He was right: they really were once a fair race.
The thought – and once he realised how uncharacteristic it was for him, he could not help but wonder in precisely which recesses of his mind it originated – occurred to him as he was watching Maat’ash’Eirene watch his library with something not entirely unlike voracious hunger in her eyes.
The library took the whole first floor of Avernus, and was the fruit of many years – many centuries – of travels and patient gathering of all the books still extant in Nosgoth at the beginning of the Empire. What had been of most interest to him had been, of course, the books relaying old legends and stories – he had hoped to find any trace of the Hylden and of the ancient vampires in them; but there was almost none. The vampires had been utterly merciless in their crusade to completely eradicate the Hylden from Nosgoth’s history; the Hylden had truly become ‘the Unspoken’, their very existence known only to the chosen few. The humans, on their part, had not been nearly as successful in destroying the memory of the vampires – but still, all the books referring to his ancestors were at best biased in opinion, and at worst completely inaccurate and contrary to what he had already known for sure.
He had managed to recover some volumes from the keep of the Hylden General in Meridian, and from the ruins of the Aerie of Janos Audron, and those had turned out to be of some slight help to him; nonetheless, the majority of the images he had seen in the Chronoplast he still had had to laboriously piece together on his own.
Still, he mused as he watched the collection of manuscripts, he must admit that he had changed much from that fledgling who had once proudly proclaimed that he would not weep over lost tomes.

Vampire blood flowed in Kain’s veins; and that blood, he assumed, would be enough to shield his future Hylden subjects from the Pillars designed to banish them from Nosgoth. But his blood was also much more: it was the purified and purifying blood of the Scion of Balance, and that turned out to have a rather unexpected effect on Maat’ash’Eirene: while in essence she was a pure Hylden no longer, she certainly looked the part; or at least what he presumed could have been the part.
Tall (though not as tall as he was: shorter by a head) and slender, almost delicate in frame, with a classical oval face and high cheekbones, she reminded him slightly of her mother. But where Maat had had hair and a rather human colouring of her skin, Eirene had neither: what little of her skin he could see, on her hands and face, was green. Squamous and green: covered with tiny scales, some lighter green, some darker, which formed odd patterns and seemed to move as the Hylden herself moved. Since what he had initially taken for armour was, in fact, also fashioned out of small metallic scales attached to bits of dark cloth, the whole arrangement looked incredibly fluid; and he was instantly reminded of Perun.
Topping all this were the emerald, almond-shaped, vertically-slit eyes – the only part of the Hylden’s body which retained what he had until this point thought to be the distinctive Hylden colouring – and the massive crests on Eirene’s head. These, it turned out, were no longer rigid and ossified: soon, he would find out that they moved as Eirene’s mood changed: rising as she became alert, curious or angry; flattened when she was peaceful and relaxed.
And then, of course, there was the matter of the wings.
It appeared that the ridges on Maat’s back had been nothing else but vestigial, ossified wings: and her daughter had them now back, fully evolved. They were just as he had seen them in the vampire murals in the Citadel of Tears: green and membranous. They reminded him slightly of Raziel’s wings before he had destroyed them –
Yes, the Hylden General had been correct: the Hylden were fair of form. Or, at least, this one Hylden was.
She was also, in his estimate, proud and conceited, manipulative, stubborn in her hatreds and a confirmed traitor; frustrated in her ambitions to the throne and in her faculties: a Seer who could See no more, a mind-possessor who could possess minds no more; and who could tell what effects the vampire blood could have on the Hylden powers: perhaps she was now as useless as a sorceress as she was a warrior? (For, certainly, she was no warrior; not with a build like that.)
Currently, she was still grateful to him for her release and infused with a healthy dose of fear of him (she believed that he had managed to destroy all the three of her siblings, and he let her believe that, for the time being); still seething with anger at her captors – but he suspected that he would have to keep her on a short leash, lest the gratefulness and the fear fade, and the anger turn against him: the next impostor on the throne which she viewed as rightfully hers.
She was also, at present, unfortunately, his only link with the Hylden (and perhaps her concern for her people was one of her better traits): that must soon change, of course.
First, however, there was the more important matter.

