Basic setting data

Core Premises
The overriding aspect of the setting is that one of the two deities that were supposed to oversee the world experiment jointly has turned to evil, and by his own choice.  As a result, all of the rules that were supposed to be in place to govern the world have been abandoned, and the afterlife is a partitioned place for it.

The angel clades have shrunk as a result, and the equivalent of blue-collar jobs arisen among them.  Where once, the idea of reproduction or marriage was unthinkable, it is now fairly common for angels or demons to wed.  This has resulted in both of their ranks growing, albeit slower than humanity's.  The once-frequent battles between Hell and Heaven have ground to a halt with the advent of cameras, and now, there are strictly-enforced treaties in place to prevent the violation of the masquerade.  The very need for a masquerade has never flagged, since the few times the existence of the afterlives and their occupants have gone public, nations have torn themselves trying to achieve something, or pledging service to a deity that actively avoids such burdens for scientific reasons.

Overriding Rules
The treaty that governs all others is thus detailed as The Treaty of the Rift:

1) Under no circumstances shall any being of birth outside the mortal planes conceive with a mortal.
2) Should one of the lingering tools of the Creator be uncovered, it shall be decommissioned and its remains shared between both heavenly and hellish parties immediately and without condition, so long as it has remained unused.
3) The physical entrances to the afterlives are to remain sealed and under permanent watch until the resolution of all conflicts and standoffs between mortal and afterlife entities and among afterlife entities.
4) Should it transpire that life evolves naturally on worlds besides Earth, its living beings shall be endowed with free will and souls of value not to exceed or diminish Earth's.
5) The only permissible circumstance under which resurrection may occur is if a mortal is acting in the direct and consensual service of the gods, and if the death of the individual in question went unnoticed among mortals.
6) No deity may pass over the Rift between planes in person until such time that only one deity exists.
7) Direct battle between the deities shall not occur safe defensively.
8) No mortal shall ever be given a perfectly accurate depiction or description of the afterlife or its residents, regardless of their status, until the treaty is null.
Violation of the Treaty by any actor, signatory, or their subordinate is grounds for immediate imprisonment for a term not to exceed three hundred years within a locale determined by The Librarian.

The Masquerade
As the Earth experiment progressed, it was the original intent of Creator to ensure that it eventually ended, and all humanity or whatever replaced it would be made aware of the existence of the primordial streams of energy and mass that would be poured over all over habitable worlds to create more life in humanity’s image.  When that happened, humanity would be given the choice of either mass-suicide, to create even more energy and mass for the universe to indulge in, or perpetuation as the forerunner species of all sentience.  However, throughout the process leading up to the final, public revelation, the world was to be kept ignorant of the existence of the afterlives and the deities that operate them.  The whole point of Earth was to allow Creator to implement what he had learned from his predecessors in other universe and avoid their mistakes.  Therefore, humans were to be kept deliberately ignorant of the state of the afterlives.  In other universes, Creator observed deities playing favorites, hurting mortals for entertainment, and inflicting on them pointless neglect and cruelty.  In his own reality, he promised, no such things would occur.  He created two deities in lesser copies of his own image, and saw to it that they would be assigned specific roles.
When Earth came into being after billions of years of hard work by Creator and his loving sons, then Creator took aside the small cadres of angels he had made to aid his sons and told them of their role.  They would maintain the ignorance of whatever sentient life humanity evolved into after he has set the laws of biology and physics and chemistry in motion.  Therefore, after life evolved and arose under the guidance of the three deities, Creator slew himself to scatter the beginnings of what became human souls across the world.
However, almost immediately, two things went wrong.  First, not all of Creator’s essence scattered properly.  Shards of his power remained, cohesive and incalculably dangerous.  These were referred to as Primordial Shards by his offspring.  These Primordial Shards are capable of amplifying any power source, including technological and magical power, to colossal levels.  These and the tools Creator used to affect his own suicide are still intact, and scattered across Earth along with the first true souls.  The second is that several angels immediately turned their backs on the process of human life and its evolution.  They decided, unprompted and to Patron’s horror, that the human race was so primitive, valueless, and selfish that only angels could serve as the template of all life.  While those angels usually fulfilled their roles on Earth anyway, invisibly observing and occasionally aiding humanity, they did so with increasing bitterness and resentment.  Eventually, these renegades were even able to persuade the god named Shieldbearer of their righteousness of their cause, and turned him to their aid.

As such, despite the misgivings of some elder angels, there was always supposed to be a veil of secrecy over the existence of angels, even if they actively sought to protect the living beings of the world from hostile invaders from other universes and learn from humans in death.  That the concept has become so heavily enforced by divine law is a sad truth.  It pangs the hearts of angels to see so many humans toil and suffer, thousands of years after humanity should have reached their true potential and mastered their understanding of life and death.

Divine Hierarchy
In the absence of balance, there are several facets of human culture that have woven their way into the culture of the planes, like cooking, music, fashion, and names.  Many angels take the names of mortals they admired, cooking is a hugely popular pastime, and some care about clothing perhaps a bit too much.  Music is just awesome.

There are four clades of angels: Sprites, which are easily mistaken for fey thanks to their flighty and childlike nature; Chorals, which are the spirits of ingenuity and free will that interact invisibly with mortals most times; Shields, which are the rank and file soldiery of heaven, and Whirlwinds, including you, who are the sort of grab-bag that fills every other niche.  Katriel and Kiba are Chorals, your brother is a Shield, and Regis is too young to have a clade, but it's looking like Sprite so far.  Sprites have gossamer wings that they can hide, even from other angels.  Chorals have wings like shards of stained glass that turn to intangible smoke when touched.  Shields have metallic wings that they can use as a defense.  Whirlwinds have golden eagle wings, akin to Patron’s, but can be flexed to act as weapons or tuck around the body of the whirlwind.

There are four clades of demons: Claimers, who tempt and assault mortals; Imps, who commit sabotage of mortals; Dreamskinners, who drive mortals insane in their dreams; and Blades, who are Hell’s black ops force.  Only those demons that began life as angels have natural wings; some can forge wings of their own using alchemy, although this is hideously painful.  Imps have meat wings made of woven thread.  Dreamskinners have bat-like wings.  Claimers have goose wings.  Blades have wings that can be made to look like any of the others, and can be made intangible.

The deities of the setting are as follows:

Creator: The God that created all of the universe, barren of life.  He set the actions of all physics, chemistry, and biology in motion, then slew himself to create and life.  All of existence, in all four of the original planes, stems from his cosmic suicide, and it is from the remains of his body that the Primordial Shards of Life emerged, which began thermodynamics as they exist now.  However, life was not solely his creation.  He wanted life to emerge naturally from the processes of his existence, and so he created two lesser deities in his suicide to prepare the universe for whatever his suicide created.  Of all of the primordial nebulae from which the stars spun, his favorite was the one that birthed Earth, and so his successor deities chose the Solar system for the first experiment in life.

