Raziel intended to end it quickly, with one blow if possible. He ran at the little balding man, right arm flourishing artfully with the wraith blade leaving trails of light in its wake.  The Dollmaker sighted the sword and his eyes widened slightly in alarm. With quick moves that belied his stocky and short frame he brought his own Reaver, the physical sword, up to block the attack.
The two swords meet in mid air and the impact seemed to ripple the air, the world distorting around them as the paradoxical affect was amplified by the two blades proximity.  Raziel perhaps was the only one who felt the distortion but he braced himself and pushed through it grimly; trying to force Elzevir to drop the sword or fall.
Suddenly the dollmaker’s Piper was there, launching a flying kick at the blue wraith. Seeing the attack coming at the last minute Raziel broke off his attack and swung to one side.  The creature put itself between the wraith and its master, pipe held to its lips in an instant ready to play its deadly song.
 “I know better than this.” Elzevir remarked as if to himself, pausing to dust off his clothes with one hand. Hen gestured and the piper started forward, blocking Raziel from attempting to rush around him to get to the dollmaker.  Thus relieved of pressure, Elzevir backed off with a casual walk. He strode up to the princess, who stood there calm and serene apparently not seeing anything of what was happening around her.
“Come by dear girl.” The little man told her, taking her by the hand. Alicia did not resist and let him lead her away. As they walked, the dollmaker lifted the Reaver blade before him and whipped its tip overhead in an arch. Perhaps acting as a conduit and amplify for his own magic, the sword began to emit a baleful white glow as it cleaved the air. The arch it which it travelled glowed in response, opening a circular hole seemingly in the insubstantial air itself.
With the princess holding his hand Elzevir stepped through and vanished from sight.
“Alicia don’t!” Raziel called out, arm outstretched imploringly. The princess turned her heard slightly as she past through but there was not understanding in her eyes. Her gaze was black and emotionless and she took disappeared.
.
“My shouted warning fell on deaf ears; or perhaps more accurately it fell on inert ears. The princess’ mind was completely ensnared and I could no more reach her calling from across the field then I would screaming into her ear.  She was lost.”
.
The rippling distorting effect of the two swords close proximity faded away with their departure but Raziel paid it no mind.
The blue wraith felt a surging gut wrench tear through him at the fate he knew for certain the princess would not endure. Her scheme to use him to escape her terrible end had failed and she was gone. He had felt no bound of even liking for her but her loss was a waste all the same.
“Enough of my kin have encountered you for me to know you now.” The piper remarked to him, lowering its instrument so it could speak without the obstruction. Raziel turned to glare at the creature over his shoulder; eyes narrowing. It was looking back at him, lips pulled back into a smile so wide that bone showed.
“Raziel, the fallen servant.” It stated as if declaring the blue wraith guilty of some crime. Raziel stared it down before turning to confront it fully.
“Since we’re in a revealing mode...” He began, body tensing and ready to spring at a moment’s notice. “Why don’t I ask what an Archon is doing shoved in a corporeal form and serving some demented human?”
The Piper did not appear overly surprised that its true nature had been guessed. It merely straightened its back and hopped up, a little jovially, onto one leg. Its pipe held level to the left hand side of its face mere inches from being blown.
“The master serves the Wheel as much as we do.” It said, making no attempt to deny its true identity. “We are merely on assignment.”
Raziel stared at the creature for a long moment and then his shoulders began to shake. His head lowered and a deep throaty chuckle began to escape him. Then with a roar of mirth he tilted his back and laughed up to the sky, slapping one hand to his forehead.
The piper hesitated, not expecting this response.
“That has to be one of the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!” The blue wraith declared, still laughing uproariously. “My former master sells his minions out like common mercenaries?! The supposed creator of life!”
He swung his arms down and in that instant the wraith blade flourished into being, burning intently with hunger.
“It’s hilarious!” He cried and ran at the Piper. He crossed the distance between them in a split second, his ethereal blade slashing up across the creature’s front. The piper dodged but a fraction of a second too late. As it danced backwards, a vertical cut opened up from its naval to the tip of its chin, a bloodless jagged wound exposing a fleshy interior devoid of blood.
