At the very bottom of the Abyss, Raziel finds himself transformed from a steampunk-goth Adonis into a shriveled, jawless monster. The Elder God tells him how it's going to be from now on: Kain and the vampires have been bleeding Nosgoth dry for too long, and Raziel is now responsible for killing them all off. Eager to settle the score with Kain for having him killed and ruining his beautiful, beautiful face, Raziel hurries toward the surface without even pausing to say "yes."

Emerging from the underworld, Raziel discovers that centuries have passed since his fall. Nosgoth has been reduced to a gray, blasted wasteland. The vampires' civilization has crumbled, and the once-proud clans stalk the landscape as feral scavengers. Raziel is already plenty rattled, but the worst shock arrives when he returns to his clan stronghold and finds that his entire bloodline has been systematically exterminated by Kain.

The outraged Raziel's first victim is his brother Melchiah. Though he expresses about five seconds of remorse for putting his youngest sibling through a meat grinder, he gets over his guilt pretty quickly when the Elder God informs him that he can acquire his brothers' unique vampiric gifts by consuming their souls.

On a tip from the Elder, Raziel steals inside the derlict Sanctuary of the Clans and finds Kain, who doesn't seem frightened or even surprised to see him. Their father/son chat doesn't last long. Kain asserts that Raziel has no right to question his judgment. Raziel calls Kain a dick. Kain blasts Raziel into submission, then shatters the Soul Reaver over his head. Without the slightest indication of alarm at this development, Kain warps away laughing as Raziel's physical form dissolves.

In the Spectral Plane, Raziel finds a flickering apparation of the Reaver waiting for him. When he touches it, the wraith blade becomes junctioned to him as an extension of his own self. Before phasing back into the physical world and exiting the fortress, Raziel meets the ghost of Ariel. The two form an alliance: Ariel offers to assist him with her characteristically cryptic hints, provided Raziel makes sure Kain ends up dead.

Raziel's next destination is the Silenced Cathedral -- the remains of humanity's last attempt to turn the tide in their war against Kain's armies. The structure hosts an immense steam-powered pipe organ designed to blast special soundwaves that have devestating effects on vampires. But the tower was overrun before it could be activated, and now serves as the nesting grounds of Zephon and his swarm.

After torching Zephon and setting out to find Rahab in the Drowned Abbey, Raziel stumbles upon an ancient Sarafan tomb thrust to the surface by an earthquake. Inside, he enters a chamber with his and his brothers' names engraved over a ring of ransacked coffins, and realizes they had all been vampire-hunting warrior priests in their previous lives. This revelation changes Raziel's whole perspective of himself, his brothers, and his quest for revenge. He begins to reidentify with his lost identity as a holy warrior.

After destroying Rahab, Raziel heads north to take out his brother Dumah, then pursues Kain into a subterranean complex beneath the mountain caves once inhabited by time-manipulating sorceror Moebius. Here, he encounters a hallway lined with windows into the timestream, where he watches scenes of his resurrection in the Abyss, his first meeting with Kain, and his discovery of the Sarafan tomb. Further down the corridor are images of events that have yet to occur: Raziel facing Kain in a dark chamber marked with Kain's insignia, Raziel striking down Ariel with the Soul Reaver, and Raziel standing alone on a stone balcony, armed with a black and red Reaver.

At the heart of the complex, Raziel confronts Kain a second time:

KAIN: At last. I must say, I'm disappointed in your progress; I imagined you would be here sooner. Tell me: did it trouble you to murder your brothers?

RAZIEL: Did it trouble you when you ordered me into the Abyss?

KAIN: No. I had faith in you. In your ability to hate. In your self-righteous indignation.

RAZIEL: Lies. You cannot have foreseen all of this.

KAIN: Eternity is relentless, Raziel. When I first stole into this chamber centuries ago, I did not fathom the true power of knowledge. To know the future, Raziel -- to see its paths and streams tracing out into the infinite. As a man, I could never have contained such forbidden truths -- but each of us is so much more than we once were. Gazing out across the planes of possibility, do you not feel with all your soul how we have become like gods? And as such, are we not indivisible? As long as a single one of us stands, we are legion. That is why, when I must sacrifice my children to the void, I can do so with a clear heart.

RAZIEL: Very poetic, Kain. But in the end, you offer no more than a convenient rationalization for your crimes.

