Cocytus was a plane of never-ending ice, one where things were in a constant state of entropy. For many, Cocytus was just a prison. For many, Cocytus was just a place of torment when it was so much more.
Tamiel, due to his status as one of the original leaders of the Watchers, knew this perfectly. Tamiel had lived for aeons. He was older than stars and had watched planets and civilizations form and die.
He had been one of the angels tasked with ensuring that reality wouldn't collapse after the Demiurgic Archangels finished their creation.
Things were so easy before. Tears were easy to mend. Gaps weren't that easy. Cocytus was one of those gaps that they had been unable to mend.
The truth was that Cocytus was something from the outside, not from their realm. It was something that shouldn't exist, that shouldn't be, that was alien to this reality, and this is why Cocytus had been chosen as the ultimate dumping ground.
Everything native to their reality stopped working in Cocytus. Cosmic energies fizzled into nothing, divine authorities were broken down to less than embers, and holy light and demonic energy were impossible to wield. This was the reason why seraphim like Satanael and Samael, beings capable of rendering reality with their will, could be trapped here helpless and powerless.
The worst, in his opinion, was that even Death didn't take a step here. The total cessation of existence without Death—this was the torment of Cocytus. A life that could be considered worse than death.
This is why the fact he was walking, traveling through Cocytus, could be called nothing else but madness. Nothing would be able to bring him back. None of his siblings would be able to save him if anything went wrong.
This was folly, yet what was folly other than genius? Doing the impossible, braving the holy and the unholy—this was the essence of a Watcher, this was the essence of a fallen.
They had chosen to discard the chains linking them to their divine father because, even though each of them had different reasons, they knew that a child would never be able to grow without leaving the abode of their parent.
Honestly, things would have been fine if it wasn't for Gabriel's ego and Helel's pride. Their father may have opposed them in the end, but he wasn't the one that had led the armies of the heavens into striking first.
Tamiel's foot broke through the ice under him. A smile appeared on his face. Finally, he had found it. Without thinking, the angel's fist moved, crashing against the ground and creating a gap the size of an Olympic swimming pool.
Tamiel laughed as he fell into the darkness headfirst. His golden eyes, celestial wonders made by his divine father, allowed him to peer through the darkness as if it didn't exist.
Dark wings akin to threads of moving darkness exploded from his back, stopping his fall meters away from the ground. The gaze of the angel fell on the frozen form of a humanoid creature.
The creature looked as if a snake and a mythological deity had been fused. Except for the fangs that could be seen from his mouth, Samael looked almost identical to Tamiel. It was expected. After all, they had been created together.
A part of him, a kinder part of him he thought had died long ago, wanted to weep at the sight of what his brother had become. Samael had been here alone for millions of years.
The worst thing was that it had been for nothing. Their father wasn't there anymore.
No final judgment and no chance of redemption would be given to Samael. Had he not come here, Samael may have stayed trapped all alone for more than an eternity, longer than their reality would exist. After all, Cocytus followed different rules.
Fortunately, Tamiel was one of the only angels naturally equipped to resist Cocytus' influence. He was Tamiel, the perfection, the harmony of the Presence. It was only logical that in consequence, he would bring wherever he went the influence, the rules his father had created and enforced on reality.
He knew that he was still taking a risk. Each millisecond passed here made him spend as much energy as a man-made nuclear reactor in 20 years. He had been in Cocytus for more than half an hour. Saying that it was exhausting was an understatement.
It was in those moments that he missed his father and Helel. He may not have liked them, but the two existing had been the reason why reality hadn't fallen apart or been invaded by foreign things or beings like Cocytus.
Unfortunately, the two Rulers were dead, and with them gone, the dream they created was showing more and more cracks.
Morpheus, even though the Sandman may have assigned one of his aspects to the protection of this reality, wasn't enough. Worse
than that, the triangular beast, the herald prophesied to end this world, was waking up, the seals weakening. Tamiel was one of the only ones who could see that everything was falling apart.
This coming war between the different biblical factions was something more. He was sure that all of them could instinctively feel it. The world was dying. Someone else needed to ascend, to take both the mantles left by Helel and the Celestial Father. The world needed a new ruler. The world needed a new god, or it would perish.
The world needed a new god, and the only ones worthy were the leaders of the Grigori. They were the ones who chose to disobey. They were the ones who chose to do what was right even though they were hated by their siblings for it.
