Thump! The dull sound of the cast-iron drawbridge hitting the ground on the other side of the moat reverberated loudly through the silence.
The rapid mountain river which had furrowed this canyon beyond the Citadel – the same which, on passing through the city, provided its defences – flowed to the right of the stony path up which the guide was now leading him. The path was rising sharply, and soon all that could tell him that the river continued somewhere down there was its sound.
His guide was walking to his right, between him and the river – perhaps due to some misguided concern for his safety, or perhaps because of some equally ridiculous desire to protect her own privacy by closing off the sight of her unbecoming wound to him. Perhaps there was no reason, and he was simply growing bored enough by the utter non-existence around him to foster such preposterous concepts: apart from the human and the spelt light in front, there was nothing moving, nothing of interest to be seen around. The fog was thinning slowly – but only to be replaced by the darkness of the starless Nosgoth night. The night that, by all rights, should be filled with the hunting calls of the predators and the screams of prey – but was completely lifeless. The only thing that still remained of Nosgoth’s nature were its black plants –
The Citadel was just about to disappear in the darkness behind them, even to his sensitive eyes, when the guide stopped. They had reached the top of the hump in the road; before them, the path dropped steadily, finally to become immersed again in the shroud of the fog. But the outcropping on which they were now both standing offered a convenient view of the mountains in front. The nearest peak – almost a tall hill rather than a mountain – was very close; he felt almost as if he could touch it.
The guide spoke. “There, my Lord – to the east of the top of this mount. The lights were visible through the smoke – they must have been really strong –”
She did not have a chance to finish; because at that moment, the shooting began.

Filtered through the milkiness of the mist below, the lights gained an eerie, ethereal glow. The fast green bolts were undoubtedly dispatches from a Glyph-projectile weapon; the blue halos, demonic auras; the red streaks, hellfire. He watched as one of the blue halos died out; then another. Then, the shooting stopped.
Then, heavy steps sounded, and two mammoth, horned heads emerged from the fog.
Then, a small tripartite metal object shot out of the human’s hand in the direction of the monsters, followed rapidly by two others. From the look of it, the blades must have been guided by magic – they homed in on the demons unerringly, embedding themselves in the creatures’ flesh. For a moment, nothing happened; and then, the devices exploded, one after another, sending pieces of the demons far up in all directions.
And then, as a shower of green blood and flesh was falling on them and all around them, he withdrew the Reaver from the innards of the blue demon which had teleported behind their backs.

It was a single Hylden warrior with a Glyph rifle. Just as he had seen through the mist, he had managed to dispatch two demons – before the rest got through its defence. Now his body, burnt to a crisp by the fiends’ fire, was lying on the bank of the stream, halfway on the path, halfway in water. The demons’ carcasses lay nearby, with a swarm of large holes blown right through them; the Hylden evidently believed in the effectiveness of brute strength. Kain’s guide, kneeling next to the Hylden’s body, was fiddling in the enchanted light with the weapon that had wrought those wounds; her face, and whatever thoughts regarding this development could have reflected on it, was lost to him, hidden in the shadow of her hood.
“Your mother was certain that no one on foot could circumvent the Citadel,” he said.
“She was telling the truth,” the human answered slowly, cutting something off of the Hylden’s armour. “This creature shouldn’t be here. Nor should those – things – it was running from –” Looking up sharply straight at him, she asked, “Am I of any further use to you, my Lord?”
From the height of his stature, he examined leisurely the small, scruffy figure squatted on the ground, watching him expectantly. “Not really.”
“Then, by your leave –” She slipped the knife back into its boot holster, and, picking up the Hylden’s rifle from the ground, started to rise.
“I do not grant it.”
The human froze midway in her move, as if pinned in place by the force of the words. For a moment, she appeared to be fighting the treacherous part of herself which was betraying her own will – but lost: she sagged back to the ground, her head slumped between her arms.
“Clearly,” he continued, “you have some suspicions regarding the provenience of this corpse. Why not share them?”
Despite the phrasing, this was not an invitation; and, like her mother, the daughter was intelligent enough to recognise it. But the answer she gave was cryptic, at most. “The ruins.”
Evidently she believed him omniscient, a mind-reader, or both. It irritated him that he was only the latter of the two – the Chronoplast portals had been curiously unaccommodating with regards to this era, as though there were too many time-streams, too many possibilities to show –
“This entire world is in ruin! Which particular ones you have in mind? Quick – I would rather not be forced to destroy it to receive my answers.”
She sighed, and, picking up the weapon again, once more got to her feet. “The derelict city in the frozen marshes. The path by which we came ends here – but if one walks in the river’s bed, it is possible to traverse the caverns carved by its flow to the other side of the mountain. And that is the only way: the marshes are closed off tightly from any other side. That’s why Mother –”
“Evidently, your mother was mistaken in her calculations. But what is this city?”
She shrugged. “Little but a few stone walls and the outlines of foundations, mostly flooded by the river and covered by a thin layer of ice. Treacherous terrain for one unacquainted with the safe paths – especially by night. I’m surprised that the creature made it this far.”
“Fear is a powerful motivator.” Acknowledging the human’s resolve to pursue her path, he added, with a brusque nod, “Be on your way – whichever way you choose. If you head north, we may yet meet again.”

