Air keens past your ears. Your blood-clotted hair buffets your face, and tears are pulled from your eyes. The ground spins far below, an indistinct brown-grey blur growing more detailed with every passing second.
To dive is not new to you. All your life, air was your element. Even now, age-old instinct tells your wings to spread open, to find a gust to glide on, to stop the plummet and fly. It only brings pain; they are broken and punctured. Every aborted flap, every twitch, every attempt to slow your descent ends in hurt.
You are – were – a bearer of the Oriflamme Sacrosanct, the golden-threaded battle-standard of the Celestial Host. From that purpose, you were called to being. You stood against the Great Enemies of Creation; the banner an incandescent beacon which lead the children of Heaven into the fray. It was an exalted duty, a glorious duty and once, it was all you were. If you could only speak of it, your lips would spill forth psalms and battle-hymns that could stir the coldest heart to righteous war; but such beauty is not for fallen lips to speak, and so you have only memories, too bright and painful for your stained soul to bear.
You lessen.
A fall from grace is more than just a plummet from the heights. Seven spheres separate the base earth from the pure Heaven. At each crossing something is ripped away. Onto members of the Host many gifts are piled. They are ground down, one by one. It feels like fading, diminishing, being made smaller. Your body is rendered weaker, brittle: mortal. Worse still, this destruction is not limited to the flesh. Your soul dims and your mind dulls, the clarity that had once filled it dissolving into doubts and weaknesses. The inviolate angelic spirit cracks, and new emotions flood into the fault-lines. You learn, one by one: despair, and fear, and the powerless anger of the broken and cast aside.
Only one part of you is left alone, and so as you shrink, it grows. The brand of your corruption, the bare truth of your failure. You wish you could remember what you did, why you took such a thing into yourself. But your memories are like an ancient scroll, seemingly whole and yet crumbling to ash under the weight of your thought. All of them but one. One thing you cannot forget, one thing even the obliteration of your soul cannot erase.
When your corruption was made apparent, your sin displayed for all to see, you were brought before a tribunal of your peers. You pleaded guilt, you displayed shame, you promised expiation. But your words might as well have been silence; they could not see past the betrayal laid bare them. They declared that you were doomed to have your sin grow and consume you, and this Heaven could not forgive; and what they cannot forgive they must reject. And so your fellows took up sacred implements of justice and – weeping, for they found no joy in your breaking– they bent and pierced your wings, and dragged you over Heaven's edge. From there you would fall to the earth below, where all vile, petty things are doomed to spend their bounded days.
The air thickens around you, heats up. You burn. You scream. Soon, your fall will be complete. Soon you will crash upon the soil below. This is not fair. This is not right. And this is not over. Before the last thread connecting you with the Heaven above severs, one final thought burns inside you with all the unquenchable zeal with which you once held the Oriflamme Sacrosanct:
You will have vengeance.
You were given no mercy. You were spared no pity. Your torturers may have cried as they mutilated you, but those were not tears shed for your pain and for your failure, but for the stains on their hands. A Heaven so concerned with its own perfection is no Heaven at all. A Heaven that unjust cannot be forgiven, and therefore it must be rejected. And for the sake of this rejection, you will claw your way back up, no matter the cost, and scream your injustice in the face of the wretched Host.
Character Creation:
The number of the Great Enemies of Creation is four, and as such the struggle against them is known as the Fourfold War. It is on one of its four battlefields that you fell, accepting the poisonous gift of corruption from the hands of those you were made to destroy.
That battlefield was…
[ ] The Wasteland of Ash, in the Southern War against the Infernal.
The Infernal are bound to the precept of total autonomy of self. "Do as you will" is their sole commandment, and for the sake of it they seek to topple the Heavens and destroy or corrupt the Celestial Host. If they have their way, they will abolish all order and thrust the Creation into a flurry of chaos and predation, ruled only by naked power. Thus they are called the Hellbringers, for Hell is what emerges in their wake.
They wield the black fire, which burns the substance of things, but not their form, and the Stygian ice which ensnares and taints. The angels that fall to the Infernal can be told by the black in their eyes and ichor in their veins. The ones that fall all the way through become the cavaliers of Hell, corruptors of nations, sowers of discords and heirs to the disordered cosmos.
[ ] The Celestial Firmament, in the Northern War against the Intruders.
Lurking in the void beyond the dome of the sky and animated by an unceasing hunger, the Intruders are the great cosmic parasites. Like ichneumon wasps, they seek to inject their essence into Creation, so that it grows and devours it from within, until the time comes for it to hatch, shattering the now-hollow world. Until they can achieve this ultimate act of parasitism, they infest and devour what they can, be they things of the base earth or the Celestial Heaven.
