Not The Sisters of Mercy, My Wings Dipped in Blood

By: The Archangel Raphael, Havona’s Assassin

I’ve been doing this for a very long time – killing, that is.

I’m not just good at it. I’m excellent at it. If you’re on my hit list, consider yourself already dead.

As my old nemesis, Nazz Madame General Kuko Kiena would say, “Assassination is my favorite leisure sport.”

HOW I BECAME A PROFESSIONAL ASSASSIN

My first excursion into La La Land on an extended killing spree happened in conjunction with the initiation of Creation number one. I was only seventeen and a half years of age when I marched into Creation Initiation Sphere Numero Uno, a blissful grin plastered across my face. I stood by my King Ayasia’s left hand throughout that first creation as his private assassin. I was the hard fist for that sneaky little left cross that came out of nowhere, aimed to crush the side of the enemy’s head.

We had taken bets on how long Creation number one would last before the Overlord’s Etherial Leviathans would clog up life so badly, we would have to flush the entire construct into The Lake of Fire. Me, being the pessimist, said only a few million years. Just enough time to build a bunch of Celestial Mansion World Spheres, and for the first Material, Evolutionary Worlds to begin forming.

Queen Ariea, King Ayasia’s mate and the perpetual optimist felt we could hold out for at least one trillion years. She thought the Overlord families would constrain their appetites until thousands of galaxies manifested, filled with plenty of Material worlds for them to consume. It only made sense the Overlords would see there was plenty of room forming for them to spread out, with at least several thousand galaxies for each family to build their new homes.

It was just a matter of our natures. I, Raphael, an assassin, had been designed to see the worst case scenarios, while Ariea, a creator had been designed to see the best. The remainder of our team’s opinions fell between those two extremes.

I guess I should have known better, but what actually happened surprised even me. The Overlords were so greedy, their Personalities so embedded with the flavor of Take. As soon as a Demigod from an Overlord family invaded any particular galaxy, the others would follow, lusting with Take, enraged, panicked at the idea of any family getting something special, something advantageous the others could not have. They spent more time fighting against each other than they did fighting El Elyon’s troops.

El Elyon had been studying Satan’s First Kingdom for quite a long while before I came along. I was born a third generation daughter of General David Pesagniya’s coupling with Mistress Sarah Phandron. General Pesagniya was King Ayasia’s primary bodyguard. My dad was the founding father of the Valkarie Silver Storms, the head of Special Services. He was that little boy called The General. The one, who long ago used his sling-shot to precisely throw a rock and hit Lady Cytheia on the temple right above her left eye.

Mistress Phandron was Queen Ariea’s primary handmaiden. She was one of those three girls who came to Cytheia’s rescue and was the primary one who blasted The General for being so indiscriminate. To the Overlords and their families, the very name Phandron meant ‘Chief Angel of Terror’.

I am certainly my mommy and daddy’s little girl.

By design, I was inquisitive and suspicious. By the time I turned thirteen, I knew there was trouble in Paradise. My elder family and friends would periodically bid us farewell, always sounding optimistic and excited, telling me they were off to survey new lands for Havona’s expansion, which all sounded innocent enough. It was forbidden in Havona to do or say anything that might harm the innocence of children, but even a child knew the survey teams always returned altered.

After one of those survey missions, my powerful, emotionally solid-as-a-rock father just couldn’t stop crying. I went to El Elyon and demanded that He answer me: “What the heck is going on here, anyway?”

Rather than sidestepping the issue again, probably because I was now a teenager, and could finally tolerate the truth, El Elyon told me the whole story.

Being a skeptic, the whole story sounded bizarre. I wondered if this were some obscure test. Perhaps a test of faith versus rationality? I demanded that He show me, so I might see this travesty with my own eyes.

He didn’t show me right away, suggesting I be placed in an advanced training course. Over the years, I had slowly realized I was different from others. After all, not many have a dual Personality.

One half of me is Raphael, Havona’s Assassin. The other half of me is Rachiel, Havona’s Nurse. My training took longer than usual, simply because the different halves of me had to be trained separately, sequentially, back and forth, one at a time. Rachiel’s Personality could sleep while Raphael trained and vice versa. But since Rachiel and Raphael shared the same body, there were limits on how much fatigue that one body could tolerate.

I was fifteen before El Elyon allowed me to travel under Satan’s First Kingdom and get a glimpse into that nightmare. By then, both sides of my Personality had seen plenty of video recordings of that sick realm, but there was nothing like the real deal. I was so proud of my twin personality, Rachiel. She took the whole thing extremely well. I worried about her because she can be quite sensitive. After a while, it made sense. Rachiel was designed to be a battlefield nurse. I killed and she healed.

Rachiel began to plan how the victims of Satan’s First Kingdom could be healed and rehabilitated. Of course, being an assassin, I set about determining the chains of command and the sequence of whom I would first kill. For years, I dreamt of the manner in which I would slaughter the Overlords, Demigods, Panis, Priests, and their Nephilim.

Ah, such happy dreams. Then, as if a gift from El Elyon Himself, He finally set me loose. We entered into a transport shuttle and were quickly whisked away to a place I had no idea even existed. He showed me the ‘Supreme Beings’, massive spherical worlds designed for specific tasks. The Supreme Being we alighted upon was a Celestial world called a Thicypher Manufacturing Facility, a world about the size of Brahaspati, the planet you call Jupiter. This particular Thicypher Manufacturing Facility was designed to construct Creation Initiation Spheres.

Already, there were hundreds of Initiation Spheres under construction with one of them almost finished. A Creation Initiation Sphere was a complex machine designed to Initiate Creations. The Initiation Sphere for Creation number seven hundred thousand, the Creation we now live within, was much later designed and manufactured within that same Supreme Being. Of course, being the pest that I am, I demanded to be given a task Rachiel and I could work on together.