Patron: The god of community, love, and death; it is he who sponsors the angels who keep reality from spinning apart.  He is, thus far, the only visibly active deity who is actually bothering to keep to the plan of the Creator, and is badly overwhelmed as a result.  Patron is one of the two primordial deities, along with Dark Liege.  He does not grow stronger from prayer, as the Dark Liege does.  Patron is responsible for maintaining the souls of living beings, principally humans, and eventually for ensuring that the rest of the universe populates with the perfected life forms that will be engineered by the Librarian from the data collected from the Earth experiment.  He dwells in the Vault of Silver, the central fortress and palace of the heavens, and the final resting place of most of the Primordial Shards.  This means that he is incredibly busy, overseeing the experiment that is Earth life.  Between ensuring that no other outsider gods like Trespasser arrive in reality, writing update reports on the experiment for the Librarian, keeping his evil brother’s armies at bay, intervening in the criteria selection for appropriate afterlife direction for dead souls, and actually governing Heaven, Patron is horribly busy and overworked.

Dark Liege: Originally called Shieldbearer, Dark Liege is the god of curiosity, passion, and life, and the most evil force in all of the world that can still be called sane.  Cold, cruel, petty, vicious, and contemptuous, it is entirely his fault that the Earth experiment has gone so far beyond its original parameters.  He gains power from prayer, but this is of little value, since the terms of the Treaty of the Rift have made it so that no mortal can ever fully grasp his essential details, and most of the demons he commands quietly loathe him.  Still, he is the most powerful single being in all of remaining creation, and so the other deities are thus far unable to dislodge him and right the course of fate.  Dark Liege routinely sends lesser demons to Earth to torment and tempt mortals in the guise of other mortals, which is technically not a violation of the Treaty.  However, lacking his brother’s understanding of death, he does not grasp why the mortals he sends his demons to tempt sometimes fight back even if their death is assured.  Dark Liege is also theoretically responsible for governing Hell, but tends to leave that to his subordinates while he researches planar travel and indulges in his occasional hobby of creating new methods of torture.  He is also supposed to send reports on the progress of the Earth experiment to the Librarian, but does so in fits and starts rather than the assiduous punctuality of his brother.  However, even he dares not wholly disregard the instructions of Creator in this manner, so he does complete his reports even if he is sick to death of it.

The Librarian: This cool, collected, and gracious goddess is the youngest of the five deities, and the only one brought about by the actions of the others.  After coming into being, she was given the portfolio of evolution and law.  Before Dark Liege broke ranks with the other deities, she was created by the joint actions of the two primordials to observe and record all things in the universe that might some day produce life, and to catalogue all of their activities, as well as to periodically check the universe for signs of intrusion by other Creators from other realms (which are invariably hostile towards their wayward brother, even billions of years after his death).  Despite her remit involving taking no sides and choosing no victors, she unreservedly supports Patron in his efforts to rein in his evil brother, or at least reclaim Dark Liege’s portfolio, so that it is safe for Patron to reveal himself to the mortal world.  For this, she has the utter hatred of Dark Liege, who regards her as a traitor.  However, her private dimension is so heavily secured that half of Dark Liege’s army working together couldn’t even get up the front steps, so he is presently unable to act directly on his hate.  When life evolves on other worlds from the mess of chemicals and energy that fill the stars, the Librarian will finally leave her fortress and assume leadership over the pantheon directly, voiding the Treaty of the Rift and assuming control of the heavens from Patron, who is looking forward to stepping back and letting her take the responsibility.  When this happens, her power will grow to eclipse Dark Liege and Trespasser combined.  However, for reasons that are not clear to anybody but themselves, neither Dark Liege nor Trespasser have yet dared to prevent this from happening.

Trespasser: This deity is an enigma and a violent enemy of the other three.  He arrived in a flurry of corrupting eldritch energy forty thousand years ago, and has waged a desperate campaign of misdirection and violence since then.  So far, all the Librarian can ascertain about him is that he is like Patron and Dark Liege, in that he was created by the death of a Creator other than the one for this universe.  He is the master of the ogre race, and is only begrudgingly a signatory of the Treaty of the Rift.  In fact, as the Treaty does not mention him at all, others may wonder why he even bothered signing.  However, for all of his brutishness, Trespasser is aware of the crippling weakness he has concealed from the others: he can exist only so long as his own spawn do, for he imbued them with fragments of himself when he was attacked by Dark Liege shortly after his arrival in the universe.  If every ogre dies, Trespasser will evaporate like fog in sunlight, and die the true death.  He currently dwells on the outer spaces of the mortal realm, thus being the only god who technically inhabits the current universe and not its attendant pocket planes.  However, he knows that if he were to create life on another world or attack Earth directly, the other three deities would put aside their differences and assault him instantly.  Thus, he bides his time, wracking his brain for any means of escape from this blasted waste of a universe.

It is something of a puzzle to the deities why their portfolio items seem to function without them.  Despite Patron being the holder of the portfolio of community, it is perfectly possible for communities to turn to evil, such as racial supremacist compounds or cult groups.  Likewise, Dark Liege holds the portfolio of curiosity, yet curiosity has led to nearly every positive discovery in human history, most of which demons and angels alike have eagerly adopted, like cooking, music, and fashion.  Both deities actively try to influence the world through their portfolios to foil the plots of the other, but for some reason, the actual impact of their actions seems minimal.  The Librarian posits that their portfolios may be somehow inert until the initial phase of the Earth experiment is over and sentient life begins elsewhere in the universe, at which time they will be able to use their portfolios to differentiate the new races and make them more distinct.  If so, then none of the remaining deities will be able to employ their fullest power for potentially hundreds of thousands of years, save, ironically, Trespasser, who as an outsider god, has no portfolio.

Mortals and the Divine
Mortals on Earth cannot learn magic without direct intervention of a demon, or theoretically an angel.  However, given that angelic magic is incredibly taxing and dangerous, no angel teaches it to mortals.  Demonic magic is no less dangerous despite being easier to use because its easy road to power so often leads its users astray.

Death is a transition for mortals.  Upon death, a soul is balanced not against an arbitrary scale of good, evil, obedience, and disloyalty, but against its willingness to ascribe to the very specific role humanity is to play in the ultimate plan of Creator.  Creator made Earth as a test bed for the mechanisms of evolution, community, thought, and emotion, as expressed by the lifeforms on the planet.  Thus, a being is judged by their practice of those concepts or expression of those ideas.  If a human, for example, was a miserable grouch, but still made the world around them better, they may be welcomed into heaven even if they were staunchly atheist.  By contrast, a devoutly religious person who made life painful for their neighbors through oppressive, cruel behavior would go to Hell for betraying the concept of community, thought, and emotion.  Thus, Godliness and adherence to Creator’s will is not a matter of mindless adherence to a code of conduct, but by being the best possible role model to the uncountable trillions of aliens who will one day look to humanity as their template.

