Estelle Ana Baca

Category: Cherubim

The warrior class of the angelic Orders. Sidriel was one of the commanders of the Cherubim. The singular form of the noun is Cherub.

  • Astaroth’s Wager, Part VII

    Back to Astaroth’s Wager, Part VI.

    It’s the solstice! Did you see the eclipse last night? Eclipses are always so beautiful. I watched it with Sidriel and Orifiel, a Cherub who helps me watch the Holloways.

    As the Apokomistis is capable of manipulating his or her appearance, most prefer to assume a human form that resembles a wealthier, idealized version of his or her environment’s common denominator. Astaroth, too, used to shift according to her geographic location, but during the 1920s, she discovered a form from which she doesn’t often vary. Astaroth has ever since fashioned her appearance to resemble that of the Hollywood blonde bombshell in the prime of her youth. Her features are always perfectly proportional, and were it not for the delighted menace that accompanies her smile, she would indeed be beautiful. She most often appears to be wearing light-colored, tailored suit—eggshell is her favorite color—thus indicating that she is a woman who lacks for nothing.

    Lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco
    An old postcard of the lobby of the Fairmont.

    Of course, women who dress as such are frequently seen in the most lavish of surroundings, and she doesn’t disappoint. Thus, when Sitri had returned from his misadventure, he found her and Svipul, along with a sampling of their Nekus, in the penthouse suite of the Fairmont. He dismissed the Nekus and explained what had happened, along with expressing concern at remaining in a place so close to the action.

    Astaroth wasn’t pleased. “Are you trying to make this more difficult for me? This could be considered a breach of your terms, and then you’d have to forfeit for the second time today. Your prize would be mine, which, I have to say, would be a lot easier than taking on Itzamná.”

    “And Kivati,” Sitri added.

    “There was no discussion about Kivati in our initial wager. If you want Kivati, you need to go after her yourself. I only agreed to one Watcher,” Astaroth said. “Tell me you weren’t stupid enough to let her identify you.”

    “She grabbed me and transported me. She knows it was me,” Sitri said. “I know that I—”

    “If you don’t keep that pathetic explanation you’ve been rehearsing to yourself, I’ll add your name to my list,” Astaroth threatened.

    “So what’s your plan?” Sitri asked.

    “I should think that you’d be aware that I want to win this wager. That said, what makes you think that I would tell you and give you the chance to spoil everything, just as you’ve done so far?” Astaroth said.

    “Kivati will be looking for you. You should leave, Sitri,” Svipul stated.

    “She’s right. You need to disappear. If you’re here, you’re only going to involve more angels. Why not check in with that Neku in Cyprus you’ve been baiting?” Astaroth said.

    “Will you see that the terms are met?” Sitri asked Svipul.

    “You have my word,” Svipul affirmed.

    Without any further salutation, Sitri was gone.

    Astaroth told Svipul, “There aren’t many options available to us now. Heaven knows that Sitri and I go way back, and they might already know I’m here. The Nephil isn’t likely to leave that primate alone. We’re going to have to recruit an Apokomistis who’s dumb enough not to suspect that he or she is our bait, and use him to draw out the Nephil and then the Watcher after. With them out of the way, I’ll be able to work on that primate.”

    “Rose Nielsen is a talented Nephil. If Sitri’s to be believed, she knew that he was there before she got close to him. We have to believe that she’ll be able to sense us in her proximity. She won’t make the same mistakes that a younger Nephil would make, either,” Svipul said.

    “She’s half-Watcher, yes, but she’s half-primate, too. We just have to appeal to her ‘humanity’ and offer her what she wants most, if only temporarily. What else do we know about Rose Nielsen?” Astaroth said.

    “I’ll send my Neku Kazuko to find out everything on her,” Svipul offered.

    “Svipul! I thought you weren’t supposed to help!”

    “Sitri got two angels after us within half the day. What he doesn’t know…”

    “…will cost him dearly.”

