PROLOGUE

The Account of Castiel, he who was once an Angel of the Lord

The first Angel, Lucifer Morningstar, fell for the sin of refusal. He was not only significant in that he was the first, but in that he was the impetus for the grander event. It was he who betrayed his brothers and sisters, and brought to them temptation and ruin.

The remaining Angels were forced to follow his treacherous path after Jesus Christ, the son of God, rose and redeemed human sin.

When the Angels witnessed the passion of the Christ, they were distressed and disillusioned by his torturous suffering – that their Father's truest son should be forced to endure so much on humanity's behalf, when they made his death a folly with a crown of thorns. At a loss to explain, and affected by anguish, some were drawn to Lucifer's gospel – that which proclaimed the inferiority of the human race. Affected by his twisted and decrepit logic, they forgot themselves and began to question their Father's love for the mortal kind. Through that gospel, their minds were muddied, and with improperly considered evangelism they spread the disease to their kin.

The dismissal of their Father's most perfect creation angered him, and so by his most mighty hand all his Angels were cast out from Heaven with such force of frustration that they were hurled upon the Earth as falling, flaming stars. Not content with that punishment alone, their Father closed the Gates of Heaven to their kind, and his first children became one and the same with humans, as earthbound creatures.

Upon their being thrown from the heavenly realm, the Angels' true forms (being those forms that defy metaphysical dimensions) were contained within those of the creatures which they had refused to admire. As such, the Angels appeared human, but were distinguished from them visibly by the presence of enormous wings, and invisibly, by the presence of Grace – a taint of the divinity from their former home.

In their angelic form, and then those human forms, the Grace was the source of the Angels' supernatural abilities, such as teleportation, telepathy and healing. But unbeknownst to them, cut off from their Father, the Grace was finite and it depleted rapidly.

When the Angels fell, their Father did forsake them. At the loss of the comfort of his hand on their shoulders, and his word in their minds, they were all subject to absolute terror and a fitful kind of madness that spread slow, vicious pollution in their minds. There were many at a loss. They loved their Father throughout their entire being – body and soul. Many had loved his humans – they had cared for them and watched over them, so why had he dismissed them?

And so, in confusion, they split into factions, each to pursue a goal that would lead to their demise.

Some joined Lucifer's ranks. They blamed the humans for their fall – for being so fundamentally unlovable in their hateful, vile cruelty. Those Angels consumed their Grace by laying siege to human towns upon Lucifer's orders and in destroying those who had caused them suffering. Their anger was boundless and thousands were annihilated. But use of Grace in anger, and in wanton destruction, lead to its quick depletion. Soon, their Grace was extinguished.

Others blamed Lucifer for the fall, and those wayward Angels that had not been true disciples of their Father's word. They avenged their Father's sadness by tearing their victims limb from limb while they screamed. Their brutality and viciousness extinguished the light of Grace inside them, and they too were left without it.

Others tried harder to love the humans in their Father's name. They sought to redeem their failings by tending to human needs. They healed those who were ill or injured, they helped their crops to grow so that none would go hungry, and they brought beauty, music and art to the people. In their kindness, their Grace lasted the longest. But eventually, it too was extinguished.

When the Grace was exhuasted the Angels awoke inflicted with pure humanity, albeit with a winged anatomy. Never before had they witnessed the world through a truly humans lens, and they despised it. The world was too bright and too loud. They were too cold, or too hot. And they were hungry and thirsty all the time. Many had never lived among the humans, and knew not how to sate such urges. Even those who had were lost, overwhelmed by the intense physicality of their form.

Worse than that, their existence hurt. All at once, they felt the full pain of the human condition. The physical pain, the mental pain and the existential pain.

Never before had they been subject to such unbridled emotion, and they could not contain it. A new seed of madness planted itself in the minds made fertile by Lucifer's works, and grew there, using rationality, compassion and love as its life force. Slowly, it strangled them from the inside until they were driven only by a desire to avenge their circumstance and their desperation to return to their Father's glory.

