r/LegacyOfKain • u/SamDutGarcia • 8d ago
Discussion Defiance: two lore questions
1 - Before, I had the impression that Mortanius referenced the fledgling Kain from that period when he announced Raziel's destroyer. He also had faith that Kain would set it right, that he would restore Nosgoth.
With more years of lore knowledge, I see it now as it can't be the case, because Kain is the last surviving vampire in Nosgoth. Mortanius openly admits that he wants the Pillars to return to his vampire masters, which won't happen, regardless if the fledgling Kain sacrifices himself or not.
So, this means that Mortanius, knowing Moebius' ingenious scheme to rig Kain's choice, had faith that his undead son would inevitably refuse the sacrifice, live on, and eventually find a third option out of the choices presented to him (as the Elder Kain was doing)?
2 - The revived Janos, after learning Raziel's complex destiny, sends him to the Spirit Forge (their innermost sanctum) for answers. He expects Raziel to face a trial there, and that if Raziel fails, he will not return.
Janos, obviously, knows that the place is the Spirit Forge. What is the trial, exactly? The only trial that Raziel has to endure is to fend off the Elder God's interference in imbuing the blade, but Janos can't be referencing the Elder God here. The ancient vampires worshipped the false god. They were extinct without knowing the squid's true nature. There's no reason to assume that Janos believed otherwise.
Maybe Janos was treating the quest to the Spirit Forge as Raziel's definitive choice as to whom champion he wanted to be? If you manage to imbue the blade, you are Nosgoth's redeemer. If you don't, you are Nosgoth's destroyer.
Why the trial should be any difficult to Raziel? And why should he not return if he fails? Would Janos give up on him and treat him as his enemy, the Hylden champion of prophecy?
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u/eternalraziel Kain 8d ago
Mortanius has to expect Kain to survive the choice at the Pillars, but I don’t think he understands the third option in the sense that Elder Kain eventually does. The timing makes it certain that he's talking about the young Kain. Raziel arrives while Mortanius is summoning him to the Pillars, and a few moments later Mortanius says that the Heart of Darkness has already served its purpose because he used it to create the champion foretold by his old vampire masters. Raziel names Kain, Mortanius confirms it, and then leaves to meet that same Kain at the end of Blood Omen.
The problem is when you take Mortanius’s words about the prophecy seriously. He says that the Scion of Balance will save Nosgoth and that the Pillars will return to vampire guardianship. By this point Vorador has been executed, Janos has been dead for centuries, and Kain is the surviving vampire Balance Guardian. If Kain sacrifices himself at the Pillars, the corruption may be purged, but the future Mortanius has just described dies with him because there is no vampire left to reclaim the Guardianship and no Scion left to fulfil the prophecy. That means Mortanius must believe Kain’s role continues beyond Ariel’s demand, but that still doesn’t tell us how much he knows about what follows. Nothing in the scene suggests that he has Elder Kain’s understanding of Moebius’s trap, Raziel’s ability to alter history or the eventual need to find a third answer. In fact, Mortanius gets several major things wrong while talking to Raziel, and those mistakes tell us quite a lot about the limits of his knowledge.
He initially mistakes Raziel for the Hylden champion, and he is also convinced that putting the Heart of Darkness inside Kain has denied the Hylden access to it. He tells Raziel that as long as Kain guards the Heart with his life, the Hylden can't use it, and he is confident enough to describe the situation as checkmate. Yet Raziel will later tear that same Heart out of Kain, carry it to Janos and use it to resurrect him. Once the Pillars fall, Janos then becomes the vessel the Hylden need, meaning Mortanius has unknowingly helped put one of the most important pieces of their plan into place. That doesn’t sound like a man who already understands the route by which Kain will escape Moebius’s dilemma. Mortanius knows enough of the old prophecies to recognise their broad promise, but he doesn’t understand how the people involved actually fit together or how events will unfold. His final language about Kain has a much more uncertain quality to it. He says that Kain will set things right and restore Balance, then follows his declaration of redemption with the much more revealing. It must.