“Free at last!” Eirene cried out, exultant, once she gathered her wits and understood where the conduit had brought them; the crests on her head rose with her mood. “Free! I have sworn on my mother’s soul and my father’s corpse that I would be free– And I am. Come, Kain, take me to a portal which opens on Avici proper, that I may introduce you to your new subjects–”
“The portals are on the upper floors of this keep; but we shall not be heading there yet. I need information, Eirene,” he replied.
The Hylden’s mood instantly deteriorated. “I told you: I can foretell neither your victory nor your defeat, Kain.”
“That is why I do not ask it of you. Instead, tell me all you know of my enemy; our enemy, now that you have entered my service. The Wheel of Fate: what do you know of it?”
He watched, amused, as the Hylden’s crests rose and instantly fell at the mention of ‘service’: Eirene certainly did not yet rule over the unconscious movements of her new body; and her indignation was evident to him, even if her voice was calm when she replied, “What do you want to know of it?”
The answer was simple. “Everything. How did the Hylden learn of its existence?”
The Hylden watched him for a moment in silence, gathering her thoughts; then, she bowed her head, and started to speak.
“In the beginning,” she said, “there was a war; a war between two races as unlike as Earth and Water are different from Air and Fire. No one now knows why the war had ever started; some say this was simply because the two races met, so different and opposite each other they were.”
“Then, word reached the Hylden that the vampires started worshipping this idol – the Wheel of Fate – and claimed that the Wheel let them see across the streams of time. In their folly, they laughed; for the vampires had ever been blind to time; and the Seers of royal blood knew that there was no fate, no destiny, only fortune, misfortune and luck; and so, the Wheel must be a fraud.”
“They were wrong,” Kain remarked, in his mind checking the information he received from Eirene with what he had learnt before: the existence of the Oracle; of the Chronoplast; the easiness with which the vampires had been deceived; the fact that Time was an Earth-aligned principle–
“They were wrong,” the Hylden agreed calmly. “And they were proven wrong after another thousand years of incessant struggle passed; for it was then, they say,” she hesitated slightly, “as the greatest Seer of them all lay in childbirth, that she suddenly saw all the time-streams – all the futures – coalesce into one. She saw this, and many other things; and she spoke words of prophecy. And it was then that the Hylden knew that the vampires had been correct all along, and that there was a Wheel of Fate, to the misery of all; but it was late, too late for that, because destinies were already set and frozen, and it was in no one’s power to change them; and that is all.”
“The precious little of it there is,” he observed. He rather hoped there would be something more to it, something which could perhaps help him fight the fiend– “What happened later?”
The Hylden’s emerald eyes narrowed and her crests again involuntarily rose and again fell; but she continued, “On the next day, the Seer was gone, having betrayed her people; or so they say. And though battles were fought to regain her, none were victorious; for,” her eyes darted to the hilt of the Soul Reaver behind Kain’s back, “the blade was seen on the battlefields, the tide of the war had turned, and the vampires were winning at last. And then, a year and a day after the prophecies were cast, the Pillars were raised and thus the Hylden banished; and the Seer’s daughter, hatched, the first of the many born in Avici.”
“And the vampires were cursed with bloodlust and immortality,” Kain retorted; the shock he had received when he had learnt the latter of the two from Perun was still fresh. “Do not dare forget that, Hylden.”
“Oh, the curse was ingenious, I daresay! You see,” the Hylden chuckled, “it bound the vampires’ souls so tightly to their bodies that they were not only immortal: they could not even escape their bodies after their deaths. Never to be reborn; never to enter the Wheel again!”
“Unless, that is,” he rejoined dryly: the Hylden’s glee riled him, “the Soul Reaver consumed them.” He took the sinuous blade off his back, and looked at it intently: it was as if he were seeing it for the first time again, back when Avernus had still housed a cathedral; or as if he had only just learnt again from the Chronoplast portals that it was Raziel’s soul that was contained within it –
Raziel’s soul; a Soul Reaver’s soul–
A parade of images and memories: Raziel feeding on his brethren and on their brood; the creature telling him that even now, pure, Kain continued to nourish him; Vorador’s uncanny return, only to be felled again, this time by the Reaver; his own instinct, telling him what he had told Raziel: that the Reaver was the only weapon that could destroy him; a human voice, demanding of his sister that she help him, and she, replying that her brother leave the sword–
The Reaver: the only weapon capable of killing him, and, as he was becoming more certain every moment, the weapon created precisely to kill him. After all, the both times he had died – or had thought he had died; the distinction now appeared to be blurry, at most – he had always appeared in what he now knew was Avici; and always lucid, more or less. And in Avici, it was impossible to die: it was the realm of uninterrupted life, uninterrupted suffering: but for him, it became a curious haven from the Wheel; unless, that is, he repeated in his thoughts, the Reaver consumes me–
(He wondered for a moment if Mortanius had known what precisely he had achieved; whom exactly he had brought unto Nosgoth. Probably not, he decided.)
Eirene, of course, was to know none of this; perhaps already she knew too much.
“Come,” he said brusquely, putting the Reaver back in its usual place, “We must make haste.”
“Where are we going? To Avici?” she asked.
“No. There are introductions overdue. Much overdue.”

