The further north he travelled, the deeper the snow became on both the ground and the surrounding trees but it was not deep enough to hide the dozens of tortured eyes watching from the centres of porcelain and clothe heads. The dolls were everywhere, covering nearly every tree he past by and only seemed to grow thick in abundance the further north he travelled.
The further Raziel pushed on he saw that the dolls changed. Those closest to the dollmakers abode had their faces twisted and pulled back in frozen expression of terror and horror. Perhaps these dolls had been here the longest.
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“The Dollmaker left nothing to chance when it came to the security of his domain and his enthralled dolls, holding the souls of kidnapped children, watched from the darkness of the forest for intruders.”
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Raziel however had skill enough in stealth to avoid the gaze of each of these sentinels, slipping through the forest from shadow to shadow. Deliberately he kept his gaze averted from their faces so that he could not have to see the expressions of torment that unnerved even his hardened mind.
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“I could feel the torment, the agony and perpetual pain from each and every one of them. This occult evil, this repugnant practise, told of a preserve nature that delighted in the anguish it inflicted.”
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He could not avoid the sight of one doll, crucified with arms outstretched across the width of an massive pine. It had nails thrust through its legs and belly and one directly through its mouth. The numb black button eyes, full of pain, stared up into the sky beseechingly.

“It would be one of the greatest pleasures to wipe this stain clean.”
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The trees ended abruptly with a short gravel shore outlining a large body of water. A river fed into it from a waterfall on the northern edge but in the biting cold of winter, that and the lake itself was frozen over completely. The air over the lake was full of a thick suffocating fog as if a cloud had settled down here.
Squinting through the gloom Raziel could make out a small landmass directly in the centre of the lake, no more than half an acre across. Even from this distance Raziel could see a structure standing upon it. It was just as the fill fated scout had described; a house on an island in the middle of a lake. This could be only one place.
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“The aptly named Lake of Lost Souls lay before me and directly in its centre lay the lair of the one who had caused so much misery, the house of Elzevir the Dollmaker.”
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The blue wraith stood looking at the island for perhaps a full five minutes, eyes narrowed in concentration. There it was, the lair... and Elzevir had gone to great lengths and pains to ensure that any approach to his domain was observed. And yet here was an open stretch of ground between here and there with apparently no watcher or guards.
That struck Raziel as simply too good to be true.
Still giving Elzevir time to devise a defence was a bad idea as well. Standing here just staring at the place was inviting trouble. Setting his shoulders Raziel began across the ice at a run, leaving his footprints in the blanket of snow. As he moved the blue wraith kept his senses open, trying to take in everything at once for the signs of danger approaching. As he made his way across the ice, the house of the dollmaker became more distinct.
Despite being built in such an inconvenient location, it was quite a large mansion with two stories and a high arched roof made of slate. A multitude of dark windows with thick red curtains drawn across ran in regular order across the front over a large but plain looking door. Lanterns with snuffed out candles stood to either side of the door, swinging on their posts.
The house looked plain and if it were truly the lair of Elzevir then it showed how small the dollmaker really was, no more than a petty hedge sorcerer hiding in the woods. To think that the owner of this lair had brought low a nation, the idea seems ludicrous.
“No guards...” Raziel muttered to himself in puzzlement as he reached the island’s steep bank and started up towards the house. Scattered here and there were lumpy sacks of hessian just lying in the snow. A glance told the blue wraith they were full of mud and he ignored them, striding up to the plain panelled door.
The large iron ring set as a knocker hung loosely and swaying as snow drifted down and away from it. The low pitched creaking it made was somehow intensely ominous in the silence around him.
“He must know I’m here...” He said in a low tone, reaching out to grasp that handle and steady it. Just as he was preparing to yank the door open, he felt a deeply ominous and aggressive pressure directly behind him.
Swinging to the left he managed to avoid being struck by a fist made of clothe. Turning the blue wraith saw his attackers. The clothe sacks he had ignored had risen up, vaguely in a human shape and were lumbering towards him blindly. As they moved holes ripped in the thin sacks that where their skin and a torrent of dirt and small stone pebbles fell out.
Retaliating in a blur of instinct Raziel kicked the crude golem directly in the chest. Its body was so weak his foot past right through and punched out the far side.
