In the end, the battle with the king of Fanum Divus was almost too easy after he lost his shield.
He swung at Raziel with his red lightning blade but armed with the shield now Raziel was able to fend off the strike and stuck back with his own ghost Reaver. He strike caught their enemy across the chest and tore away the remainder of the breast blade away. It clattered to the ground in useless chunks and pieces.
The king of the Divus tried to defend himself but Ewoden struck from behind, clawing savagely and fast at their enemy that he clawed deep wounds down across his arms raking away the shattered remains of the bracers and pauldrons.
Perhaps their advantage of numbers helped but Raziel-Divus conviction seemed to die as the fight wore on, anger and rage giving way to fear and panic.
Kain pressed in on that, not giving him a second to recover his composure. He quickly came to Ewoden’s defense as Raziel-Divus swung his blade around at him, parrying the thrust with the Reaver.
Once again armed with the  Reaver the scion of balance felt like there was literally nothing he could not do. He flourished it almost overly theatrically in the face of his enemy, making sure that the blazing Reaver almost the only thing in the Divus’ line of sight.
The strategy paid off. So terrified was their enemy that when Raziel struck him from the left hand side, Kain was able to get in close. He didn’t even need the blade. He was not going to kill the king of the Divus. History had another fate in mind for him.
After had quickly sheathed the blade across his back, Kain almostcalmly reached out and took hold of their enemies’ wings. Gripping quite firmly he laid one foot against is back and forced him to the ground.
“Kain!” Raziel screamed at him in horror. The vampire did not listen. He pulled back, heaving as far and as hard as he could.
“No... NO...!” The king beneath him gasped in a strangled sob when he realised what was happening. Kain kept on pulling, his muscles tightening. Methodically and with cruel deliberate slowness he tore Raziel-Divus wings off.
The air was suddenly full of blood and black feathers muscles thick with ropey tendons and veins flopped out onto the ground with a wet slop.
The scream that game from the Divus’ mouth was a wail of such utter pain that it shook the very mountain beneath them. He stumbled forward thrown completely off balance by the loss of his wings, trailing blood and wound from the giant gaping wounds on his back.
He collapsed forward onto his knees, now unquestioningly defeated. His armour went and battered, his sword fell from his trembling hand its red lightning sparking away leaving it black and lifeless.
All around them the homunculi which had been infesting the ruins collapsed, breaking down into a stream of golden dust that mixed with the white snow like brown sugar. Kain had suspected that it had been the kign of the Divus’ own energies that kept them anchored here, [perhaps even animated to begin with.
Struggling to try and rise he looked up at them all gathering, their weapons of choice at the ready. Fear was written into almost every wrinkle on his face. He was terrified, not so much of them, but of what they represented.
“Destiny!” He garbled through bloodied lips. “Destiny is upon me!”
He turned from them, reaching out imploringly into thin air; his gaze carrying beyond the immediate surroundings.
“Metatron!” He cried out in desperation. “Take me away from here!”
There was no reply, only silence answered his plea for assistance.
“Metatron!?” He demanded again, more shrilly this time, blood running down his back to form a thick puddle on the ground.
Again he waited, his desperation and fright growing by the second without a reply. Then one came, but it was not the voice of his dutiful and loyal protector. It spoke directly into his mind and its tone was amused.
“I’m afraid your loyal bodyguard can’t help you right now.” It said and it chuckled evil. The king of Fanum Divus recognised the voice. His senses honed in on the speaker and he finally saw why his bodyguard had not come.
Metatron was flying face down in the snow unmoving. There was a horrible wound in his back, as if his rib cage had been caved in from behind. Standing over the corpse was another of their blue skinned winged kind, holding the silver morning star which had claimed Metatrons’ life.
As if sensing he was being watched, the murderer grinned at him with malicious glee.
“Asmodeus!?”Raziel-Divus spluttered through his own pain, his eyes wide. “What is the meaning of this?”
Asmodeus-Divus hooked his weapon back on his belt quite causally.
“The meaning?” He repeated with a raised eyebrow.  “You mean you haven’t grasped it yet?” He shook his head in disappointment and open disgust. “I’m terribly disappointed in you, old boy.”
A dawning horror began to creep, slowly, into the king’s mind. Dulled as he was by his fear and pain it took him longer to understand then he usually would and the expression on his face, a slowly morphing from fear to true horror reflected that.
“You just figured it out yourself haven’t you?” Asmodeus asked, sneering at him. “This is the point where your rule as the Scribe of Heaven and the King of Fanum-Divus comes to an end. Someone else will be taking that role from now on.”
Raziel-Divus slowly began to tremble, blood running from his mouth.
“You... you betrayed me...” He almost gargled. Asmodeus shook a talon at him insultingly.
“You can only betray someone if you were loyal to them to start with.” He contradicted and laid a hand over his chest. “I serve only the greater good of our cause.” He paused for a moment, reaching down to unceremoniously heave the body of the dead guardian up over one shoulder.
With that accomplished he turned his back on the king and gestured negligently with his free hand. At his commanded, a doorway opened in mid air before him; a gate back to the realm beyond time and space, the gap between everything and nothing where the angelic city dwelled.
“You will be missed though, I promise you.” He said looking back over his shoulder eyes alight with sardonic amusement. “But do not fret, I’ll take good care of your throne.” Waving in farewell with one hand he stepped towards the doorway.
