The original Sarafan Order were an sect of fanatical warriors dedicated to the extermination of the ‘vampire plague’. They massacred and decimated the vampiric clans of Nosgoth, and were at their peak of bastardness when they slowly tortured and murdered the benign and passive Janos Audron. Shortly after the order was hit with a fatal blow that destroyed most of the leadership, Melchiah, Zephon, Rahab, Dumah, Turel and Raziel, the Head Sarafan Inquisitors, were all murdered in their own stronghold. The murderer was, as Soul Reaver 2™ reveals, the time-streaming soul-devouring wonder-boy Raziel. However, at the time no one knew this and Lieutenant Columbo is conducting his own investigation into the matter. With the leadership all but gone, the damned wraith of Malek took the Sarafan Elite to his isolated bastion in the North, and for the most part the Sarafan Order disbanded to become a footnote in history. Malek kept the Sarafan Elite as virtual prisoners, forcing them to undergo gruelling exhausting training exercises, obsessively trying to create a perfect Sarafan army to hunt down and destroy the vampire Vorador who humiliated him in ages past. Those who didn’t meet his impossibly high standards met with death, but as his numbers of soldiers dwindled, Malek grew more deranged, unstable and obsessive. He began experimenting with soul-machines and armour, trying to reproduce the spell Mortanius had cast upon him. Eventually, he met with success and forced the his remaining human troops to undergo the painful transformation procedure. In the process, Malek strived finally to create the perfect soldier, removing that which could be distracting, emotions, instincts, and simply programming them with the directive to kill Vampires. When the fledgling Kain, in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain invaded the bastion, Malek finally got to put his experiment to the test. They had been training for centuries, and upon encountering a fledgling vampire… they were soon defeated. Malek had not realised that without passion, fear or aggression, his troops were just unthinking weapons, they couldn’t handle the surprise and unpredictability of battle with biological life. The Sarafan Order, being perfected for hundreds of years, was impotent and utterly useless. As Kain destroyed all of the soul-machines in the bastion, the lifeless troops, for lack of a better word, died. Malek’s obsessive behaviour had been his downfall long before Kain was born. Furious, events soon allowed his anger to be vented. A final confrontation between him and the first Vorador took place, a confrontation the Paladin lost, although how exactly this legendary defeat occurred is lost to history. The Sarafan Order was dead. Centuries later, as The Vamperor dispatched his agent into Nosgoth, and under advice from his master the agent took the name of ‘Sarafan Lord’ with its connotations of legend and history. Reviving the order of the Sarafan, the Sarafan Lord began another hunt of Nosgoth’s vampires, and earned respect and admiration from the humans of Meridian. Seeing the Sarafan Lord as a figure of strength and leadership, he was elected as Supreme Chancellor of the Meridian Republic. Only then did the Sarafan Lord reveal his true intentions. Disbanding the Meridian Senate, the Sarafan Lord increased the role of the Sarafan making them the supreme army of Nosgoth. Meridian became a military state, controlled by the corrupt and powerful Sarafan Knights, and began to expand the Sarafan Empire into the surrounding cities of Nosgoth. A massive fleet of Sarafan Warships were constructed using the newly-discovered Glyph magic, twenty Imperial Sarafan Destroyers, each two miles long, and the flagship, the Super Sarafan Destroyer, a sixteen-miles-long floating armed city. Surrounding Nosgoth could offer no real opposition, the superior technology of warships, glyphlasers and glyphshields were too advanced. Eventually, most of Nosgoth came under the control of the Sarafan Lord and his armies of Sarafan Stormtroopers. Blood Omen 2™ revealed that the real power behind the revived Sarafan Order was the Hylden. With Nosgoth’s humans subjected to strict laws, of which the penalty for non-compliance was death, the Hylden were free to finish constructing the first Device. However, Kain’s revival was unexpected and unplanned for. The vampire destroyed the central component to the Device, the Mass, and collapsed the Hylden Gate. The Sarafan Lord was killed in the collapse, but was revived instantly and ordered the entire Sarafan fleet to intercept Kain and stop him once and for all. As Kain is sent back into Nosgoth’s past, the Sarafan Lord on the bridge of the Super Sarafan Destroyer orders his vessel to follow. The hole in time seals behind it, leaving the Sarafan Empire of Meridian without a leader or the flagship. The power vacuum caused Sarafan Warlords to conflict for power and the Empire descended into civil war. As the people of Nosgoth took back their lands having been oppressed for so long, the Sarafan Empire was revived briefly for a period by a human-Ancient hybrid, the blue-skinned, red-eyed but non-winged, Grand Admiral Thrawn. This revival lasted for only a short time though, and only after the death of Thrawn, the Empire disintegrated and the Sarafan Order was finally crushed, never to be revived again. Though with a Super Sarafan Destroyer with tens of thousands of fanatical Sarafan Troops in Nosgoth’s past, anything could happen. They could even be responsible for creating the original Sarafan Order in the first place. Pfff. As if things weren’t complicated enough.

Thrawn is cool.