Throwing the last dial into position, Kain set the Chronoplast device to open a porthole in time to leap over five thousand years, to the time when his empire was old and decadent and he and Raziel had first began their strange odyssey through causality. He did not believe that he had time to set the machine to any specific location and had to settle for emerging in the same place, delivering them into the same room only eons in the future.
The armillary began to churn above their heads, spinning as it gathered energy. As it spun, it shot offs sparks to show its state of disrepair. The Serioli were straining to keep the door to the room closed but they were fighting a loosing battle, the strain too much as the door began to edge inexorably open.
Dozens of scrabbling terracotta arms reached through the widening gap, grasping for anything they could. One of them tried to stab at Ansu’s head with a short sword but the warrior struck the arm away and then cut it across the middle with his axe, the severed limb dropping to the ground and smashing open like pottery.
Again came the booming clash of what could only be a battering ram rung through the chamber and the door began to push open and the Serioli could not stop it.
Kain leapt to the attack, charging into the midst of the homunculi as they tried to come through. The Reaver screamed its complimentary outrage, cutting through into the soulless creatures in their droves, sending them back with its serpentine edge.
Forced back the Hommucli retreated a few feet around their crude stone battering ram, giving the Serioli enough time to bar the door again.
Despite its protests, the Chronoplast was beginning to reach its zenith. The armillary was spinning faster and faster, its energy reaching its peek.
Even preoccupied as they were, the Serioli looked up to watch the deice glow with its power before it unleashed it as the heretofore unnoticed porthole at the back of the chamber.
The pulsing energy the porthole received pushed out like a rising wave and then contracted, caving in one itself with a groaning noise as a hole was opened through the fabric of time itself.
The Serioli as one simply stared in wide eyed amazement at the spectacle, even as the homunculi outside resumed their attack, the door creaking open again with a loud boom.
“GO!” Kain shouted at them, turning again to face the advancing enemy. “Go now!!”
The crates that they had piled up around the door were cracking and giving away, ready to burst at any moment.
Ajatar recovered first, screaming orders to her warriors to carry whatever provisions they could and run through the porthole. As loyal as they were, the Serioli were unwilling at first to advance through that vortex. It was only when Ansu turned on them with his axe in hand that they went, an advantage party making their way up the stairs before disappearing into the swirling energies.
Other picked up their supplies, or as much as they could conveniently carry, and followed in intense apprehension.
Before they were finished however, the door gave a final boom and it swung open, slamming against the wall. The homunculi charged in one huge mass of soldiers, swords drawn ready for the kill.
Kain swung and swung, forcing them to divert their attention to him as the Serioli were forced to abandon the lion share of their resources and flee. Faced with the unknown and certain death, the survivors that they were they chose the unknown. One by one they disappeared through the vortex.
Ajatar herself stood on the precipice for just a moment, looking back at him with a worried anticipation of disaster to come in her eyes before she too was forced to run through the gateway.
With her leave, the Serioli was now beyond harms reach.
Kain began to back track, fighting the homunculi that surged at him, each backward step leading him towards the porthole and to safety.
They came at him in droves, unrelenting and unwilling to let him escape.
Facing a never ending swarm of these creatures Kain hacked and chopped at them ceaselessly, fading into mist form nearly constantly to avoid their swords.
Reaching the top of the chamber and the edge of the porthole seemed to take hours and when he finally reached it he was sweating hard and straining with each swing.
Several of them attacked from both sides, some slashing at him down his mid section. One even managed to jab its sword in quite deep.
A telekinetic burst sent them flying from him but they had done their work, injuring him quite badly. Wrenching the blade that was stuck in his side out, he turned to face the porthole.
The moment he was preparing to jump through, absurdly, something else came through instead; emerging from the vortex of time to block his path to safety.
He halted, staring in utter disbelief at the feminine figure before him.

“And there she was, emerging to stand before me. Even in the chaos of the moment she was there, her face filled with a deep regret and sadness.  The Seer, journeying through time itself to behold me in this calamitous moment.”