    “And he’ll deserve it,” Svipul added, and she stalked off to converse with her Neku.

    Astaroth called her Neku Caius to her. She said, “Tell the others that we’re leaving, and check us out of this hotel. Do assure them that we appreciated everything and make a reservation for this same suite for this same week next year. I’m coming to appreciate San Francisco in June.”

    Stolas the Apokomistis
    Stolas was an Apokomistis who lived in Athens. He was drawn as such in Collin de Plancy’s Diccionaire Infernal, and was so furious at the depiction that he was solely responsible for de Plancy’s subsequent fervor for Catholicism.

    “Might I tell the others where we’re going?” Caius asked.

    “No. Give them leave for exactly seven days to do as they wish and to await your instructions at their finish. You, however, are coming with me. Send a wire to Athens and make our usual booking there,” Astaroth said.

    “Shall I notify Stolas that we will be at his doorstep?” Caius wondered.

    “If you do, I’ll destroy you,” Astaroth replied with her unnervingly pleasant smile.

    Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy Kwanzaa! If you and your family celebrate something different at this time, please accept my warmest wishes for a wonderful holiday. Dominus vobiscum.

    On to Astaroth’s Wager, Part VIII.

  • Astaroth’s Wager, Part IV

    Back to Astaroth’s Wager, Part III.

    I hope you can forgive me for not providing a chapter last week. I am thankful that I don’t require planes for transportation. They’re so loud, slow and confining. Anyway—back to business now.

    Astaroth directed the driver of her car to take them to Market Street to placate her frustrated companion. She stared at Sitri with a mockingly pleasant smile on her face for the longest time.

    “Why are you smiling at me like that?” Sitri asked.

    “Because you’re going to lose,” she answered. “And you know it. You haven’t thought this through at all. I must say, this is your poorest effort in at least five hundred years. You’ve admirably demonstrated that the only hopeless one in this entire affair is you.”

    Sitri didn’t suffer insults lightly. He had his steel at the ready, and he drew it from its scabbard with a menacing slowness. He said nothing, but his intentions were clear from his scathing expression.

    “You’re not going to attack me,” Astaroth said. “You’re going to do better than this. Going through his life and systematically eliminating the things that are going well for him isn’t the answer. It didn’t work on Job, and it’s not going to work on him.”

    Sitri remained silent and ready to attack.

    “You want your favorite London property back, and I want that smug little primate to realize that hope is as mortal as he is. Make him suffer, Sitri, or admit defeat now and present me with a wager,” Astaroth said.

    “I’ll do fine without my property on Tottenham Court Road. You won it fairly, and I would appreciate the opportunity to win it back fairly in the future. You were right, Svipul. You can’t make a human lose hope in twenty-four hours without resorting to cliché. And you know as well as I do that the Nephil I injured back there is Itzamná’s daughter. He’ll be looking for me. I’ve got bigger problems than this petty little wager,” Sitri said.

    Itzamná, the Watcher
    Itzamná was a Watcher. He was stationed in Mesoamerica and was spotted by the Mayans. They revered him as one of their gods.

    “So you admit defeat?” Astaroth said.

    “Yes.”

    “What is my wager then?”

    “You have a month. Since you set me on this task, you’re now going to deprive that same smug little primate Thomas Carver of all hope—since he seems to be more than just a bee in your bonnet—and you’re going to get rid of Rose Nielsen and Itzamná before they find out what this was all about and come looking for us,” Sitri said. “And I’m going to lay low and let you do all the heavy lifting.”

    “And what will I receive upon success? Getting rid of an angel and his Nephil is likely to provoke an angry response from Heaven, and I’ve worked very hard to keep Michael off my back. I don’t want to end up anywhere near the top of his list again,” Astaroth said.

    The car went silent while Sitri made his offer telepathically.

    Astaroth’s smile was wickedly delicious. She squealed and said, “Are you really prepared to cede that title?”

