Kain would have gone into bat form immediately to head to the pillars and from there to the Citadel but he paused just long enough to hear the unmistakable sound of someone moving around nearby.
His body trembled slightly in response, informing him of its need to feed after so long a journey and the previous battle with the Homunculi.
Following the sound and the quickening scent of man and beast, Kain manoeuvred his way towards the stream always keeping a tree between himself and his quarry.
When he got close enough he perceived that it was only one man, with a hunting dog at his side.
The dog was an early breed, still partly wolf and had a thick leather collar.
The man wore bronze armour, underlain with animal furs. A crude bronze knife and sword was belted at his waist and his boots were made of badly stitched cow hide.
The helmet around his head however caused Kain to stare for a moment. If he did not know any better he could have sworn it to be a crude version of the later era Sarafan helmets.
With nothing to fear from so light an adversary, Kain stepped out from concealment and approached. He did not bother drawing the Reaver.
The dog barked and bared its teeth, ears flat against its head. The man looked up in alarm and when he saw Kain, staggered back.
“Nefastus!” He declared, reaching for his blade.
-
“This human spoke the ancient tongue. The word ‘nefastus’ meant unholy one. T’would seem my reputation exceeded beyond the boundaries of time itself. How pleasing.”
-
The dog launched itself forward with bared fangs and claws. Kain sent it flying with a single bolt of compressed force to the head, the dog whelped as it flew accompanied with the audible sound of cracking bones. It landed with a splash in the river and was quickly washed away, the water churning red.
The early age man watched it float away with a look of anguish on his face before with a yell he ran at Kain, his sword raised high. His charge had no element of finesse or strategy in it. It was just blind, simple aggression.
Kain simply let him approach and causally knocked the weapon out of his hand. As the human was momentarily stunned, Kain lunged forward and stabbed his talons through the mans breastplate and directly into his chest.
The human cried out, collapsing forward and Kain took him in both arms and sank his fangs directly into his neck.
-
“As this early warrior died, I drained him of his blood to restore my strength. But I required more than just sustenance. As his life left him, I probed his archaic mind for information on the status quo of the ancient world. What I found there in his recent thoughts was more than a little vexing.”
-
He slid into the dying human’s mind, overlapping the fading consciousness with his own. His thoughts were so simple and debased that peering through was child’s play.
Kain found himself frowning when the human revealed to him an unwelcome scene.
There was a large ground, gathered at the bottom of a small hill. Nearby where snarling animals, wolves…no… they were too deformed and monstrous to be just wolves. They were all collared, the chain leashed held by more men in armour, similar to this dying man only far more polished and a lack of animal fur.
The beasts snapped and strained against their restrains, probably galled into a frenzy by the smell of so much fresh meat.
On top of the hill were two figures that at first glance were strangers but as Kain observed the man’s memories that nice illusion was shattered.
The one on the left was about perhaps twenty with oily black hair tied back behind his head. He wore a red toga robe with golden armour around his mid section.
The one on the left was perhaps slightly older, with a head shaved bald and a face lined by darkened eye sockets. He wore a far shorter violet robe and in one hand he carried a staff affixed with a glowing orb atop, carved to look like a snake was devouring it. The freshly scared icon of the symbol for eternity on his forehead easily indentified him.
These two boys were the young incarnations of both Moebius the Time Streamer and Mortanious the Necromancer.
Behind them, chained to stone stab was a blue skinned Ancient. His wings had been clipped and his body was covered in scratches and deep cuts. Burns were left all over his skin where water had been applied directly to his body.
“My brothers! Hear my words!” Meobius began; his voice a pale tenor of what it would become in time. The crowd did not quiet down and only stopped talking when the guards holding the leashes of the deformed beasts whipped them into a chorus of barking.
“For century upon century the Vampires have been our masters, content in their obese status and glutinous dominion they had treated us with contempt and derision.” He carried on now that the crowd was paying attention.
-
“T’would seem Moebius had begun his practise of public narration at a young age.”
-
“How many of you assembled here have ancestors who died, whipped to go into battle against the Unspoken for the amusement of the winged devils?” He asked, gesturing to members of the crowd in turn. The anger and resentment clear in their eyes.
“And how many of you have lost your beloved children, taken be to profaned in their corrupt citadel and turned into the blasphemous hybrids by the Audron?”  Mortanious put in with a raised clenched fist, his head looking across the width of the crowd.
The faces of the angry crowd were spotted here and there with actual grieving men and women.
“The voice of god has spoken to us and he is with us in our cause for justice!” The young Moebius carried on. He raised his staff higher and the orb at its apex glowed brightly, the eyes of the snake carving almost seemed to glow with it.
The Ancient chained to the rock screeched in pain, eyes wide and back arched as the Spectre worked its dreadful magic on him.
“He bends his holy power to aid us in this noble goal.”
The crowd bussed angrily with clear resentment at the tortured Vampire, many of them shouting insults and casting small stones at the winged being.
“Join arms brothers!” Mortanious said, encouraging them and gesturing with a spread of his arm to the warriors who still held the leashes of the deformed beasts. “Join the Seraphim Brotherhood and rid the world of the unholy black feathered scourge!”
He beckoned up to warrior’s, who in response half dragged one of their feral creatures up the hill, snarling and growling the whole way.
