Redemption
January 23, 2009
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.
