Overview of the Twelve Knights
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Archangel of Mercy and the Leader of the Twelve Knights, Gabriel
Of all God's hands, there were the four most famous and most powerful. Lucifer was God's star, Michael was God's judgment, Raphael His compassion, and Gabriel was His mercy, His first and truest personal messenger.
The archangel Gabriel makes his existence no mystery, as he has forever dedicated himself to just one ideal -- what he calls God's Plan. This Plan, Gabriel believes, entails the loss of the Lucifer's rebels, the war in heaven, the murder of the Christ Son, and the encroaching sin welcomed by His unappreciative creation. And, more importantly, the mistake of the Twelve Knights trapped upon Earth.
To Gabriel, there is no permanent loss from Heaven for the Twelve. Everything that has happened is God's will, and His Plan for His creation. Gabriel embraces this Plan with infinite trust and infinite loyalty, serving it before he would serve any of his brothers and their dissidence. They are here for a specific reason. They are the angelic front on Earth. They were not trapped, not lost, not forgotten; they were dispatched! They were sent to destroy the demons.
They will do as they were commanded.
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Angel of Holy Justice, Camael
His name means, "He Who Sees God", and it's rather apt, because his eyes have been forever turned up on the Heavens.
He is an angel of both war and peace, the patron of destruction and compassion. He represents divine love -- the love reserved only for God -- Chief order of powers, personification of holy justice. He remains infallibly loyal to Gabriel because Gabriel is infallibly loyal to God, acting without question any and all demands of his archangel brother.
And his actions are noticed. It is apparent within the Twelve Knights that Camael wields the power behind Gabriel's quest, ensuring the latter's leadership and suppressing dissidence within the others. He is unquestionably powerful, but unlike Af, the Twelve's second warrior angel, Camael is peaceful and gentle at heart.
His only passion beyond his divine love was for what men made and called the chivalric code. Though their knights rarely ever lived to such standards, there was an angel among them that found these the purest sorts of ideals one could ever live by. To a fault, he has dedicated himself to chivalry, calling humility, honour, courage, and fidelity to his part in Gabriel's war. He is an old-fashioned angel in this respect, honest and humbled, and sooner to lop off his own hand before he'd ever strike a lady.
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Angel of Love, Flaef
He has immersed himself with the concept of mortal love: that which exists apart, and contests divine love. He found that men have, since their creation, put a fascinating concentration on loving each other before loving their Creator. Some make it their lives. Many have died for this love. Others will kill for it. Some seem to have forgotten divine love altogether, choosing their consorts and their children before God.
Flaef was created for this question, for the inquiry of love. Was love of the flesh all lust, all sinful behaviour spurred on by the whispers of demons? Are human beings justifed in loving each other as much, or even more than they should love their Creator? Or was mortal love a noble thing, a hopeful thing, that which has the potential of compassion and sacrifice?
It was a simple fascination at first... a duty to God to fulfill a specific role, but something has changed in Flaef. He is engrossed in the nature of human love and sexality. So obsessed in it, recently, he's been hit by the passions of the Grigori choir.
The story of the Grigori begins where they were the first and only choir of earthbound angels, called the Watchers. But one day they stopped watching and began to touch. They fell in love with mortals. They conceived monsters. And they fell to Hell for it.
That knowledge has stopped Flaef from committing the sin of copulation. But he thinks about it. He yearns for it. He is enthralled with people, and he wants to feel what they feel. He wants the passion, the abandon, and the comfort of love. He wants to know their bodies. He wants to be loved.
He is on the edge between watching and touching.
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Angel of Wrath, Af
If Af had to recall his most treasured memory in his millennia of existence, it would be the Great War.
There he stood on the blazing, bloodied Elysian Fields, soaked in the butchery of his fallen brothers and sisters. It was at that moment when his weapons where burned into his hands, he could smell burning wings and endless screams, and in his mouth his first taste of gore, something great and horrible dawned upon him. Looking upwards on the seared heavens, changed forever for the horrors it had witnessed, Af knew he loved something more than God.
It would be the last thing Af would see. He was struck blind at that instant, and expelled from his battlefield.
His imprisonment on Earth changed nothing in the angel. With his savage bloodlust awakened, wanting no more than the glory of victory, the heralding call of pain, and a moment’s catharsis for his perpetual rage, Af joined mankind at their front lines. He has been in all of Earth’s wars. He even instigated one or two on his own.
Taking no sides, his sword devoted to nothing but his own fury, the murder-hungry angel helped rise crusades, helped fell empires, and took a keen joy in man’s preoccupation in weapons. When blades fell to gunpowder, and when guns grew into the blinding clouds of the first atomic bomb, he was there. And he was mildly amused for a little while.
In actuality, Earth has done little to assuage Af’s brutality. He has not found a war yet to weigh a feather against the Great War campaigned in Heaven. Men, in all their evolution, in all their growing intelligence, will never know how to fight like angels.