When it reached the top and saw the winged Vampire spiralled out like a sacrifice, it roared and tried to charge but the warriors held it back.
“Join the Seraphim Brotherhood and rid the world of the unholy black feathered scourge!”
“Become more than men! Become heroes!” Meobius intoned and with one final flare of the sceptre, the beast was released and it fell upon the screaming Vampire to the thunderous applause and encouraging screams of the crowd.
-
“I had seen enough and disgusted, I retracted my mind and let the human drop down into death. Seraphim…. Sarafan…the judgement of a coincidence that two groups so nearly identical could form unrelated to one another I could not credit.”
-
As the human dropped down dead what was left of his blood soaked the ground and began to feed into the river.
Kain whipped his mouth with the back of one hand and grimly began to appraise the situation.
-
“The only logical conclusion was that these two Orders were in fact one and the same. I had come to witness the birth of the Sarafan, known in this day and age as the Seraphim.”
-
The Seer had been truthful. Her settings for the Chronoplast had indeed delivered him to a time before the human uprising lead by Moebius and Mortanious, which he now knew to be the beginning of the Sarafan Order itself.
During this era the tablets on which was written his destiny might still exist. And now he understood why they would not be available in any future time.
Either the early Sarafan destroyed them… or he got to them first ensuring that they would not be around for him to discover centuries from now.
-
“I would have to hurry. I trusted Moebius not to hold of his eventual attack on the ancient Vampires. If I wanted to retrieve the Tablets of Dark Fable I would have to beat him to them.”
-
Turning he looked out towards the horizon and the distant towering spectres of both the Pillars and the Citadel itself. The ancient’s old capital and council place of the original Circle of Nine was the logical place to start looking.
-
“The notion of a race, while appealingly simple, was naively convenient for me and the hand of fate had never given me reason to trust it.”
-
Commanded by his will, his body broke apart and once again he took to the air in bat flight.
Flying through the sky of the ancient world, Kain perceived the layout of the land. The southern shore of Nosgoth in this day and age extended further south than before, revealing that where in his time there was nothing but ocean, was fertile fields were food was growth by extensive farms and plantations.
Many of the ruins of the Ancients stood in tact and seemed well kept; although he spotted no other blue skinned ancient even when his flight took him near the Pillar’s themselves.
Around the Pillars stood a ringed high wall with battlements but this defensive structure was completely abandoned, the doors left flung wide open for any undesirable to venture inside.
Then he was over the Lake of Tears and the Citadel itself, the capital of the Vampire nation, was towering up before him. His first impression from a distance was not magnified and now he beheld the fortress in its former glory. Unblemished by the years yet to come it stood defiant and proud, surrounded by a natural moat.
Not wanting to announce his presence to a city that in this era was surely occupied, Kain’s bats found a secluded spot in a small high suspended plaza to come together and reform.
He had seen no one from the air but his acute hearing did detect the occasional sound of movement or distant conversation.
It would be unwise in the extreme simply to wander this place freely. In this era there was unlikely to be any vampire like himself and even in a city of his own kind, he would stick out. The best course of action therefore was to scout the Citadel and see what time had hidden from him in the future.
The Citadel was a masterpiece of construction, built to be easily accessible at most levels to those gifted with flight but near unassailable to any other.
Kain had no wings to carry him but the short range teleportation spell would overcome that difficulty.
Maundering around the outer exterior, Kain immediately perceived many buildings standing that in the future were all but gone. Clearly when Moebius’ inevitable attack came he would raze those structures to the ground and the rest of the damage was due only to time itself.
One structure on the top level seemed quite impressive. It was obviously a temple of some kind as the wretched symbol for the Wheel of Fate was suspended above the door.
Kain decided to try exploring that structure first.
Translocating himself inside, he paused in the shadows to see if there was anyone around. To hic chagrin there was.
It was a human, but different from the one he had encountered out in the wild. She wore a feather dress down her back like a cloak, almost as if she were imitating the feathered wings of the Ancients.
She wore close fitting leather garments and sandals, despite the cold and was busying herself at the alter at the far end of the long hall interior of the temple. She was laying out candles upon the top in a strange circular pattern.
Kain was tempted for a moment to dart in and kill her before she could see him but suddenly a voice from beyond the alter spoke, again in the ancient tounge. Out from behind a red certain, a blue skinned face with golden eyes appeared and said something to her quite sternly.
The human nodded, quickly finished her work on the alter and then followed the Ancient who must have been either her owner or superior out of the room and behind the curtain.
Kain remained silent, listening to them go before he moved out of concealment.
The temple hall was long but unlike the Hylden temple back in the Forgotten Keep there were no places to sit. There was however a great deal more artwork on the walls.
As Kain admired them he began to wonder if his various inspections of murals, Human, Hylden and Vampire alike were beginning to turn him into an art critique.
Then he turned his head to look up at the large mural above the alter and his eyes widened. The shock was so powerful he actually took several steps back.
Displayed proudly in that image, made from pieces of thin glass attached to the wall, was the picture of a young blue skinned Vampire with wings spread. His hair was blue black and cut short into two bangs on either side of his head. He wore golden armour down the right arm and his chest was bare.
Upon his forehead was carved the same symbol for eternity which Moebius wore. But that was not the utterly surprising element which had so stunned Kain.
Below the figure was large plaque with carved letters which declared:
‘RAZIEL-DIVUS’