Therefore, people typically go to Hell for one of two reasons: either consistently poor behavior in life as defined by the criteria Creator set forth, and that his successors have slightly modified, or artificial taint by a demon who has successfully cast magic upon the targeted human, with or without their knowledge.  It is the second that is the more perfidious, but also the easier to fix.  A Choral angel can repair a tainted soul, as can some other angels in the case of lesser taints.  However, if a soul dies tainted, there is little that can be done.  This is why angels are so often authorized to patrol large areas of Earth, keeping sharp vigil for the signs of demonic activity.  Demons who do manage to reach Earth and contact Hell for any reason are often sharply encouraged to spread their taint as subtly as possible, to maximize deployment time.

Earth’s True Purpose
Given that the world is to be expressly kept ignorant of the precise existence and nature of the true afterlife and its rulers, there is some laxity built into the process of sorting souls, with many souls requiring case review by the presiding deities, and precedents being sometimes overturned, with the usual interruption of attention that causes.  The deities of the world are not able to intervene in the case of specific souls, but the parameters by which souls are sorted after death can be modified.  However, since Creator ultimately thought of Earth as little more than a test bed for his ideas, there are opportunities for dead souls to simply abandon existence, and return their souls’ energy to the streams of primal matter and energy with which the universe recycles itself.  Thus, even souls in the darkest pits of Hell can theoretically escape once they get a chance.  In this way, the afterlives can prevent overflowing into adjacent universes, as at least one of those is into this one.

In addition, Earth was to serve as a test bed for more than just sentient life.  The concept and physical laws of evolution were also to be tested on Earth, as they are extensively, every day.  This is the one factor of Creator’s plan that has so far gone off without a hitch.  The plans that Creator enacted to test whether evolution could function without divine oversight are thus far flawless, with more than enough proof for its success to enable its deployment on the other chemical-rich worlds of the universe, so that one day, Earth life will not be alone.
The entire Earth population were originally to serve as both trial and prototype for self-replicating, non-divine life.  Creator saw with horror and disgust how poorly every other universe had been administrated by his sick, selfish cousins, and resolved to create life-forms that were able to operate wholly without interference from above.  He created Heaven, the Library, and Hell to serve as mechanisms for his attendant angels and godly children to learn from mortals after their deaths, recycle their souls for power, and reproduce without wasted time.  Obviously, this has not happened.

The Earth experiment, however, was never open-ended.  Like many human scientific projects, the Earth Experiment has an end goal.  Its ultimate task was to allow humanity an attempt to evolve into a state of readiness, both biological and philosophical, to accept the true state of the multiverse, even if no human ever explicitly figured out every detail.  All humanity is to serve as cautionary tale, template, exemplar, and test bed alike, for all of the techniques that will someday populate all of reality.  This readiness, and detecting it, is the entire reason that the two sons of Creator decided to make a new god to serve as their eventual replacement, for neither fully trusted themselves to correctly interpret the data of the Earth experiment without their father’s guidance.

Because of the growing size and complexity of human life, thought, and philosophy, the afterlives have had to expand radically since their original establishment, over one hundred forty thousand years ago.  So far, humans, angels, and demons are the only beings that are allowed into the afterlife from the mortal world, although both realms of the afterlife do contain all manner of native fauna, some quite bizarre to mortal senses.  Creator provided mechanisms for this to occur.  The physical spaces the afterlives occupy are determined by the proportional power and occupation of their realms, such that the larger the number of people in the afterlife, the larger it becomes.  Theoretically, they could expand infinitely, but as a practical matter, this is impossible to test without a correspondingly infinite population of dead people.

There is always the possibility that the primordial matter left throughout the rest of the universe could evolve life without any further action on the part of any gods or humans.  If that were to happen, the Treaty of the Rift specifically dictates that the new life shall be given access to new souls, just as humans are.  However, the world upon which this life evolves would be bereft of any physical entries to the afterlife, and there would be no angels among the population to keep things safe from extra-dimensional invaders, so it would no doubt be perilous there.  In addition, new accommodations would have to be established for the dead of that world in Heaven and Hell, which are already increasingly understaffed as it is.  Patron and Dark Liege both, ironically, hope that no more life in the universe exists, as it would make their jobs far harder.

The Library
Despite the best efforts of time, disappointment, and overwork, the great Library of the Planes still exists.  This small dimension contains physical and magical records of all human and angelic knowledge, and much demonic and even ogre knowledge as well.  Every fact that a human has ever died knowing is recorded here, and every lie and half-truth, too.
Over the vast stacks of magic paper presides the Librarian.  This goddess of knowledge and adjudication serves as the record-keeper of the Earth experiment.  The Library is her demesne, her realm, and her fortress.  Within its walls, even Dark Liege cannot oppose her directly.  Despite its nature, it can be visited, with the Vault-children and the elder angels of Heaven being the most frequent attendees.  Here, anybody who wishes to know the facts of the Earth experiment may learn them, if they can find them.  The books are indexed, but the frightening rate of expansion of the human race has forced the Library to accommodate an inflow of knowledge it was not designed to contain.
The Librarian herself is a quiet, contemplative, and unemotional deity, but she has an aspect of patience and tolerance that endear her to most who meet her.  Despite her disappointment in Dark Liege’s self-aggrandizing conduct, she has allowed demons into her library before, to ensure that they are not unfairly denied information.  However, one thing she does enforce immovably on all visitors is that no violence is permitted in her Library.  Visitors find themselves unable to draw weapons or cast spells in the building.
No two visitors perceive the building in exactly the same way.  Most see it as a literal library, albeit a different one from the others who do.  Others see it as a sort of cave or hollow in the woods, with the information they seek floating in mist that coalesces into books when approached.  Patron sees it as a school, with the school library taking up most of the floor space, while Dark Liege sees it as a great public space, with books on shelves dotted around in all manner of random patterns.
Why the Librarian would want the building to be perceived differently by all, nobody can say but her.  She chooses to do so because she suspects that the building and its resources would be exploited in Dark Liege’s and Patron’s war if it were easier to map.

