The jubilation did not last beyond the immediately digested fact of his freedom as Raziel soon began to see the ghosts.
‘Ghosts’ was the only word to describe them. They were not souls of the dead he would have known that immediately but were images, like a painting brought to life before his eyes.
The people around him were more than familiar to him for he had lived with them for over a thousand years, vampires all of them bearing the banner and mark of the Razielim clan.
Raziel wandered the castle where he had once held sway, seeing a strange double image as he observed. All at one time he saw the ruined walls and fallen masonry of the present but simultaneously he observed the proud battlements, fresh banners and hallways filled with young fledglings that he recalled.
-
“The faces of all those who had lived here were like shadows, free floating through these ruins I had never beheld their massacre and so, I knew that the images that appeared before me of horrible mutilation and fiery torment could be but my own imagination taking form.”
-
The imagery of the past shifted and changed and no matter which way Raziel turned, he was forced to observe the dead and dying. The spilt blood of fellow vampires, a near unthinkable taboo in Kain’s empire, ran through the cracks in coddle stones. Corpses were pilled up high and set ablaze by warriors baring the mark of the Dumahim, the smoke of the dead roasting flesh rising high into the air. Raziel could smell or hear nothing, no screams of agony nor rich scent of blood. The entire spectacle was illusionary.
-
“I wandered, passing between past and present, always forcing myself back to the now. It was a struggle that took a great deal of will to endure.”
-
Try as he might he could not help a sense of deeper guilt. They had been his charge and his responsibility and he had not been there when they had needed him the most. In fact, he had forgotten about them entirely even after he had learned of the massacre hardly even recalling their deaths beyond their immediate effect of enraging him more during his early crusade against Kain.
And even after that, his quest had become wholly selfish he was now forced to admit, focused only on his role in Nosgoth’s destiny and how he might escape it.
Eventually he found his way to his central chamber where he had once held court with his elite clansmen. Once again his vision had that peculiar double flash to it as he saw past and present in once single look.
Time had reduced most of his chamber to rubble, the roof fallen in and the back fall had cracked down the centre to leave a panoramic view to the distant sooty horizon. From here, he could see the distant smoke stacks that had once been at the heart of the Turelim territory. These massive chimneys that had once belched the smoke that had blocked out the sun and darkened the world now stood there against the faint sunlight without so much as a rising whip.
Already the overcast sky was a good deal brighter than it had been before. The stacks must have ceased their bellowing smoke quite some time ago.
Slowly Raziel made his way over to the broken and forgotten seat and stared at it, his pale eyes narrowing. The, perhaps a tad whimsically, he sat down on it placing his hands on the familiar stone arm rests.
-
“Desperately I tried to stay in the depressing and drab present, where there was no spilled blood and merely old stones.”
-
As he sat there, Raziel began to push away the suggesting images he was seeing from his mind. He was tired, both physically and mentally and wished to rest unburdened by their intrusion on his solitude.
Eventually self discipline won over and slowly but surely the images faded and the present became dominant over the past, colour fading and the grey prevailing. He also banished that feeling of guilt was well, driving it from him with a jealous passion.
With a vicious shake of his head, Raziel banished them completely from his eyes and let out a long sigh seeing his vision once again clear.
He sat there for a long time afterward staring off into space and concentrating on keeping his mind focused so that the images did not come back.
Dozens of questions distracted him from this meditative state and the lack of answers to them was arrogating.
The last thing he consciously remembered before awakening here was the startled and dismayed look on Kain’s face as the Reaver consumed Raziel. After that there was nothing but flashes of memory, mere images he could not understand like some hideous nightmare that his mind had mercifully not recorded.
How could he be free from the Reaver blade? He did not understand how such a thing was possible.
True enough he was jubilant and ecstatic over this miracle but it made no sense.
And where was Kain now? What of his clash with the False god that had been Raziel’s master? What of the dark unspoken who had taken hold of Janos Audron?
Raziel let out another long sigh.
The questions were near endless and with no answers they served only to drive him to distraction. As such another form that could not be real began to manifest before him, but this one wholly unconnected with the former display.