They flew to the Pillars in silence; when he had opened the complex mechanism which opened the library’s outer door, he was surprised to see that it was already late in the evening; and that the sun was already below the smoke cover, and about to set. His foray into Avici had taken the best part of the day.
The five restored Pillars were clearly visible in the western sky; the rays of the sun tainted them the deepest blood-red. As Kain neared them – Eirene had fallen slightly behind: she must still have trouble commanding her changed body – he could make out something move in the clearing–
The demons had returned: it would be a good opportunity to see how Eirene fared in combat.

Eirene hovered in the air next to him; the crests on her head were standing erect and her emerald eyes were narrowed as she appraised their opponents below: another batch of the massive, black demons–
At last, she arrived at some decision: a shield appeared suddenly around her, surrounding her completely by a translucent green glow; the following moment, equally abruptly, the time around them slowed its pace. Before he had the chance to wonder how she managed to account for his existence in the spell, she was gone, diving with neck-breaking speed at the demons below–
From the above, he watched her: as she came out of the dive, a bit too early – probably afraid of losing the control of her drop – and released a wave of energy which knocked down several of the closest demons; and then, as she threw a series of telekinetic projectiles at the nearest downed fiend–
At that point, he decided that he had seen enough: Eirene, though he would be careful enough not to mention it to her, fought just like her late sister. That is, decent enough: she would be brilliant as support for a larger group – that she had slowed time meant, at least, that he did not have to do this himself. But she would never manage to deal with the fiends by herself.
And, of course, she did not have his regenerative powers–
He dove after her.

The Hylden landed softly next to him and folded her wings. Her scale armour was charred in one or two places; but, on the whole, she appeared to be unharmed by what he presumed must have been the first battle in her life: her baptism of fire. She walked lightly between the demons’ corpses left after the fight, watching the Pillars; if he could judge the expression on her alien face, with mixed feelings. The Pillars were to her, after all, the source and the symbol of her people’s long captivity; on the other hand, it was clear that she could not deny the place its singular beauty.
He decided that he owed her some explanations.
“Nine Pillars,” he said from behind her. “Four of them to regulate and draw on Nosgoth’s native energies; each one of these tied to a different elemental principle. One acts as the axis of transference–”
“Balance, of course,” she interrupted him dreamily; she touched tentatively the central Pillar, and then instantly withdrew her hand, as if the Pillar had burnt her. “Two bind us in Avici, so that we may access Nosgoth neither through space nor through time–” She turned round abruptly. “And the last two?”
“Conflict and Death,” he replied dryly. For some time, he had been himself wondering about these.
For a moment, she appeared to be digesting the news; then, she must have decided that the names spoke for themselves, and that there was nothing to discuss here; because, in the end, she asked only, “You spoke of introductions, Scion?”
Kain nodded. “Follow me, Seer.”

