Legacy of Kain: Blood Brothers

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Chapter Four

The Sarafan’s Revenge

Turel stepped up onto the circular dais and looked around the stained white marble of the tomb entrance. Thick dust and mold was up to an inch thick in some places, but since it had been opened to the elements, the tomb did not appear quite as ancient as it most certainly was.

An earthquake, one of the many earthquakes that Nosgoth was increasingly prone to in recent years, had revealed the crypt entrance. At first, Turel expected it to be just another tomb for fallen human warriors in the early days of Kain’s empire, but as soon as he stepped inside the round antechamber, he knew that this was much more than a simple crypt. The entire outer chamber was lined with gold trim and decorated excessively with complex engravings. Turel realized that whoever was entombed here was not some simple commoner. In the middle of the room, over fifteen feet in height, was a wide slab of black marble in contrast to the white marble elsewhere.

Turel walked up to it, his hooves clicking loudly on the marble.

Several decades before, he had woken up from a week-long slumber to find his legs grotesquely warped. Now they looked like the legs of an animal like a goat, with his knee facing backward and his feet replaced with large black hooves. Now, his lower body was covered in coarse brown fur, but he suspected that it would not stop there. Even with this disfigurement, he considered himself infinitely more lucky that Zephon and Melchiah, who didn't even look humanoid anymore.

Finely-written calligraphy covered the monolith, and Turel began to read the complicated inscriptions. Almost immediately, he almost staggered backward in surprise.

The Sarafan! Entombed here were the Sarafan Priests! An ancient order of knights, long before even Kain was born, who engaged in one of the most destructive vampire genocides in Nosgoth’s dark history. They had supposedly been obsessed with ideas of moral purity and virtue, and all but wiped out the vampire race, thinking vampires were a plague to be eradicated. Their bodies had lain here for several millenia now, undisturbed in final rest.

Turel backed away from the monolith and almost had to laugh. If the Sarafan thought that vampires were a scourge in their own day, they should have lived to see what Nosgoth had been reduced to in this era. If vampires were a plague all those centuries ago, then Kain turned them into a full-blown epidemic, and the whole world was dying from it.

Grinning at the absurdity of it all, Turel entered the long hallway into the center of the tomb, where the bodies of the Sarafan Priests lay. He wondered how their crypt could have remained untouched for so long. Incredibly, it lay only a few miles from the Sanctuary of the Clans. Did Kain know it was here? He had been around for centuries, so he must have known. But why would he leave it undisturbed? The Sarafan represented a pathological hatred of vampires that even modern humans would be hard-pressed to match. Hundreds, even thousands, of vampires were killed by the Sarafan in those ancient times. If Turel had been in Kain’s position, he would have demolished the tomb and defiled the interred bodies long before now.

As soon as Turel pushed open the heavy stone door to the central chamber, he knew something was wrong. Right in the center of the room, one of the casket lids was flipped upside down.

Ancient grave robbers? Turel thought.

He took another step into the room and realized with slow disbelief that all of the tombs were broken open. The engraved sarcophagi were tipped over, their lids knocked to the floor. There was a sense of profound coldness in the room, but it was not the coldness of death. It was something else, something colder. Turel felt himself shiver involuntarily.

The bodies of the Sarafan were not here. The caskets were empty, the tomb completely stripped. With a foreboding sense of horror, Turel’s gaze drifted to the names inscribed above each of the empty stone coffins, the names of the sacred Sarafan Priests.

Dumah. Melchiah. Rahab. Zephon. Raziel.

Turel.

*****

As rain poured down continually, as if there was a constant, unrepairable leak in the heavens, Rahab surveyed the abandoned human metropolis, now mostly submerged under water. He had sought out such a place to perform his experiments, which he hoped would give him the key to unlocking the secrets of their evolution. His brethren followed him there unquestioningly, but with noticeable hesitation. They may not have spoken such doubts out loud, but Rahab knew what they were.

Why come to this place? Why make their new home in such an inhospitable location? Water was one of their race's few natural weaknesses, so what would possess their Lord to move them to a place full of it?

