Estelle Ana Baca

Category: Origins

The emergence of a species or the first use of a term. Rather self-explanatory.

  • Orders, Part I

    Not long after we angels were created by God, He separated us into the Orders. Angelic Orders can best be described as the different types of jobs that God assigned to us. Contrary to what has been written about angels by most humans, there are more than nine Orders. Most things relating to angels come in twelves (although on occasion, you can find concepts in sevens and fours and nines), and accordingly, there are were twelve Orders in the employ of God. Each angel was assigned to his or her Order based upon his or her unique talents. The Orders gave us purpose in the Universe, and our Graces helped us to execute our mission to care for the Universe.

    detail of Michael from Beccafumi's Fall of the Rebel Angels
    Detail of Michael from Domenico Beccafumi’s Fall of the Rebel Angels. Michael prefers this likeness of himself, even though it doesn’t resemble his typical human manifestation. He doesn’t have wings, either. (None of us do, actually.)

    I, Nadiel, was assigned to the Order of the Archangels. There are twelve of us: Camael, Ariel, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel (pronounced OOH-ree-ell, if you please), Raziel, Sachiel, Anael, Cassiel, Barakiel and me. The twelve of us are the strongest and brightest of all angels, and Michael is the strongest and brightest of all. The Archangels were given the task of envisioning how the Universe should work and unfold, and we were chosen to rule over all of spacetime from a promontory point in Heaven after everything was up and running. Within this Solar System, I was given the responsibility of the planet Mercury and everything within its orbit (space), and one-twelfth of the duration of each planet’s revolution around the Sun (time). The month of Nadiel on Earth begins at sunrise on May the 20th and ends the moment before the sun rises on the morning of June the 19th. I do love to nurture creation in full bloom, and my brother Sachiel, who oversees oversaw the transition from spring into summer before the other solstice, was kind enough to let me assist him in the Southern Hemisphere.

    Archangels’ strength and brilliance come from each of us being the embodiment of one particular type of the Graces. Just as there are were twelve Orders, there are twelve Graces. I am the truest expression of the universal concept of Inspiration, and my Graces of Adaptability, Judgment and Mindfulness extend from that concept. (Give it a good think and you’ll arrive at how each graduates to the understanding of the next.) We worked together with the other angels to put the formulae in motion for the Earth to evolve into the incredible planet it is now. Gabriel, Cassiel, Camael and I included the capacity for all living beings to appreciate beauty, along with the desire to protect it and create it within the world. I also added a bit of code, if you will, which successfully led to the creation of music.

    Matters got very interesting on Earth a little more than 20 angelic generations ago—41,398 years ago, to be exact. I shan’t go into it now, Estelle won’t let me but suffice it to say that it wasn’t only homo sapiens that caught our attention. God reassigned several angels from the Order of the Watchers to observe and report back on what was transpiring here. As you can imagine, the Watchers’ mission throughout the Universe was almost exclusively observation and documentation. (Bear in mind that the Watchers who were assigned to Earth shouldn’t be confused with the fiction that was spun in the Book of Enoch, for Nephilim have different origins, appearance and purpose that she won’t let me talk about, either.)

    Watchers were never allowed to interfere with creation unless the orders came from God, but nevertheless, God did give directives for intervention from time to time. There was one occasion in particular, in which the situation deteriorated in such horrific fashion so as to require a squadron of God’s army, the Heavenly Host, to set things right again. It all started when the Watchers Sabrathon and Kochabiel informed Michael—

    Oh dear. The sun rises. Dominus tecum.

    On to Orders, Part II.

  • UPYR! Part III & Conclusion

    Back to UPYR! Part II.

    …her life had seemed to fall apart. yes yes yes. End of sentence.

    Before we return to our history of the servant woman Aleksandra, there are two things that you must know about demons: one, demons love to pose as gods, and two, if they can sniff it out, they will never miss a blood sacrifice.