Clutching one hand to the wound, the third Piper Raziel had engaged in battle leapt back out of the reach of the wraith blade. Its impossibly long leap took it halfway across the clearing.
Raziel levelled his blade and charged again, hoping to make it to the thing before it could mount a counter attack.
With a flourish the Piper brought its instrument to its lips and began to play, long fingers playing up and down in a rapid pattern.
This song was different from all the others. No insects exploded from the ground to envelop him, no wild animals summoned to its aide. The sound seemed to be commanded, a marshal tune one might play while an army was marching.
Apprehension filling him, Raziel slid to a stop in the mud and tensed, wraith blade ready by his side. The air around him seemed to be growing colder as the song rose in pitch. Ice began to form on the ground at his feet, a crust over the scummy wet soil.
Accompanying the song there came known another sound, a higher pitched noise not at all in accompaniment to the music and providing a disturbing echo. The noise was familiar.
.
“I knew that sound all well. The spectral realm was filled with such sounds, the noise of lost souls wandering in perpetual agony.”
.
Even so, when the dolls nailed to the trees around them began to move it took Raziel aback. His gaze darted from right to left, seeing the toys twitched and writhe as if in agony. Their blank gazes did not change but their eyes seemed to glow a bright neon blue that stood out in the twilight.  Voices echoed from all around them, coming Raziel realised in mute horror, from the mouths of the dolls themselves.
“Mommy!”One of them cried in despair and the voice was that of a young child.
“No please don’t!”  Another begged, the voice unmistakably a young woman, no older then perhaps sixteen.
“I just want to go home!” This time it was a boys voice piped up, tinged with fear and terror. The chorus of voices continues and amongst them all nowhere did Raziel hear the voice of an elder.
“No... no!” The louder, closer, voice of Ariel echoed in his mind. Through his senses she could see all that was going on and seemed to recoil from it as it caused her physical agony.
“It’s too horrible!!” She almost screamed. Glancing to his left, he could faintly make out her ghostly image; hands clutched to her face in tormented revulsion. Her face was corrupted, one have a skull and twisted by her dismay.
“Ariel?” He asked of her. “What is this?”
Her gaze was fixed upon the dolls all around them and she did not avert her eye.
“Can’t you feel it?” She asked of him, voice trembling. “I can hear them screaming out for their mothers! Even as their souls are ripped out of them!”
Raziel made the mental connection and it left him feeling numb.
“Children?” He asked in a small voice. Ariel did not need to give any sign of confirmation for him to know it was true.
“I had thought I could withstand any plea  after so long at the pillars!” Her voice was just a whisper, sounding hoarse despite her lack of an actual throat to be hoarse with. “That I was numb to the emotional pleas of the world around me!” Her voice began to rise up into a desperate wail. “But I can’t stand their screaming!!!”
With that, she fled delving as far into his essence she could go.
.
“Ariel had retreated to the darkest depths of my soul to shield herself from that terrible reality that had shaken her so much. While I did not like how bereft of composure she had become the shock would ultimately do her some good, prod her out of the self imposed guilty silence she had been imposing upon herself since Fanum-Divus.”
.
After imprisonment for so long, haunting the pillars and her efforts to keep him sane through his own captivity inside the Reaver blade Ariel had developed a tougher outer shell of indifference and neutrality to the plights of the world around her. It was the only say she had been able to keep her mind intact. But she was not invulnerable and still human.
Raziel shielded her as best he could from the dolls around them, crying out with the pain of lost and stolen children; trapped for perhaps dozens of generations going back to when Elziver first began tormenting the Willendorf realm.
.
“But for now I had others concerns. The dollmaker still had both the sword and the girl and he could not have gone far. No doubt he had retreated back to his lair, an island in the middle of the aptly named Lake of Lost souls.”
.
The longer he lingered here, the more time the dollmaker would have to fortify his own position in preparation.