Mortals from Heaven sometimes come here with the aid of a friendly angel, if they wish to look something up or perform research.  However, this is not especially common, since there are abundant conventional libraries in Heaven, and much of the information in the Library is of an academic or explanatory nature that is of little use to mortals.
Higher angels peruse the books often, however, looking for patterns.  After all, the entire Earth experiment is designed specifically to look for the pattern of cosmic awareness that signals its own end, and the beginning of the deliberate design of life throughout the rest of the universe.  Some angels wonder how much longer the experiment shall continue as Earth becomes ever more culturally complex.

This is not to say that she regards angels with no disappointment.  While their embrace of their inherently empathetic and loving nature may have made their own lives more comfortable, more than a few angels have failed at their task of ensuring no outside interference in the Earth experiment by overplaying their own involvement.  Most, if not all, angels regard demonic interference in the Earth experiment as being just as bad as ogre involvement, and angels were stationed on Earth specifically to prevent ogre involvement.  Since demons obviously did not exist when the Librarian was created, she is willing to make some exceptions for angels who hold this belief, but she thinks many are too zealous to slay their former kindred.  Of course, she has never seen the raw horror of Hell with her own eyes, either.

The Library is the only one of the outer planes of existence with no native life, not even bacteria.

Divine Life
Angels are created naturally by the expression of thought patterns in the primordial energy.  Thus, when a sufficient number of souls from heaven and hell have vanished into the primordial streams to be disincarnated, an angel materializes from the stream, fully adult and aware, and falls naturally into their clade.  Some angels who have assumed a human guise for some reason can also reproduce with other angels who have done the same, and thus birth infant angels by that method.  This is rare, but the offspring of this method are welcomed unreservedly into society as further proof of Creator’s brilliance in designing evolution.  From random energy and matter, comes self-replicating and recombining life; as on Earth, so in Heaven.

Angels serve Patron, their master and god, and the last primordial entity that is actually following the plan from his Creator.  As a rule, angels tend towards empathy, kindness, and a gentle nature, making the exceptions like Sebastian all the more stark in their contrast.  Of course, being an angel, even Sebastian is capable of passionate love, gentle conduct, and wholesome occupation.  They just aren’t his default nature.
By the rules of the heavenly realms, including the pocket dimensions that have budded off of Heaven to serve as private residences for senior angels, angels may pursue various hobbies and distractions if they wish.  Because humanity serves as the template for all future life in the universe, many angels adopt human names or hobbies to better understand this peculiar race.  This has had the added benefit of giving those humans who make it to heaven, which is most of them, a sense of instant familiarity that they might otherwise have missed.  This is part of why Patron allow this.  Patron himself is not unapproachable, but is so horribly overworked that his speakers and messengers take most questions on his behalf.  Patron chooses to appear in a human guise himself, although his is an illusion instead of actual flesh that disappears when he abandons it.
Patron also operates an academy for those angelic children who are born as a result of angelic parents coupling instead of the natural arrival from the streams of primordial matter.  This is perhaps the most heavily fortified locale in all of the planes, with four full garrisons of Shields and twelve Whirlwinds overseeing it at all times.  Dark Liege has no actual plans to attack it, but he allows Patron to think he does so that those thousands of angels aren’t getting in the way of his plans instead.

Demons are also capable of reproducing if they assume human form.  Natural demonic spawning comes not from the passage of souls into oblivion, but from the agglomeration of the hate and negativity that radiates from the souls deserving of damnation.  As Hell grows, some souls of like mind and similar sin may suddenly and irrevocably slam together in a surge of violent energetic discharge, and emerge as a fresh demon, in the body of a child but with the mind of a grown adult, fully aware of their origin and role in the damned hierarchy.  Elder demons, including the fallen angels that conquered Hell from its rightful guardians at the dawn of human civilization, loathe these fresh demons, referring to them as Hailespont, a pun in the tongue of Hell on the undignified nature of their birth.  However, a Hailespont may well climb the ladder to power and authority based solely on the merit of their actions, should they damn enough souls with trickery and guile to spawn another demon from the product of their labor alone.  When this occurs, any stigma the first demon may have held is cast aside, and they may choose to abandon Earth duties to climb to a less strenuous position.  A surprisingly large percentage of Hailespont take the offer, perhaps to escape the dangers of operation within sight of the forces of Heaven.  The punishment inflicted on a demon caught by an angel in the process of creating enough sinners to spawn a new demon upon those sinners’ deaths is bone-chillingly painful.
Demons born of the union between male and female human forms of demons who can assume such shapes are under less of a stigma, and there is no special name for them.  On the contrary, they are held up as an example of Hell’s superiority, as they are the most triumphal expression of evolution and community that the demons can think of.  Even scorned by Patron and the Librarian, even cast into darkness and hate, the demons can come together to create family, despite the marriages between demons rarely being more than a few pieces of paper and a promise to not lie with others until the birth of an offspring.  Forming lasting attachments is difficult for beings bereft of a true understanding of love.

Ultimately, many angels look on demons with pity.  Actively choosing to abandon Creator’s plan and embrace hedonism and cruelty physically changes an angel, and it is not a pretty process.  Many fallen angels are now so far from their original forms that it brings the loyal angels to tears.  What is more disturbing is that many of the demons and fallen angels who engage in torture of dead mortals (or living mortals) seem to have no true motive for doing so.  They simply trudge through their jobs, hurting people who can’t fight back, and sometimes don’t even look to be enjoying it themselves.  Of course, this only makes sense from the angelic perspective.  Some demons simply regard their roles as jailors as a punitive form of employment, or as sport.
However, what many demons are unable to admit to themselves is that the entire system of hurting damned souls is not part of Creator’s plans.  After all, Hell would not have been built as escapable if Creator had wanted prisoners in Hell to be non-dischargeable.  The wanton cruelty and redundant punishments of Hell were never part of Creator’s schemes.  The demons who are able to acknowledge this to themselves are usually quite cynical about it, and some say the same of Heaven.  After all, Creator barely cared about Earth; he viewed it as being nothing more than a test bed and data platform for his grand experiment.  What benefit do angels glean from keeping souls around in Heaven that the demons don’t in Hell?  Many demons justify their actions to themselves and others by calling angels hypocrites for this, and some more detached angels might even admit that they have a point.  However, this is not wholly accurate.  Hell was originally intended to serve as a sort of prison to be operated by the Vault-children, after all.  Originally, all souls were to be sent to Heaven after death, so that their knowledge could be directly collected by the gods and their servants, processed, and sent to the Librarian.  It is the demons’ fault, and no others, that so many souls wind up there instead.  Souls were never supposed to linger for millennia in Hell, they were to be cleansed of flaws and recycled in the primordial streams of matter and energy.
Ultimately, the only one who can say for certain is the Librarian, and she is not forthcoming.  Endowed with all of the knowledge of both gods, at their prime and before Dark Liege’s corruption from his former, noble persona as Shieldbearer, the Librarian is the only player in the game to have figured out every aspect of the rules.  The demons are correct in that the lingering of virtuous souls in Heaven was not part of the plan, and the angels are right that the torture of souls for thousands of years in the cells of Hell was also unnecessary.  However, she regards the demons as the greater hypocrites, for claiming the angels are deviants for breaking Creator’s plans when the whole collapse of the system was entirely the fault of their leader.  Patron would have been perfectly happy to keep the experiment running smoothly and then retire.  It was Dark Liege who clung to power and pride, and who insisted on pointless, arbitrary changes to the soul-sorting criteria.  It was Dark Liege who invented the wicked magics that have slowed the process of natural human development, and it was the wars that Dark Liege started that allowed Trespasser to slip into reality unnoticed.  It was Dark Liege who drove the Vault-children from their homes, and Dark Liege who made the Treaty of the Rift necessary.