KAIN: These chambers offer insight for those patient enough to look. In your haste to find me, perhaps you have not gazed deeply enough. Our futures are predestined. Moebius foretold mine a millennium ago. We each play out the parts fate has written for us. We are compelled ineluctably down pre-ordained paths. Free will is an illusion.

RAZIEL: I have been to the Tomb of Sarafan, Kain. Your dirty secret is exposed. How could you transform a Sarafan priest into a vampire?

KAIN: How could I not? One must keep his friends close, Raziel -- and his enemies even closer. Can you grasp the absurd beauty of the paradox? We are the same. Sarafan and vampire. With our holy wars, our obsession with Nosgoth's domination...who better to serve me than those whose passion transcends all notions of good and evil?

RAZIEL: I will not applaud your clever blasphemy. The Sarafan were saviors, defending Nosgoth from the corruption that we represent. My eyes are opened, Kain -- I find no nobility in the unlife you rudely forced on my unwilling corpse.

KAIN: You may have uncovered your past, but you know nothing of it. You think the Sarafan were noble? Altruistic? Don't be simple. Their agenda was the same as ours.

RAZIEL: You are lost in a maze of moral relativism, Kain. These apparitions and portents... what game are you playing now?

KAIN: Destiny is a game, is it not? And now you await my latest move...

Even with the Soul Reaver, Raziel fails to defeat Kain and the tyrant escapes beyond his reach. Summoned by the Elder God, Raziel takes a detour to the Human Citadel, mankind's last fortified outpost against the vampires. After breaking up an underground cult of Kain-worshipping humans and slaying their high priestess, Raziel exits the city, revered as a divine savior by its inhabitants.

Now it's back to business. Raziel follows Kain's trail through the volcanic territory of Turel, his last surviving and most powerful brother. After an exchange in which they accuse one another of being a pusillanimous lapdog and a blind ingrate, Raziel kills off his last remaining brother. Now only Kain is left.

Beyond Turel's stronghold, Raziel storms Kain's mountain retreat. As Raziel races to confront his former master, Ariel appears before him with a message: the only way he can hope to defeat Kain is by charging the Soul Reaver with her essence. Raziel obliges her and strikes her down, empowering the Reaver and fulfilling Moebius's prophecy.

Soon Raziel meets Kain for the last time, and finally arrives at an understanding of him. Whether compelled by fatalism or some last untainted shred of his abandoned humanity, Kain wants Raziel to kill him -- to carry out the one act he could never do himself and restore balance to Nosgoth.

Kain is dead, but one final task remains for Raziel. From the roof of Kain's retreat, he glides to the Silenced Cathedral's pinnacle, which had previously been blocked off by Zephon's activity. Raziel outfights and outruns a frenzied horde of vampires to activate the tower. A catacylsmic hymn erupts throughout Nosgoth, decimating the vampire population. With Kain dead and the vampire problem solved for good, the world can finally begin to heal. The Elder God congratulates his faithful servant on a job well done. Raziel, for once, says nothing.



So. Let's take this apart a little.

Soul Reaver was clearly designed with a "fallen angels" motif in mind, which means Hennig probably pulled out her old dog-eared copy of Paradise Lost and consulted it reguarly while working on the game's story and characters. For anyone who faked sick the day their high school English class sped through Milton, Paradise Lost's story goes something like this: the proudest and most beautiful of God's angels, Satan, decides he has problems with servitude. He marshals an army of rebel angels and leads them to war against God, which ends with them getting blasted out of Heaven and cast down to Hell. Beaten but refusing to admit defeat, Satan escapes from Hell and sneaks into the Garden of Eden to look for a way to screw up his adversary's latest creation. He talks Eve into eating the Forbidden Fruit, bringing about the Fall of Man. Satan retreats to Hell. God boots Adam and Eve from Paradise. The archangel Michael consoles Adam, telling him that all of this is part of God's plan and foretells the birth of Christ and the eventual coming of God's kingdom to Earth. Heartened, Adam leaves Eden to spend the rest of his life in miserable agrarian toil with Eve.

Soul Reaver owes a lot to Paradise Lost. Raziel's beauty, pride, fall from grace, and return from the underworld echo Satan's. Kain's lieutenants -- with their angelic names, previous lives as Paladins, and hideous appearances -- are probably inspired by Satan's troop, whose beauty fades the longer they remain in Hell. In their unwavering loyalty to Kain, they are also reminiscient of Milton's "good" angels and their unquestioning obedience to God. Paradise Lost deals with an all-powerful God and the immutability of Divine Providence; Soul Reaver deals with a false god, a real god, and world with an apparently predestined timeline. Et cetera, et cetera.