He has confronted Gabriel for his little fixes, the worst discussions leaving Af deaf and mute, as well as his sustained blindness. Despite this, Af still swears his loyalty with the Twelve Knights. Gabriel, however disliked, has promised him a second glorious battle, if not against Lucifer himself, but the Disgraced.
Even with only two senses intact, and even though he may distinguish friend or foe, Af is waiting for his Second War.
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Archangel of Healing, Raphael
Raphael has always been gutsy with his selflessness; he’s the only of the Knights who has openly confronted Gabriel with his goals. It is possibly only the absurd power he carries that let him weather such a discussion.
Though he remains loyal and consistent to his leader, it is because he too believes God had a reason to bring them down here. But Raphael does not believe destroying demons or mending a rippled world fabric to be the first on their angelic agenda.
He came down to the world and he saw suffering. He is immersed in human pain, human illness, human cruelty, and human compassion, and refuses to turn from it. Raphael believes God sent him -- trapped him -- to help his dying creation, to save them from themselves.
And on God's behalf, Raphael cares deeply for those countless human beings, protecting and treasuring their lives, mingling with the lost, sick, lame, and ignorant lambs to help shuffle them back to the herd. He takes on an insistent, faceless, thankless role on Earth, playing a mortal among them, offering them aid and advice, a gentle guidance that comes with no cost.
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Angel of Music, Israfel
They say God had to stuff wax in the ears of the first men, to deafen them from the voices of angels. They say that once, only once these men heard Israfel sing. It made them forget to eat, sleep, bear lines... to live save for empty stares up at the skies.
But that's only what they say.
She was the angel that invented song, and her song lured the sun to rise on the first day, and her lullaby lulled it to sink into the first horizon. Her voice inspired her brothers, and brought their hearts to experience impossible joys and raptures... while her own was entrusted to another.
They also say that her songs, every one she ever sang, were for one being.
She was in love with the first prince of Heaven, Lucifer, so passionately, and so completely, that his betrayal and his fall were said to change her forever. The war in Heaven broke her heart, and despite that great love, still she bravely fought Lucifer's rebels and helped purge them from paradise. Now she is of the Twelve trapped on Earth, and it is said she has neither sang nor spoken since that day. Millennia after the war she feels just the same, just as grave, and she spends her time to herself but always among people, watching them, wanting something they have. A clean slate.
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Angel of Memory, Zadkiel (DECEASED)
Zadkiel's murder by the Disgraced was a strategic blow dealt upon the Knights.
While all messengers are ageless, the immortality possessed by their bodies does not extend to their memory. They can and do forget just as human beings do. And especially on Earth they can feel the deterioration.
Zadkiel was the only angel bestowed by God with a timeless memory. He was incapable of forgetting. Gabriel immediately dispatched him as the keeper of the Memory, to extensively record and document their years spent among the mortals, their plans, their successes, and most importantly, their mistakes.
He excelled at this task, and soon became quite fond, if not devoutly protective of it. Zadkiel's Memory was infallible to Gabriel, second only to God's Plan, and his position among the Knights grew into an important, if not crucial one.
He was Gabriel's prized advisor, keeping only to the leader angel or to himself. He held little interest in mankind, but was a lover of antiquity. He revered history as much as he embodied it, and his mind was always turned toward the past. He held little interest in the present position of the Knights, and the future war that lay ahead of them.
Zadkiel's backward thinking would be his undoing. The clash that resulted in his death was what opened Earth’s very fabric, the fourth dimension broken, bestowing all benefactors the newfound means to carry in the souls from other worlds.
But it gets worse than that. Gabriel has discovered he cannot read Zadkiel’s tomes. His sacred Memory is as lost to the world as he.
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God’s Lion, Aariel
Aariel is something of a mystery, even among his fellow Twelve, and they are wary of his torn loyalties. Only a piece of his time is spent with his brothers and sisters, where he is loyal and devoted to them only because they are his family. But then he is gone, immersed into nature, protecting and guiding and savouring the Earth what God created.
He is said to have the greatest love affair with the world, one to rival his love for the Lord Himself, and the angel goes to great lengths to guard what little land remains untouched by men. They call him God's Lion, and he is, proud and fierce and a noble consort of the wild.
But the Twelve Knights find he has become somewhat... bestial in his solitude, turning into something with animal behaviours, animal instincts, and an animal's lust for the hunt.
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Daughter of the Voice, Bat Qol
Within both Heaven and Earth there was a single being, an echo of God's divine will, the side of God's voice and prophecy that was meant to be heard by men. This voice was embodied as an angel, called Bat Qol, but she was a being of many names. When they could hear her, most famously she was called the Daughter of the Voice.
She was especially the Lord's voice of prophecy, a consciousness meant only to contain and embody all His wisdom. She could not speak for herself. She had not one opinion that was a direct rely of her Lord's. She only existed as a messenger, delivering divine foresight. Soon she became a known as a divination among men; long ago there was a legend among God's first people that, if they were to pray to Bat Qol, the first words uttered to them by the world would be oracular.