    This occasion was no different. A demon called Valac was in the vicinity, and he was enticed by the miserable scene. And so, just when Aleksandra couldn’t possibly have felt any more dejected, Valac assumed a shape that matched her inner visualization of Perun, put his hand to her shoulder and assured her that her sacrifice was more than acceptable.

    Aleksandra was the very picture of shock. She had always believed in Perun, but never had she imagined that she was worthy of a personal visit. Valac as Perun glowed faintly in the dark of the woods, and he smiled brightly, assuring the poor servant woman that she was worthy of his attention. When she recovered her senses, she threw herself at his feet and begged him to rescue her from the court of the disbelievers. Valac petted her head and promised to rescue her on the following night at midnight, all the while nibbling on the bit of flesh she’d hewn off for Perun.

    The servant woman wiped her tears away. Although she was exhausted and weak from the blood loss, she felt relieved for the first time in weeks. She had kept her promises to Mariya, and she was finally going to be rewarded.

    Valac disappeared after making additional promises to return for her, taking his glow with him. Aleksandra caught her breath for a few long moments while she allowed her eyes to readjust to the darkness of the wood. She was preparing to stand when she heard a twig snap behind her, and a pit settled in her gut when she realized that she hadn’t been alone in the woods.

    The darkness had obscured Gleb’s expression, but it was clear to her that it was full of malice. He whispered that he had seen her evil treachery in the woods, and that if she made even the quietest complaint that he would not hesitate to let the Prince know that she worshipped false gods.

    Aleksandra was filled with terror, but she also recognized that she had a god—a god who had just promised to save her, at that!—in her corner. So she screamed. She screamed as loud as she could.

    Her scream carried far, even though she had travelled deep into the woods. In the distance, the palace guard took up arms and shouted to each other to search for the disturbance.

    Gleb panicked. Aleksandra continued to scream, and Gleb understood that the only way for him to stop her scream was to stop her throat. So he stopped her: he put his hands to her neck until Aleksandra could scream no more.

    The boyar was furious that he had destroyed so lovely a creature. He knelt next to her, uncertain as to which vile action he wanted to perpetrate on the destroyed woman.

    Remaining true to his degenerate self, Valac hadn’t left the woods. He had stayed to watch the whole ghastly murder play out. With the taste of flesh still on his tongue, he felt compelled to toy with the humans, so Valac entered Aleksandra’s poor, lifeless body and animated her corpse.

    Gleb was still kneeling over Aleksandra’s body when he was suddenly thrown onto his back. He looked up in utter horror to see that Aleksandra had pinned him to the forest floor, and she had a vicious, ugly grin on her strangely illuminated face. With a burst of unanticipated strength, he broke free and ran toward the palace, but he was no match for the demon inside the body of the dead servant woman. Just as they reached the edge of the woods, Valac overtook the boyar, and the demon, in Aleksandra’s body, bit into the warm, tender flesh of Gleb’s neck and subdued the boyar without much effort.

    All the while, the palace guard had spread out in search of the source of the scream. It wasn’t long before one of the guards happened upon Valac possessing Aleksandra, feasting upon the throat of a convulsing Gleb, with that same vicious, ugly grin on her face. The guard recognized Aleksandra and was frozen for a moment by his revulsion. Only one word came to mind, and it was the epithet that had been uttered about her behind her back. He cried, УПИР!

    Good news travels fast, but slander travels faster. Before the end of the night, everyone within the palace of Kiev was unable to sleep, for word had spread that the упир Aleksandra had murdered the boyer and was on the loose.

    Helena wept over the body of her husband, and her grief dared her to demand from the Prince Vladimir and Princess Anna why they hadn’t believed her when she said that the servant woman had been nothing other than an evil, blood-drinking упир.

    And упир, after it’s been transliterated and contorted over several centuries to fit inside the Romance and West Germanic languages, starts to sound very much like the word vampire.

    Poor Aleksandra.