Raziel stared at her in mute awe for a moment and then slowly rose back up to his feet at the flicking being that floated back and forth as if caught in breeze.
Ariel, the former Balance Guardian before Kain, was here.
She was as he knew her; a spectre devoid of flesh and bone and glowing faintly with the light of her own spectral energy.
But her face was a flux, morphing from the beautiful visage he had seen once before to the hideously scared norm that showed bone and back again.
Her lips moved as if she was speaking but Raziel heard no sound.
-
“She floated, unattached as every other illusion in my sight. I watched her in detachment, knowing that she could not be real.”
-
He tried not to look at her but he could not tear hi eyes away, his gaze fixed on her face in whatever state it was in. She stared back at him in turn with unblinking eyes and in her gaze was all the sincere pity that Raziel never wanted nor received before. It made him feel the weight of all of the injustices done to him all at once and an unbearable weight of turmoil and dismay threatened to crush him from within.
But those eyes held his and her pity and compassionate understand was like a pair of hands helping him with all that weight.
-
“But at that moment I wished she was.”
-
Slowly, involuntarily, his hand started to move towards her.
Then suddenly her image flickered and vanished, leaving him momentarily taken aback. There was now a sense of presence, a immediate intrusions physically and not just an illusion. At the front of the chamber there was a light shimmering and space itself began to distort around it, pushing something through from someplace else.
In preparation for an attack, Raziel crouched slow as was the best fighting style with his ruined frame with his talons out spread. Instinctually he went to summon the wraith blade and only at the last second did he recall that his weapon was gone.
Emerging out of a translocation was a woman, quite unlike any Raziel had ever seen before. She was tall and tan skinned, her short brown hair cropped back over her shoulders.
With her enlarged ears and bony structures along her back and shoulders she was clearly not human and Raziel had never seen a Vampire of her like before.
“Raziel, my Messiah.” She began in a voice thick with a peculiar accent. “Hear me!” She actually dropped down to her knees before him and Raziel blinked in confusion.
“What… who are you?” He demanded, talons still raised and arched forward. His emotions were already tightly wound and he was ready to spring like a coiled snake.
“Please…” This woman began with his face down to the floor. “I beg your forgiveness.”
The wraith stared at her incredulously and then slowly straightened back up.
“My what?” He arched with a raised eyebrow. “I do not even know how you are.” He glanced again over her strange form, with oddly arranged limbs and bony back protrusions. At present he could not quite place where but he felt he had seen anatomy such as this before. “Or what you are.”
“My true name is no moment, Raziel.” She said standing back up as well, showing him her bright violet coloured eyes but maintaining a respectful incline of her body. She was dressed in little more than a few clothe and leather straps across her chest and a long oil clothe between her legs and another hung down behind her click a cloak, suspended by her bone like frame. “I am known simply as the Seer.”
Raziel snorted and frowned at her.
“That is as unhelpful as it is annoying vague.” He declared testily, then paused and his eyes narrowed even further. “And how did you know my name?”
The woman let out a short, incuriously laugh when he asked. “There is not a Hylden alive who does not know your name.” She said and Raziel’s eyes bulged. “Your name has been the only thing to give my kind any hope in their exile.”
“Hylden?!” The wraith explained, taking an involuntary step backwards. Now he knew where he had seen those features before. He had observed them many times in the murals created by the Ancient Vampires and the anatomy was distinctive enough now that had been reminded.
If this woman was indeed a Hylden than she did not appear at all the deranged, demonic, almost gargoyle like as the murals had once depicted them. Obviously now the Ancients had depicted their enemies as feral evil looking beings in order to make their own heroes appear more herculean.
Still he was extremely wary in her presence and maintained a prudent distance; his perception of the enemy race perhaps still coloured a bit by Janos Audron prejudices.
“You are so desperately needed.” The Seer was saying to him, her expression filled with conviction but at the same time a deep gnawing guilt. “And I did what I had to do to bring you back.”
Raziel stared at her not quiet understanding what she meant for a moment but then he raised one eyebrow as her meaning became clear
“You are the one who freed me from the Reaver?” His tone was incredulous and highly sarcastic. He had learned the hard way never to take anything anyone said at face value.
