…WHICH PASSETH UNDERSTANDING…

"And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds ..." Philippians (ch. IV, v. 7)

An odd, slightly (okay, okay. VERY) rambling piece of Kain-introspection. Hey look! The idea came out of nowhere…and it went…uh, nowhere…but never mind. This is kind of a thankyou to SeedyDeeDee and Sereda, who have made me remember how much I enjoyed writing again. I almost forgot there for a while.

I did not know what love meant until I killed it.

Killing is a part of life: killing is life. Like shadows that cannot exist without light, so life cannot exist without its partner, death – and I know all about both shadows and life. A reason and an excuse: an affirmation and a condemnation, all in one.

You cannot truly understand something until you have killed it. I wonder sometimes if the humans know this - if that is why they truly fear me and my kind. Perhaps it is not about the blood, the fact that we use them for food, the fact that we are so much faster, so much greater in strength and intellect than they: perhaps it is because they know in their animal hearts that when we kill them we understand them better than any God they care to call upon.

In their last moments their God abandons them, but I am there with them. I am there, pulled so close that I can feel the beat and brush of their lives as they fade away. In that moment I know everything about them.

Whether a human dies screaming and kicking, fighting my grip to their last ounce of strength, or whether they die in a paroxysm of terror – their attitude to their fate does not diminish my understanding of them.

Killing a vampire is no different. So I thought.

I've killed a number of pretenders to my throne over time. There are always pretenders, and traitors, and those who happen to get in the way when their sense should have told them not to. Some of them I broke carelessly, shattering them like jars: some of them I took my time over, like a sculptor with clay. In some ways vampires break easier than humans. One of Rahab's children, a female, was broken before I even laid a hand on her. She was so busy kissing the ground I walked on she didn't notice my foot on the back of her neck until it turned her vertebrae in on themselves.

For some reason, when faced with me, vampires tend not to fight. It's one of the few things that took me over thirty vampire deaths to understand.

I am their father, their God who will not abandon them, at one and the same time their greatest security and their greatest threat.

I would never have thought of myself as arrogant until one of the dead looked me in the eye and told me that I was no deity to him in tones of hatred so great that the Pillars themselves would have shuddered.

But even that only developed an understanding that began when I saw Raziel fall.

There is a strange kind of helplessness that comes with fatherhood. I cannot abide being helpless, and yet there is something about fledgelings that renders even the most powerful of us as idiotic as the living. To watch them stir from dry bone and a vicious hatred for vampires to smooth flesh and a delighted killer's instinct, that is a true miracle.

They were all different and murderous and beautiful. Vampire princes. Kain's children. I taught them what they needed to know and no more – if you tell your children everything they will end up surpassing you, and who wants that? – and they were loyal and devoted and grateful to me for what I had done.

But just as a mewling baby loses its slavish devotion to its birth parent, becomes a stranger to the ones who bore it, so my "children" grew, and changed.

I was both pleased and horrified to discover that they were nothing like me.

I did not look at Raziel when his brothers, obeying my order, cast him from the rocks. I contented myself with hearing his cries. He was not screaming for mercy, nor was he overcome with fear. His mind was consumed by fury long before the water consumed his flesh.

His fury was the memory I carried with me for centuries, knowing what must come, knowing that when I looked into his eyes again that rage would still be there. And that memory was the first glimmer of the understanding that was to come.

Rage, unlike children, rarely grows or changes. It merely waits to be unleashed.

And yet I could not have estimated how seeing what Raziel had become would affect me. His rage was timeless, had not altered. He was as angry then as he had been when I tore those arching wings from him, breaking the newly-formed bones asunder like kindling.

And I?

I felt…nothing.

Should I have been sorry for him? No, for there was no pity left in me. He was wretched, a shadow of himself. When the torchlight hit him he seemed as ragged and insubstantial as torn silk. But he still moved like the vampire I remembered, sure on his feet, the corded exposed sinews of his legs carrying him faultlessly as he mounted his attack.

Should I have been afraid of him, knowing what I knew? No. I had lived a very long time without fear and I was old, even then - set in my ways. It was a little late for me to start being afraid.

So instead I resolved myself to the emptiness, the feeling-nothing, not realising that I did not understand him yet.

The Abyss was too distant, too impersonal. I should have killed him properly that first time, ripped out his throat as I ripped away his wings. Perhaps then I would have felt the passing brush of his soul…perhaps then I would have realised sooner…

But that was not the fate planned out for either of us.

And so I met him again, the wayward one, in the maw of Avernus, and there he turned the tables and cast me from him in death.

I am disposed to wonder if, having killed me once in the all-too-personal manner of removing my heart, he too gained understanding: and that is why I found his claws scrabbling weakly at my arm as the blade I have carried for centuries gored his frail-looking body.

Affirmation and condemnation, shadow and life. Together we were stronger.

Standing on this balcony, the awful and glorious vista of my kingdom and the pillars before me, and yet my eyes are blind to all save Raziel, seeing him over and over again as his life spilt up the blade and pooled in the hollows of the Reaver's hilt. Raziel, Raziel…I understand.