    I’ll tell you more about Valac on the next day of Anael. Dominus tecum.

  • UPYR! Part II

    Back to UPYR! Part I

    Where were we? Oh, yes.

    On the morning following the Baptism of Kiev, Aleksandra was summoned to assist in attending to one of the visiting boyars, Gleb of Smolensk, and his wife Helena. Gleb was immediately taken with Aleksandra’s understated beauty, and the objects of his fascination never escaped an encounter with the boyar without harm.

    Helena knew all too well of her husband’s wicked ways, but she loved him still. When she sensed his intentions for the servant woman, she found it difficult to conceal her jealousy and wanted to eliminate her competition. Uncertain how to act, Helena ordered her own servant to follow Aleksandra and learn everything she could about her.

    Helena’s servant girl reported back her mistress after a week. The boyar’s wife, who was born a Christian, was delighted to discover that Aleksandra appeared to be less than enthusiastic about having Christ in her life. Prince Vladimir had made it clear that paganism was no longer allowed in his Christian state, and so Helena found it all too easy to discredit her rival. That evening, while in the company of her peers at court, she let it slip that she worried that Aleksandra was an упир (which is insufficiently transliterated into Roman characters as upyr and pronounced vaguely like ooh-peer). Even though she pronounced it with the leaning drawl of her native dialect, everyone knew what she meant. Everyone knew that Helena believed that the servant woman Aleksandra was a witch.

    Poor Aleksandra hadn’t noticed that the boyar’s wife had it out for her, for she had been too busy trying to avoid the boyar himself. Gleb had made a habit of accosting her at every opportunity. Fortunately, all of his attempts had been foiled by the luck of someone turning the corner to interrupt his advances, giving Aleksandra the split second she needed to sneak away from him.

    The boyar’s persistence frightened her. She set a chair against her chamber door each night to prevent him from entering her room while she slept, and before she drifted into a deep sleep every night, she prayed to Perun to reward her faith and service with the punishment of those who didn’t recognize the lightning god’s awe and might.

    As Midsummer approached, life grew still more difficult for Aleksandra. Not only had the boyar pursued her without relent for more than two solid weeks, but she had also been ordered to handle some of the more difficult work around the court. She didn’t complain, for she honored Mariya’s dying wish to serve the court despite vehemently disagreeing with the Prince’s conversion to Christianity. However, it was worrisome to notice that the nobility were punctuating her name with whispers of contempt for reasons she didn’t understand.

    Worse still was that the feast of Perun was on the first of August, and she realized with despair that she would have to make her sacrifice to honor the great god in secret, for none of the other servants in the court would dare to make the sacrifice with her for fear of being unfairly accused of acts of high treason. She also knew that she wouldn’t be able to obtain any animals to offer Perun, for the gamekeeper kept track of the animals for consumption and would notice if any went missing. She knew that all that she had to offer were her own flesh and blood.

    On the eve of the first of August, Aleksandra lifted a bowl and a carving knife from the kitchen. A few hours after night fell, she sneaked out of her chamber and listened carefully for the guards behind a column near the eastern palace gate. The guards lazily relaxed their watch after an hour, and when the coast was clear, she ran out into the darkness with the knife, the bowl and her wooden statue of Perun.

    She found a small clearing where the moonlight shone through the trees. She set up her small wooden statue and the bowl. In an act of great bravado, she begged Perun’s forgiveness for her weak offering, and she cut into the flesh of her arm. She hacked off a small patch of flesh and placed it into the bowl.

    Aleksandra fell into tears as she lamented how her life had seemed to fall

    (Humans eat more than any other creature. Maggie, Sage’s mother, has summoned me to another meal. More later. Dominus tecum.)

    On to UPYR! Part III

  • UPYR! Part I

    As a matter of fact, almost every monster ever counted and named by a human is merely an angel or a demon in disguise. The others are merely misunderstood living, biological creatures that have been maligned over the years.