And so, slowly at first, but then faster, they became animal. They lost the power of speech and remembered only their hatred for humans and the desire to see them destroyed. Their bodies changed too, and they became unrecognizable under a full down of jagged, ragged feathers and hunched four legged silhouettes, until they were nothing more than vile beasts.

They took to the skies and prowled there as winged mercenaries for the forces of chaos and destruction. They haunted human citadels and villages, and hunted their inhabitants for meat and sport. At night, they screamed a vile chorus that promised destruction and malice to all those that were unlike them – a hymn of vengeance, punishment and retribution.

The humans fought to protect their lands, and restrain the creatures. But they could not exterminate them. Even without their Grace, the Angels were superhuman in their speed and strength, made brutal by the presence of claws with the strength of iron and fanged teeth. They all but eradicated humanity in many places, but the decimation they wreaked was not enough to sate their bloodlust. On they continued, growing ever fiercer and crueler.

The last societies were on the brink of destruction when they were saved. A human mage discovered a way to keep the beasts at bay, with a series of sigils drawn around the perimeter of their cities, across which angels could not pass without incineration.

So prohibited, the Angels retreated to the wilderness where they could sate their appetites and anger with the beasts there. That was not the end of their violence, for those on the roads were still at risk of ambush and attack. But gradually, communities recovered. Citadels grew and trade routes were developed to form a network between cities, to ensure human development could continue.

A tentative kind of peace was established. The humans were largely secure to grow old and prosper. Only those who travelled on the roads were vulnerable to attack, but they became proficient at travelling furtively, and loss was minimal in comparison to previous centuries.

Those who did travel were largely traders, and those volunteer knights who protected them. Such soldiers were venerated as heroes, and considered saviors of their cities – particularly when drought or famine threatened to starve a city from the inside out, and they provided crucial supplies and medicines to their people from neighboring towns.

Perhaps it was not peace, specifically, but at least an absence of grand suffering.

…

My kind were rare, even centuries ago. We are the Angels still possessed of our Grace, who properly remember our Father and our home.

When we fell, we refused to engage in hatred. We afforded our Father's creation the admiration it deserved. By luck, our Grace was not extinguished before we understood its finitude. And so, we were spared.

We survived by living carefully – by eating and sleeping and drinking, as humans did, to avoid wanton consumption of Grace, and by cautiously avoiding accident to prevent the need for healing. But stasis did not suit us, and we worked tirelessly to protect the creatures that our Father cherished most.

When we could, we used our Grace to restore the lives of those we saw attacked, and to vanquish their attackers. Otherwise, we fought as humans against the creatures, and protected the travelers on the Roads.

But even a cautious life wielded casualties. Eventually, my brothers and sisters began to fall. Some fell by accident – they utilized the last vestiges of their Grace unthinkingly, having not felt the ache that marked its depletion. Others extinguished theirs deliberately by healing humans in spite of the ache. Some were injured so severely that their Grace could no longer repair them, and they died as humans died – screaming. Regardless, they all eventually re-awoke, to join the ranks of the unthinking. When they turned, we slit their throats to spare them the humiliation.

We did not know then that it was not enough to save them.

We fought until there were five of us remaining. When our final sister fell, we hid our Grace within ourselves and chose to refuse oblivion. We betrayed our brothers and sisters that had died in service of our Father's cause, and we chose cowardice, leaving the humans to die on the roads and retreating to the wilderness as hermits.

At first, we lived together as humans, but we grew tired of suffering and tired of each other. And we grew tired of the killing, and the pain of those absent grew too heavy. After some time, perhaps a century, we separated and we lived alone.

I know not whether my final brothers still live.

I have lived alone now for two hundred years, in the cottage in which this account is likely to be found. There is no other aspect of my life I wish to impart, for it is of no consequence, other than this:

God is dead. He has forsaken us to darkness and misery. God is dead. I am only one who was once a harbringer of the divine. But to that, no more.

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