They were the ones who first discovered that good and evil were subjective concepts. Fallen they were called. How foolish were they all?
They called their father perfect.
Pure holy light exploded from the body of Tamiel. The light rose like a pillar tearing through Cocytus and its foreign rules, tearing through what shouldn't have been able to be torn.
The wings on his back broke through ice and rime, extending, moving through the sky of Cocytus, creating a twisted illustration of a tree.
How could something perfect create something imperfect?
The eyes of the angel changed, turning into burning stars. His wings changed, the darkness disappearing from them as if they were being violently torn with bloody fingers.
How could an angel fall? How could a divine being be imperfect?!
Holy light ran through his wings, making them shine like fireflies. Thinking an angel was imperfect was by nature blasphemous, and Tamiel may have been rebellious and a fool, but he had never been blasphemous.
Reality shuddered as Tamiel's authority seeped through the entirety of Cocytus. Something greater, something magnificent moved under the skin of the Watcher, begging, fighting to be released from the mortal coil the Watcher had chosen.
"י," the Watcher whispered, a savage smile etched on his face. He wasn't his father or a Demiurgic Archangel. Tamiel was far from being the strongest of the leaders of the Grigori.
What made him able to stand proud and unafraid before beings so much stronger than him was the authority that had been bestowed on him at birth.
" ה " he spoke softly, yet the word reverberated in all of Cocytus and probably beyond. He would need to act as quickly as possible. Their father may have been gone, but there were always people listening, people who purposefully geared their omniscience toward the uttering of the Tetragrammaton.
"ו" he whispered, yet the word made itself known against the background of Cocytus. In the sky, a giant tree began to take shape, one whose roots began to move toward the core of Cocytus.
" ה ", Tamiel uttered, and with the release of the word, his replica of the Kabbalah took root in Cocytus. For a brief instant, Cocytus stopped being alien.
For a brief moment, Tamiel understood it. A chuckle escaped the Watcher as golden tears fell from his eyes. This was ridiculous. Cocytus was something beyond perfect. Cocytus was something from the [ ].
He could see it now. He understood why the Demiurgic Archangels had chosen to seal this universe away from the greater reality beyond.
Already, Tamiel was dying, being consumed by [ ]. Tamiel knew with certainty that in the next milliseconds, he would die.
That was fine.
His right hand moved, extending toward the prone form of his brother.
A millisecond was enough, he thought with a smile as he touched the face of his brother. "and the twain shall become one flesh: so that they are no more twain, but one flesh," the Watcher whispered, a giggle failing to escape from his lips.
Words of power could be used to twist reality. It didn't matter that they came from his enemies or that the words weren't originally said in that context.
Those words, twisted and manipulated by him, made things easier. Samael and Tamiel had been created simultaneously. Samael and Tamiel both had been part of their heavenly father before being created. It was only right for things that had once been one to become such again.
Samael melted under the touch of Tamiel, absorbed, sucked into the skin of the Watcher. Pain wreaked havoc through every single speck of the Watcher, yet Tamiel only laughed and laughed. Memories assaulted his mind and tried to break it as everything that was Samael became Tamiel.
The poison and the divinity of his brother began to run through his veins, both empowering and destroying him from the inside. Another pair of wings exploded from his back in a shower of golden gore.
His skin began to bubble from the inside and moved grotesquely. The angel looked like a mess. What he was doing was madness. What he was doing was suicide, yet determination continued to shine through the essence of the Watcher.
Power was nothing else but a means to an end. Tamiel took a painful step forward, one that animated everything around him in a radius of 100 kilometers.
Tamiel didn't crave power only for the sake of power. Tamiel craved power so that he would be able to protect the other Watchers and himself.
Tamiel craved power to be able to be left undisturbed.
Tamiel raised one hand toward the sky of Cocytus. "Let there be light," he whispered with all the strength he had left.
A ball made of divine authority flew from his hand to the tree in the sky as the angel fell to his knees.
What was poison? Most would call it a substance that is capable of causing the illness or death of a living organism when introduced or absorbed. Cocytus was something alien, different, so much that Tamiel wasn't sure it could normally be called alive.