    Since I’ve assumed the shape and station of a human teenage girl, I just couldn’t help but notice that the most popular monster of all these days—quite a shift from what it used to be—is the vampire.

    The history of the vampire is rather varied. There’s no singular event that brought about the origin of the creature as it’s recognized now. All the intelligence on them was, for the most part, consolidated within a single narrative when Mr. Stoker created the character of Dracula (which drew from the seminal work by Mr. Polidori), and even then, most of what he had put together was largely based on myth.

    However, I can report on the origin of the term vampire.

    It was in the year 988, in the city of Kiev, when Vladimir the Great realized that the Slavic gods could no longer provide him with the spiritual comfort and refuge he had sought for so long. And so it was that the Grand Prince of Rus was won over by the promise of heavenly salvation (and earthly power) that was offered by the Cross, and with a show of great love for his new (Christian) wife Anna of Macedonia, and with even greater intentions for his kingdom, he embraced Christianity.

    Vladimir couldn’t think of a more sincere profession of faith than to save the souls of his pagan people, and on the 12th of July (on the old Byzantine calendar) of the year of his conversion, he ordered bid all Kievans down to the banks of the Dnieper River and made invited them to step into the water in an act of mass baptism. All the true believers there testified that the Dnieper carried the sins of the city downstream and far, far away into the belly of a giant sea dragon lurking in the depths of the Black Sea.

    But not all the Kievans fell in line immediately. Some of them held onto the old ways. One Kievan who refused to accept Christ as her Lord and Savior was a young woman named Aleksandra.

    Aleksandra had been left upon the doorstep of the servants’ quarters at the palace of Kiev in the spring of 970, and she was taken in and raised by Mariya, the matriarch of the servants. Mariya was typically perceived as a stern woman, but she loved Aleksandra as a daughter and reserved all her tenderness for her ward. She taught the child the arts of healing, which was an invaluable skill to have as a servant of the court. She instilled within her surrogate child a strict loyalty to the court of Kiev and an unwavering obedience to the gods of the sky, forest, mountain, river and sea.

    Neither Mariya nor Aleksandra had been allowed much in terms of possessions in their shared quarters, but they did have one small wooden statue of the supreme deity Perun that they held dear. They took it down from their makeshift altar only once, and that was during the festivities following the coronation of Vladimir in 980. The Grand Prince had unveiled a new monument to the lightning god, and when they compared the two likenesses, the ladies were pleased to discover that their representation of Perun was just as omnipotent-looking as the rich sculpture fit for a monarch.

    Mariya had already lived far beyond her own expectations when she reached her sixtieth winter by her own reckoning at the beginning of the year 985, and it was no surprise to anyone when she became gravely ill on the last full moon before the spring equinox. Mariya sensed that death was near, and in her final breaths, she made Aleksandra swear to her that she would always maintain her fealty to the gods and to the court that had looked after them.

    Life went on for Aleksandra in the years that followed. She kept the promises she had made to Mariya: she served the court of the Grand Prince Vladimir until her feet ached and her back complained, and she honored the gods with every spare moment she was afforded.

    Thus July 12, 988, was a day of unimaginable horror, for Aleksandra awoke to the insufferable blasphemy that Vladimir was forsaking the gods and embracing a new god—a single god—who demanded that they all bathe in the river to rid themselves of evil.

    Aleksandra was painfully offended. She had lived an honest life. She knew that she had no evil within her. She hid her tears when they cast the great statue of Perun into the Dnieper and hacked the effigies of all the other gods to pieces. That night, after she prayed to her little wooden statue of Perun, she hid it inside her mattress, and when she slept, she dreamt that he sent a violent storm to crush the god that had usurped him.

    (And would you believe it but Sage’s father Dennis is demanding that I help him prepare yet another meal. I’m afraid I’ll have to finish this history later. Dominus tecum.)

    On to UPYR! Part II

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