    “If you can actually accomplish it, and get Itzamná out of the picture? Absolutely. You’ll have earned it,” Sitri said. “But I’ll warn you now: you’re going to fail with Thomas Carver.”

    “Why are you so confident of that?”

    “Because he understands something that you never will, Astaroth,” Sitri said.

    Astaroth rolled her eyes.

    Sitri demanded, “Do you find the terms of our wager to be fair, Svipul?”

    Svipul responded, “A month to get rid of an angel as strong as Itzamná? That’s hardly fair, considering that you fouled up a simple wager, Sitri. You didn’t have to attack a Nephil and bring angels into this. She needs adequate time to put a plan in place. Otherwise, we’re all going to be in for it, and I don’t want Michael or any of the Cherubim or Seraphim on my back, either. Give her at least a year.”

    “A year, then,” Sitri agreed. “I’m still going to Market Street, though. I do rather enjoy making Thomas Carver believe that gangsters are after him. He should be back at work by now. Are we agreed to the terms of this wager, Astaroth?”

    “Agreed,” Astaroth replied.

    Dominus tecum.

    On to Astaroth’s Wager, Part V.

  • Orders, Part VI and Conclusion

    Back to Orders, Part V.

    Jiang Xuande didn’t have much time to prepare for the attack that Astaroth had in mind for him, but he did have fair warning that she was coming. She had made an unsuccessful attempt to recall Makeri to her service, and Makeri writhed from the excruciating efforts, issuing a profound number of curses upon the magician’s head.

    The magician hadn’t had much time to play with the Orrery and perfect the magics in it, but he got the gist of how to summon his own army. Makeri’s human host went gray with the amount of blood that was necessary to summon forty-nine Nekus, and Jiang Xuande ordered them all to possess the forty-nine generals in command of Duke Xiao’s royal guard. The generals were then ordered to defend Jiang Xuande against the attack from Astaroth’s army.

    Astaroth had had a different plan in mind at first, but when she understood what Jiang Xuande was up to, she had to shift things around. She took the shape of Duke Xiao (and left the real Duke incapacitated within his bedroom to flirt with insanity at the sight of his double running about) and commanded his forces to destroy the mutinous attack launched by Jiang Xuande and his own royal guard. She also summoned more than eight thousand Nekus to possess the army, and they were all of them ordered to annihilate everything in sight.

    The armies assembled on the battlefield. Each side waited impatiently for the order to attack. In the anticipation, the concentration of dark metaphysical energies within the state of Qin brought that part of the Earth into serious distress. Sunlight bent and scattered, spring turned to bitter winter and life itself began to wither under the oppressive evil.

    Michael had made a sweep of the area. He was loathe to destroy the vast number of humans assembled there, but he had to do something to destroy the demons. He determined that both sides were armed with human weapons (it requires an entirely different type of weapon to do harm to an angel), and understanding the risk, he ordered Jophiel, Sidriel, Sabrathon and Kochabiel to the battlefield to dispatch as many demons as possible while he worked on a solution to fix the accumulating metaphysical damage with a few other angels in Heaven. The four angels set out inside the hordes of demons, approaching each Neku with great stealth to destroy them inside their hosts. All of them did their best to leave the humans alive without causing them serious harm.

    Astaroth didn’t care to tarry, and she ordered her army to advance against Jiang Xuande’s forces. They charged across the field with a murderous speed, and when she was sure that Jiang Xuande was preoccupied with being outnumbered more than 160 to 1, she went after him to recover the Orrery.

    It was in use, just as she had suspected. Jiang Xuande had it engaged to locate Azrael, for he was certain that the Angel of Death was present on the battlefield.

