Nexus Stone slid into its slot with a loud satisfying clunking noise.  There was a moment of silence, dragging on and on seemingly forever.
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“I placed the stone into its rightful place with a deepening sense of anticipation. Something momentous was about to happen, an event that might have a great significance as to either allow my triumph or send me plummeting into damnation. It was time to see which.”
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With a series of clicks and whirs four metallic arms like insect legs slide out of the pedestal and drags the Nexus Stone down further into the surface. Building slowly, there was a deep rumbling noise, ascending to a vibration that had the metal plates the room was made from rattling. When that noise reached its crescendo the jewel in the centre of the Hylden artefact began to glow, bursting forth with a light so intense Kain had to cover his eyes with one hand.
Watching through the gaps between his talons, Kain watched the pincers holding the stone dig into the space between the jewel and the metallic decoration around it. Slowly these pincers began to pull backwards, tugging at the ornament.
Then with a loud crack the metal slide to either side as the stone was freed of its confines. In that single instance, whatever restraints that held the stone were removed. The result was a naked display of tremendous force burst forth from such a confined space.
Kain and Ewoden were both sent flying by the shockwave, crashing to the far wall with a sickening crunch each. Ezekiel, who was standing by the door, was merely knocked off his feet.
One by one, the metallic statues of the heads lining the walls let off a metallic groan and an intense grinding sound. The emerald green eyes were moving, inch by agonised inch moving down until they locked eyes directly onto the stone.
The metal of their faces shifted as if it were living flesh, each of the five heads adopted a different expression. One looked angry, another face and a third even jubilant. Their eyes all began to glow with that same intense light came from the stone itself, blinding and piercing.
“Lord in heaven...” Ezekiel breathed, wisely staying down and covering his head. Kain slide to the floor from the dent he had made in the wall and looked up, his hair bellowing around him as if caught in a wind he could feel on his skin.
Then the wails began, a symphony of agonised cries that melded together into a song of torment and pain. Physical and mental anguish were notes to which the music played. Accompanying the chorus of maddened screams came a swirling mist, a deep neon green vortex that spiralled up out of the stone until it seemed to fill the entire cavern.  As Kain stared he saw that the mist was not cloud at all but rather made up of hundreds... no... thousands... millions of luminous skulls that screams in agony.
Staring at the he recalled the tall he had had to recreate to enter the chamber and realised that he was seeing, unleashed, the souls of the Hylden that had been forced into the artefact in order to make it. There sheer amount of them was overwhelming and their collective pain was obvious and Kain felt himself reacting in sympathy despite himself. Could this be that same vortex he thought he had experienced when falling from Fanum-Divus back to Nosgoth?
Out of the vortex, a face seemed to come into place; made up of these tormented souls all moving together and compelled to form that shape. It came into being slowly, twisting back and forth as it had to fight its way free of something.
When the image became distinct, the face made up of swirling souls was that same noble face of the Hylden nobleman depicted through these underground ruins.  But this was no still image, but an animated face that looked down upon him with living eyes.
There was some deep wisdom to that face, a wide intellect that was reflected in expression and posture.
“Kain!” The face said, the morphing lips moving not entirely in sync to the words. That voice was terrible, not for its tone or inflections but rather for the echoes of a millions despairing voices behind it. “I bid you welcome to this time and place, Scion of Balance.”
Kain stared at the disembodied head for a moment and then stood back up to his feet.
“I am heartened indeed that, despite the time difference between us, we have this opportunity to speak.” The ghostly visage added.
The vampire took a moment to regain his composure. Ewoden meanwhile had remained where he saw, eyes wide in stunned terror.
“Who are you?”  Kain asked. The face tilted itself up proudly in response.
“I am called Ashar.” It said. “I am the last rightful king of the Hylden people. It was I who crafted the Nexus Stone you have brought here.”
That took a moment for Kain to absorb but the face went on.
“You knew my son as one of your worst enemies, the dark Unspoken given the name Hash’ak’gik.” Then, seemingly to want to throw Kain completely off balance it added; “You knew my granddaughter only as a mysterious soothsayer dubbed, the Seer.”
Kain was left stupefied for at least ten seconds. The implications of that claim left him feeling a little light headed. The Seer was the daughter of the Hylden General or the Sarafan Lord? And Raziel had trusted her?