“Ta-Ta Raziel-Divus. Do try to face your destiny now with some dignity, won’t you?” Then he vanished and all trace of both he and Metatron were gone.
Raziel-Divus was catapulted violently back to his own location and before him was the finality he had dreaded so long. Embodied in Kain’s very flesh, destiny was reaching down to grasp him and when it took hold of him its grip was iron clad.
.
“Grasping my enemy between my hands, I did not kill him for I knew that was not his fate here. But rather I flooded into all of his being the spiritual energies I had received in the Forge beneath the ancient citadel. Like the Seer, I purified him and lifted the veil from his sight.”
.
Kain concentrated hard, remembering how it felt when he had lifted the Seer’s veil as part of his condition for providing him the settings had had once needed for the Chloroplast device. That connection, a bridge between souls... not a bridge.. an aqueduct, allowing the healing cleaning waters of the sprit to wash away the veil and allow true sight.
Raziel had been able to see their true enemy from the beginning and this was why, because he had been purified before any of them had even known of it.
.
“Judging by the expression his face when he finally saw, his memories purified, the true form of his God; killing him might have been a mercy.”
.
The horror etched already on his face was nothing compared to the sheer and utter shattering of illusions, the tearing down of stone preconceptions that were reflected in his eyes. It was almost too painful to watch. Before the eyes of the king of the Divus paraded the true horror of the false god. He could see its true form and he could not close his eyes to it.
Kain bored in inexorably, not letting go of the Divus until he was sure that the job had been done. The king of the Divus almost seemed to glow with the energy of spirit, the ultimate element.
When the scion of balance finally released him, he was rigid his eyes open so wide it seemed to be willing them to pop out.
“No...” His voice came out as a strangled sob, his head slowly shaking back and forth. There was a deep pain in his eyes, a hurt far beyond anything Kain could compare. “No ... it can’t be...”
There could be no comfort for him now, only the truth. Kain knelt down onto one knee to look him in the eye.
“What you see is the truth.”He said in as stern a voice as he could manage. He forced the defeated enemy to look at him square in the eye. “Do you see it? Do you see how vile he truly is? Do you see how empty his promises are?”
Raziel-Divus was trembling violent and he began to almost babble incoherently, his face twisting back and forth but unable to break his eye contact with the vampire.
“The lord is our shepherd....” He managed , his tongue twisting inside his mouth. Kain smiled ironically.
“Yes... I imagine he is.” He agreed. “The problem with shepherds though is that they guard their flock not out of any fatherly affection but because they eventually plan to sheer and eat them.”
Heedless of his wounds Raziel-Divus’ hands flew to his eyes finally breaking that painful contact between them. His trembling became more then he could control and he collapsed completely to the ground sobbing uncontrollably.
“NO!” He wailed his voice muffled by his hands. Kain stood up with a sigh.
“How many did you have killed in the ancient war? All to feed him?” He shook his head and looked over at the others, two all stood around him with carrying degrees of contempt and pity on their faces.
A clanking caught Kain’s attention and he turned to see that stepping out of a side passage that lead into the keep itself was Umah. She had the metallic pieces of Ashar’s vessel with her keeping, kept safe inside a dirty bag of canvas. She walked right up to them and Raziel did not so much as bat an eyelid at her presence, his gazed firmly fixed in pitying disgust on the crumbled defeated foe before them.
Umah joined them standing by Kain’s side silently. It was over they had won and now a new chapter was opening before them all. Kain did not know what to expect from this new journey they would undoubtedly all take. His own odyssey was not at all what he expected, filled with revelations and enemies he had never even expected. What else would fate throw his way before this war was over?
Slowly it began to snow again heavily, not a blizzard but a soft drifting down of thick heavy flakes. The misty flakes drifted across the mountain and were everywhere within a few minutes, as if nature intended to bury all trace of the battle in the permanent frost of the north. The fallen king of the Divus just lay there, silently letting the blanket of white cover him uninterrupted. Then, just as Kain began to wonder if his enemy had succumbed to his severe injuries, Raziel-Divus burst up with his arms reaching high above his head. Kain slide back a pace, his hand halfway to the hilt of the Reaver. Other made similar motions, Raziel holding his right hand up as if he were about to call his own ghost sword.
His face was contorted with pain and self loathing, his lips pulled back in a grimace of despair. His eyes were locked on the sky above unblinkingly at something that it seemed only he could see.
“PLEASE!” He begged in a shrill voice that voiced across the mountainside.  His tone was pleading. “ANWSER ME!!!”
With a desperate agony he called out.
“KEEPER!!”
There was a long moment as his voice echoed back to them several times. Then Kain felt it, that undeniable sense of overwhelming presence. Slowly the vampire turned to look up at the clouds above them.
The thick grey clouds were roiling, slipping and sliding around each other with the movements of a river through thick mud. There was something there, a colossal shape that behind the clouds was but a mere suggestion of a silhouette. But the suggested shade of something so huge was more than enough to cause the others around him to flinch back in awe.
Bits and pieces began to break the cloud cover then, a massive blue and green fin here, a suggestion of a mammoth underbelly. Then finally the head emerged, preceded by the four curving ivory tusks. The head was perhaps about the size of bastion fortress itself and with it hovering above them the five staring eyes with their otherworldly yellow glow made it all the more ominous.
The king of Fanum-Divus had called out to the Keeper. And the Keeper had responded.