Chapter Text
I come back to these memories from a safe and comfortable place, for it is only now that I am capable of stringing them together in any kind of order. For a time, I was the Soul Reaver. I could not discern time from within the blade, and I had lost all concept of myself other than the faintest sense of hunger and the alleviation of it afterwards. I knew, in a way, that I was a tool to be wielded, and that I belonged within the hand that fed me with the souls of those it vanquished. I existed, comfortably, in that oblivion for time immeasurable.
And then suddenly, my shell was cracked open wide. I suddenly had form, and in that form, I knew agony. I felt as my body regrew from the nothingness where I had dwelt, bones and viscera knitting together from a thousand other bodies scattered across the planes of existence. I was aware, within and outside of myself, of disparate memories battling for dominance of the limited vault of my conscious mind. I knew the instant I had lungs to fill with air, and a mouth with which to release it all to the heavens in ear-splitting screams. That split second of eternity, that timeless instant, signaled the end of the Soul Reaver as it had ever been and would ever be. The coin had spun and landed on its edge, and I emerged from it as I had been before.
I, again, was Raziel.
I understood little at the moment of my rebirth. I opened my eyes and found myself surrounded by the ruins of the Pillars of Nosgoth, and in the corners of my vision I saw familiar forms that might have been Kain, might have been Vorador, might have been Janos Audron- might have been any of them or none of them, for I was too overwhelmed by the burn of the sun against my bare back to investigate. Everything that touched me, or that I touched, was a new kind of pain against my skin, of which something was inexplicably wrong but in ways I could not describe. All of it, overwhelming and unstopping, flooded my senses, and in my panic, I pulled myself inward into the Spirit Realm.
The shift to that weightless plane soothed my senses for a moment, but only in the way a blanket smothers a fire. Without the pressures of imaginary eyes on me, I could recover myself at my own pace. It still equated to little more than cowering in an alcove and gasping for breath until my heart stopped racing.
And oh, what horror dawned on me as I gathered my thoughts. I had skin. I had a heart. I had a mouth. I scrambled and roamed the spirit realm in desperate search for anything reflective before I remembered that nothing so existed here. I was left only to piece together what my body had become through what I could see, and what I could touch with my own talons. My body had restored, but not fully to its state before my fall into the abyss. My arms and legs, still leather-wrapped and still noticeably blue, were whole. My torso had filled back in, and while I could feel a steady heartbeat and the heaving of my chest in breath, I discovered to my horror that I remained emasculated. Why I lacked these parts of me seemed baffling, as I could feel the curve of my jaw and chin through my cloak and the pinprick of my fangs against my tongue. It occurred to me, in a fit of cruel irony, that perhaps my manhood had simply been exchanged, for when I put my hands to my shoulders, I felt the sharp spines of my wingtips pressing back into my palms.
My wings… What had been done to me, that they felt as full and whole against my back as when I first emerged with them all those centuries ago? I had scarcely had them an hour before Kain ripped the bones out by the roots, and now here they lie, a cruel testament. It was as if everything I had accomplished in those eons of torment, waging war against the very forces of life and death, had been for nothing.
But, as I sat in stupor, I plumbed my memories to see which turn in the path had lead me here, and found multitudes. Times of my life, human and vampire and wraith alike, all lay atop each other like so many reams of translucent paper, the lines stacked atop each other to form a haphazard picture of my past. I was familiar with this effect from the backlash of time streaming abuse, but never to this extent. Whatever had been done had been done with a wild prejudice that rendered any attempts to piece together the narrative futile. I had only the here and the now to trust: that I lay in the spirit realm, staring up at a clear godless sky, not vampire and not human, but some living amalgam of the two with all my soul-stolen powers intact… and still, faintly, resentful that I had been able to keep all of these but not the one thing that could provide me with an uncomplicated distraction.
I must have wandered in the spirit realm for hours. I would like to say I was deep in thought, contemplative of my new body and strange circumstance, but in reality… I thought nothing. I simply moved forward, regardless of the souls which drifted in and out of my periphery. I knew only the soft tap of my claws against the ground as I made my way, slowly, away from the Pillars and out of sight of those who would have searched for me. The sun made no path through the sky in the spirit realm. The stars never emerged. I simply walked, and if I met an obstacle I could not pass through, I made my way around it, until stones became trees and trees became a lake, and the lake… became a great wooden wall bearing my clan symbol.
It was here, with some effort, that I manifested back into the physical realm and swam out to that walled city on the lake. It took the last of my strength to scale that great pine barricade, increasingly aware of the deep pull in my stomach with every movement. I made no effort to hide myself as I vaulted over the summit- indeed, the humans within knew very well I had entered their city through the wall.
I slipped and fell into a henhouse.
Stunned as I was, the humans were quick to surround me on all sides, and the touch of their bare hands at first shocked me. I was not assaulted. Lifted, and assessed, yes, and stared at by this gaggle of humans who, inexplicably, born the mark of the Razielim on their clothing as naturally as if I had written it there myself. It was only a pale approximation, of course, as humans lacked the talons to write it properly. It was still enough, as they recognized the same such marking on my cloak, and in that moment, we acknowledged each other. As kindred? Or simply as familiar… I could not say.
Not that I did not try.
“How do you know my clan markings? And why do you wear them upon yourselves?”
They answered me in the gibberish language of humanity. Or perhaps they simply asked me the same question. I had spoken to humans before of course… but only centuries or further into the past, when the vampires and the humans were not so distant from each other, before Kain’s empire reduced them to cattle.
The town they walked me through was not the making of cattle. Less a city than I first assessed, the homes here were humble and small below the great wooden walls surrounding them. I was lead past the center of the homes and into a small temple, where the humans addressed an elder dressed in white robes. I watched with the faint attention of one weak and starving. I knew not what I hungered for, for it was not the ravenous bloodlust nor the parasitic thirst for souls. It was only a pressing, pedestrian hunger, one that blunted my instincts and made me weak and limp in the humans’s hands.
And from his great pulpit, the temple elder drew a heavy tome and opened it to its early pages. There, inscribed in the illuminations, was me. Cloaked, heroic, armed with the Soul Reaver, (although I did note I was taller and more endowed than my current body,) I was framed as their patron, their avenging angel against the vampire hoard, and I realized that these humans were the descendants of those I had blithely spared in the past… or future, or somewhere inbetween. The lines of history were tangled and fuzzy, but in whatever case, it was spelled out plainly in one of their holy books: I was not a monster out for their blood, but their most divine protector.
The holy one spoke to me, gesturing to the book in a manic plea for validation.
“Yes,” I admitted. “Yes, that is me. I am Raziel.”
It was as if my name was benediction, for a great surge went through the humans as I spoke it. They cheered and they tossed me into the air with a shout of my name…
“Wazzle!”
Apparently the human language wreaked havoc on fine pronunciation.
And thus, I was adopted.