Crucial to understanding Paradise Lost (or arriving at the point where you claw at your scalp from frustration at failing to understand it) is the piece's problem regarding free will. Though Milton's stated reason for writing this ten-thousand line poem was to "assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to man," many readers walk away from the poem feeling like God acts like a hypocritical tyrant. He severely and permanently punishes Satan, Adam, and Eve for certain choices they make -- for exercising their freedom of will. At the same time, the narrative makes clear that God not only planned their falls, but actively facilitated them. Also, God is kind, benevolent, and only wants the best for all his creations. Milton tries to argue and reason his way around this around several times, but never satisfactorily. And so scholars have spent the last few centuries arguing back and forth about whether Milton makes good on his purpose or unintentionally makes the Almighty seem like a crazy despot.

Hennig is sufficiently well read to understand that Paradise Lost is about more than just proto-Romantic fallen angels, and so places a similar riddle about free will at the heart of Soul Reaver:

1.) KAIN. Soul Reaver's Kain is guided by a profound fatalism fostered by the visions in Moebius's temporal windows. He also admits to deeply regretting the choice he made at the end of Blood Omen. If Moebius's predictions prove that all history is preordained, Kain is completely off the hook. He can't be held responsible for damning Nosgoth, because he never had a choice in the matter. But in order for this to be so, Kain has to make sure that all of the visions in the Chronoplast come true -- because if one prediction proves inaccurate, history is not predestined, and it's still his fault the world was ruined. But knowing Moebius's skill at manipulation and precognitive powers, it's not unthinkable that the images he left in the Chronoplast for Kain to find were only possible paths the future could take -- and Kain, driven by guilt and convinced of predestination, freely chooses to ensure that the future Moebius predicted comes to pass.

2.) RAZIEL. Who controls Raziel? Is Raziel bound by fate, as Kain suggests, or does he control his own destiny? If Raziel possesses free will, then he blithely allows himself to be controlled by the wills of Kain and the Elder God. If this is the case, then Soul Reaver's brief ending carries a powerful significance, especially in light of Blood Omen's conclusion. After discovering the sorcerors' machinations, Kain exerts his free will, saving himself and sacrificing the world. Raziel, on the other hand, does precisely what Kain and the Elder want him to. He saves Nosgoth, but instead of riding off into the sunset or even getting in the last word, he stands around and listens while the Elder congratulates him for loyally murdering his family and wiping out his species. Kain chooses to doom Nosgoth and becomes a king. Raziel doesn't make any choices, saves Nosgoth like he is told, and ends up a lonely chump.

3.) META STUFF. Maybe we could be accused of reading too deeply into all this. But considering how Blood Omen ends with a conscious decision on the part of the player, and all Soul Reaver's talk about choice and destiny, I rather doubt it. It also wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest that Soul Reaver is a video game about free will in video games. Notice how Raziel never actually agrees to hunt down Kain for the Elder God -- the player immediately begins guiding Raziel toward the surface. Even though the player is in control of almost every move Raziel makes, Raziel nevertheless spends the whole of Soul Reaver doing precisely what the Elder God and Kain tell him to. Even after Kain is dead and Raziel no longer has any personal reason to go ahead and finish off the rest of the vampires, the player drives him toward it anyway. The Elder God's last words -- You have done well...my servant -- are the original a slave obeys. Soul Reaver makes a point about free will and autonomy in video games nearly a decade before BioShock achieved critical accolades and mainstream recognition for doing just that.



But wait a minute, you're saying. This all sounds really cool. I thought you were talking about how much of a disappointment Soul Reaver was?

Well, here's the thing: none of this actually happened.



Let's back up a bit. Scroll up to the plot summary and find the part where Raziel discovers the Sarafan Tomb and then kills Rahab. Starting over from there...

After defeating Rahab, Raziel heads north to take out Dumah. From there, he heads into Moebius's caves and meets Kain in the Chronoplast. He and Kain have their argument about morality and free will, then go another round. Afterwards, Kain pulls some levers and activates a time portal. This is not where or how it ends, he says ominously, and vanishes into the timestream. As Raziel approaches the portal, the Elder God warns him that he's on his own once he passes through. On the other side of time warp, Raziel meets Moebius, who welcomes Raziel to his destiny.

TO BE CONTINUED, says the final screen. The credits roll.