The final nail in the coffin for Dark Liege’s guilt, in the Librarian’s eyes, is that Dark Liege has specifically made leaving Hell almost impossible for the souls in his captivity.  If Dark Liege truly sought to uphold Creator’s will in guiding and recording the Earth experiment, why would he slow the means by which souls could be recycled, and life’s growth accelerated?  He claims it is for security, but the real reason is obvious: the more souls escape Hell, the faster new angels are born, and that strengthens his hated enemy.

Life and Death
Mortals cannot become a demon or angel on their own.  When a mortal soul arrives in their deserved afterlife, an attendant angelic guard or demon collects them and incarnates them into a physical form.  For the blessed, this is usually just the form of the body that the mortal had at the happiest moment of their life.  For the damned, this is usually the same, just as a reminder to the damned of what they can never have back.  Mortals are then given a home, usually one of the great towers of opaque crystal that the divine and damned have hollowed out to create hybrid apartment complexes and galleries.  Thus, the streets of Heaven and Hell teem with souls nearest the spots where the dead arrive from the mortal plane.  Most souls suffer significant memory loss after death, but it is not always permanent.  Dead souls, regardless of their locale, cannot reproduce.

Souls that have passed into the next life can’t be destroyed, even deliberately, except by exposure to the streams of primordial matter and energy.  Thus, injury and decapitation are no impediment to sport and torture by demons, who amuse themselves by finding new and creative ways to torment their victims.  Of course, that also means that there is no impediment to hobbies in Heaven that would be insanely dangerous on Earth.

Heaven
For diversion, the residents of the heavenly towers may travel as they wish, and explore any of the pocket planes attached to the heavens, which may contain any combination of natural and artificial destination, but trend towards recreations of places of great beauty from human history.
Mortal residents of Heaven are free to pursue whatever behavior they wish, which is enabled by the abundance of self-replenishing resources of Heaven as allowed by its gradual expansion.  Like Hell, Heaven expands proportionately to the number of people in it, angelic or mortal.  Unlike Hell, people generally don’t want to leave, and most humans wind up there anyway.  Thus, new ‘wings’ of the afterlife appear all the time, suddenly materializing blank and free of features at the periphery of Heaven’s fields.  These barren expanses of rock and rich loam usually sprout trees planted by the Sprites and Chorals who take it upon themselves to welcome the new dead to eternity, which in turn can hide small villages of those souls that prefer peace and quiet to the hectic and vibrant afterlife of the great cities.  In the cities at the heart of the heavens, the crystal spires do not contain merely housing, but sprawling trade hubs and shops, with their own barter economy.  Thanks to the materialization powers of older Chorals, resources never lack, and so Heaven has no currency.  Souls are free to collect whatever hobbies and pastimes suit their fancy.  If a soul wants privacy, they can return to their residence in the great crystal towers any time they wish.
Of course, some activities are more disruptive than others.  Souls that pursue raucous parties or other noisy and space-consuming activities are usually directed to several crystal towers established specifically for that purpose.  Other crystal towers contain the collections of artifacts and relics that older human souls or angelic artists created, from vast murals to complex sculptures.

Light in Heaven is provided by the soft glow of an eternal source that hangs above the plane.  As Heaven was the original site of Creator’s operations before his death, it contains the preponderance of his older works, such as the Primordial Star.  The Primordial Star is exactly what it seems: a mass of physics-defying plasmoid energy and mass that hangs high over Heaven and provides comforting light that never burns or fades.  Souls that wish to sleep may do so by simply closing the blinds provided on every single crystal tower’s window.
Pocket planes of angelic residences are an exception to this.  Because these are the demesne of the angels who dwell in them, they are instead under the control of those domain-holders, who can will them to be louder, quieter, brighter, darker, or any other state they wish.  While Patron loves all of his children equally, the largest and most prestigious pocket planes are usually awarded to those of the Whirlwind clade, simply because their job is so much harder than the others.  Some of the pocket planes even float through the ethereal nothingness that swirls around the primordial matter and energy streams that will someday coalesce into new life on other planets in the universe in imitation of Earth’s, and have a grand view of the future.

Heaven teems with life, both in imitation of pre-human Earth and because of its own lengthy existence.  What life exists in Heaven tends to be either celestial variants of Earth animals and plants, or creatures created by Creator or Patron to entertain and accompany their angels.  The most obvious of these unique creatures are the great winged snakes that lazily curl their way through the thin clouds of Heaven, basking in the celestial glow that feeds and nourishes them.  They occasionally descend to the surface and nap on the warm soil, where they tolerate departed souls approaching them and petting them.  The other major exception is the enormous species of fish, the size of a whale shark that occasionally noses its way up onto beaches by the heavenly seas to investigate mortals nearby, then pushes itself back into the water to swim away.