Raziel had to abandon plans of the future for the immediate situation when two of the dolls burst from the trees, flying at him like a projectile. They soared through the air, screaming in agony as they came.  The piper’s song carried on intently as they flew, seemingly controlling their flight path with the notes of his music.
Leaping away, Raziel back flipped to avoid them. The two dolls came down on the spot where he had been a mere moment ago and simultaneously they detonated.
The sensation and sound of their explosion was indescribable. When those vessels burst the captive spirits within burst with them, showering their energies out into the ether and the personalities that had once been were lost as well. The shockwave that abandoned the blast was bad enough, knocking him back several feet but the assault on his senses was worse. It was like a deadening, like he had just been witness to something real being made into a vacuum of existence.  Even the Elder did not destroy souls, merely sap them dry before casting them out again. This act was evil for there was no other word in any language Raziel knew to describe it.
He stood there, transfixed staring at the blackened hole the explosion had left in the ground; numbly unsure of whether he could believe his senses. Slowly his mind and reason returned and realising what had happened, his ire rose and blood began to boil.
With a roar he dug his heals into the ground and ran at the Piper, summoning the wraith blade.
The creature saw him coming and began to furiously play on its instrument, the dolls from all around the clearing began to tear themselves from their bindings.
One by one they launched themselves at him, wailing in despair and hopelessness. Raziel forced himself to tune it up, ramming his consciousness into the only state that could survive this ordeal; that of the berserker.
He kept on running with a roar of outrage breaking the night, darting right and left as the dolls flew at him of their enforced kamikaze mission.
As they exploded behind him the sensation of deadening passed through him and inside his soul, Ariel quivered each time in response. That only served to enrage him more and his pace quickened, turning from a run into a full charge.
The piper’s eyes widened in alarm and its tune became frenzied and almost maddened. The dolls nearly tore the trees with them as their mass majority flew up into the air at its command, surging down at him in swarm of screaming torment.
Their combined screams broke through his berserker state of mind causing him to flinch with each step but he kept on running anyway.
The explosions began not long after that, detonation after horrible detonation. Each one was a gut wrenching event and each one added fuel to the fire of his anger. Adrenaline surged through his body and he ran, even jumping through one of those deadly explosions as one of the dolls exploded directly in front of him.
The piper was no more than a few feet away now and seeing its very real danger, it played a frantic tune calling all the remaining dolls in the clearing to surge up high into the air in obvious preparation to surge down together at the blue wraith.
The note of command only just echoed from it when Raziel reached the creature. The impact was thunderous, jarring them both but Raziel pressed into it with all his strength stabbing it through the chest with the wraith blade.
He plunged the ethereal weapon in as deep as he could, his entire hand bursting out its blade. The piper gagged and its bone instrument fell from its lips to sink into the mud.
Above, given the command and forced to obey, the dolls were descending down like a falling comet towards them screaming as they came. Raziel grabbed the creature by the neck with his free hand and dragged it down so that they were eye level.
“Your assignment is over.” He hissed at the creature and then kicked it in the chest with both feet. The impact propelled him backwards, artfully flipping in mid air. The stunned piper stayed there with a hole in the middle of its chest, its arms outspread wide as the dolls slammed directly into it.
Still in mid air Raziel was thrown to the far side of the clearing by the explosion, as were a few smaller trees and a large quantity of mud.
The sensation was worse however. The feeling of so many souls destroyed at once left him lying in the mud, retching made all the more terrible in that he had no stomach to bring something up out of.
By the time the blue wraith managed to get back up to his knees and look up he saw that the Piper was gone, replaced by a deep crater filling with water. Bits of porcelain and burning fragments of clothe were raining down in all directions, all that remains of the vessels which had held those now destroyed souls.
Ariel was still deep inside his spirit and was refusing to come out or make a sound. That was fine. He wrapped her as best he could within his own essence, a comforting embrace as much for his benefit as it was for hers.
With slow deliberate motions he got to his feet and stared at the crater, his face grim. Then Raziel turned and looked off, through the trees, towards the northwest.  His purpose was now firmly solid in his mind. The soul Reaver had to be recovered and Elzier the Dollmaker had to die.