As my human guide vanished into the dark caves, leaving me alone in the obscurity of the Nosgoth night, I considered the new development. The riddle of the Hylden attack, which I had deemed resolved, returned – if the Hylden had already entered this territory, why were they attacking the Citadel with such ferocity? The matriarch of the city was confident that nothing of value was hidden there; and I knew that, within reason, I could trust her words. She would not have consciously misguided me had she had any confidence that she could retain me in the Citadel.
Yet, another aspect of the matter was perhaps more worrisome: the Pillar of the Mind was restored, protecting the minds of Nosgoth’s inhabitants – perhaps more efficiently than ever since Janos Audron had fallen to the blades of the Sarafan warrior-priests. But why did its twin, the Pillar of Dimension, still permit the entrance of demons to Nosgoth?

He took off into the darkness of the starless night, aiming to circumnavigate the peak of the mountain from the east. Air was still very much of a new milieu for him, the down-to-earth being that he was; for a brief moment, he savoured its cold caress on his wings – but soon, the Soul Reaver began to weigh heavily on his back. He welcomed back the mundane soil without much grief.
And it proved a good thing that he had not let himself be distracted by the newfound sensation; for the very moment he alighted on the frosted soil, a welcome committee appeared from the darkness. Five demons: it was time once more for the Reaver to sing its deadly song.
The first fiend fell, decapitated, within seconds. The next monster lasted a bit more, as he had to fly back up to avoid its fiery breath; then, it also fell, cut vertically in half with a forceful blow. The third one he had then shot in the air with the Air spell he commanded; disoriented, the creature impotently witnessed its both electric feelers being cut off; then it, too, was decapitated. The fourth one, which had attempted to sneak on him from behind, suddenly found itself alone. Very alone.
He finished it off with a few offhand cuts, and scanned the surroundings for the fifth monster. It had lingered behind its companions, and was now hovering in some distance from him, right on the brink of an ice sheet; a telekinetic push was enough to deal with it. The thin layer of ice gave way under the fiend’s weight, and the current of water, rapid in this place, drew it under the ice cover and out of his sight. He looked around, remembering –

Time had not been kind to the place of my birth. The plague that had ravaged Coorhagen in the time I had made my fledgling travels had marked the beginning of its descent and eventual fall. The Coorhagen that my legions had burnt to the ground had already been little but a shadow of its quondam glory.
What little remained after the fires had extinguished would suffer in one of the multitude of Nosgoth’s earthquakes; finally, water had struck the finishing blow, inundating the city’s corpse – and yet, at the same time, preserving a memory of Coorhagen in eternal ice.
A memory which, I would soon learn, hid another, far more ancient one.