    It didn’t take Astaroth much effort to recover the Orrery. Ninalla had been a proud Neku, and she’d neglected to tell Jiang Xuande about the stark differences between Nekus and Apokomistai. Had Astaroth not been so adamant to recover her property, she probably would have made Jiang Xuande’s death a far more painful event, but she ended his life quickly. She had begun the process of claiming the dead magician’s soul for her own before it returned to Earth’s well of souls, but Azrael materialized in the nick of time and took his soul instead.

    Astaroth wasn’t about to surrender such a corrupt soul to Azrael. Unlike the thousands of Nekus on the battlefield, Astaroth did have a weapon that could harm an angel. She drew her sword, ready to steal back the soul that she felt was rightfully hers. She struck out at him, but Michael had appeared to intervene. She fell off balance and quickly sheathed her weapon. She knew that she was no match for an Archangel, and so she seized the Orrery and disappeared in tact.

    The four angels on the battlefield had destroyed over a thousand Nekus—Jophiel and Sidriel had taken out more than four hundred each. Michael surveyed the situation. He knew that if he left Jophiel and Sidriel in the battle long enough, the rest of the Nekus would either leave the battle or fall, but there were still over six thousand demons in the area. The concentration of six thousand demons in one location was rapidly contaminating the metaphysical fabric of the Earth.

    Terracotta Army. Photo by Kemitsv, courtesy of Wikimedia.
    Infantrymen from the Terracotta Army. They were inspired by the soldiers petrified by the heavenly rain.

    Michael called the four warriors on the battlefield to him, and with the help of a few angels from the Order of Virtues—Virtues are celestial architects and engineers—they brought a great storm to the sky over the battlefield. It rained a heavy, thick liquid upon the Nekus below, and it slowly transformed the human hosts of the Nekus into clay over the course of half of an hour. The hosts with the Nekus sank into the mud of the battlefield. After the hour had passed, the storm diminished, and every surviving Neku had been trapped inside a dying host, anchored to the Earth.

    Azrael collected the essences of the Nekus and spirited them away to a dark corner of the Universe. The balance of the Earth had returned.

    Most of the clay soldiers sunk deep into the ground and were forgotten, but a few of them had perished on rock. Over the years, the people of Qin had spun tales about how these soldiers had come to be. A century later, the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang had heard tales of how these clay soldiers had once been spirit warriors, until a great dragon had turned them into clay. He felt that spirit warriors would be exactly what he needed after he had passed on, and he built an army of them—an army of more than eight thousand—in terracotta to guard his tomb, vigilant until the end of the Earth.

    This concludes our tale. A happy and safe Halloween to you! Dominus vobiscum.

  • Orders, Part V

    Back to Orders, Part IV.

    The effort to summon Makeri almost bled Jiang Xuande to death. Makeri reported rather reluctantly to the magician and gave him an insouciant and bored greeting.

    Makeri hadn’t anticipated that Jiang Xuande had built a trap for him, and Jiang Xuande bound Makeri’s metaphysical essence to the peasant girl, making it impossible for him to escape without fusing his soul to hers. Makeri realized that he was obligated to do Jiang Xuande’s bidding or forfeit his existence as he knew it, and so he had little choice but to help the magician carry out his mad plans until he was released from the cage of the peasant girl’s body.

    Jiang Xuande needed the Neku to execute his plan. The first thing he made Makeri do was to provide detailed information about Astaroth’s palace in Persepolis. Jiang Xuande was delighted to learn from Makeri that the palace was, relatively speaking, unoccupied, for Astaroth and her entourage had gone to Egypt on an errand.

    One of the more sinister magics that Jiang Xuande had learned from Ninalla was how to separate his own consciousness from his body and, in essence, become something like a Neku himself. It was through this dematerialization that he was able to travel thousands of miles at a great speed (a speed that’s hardly impressive to those of you in the 21st century, but nonetheless impressive for an actual mortal without the aid of a machine) to Astaroth’s palace. Given what he’d learned from both Ninalla and Makeri, he knew exactly what he needed and exactly where to find it, for Jiang Xuande’s intention was to sneak into Astaroth’s palace and steal from her library the most discreet of grimoires. This grimoire was particularly powerful (and is now lost, having been “misplaced” in ab urbe condita 560, or 193 BC), and it was unique, for it was a remarkable source of demonic magical secrets tucked inside a miniature orrery.

