MAGIC KINGDOM (A tale of Lupa & Raziel)

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit-making, harmless piece of fanfic. Raziel belongs to Crystal Dynamics, Eidos, and the all the good people who created Legacy of Kain. Not to me. Lupa, however, is my responsibility *sighs*…for my sins…

Author's note: This story takes place during the very early stages of Soul Reaver 1, long before Lupa and Raziel ever drove Vladimir's Beetle off the cliffs in the Drowned Abbey…

"Die! Die! Die! Die! Die….."

In the Sanctuary of the Clans, Raziel, Reaver of Souls, ex-vampire and revenger of the Elder God, poked his head around the corner and stared.

"Die, vampire scum!" and then a series of thunking noises.

"Uh, Lupa…" Raziel called, as loudly as he could over the noise.

"Not now! Busy!" Thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-

Raziel, sensing he was in no danger whatsoever, walked out and leant against a nearby pillar, spear in hand, watching the scene before him with an amused look on his half-face.

The wolf-girl was engaged in hitting a Dumahim fledgling on the head with the blunt end of a broken staff. The young vampire was growling in confusion and vague pain. The constant thumping was starting to give it a headache.

"Do you want any help with that?" Raziel asked after a few minutes had gone by.

"No thanks. I'm doing great."

"He – um – doesn't seem to be getting any deader, that's all. What is that you're doing, anyway? Some form of slow torture?"

"I'm smiting evil things. What's wrong with that?"

The fledgling stumbled as a particularly hard blow caught it on the collarbone.

"Nothing, nothing at all," said Raziel. "Smiting evil – great hobby – I do it all the time. It's just that my smiting tends to involve the evil actually dying."

Lupa stopped thunking long enough to take a good look at the slightly dazed vampire.

"He's getting there," she said, as the fledgling growled and shook its head, trying to steady itself.

Raziel, seeing her prepare to begin her assault with a very blunt instrument once more, intervened. A couple of blows with the spear, and the vampire was bleeding: a further swipe, and it was writhing in its death throes.

Lupa dropped her stick as Raziel drew in the fledgling's soul, and put her hands on her hips.

"What?" Raziel asked, catching the tone of her stance.

"That was my vampire! I was killing him!"

"You were giving him a mild migraine," corrected Raziel, trying to be diplomatic. "What I did just then? That was killing him."

Lupa rested her weight on one foot and sulked. "Don't see why you had to interfere, anyway," she muttered. "What do you care if it takes five minutes or five days to kill a Dumahim?"

"I may be a vampire killer," said Raziel, taking her by the shoulder with one claw and leading her away from the scene, "but I am not an advocate of excess cruelty. That vampire would have had a headache for weeks. Do you know how difficult it is to get ibuprofen in Nosgoth?"

They walked for a while aimlessly, ending up dangling their feet over the edge of the Abyss while Lupa told Raziel about her day.

"I figured it had probably been a bad day at work," said Raziel. Lupa sniffed.

"I don't have good days, Raz."

"You should let me come back with you," he said. "I'd teach them a thing or two." He held up a heavily clawed hand, and waggled the claws in turn at her. "Or three."

"I wish," said Lupa, kicking loose stones over the edge and watching them plummet into nothingness. "There are quite a few people I know who deserve to be on the business end of a pointy stick."

"So let me come with you when you go," he repeated. Lupa shook her head.

"It's a nice thought, but…nah. It would take way too much explaining."

"What's to explain? I could just pop in, terrorise them a bit, go spectral again – they'd never know I was there."

"Ohh, I think they'd know," said Lupa, dryly.

She got up and strolled along the very rim of the drop, her arms held wide for balance, wobbling from side to side for effect.

"Don't do that," said Raziel. The Abyss always gave him the creeps. Even though he knew his wings were capable of carrying him over the worse parts of the chasm, he still hated that jump, with the constant awareness of the water surging far below. It brought back bad memories.

Lupa bounced up and down on a rock outcrop looking out over towards Raziel's clan territory. The stone made an ugly, cracking sound, and Raziel winced.