Surprised by that weakness the blue wraith brought his leg back and then swung it straight across the torso from right to left. It tore in half as if he was kicking through dirt, the cloth skin easily parting. The entire putrid thing collapsed in on itself and fell to the ground in a twitching heap of mud with no structure.
Another lumbered up to take its fellows place and seeing it coming, Raziel threw his arm forward unleashing a condensed bolt of telekinetic force. The impact blew a huge hole in the middle of the creature and with no support its top half fell in on itself.
Perhaps these creatures might pose a threat to a human intruder or even to an experienced fledgling with no enhanced abilities but to him it was mere child’s play.
A third lunged at him from behind, twisting its body to try and grapple the blue wraith with its massive pudgy arms. Raziel ducked under the lunge and using the creatures own momentum against it, he smashed its body into the side of the house with enough force to make it burst.
More were rising from the snow, perhaps animated by the deaths of the others. One or two of these creatures was no challenge but if they fathered into a group they might cause hindrance. Raziel decided not to linger with a prolonged fight and instead flourished his arm, the wraith blade roaring into life at his command.
He rushed into t heir midst, body twisting and spinning in a furious dance that landed on blow on each of the animated sack men within his arms reach. It was hard to tell in the blur of combat but he estimated that he had struck five.
Bits of torn and ravaged dirt and torn hessian dropped down into the snow with wet thumps, pupating lumps of mud still trying to move for a moment after dismemberment. If Raziel were to guess their method of animation he supposed it would be the same as that of the dolls he had seen, souls bound to objects and forced to perform on specific function. With no ears or ears to tell them where he was, these golems were only able to tell where he was by the drive of the enchantment binding them within the unnatural form.
They were slow, clumsy and unenthusiastic; slaves forced to work their tortured souls did not understand.
The last four of their group kept on coming, ignorant of how very much outclassed they actually were.
Raziel set into them quickly, to at least free them from this bondage if nothing else. One he cleaved from shoulder to hip with one swipe, a second he decapitated and then sliced down the middle so the two halves fell away to either side.
The third ran at him blindly and he ducked down, whipping his legs around and knocking the golem’s support out from under it. As it fell onto its back the blue wraith was upon it, savaging with his talons up and down until its body was a scattered mess.
The fourth was still far away down the bank when it started moving towards him. Raziel didn’t bother getting in close this time. He cupped his hands in front of his chest and using his mind focused a burst of Telekinetic force between his talons. Unleashed, the bolt struck the golem full on and sent it flying out over the ice of the lake.
When it struck the ice cracked open and the bundle of animated dirt and clothe vanished beneath the water. It didn’t come back up.
Staring after it, Raziel was confirmed in his suspicions that Elzevir was not a great a threat as the Ottmar’s feared him to be. His methods were crude and his magic third rate, augmented by the enchantments upon the Reaver. He was like a child playing with fire, barely comprehending its potential.
He didn’t bother pulling on the door. The blue wraith simply kicked it down. The doors fell inwards with a loud clatter and with no other obstacles in his path Raziel entered the house of the Dollmaker.
From the layout Raziel supposed this house might have been built as a winter mountain retreat for some nobleman and the dollmaker had usurped it. The house certainly had that look to it with highly artistic wooden buttress running the corners the ceilings in each room, delicately engraved with flowers. The walls were shabby and run down but showed evidence of a tarnished former glory.
Most of the rooms were abandoned, full of thick dust and spiders webs. A few had furniture like old sofas and chairs but those were covered in thick white sheets that had just as much dust on them as everything else.
A few rooms he came into had been swept and cleared for a new purpose and each one was disturbing in a unique way. One had more of those dolls inside, nailed to the walls has the others had been to the trees and these were the worst he had seen so far. Their faces twisted so horribly into visages of demonic horror Raziel wondered if souls trapped inside were even aware they were once human.
Another room was a workshop of some kind. Wood carving tools lay on one table and a sewing kit on another. Toys of all kinds were laid out on row upon row of shelves, dolls, puppets, teddy bears, stuffed animals as well as many others. In any other setting the room would have been charming. Here it only deepened the blue wraith’s sense of distaste and repugnance.
He was half expecting the teddy bears to leap off the shelves and attack him, but dismissed it as his simply being jumpy.
Methodically he explored the first floor of the house, even dipping down into a cellar much to his disgust when he found more dolls locked away in the darkness. But the dollmaker himself eluded discovery.