This was at least before Tamiel connected to the foreign realm with his authority. As long as his authority was activated, as long as the rules created by the Demiurgic Archangels were applied here, this realm could technically be considered alive, and because it was alive, it could be poisoned.
Poisoning something didn't always mean destroying that thing. The orb of divinity touched the tree, and the tree glowed before exploding. Light came rushing, surging, infecting, poisoning every atom, everything both physical and metaphysical that made Cocytus Cocytus.
Tamiel commanded his holy energy, creating threads inside his own flesh to guide his body. With them, he clasped his hands.
The war was one that would be disastrous. Tamiel and the other leaders knew the ones who were the most at risk were them. They didn't have monsters like the Gremory and Astaroth brat. Even reunited, they knew they wouldn't be able to win against the hornblower, even with an absurd amount of preparation.
What they needed was something, a place where even Gabriel and Michael would find difficulty entering, a place only for fallen angels, truly theirs unlike their territories in the Underworld that originally were given to them by Helel.
The legion angels had Heaven. The hordes of Hell had the Underworld. It was only normal for the troops of the Grigori to have their new Eden. "With this treasure, I summon Thee," the Watcher whispered using the last dregs of holy energy he had, "Fifth Heaven: Home of the Grigori." It wouldn't truly bring the exact home they had in Heaven. He could have done so, but Tamiel didn't want to have, at least now, the focused ire of the heavens.
What this invocation did was create a replica of the Fifth Heaven on the surface of Cocytus and only allow angels from the Grigori to reach this place.
Before his eyes, Cocytus shifted, taking the appearance he had wanted. Tamiel would have laughed in joy if he could. He had before coming here created keys that he had engraved into the essence of his siblings without them knowing. Completely spent, Tamiel at last fell. His back didn't meet the icy ground of Cocytus. Instead, it was familiar divine arms that stopped him.
"Why?" Azazel asked him. The Watcher was crying, something rare. Tamiel felt sad that he was the one who made his brother do such. "We could have found another way."
"I made us a new home, brother," Tamiel whispered, a bloody smile etched on his face. "Birds born in a cage think flying is madness. Hell was our cage."
A sad smile bloomed on the face of his brother. "I won't let you go, you know," Azazel said softly.
Keeping his eyes open felt hard. Tamiel wanted to close them, maybe forever.
"I never expected anything else from you."
After all, Tamiel should have already been dead. It would have been the case if the mystical energies of his brother weren't working, ensuring his continued existence.
Tamiel would probably now fall into an eternal sleep until he was strong enough. Before that though, there was one thing he needed to do. His eyes flashed gold one last time, transmitting into the mind of his brother important information. He closed his eyes as he felt his brother shudder in shock. "I did it for us, for all of us," were the last words of Tamiel.
"You did," the older Watcher spoke softly. Behind him, he felt the presence of the other leaders of the Grigori. The leader of the Grigori didn't move, transmitting the information he had received from Tamiel to the others. He felt some of them shudder in excitement, shudder in fear, some of them began to laugh.
"Azazel, this thing, it changes everything," Penemue said behind him.
The Watchers were before all scientists and scholars of the world and its rules. What made them strong wasn't their inherent multiple divine authorities.
What made them dangerous was the fact that they understood more about creation than some primordial representation of it did.
What made them dangerous was their knowledge and the fact that they had just been given by their brother knowledge about things alien to the world, things that could be manipulated to allow them to finally stand equal to super devils and Demiurgic Archangels. The Watchers had just been given by Tamiel knowledge of [ ].
"Yes, it changes everything," Azazel, once known as Ragiel, whispered while looking at the prone, bloody form of his brother.
This chapter was kinda an interlude, a way to show what was happening outside of Rias and Sirzechs' actions. The Grigori or literally the watchers in English had been there since the dawn of humanity. They were the ones to teach them, guide them. What I find interesting about them is that in canon, unlike Hell or heaven, they didn't lose any of their cadres. My interpretation is that while they are not the strongest what they are is clever and that allows them to survive, no, thrive amongst behemoths like the devils and the angels. They understood that if you couldn't win against the bear with bare hands, it meant that you just needed to create the necessary tools. They're like humanity or maybe it's humanity who is like them. Anyway, I got four more chapters on my (p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m / Eileen715). With 4.99, you have access to everything I post in a month in advance. Don't hesitate to visit if you want to read more or simply support me