Hell
For the damned, there is no diversion, and those who leave the cells in which they are closed – never locked – may stumble through the confusing mazes of the crystal towers, seeing only the regret and pain of those who died before them.  Even those who escape the crystal towers find no respite, for Hell is akin to a Klein bottle: it loops back on itself endlessly.  Even those who flee from their towers at a dead sprint find themselves only reaching the thick bands of trees that separate each tower, in which rapacious monsters dwell.  Beyond the farthest trees, another spire will rise, and so on, in alternating bands of hostile wilderness and three-dimensional torture maze.  At any time, a soul attempting escape can be called back to its cell by the demon assigned to its torture, and the soul shall return, through whatever obstacles may present themselves.  Leaving Hell outright can be done only by the voluntary dissolution of self into the primordial streams of matter and energy, which Dark Liege makes quite difficult to locate.  However, as he did not create Hell, Dark Liege can’t actually destroy the streams, and so any soul that finds it can find their oblivion there if they can get to it before their overseer notices their absence and recalls them.  It is hidden beneath one of the fortresses built into the largest crystal tower, and is only accessible through a fourth-story window.
There are other locations breaking up the recursive checker pattern of plant life and crystal towers.  Some spots on the blank stone ground of Hell are instead broken up by interminable pits, containing no natural light sources.  Unlike the walls of Hell, which glow with a dim purple light at all times, these pits are murky, with no natural features.  Quite why these pits exist, the demons of Hell do not know, since they long predate Dark Liege’s conquest.  The Vault-children insist that they were originally to hold high-security prison facilities that were never constructed, but the demons have their doubts.  Occasionally, a demon will throw a soul into the pits for sport, secure in the knowledge that they can be recalled at any time by the fallen angels they serve.
Hell’s final geographic features are the plateaux that dot the endless Hellscape.  These plateaux are used as staging areas for the military, in case of incursion by ogres, angels, or any other problem that may arise, such as a mass breakout attempt.  Because Patron has little interest in challenging his brother openly, there is no real chance of Hell’s full might being called to act defensively.  However, on occasion, Dark Liege does toy with the idea of staging assaults on the heavens, to capture souls for his own use, or to seize angels to transform into Blades.  These ideas rarely move beyond lethargic drills and training sessions for his armies, whereupon he sees the general opposition he faces from his own subordinates and gives up on the idea.  On the rarest of occasions, however, he may find himself fired up by some defeat or fit of resentment, and actually order an assault on one of the other gods.  When this happens, all but a handful of demons sortie from the crystal towers and plateaux, and begin the process of dispatching.  Because of the individual superiority of the angelic armies, the assaults rely on overwhelming numbers.
When demon armies go to war, they rely on the fallen angels that lead them to open dimensional travel routes for them.  Thanks to the fact that teleportation rarely allows more than one person to travel at a time, other methods are required.  Most of Hell’s research assets work on finding means of allowing faster mass transit between the planes.  Therefore, when the armies of Hell march on the heavens or on Earth, it usually requires a demon or fallen angel to be at the destination already, working to bring others in their wake.  This is understandably slow, and allows vigilant defenders to react in time to interrupt them.  The ritual needed to open a portal between realms large enough to allow mass transit takes over five months to complete, and has been successfully enacted only five times in the one hundred fourteen thousand years of human history: twice to Heaven, and thrice to Earth.
By contrast, Heaven does not invade Hell.  Although Patron is more able to move troops about as needed, he has entirely enough on his plate, and thanks to the mechanisms by which angels propagate, it is far more useful to simply prevent humans from sinning or tainting themselves to deny demons their numbers.  Additionally, Hell has no real strategic value for Patron, since it is a place where souls that are of no use to him would go whether Dark Liege is alive or not.  However, on the five occasions that the armies of Hell have managed to rise to Earth or Heaven thanks to local collaborators, Patron’s armies have mobilized to their fullest.  Since an angel could be killed permanently in Heaven, Patron lead both countercharges against his brother personally, supported by his Shields, to reduce potential losses.  Dark Liege, by comparison, cares only for his fallen angel brethren and not one whit for his demonic hordes, and so fought without regard for collateral damage.  Heaven has claimed the field in all five wars so far, and thus was in a better position to dictate terms for the resultant Treaty of the Rift.

The native fauna of Hell are more or less the same as that of Heaven, save for the notable absence of the winged snakes.  Thanks to the Vault-children being obsessive jailers, there is far less of that life, but it is no less diverse overall.  This has led to some truly incongruous moments when clearly benevolent animal life has wandered into scenes of mind-shattering torture simply because the local demons have no interest in displacing it.
However, Hell also has vicious beasts of its own, the result of Hell’s amoral evolution experiments.  Using artificial selection, some of the beasts that once dwelled in Heaven’s jail have been bred into truly terrifying monsters, some of which have no Earth analogue.  The most dangerous is the eight foot long predator known as the Soul-robber, for its tendencies to inflict wounds on souls of such gruesome depth that even the undying residents of Hell can’t heal straightaway.  Its body is roughly akin to a naked bear, but with cords of pulsing muscle and vein beneath its warty skin, and great envenomed fangs that pierce through armor like a sword through tissue paper.  These dwell in the bands of plant life that separate the crystal towers, but not all of them.

Divine Travel
Angels can come and go from Earth as they please, so long as they have Patron’s consent.  He would only withhold consent from his trusted servants in the case of a true emergency, and thus angels are able to visit Earth with ease most of the time.  They do so by what they refer to as ‘perspective walking,’ which entails appearing in a physical space in the world no person is observing, directly or via camera.  They arrive moving, in a normal walking pace, even if they are doing so in an angelic form instead of a human guise.  Why this works so well and so universally, it is not yet known, since the angel who invented the technique fell to evil long ago and no longer communicates with his brethren.  Similarly, angels can return to heaven or one of its pocket planes by the same technique, but can only appear in a single place that they demarcate.  Usually, this is by affixing their names to a physical spot in heaven that they mark with their name somehow, or in their private home if they have one.

Demons can only come and go from Earth in any haste by one means: conjuration.  Demons can conjure other demons, but given their territorial nature, they rarely do so except to reinforce a hedonist circle.  Most demons are conjured by accident, as a result of a group of humans of similar sinful natures existing in one area.  Most demons are quite busy in Hell torturing captive souls, and thus are rarely expecting to come to Earth when they do.  However, most make the best of it and assume a human guise, promptly going about corrupting any souls they happen to find.  It is very rare for the conjuration to repeat itself and summon another demon from the same group of proximate sins, but it has happened.  It was the fact that some angels could no longer come and go from Earth as they pleased that was the first sign that they had truly fallen from Creator’s plan.  Notably, this happened before Dark Liege fell from his own lofty station.  Demons take up residence anywhere in Hell that they can, which could be very unpleasant indeed.  Since Dark Liege has not taught most of his demonic followers how to make a pocket plane, only the eldest fallen angels have private homes of their own.  Most demons just bite the bullet and live in the vast garrison structures interspersed among the crystal towers, which are only one step above jails themselves for comfort.  Those eldest fallen angels, however, usually remake their planes into the height of sinful luxury, with favored servants and all manner of debased artworks to distract them from the ultimate pointlessness of their lives.

Defections from one camp to another are incredibly rare.  No angel worth the name can still look at the original goal of the falling angels of long ago and say it’s worthwhile, and no demon has ever harbored thoughts of leaving Hell to join Patron without Dark Liege catching wind of it and making an example of them.  However, demons who are in the field on Earth could hypothetically escape if they encountered a Choral of sufficient power to purge demonic taint from an actual demon.  This almost never happens, both because demons usually take pleasure in killing any Chorals they find and because to go to Earth as a demon is to by fully surrounded by the most tempting prizes of all: untainted souls to lord over in Hell when they go home.  Even a demon developing principles can’t resist a chance to feel better than something else.