Bat Qol was a mysterious but obedient servant of God, even if she enjoyed speaking to and instructing mankind than her celestial brethren. But she was faithful and respected until one day, in the years after the war, she disappeared. Some say Lucifer's rebellion had always lived in her heart. Others say she destroyed herself, unable to stand speaking only the Lord's words and not her own. Others say she is merely hiding, down among those people she enjoyed so much.
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Angel of Artistic Creation, Uriel
Uriel is so bored of the war. Really, it's been going on for too long. It ended millennia ago. The Heavens were split, the rebellious were dealt with, the wrath of God was visited upon the deserving, yada yada yada, please wake him when it's over.
He was an angel of artistic achievement and glory... and carrying grudges, it seems, as to this day he detests having to pick up a sword on the Elysian battlefields. He despised every moment, but he went against his own nature and took sword against the fallen, and this is how God decided to repay him.
Despite that, he can admit to himself it wasn't all bad. Earth gave him Da Vinci. It gave him Michelangelo. It gave him Picasso and Monet and Van Gogh and Munch. It implored of him to bestow his inspiration upon his favourite human beings. Civilization was Uriel's easel.
Of course, Gabriel would be all too prepared to disrupt Uriel's paradise. Millennia of being forced to stomach God’s Plan, preparing for the Second War, and the threat of noncommittal deserving only quick and cruel vengeance.
There's only so much one can take. Even if they're immortal.
Uriel makes regular, unscheduled escapes into the Earth despite his leader’s warnings and growing unrest. His greatest confidante is ironically not a single one of his allies... but the demon Furcas. They were the closest of allies and share a healthy, mutual rivalry, and meet often in secret in mortal guise. There they play chess. The angel and demon meet other not as enemies, but equals, forgetting the battlefront to debate philosophy, mankind, and how to get themselves freed from Earth.
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God's Secret, Raziel
The Knights are wise not to trust Raziel.
He is the only angel rumoured to possess more of the Lord’s secrets than Metatron, His very voice, or Michael, His very prince. Some say that God entrusted Raziel personally with his knowledge because the angel knows never to tell.
Some say that Raziel, with all his cunning, stole God’s secrets like Prometheus stole the fire. And there he took God’s knowledge and dared further to write them down into a tome, where he hid it somewhere within Earth.
Raziel himself neither confirms nor denies this.
But one fact holds true above all: Raziel speaks nothing of himself. He is the most private of all the Twelve, and little is known about him even to his closest allies. Despite Gabriel’s hot disapproval of his manner of secrecy, the angel is both tolerated and treasured for the vast amounts of knowledge he imparts upon his fellow benefactors -- of course, when he wants.
If there is one thing Raziel has revealed of himself it is his great preoccupation with people. He enjoys them. He likes man’s inquisitive nature. He especially likes the modern age’s vow of skepticism, to question facts and infallible testament that would question God’s word Itself. He finds it’s a promising trait.
Raziel holds a deep and secret affection for mankind’s investigators, its policemen and detectives, and if he were ever to indulge himself in a leave of celestial absence, it would be without doubt to go mingle with the flatfoots.
There’s nothing he enjoys more than watching someone solve a good mystery.
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Angel of Joy, Sandalphon
Something has happened to Sandalphon. Something is happening to him.
It is a topic rarely mentioned among the Twelve Knights. Gabriel, the closest brother to seraph, denies this has happened at all: in their time on Earth, it has only been discussed once. It is rumoured that Af's muteness became of that discussion, his tongue ripped from his mouth by Gabriel's hand, when the former dared to bring up Sandalphon's name to the topic of angelic violence.
Sandalphon was the Lord's angel of joy. He indulged in God's love and radiated it to all his brothers, and beyond that, to the world beyond and the men within it. And to a precious few, those that looked up and believed in their Creator, the angel's love was a real thing, intense and glorious.
Then in the war against Lucifer's rebels, he found himself forgotten on Earth. The skies were closed to him and his eleven brothers and sisters. God's voice went silent. God's love was murdered.
Sandalphon could no longer relish in his Lord's grace. He could no longer feel it. And he could not understand why. Why, why had his Lord cut him off? Why was he no longer able to feel the joy he represented -- that he very embodied? And what was this new feeling inside him... this hollowness. This sensation of being gutted.
And now something has happened to Sandalphon. There are consequences to be reaped from this mistake. Angels were never designed for the world. There was one choir, the grigori, that were bred specifically to serve men, and they were tempted and they fell. An angel like Sandalphon, so dependent on his contact with God, his happiness fed only by his place within paradise... he was never meant to be here.
He was going slowly, irreparably mad. He was lost without the divine love. He was nothing without his joy. He spent centuries trying to tear the metaphysical walls between Heaven and Earth, desperate, starving, insane to find himself reunited with his master.
But now, and without warning, it seems he has settled, and that is why Gabriel so violently finds nothing amiss. He thinks Sandalphon has finally seen God's Plan, finally felt it, and the newfound, sincere joy he radiates is because of it.
There is some truth. Sandalphon has found joy again. And Sandalphon thinks he sees God.
But he is finding Him in depravity.
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