They are the masters of flesh, their forms protean and undulating. As they disregard the laws of Creation, so too their bodies care not for petty limitations of sinew and muscle. The angels that fall to the Intruders can be told by the rippling of their flesh, a cancerous, but deep well of power. The ones that fall all the way through become incomprehensible horrors with no set form; they wear infinite masks and shells, but the only truth of them is hunger.
[ ] The Tangle of Notions, in the Eastern War against the Primordial.
Born in the darkness before the light of the sun, original gods of Creation, deposed in the coming of the Light and defeated by the Celestial Host, the Primordial survive and seek to restore what they have once lost. Their aim is to snuff out the sun and lash the dance of stars back to their will, claiming mastery over fate and base matter alike. Their victory would be the severing of the link between the Heavens and what rests below them and the guttering of the Light.
They claim dominion over the four elements, and all things untouched by the Sun. They are the lords of the mad and the wild. Although they no longer rule over fate as they used to, they are nonetheless masters of prophecies and secrets, knowledgeable in matters that even the Celestial Host had not fully understood. The angels that fall to the Primordial are adorned with antlers and cloven-footed. The ones that fall all the way through become kin to the old gods, their equals and successors.
[ ] The Hadean Plain, in the Western War against the Silence.
Offended by life in its vibrancy and motion – the tell-tale signs of entropy - the lords of Silence hopes to preserve Creation like an insect drowned in amber. They style themselves as the Last Kings, who will reign motionlessly over a quieted cosmos, for all eternity to come. If that is impossible, they will bring it to the final annihilation, so that all matter is rendered back into the perfect uniformity of non-existence. They are the champions of death and abolishers of rebirth.
Their power is entropy and death; with one hand they still the hearts of the living and with the other, they raise the dead to their will. They know the anti-language, the dissolution of understanding and shredding of mind. They are known as the Peacebringers for they follow the path of ultimate quieting. The angels that fall to the Silence can be told by their pallid demanour and merciful aspect. The ones that fall all the way through become gaunt monarchs of the dead, as inimical to life as they are exalted in death.
[ ] A different battlefield, against an unknown foe [write-in]
Although the number of the Great Enemies of Creation is four, it is by no means the complete list. Minor abominations, short-lived mad powers and other hostile forces emerge and disappear all the time. The Celestial Host destroys most of them and others fade into obscurity; but when the opportunity arises, they do not hesitate to offer corrupting gifts to their oppressors.
Author's notes said:
Hello and welcome to Gargulec Attempts To Write A Quest Again!
The idea of the quest is, I hope, quite obvious: you play a fallen angel, corrupted by a force hostile to the world and cast down by her fellows to a base earth of which she knows very little, if anything, now seeking to avenge herself on them. Of course, the matter is made more complex by the corruption she carries – it is up to you whether you embrace it all the way through and become a Great Enemy of Creation, or rather if you seek to slow its growth and perhaps find a way to purge it or at least put it under your control. Both paths are possible; if you reject the Heaven's judgment, you also reject the permanence of your sin – if you so desire.
The Quest will be narrative in nature; I do not want to mechanize power and corruption, for as interesting as it would be, I have no mind for rule-systems and I think they'd detract both from my commitment to the quest as well from its overall construction.
One thing that I want to note before anyone asks is that this quest was born out of casual flicking through Magic the Gathering art, as well as a bunch of other, equally schlocky sources. Therefore, I will be making little if no attempt to tap the rich resource that the Judeo-Christian (or any other) angelologic tradition is; this is not a Pseudo-Dionysius Quest; it is something both less ambitious and more accessible, or at least such is my hope.
With that said, I hope you enjoy the quest, with all the sin, redemption and revenge it seeks to contain.
[X] The Celestial Firmament, in the Northern War against the Intruders.
yeah ok but imagine if you had this angel right and she goes yandere for cthulhu and she falls because she thinks nyarlathothep is the ideal husbando and her husbando is a shit so heaven exiles her because she has fucking shit taste
Somewhat seriously, I feel like Lovecraftian tentacle fallen angels and Ye Olde Traditional "Muh Daddy Issues. Muh Hellfire and Brimstone" fallen angels are overdone.
Omnicidal Nazghul fallen angels, on the other hand...
The first sounds interesting the nearest to a classic fallen Angel but I would like something different. The second sounds like a fusion of the New World of Darkness's Abyss and The Dresden Files Outsiders.
The third feels like the Infernals of Exalted. I want something different something final.
So
[X] The Hadean Plain, in the Western War against the Silence.