There is no common way for a soul to be trapped in the wrong afterlife by accident.  The arcane mechanisms Creator built to perform the role still work perfectly and are impossible to avoid.  However, in theory, specific fallen angels of high enough rank could forcibly rip a soul out of a living person and imprison it in their own pocket plane, so long as the soul never escapes to Hell itself, whereupon it would be detected and filtered out.  Some fallen angels have actually done it, and their private planes slowly fill with the souls of the undeserving.  However, this is a colossal risk, because if Patron, Dark Liege, or the Librarian ever learned of it, there is nothing that deity would not do to restore the natural order.  Since being killed in their own pocket plane is one of only two ways to permanently erase a fallen angel, and Patron would personally lead an assault on any fallen angel found harboring stolen souls, to steal a soul as such is the ultimate forbidden thrill these dark angels can undertake.

An angel or demon slain on Earth will reconstitute within days on their home plane, which is another reason demons crave their own pocket planes: to avoid the embarrassment of reconstituting before their jeering comrades.  However, any personal possessions the angel or demon had when killed are lost until they can be physically retrieved.  In Heaven, Patron took the time to build a special wing of his garrison to allow any angel who needs to reconstitute a private place to do so.  When a fallen angel dies and reconstitutes in Hell, most demons hold their tongues, but a lower class of demon is fair game for mockery.

One thing that no deity, regardless of age or origin, permits, is the travel between planes.  Death is one-way, and even the absolute mightiest of angels can’t resurrect a mortal without the explicit permission of Patron.  Astral travel is one form of magic that demons can’t teach their wizards, and even those Shields who forge life-long friendships with a mortal never even attempt to bring the mortal with them to the afterlife.  Of course, there are several reasons for this, the first being that it is a violation of the Treaty, but there are mechanical reasons that enforce its proscription.  Living tissue cannot withstand the awesome power of the planes, and as living tissue is full of water molecules, the result of bringing a mortal physically across a planar barrier is somewhat akin to putting cup of potato soup in front of an industrial microwave cannon.  The other reason is that the sorting of souls to their proper destination is an automated process beyond the control of any one deity or even all four, put in place irrevocably by Creator.  Even though the criteria used to decide a soul’s fate are mutable, the actual implementation of that fate is utterly impossible to avoid.  Thus, even if a mortal were somehow transported to the afterlife, they would die instantly.  This also extends to living things without souls, like plants and bacteria.  Native life in Heaven and Hell is more durable, but would not survive long in any plane other than the one in which it was created.
As the Treaty of the Rift suggests, there are actual entrances between Earth and the afterlives.  However, by mutual if grudging agreement, no party may presently use them.  The original intent of Creator was to allow them to serve as a means of transit for angels to visit Earth after it had served its purpose as the template for life elsewhere in the universe, the better to communicate with the living humans.  Most of Hell’s research into mass transit between the planes is based off study of their door to Earth.  The door from Heaven opens up into a small glade of trees in Anhalt, Germany.  The door from Hell opens up into a tidal cave on the coast of South Africa.  Neither area is inhabited by humans in any large number, allowing both doors to remain secret.

Lesser Factions
Angels and demons are not the only players of the game.  Ogres are the spawn of the invasive god called Trespasser.  In their natural form, they tower over mortals, at fully three meters tall fully grown.  They live for roughly ninety years on average, with the exceptional living for up to one hundred fifty.  Some ogres are born with simple evocative magic, and can cast waves of savage cold from their hands that can wither the energy out of nearly anything they touch.  Notably, thanks to the hundred thousands of years of research Patron’s forces have carried out, angel armor is all but immune to demonic ice attacks, but ogre ice attacks can cut through it, thanks to deriving from an entirely different power source.  Ogres organize in groups called Chapters, usually led by the oldest male in the Chapter, or the mightiest mage if one is present.  Not all ogres can use magic.
Ogres can disguise themselves as humans with the use of powerful disguise magic, which only angelic or demonic soldiers can see through without technological aid.  However, an ogre in battle is impossible to miss, as their native strength bleeds through their arcane disguises, and their tusks sprout through their magic masks, until there is no disguise, only a hulking pile of muscle and teeth almost ten feet tall.  Ogres have no afterlife, but instead reincarnate.  When an ogre dies, a female somewhere else on the planet instantly becomes pregnant.  Thus, their numbers never stay diminished for long.  This is a survival mechanism by Trespasser, to ensure he never disappears.  However, some ogres are also able to mate with humans, and the resulting child is guaranteed to be an ogre, and kill the mother in birth.  Thus, their numbers are actually growing slightly.  Dark Liege finds this a convenient distraction for Patron, and has covertly aided ogres escape angelic assassins in the past.

The two other factions in the masquerade are the Vault-children and the Repentant.  The former are the original dwellers of Hell before it was overtaken by Dark Liege, who have managed to escape into a pocket plane near the Librarian’s realm and have reluctantly but firmly allied with Patron.  Before its transformation, Hell was a mere prison for angels driven mad by exposure to the eldritch powers that allowed Trespasser to enter the mortal realm.  The Vault-children were simply another faction of angels before this, who served as a combination of warden and psychologist to their traumatized brethren.  To the horror of Patron and the delight of Dark Liege, the mechanisms for isolating mad angels are still in place despite Patron’s desperate attempts to shut it off, and so any angel who sinks too deep into insanity – for any reason – is automatically siphoned into Hell, and promptly gets snatched up by Dark Liege to craft into a new Blade.  Thus, mental health is an utmost and overriding concern for Patron’s allied angels.  The Vault-children resemble animated plant creatures, akin to Kudzu plants, but are mobile thanks to be able to move their vines to swing on objects, or simulate human limbs.  They would like nothing more than for every other faction in the universe to bugger off so that they can get back to work, but so far, Dark Liege has resisted all of their sabotage efforts to reclaim their home.  They are the only magic faction unable to disguise themselves as a mortal, but they also never need to as none have visited Earth in over eight thousand years.  They occupy themselves by researching magic, and by acting as the guards for the prison in which violators of the Treaty of the Rift are incarcerated.

