| |
| Lieutenant Turel | |
|---|---|
| Universe | Legacy of Kain Universe |
| Homeworld | Nosgoth |
| Dark Gifts | Telekinesis (Primary), Enhanced Senses at the cost of total blindness |
Turel was once a Human on the world of Nosgoth, serving as one of the Sarafan Order, a group of warrior-priests which serve the Council of Nine, the guardian's of Nosgoth's infamous pillars. He participated alongside his brethren in the hunting down and slaying of old-world vampires, be they spawned from Humans or the blue-skinned, winged Vampires of ancient times. When Raziel witnesses his past self and his vampire brothers murdering his ally Janos Audron, he follows them back to Sarafan Keep, where he enacts his wrath and vengeance upon them all, killing Turel second-to-last alongside Dumah. It was these corpses that their lord Kain used to breathe vampiric life of a third type of vampire, one brought to existence by the necromancer Mortanius that may have more in line with the Hylden than the Ancient Vampires. Turel was the second to be raised after the corpse of Raziel, making him the second-most powerful of Kain's new vampire lieutenants.
Turel of the Sarafan, just before his untimely demise at the hands of the future version of Raziel.
These "Nosgothic Vampires" were much different than previous lineages; like Vampires borne from the living wherein their vampiric powers were bestowed upon them by the Ancient Vampires, they mutated over time, but unlike that species, they never stopped evolving. As such, every so often they would enter a state where they would receive a new dark gift, although the elders (Kain, followed by Kain's lieutenants, followed by adult Nosgothic Vampire lineages, followed by the fledglings) would receive their gift first, with those that followed gaining theirs some years after their masters. In terms of the Lieutenants, they would show off their gifts to Lord Kain, who sat upon the once-pristine pillars that he had transformed into a sort of throne room. After a millennium past, the first-born Lieutenant Raziel - Kain's personal favorite - revealed his own new dark gift, the power of flight through the use of a pair of dragon-like wings, surpassing Lord Kain's own abilities. Kain was obviously awestruck by this although none of his Lieutenants would know why until after the following events, and he went and observed Raziel's transformation more closely, before suddenly and seemingly sadistically he ripped the bones out from the wings, causing so much agony in Raziel that the vampire fainted on the spot. He then ordered his next two highest-ranking lieutenants, Turel and Dumah, to caste Raziel into the Lake of the Dead, where all traitors and weaklings were ultimately executed. Both did so willingly, and believed they were rid of Raziel for a time, until Kain revealed to them all that Raziel was predestined to return and slay all of the other surviving lieutenants, although it is unknown if he actually told them all why.
Turel as he appeared during Raziel's execution.
While Raziel did return many centuries later as a Wraith, Turel was the one lieutenant who would not see this. Some time before Raziel's reawakening at the "hands" of the Elder God, the former Guardian of Dimensions, Azimuth the Planer, used Moebius the Timestreamer's timestreaming device and her own abilities to kidnap Turel and bring him into the past, where he was imprisoned and worshiped as a god by a sacrificial cult known as the Cenobites as Hash'ak'gik. Henceforth trapped beneath Avernus Cathedral in its deepest catacombs, he began to lose his grip on sanity, which was not helped by the cult's Wikipedia:Hylden masterminds which would use him as a vessel to command their Human followers in the Material Realm from the Demonic Realm, where the Hylden were trapped long ago by the Ancient Vampires.
In his absence, Turel's children, the Turelim, served Kain directly as his personal guardians. Raziel slew many of these during his final days in his own time before traveling for the rest of his unlife through various times, the slave of most everyone's bidding due to his blind (and actually somewhat unfounded) hatred for Kain. Eventually Raziel did come across his final brother, Turel, who sensed him at the precipice of his abyssal prison, and forcefully pulled him down using his powers. As Turel had gone blind over the years, he first actually recognized his brother by his smell, and then by his voice when Raziel chose to speak. While obviously crazy, Raziel did not wish to kill his only remaining brother, but the agony that the Hylden caused Turel made him desperate to fight them off. Turel stated that he needed blood to satiate himself to help stave off the possessions, and apparently not knowing or having forgotten in his dementia that Raziel was in fact a Wraith and no longer a Vampire, he attacked. Given the deceitful ways of the Hylden, it seems that they most likely possessed him at that time in order to force Turel's cloven hand and kill Raziel or at least to have him release his brother's soul, as he had done with all the others. Raziel was anguished by this, but in the end received his powerful telekinetic abilities, enhancing Raziel's own, although it would not last him very long before Raziel himself was sacrificed for the greater good of Kain's plan.
Trivia[]
- Turel was voiced by Richard Doyle in Soul Reaver 2 in his Human form, and voiced by Gregg Berger in his final monstrous form in Legacy of Kain: Defiance.
- During the development of Soul Reaver Turel's development codename was 'Morlock Boss', derived from the cave-dwelling humanoids of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. The codename 'Morlock' was later applied to a Turelim vampire guarding the Sarafan Tomb, who was added to the game in place of Turel and speaks some of Turel's originally-planned dialogue.