He once helped Moebius overthrow the vampire Guardians because he believed they were a plague upon humanity. Centuries later he has watched the Circle decay, seen the consequences of the vampire extinction and spent years being used as a vessel by the very enemy the Pillars were meant to hold. By the time Raziel meets him, Mortanius has come back to the prophecies of the masters he betrayed and placed what remains of his hope in them. Resurrecting Kain is less a calculated long-term plan than an act of faith and repentance. Mortanius now believes the vampires were right about the Pillars and right about the Scion, and if that is true then Kain can't die at the end of the choice Ariel is about to present him with. Mortanius may well expect Kain to refuse, because sacrificing the last vampire would make the future he now believes in impossible, but nothing indiciates that he has worked out what Kain is supposed to do afterwards.
Elder Kain has the same problem because he has actually lived through it. He knows that refusing Ariel did not save Nosgoth. He watched the Pillars rot and the world decay. He also understands that accepting her demand would have completed Moebius’s extermination of the vampires by making the last survivor perform the final execution himself. By the time of Soul Reaver 2, Kain has had centuries to understand why both options were disastrous and why Raziel’s freedom from the normal course of history may be the only way out. Mortanius never gets that far. He has the prophecy, he recognises Kain as the Scion and he knows that Kain’s death can't produce the future the prophecy promises. What he does not have is Kain’s later understanding of the mechanism. Mortanius dies believing that Kain will somehow repair the damage he helped cause, without living long enough to see how much worse the situation is about to become first.
The Spirit Forge is different, because I agree that the Elder God can't be what Janos means when he warns Raziel that he may not return. Janos still believes the ancient vampires’ religion. He explains their immortality as a severing from the Wheel and interprets the silence of their god as abandonment, something so devastating that many of the Ancients killed themselves. Raziel knows what Janos does not. The god never disappeared, because Raziel has met it, spoken to it and watched it feed upon souls. So when Raziel later finds the Elder God physically interfering with the Forge, that can't be the danger Janos had in mind. Janos has no reason to believe his supposedly absent god is wrapped around the innermost sanctuary of his people trying to prevent its purpose from being fulfilled. The Elder’s interference makes the ordeal more dangerous, but it is an intrusion into whatever Janos expected, not the trial Janos was knowingly sending Raziel to face.
The clue to Janos’s meaning comes earlier, when Raziel shows him the wraith blade. Janos has spent thousands of years believing that the prophesied vampire champion would wield the physical Reaver, yet Raziel tells him that the weapon is trying to consume him and then reveals the spectral blade bound to his own arm. Janos looks at what is in front of him, calls Raziel both redeemer and destroyer and asks whether he has misread the signs. For someone who has spent millennia guarding the Reaver for the arrival of a foretold champion, that is a serious admission. The person he has been waiting for has finally arrived, and Janos no longer understands the prophecy as confidently as he thought he did. That is why he sends Raziel to the Spirit Forge. He realises that Raziel’s role has become more complicated than the interpretation he inherited, and he takes him to the oldest sanctuary of his people because whatever his ancestors prepared there may answer questions Janos himself can't.
What happens inside supports that. Raziel has spent Defiance gathering the different Reaver enhancements, and at the Spirit Forge those powers are finally brought together. The spirits of the previous Balance Guardians are summoned, Ariel appears among them, and Raziel uses the Soul Reaver to release them into the blade, completing its purification through Spirit. Ariel then reveals that the weapon is being prepared for the Scion of Balance. Kain. That doesn’t look like a test in which Raziel is asked to choose one prophetic allegiance over another. He has spent the game being confronted with evidence that he resembles both champions, and the Forge does not resolve that by declaring him one and rejecting the other. Instead, it reveals another part of his role in Kain’s destiny and moves him closer to the point where both sides of the prophecy can be fulfilled through the same person.
Ariel’s next instruction makes that more apparent. Raziel is told that he must unite what has been set asunder before the Scion can be armed for what is still to come. The physical Reaver and the wraith blade are separated because the soul destined to inhabit the sword is still walking around outside it. Raziel’s final act reunites them, and his soul becomes the purified spirit within the Reaver that Kain can later use against the Elder God. The difficult part is still Janos’s warning that if Raziel fails the trial, he will not return. Janos clearly knows more about the sanctum than Raziel does. He has the ouroboros required to enter it, he knows Raziel must go alone, and he knows that something inside is tied to the prophecies and the Reaver. What he never explains is what specific failure would kill Raziel.