In Rahab’s mind, that was the perfect reason to move there. If he was going to manipulate their evolution to make them more powerful, what better way to do so then to erase their weakness to flowing water?

Now, standing in the pouring rain, Rahab closed his eyes and sighed pleasantly, letting the water drench over him, soaking into his cloak, but not touching him through the layers of clothing. Even a vampire as strong as Rahab was not immune to water; rain would not kill him, certainly, but it was not a pleasant experience. Despite this, it felt good, it felt calming. For the first time in his life as a vampire, he almost understood what it was like to enjoy a simple pleasure. Momentarily, he felt what it must have been like to be a human.

“My Lord?” came a voice behind him.

He turned to see one of his brethren, a vampire named Valen, standing in the broken doorway leading to the balcony Rahab was standing on. He stepped out into the rain and cast an sour look into the gray sky, his wide hood protecting his face from the falling rain.

“My Lord,” he said again, “The others and I are rather confused. About coming here, I mean.”

Rahab smiled and gazed back out into the half-drowned city. “Finally voicing your concerns?”

“Well,” Valen said uncomfortably, “things have been so strange lately.”

“They’ve been strange much longer than that,” Rahab said. “For centuries now.”

“The changes in your brothers. Your falling out with Lord Dumah. Our movement here.” Valen took a deep breath, readying himself, and spoke in a hushed tone, as if afraid of someone overhearing. “I did not want to bring this up before, but just what has been going on?”

“Time has been going on,” Rahab said cryptically. “Only time, Valen. The course of nature.”

“But my Lord,” Valen said, sounding pained. “What does it have to do with us?”

“It has everything to do with us. Because unlike my brothers, who are content to be victimized by it, we are going to take advantage of it.”

Valen, understandably, was confused. Rahab looked at his bewildered face and could not resist laughing. He put his arm around Valen’s shoulder and led him back into the building.

“We all evolve over time,” Rahab said, leading Valen down the arched hallway. “These changes are what separates us from the humans. We are continually becoming stronger and more advanced, while the humans do not. It's the reason our race is the superior one.”

Valen nodded, giving Rahab a sideways glance. “I know all this, my Lord. I still fail to see what it has to do with moving our entire clan to this deserted human city that’s half submerged under water.”

“I’m getting to that. You mentioned before how my brothers are changing. What do you think of their evolution?”

“Honestly, my Lord?”

“Yes, honestly.”

Valen looked straight ahead. “I’m glad that I am not in Lord Zephon’s clan. Their appearance horrifies me.”

“It horrifies me too, Valen,” Rahab said, turning a corner. Part of the wall was caved in, with rubble scattered across the floor. Rahab and Valen walked around it, stepping across a wide puddle from the rain making its way inside. “The same with my brother Melchiah. Even Dumah and Turel are gradually changing, but their new forms are less hideous. And yet, our clan has not changed at all, have we?”

“No, Lord.”

“Do you have any theories as to why that is?”

“No,” Valen repeated. And then, after a pause, “But I am glad that it is so.”

Rahab smiled. Such naive honesty was the reason he’d chosen to give this little speech to Valen and not some of his other kin, who might be tempted to conceal their true emotions. Valen was sincere to a fault, which was simultaneously his greatest virtue and his greatest weakness. Rahab did not exactly respect him for it, but he did not hold such unerring honesty against him. Honesty was a rare trait in vampires.

“I have theories, but I won’t share them all with you right now,” Rahab said. “The point I want to make is that we are going to evolve eventually. It is unavoidable. All we can do is try to make that evolution work for us instead of against us. We have the power to manipulate that natural state of change, but only if we take advantage of it.”

“Have the other Lords done this?”

“Dumah has, but not intentionally. His size and strength have increased over time because of his confidence. He believes himself to be the biggest and strongest, and so his evolution guided him in that direction, because he feels that way so strongly. He thinks he's invincible, and I wonder if someday he might be.”

“And what of your other brothers, my Lord?” Valen asked.

“It's affected them too, but negatively, because they didn't use it to their advantage. Take Melchiah, for example. He's always been full of self-loathing, and look what he's turned into. Our evolution reflects our self-image, I'm sure of it.”