-
The Hylden woman looked at him sadly and a look of intense sorrow past her thin face, her hair cast above the sides of her ridged head by the energy flow of the time vortex behind her.
How could she have done this, followed him here?
“I’m sorry Kain.” She said in her thick accent, her shoulders slumbered. “It was a choice between the well being of my people or your own.”
Even before she had finished erecting the barrier of force in front of the porthole, Kain had realised that she had betrayed him. He launched to the attack, but by the time the Reaver connected with the shield it was completely and his way to safety had been barred.
The Seer watched him slash at the barrier between them with dull eyes before she turned and re-entered the gate, vanishing from sight.
The vampire screamed in frustration, as much at himself as at his betrayer. He should have known something like this would have. He had suspected her of treachery before but never to this extent. He should have never simply trusted her word when she agreed to help him before.
But so confident had he been of being on the right path to his destiny after so long, he had been blind to it.
Trapped now, Kain slowly turned to face the homunculi. They filled the chamber completely and they had him completely surrounded. He was injured, cut off from allies and assistance. He had no way forward and no way back.
Frowning, the expression barely expressing the built up rage in his soul, he held the Reaver at face level; ready to Cleve the first one to move at him in two.
That dreadful moment of silence, broken only by the churning of the vortex and the hum of the barrier before it, seemed to endure for a long time.
Then his enemies backed off, each of them retracing their steps away from him. As one these puppets backed off until they were crowded around the periphery of the chamber, standing still and to complete attention.
From the cleared space in the centre of the Chronoplast, a bright light began to glow; a light that widened out and spread forming the outline of some physical shape. Wings emerged from the light, two streaks of black against the light. The glow faded and those wings spread out wide, revealing their owner who drifted slowly down to the floor.
“Greetings to you Kain, the blackest nefastus.”
The Scion of Balance stared, unable to accept that his senses were telling him. The face before him was unmistakable, those features branded into his mind for eternity. Standing before him was a winged Vampire Ancient, the spitting image of the image he had seen in that now derelict temple back in the citadel.
Almost like a parody, the features were those he knew so well were given the yellow eyes and blue pigmentation of the ancients.
-
“No….”
-
“This… it can not be.” He breathed, unable to take in what he was seeing.
But that voice… it was impossible to deny.
Raziel stood there, in this new form as if he had never gone anywhere. Like that mural, he wore golden armour down his right arm where upon his wrist was a strange device with three ornamental bird’s heads jutting out in separate directions.
He was naked to the waste down otherwise, straps of similar armour across his skins and calves. White clothe embroidered with silver and jade decorations hung down from his belt on either side of his waist.
“I finally get to meet you for the first time.” This impossible incarnation of his first born son said in mock greeting. “Or is the last?” He gestured around him to the chronoplast chamber. “Time travel does upset a linear narrative so. But I am here to change all that.”
Kain was slowly shaking his head, actually letting the Reaver drop down in his stunned amazement.
“…Raziel?” He asked in hushed whisper. The winged incarnation flapped its wings a few times.
“I am sancrasanctus - highest of holy.” He corrected in tones of the greatest arrogance that made even Kain uncomfortable. “Servant of the one true God and king of Fanum-Divus, castle of the demi-gods. I am Raziel-Divus!”
The vampire’s eyes flicked to the forehead of this Raziel, seeing with distaste the same mark that had adhered Moebius’ head…the mark of entity, the symbol he knew now to be upon the servants of his enemy.
“Then these…” He glanced off to one side as the hundreds of spectator homunculi.
“Are little more than pawns.” Raziel-Divus finished and clicked his talons. The army around them cracked like broken pottery in that one instant and then collapsed back into the dust from whence they had come.
The dust cascaded down over the Chronoplast’s levels like a waterfall of gold, pooling at the bottom layer.
