Israfel

Israfel stood in a field of wheat with twenty other indigent workers, making his way up a row gathering the chaffs as they were cut by the man in front of him. The work was methodical and slow, and the tedium of the step shuffle, lift, cut, lift, bind, step was pushed to the side by the singing of the workers. A regional tune, a variant on all such tunes, a song that came from a place within the performers, a song not made of the lungs and the throat but from the whole of the will. A song that carried only as far as there were people to hear it but far enough to meet all who would listen.

Israfel wore a cassock in a light tan over similarly colored pants and shirt. He was barefoot and his average frame was bent under the weight of the wheat slung across his back. His skin was darkening from the weeks of work in the sun just outside of Persepolis after it had paled from months working the hunting season with an Inuit tribe in Yellow Horse. This was his homeland, near the great desert in central Iran, and he was happy to stretch in the sun as he lifted the more wheat and added it to his load.

The day was growing old and shadows began to spread through the mountains and the field. The timbre of the song was brighter at this time, the promise of rest, fellowship, and meals added a layered harmony to the voices of the chorus and the work hastened just a little to complete a row or an internal quota.

Israfel was not fond of night. He understood its necessity but his was not the rhythms and songs of the dark, his was the music of life and the yearning of spirits to be complete and whole. Somewhere Shamshiel was about to stop breathing the sun in this area. The notes of his breath were as visible to Israfel as the beams of sun were to anyone else. And it was in this way that Israfel saw the world, chord structures and melodies, a flowing staff with notes of purity and dischord  running along it.

The working day had ended and the harvest was layed in piles to be thrashed by other workers in the morning. Lights were coming on across the camp and the smell of food joined the refrain in Israfel’s mind like a section of an orchestra springing into the mileau of a movement.

Nephilim

The children of angels and man originally created by a Job like argument between two angels and God. They claimed that given a chance the same as the humans they could rise above the temptations of sin and depravity. God, as he did in those days, acquiesced to the their bargain and a contingent of angels was sent to Earth.

It didn’t take those angels long to begin fornicating in earnest with the daughters and sons of God and a whole race of half angel half human beings was created. The Nephilim, a distinction for those who are 1/2 and 1/2 regardless of if their parent was acting as a female or a male at the time, are the basis for legends of demi-gods the world over.

They got to be so plentiful and troubling that Michael was dispatched to round them up and shove them in a valley to await sentencing. (The parallel to the Titans of the Greeks and the enslaving of giants by the Norse is unmistakable here.)

The great flood was supposed to kill them off and did wipe out many, but later giant figures such as Goliath would surface showing that the Nephilim blood line was still active on Earth.

Nephilim are powerful beings with certain divine powers. All Nephilim are essentially holy at birth but corruption comes and goes. Fallen Angels are unable to procreate with humans to create Nephilim, such spawn are always demons and monsters of terrestrial origin. Though the act of procreating with humans was deemed an sin in Heaven after the initial plague that was mostly curtailed by the Flood, it still occurs and harsh punishments are exacted upon those who engage in such acts, but the act in and of itself does not warrant automatic casting down of the angel involved.

Why this crime/sin is not punished with automatic expulsion from Heaven is unknown but it good money points to an edict from on High that even Michael can not twist or turn.

Even so there are precious few Nephilim wandering around. And the children of the Nephilim lose their touch of the Divine rather quickly. Within a single generation in fact.

There are rumors of several Nephilim that have bred further with other angels creating something greater than a Nephilim, lower than an angel and different the the Scions.

Whether an individual is 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 blood they are all referred to as Nephilim. The only distinction made is that of the  parentage of the Nephilim. Those born of an angel acting in a female role, that of the womb, are sterile be they male or female children. Those that are born from a human woman with an angel acting as procreator are capable of passing along the blood.

Ireul

The angel Ireul lived in large dark rooms populated almost exclusively by the blinking of power and indicator lights. The walls of her living space were packed to the breaking point with racks upon racks of servers. The heat that would normally be created by such a massive set-up was dissipated by the nature of her Office and the power necessary to run such things was likewise supplied through will over wall.

Ireul sat in the myriad glow of a dozen monitors constantly painting and repainting her toenails.

Ireul was a small thing, barely four feet tall and 80 pounds. She resembled a fairly average 13-year-old girl and the darkness of her skin let her blend into the darkness of the room save for her eyes and the sometimes iridescent quality of certain nail polishes.

Ireul worked without sleep and without food; though she did eat a lot of gummy bears by habit more than necessity.

Ireul spoke in simple curt phrases. Her tone as clipped as her sentences, but she refused to use acronyms of any kind. Perhaps this was to avoid internetese and perhaps it was simply to keep the possibly hundreds of such abbreviations that she dealt with daily straightforward and uncomplicated.

Ireul wore sundresses, indoors in a nearly completely dark room, and had a disposition that sometimes matched the dress and sometimes matched the room. Her attitude was dichotic and swung back and forth from sentence to sentence with no variation between strictly stoic or exuberantly cheery.

Ireul spent her time data mining and blogging and emailing and searching for bits of various information that she carefully and purposefully disseminated where she thought it should be. Her task was to further invention and spur on the inquisitive nature of man to create and build more and more complex devices.

Not that she was always a fan of the results of those labors. And she has more than once gone on staccato tirades against the sour grapes of her labors.

Redemption

The central theme of The Third Host stories is redemption. Some characters are obsessed with obtaining it such while other characters arr doing their damndest to rewrite the system of it. Some characters want to understand its mechanics and some are searching for it’s origin.

Conversely, characters such as Uriel, the current angel of death is trying to understand why there have been 12 other angels with the same Office, almost all of whom later Fell.

