The Legacy of Raziel!

Okay, where were we?

Right, the human guardians!

As I mentioned before, there needed to be one additional guardian of all the pillars as well as the Blood Reaver; Janos Audron. Because both the pillars and the Reaver were made by the vampires, this guardian needed to be a vampire. The relevance of this will be explained later.

As the years went by, the humans hunted the vampires, believing them to be demonic beings the sole purpose of which was to terrorize the humans. By the time of the events of Blood Omen, the first game in the series, the vampires were nearly extinct, Vorador being the last, at the hands of a fanatic order of vampire-hunters called the Sarafan.

Some 500 years before Blood Omen, six members of the Circle of Nine were slaughtered by Vorador in response to the Sarafan killing Janos, thinking wrongly it would put an end to all vampires.

Later on, the Hylden managed to corrupt the guardian of Death, Mortanius The Necromancer, and got him to murder the balance guardian, Ariel. Ariel's lover, Nupraptor the Mentalist, was driven to madness by this, and spread his madness to the rest of the members of the Circle, including the newly born balance guardian; Kain.

When he was a young nobleman, Kain was murdered in his hometown. This allowed Mortanius to "help" him by resurrecting him as a vampire. Unaware of it at the time, it was the heart of Janos Audron that Mortanius used to do it.

Kain was then sent on a mission to slay all of the corrupted guardians and recover items of importance from them to use to cleanse the pillars of the corruption. Eventually he found the Blood Reaver, the same sacred weapon forged by Vorador.

During this quest, he came upon the evil conqueror called the Nemesis, who was rapidly spreading from northern Nosgoth. Enlisting the gentle king Ottmar of Willendorf, he tried to stop the Nemesis. They failed utterly, and in the slaughter on Ottmar's forces in the great battle, Kain found the Hourglass of Time, belonging to Moebius the Timestreamer, the guardian of the Pillar of Time.

The hourglass took him back in time, to when the Nemesis was simply a good king known as William the Just. In order to prevent the Nemesis from ever existing, he fought and killed William, who just so happens also carried the Reaver. The paradox created by the two Reavers meeting changed history, so that the Nemesis never existed.

However, when Kain returned to the present, he arrived at the execution of Vorador, carried out by a mob lead by Moebius, who had manipulated Kain all along to get him to kill William, so that Moebius could make him out to be a martyr to motivate people to murder any vampires that remained.

With this act, Kain was left as the last of his kind, making him the guardian of the Reaver, as well as the Balance guardian.

After slaying Moebius, he came back to the Pillars, just as Mortanius the Necromancer killed Anarcrothe the Alchemist. After Mortanius was killed, the Unspoken, a demonic agent of the Hylden, attacked, and was also slain.

This left Kain with a choice; to sacrifice his own life to restore the Pillar of Balance, or refuse, damning the Pillars to eternal decay. If he decided to give up his own life, that would be the ultimate end of the vampire race.

He refused, and went on to build a great empire that spanned all of Nosgoth.

You think all of this is confusing? You have no idea!

Tomorrow, it'll get seriously weird!