“We have much to speak off but I fear little time.” Ashar said quite urgently, catching his attention once more. “Your enemies move against you and Nosgoth’s fate lies precariously in the balance.” He was about to say something else but the face blinked and looked from around the chamber, seeing Kain, Ewoden and the visibly startled Ezekiel.
“Where is the wraith?” The king asked in some evident surprise. “I do not see him.”
Once more Kain was surprised but hide his confusion this time behind a frown of irritation.
“Raziel? Was he supposed to be here?” He asked, amused to be talking to a disembodied face this way. It had a certain amount of perplexing surrealism to it.
“What I have to tell you involves him as well.” Ashar said, looking annoyed but it past and the swirling souls making up his face smoothed into a calm determination. Or at least they seemed to at first. Kain’s frown deepened as he saw that the souls making up this vision were beginning to deviate away and struggle from their assigned course with more and more urgency. The face began to loose its defined outline but Ashar himself seemed not to notice, he kept right on talking.
“But for the moment you are...” His words were cut off. This time he had to notice the deviation. The ghostly manifestations of the entrapped souls were tearing themselves away from the vortex with tremendous force.
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“I did not fully understand the mechanisms behind this strange event but clearly something had gone wrong. The sensation of the air around me turned hostile.”
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Ashar’s face as it disintegrated, looked alarmed and stunned, incredulous at such an event as such time.
“No! What are you doing!?” He demanded but got no reply. The souls that made up his avatar burst out like an explosion and Kain threw himself to the ground to keep from getting in their way.
From the floor Kain watched in stunned awe as the souls surged overheard, bursting out of the chamber door and into the room beyond. There the sprits surged around like a horde of angry insects, flittering this way and that confused and directionless. The vortex of souls over the Nexus Stone was still open but the spirits Ashar had used to compose his avatar were now free.
But their freedom did not seem to do them any good for they still screamed and writhed in their agony, twisting in upon themselves.
Then they seemed to do the only thing they could do, find a body to inhabit. Perhaps after being so long a disembodied wraith with no sensation other then torment they were unwilling to undergo it anymore.
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“A vortex of confined souls, tormenting and screaming, surged out of their prison and to the only bodies capable of receiving them; the suits of Sarafan armour Malek had so proudly placed on display.”
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Only a few slipped down to slide into the waiting metallic vessels as if scouts for the advancing horde. Then they all came down, a wave of screeching entities that desperately sought out a suit of armour to call home. Kain watched them one by one pass into the armour and disappear.
Even as they entered, the Sarafan armouries began to twist and writhe with a life of their own.  Backs arched wildly and arms twitched in every direction.
Kain stared at them. Malek would be appalled to see them so willingly jump into such unfeeling bodies when he had been condemned to it.
Then as the Hylden spirits settled into their new bodies the armours began to change. Their metallic plates began to elongate with a low grinding noise, loud from so many at once. The helmets seemed to stretch to a a Hylden head that wasn’t there and spikes slide out from the shoulders and curved back like a demons arrangement. Where there were gaps in their armour there blazed forth a pulsing neon green light as if the soul itself gave the body substance.
Ewoden and Ezekiel backed off from the door as the multitude of possessed armours began to lurch around, morphing as they walked into a semi Hylden visage.  The Sarafan armour had been styled to be iconic of angelic artistry and how it was being twisted into its antithesis. These ghouls, these walking automatons, all stumbled back and forth as if trying to get their bearings and remember what it was like to walk. Not all of the suits of armour had been possessed, perhaps a third of them with more still standing vacant and uncorrupted.
“No more, no more!” One of them said as it staggered to its feet and glared around; its voice nasal and echoing as if from down a long pipe.
“No more torment!” Another added. Almost as one they all turned to angrily and aggressively face one of their own, who was just now standing up. This one was different from the others, being a good head and shoulder taller and broader. The main visible different were the pair of curving goat horns on either side of the helmet.
The possessed armour looked around at the hostility around it, apprehensively
“You fools!” It cursed them and Kain recognised the voice of Ashar. The king of the Hylden had been brought with them after his people had taken their opportunity to escape. “I told you what was involved when we began!” He said and pointed with the finger of the gauntlet that made up his hand in a wide arch around them.  “You all agreed!”