Valen stopped and looked out through one of the large stained-glass windows that lined the hall, somehow unbroken despite long years of neglect. Outside, water lapped against the side of the building as rain poured down.

“That is why we’ve come here?” he asked finally. “So we can change the course of our own evolution?”

“Yes,” Rahab said with deliberate forcefulness. He could see the look in Valen’s eye. He knew where this was going. “I’m going to make us immune to the water, Valen. I’m going to turn a weakness into a strength.”

“But how?”

“By performing experiments, by testing our ability to withstand it. If we keep ourselves exposed to the water, and if we believe that we can someday conquer it, then someday we will. It will be like building up an immunity over time.”

“Do you truly think we can do it?”

“I know we can.”

Valen thought about it momentarily, then shook his head and turned away. “I don’t know about this, my Lord. It all seems so fantastic. I can almost see how it could be possible, with what has happened to Lord Dumah and Lord Melchiah, but do you really think we could achieve it intentionally? How long would it take?”

“As long as it takes,” Rahab said with an indifferent shrug. “As long as it has to.”

“But why, my Lord? I mean, if we could truly alter our evolution by will alone, then we already would have. The changes in your brothers have only taken place in the past few centuries. If what you say is true, then we would have already evolved to higher forms.”

Rahab put his hand on Valen’s shoulder again and started walking down the corridor. “You’ll have to trust me, Valen. It may sound incredible at first, but I’m convinced that we'll succeed. It may take a hundred years, but I'm going to make us immune to water.”

“I trust you, my Lord,” Valen said, perhaps a little too quickly. “I’ve always trusted you.”

A section of the hallway had broken away, leaving a twenty-foot gap. Below them, water churned and splashed, as if fighting to get inside. Rahab leaned over the edge and looked down into the turbulent water below. Valen did so as well, pulling his hood tighter to block out the oncoming rain.

“You’ll help me, won’t you, Valen?” Rahab asked.

“I'll help you if I can, my Lord,” Valen replied. “But I admit,” he added a little guiltily, “that I'm skeptical.”

“I know you are, but that’s not a problem. You can still help me.”

“If what you say is true, my Lord, then we all must be convinced that we can overcome our weakness to water. But I just don’t think it’s possible. How can I help you if I don’t believe it will work?”

Rahab put his hand on Valen’s shoulder as if to pat it reassuringly. Instead, he braced himself and pushed forward, knocking Valen off the ledge and into the swirling maelstrom below.

*****

Turel found himself on his knees. The horrifying realization of his origins struck him like a blow, knocking the wind from him. He set his hand on the floor to hold himself steady, gazing back up at the names inscribed above the seven tombs surrounding him.

They were Sarafan! He and his brothers had been resurrected from the dead bodies of the most fanatical vampire hunters in the history of Nosgoth. Kain used the corpses of his greatest enemies to house the resurrected souls of his most loyal soldiers. Now, finally, Turel saw the reason there was nothing in the historical record about the creation of Kain’s lieutenants. Kain would have made sure that the secret remained hidden from those it affected most.

Turel stared at the empty sarcophagi. And to think, he had searched for this answer for centuries, and now that he had it, he wished that he had never begun searching. It was as if fate had played a hideous practical joke on him; the harder he looked for the truth, the more shocking the truth was destined to be.

Sarafan Priests! Just the thought burned Turel to the core. When he was human, he dedicated his life to the extinction of the vampire race, and now as a vampire, he helped almost exterminate the humans. His entire existence became one giant paradox. And not just him, all his brothers as well. They had all been Sarafan, and Kain turned them into their own worst enemy.

After a time, Turel stood. He wondered how his brothers would react to the news that their bodies once housed the opposite of everything they ever believed. Surely, none of them would ever find this tomb on their own; Melchiah and Zephon could no longer even leave their homes, and Dumah and Rahab were not the kind to delve into the past. Should he even bother telling them? What possible purpose would it serve?