Together, they descended into the subterranean chamber; it was already dark within, and so, they released several enchanted lights to accompany them; Kain did not need them, but Eirene, apparently, did not see well in the darkness. Given where she had lived the whole of her life–
“Ah. Kain. And you have found yourself a new lieutenant, I see. Does she know what happened to the previous ones? Well – do you, Seer?”
The booming voice of the Elder God filled the chamber completely; and, from the look on Eirene’s face, she could hear it as well. The Hylden looked at Kain sharply, questioningly; the vampire smirked, and said, keeping to an excessively formal tone, “Eirene of the Hylden: meet the Hub of the Wheel of Fate.”
The expression on Eirene’s alien face was now priceless. “What–” she stuttered, “Is that true?” she demanded of Kain, of the chamber and of the world in general.
“That I am the Hub of the Wheel, the Engine of Life, the Devourer of Death? Yes, it is true. And it gladdens me to see you in Nosgoth, Eirene: for now I know that in your deathless prison, your kin has finally learnt the lesson of the importance of oblivion. Come, if you will, young Queen, and bring forth your people; live, die, and be redeemed in your rebirth–
The Wheel awaits; the past is forgiven.”
Kain’s eyes narrowed. He had brought Eirene to the Pillars in an attempt to give her anger a focus, to drive home the importance of following him against a common enemy; but he was beginning to think he had miscalculated. Eirene, knowledgeable as she appeared to be, was not, after all, aware of the demon’s past machinations. And though in years she might be old – older than he was, in fact, he reflected with sudden surprise – in experience, she was definitely not... The Elder One was correct in this one regard: the Hylden was young. Young – and impressionable, susceptible to influence and flattery–
But, the damage was not yet done: for the Elder continued, “But you have not yet answered my question, Queen: has he ever told you what happened to his previous followers?”
“There wasn’t much time,” she replied calmly; still, Kain could see how flattered she was by the honorific. “But pray do tell: you have caught my attention.”
“Then,” the deep voice rumbled, “you do not know of his champion, imprisoned and tortured out of his mind until Kain found him and offered him release – the release that never came? Of the woman who nourished him from the brink of death, and whom he killed with his own hands the moment she dared think that what was best for Kain might not be the same as what was best for Nosgoth?”
Kain’s eyes narrowed involuntarily. Magnus and Umah: his conscience was clear on both accounts, of course – but declaring innocence now, of course, would do little to improve his position–
“And what of his precious firstborn, cast away and condemned to eternity of torment? And of his firstborn’s children, all dead at the stake so that he could preserve his status–”
Now that was surpassing ridicule. “You dare–”
“Yes, I dare,” the rich voice calmly replied, “Some, he induced to sacrifice for him; others, he killed himself or left to die when he found no more use for them; either way, they all mark a bloody trail behind him while he goes on and on, merrily prattling about his destiny! And what is this destiny? A mere delusion, a wishful misreading of the prophecy which foretold his death–”
At that point, Kain finally found his opportunity to interrupt. “Only because from the outset, it had been engineered by you, fiend. But not till the end: it had grown beyond your intent, had it not? Or have you already forgotten the beating that you have received in the Citadel of Tears, and the signs left behind in that place?”
But it was clear that the Elder One was now speaking only for Eirene’s benefit.
“This is my only counsel for you, Queen and Seer of the Hylden: when the time of choice comes, choose right. Choose right – or, like many before you, fall into the trap, and witness firsthand what happens to those who follow him and fall behind. Even now, another burns for him; another moth drawn to his flame–”
At that, Kain laughed; he had to, else he could not contain his fury any longer.
“You have said too much, demon. You have always said too much–”

Suddenly, the vampire’s speech was interrupted by a thundering roar.
“I grow weary of you, vampire,” stated the disembodied voice; in a much more courteous tone, it added, “Until our next meeting, Seer.”
She looked around–
“The water!” she cried out; already she was to her ankles in it–
As it turned out, her warning was unnecessary; for that, that – bastard – was already halfway up the height of the chamber, and flying as fast as he could.
She followed him, emerging from the chamber seconds before it flooded completely – and straight into the demons’ fire; manoeuvring in the crossfire of the spewed jets, they both shot high up into the air above; he first, she, somewhat behind–
Seconds later, she was thrown far away as a powerful shockwave spread through the air; her young, still tender wings suddenly shot with pain, unable to bear the terrible pressure. When the pain subsided, she blinked: for, to her incredulity, there seemed – no, there were – two more Pillars risen in the distance; the vampire was hovering in front of them, completely unaffected–
“Follow me as fast as you can,” the vampire cried her way, setting off in a roughly north-west direction; not even looking back to see if she followed.
She felt her crests rise of their own volition.
Does he intend to return to Avici at all?