Slowly, he began to make his way through the marshes in search for something that would explain the presence of demons and the interest of the Hylden in this remote corner of Nosgoth. There was no fog on this side of the mountain, but the guide had not exaggerated – this was, indeed, perilous landscape, for both human and vampire. Thin layers of ice covered the flooded areas, ready to cave in under his weight without the slightest warning, had he been so foolish as to rest his feet on them. He would not risk a burn, however, and, if he felt the need to descend to ground, only stopped on the islets of permafrost which peeked out sporadically from under the ice.
From time to time, he came across the remnants of stone walls – the only remainders that, indeed, some three millennia before, this place had been colourful, and not monochrome; a city, and not a necropolis; teeming with life – and not demons; because, though all else was lacking here, demons were aplenty –
He had just finished off another group of them, and had stopped for a moment by a pool of energy gathered in some ruined house – one of the fiends had managed to slip a vicious blow through his defences, and he decided to wait until the wound closed before proceeding further – when he saw again the faint glow of the enchanted light piercing through the darkness, not far from his current position: apparently, the human had managed to pass through the caves.
The scout was nowhere to be seen when he approached the light; but that which he found instead proved far more interesting: the corpses of several Hylden warriors, though barely recognisable as such – they appeared to have been quite literally torn into shreds. Without a doubt, this was the work of the fiends that had invaded the marshes.
“There are more, both corpses and their assassins, to the north.” The human stepped out of the darkness on the other side of the light. Her grey clothes made her inconspicuous, blending her almost seamlessly with the shadows.
“The Hylden attempted to escape the demons,” he concluded. “Did you encounter any survivors in the caves?”
“No.”
The answer arrived a fraction of a second too fast for his liking. He looked up from the bodies to confirm that the human was lying –
The hood of the human’s camouflage clothing was now down, for the first time since they had left the Citadel, and for the first time he could really look into her eyes, over that hideous wound on the cheek that she had been yearning to hide. There was a careful lack of expression in the eyes, so careful that it could not have been due to anything but the most meticulous effort of conscious will. But something else in these eyes captured his attention –
As he watched the human, her eyes changed: for the briefest of moments – so brief that if he had blinked, he would have missed it entirely – they were not grey, but completely white, iris-less; but with a wisp of the most virulent, phosphorescent green issuing from them; and for that brief moment, he had the feeling that something much different from this puny human was looking back at him. And he remembered how, back in Avernus, Raziel’s eyes had turned a similar colour even as his firstborn had attacked him –
The vision disappeared quickly; but the suspicions it had spawned remained in place.
“Tell me, Zosha,” he said coolly, “does your mother know that you harbour the seed of your enemy in your blood?”
“What?” For a moment, the scout appeared dumbstruck; then, understanding dawned in her eyes. “You saw –” Her left hand rose unconsciously to her cheek and eyes; amusedly, he noticed that at the same time, the other hand surreptitiously primed the Glyph rifle. At last, the human seemed to recover her wits, and answered, “She does.”
“Do not dare lie to me, human,” he snarled.
It did not take much to make the scout lose her previous cool disposure. “No! It –” she scrambled for words – “is contained, at least for now. Mother assumed that my resilience was due to our natural strength in mind magic. After all, all the others in the Ash Village –”
He interrupted her disjointed excuses, “Perhaps your mother is right. Lead the way: we will travel together now.”
Something – the shadow of anger, apprehension, or perhaps relief – crossed Zosha’s eyes as she wordlessly set out forward. It quickly faded into nothingness, leaving only her customary blank, unreadable expression: it was clear that she believed his placating words as little as little effort he had put in to make them appear such.

Although the human may have believed the lies her mother had fed her, I knew better: my experience with Mortanius had taught me that humans could endure years under possession – if it were to the possessor’s benefit.
But the experience of aeons had also cured me of the impetuousness of my youth. I would travel with the Hylden for now; in all likelihood, the mind which lay behind the scout’s knew our destination better than either of us did.