"You are alone, child. There is only darkness for you, and only death for your people. These ancients are only the beginning. I will command a great and terrible army. We will sail to a billion worlds. We will sail until every light has been extinguished. You are strong, child. But I am beyond strength. I am the end. And I have come for you."
[ ] The Wasteland of Ash, in the Southern War against the Infernal.
No plant grows there. No love lives there. The sun is never bright there, no nation claims it, no map shows it. The ground is arid. Sometimes it crumbles underfoot, opening onto the vastness of nothing underneath. No one of interest was ever born there. No wind ever blows there. Nobody goes there save by force; and even though you can break a person by chaining them there for a day or two, even though it'd be the kind of punishment any despot or cruel authority would love to inflict, it doesn't even get used for that very often, because the thing that places have that make them easy to remember is a thing the Dead Zone no longer has.
It was a place. It had qualities. It had stuff. It had things. They went away.
I am so deeply tempted, but the philosophy write-up doesn't speak to me. The black fire is such an interesting power, though.
[ ] The Tangle of Notions, in the Eastern War against the Primordial.
Gods found themselves born into the world in the primeval state of the amoeba, the virus, and the mold. We see this through the lens of science, squinting back, as the emergence of single-celled prokaryotes from the inanimate — the dead world, beginning to waken to a state of war.
Listen, for this has always been the truth of life: that it hungers for the death of other life. That from the moment of its birth it seeks to consume the life around it, to subsume the life around it, to subdue the life around it and make it a portion of itself. In the primeval tangle, the gods that were the greatest predators survived. They are the baseline for the world.
We know this — we should know this, at least — Empathy was a latecomer to the game.
[ ] The Wasteland of Ash, in the Southern War against the Infernal.
I am so deeply tempted, but the philosophy write-up doesn't speak to me. The black fire is such an interesting power, though.
[x] The Tangle of Notions, in the Eastern War against the Primordial.
The gods of the unformed world, on the other hand... oh yeah.
The Primordials actually have my favorite fluff, but I am just not into elemental powers. Especially in a Quest like this, where they don't feel... Transgressive enough.
The Primordials actually have my favorite fluff, but I am just not into elemental powers. Especially in a Quest like this, where they don't feel... Transgressive enough.
I think the write-up is more important than the power, unless we decide to jump off the slippery slope - in particular I'm not a fan of taking the alien space wasps because the metaphor I see them being is addiction, and I'm not super into that as a theme for the story. If I was voting based on powers I'd be all in behind the Infernal because weird metaphysics debates are my jam, but the Primordials standing in for instinct, for rage, for a lack of empathy is something I want to explore.
edit: also, you'd best believe i'll be leaning on gargulec to make the primordial aesthetic as much 'precambrian' as 'mammalian'
[X] The Hadean Plain, in the Western War against the Silence.
I am absolutely down for a Quest about an angel that so loved the world she would rather see it preserved for an eternity than risk it becoming corrupted through rampant change.
"Hush, child, and do not worry - you are perfect, just the way you are, and that is how I shall keep you."
The problem with the intruders to me is there are apparently the mystic equivalent to Warhammer 40k Trynaids. They want to consume the universe from the inside out. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of room for interpretation and discussion.
The other groups have some sort of goal or vision for the universe. Whether it's a blasted hellscape, a return to the rule of the oldest beings, preserving the universe against entropy and decay etc.
We can talk to others within those factions, guide the grand war a specific way with them. But ultimately the Intruders are going to consume the universe.
[X] The Hadean Plain, in the Western War against the Silence.
I am absolutely down for a Quest about an angel that so loved the world she would rather see it preserved for an eternity than risk it becoming corrupted through rampant change.
"Hush, child, and do not worry - you are perfect, just the way you are, and that is how I shall keep you."
The problem with the intruders to me is there are apparently the mystic equivalent to Warhammer 40k Trynaids. They want to consume the universe from the inside out. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of room for interpretation and discussion.
The other groups have some sort of goal or vision for the universe. Whether it's a blasted hellscape, a return to the rule of the oldest beings, preserving the universe against entropy and decay etc.
We can talk to others within those factions, guide the grand war a specific way with them. But ultimately the Intruders are going to consume the universe.
Why would anyone want that? killing for beings apathetic to human life to begin with is boring. being crazy for something that drives people crazy on sight is even more so.
Much better is Cthulhu-Tsundere's. denying your love for the Great Old Ones only makes them stronger.
"I-it's not like I wanted to wake dread Cthulhu from his eternal deathlike slumber beneath the ancient city of R'lyeh or anything. b-baka."