“We are like the homunculi in so many ways.” He commented, brushing aside the fragments on the ground with his foot.  “The Wheel turns, dragging us from the dust from which he came and with its fulfilment the wheel returns us whence we came.” He smiled in a macabre fashion. “Ashes to ashes as it were.”
Kain stared still, slowly shaking his head. His mind was fraught with confusion and dismay.
Within the blade he held, the spirit of the Raziel he knew let out a soft animalistic growl. The very sword seemed to shiver in his grip as if enraged.
“I can sense the question you wish to ask.” Raziel-Divus began. “How can I even exist?”
Kain drew in a soft breath
“You’re not Raziel.” He began still trying to deny it.  The winged figure snorted derisively at this.
“I am more ‘Raziel’ than the pathetic wraith I’m destined to become will ever be.” He spat in deepest contempt.
And it was then that Kain fitted the pieces together. What Ajatar had told him and the images of the murals back in the Citadel, his own experiences dealing with the Raziel that he knew.
“If this is who you were originally…” He began, still unbelieving somewhere deep in his soul. “Raziel, his first incarnation… then perhaps I did not know him as well as I thought I did.”
It was a lowering thought and ye another of his preconceptions had been dealt a fatal blow. Was nothing in his world fixed?
“Apparently not.” Raziel-Divus replied, still scowling deeply. He paced back and Kain began to make his way down the stairs, Reaver still at the ready. “Can you imagine what torture that knowledge is?” His adversary asked “To know that one is destined immutably to first lower oneself to being human…”
He said the word ‘human’ with as much disgust as one might say the word ‘cockroach’.
“Then your servant for a millennium?” He still had his back to the vampire and for a moment, Kain entertained the idea to rush him and end it quickly. In the end however he could not do it.
“After that; a disgusting, hideous wraith and then the final insult… part of you!” Raziel-Divus turned around to face him, feature set into a deep frown.
“I no more anticipate with delight the fate of being entwined around your being than I am about captivity in the Reaver blade.” He declared.
A flash of memory crossed Kain’s mind. He recalled that moment where he had accidentally impaled Raziel with the sword and in sacrificing himself, Raziel had let his wraith blade pass into his being; dispersing into him to purify his sight and heal the damage done long ago by Nupraptor’s poisonous telepathic cancer.
Kain had never actually thought about it like that before but Raziel-Divus was right… the wraith blade had indeed been Raziel’s own future self bonded with him. If it had dispersed into him, than Raziel… his Raziel… was not stuck repeating his destiny forever.
He had escaped the Reaver’s curse by bonding with Kain himself. Involuntarily Kain glanced down at his chest where the hand of his son had touched him.
Suddenly he felt very vulnerable.
“A loyal servant and prophet of God I may be…” Raziel-Divus was carrying on. “But to leave my fate there, joined with you like some defective twin is something I can not abide.”
His talons he held out wide like menacing claws. The device upon his wrist gave a loud click and three blades sprouted from the beaks of the three birds, forming a triangle of steel.
“I will correct it… here and now.”
Kain’s eyes trailed up towards him.
“And so this is the sad task you have set yourself to in the name of your False God?” He asked sadly. The irony was so perfect here. “I have seen your master, made him bleed and cry out in pain.” He pointed a talon at Raziel-Divus. “When you see him for yourself, as he truly is, you will turn against him too.”
“He told me you would say that.” The winged incarnation said, holding his right arm out in front of himself, the blades angled out to either side. “I am not prepared to entertain your lies. Your corruption is the only reason I will turn against Him and he has pre-emptively forgiven me for it… provided I do one thing for him.”
He charged, leaping up into the air. His movements were so fast that he blurred. Kain was almost not able to keep up with him, dodging back to avoid a swipe with the triad of blades.
“Rid him of the nuisance that is the Scion of Balance!” Raziel-Divus landed a kick across Kain’s stomach, hitting the wound the homunculi had inflicted upon him. The pain stabbed through the vampire’s body and he stumbled back against the side of side of the wall.
“Methinks this will be no great task.”