They followed the trail of Hylden and demon carcasses north through the frozen remnants of the city, killing what demons they came across. The scout turned out to be of little help – although she must have had some combat experience and training, and was an almost adequate fighter, making use of both the flay-cum-explosive devices and the Hylden warrior’s rifle, the mammoth beasts were clearly out of her league. The brunt of the fighting was on him: on that night, as on the previous day, the Reaver would feast on souls.
He only hoped that, one day, Raziel’s magnanimous gift would –
He espied yet another group of demons in some distance before him; they, in turn, occupied as they were with a pile of Hylden bodies, hadn’t noticed him yet. He counted the fiends: seven – not the most, or the least, difficult fight in the marshes so far.
He fell into what by this point was familiar routine: first, Mind projections which would buy him precious seconds, quickly followed by the Dimension spell, in order to deal as much damage as possible in the limited time; then –
The Reaver sang for the last time as the last demon fell. He sheathed it, and walked up to the disjointed Hylden bodies –
And then, another batch of demons teleported in, surrounding him from all sides. It was only his vampire instinct that saved him – he shot up into air mere fraction of a second before the fiery breath of a red demon struck the ground where he had been standing, melting the snow into a puddle of water. The demon soon paid for its audacity as the Reaver devoured its soul – but as he was killing it, a telekinetic projectile from another creature hit him, sending him far up and away from his enemies. He recovered his lost balance after a moment, and, gathering his remaining spell-casting power, dove back to the battlefield, midway in the lunge creating a powerful updraft of air which brought the fiends to him and in the path of the Reaver –
He heard shots fired from the Glyph rifle. Apparently, the human had problems of her own – he sneered in contempt: most probably, she had let herself be seen by some of the demons, and now had to deal with the result of her lack of caution. He pulled the Reaver from the eye-socket of the last fiend; the creature hit the ground with a dull thud – and whirled around mid-flight to look in the direction of the shots –
The human was standing with her back protected by the corner of a derelict building, frantically shooting at a pair of red demons which were heading in her direction with their deceptive slowness; the carcass of a green fiend already lay in the ground in front of her –
Suddenly, the shots stopped. For the briefest of moments, the scout looked at the rifle in disbelief; but the moment did not last long, and, throwing the weapon in the general direction of the fiends – a thoroughly ineffectual move – she began a frantic search for her throwing blades.
By this time, he was already heading towards the building, already knowing that he would arrive too late: one of the creatures was already taking in the air that would fuel its fiery breath, and within seconds –
The human looked straight at him, with a curiously apologetic look; and then, blinked out of existence, leaving behind only the afterglow of teleportation magic.
The next moment, a handful of the explosive flays shot out from the darkness behind him, narrowly missing him on their way to their hapless targets. He turned around again: the demons were already as well as dead –
The scout was standing atop the pile of the Hylden bodies, looking for all she was worth as though she had been one of them, her eyes aglow with the unholy emerald fire. Evidently, her mind had finally snapped under the pressure of the Hylden intrusion on her psyche –
He used his telekinetic powers to shackle the scout in place until he got to her – but the force of the spell was absorbed by a Glyph shield the possessed creature cast at the last moment; and then, protected by her shield, she cast one more spell – and was gone. He looked around himself, assessing the situation – he knew that she could not have teleported herself anywhere far; unless she had been here before, and remembered the terrain, only as far as her eyesight reached–
The first thing that struck him was that, absorbed in the fighting as he had been, he had failed to notice the change in scenery. Behind him was the inundated city – but before him stretched the white wall of the glacier from which the river which engendered the marshes sprang. It was covered by a thin layer of snow – and, in places where the demons’ fire had hit, sporting quickly freezing puddles of water.
And, within a distance, near another pool of stagnant energy, there was a narrow opening cut in the monolithic wall of ice; by the looks of its jagged edges, by the Glyph rifles of the Hylden soldiers.
He changed into his wolf form, and entered the fissure cautiously, agonizingly aware of the volatile balance of the tunnel, and the masses of ice above him and around him. After several turns, the ice passage gave way to a tunnel cut in rock; once upon a time, aeons ago, its entrance would have been open to the world outside. There was more place for him here; he shifted back –

The walls of the tunnel were adorned with murals of figures, their appearance unmistakably vampiric. Bent in reverence, they performed unholy rites which purported to appease the wrath of their god.
I knew all too well the idol which they worshipped: for in all scenes, a constant motif repeated. The sign of my enemy. The sigil of the Wheel of Fate.

“What is this place?”
The tunnel opened into a large grotto. Its centre was occupied by a circular pond surrounded by a low stone wall – he was immediately reminded of both Moebius’s secret room under the Sarafan keep, and the Oracle chamber in the ancient vampire Citadel; but unlike those, this pond was frozen by the sub-zero temperatures in the cavern. The walls of the shrine around the pond were also covered with the murals depicting the dark rituals; the figures in the paintings looked as if they were moving. Vampires worshipped their deity again, brought back to life by the flickering light of the human’s spell.
Zosha was standing in the middle of the cavern, looking around herself in clear awe. She appeared to be lucid and back in control of herself for the moment; her eyes were returned to their natural dull grey. He stepped into the cavern – a detached part of his mind noted a warp gate on one of the walls: this, then, was how the Hylden had arrived in this part of Nosgoth –
“A shrine devoted to a fraudulent god,” he answered at last.
“Oh. Not unlike –”
But before she finished the sentence, the emerald light returned to Zosha’s eyes, now again white and iris-less. When she spoke again, her voice sounded very differently, much older and inhuman –
“Ah. It appears that without asking the question, I received the answer.”
Fast as only a vampire could be, he got to the human, lifting her in front of him by the throat so that he could look straight into the possessed eyes – the hunt had become far too boring far too long ago –
“And who dares speak to me so?”
“Maat’ash’Eirene, who salutes the Scion of Balance... How regretful it is that we cannot continue this conversation now. We shall meet again, of course.”
“Of course. Until that time –”
He struck. Hard.