One of the sarcophagi was not defiled, he noticed. It belonged to Malek, the leader of the ancient Sarafan. According to the stories Kain told, which Turel had no real reason to believe were true, Malek was killed when the great vampire Vorador murdered six of the Circle of Nine, long before Kain’s birth. Mortanius, the Guardian of Death, who later resurrected Kain himself, brought Malek back to life as an undead servant, and he was later destroyed by Vorador once again, centuries later, when Kain was on his mission to murder the corrupted Guardians. Turel guessed that the reason Malek was not resurrected as a vampire was that there was not enough left of his physical body to make it possible; Kain once described the undead Malek as nothing more than bones and armor held together by powerful dark magic.

Turel approached his own sarcophagus and looked inside. It was lined with dust and grime after a millennium of neglect. Standing there, over the place where his body should have been eternally laid to rest, Turel could not help but imagine what his life must have been like. Thousands of years ago, long before Kain’s refusal to sacrifice himself doomed Nosgoth to ruin, the land was still pure and unpoisoned. Sarafan priests were like Kings, worshipped like living deities, dedicating their life to eradicating what they saw as a mortal threat. In the Vampire Purges, thousands of vampires were killed, most of them rather brutally. Impaled with staves and crucified, hung up to be incinerated by the sun.

None of this was embellishment by Kain. Most of what Turel knew about the Vampire Purges was from historical texts written by human historians, in order to record for posterity the holy crusade of the Sarafan. Even written from their own perspective, Turel saw the Purges as utterly reprehensible and morally corrupt. The Sarafan, as far as he was concerned, were nothing more than a force of fanatical murderers and demented psychotics who wanted to control the populace by exaggerating the vampire threat, and using it as an excuse to butcher innocents.

Turel looked at his hands. Since his resurrection as a vampire, were they any more bloody than they had been when he was human? He had killed others, of course. Being a vampire made it a necessity, after all. But he had to admit that he had also killed for fun on occasion. But as a Sarafan, he must have killed on a daily basis, reveling in each death, believing each dead vampire was some kind of moral victory. He must have wanted death, desired blood on his hands.

Turel, in his vampire unlife, accepted death as a necessary part of his existence. He had to kill to survive. But he never had anything against the humans, he had no desire to see them exterminated or needlessly slaughtered. He never joined in Dumah’s pointless attacks on the human citadel, for example. He was the enemy of humanity not by choice, but by need.

He didn’t hate humans. He could accept a world where vampires and humans could live peacefully together, even though he could also accept a world in which that was not the case.

He turned on his heel and walked out of the tomb. Knowledge of his origins did not bother him anymore, now that he had thought about it. Which is worse: killing because you have to, or killing because you want to? Turel decided he would rather be a vampire with a sense of morals than a human without one.

Maybe Kain had done them all a favor after all.

*****

Kain had nothing to do but wait. Ever since he had taken over Moebius’ Time Chamber over a millennium before, Kain had realized that his life, and the lives of everyone who ever lived, was nothing more than a drawn-out waiting game. Despite his best intentions, and despite the opinions of the millions of individuals his actions had affected during his existence, Kain never really changed anything. His resurrection as a vampire, his refusal of the sacrifice, his creation of the Empire; none of these things changed the world in the way many people thought they did.

History could not be changed, it could only be experienced. The future was spread out in front of him like a map, and all he could do was follow the predetermined path laid out for him. He was like a puppet with the strings of Fate moving him around, making “choices” that seemed to affect all of Nosgoth. But long before he was born into the world, the course of his human life and vampire unlife had already been set in stone by hands unseen. Kain never chose to refuse the sacrifice, the unalterable whims of history and fate forced him to. He never had a choice to begin with.

Kain stared into the swirling void of the Time Window, watching in perverse fascination as snippets of the past and tantalizing hints of the future flashed before his eyes. He had done it a thousand times, stared penetratingly into the mists of time, discovering the secrets of the past, and learning the course of events for centuries to come. At first, it was frightening, and painful, to know that every choice he’d ever made had been predetermined, but by now he accepted it with cold resolve.

Even a prisoner trapped in a dungeon has a small spark of hope, a longing belief that someday he can escape his imprisonment, if he could just arrange the right set of circumstances. Kain, in his own sort of imprisonment, had the same idea. All he had to do was arrange the right situation and nudge things in a different direction to achieve the desired outcome.