A flight of stairs led up to the top floor, the red carpet running down them grey with age and thick with spiders eggs.
The lack of any guardians inside the house, even more simple ones such as the golems from outside, left him even more disturbed. Surely Elzevir could not be this stupid, not to have a last line of defence in chase intruders got this far? Suddenly it all clicked in his mind and the blue wraith stiffened.
He had missed the simplest explanation. Perhaps he had been used to dealing with people with complex motivations for no long not to see it. Elzevir had no grand designs for letting him get this far. The little man was insane, pure and simple. His use of the dolls, his very modus operandi and intents showed that beyond any doubt.
Willendorf, the mighty kingdom of the lion, had been brought low by a man who ought to be locked deep within an asylum. That was perhaps the saddest part of this epic tragedy and yet superbly fitting for this era, when all of Nosgoth falls into anarchy.
The was a door at the top of the stairs. It wasn’t locked and pushing it open, Raziel stepped into a long but cramped hallway running down the back of the house with others branching off from it into separate rooms. Doors were set into each corridor evenly and each one was plain with no identifiable markings to differentiate between them. Perhaps either Alicia or the Dollmaker was behind one of these doors.
There was nothing for it but to search them. Reaching out Raziel gripped the handle of the nearest door and pushed it open, stepping inside. The light coming through the draw curtains was poor but it was still good enough to see what lay inside.
As Raziel put a foot down he stepped on something dry and brittle and it cracked. Looking down he saw that he had stepped upon the skeletal remains of an arm.
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“With dismay I realised what these rooms held, for here was the resting place of the children lured here by the Dollmaker’s piper minions.”
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Slowly his head moved up to take it all in. The bones of dozens upon dozens of skeletons lay piles up high in the corners and across the floor, skulls and ribcages all smashed in as if pulverised. None of the skeletons was tall enough to be that of an adult.
With a sort of sick numbness, Raziel turned from the scene and immediately opened the door directly to his left. The room beyond was exactly the same, full of the bones of children. The room beyond was the same again and the one beyond that. In a blur Raziel had the doors in this one corridor open. Every single one of the eight rooms was full of discarded skeletons, some old and brittle and others more recent and still tinged red with gore.
This was the final piece of evidence Raziel needed. Elzevir was without a doubt utterly insane and his possession of the Soul Reaver allowed his madness to spread, hastening the decay of a world already in decline.
Ariel’s projected manifestation appeared beside him, her face a purified whole but creased into an intense visage of righteous anger. The emotion he suddenly felt from her was unbridled rage, something she had not displayed even towards Kain. When she spoke her voice echoed as if a second person were speaking over the top of her with the same voice only lower in pitch.
“I am only a former guardian...” She said; eyes fixed on the heinous macabre spectacle. “...and a shade of a person, memories imprinted onto released energy.” The former balance guardian was a portrait of rage. “But by all the authority in the entire universe that I might have left, Raziel!” Her head turned sharply to look at him and he meet her gaze with his own, just as fierce and angry. “Do not let this man live!”
“That, I promise you.” He told her immediately with just as much intensity in his voice as she displayed. They were for that moment bound together by their shared outrage.
With their resolution iron clad, Raziel preceded to the last door at the end of the second corridor. It was larger than the others and had a curved rather than a flat top.
There was nowhere left in his house to run. The insane little man had been driven to ground. Reaching out he turned the handle. The door swung open casting light into the darkened room, a long room with a high ceiling with wooden beams holding up the roof. It seems to be another workshop, with shelves full of stuffed toys and other childish things. Puppets hug from the rafters like bats and teddy bears, some as large as a person, lay against the walls like oversized pillows.
Sitting in a chair on the far side of the room, framed on one side by the largest of the bears, was a familiar figure, staring at him with wide eyes.
In a flash he recognised Alicia Ottmar, the daughter the king had tried to sacrifice to save his own skin. But in that moment of realisation the blue wraith also realised that he was too late to save her.  Her skin was pale white and there were large dark patches splattered around the floor by her feet, travelling up her dress to her neck. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear and the blood was drenched down her front.
Raziel had had a lot of experience with cadavers and corpses. One glance was enough to tell him that he had arrived around one hour too late. Elzevir had claimed another of the Ottmar bloodline.