The project originally started back in 1998 when I was working on connecting several comic book stories into a central universe. I’m a fan of continuity and so sought to find a place that could allow for several different cosmologies and time lines to fit together.

So originially there was a cafe that served as a sort of way point between all universes. A time traveller or dimensional hopper hang out. The place, the Oroberous Cafe, was run by Isaac Asimov, because nobody knew as much about everything up and down the human knowledge spectrum as Isaac.

I later found that a writer named Spider Robinson had created a place that followed along the same lines, so I removed it as the central focus and tried to find a title that fit what I was trying to do with the then only central character, Daniel Grace.

Daniel used to be a very different person than he is now and he has the unhappy misfortune of being able to see the best and worst examples of who he is at any time. While working to get away from his Infernal self and make his way to his Divine self he had to travel through time a lot to fix things that he was busy screwing up at the same time.

At some point in 2002 the focus shifted from Daniel’s struggle and over to the angel Olivier (pronounced just Oliver, without the extra ‘i’). Olivier is the only angel in any account of lore or myth that actively has been seeking redemption.

Once Olivier was at the head of the story the whole intent of the universe started to shape up. At the time it was called Opposition, and was a set of stories about working against the most basic idea. Satan, Lucifer, the Devil, became a character commonly referred too as Adrian Lucien and the guy was pretty much hired by God to represent the opposing side to Heaven so as to give humanity a choice.

That persisted for until 2004 when I was at a religious function and someone was reading a passage about the Third Host of angels. I was intrigued to think about the implications. I had always known that in stories there were three hosts, each made of one third of the whole of the heavenly host, but I hadn’t spent any real time thinking about what that third group did.

So, recruiting my partner in crime, Rowsdower, who had a whole set of angel characters working at various tasks himself (most of the angel of death stuff is his, for example), we reshaped the concept and gave it a more general title The Third Host.

It’s a diverse group with a lot of goings on, and not everyone is always on the same page or fighting for the same side, be it Heaven, Hell, or Earth. But the umbrella holds up and we’ve hatched a good 500 characters since then.

That being said, 11 years of work have gone into the background concept of this stuff and while not all of it was grueling over a computer typing work, it takes a lot of growing and aging to get certain concepts out of a simplistic mold and start wrestling with the gritty reality of a world that may essentially be hanging between two opposing concepts, but has a lot of room to fight for a place of its own in between.

(Untitled) Hematopathologist Story

An unassuming hematopathologist working at a cancer treatment research facility in New York City gets a hold of a rand9om blood sample with unusual properties.. The amazing curative and regenerative properties of the blood are intriguing but considered a fluke by the man until his own daughter is diagnosed with AIDS.

Desperate to cure her he returns to the mysterious sample of blood. On his search to acquire more he comes across an angel that routinely gives blood as a way of spreading little miracles.

The hematopathologist wants to work with the angel to generate cures for more widespread problems. Realizing the risk this would cause to the world in general the angel flees.

Incensed the hematopathologist captures the angel and begins milking him for the precious miracle working substance.

Meanwhile, the daughter gets further caught up in a seedy underworld that led her to acquire AIDS. The men trash her father’s office one night looking for drugs and drug making tools only to find an angel.

The angel, desperate to be freed reveals too much information about itself and the fabric of the heavens.

The men take the angel and their boss begins the process of further killing the already weakened creature.

The hematopathologist, realizing his error in capturing the angel works with his daughter and an odd friend of hers to rectify the situation as it spirals into a situation of biblical proportions.

Angels, as a Matter of Definition

An angel is a being created by God to serve a Function. An angels Function is intrinsically linked to its Name. (Either by purpose or simply by a matter of Hebraic etymology is unimportant to the writers.)

Angels are soul-less, they are animate and have a level of free will, but that will can only be expressed in the fashion in which they carry out their Office. Without a soul they are subject to very little in the way of change.

An angel may go rogue by become Infernal or neutral, thereby joining the Third Host, but in no recorded history has an angel ever returned to a state of grace and become Divine. This subject is the motivation of several key figures in the Third Host storyline.

An angel is most powerful when under the direct Form of their Office, this is also the only time an angel can be properly killed.

Killing an angel is an act of incredible and precise malice. The angel must be fully in the Form of their Office, and must have the Symbol of their Office confiscated in the act of the killing.

An angels Symbol and Form of Office vary wildly from angel to angel, but are always recognizable as such.

Angels are organized by Choirs in Heaven, Bands in Hell, and of little consequence on Earth. Generally speaking the higher rank up the ladder the more powerful the individual, but there are always exceptions particularly when one angel treads on the territory of anther’s Office.

Angels are also a product of human minds. The longer an angel has existed the more likely they have undergone metaphysical evolutionary changes. Depending on what damage has been done to their Office, or what reverence it is held in you will see different affectation to whomever holds that Office.

Concept

Whether it be strictly biblical, the idle fantasies of Milton or Dante, or perhaps even the obsessions of Alexander Pope, the concept of a War in Heaven in which God himself was challenged by his second in command Lucifer, is literary dynamite.

The forces marshaled across the Elysian fields, the cries of death and carnage.

But, the War in Heaven, much like the wars of Earth, are not two sided. There was a third and equal portion of the Host that neither fought for God or against Lucifer. This Third Host, of which little record or literary mention exists, were those who chose not to fight.

They were not pacifists, they were not cowards, they were beings with another plan altogether. Whether they stayed neutral to protect the Earth during the conflict or simply refused to be drawn into diametric conflict, their purpose continues on today, standing as a mid point between two factions that will not think peace, cannot accept compromise, and likely will never stop fighting.

Led by imminent will and no clear design, they work to keep humanity evolving and moving forward so that someday the War will be forced to conclude.