But time is relentless, and only a major alteration to the set course of events could truly change the future. It was not enough to make little adjustments here and there, hoping that they would add up to something important. Kain scanned the Time Window for that one moment when the future was truly made. He was looking for a fulcrum, a temporal axis, a point at which events could transpire in two different directions. If he could provide pressure at the crucial moment, he could truly change history

Free will was an illusion for all but a very select few. As far as Kain knew, the only two people for whom Free Will might conceivably exist were the Time Streamer Moebius and Kain himself, since they had knowledge of the future. And even then, the vast majority of their decisions were not really decisions at all. Even Moebius himself was a slave to fate in the end. He had predicted his own murder years before it occurred at Kain’s hands.

Like Moebius, Kain knew when his death would occur. It was actually scheduled to happen many centuries in the past, but whereas Moebius’ death had been unavoidable due to the circumstances surrounding it, Kain’s death just happened to occur at one of the fulcrums of history he was searching for.

He reached out, as if trying to touch the visions displayed across the Time Window. He smiled slightly as the scene dissolved.

It was almost as if fate was finally giving Kain the ability to really choose the direction of his destiny. The scene was already preordained, so all Kain had to do was follow the path until he came to the intersection he desired, and go one way instead of the other. It would not be exactly that easy, but Kain knew it was possible.

All he had to do was wait.

*****

Rahab’s dreams were murky and fractured. Faint images of floating through an endless void, flailing his arms and legs to no effect, feeling a constant sense of pressure all around him. His eyes opened wide as he awoke, and he found himself once more in his laboratory, almost completely submerged in a pool of stagnant, foul-smelling water.

He wore a special outfit made from thick animal skins and coated with a layer of fat. It was completely waterproof, and he would stay for hours in the pool of water, trying to accustom himself to the feeling of water all around him. Without the suit, of course, he would incinerate himself, but he slowly was getting used to the constant wetness around him.

He climbed from the tub and stripped off the suit, letting it flop to the floor. Almost twenty years had gone by since he had moved his clan to this water-logged abbey, and the water was still deadly to his vampire brethren. But Rahab knew that they were making progress, however slow.

He walked to the window and pressed his hand against the glass, looking out at the endless monsoon that wracked the area. When he pulled his hand away, it left a sticky residue on the glass. For some time now, Rahab had noticed his skin was constantly covered in the greasy substance, which bathing could not rid him of. He took it as a sign that his efforts were working, that his body was changing. The grease was the first step toward an immunity to water, he was sure of it. And slowly but surely, his kin were beginning to believe it as well.

Rahab walked down the damp hallway to an open balcony continually washed by rain. The building sloped sideways, so the water ran off the edge of the balcony instead of flooding the hall, and Rahab could stand safely within feet of the downpour without risking himself.

He watched the rain for a few minutes and felt an overwhelming desire to jump out into it and soak his body in the falling water. Each day the temptation was a little stronger. Hesitantly, he reached out and exposed the back of his hand to the rain. Several drops fell onto it, and Rahab quickly retracted it, wincing in pain.

His hand smoldered for a moment or two, leaving several small burns where the water had touched. Perhaps it was just his imagination, but Rahab felt that the pain was less severe than it had been in the past. The water didn’t burn him quite as deeply, quite as harshly. The grease covering his skin seemed to be forming a protective barrier.

Once the metamorphosis was complete, when the Rahabim could immerse themselves in water with no ill effects, their clan would soon become the dominant clan in Nosgoth. Rahab could see a time in the near future when his brethren, and his brethren alone, ruled the world. The other vampire clans could not challenge his clan when they had such an advantage. In the water, they would be unassailable. They would be invincible in their new element.

They could build dams across rivers to flood other areas of Nosgoth, forcing the other clans to higher ground. They could use water as their weapon, and build pumps and hoses to spray water at anyone foolish enough to get in their way. Rahab imagined complicated scenarios where his clan’s immunity became their primary strength.

He clenched his teeth against the pain and stuck his hand once more into the rain. One day, his work would all come to fruition. Someday, the Rahabim would dominate the water, and then nothing could get in their way.

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