The nearest of the other possessed armours slapped his hand away with a snarl of hate.
“You were the eye of the storm!” It snapped at the king.
“You did not feel the winds of madness tearing through you, without pause!” The one next to it accused, reaching down to its side and drawing out the Sarafan blade holstered there. In its grip the blade altered, becoming jagged and demonic with a serrated edge.
“Never ceasing, never stopping!” Others drew axes or bows, the same transformation overtaking those weapons as well.
“Never with an ounce of mercy!” As one they began to advance on Ashar, slowly but with deliberate intent. Kain would have been content to just watch, but those nearest him and the others took notice of their presence. They turned off from Ashar and began to make their way towards him. Kain stiffened and quickly got to his feet.
“We’ll not go back!” Another Hylden armour snarled. “We’ll not be used again!”
Ashar looked around quickly perhaps for a way to escape, taking a step backwards his armour body clanking.
“You’ll doom our entire world!” He accused them all. The degree did not seem to both the others in the slightest.
“Then let it be doomed!”
Their slow march became a rush and Ashar vanished from Kain’s sight behind the body of an automaton as it charged him. It lunged at the vampire with its jagged axe swinging down. Kain caught the hand that held the weapon and held it at bay before stabbing his talons into its helmet. He punctured the metal and destroyed its makeshift head. The Hylden soul inside did not feel the pain as its body was artificial and kept on pushing trying to bring the axe down.  Kain smashed his knee into its abdomen and then, when it staggered back he brought the talons of both hands across and sliced it in half.
Before he could react, a second stabbed at him with a sword. Dodging back he narrowly missed being stabbed through the gut with it although its tip scoured a line across his belly. As the Hylden armour carried on past, Kain grabbed it by the back of its chest plate and tore it free leaving a giant hole through its centre. Without that structural support the automaton collapsed in on itself.
A blur of red shot past him with a road and Kain saw just in time Ewoden tackle two who were trying to flank him. In full Lycanthrope form the emissary tore into them with his claws sending fragments of metal flying.
The door was a narrow opening and if circumstances were different Kain and Ewoden might have been able to hold it, but there were simply too many of these possessed suits and they seemed not to care about how many of their number they lost. Their time kept imprisoned inside the Nexus Stone had robbed them of even a sense of self preservation. They knew nothing but pain and release.
With no regard for the safety of their comrades and fellows they began to surge into their defences, stabbing and clawing. With too many weapons to fend off Kain had to keep retreating step by step away from them. Ewoden as well, despite his advantage of size and momentum, was being overwhelmed.
Two of them shot past Ewoden, breaking through his attempt to hold them back. Kain tensed ready to spring but they ignored him and ran past. Half turning Kain saw their intended target, the defence old man who had wisely gone to the back of the chamber to stay out of the way. Ezekiel saw them rush at him with wide astonished eyes.
Acting quickly Kain reached out and grabbed one of them in the grip of a powerful telekinetic grasp and hurled it across the room to smash into pieces He turned to try and grab the second but he was too late. It was already upon the old man, bringing its sword up.
“No!” Ezekiel called out. “It’s not time yet!” With surprising speed the old man dove out of the way but he was not quite quick enough. The blade caught him, slicing its tip down through his exposed right arm.
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“There was no gap between the pain and the injury inflicted an instantaneous response. I could even feel the blade lance through his flesh as if it were my own. My chest throbbed in response, a powerful sensation of weakness flooding through me again. All strength fled from my body almost instantly.”
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Kain clutched at the sudden stigmata wound that had opened precisely where the old man had been cut. He stared at it in mute incomprehension. How was this possible?
 Everything around him seemed to slow down and drop away, the world fading slowly with sounds and images left behind as if he had kept on walking and they had stayed put. Soon even the mystery of that strange event faded, for he was unable to grasp anything in a mind so weak.
His body was not his own, that terrible draining weakness surging through him again. There was no pain this time but it was somehow worse, as if life itself were being emptied out of him like water down a drain.
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“My mild whirled; overcome by enemies and weakness from within... my only option was a humiliating retreat.”
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It was the only thing he could do. Reaching inside himself for the little energy he had in reserve he used that to consume himself with a translocation spell, disappearing from the scene of battle and fleeing to whatever relatively safety his fragmented mind could find.