New Columbus, UFNAS - 29 May 2102
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Ananke
It was about seven o’clock in the evening on a Thursday and Asaph Ananke Sherman was just leaving from a long and tiresome day of work at the CORC headquarters in New Columbus. They had just recently been promoted to be Deputy Director of the entire Commission, and had only made the move to downtown New Columbus a week ago, so this was their first week in the new office. They had hoped the whirlwind of transitional meetings, trainings, briefings, and reports would have petered out by the end of the week and yet here they were, leaving the building more than three hours later than scheduled for the fourth day in a row.
Asaph glanced up at the sky to check in on its threats of rain and was jarringly presented with the fulfillment of those threats as a sizeable raindrop hit them in the eye. This marked the onset of a sudden and heavy drizzle, which Asaph weakly attempted to shield themself from with their messenger bag as they rushed across the street toward the monorail station. As they stepped up the curb cut from the crosswalk, an SUV parked streetside next to them and several men in various shades of beige trenchcoat got out at once.
Just as Asaph was ducking under the awning of the station entrance, the men were surrounding them. They felt something narrow and cold jab into the small of their back, and then they heard a sharp and muted sound, and then they felt nothing anymore, and as they fell unfeeling to the ground they saw the men stand over them before they couldn’t see anymore, and then Asaph Ananke Sherman died.
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As a pool of Asaph’s blood leaked onto the sidewalk, mixing with rainwater as it trickled into the sidewalk cracks and down into the street, their guardian angel Azrael did something unexpected. Azrael felt angry. He felt lost. He felt loss.
Encoded in the eternal geometries of Azrael’s divine frame was a need to collapse back into other divines when his karmic ward expired, however having never created another individual from his frame, he was unable to locate another of his exact kind to give himself into. Observing this, Azrael attempted to fold back into the greater Host. He disintegrated the constitution of his frame and transfered his energy at the nearest Crown, a Halo-type on one of the assassins, with disastrous result. The Crown shattered, causing the energy of both angels to transfer to the next nearest crown, a Couture-type, which was able to absorb all of the energy by reconstituting its own frame.
This created the first Archangel, who was also called Azrael.
This also destabilized the entire Host of Crowns, and they all were reconstituted in the same way. In order to take on the same new stable form as Azrael, those Crowns that became Archangels absorbed their nearest neighbors. It should be noted that the immense transfers of energy between crowns caused those coronated whose crowns ascended to have their skulls violently annihilated. Those whose crowns were instead consumed by their neighbors were spared that swift and violent end, but as the Archangels grew, so too did their ability to affect the material world around them, and it was not long before they were amassing armies of humans to wage war upon each other.
[https://marts.notion.site/image/https%3A%2F%2Fprod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Ff55aaa38-563a-4fb9-b6f7-a8add6e64006%2Fa58fe79c-7023-44af-837c-714a245cda46%2Fasaphination_final.png?table=block&id=2e7d525e-bdc3-49d1-a874-37d96e90e32e&spaceId=f55aaa38-563a-4fb9-b6f7-a8add6e64006&width=2000&userId=&cache=v2]