And so, at the tender age of seventeen and a half we loaded up.

I WITNESSED THE FIRST BIG BANG

Physicists make a critical error when theorizing the nature of a Big Bang. Because it makes sense to mathematicians, most physicists assume a Big Bang must start as an infinitesimal – a singularity. Nope. Not the way it happens.

Each Creation Initiation Sphere turns out to be the same size as the largest moon of planet Neptune, the one you call Triton. All the personnel and the mechanisms, which lay down the Morontial framework of a Creation, are carefully packed into that sphere.

King Ayasia decided his first strike should be on the Overlord with the highest level of personal power — Satan. We detested the bastard and all of his family. But there was no one whom repulsed King Ayasia more than a dastardly Demigod named Tse-Zedung, the one Prince Satan called ‘The Chairman’.

Tse-Zedung was the head of Satan’s secret police. This Demigod would do absolutely anything to anyone just to curry the most piddling drop of favor from his personal God. Moreover, since Satan ruled by force, it made sense Tse-Zedung would have a vast military police and a vast industrial complex to support and fund his military.

Who can explain the exquisite nature of the timing? All I can say is “El Elyon is Good.”

As it happened, Tse-Zedung was in the midst of holding a vast pass-and-review of his cadre. Trillions of Sadistic warriors marched in front of him, displaying their latest military, espionage, and torture technologies. As we calculated it, the parade was about three-quarters over, when Creation Initiation Sphere Numero Uno unexpectedly arrived in their midst.

The outside of the sphere was fitted with a complex apparatus, including video feeds and audio speakers. King Ayasia gave my father, General David Pesagniya the honor of addressing Tse-Zedung and his troops.

I was expecting some long-winded, drawn-out explanation of the history leading up to our arrival and what was about to happen next. General Pesagniya was well-known for lengthy, exacting explanations. The man used to drive me nuts. But this time, he limited his comments to: “Fuck you all very much.”

King Ayasia delayed for three and a half minutes, giving them time to contemplate Pesagniya’s words. Then he pushed the red button.

The explosion was a multi-staged cataclysm. Six hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine projectiles were first launched from equidistant points on the Creation Initiation Sphere’s surface. Each projectile unfurled a microfilament as they flew. The projectiles shattered everything in their paths as they crashed through the entirety of Satan’s First Kingdom. No Overlord family remained untouched. The projectiles continued unabated until they struck the fabric of the Primordial Absonite, scattering in a precise pattern across the inner walls of Satan’s First Kingdom. The projectiles, designed to be eternal fixtures, remain embedded there today.

When given a long list of projects for the completion of Creation Initiation Sphere number one, and asked which one we wanted to work on, Rachiel and I immediately jumped on the projectile project. It was splendid to visualize those 699,999 diamond-hardened projectiles shattering throughout the Overlord’s kingdoms.

But it didn’t stop there. Oh no. We were not that merciful.

The microfilaments that unfurled behind the projectiles served multiple purposes. They served as energy conductors to power the projectiles to ever-faster speeds. There were multiple sensors within the projectiles, so another purpose of the microfilaments served as data transducers. For me, that was the best part — actually seeing the wake of devastation the projectiles left in their paths.

Finally, as soon as this first Creation Initiation Sphere slowed from its rapid expansion phase, increasingly large, primary conduits flowed out of the Sphere, pulling themselves along the microfilaments, quickly making there way to the insertion points where the projectiles were embedded in the Primordial Absonite.

As you might have guessed, these primary conduits served multiple purposes. Precisely spaced nodes lined the primary conduits. Most of these nodes were designed for the starting and ending points of secondary and tertiary conduits, affording the transfer of information, personnel, materials, and medium-sized galaxies from any primary conduit to another. Only one node on each primary conduit served as the insertion points for the following 699,999 Creation Initiation Spheres.

As one Big Bang followed another, the result was an exacting geometry for the total obliteration of Satan’s First Kingdom.

Did I mention the Satanists have hated us ever since that very first explosion in their midst? Never mind, we ultimately ignited seven hundred thousand explosions as we created the seven hundred thousand Creations.

Joy from the memory of Big Bang number one is still fresh in my mind. I often have to remind myself, whenever I’m up to my ears in shit again, that the war was essentially over as soon as it had begun.

WELCOME TO HELL

Here we are now, you and me, in Creation number 700,000, the final chapter of this long war, the cleanup phase. All of the Overlords and most of their families have been herded here, into this Local Universe called Nebadon, a Local Universe designed by King Joshua and Queen Magdalene to serve a unique and singular purpose – a trap.

I hope the majority of you will find this as entertaining and amusing as I do, because for some of you nasties out there, this is really bad news.

You’ve probably read books or seen movies where someone goes through a strange series of events, only to awaken from their bizarre dream to realize they are actually, in reality, already in Hell.

Well. That would be right now.

Guess where we are?

Yep. You got it.

WE ARE ALL IN HELL….

And guess who’s in charge of Hell?

Yep, you got it. That would be me. Raphael.

So, one piece of advice. Read ‘Angels’, written by one of my personal heroes, Lady Sipheria. She is old and wise, a truly wonderful creature of compassion, the one they call The Teacher, born at the same time as my own mom and dad.

She heads a choir of Angels called The Sisters of Mercy. Considering we are all in Hell right now, I suggest you do your best to identify someone who belongs to that splendid choir of Angels and hold to them as tightly as possible.

Become their servant. Do as they say. Try your best to learn by example. Because, if you are such a monster that The Sisters of Mercy turn away from you in disgust, well guess who will be there to fill the empty slot they left behind?

Did I mention my favorite leisure sport is assassination?