URBAN NOSGOTHIC

Legacy of Kain created by Eidos Interactive, Crystal Dynamics, Silicon Knights.

I don't know where this is going, so bear with me. Darker than normal. Should I continue? Seriously, if this is no good, I won't take it anywhere.

Cruelty isn't something exclusive to humanity, you know.

It was there before humanity knew what to do with that sharp piece of flint: it was there before furred beasts were even born.

When life first crawled on this earth, that was when cruelty began. When the first creeping thing saw the second, smaller creeping thing; decided it didn't like the way the second creeping thing was looking at it, and decided to stand on the second creeping thing's insert likely appendage here - that was where cruelty was born.

Seems a little odd to me that, millions of years on, we haven't developed this crucial skill into a fine art. Even with the most carefully planned tortures, the most advanced acids and tweezers, there's something so fundamentally blunt about cruelty. Even modern cruelty has no real finesse.

When it comes to it, it's still all down to standing on the little guy's likely appendage.

Raziel was, for once in his long life, the little guy. Kain was the bigger wolf in the pack, the heavy metal in the mix. Raziel loved him, served him faithfully.

Died for him. Again.

"Are you still playing that game?"

Pause.

"No. Yes. I'm sorry. I'll turn it off."

How could I have ever explained it to him? That I knew what Raziel was going through? That the little blue guy's obsession with vengeance for past wrongs was also mine?

My boyfriend comes back into the living room and plunks down on the sofa, beer can in hand. He peers at Raziel's angular, PS1 form, frozen in the middle of a vicious attack on an early Dumahim vampire. "You played this game already," he says. "Is this what you do all day?"

I don' t answer. Stay safe. Stay quiet. My body is already tensing at the suspicion in his voice. I am getting ready to run, to cower. What was I thinking, playing while he was in the house? It's not as if I enjoy spending two hours every morning trying to cover up the bruises with cheap foundation and pressed powder.

The pause lasts long enough. Safe. I breathe quickly. He turns the playstation off and pokes me in the arm - oh yes - hard enough to leave a bruise. "I'll start thinking you'll fancy him," he says, chucking the game box across the room and flicking to Baywatch.

Again, I say nothing. What should I say? That I'd rather date a jawless, emaciated demon than date him? That Raziel, vampire or not, scares me less than he does?

My boyfriend grins at me. "Run out to the service station and get me some cigarettes, won't you?" he says. "You got some money, right babe? you were paid today?"

"Yep," I say, quickly. I don't smoke. Smoke gives me asthma. He knows this.

You see, my problem is that I always fell for bad boys. Dangerous men, who had power and weren't afraid to use it. Loving him. Serving him faithfully...

He throws the car keys at me and nearly catches me in the forehead.

Another little thing about cruelty, my friends. Cruelty begins at home.

Every time I walk out of that house I think about never coming back. But do you know what brings me back? Raziel.

I'm a little like him, I guess. He wants his life back the way it was, before someone he trusted, maybe even loved, a little, hurt him in a way he could never have imagined. And as much as he wants to leave, to return to death or even to return to a new life, he is tied to Kain by his desire to right that wrong, avenge himself. I'm tied down by that, too. I guess I once had wings, as well, though like his they're broken now. I still get hypnotised by that moment in the game intro where Raziel, feeling the touch of Kain's hand on his brand-new, dragon's wings, scowls and brings one wing up slightly, as if repulsed by the intimacy and trying to pull away.

I get the cigarettes and come back home to my very own Kain. He's drunker now than when he came home an hour or so ago, and he's playing Tekken, which is never a good sign.

"Piece of shit!"

He hurls the controller away from him. It breaks. It was the last one we had, the previous two having suffered much the same fate. I feel a stab of loss and misery - no more escape to Nosgoth for me - and then he turns on me, as I knew he would. I throw the packet of cigarettes at him, a pointless defensive act, and back up against the wall as he stumbles toward me.

Dear God. This time, he has a knife. It gleams a little along one edge. Wicked sharp, as my best mate Carrie would have said. "Bitch..." he slurs, swiping with it. I bring up my arm, futilely, as Raziel would have arched his wing against Kain's invasive touch -

The blade makes an odd, ringing noise as it glances off something hard. My vision is suddenly full of dark blues, greens and browns - I gag as something that feels and smells like a flap of mummified skin slaps me in the face.

He's finally done it. Hit me so hard he's knocked all my brains out of my head.

Because really, what else could explain the fact that Raziel is standing here, in my living room, all over-six-foot of him, with one set of talons flung forward to block my boyfriend's knife?