    An Orrery. Photo credit unknown.
    An orrery. The Orrery, now lost, was about the size of a grapefruit.

    You might ask yourself how an orrery could function as a grimoire, for an orrery is merely a machine meant to represent the movements of the planets in this solar system. In this case, each planet had different meanings assigned to it, and dependent upon the geometric relationships that were created, it was able to harness specific demonic energies that could then be used. As Jiang Xuande was an astronomer, alchemist and magician, Ninalla had told him all about this particular grimoire, known simply as the Orrery, for she felt that he had the specific expertise necessary to make it work if he were ever able to lay his hands upon it.

    But knowing what he needed and where it was located was less than half the battle, for Jiang Xuande had to get the Orrery out of the palace, and he couldn’t do it without a physical form. He possessed the body of a young beggar boy (which was a horrible state of existence for both, particularly the boy, if you can imagine such a crime against nature). He then summoned another Neku named Piktaungitok who was associated with neither Astaroth nor Sitri, for he needed her to gather the magics necessary to transport the Orrery back to the state of Qin in China.

    Jiang Xuande had envisioned many different scenarios involving the success and the failure of his plan before he had put it in motion, but he found himself pleasantly shocked at how easy it had been for him to thieve from Persia and return to China as the most powerful magician in the world.

    And so now we’re at the part where we angels got involved…The angels Sabrathon and Kochabiel had been keeping an eye on Jiang Xuande over the fourteen years that he had been a practicing magician, for they had found his alliance with a demon to be particularly dangerous. His return to the state of Qin with one of Astaroth’s grimoires was particularly worrisome—especially the Orrery—and that was when Sabrathon and Kochabiel contacted the Archangel Michael and explained to him what they had observed.

    Michael understood that the situation could feasibly spin out of control—and quickly— so he sent his two best lieutenants, Jophiel and Sidriel, to stand guard with Sabrathon and Kochabiel. Jophiel and Sidriel were ordered to crush anything that could disrupt the balance of the Earth if it arose and bring in further help if necessary.

    (A note: I know that when I began my tale, I mentioned that a squadron of the Heavenly Host was sent into battle. I should probably clarify that Jophiel and Sidriel are a squadron by themselves, for the two of them are were some of the most powerful weapons in Heaven. Jophiel is was a Seraph. The Seraphim are were the Order who served as God’s personal guard, and Jophiel is was their general. Sidriel is was a Cherub and always will be a Cherub, in one respect or another. The Cherubim are were the warriors within the Orders, and Sidriel is was one of the Commanders of the Heavenly Host, after Jophiel, Camael and Michael.)

    Michael assured Sabrathon and Kochabiel that he would gladly lend his personal assistance and a battalion of the Heavenly Host if the situation escalated into all-out war. Michael also saw Azrael to inform him that a powerful human magician had it out for him. Azrael was rather amused by the notion of a human trying to cause his demise. He pledged to Michael that he would be on hand to make sure that the balance of souls would be preserved on Earth should a battle come to pass, and he went on his way.

    And of course, just as one would expect in a situation like this, everything did spin out of control with magnificent speed. Jiang Xuande’s luck seemed to run out on two days after he had returned home. Piktaungitok, the Neku whom he had summoned to help him get the grimoire back to China, had inflicted enough damage on her host for her to die and release her. Jiang Xuande had seen to bind her to the body of her host, but not to the soul. He was about to regret that misstep, for even though her alliegiance was to the Apokomistis Tohil, she ran straight to Astaroth to tell her that the Orrery was in the hands of a mortal.

    I will conclude this tale next Tuesday. Dominus tecum.

    On to Orders, Part VI.

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