#wraith blade

[guardiansofnosgoth]

Showing off the wraith blade's particle effects.

[vicwritesbooks]

My two newest books arrived! One from my all time favourite author S.M. Boyce and second one from a self published author Jane Shand, who I believe will do great!! Can’t wait to read both of them!

[legacyofdefiance]

Raziel and the Reaver

Embracing its twin, its mirror self, the Reaver's long-dormant spirit was now fully aroused. And for the first time, I felt the true presence of this other entity - willful, ravenous, and deranged from thousands of years of imprisonment... As I recovered, I realized we were now bound together in a fragile alliance - the Reaver no longer merely my symbiotic weapon, but a sentient parasite, competing for control. I could now summon the blade at will, regardless of my strength. But once summoned, the blade's ravenous appetite could not be contained. It devoured the souls of its victims... And if I allowed it to become over-aroused, the Reaver would now turn its hunger on me.

The Reaver's soul-devouring nature and the possibility that it's possessed are briefly mentioned in SR1, but they are presented as legends rather than hard facts. We can conclude that Raziel never thought of the wraith-blade as a sentient entity until the moment of its awakening in William's chapel. Their struggle of wills is constantly referenced after this point-- despite being completely insane the wraith-blade often overpowers Raziel, and not once does he manage to regain control by the strength of his own will. He is forced to wait until it chooses to release him (has anyone else noticed that willpower is really important to the functionality of many of Raziel's abilities, because that's a thing I find significant). And of course this struggle leads up to his discovery that the wraith-blade is his future self-- at the end of SR2 he's in a state of utter despair, terrified of the sword and everything it represents. But the next time we see him is at the start of Defiance, and at this point the struggle is over. It's just never mentioned, and the wraith-blade works with him again, only taking souls when he lets it. So what changed? I think that as time wore on, trapped in the underworld being forced to listen to the Elder and so weakened by hunger he couldn't even move, he started to pay attention to the wraith-blade. It still terrifies him but he can't ignore it-- on some level he needs to know what he's up against. He begins to 'talk' to it, though it doesn't seem to really understand him and it never replies. He can feel its residual emotions, echoes of the agony and fear and betrayal he so keenly felt himself not too long ago-- and above all else its terrible hunger, ever present and a perfect mirror of his own. And as he talks to it, the wraith-blade becomes calmer and it stops fighting him as much, and Raziel begins to hope that even if he can't escape this fate, maybe he can make things a little better for his future self. So then at the beginning of Defiance he's come to terms with everything a bit more-- he's still scared and wants to avoid this fate if he can, but the thought of it no longer brings him utter despair. The wraith-blade has even started responding to him a little; it's still not sane and it still doesn't speak but its vague echoes of emotion carry a bit more meaning; they've become sharper and more varied, and through this contact Raziel begins to learn a bit more about the nature of the Reaver-prison*. And while he clearly has no intention of just lying down and accepting this fate, he has realised that it doesn't have to be as terrible as he feared, and he's resigned to the possibility that there may be no way out. * in that first scene in Defiance Raziel says 'But that sentence [entering the Reaver] was no worse than the stalemate I now endured', which indicates that he knows enough about the Reaver-prison to compare the two situations and find them roughly equivalent-- learning from the wraith-blade is the only means by which he could have logically obtained that knowledge. As a side note I sort of see the wraith-blade as a relic of the original timeline-- ie, it's the Raziel that (would have) entered the Reaver in the Sarafan era before that event got unhappened. This could be completely wrong but there are a lot of little details that would seem to support it-- it's implied that Raziel is immune to the repercussions of time shenanigans (where altering the timeline doesn't change current wraith Raziel), and then you have the whole free will thing which is unique to him. And I think that at the end of Defiance Raziel has realised that he does have a choice and the wraith-blade is not evidence that he must inevitably enter the Reaver, he could choose to evade it entirely-- but this would actually be the worse option because the Elder would have buried both him and Kain and then pulled Raziel back to the underworld again, and that would be the end, eternal imprisonment and a slow descent into madness for them both. By entering the Reaver he gives them a chance at victory, and it's implied that this choice has allowed hin to finally escape the Elder God's clutches (it's pretty subtle but if you look at how the Elder refers to Raziel the language is consistently very possessive, he's always reinforcing the idea that Raziel belongs to him right up until Raziel enters the Reaver-- and after this he refers to Raziel as belonging to Kain, indicating that Raziel is beyond his reach).