“You freed yourself, my saviour.” She told him ingratiatingly. “I know of the horror that awaited you at the direction of Moebius the Time Streamer.” She spat the name out with the venom it deserved and Raziel mellowed slightly. If she hated Moebius as well she could not be all that bad.
“It was his intent for you to repeat that hideous circle of consumption forever.” She explained. “Yet you prevailed against his machinations and in doing so destroyed yourself.” The Hylden woman bowed low again. “You are the foretold, Redeemer and Destroyer.”
Raziel did not practically like being called that
“Why must that phrase forever dog me?” He asked exasperatedly, letting his arms drop to his sides and cast her a sidelong glare.
“And what possible need could you have for my forgiveness?” He asked then, the thought only now just coming to him. “What have you done to me that warrant it?”
She actually seemed startled and confused by his question, her wide eyes blinking several times.
“Then… you do not know?” There was a great deal of tension in his voice and she swallowed hard. “What I did…”
Raziel stared at her hard.  “If I did, would I be asking?”
The Hylden woman hesitated and looked as if she were about to take a step or two forward but at the last second decided against it and remained in her spot.
She set her face in a resigned but grim and firm expression. “In order to release you from your imprisonment inside the Scion of Balance, I had to betray him.”
Raziel stared as well he might. She had confessed this to him almost in one go and it took him a moment to digest it. Imprisonment within the Scion of Balance? But he had been captured within the Reaver Blade… not Kain. He laid a hand on the side of his head as it suddenly began to throb.
“Betray…” He repeated lamely.
“Kain is gone.” The seer said with a forced, straight face. “Perhaps dead.”
-
The moment the words left her lips my mind plunged back once again into the past. But this vision before me was far stranger. I saw this strange woman through different eyes and in some different place and I felt an intense rage at the image.
-
It was like watching theatre and performing on stage without trying. Raziel saw the Reaver in the hands of whichever character whose point of view he had commandeered, slashing away at a barrier of energy between him and the Seer. The Seer in the vision watched the frantic enraged attempt gravely and then watched through a glowing porthole behind her vanishing from sight.
Raziel clutched the sides of his head, feeling a deep compassionate rage building up in him.
-
“Kain… I was seeing this through Kain’s eyes. These were not my memories that had been haunting me, but Kain’s. And now I remembered.”
-
The wraith brought his hands forward sharply and stared at them, recall perfectly clear now.
-
“In order to heal Kain of the mental poison that had tainted him his entire life I had dispersed the wraith blade into him and as that blade was in truth my own future self I had put myself into Kain’s very being. I had joined with him in some unknown way, conscious within and on some level aware of what was happening.”
-
Then with a quick motion he turned on the Seer, eyes blazing.
“You dare come to me asking for help after what you did?!” He was irrationally angry and was stalking towards her talons held ready. 
“My saviour…” The Seer began, clearly alarmed as she backed off.
“I am no saviour of yours, harlot!” The wraith spat. “I should rip your throat out right here!” His arms and legs were tenses read to spring directly at her. “I sacrificed myself so that Kain could live. I put myself through hell a dozen times over for that one purpose, my entire destiny bent around it and then you undo all in a moment of treachery?
His arm drew back as he if intended to savagely rake her with his talons. The Seer gave him one terrified and startled look and then promptly disappeared; vanishing into the white flash of a translocation spell.
-
“She was right to flee. Had she remained it was possible that I would have flown at her with my bare talons. The memory of her betrayal of Kain was coloured through his perception and I had inherited that prejudice from him. So perhaps my reaction had not been entirely my own. Nevertheless she was ludicrous if she believed I would trust her after what she had done.”
-
Raziel stared at the spot where she had been and then went back to his throne and sat back down, letting his ruined wings drape across the stone arm rest He sat there rejected for quite some time. Then when he finally became sick of his moping he looked back over his shoulder at the gap in the wall and the distant horizon visible through the hole.
-
“Still, her actions had left me once again in the land of the living. If I am to make any sort of start for myself, I must learn precisely what era I have awaked to.