Author's Notes: What the hell? THIS old thing? Out of the darkness of time, I update my LoK fanfiction...because I miss Raziel and my old nerdy dumb self. I resurrected this out of sheer boredom... and I'm currently entertaining more crossover fun. Not that it hasn't been done yet. I don't dare undertake more fanfics. I can't really handle the burden of balancing the ones I've got going now!
Can and Can't
Raziel had depleted every soul that could haunt the woods surrounding the lair they shared with Darius. When Raziel told Amanda this, he looked a horror - the magic that kept him looking prim and proper only worked as long as he had souls to power it. Amanda nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw him enter her little room without flesh, his tattered wings dangling and his muscled form completely devoid of skin.
The corpse who bore the name Raziel seemed embarassed, but he said (managing speech in a way Amanda couldn't really understand yet), "As you can see, I am feeling a bit peckish for souls. I've eaten all the ones I can find. Time is running out."
Amanda panicked. She stormed around the room in a raging fit, furious with herself for not working fast enough, being good enough. Raziel, not really afraid but staying out of her way more as a state of preserving what was left of his body from her rage, hid roosting on top of a large stone outcropping. Finally he jumped down and grabbed her with his talons, diffusing her wrath in an instant.
"You put me in a state of regret," he said darkly. "Do not make me regret letting you live by acting like a child. Put your head on straight, girl!"
Amanda cowered slightly. His eyes were pouring out that same ethereal smoke she had found alluring, but now she avoided his gaze as if she were the one to be embarassed. Terror struck into her heart. Not because Raziel scared her, but the fact that he was angry with her made her anxious. She hated her temper, and more than anything wished she could control it and always be calm and collected--
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, "I don't work all that well under pressure, y'know?" Detangling herself from his claws which left white tracks on her arms, she pored over some old text. She seemed to sense more than see Raziel fold his arms over his exposed ribcage.
In a few minutes, she expelled a glad little cry and thrust a book at him open to a page. "This. I don't know, but... I think I can replenish the souls. I'm pretty sure I can draw spirits from other areas to this one so you don't have to go far. It may take some doing, though."
"Do whatever it takes. If you fail... I'll be stuck in the Spectral Realm--"
"I know, I know," Amanda interrupted, waving away his worries.
Raziel frowned with the muscles of his eyes, then turned away to let her work and to find a place to brood. As he moved, his body became less and less capable of doing the necessary movements, so he sheltered himself on the leather sofa with his arms around his knees, nearly invisible except for the quietly brewing gleam of his drooping eyes.
An hour or so later, the human girl scurried outside with a bundle of sticks, incense, candles, and a live rabbit kicking to be free from her grasp. She seemed all too reluctant to use a living sacrifice, but she needed to do this for Raziel. She steeled her will, muttering to herself, the chanting beginning to feel weighted with true power. The rabbit had been caught for such a purpose as deemed by Amanda, imploring Darius for animals. The vampire had sneered that he condemned the task of capturing live prey, but with a single glare from Raziel it had been done.
Raziel had crept out with her, crouching like an animal at a safe distance. The woods seemed to expectant, swelling with unimaginable energies. Raziel began to feel inklings of excitement stirring in his spiritual form, as magic akin to his own reckoned with the souls far and wide. As the spell moved to its peak stages, Raziel felt a jarring pull at his own bindings. Amanda cried out and lifted her arms. Though unseen to most eyes, a swarm of spirits of the lingering dead filled the sky above, all of them screaming with indignation, fear, or worse yet - wrath.
They scattered, but none wandered too far. The spell set up a sort of magnetic vortex that drew souls to it, with the exception of Raziel's. Thus the souls moved in a spiral, a wheel, like a small galaxy.
Amanda fell onto her side. Raziel, snapping up a soul along the way, pounced toward her. The spiritual energy of a single soul filled out his form, but it was almost more horrible with organs and things laying inside a string web of flesh.
"Is that... enough?" she gasped, her skin so pale it looked as white as the pages of her new books. Raziel sighed over her drain of energy and lifted her as he would lift a doll, cradling her head and moving her within the confines of their cave.
"It will serve," he said gently, laying her to sleep. He raked his talons through his hair, and noticed that he was, once again, disheveled and unclothed.
In the wardrobe shared with the girl, he dug out clothes and pulled them on. At Amanda's insistence, even if he was most comfortable and not at all ashamed to be running about in his "birthday suit", as she haply nicknamed nudity, he was to be dressed at all times. Also, he discovered he could manifest himself in his full, terrifying soul reaving form at will... but that somehow didn't please him as much as it used to.
He prowled the forest in the reaver shape, terrifying animals into hiding and devouring one or two souls. The trees were teeming with living spirits. He almost felt sorry for them. However they may have died, none of the spirits that ever lingered stayed because they wanted to. They died mostly painful deaths. But sometimes spirits lingered because of someone they loved, deeply and desperately enough to wish to remain from the purifying cycle. That wish was powerful enough to move worlds.
Raziel contemplated those souls. They were quiet and said not a word to him, but they watched him sometimes just as intensely.
"What do you think about?" he asked aloud. Suddenly, he recieved an answer:
"The wind."
A spirit moved around from his left, and he nearly jumped when he heard the voice. He often heard the dead's cries. But this voice was small and like a child, but the form was female and fully-grown.
"It is all the things the air is. And I can't feel the air anymore."
"How very odd," Raziel noted dryly. "I can't feel the air either. Nor can I taste food, drink water, or touch another's skin. All that I can feel now is the hunger for the vast bodies I call souls."
The spirit hugged herself and smiled. It was strange to see a ghost smile, with no eyes but glowing spheres to show mirth. "But spirits such as we... are made of the emotions that floated us from our graves. We can feel many things most living mortals cannot anymore. They feel no closer to themselves than they are to the center of the earth."
"Nothing elevates me. Not much incites me to live but revenge..." The three-clawed talon of his left hand began to close into a tight fist, that could smash a man's skull like a hammer to a pumpkin.
"But you're with that girl. I saw the way you picked her up and brought her inside. You can't tell me you didn't feel anything then."
"I--" Indignant, Raziel stood up and left the tree he was sitting beneath. He could have devoured that ghost and ceased the inane babbling. Surely the thing was mad. No, no, best forget about it.
The young witch's pink hand was dangling from the edge of the sofa, her arm draped around another pillow. An empty plate of something called "rah-men" sat on the floor. One last noodle was draped over the edge of the bowl. The flavored powder left a thick smell in the air that was dizzying. Amanda's eyes were closed and her breathing deep and even. Usually a good meal and sleep was enough to revive her. He was silent as he picked up the bowl and returned it to the sink, and crept back to find her still resting.
The Soul Reaver crouched by her side, mindful that he did not touch her at all. But her hair seemed out of place... or rather, did not look comfortable as it was. He extended his arm, each sinuous muscle flexing and moving. He was still a perfect machine of murder, the Angel of Death, and nothing he could do could change that irrevokable truth to a happy, managable fiction. The tips of his talons were lethal sharp, but he sifted them through her cropped locks gently, embracing his own dangerous thoughts with steel-trap silence.
At the first stirring of her eyelids, he abandoned his physical body in a panic and dashed to the portal. No. No, he sternly disregarded that feeling. If he had a heart, it would have been pounding as he reclaimed his physical form in an alcove by the entrance.
Trembling, he placed his claws on the wall and bowed his head. No more, he begged someone, anyone, silently - the first time to beg for anything in his unlife. I cannot bear this, please!
No one answered.