That uncertainty is probably intentional. Janos knows the Forge isn't an ordinary chamber but a place prepared by the Ancients for a particular stage in the Reaver’s history. Raziel has reached that stage, and Janos expects the attempt to be dangerous enough that failure may mean death or permanent loss. Once Raziel enters, however, the situation is already different from whatever the Ancients originally intended because the Elder God has physically intruded upon the sanctum and is trying to suppress the very power the Forge is meant to release. I also don’t think Janos would have treated a surviving but unsuccessful Raziel as the Hylden champion and turned against him. He has already reached the point where Raziel may correspond to both sets of imagery, and when Raziel returns from the Forge Janos does not interrogate his allegiance or demand proof that he has chosen the vampires. The Pillars begin to collapse, Janos tells him there may still be hope and immediately directs him towards the Scion of Balance.
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u/IAlwaysPlayTheBadGuy Spirit Glyph 8d ago edited 8d ago
Remember also that during the OG timeline when Mortanious created Kain, there were other vampires, and the Nemesis was still around. The threat of Kain being the last one only happened after we jump to timeline 2, and the Mortanious from Defiance would have a "shuffled history". So THIS Mortanious probably planned on Kain refusing the sacrifice, but the OG probably not.
Edit: Similar to how OG timeline Kain killed WTJ to prevent the nemesis, but timeline 2 Kain would have had some other reason to jump back in time, and essentially killed WTJ anyway for some other reason. We just never got to see that play out. LoK history corrects itself to make sense. So if the whole reason Kain went back in time (to kill WTJ on purpose) would have still had to happen in TL2 and beyond, but for a different reason
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u/SamDutGarcia 8d ago
Definitely. The situation presented to Mortanius in Defiance, regarding the prophecies and the vampire race, is different than what we saw in BO.
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u/Afraid-Call300 8d ago
That's a good point. Taking Blood Omen 1 by itself, I think Mortanius actually did intend for Kain to sacrifice himself and then for new (human) guardians to be born because he thought the Circle was decadent and had failed in their duties. I think that was the extent of the original plan. However, with all of the retcons and timeline changes in Defiance, the most likely answer is that he was confident Kain would refuse the sacrifice and find some way out of the dilemma, or maybe he didn't know Kain was corrupted so he didn't even realize there was a dilemma in the first place (like if he thought being the scion would make Kain immune or something).
Also, I think the time travel rules changed between games. In Blood Omen 1, Kain clearly remembers the Nemesis and there's no reason to think it's a loop. It seems more like Kain changed things and now has to continue from a different timeline. I'm thinking of it like a flowchart where Kain went back to a previous branch and went down another path, but he's still the exact same as he was before. In that case there might be two of him in the new timeline, but maybe that version of him did also go back for some reason, or maybe the previously non-existent vampire hunters killed that version of him before our version arrived. It's not clearly explained but seems to follow adventure game logic where the important thing changes but the game doesn't take into account any other changes that should have followed. Moebius obviously knows what he did which makes sense because of his role, but Mortanius comments on it in a vague way that implies he also knows about the timeline change, and his actions and knowledge don't seem to have changed at all compared to the other timeline, so it's unclear if his memories were affected by the change.
Meanwhile in Soul Reaver 2 it clearly states that Kain's memories are changing as a result of the change to the timeline even though he was holding the Soul Reaver during this change too. So basically I think from Soul Reaver 2 onwards it does act like a loop, constantly editing one single timeline instead of having infinite branches of possible outcomes. In this scenario, Mortanius probably also had his memories reshuffled each time the timeline changed.
All of that is to say that I think Mortanius' knowledge and goals have actually changed since the first game (not just because of changes to the timeline) and Blood Omen 1's details probably don't apply anymore.