"Lupa, I'm serious, stop doing that."

The wolf-girl turned on her heel, about to deliver some witty retort, but the stone beneath her crumbled beneath her and she dropped with a howl.

Raziel was at the edge in seconds, peering down into the drop, ready to make the jump if he had to: but Lupa's stubby claws were dug into the crumbling rock a few feet below, and her yellow eyes looked up at him in pure terror.

"There's a reason why I tell you not to do things, you know," said Raziel, calmly slamming his own claws into the rock face and hanging himself over the edge to reach down towards her. "Like when I told you "Don't say 'Wow, you're ugly,'" when you first meet Kain…and the time I told you not to go paddling in the Drowned Abbey…and the time when…"

"Yeah, okay, I get it," came the somewhat strained response from below, "I get the point, Mom. Now can you get on with the rescuing?"

Raziel stretched his thin arm down towards her. Lupa climbed up it like a monkey up a rope and clung, trembling, to his bony flank as he pulled himself back onto the platform, wings flaring for extra lift.

Lupa and Raziel's relationship was a complicated one: they had met several months previously when the wolf-girl had managed to stumble through one of the warp-gates while searching for a short cut to Disneyworld. Raziel had been somewhat busy at the time battling vampires, and when a hand had tapped him on the shoulder from behind he had whirled ready to strike: only to find Lupa staring at him with huge eyes and commenting, "You aren't Mickey Mouse and this sure isn't the Magic Kingdom, is it?"

She hadn't seemed to be afraid of him at all.

That was the thing that had puzzled him most. His appearance wasn't designed to inspire trust or liking in anyone. Even his vampire self, although handsome, had not been the sort of person you'd happily ask to baby-sit your children. But Lupa had trusted him immediately, if only to the extent that she wholly believed he was one of the good guys.

"You're rather a strange girl, aren't you?" had been his immediate response after the who-the-hell-are-yous and the where-did-you-come-froms had been exchanged. Lupa had shrugged, indicating with her stance her yellow wolf-eyes and her sharp ears, her long tail, and then grinned at him.

"You aren't Joe Normal yourself, are ya?" she had said.

Lupa in her turn had, once they had spent a day or so walking around Nosgoth and talking, begun to feel sorry for Raziel. She had in fact been petrified when she had first laid eyes on the snarling, emaciated blue demon with incandescent eyes and no lower jaw – but Lupa had been brought up on western movies where the good guys are instantly recognised by their strong jawlines and their white hats, and the bad guys are always dark and covered in warts or scars. The things the blue guy was fighting looked so much darker and uglier than he did, lower jaw or no.

So she had approached him, tapped him on the arm, and nearly had a heart attack when he turned, claws raised, to face her.

But when Lupa got frightened, she babbled. So she'd yammered some nonsense at him, and watched as he broke off his attack in response to her civil (if ridiculous) words.

After that, she came back to see him nearly every day. He taught her the basics of how to fight, so that she wouldn't be constantly in danger while travelling with him. She told him about the office where she worked, about her life, about her family. Eventually, after some prodding, he had returned the favour in kind.

"If your family lived in my world," she had said after hearing about Raziel's de-winging, "you'd be undergoing several years worth of therapy, do you know that?"

"I rather imagine myself and my brothers would all have been taken into care," returned Raziel, dead-pan. "But it doesn't quite work the same here."

"Do you have psychiatrists in this place?"

"Psychiatrists? I'm going to be quite certain saying no before you even tell me."

"I was just curious. How come you're not depressed? Your father ruined your life."

"I am depressed," Raziel had replied. "But us vampire-types tend towards physical solutions to our mental problems."

"Meaning…?"

"I'm going to kill him."

"Oh."

Lupa had looked at her feet for a moment. "Fair enough, then," she'd responded, cheerfully. "Can I help?"

Okay, so they haven't got in a car yet…but do you like it? *grins* Thank you to everyone who read and reviewed "Driving Miss Raziel" – U R all great!