When the eyes reopened, they were grey again. Grey – and moribund: within the depths of his mind, owing to that ancient gift he did not fully understand even now, he could feel the human’s soul of as it tried to slip through his claws, to become useless to him; to enter his enemy’s precious Wheel of Fate.
“An average human can lose a litre of blood before the pressure on the vessels is too small to sustain circulation,” he spoke calmly, as though he were making a casual comment at a feast in one of his son’s castles. “You are approaching that limit fast. Your mind is almost irreversibly damaged as a result of the Hylden incursion. Almost. Make your decision – do you want to live to see your revenge?”
It did not take long for her to decide; she could not speak, of course – but the Whispered word he heard was as loud as a scream.
“Then you will take that which is offered.” In the darkness of the cave, his simple words sounded like a proclamation.
He slashed at his arm, just above the gauntlet. The cut closed almost instantly, but not before several drops of his blood fell on the creature’s cheek, on the wound he had reopened, the wound from which the red, life-giving, deceptively clear and pure blood was now spewing out.
But when the droplets hit the wound, it seethed and boiled; green foam started to emerge from it. The human howled in pain like an animal –
In the end, the whole process did not last long – after a moment, the froth ceased to come out; the inhuman howling stopped; and then, the wound began to close as the tender flesh of a new scar started to form.

“Wh-what happened?” Speaking still hurt; but, at least, her mind was clear and belonged to her again.
The powerful creature that Mother had told her was the vampire lord who had once been the ruler of Nosgoth, then had been missing for a century, and now had returned, looked at her from where he was studying, with an incongruously sad expression, some detail of the blade of that peculiar sword that he wielded. She felt embarrassed, as if she had intruded on some intimate moment.
That impression passed quickly, as the – entity, she could not find any other word to describe him – said matter-of-factly, “The catalyst present in my blood expunged the Hylden poison from your mind and veins. That – and more.”
“Oh.” She tried to rise, and discovered that it was far easier than she had thought; in fact, for someone who was cold, hungry, tired, and, above all, had not expected to live this long – otherwise, she would never have embarked on this mad chase after Hylden phantoms in the first place, and without a proper weapon, at that – she was faring, and feeling, surprisingly well. A suspicion crossed her mind, harking back to the memory of something she had been told by Mother long ago – “Am I – one of your kind now?”
“You are afraid of becoming a beast, are you not?” His voice was dripping with contempt. “You need not worry. You are no vampire. Merely – a human who has felt the touch of the divine. You can feel it in your veins, do you not?”
Suddenly, she could. And, as he spoke on –
“The sudden onrush of power – the feeling of invincibility... With time, this will pass. What gifts you have received will not.”

He watched as the human tried to absorb the knowledge – what little of it there was; he hadn’t been entirely sure himself what the result of his little experiment would be. He changed the topic, reminding the human of her end of the transaction:
“I will teleport you to the Citadel; tell your mother that you are now mine. Take over command, gather the troops – I grant you my leave to share your gift – retake the city and head to the Ash Village.”
For a moment, she looked doubtful – but then, she touched her cheek, tracing the triple scar which his talons had left in it. He laughed, “I see you understand. You arenow a mirror image of the Founder of your line – for a very similar reason, I might add. The troops will follow you.”
“Once you reach the Village,” he continued after a moment, “destroy the Ward Shield. You may kill everyone you encounter –” a crooked smile graced the mutilated face – “apart from the commander. That one is mine.”
The smile turned fleetingly into an impatient grimace, before disappearing altogether in a careful non-expression. Recognising the symptoms, he laughed: the youth were so utterly predictable –
“Defying me already? At least wait until you have more power... Now,” he continued, no longer laughing, “I put you in command. Therefore, should anything happen to the commander, I will hold you responsible. Should he fall on his own sword, or his weapon misfire, or lightning strike him – or if he takes a bad step, and, by pure chance, falls into the Abyss – I will hold you responsible for his misfortune. Am I understood?”
“Yes, my Lord,” she bowed slightly, once more the obedient soldier.
“Then go. Destroy the Hylden in my name.”

He sent the human off to her kindred, and was now again alone with the Reaver. He looked around – when he had struck the human unconscious, the spelt light had vanished; and with it had ended the danse macabre of the figures on the walls: vampires had lain again to their peaceful rest. He turned to the frozen pond in the centre, and whispered, half to it, half to himself:
“When every last sentient being in Nosgoth is immune to your treacherous appeal – what will you do then, hub of the Wheel of Fate?”

Even the healing of a land has to start somewhere. When I had ordered Raziel to be cast into the Abyss, it had been such a beginning; his refusal to kill me at the tomb of William the Just had been another; needless to say, so had been his ultimate terrible sacrifice.
This was, perhaps, another in the series of such beginnings. In one move, by taking a Hylden pawn and converting her into my own tool, I had assured my sovereignty over humankind – and, far more importantly, deprived my avowed enemy of any future servants.
And now, the time came for the next step of my journey. Wherever it would take me, I would enter the portal.