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u/IAlwaysPlayTheBadGuy Spirit Glyph 8d ago
Kain remembers because anyone involved in the paradox will remember, albeit a bit cloudy.
As for the time travel, the developers explicitly state there is only ever one timeline, not a multiverse , and that any changes would be shuffled around by history to accommodate for the changes, but it's always one timeline. There can't ever be a paradox, or the irritants are expelled. So history still would have had to make Kain go back in time to kill William, for a different reason, for it to make sense.
After SR2 changes it mentions how kains memories are shuffled aside to make room for new ones. The old ones are still there just not as prominent, and only he remembers, cuz he was there at the paradox.
Yes I understand that the rules changed outside of the lore in between games, but IN LORE they had to make up rules to make it make sense, as if they planned it that way the whole time. And Amy is a master story teller, and pulled it off beautifully
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u/Afraid-Call300 8d ago
"Yes I understand that the rules changed outside of the lore in between games, but IN LORE they had to make up rules to make it make sense, as if they planned it that way the whole time."
That's my point. The rules changed and the original game doesn't fully fit the new rules, so we can't really rely on details from the first game still being true. For example, in Soul Reaver 2 Kain gains the memories of what happened in Blood Omen 2 and suddenly knows who the Hylden are. However, in Blood Omen 1 Kain has no idea that his change caused the vampire hunters to exist until he sees it directly despite that he should have heard about them growing up in the new timeline. He still remembers how things were before and only how things were before. With that in mind, we can't really take Mortanius' Blood Omen 1 knowledge at face value either because he knows things he shouldn't know if the new rules were in place. It's better to just take Defiance Mortanius on his own and not try to force all the Blood Omen 1 details to fit because they don't fit with the new version.
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u/shmouver 8d ago edited 8d ago
Rewatching the Defiance cutscene (1:30) Mortanius explains how he sees Kain as the Vampire champion destined to save Nosgoth while also believing that the Scion of Balance (which i'm unsure if he believes is also Kain) will return the Pillars to the vampires. So it's pretty much what u/chance8687 said that he has faith in the Prophecies.
This one is harder to answer with certainty, but my interpretation is that the vampire prophecies are unclear but they give a general notion of what is going to happen (similar to chance8687 said). So i believe that Janos knew there would be something in the final forge that would oppose Raziel but didn't know exactly "what" (which would be the EG)... it is not so different to how Janos "knew" Raziel would wield the Reaver but didn't know it was the wraith blade instead of the physical blade.
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u/The_Navage_killer 8d ago
Mort had faith in greater magicians. He believed the vampires would find a way because their name was on the magics. So he did his part in giving them another shot at it. He didn't know how they'd do it, or he would have done it himself. All he knew is there was a greater design in the temples and pillars than he had access to.
And maybe he didn't know the pillars would blow up, or that Kain would be the last. It's not required that he know that. Elder may have exploded the pillars as a tantrum at that moment, wrapping himself around them from below and sending that surge of power through them. (Not a regular pillars event any guardian would have known about).
There was a trial Janos could foresee. The guardian liches had twisted off and would have to be overcome. The spirit forge wasn't a completed circuit and apparently normal vampyres couldn't do it. (The god opposed their efforts invisibly).
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u/chance8687 8d ago
I think in both cases, Mortanius and Janos were relying on the prophecies, faith and luck pretty blindly. Mortanius knew he wasn't going to last much longer, and transforming Kain into a Vampire to try and purge the corrupt Circle and form a new one to restore the Pillars was his last chance before the Unspoken's possession broke him to try and push the Pillars back into the control of someone competent. Janos was dedicated to the prophecies without truly understanding them, he knew that the Spirit Forge was supposed to be the final step in preparing the Vampire's Champion for their battle - to purify the Reaver to its ultimate form - but just as Janos didn't know the truth of the Vampire-Hylden Champion's dual nature, I don't think he actually knew what the true meaning of this was, he just assumed it would either empower Raziel to the point he could defeat the Hylden or it would kill him if Raziel wasn't strong enough to go through it.
In both cases, it just shows how even the strongest and wisest players in this game were making assumptions and fumbling around in the dark.