Chapter Text
“I have been to the Tomb of the Sarafan, Kain. Your dirty secret is exposed. How could you transform a Sarafan priest into a vampire?”
“How could I not? One must keep his friends close, Raziel, and his enemies even closer. Can you grasp the absurd beauty of the paradox? We're the same, Sarafan and vampire, with our holy wars, our obsession with Nosgoth's domination. Who better to serve me than those whose passion transcends all notions of good and evil?”
Kain boasted for a millennium about the Rising. In his testimony he rescued his six sons from the darkness of death in one night, they rose with their full faculties, pledged their loyalty and began marching off to conquer Nosgoth straight away. In Kain’s vain telling there was no hesitation, no doubt, only his irresistible will, triumphant over death itself, and his lieutenants were powerful and victorious.
It does not serve the legacy of Kain to tell the true story of the Rising.
But neither does your author.
In the true telling, it took several nights to bring the six dead Sarafan back as his vampire lords and Kain lost consciousness more than once. It was a lonely, exhausting, and complicated ritual that involved much more than the usual mechanics of vampire siring. The Sarafan lords had been dead for a long time. Of course it took blood, a lot of blood, but it also took necromancy, the tricky task of reaching into the underworld, of finding and plucking a particular soul out of oblivion, and it took the breath of Kain’s own soul, a piece of it irretrievably donated to each body.
The souls of the Sarafan knights were at rest, peacefully, blissfully dead before Kain summoned them back against their wills. They were roused rudely from their slumber, forced back into bodies that had been artificially preserved, but dead for centuries. It was not a pleasant reentry to the world for any of them and none of them consented to it.
Once reanimated, his newborn sons were anything but powerful and fearsome. They awoke clumsy and confused, speechless and scared. None of them seemed to remember their former lives. It took hours before they regained lucidity.
In truth, Kain had not even been certain it would work or that he could manage it on his own. But he had to try. How could he not?