The final faction is known among their ranks as the Repentant.  This group consists of humans who have both learned of the true existence of the afterlife and at least some of the roles that angels play in repairing damaged souls for fair judgment.  However, while some mortals learn of Patron’s work and devote themselves to it, the some Repentant have chosen instead to flee his forces, lest his Chorals take their memories.  Other Repentant mortals have committed, or believe they have committed, some horrid sin in their pasts that would earn them damnation on death, but thanks to the deliberate lack of information on the true afterlives and their criteria, have no idea how to earn their way into heaven.  Sadly, the nature of Earth as an experiment, into which as few outside factors as possible should be introduced, has been both restrictive on the extent of aid that Patron’s forces can render and inconsistent.  At times, to counter particularly egregious efforts by Dark Liege to subvert the experiment to his own ends, Patron has authorized thousands of Sprites and Chorals to field on Earth to repair souls and restore morale of mortals.  Dark Liege frequently does nothing to restrain demons who leave or are summoned from Hell who corrupt mortals after arrival.  Thus, the Repentant are aware of the existence of Hell and have little idea of how to avoid it.  Repentant are the beings most likely to violate the masquerade on purpose, and can sometimes be found on message boards or street corners, bawling out the truth to any who will listen.
Rarely, a member of the Repentant will actually figure out that a person in the mortal world is an angel and approach them for help.  However, while angels are permitted to repair damaged souls, the accumulation of sin through consensual action is not something an angel can or will fix, and so particularly desperate Repentant have actually attacked angels out of panic or rage.  Dark Liege finds this hilarious, and sometimes covertly directs Repentant towards angels whose cover he has spotted.
Other Repentant are not actually damned, and can simply have their minds erased of their traumatizing knowledge and sent on their way.  Others yet, even rarer, volunteer to aid the angels they have discovered in some task, perhaps in exchange for a chance to speak to a departed loved one or some material reward.  However, an angel is under no obligation to render this opportunity, and indeed not all of the angels the Repentant approach are in Patron’s service.  Some are the fallen servants of Dark Liege, who are perfectly happy to twist the soul in question to evil.  Since this is done with the mortal’s full consent and knowledge, there is effectively nothing any non-fallen angel who discovers this can do about it save killing the demon in question, who the mortal shall surely try to defend.  Dark Liege finds this hilarious, too.

Mortal Roles
Some other mortals serve the divine directly.  These are generally humans that angels have befriended or demons have enthralled, and who figure out the nature of the masquerade on their own.  These mortals could be the neighbors of particularly active angels or demons, or perhaps survivors of ogre attacks who slowly realized their brutish attackers were never human.  Some angels are actually able and allowed to enter into lasting friendships with certain mortals, so long as the mortal is the one who enables it.  The reason can vary from simply finding that mortal a convenient ally in major missions to the mortal in question falling in love with the angel’s cover identity.  Some mortals are even permitted – under very strict supervision – to bear an angel’s arms into battle if the angel is desperate for backup and unable to find it.  However, Patron strongly discourages this, as he is already concerned about the extent to which the other players of the Treaty are willing to violate it to shift the Earth experiment in their own favor, and does not want to be seen as stooping to their level.  Also, as angels age slowly, they are guaranteed to outlive mortal friends and servants.

Likewise, some demons form circles of humans called covens.  These covens consist of anywhere from one to a record-busting seven hundred mortals who have either sworn their souls to the demon in exchange for power, or entered into their service to avoid damnation.  Demons use covens as spies, robbers, messengers, or even an army.  However, demons that were born after the original fall of the Dark Liege do not have a means of materializing the variety of weapons that angels can, nor of repairing the flesh and souls of defeated human minions without inflicting gruesome and unmissable scars and markings on their flesh.  Thus, even demons with huge covens rarely field them in battle against other supernatural entities unless all other options are exhausted.
One particular favorite role for covens is transport.  A demon may not be as powerful as an angel on average, nor able to materialize fiery greatswords (unless they were one of the original fallen angels, of course), but they are able to grant some simple material desires of their coven members.  Thus, it is a popular pastime among older demons to use their minions to collect a variety of fast cars and properties of land, the better to escape angelic pursuit or create cover identities.  Most demons who are not Dreamskinners or Claimers find humans slightly repulsive, but all are able to overcome their physical feelings for mortals who are of sufficient use to them.  The oldest demons may well be able to materialize gold or jewels for their minions to sell, to better fund their activities.  Technically, only specific Blades and Whirlwinds are able to use this power, and so its use is a dead giveaway for members of one faction hunting down the leaders of the other.
Covens may be held together by other means, however.  Some demons forge covens with the specific intent of using them as soldiers, in contrast to the vast majority of their peers.  These covens, called War-Circles, are often used as a militia to seize hostages and land for the protection of the demon leading it.  Others are made of the overconfident mortals who think it is possible to outsmart a demon in a deal.  Some demons hunger for the control of souls to such an extent that they are willing to make promises of ongoing payments of diamonds and other valuables to particularly strong-willed sinners, and these sinners may well covet this wealth so much that they jeopardize their souls in a bargain from which they may later try to escape.  However, no sinner escapes a bargain with a demon forever.  Even those who bargain for life-extending medicines or dark magic ultimately taint their souls in the use of such things or in the activities they undertake when so empowered.  Outsmarting demons isn’t terribly difficult, but escaping one’s own dark desires is.  When the means of reaching those desires are placed in the hands of those already ambitious enough to bargain with Hell to obtain them, escape is all but impossible even for the strongest.  The crystal cells of Hell overflow with the screaming souls of those who thought themselves too clever for damnation.
The rarest covens are called Magic Circles by Patron’s army, and they are by far the hardest to root out.  These are the circles of the very eldest demons, the first few hundred angels who fell at the same time as Dark Liege gave in to his lust for power and control and spat in Patron’s eye.  These are the fallen angels who had already decided to walk the same path as Dark Liege and simply took the chance to follow the leader.  As such, they were insulated from the effects of the reprisal actions Patron took against his brother, and arrived in Hell with all of their powers intact.  Their numbers are occasionally replenished by angels who are siphoned from the host by the mechanisms of Hell itself, thanks to the Vault-children not being able to shut them off in time.  Although these new arrivals are uniformly insane, the mad have their uses as raw materials.
The Magic Circles these high demons create are circles of enchanters and wizards.  They are filled out by mortals with an affinity for demonic magic, who have been modified by their demon master to attune themselves to the invisible flow of primordial power all around them, at the very heart of Creator’s grand experiment.  They can hurl bolts of lightning, raise motes of stone from the ground and propel them like missiles, or even animate the bones of the dead and use them as disposable shock troops that never tire or grow hungry.  In fact, a cursory examination of these Magic Circles would reveal that the mortals in their ranks are even more voracious users of demon magic than the actual demons are.  The demons who head such circles do not bother with trying to grow them or wage wars.  Instead, they use the gullible wizards and warlocks of their Magic Circle covens to serve as cats-paws in their own schemes, to cast their spells instead of having to do it themselves and reveal their cover identities to the angels who hunt them relentlessly.  Not all demons have such patience; the very oldest demons are over four billion years old, and have learned such traits.
Magic Circles are so dangerous and so hard to destroy that ogres steer well clear of them, and only Shields and Whirlwinds dare attack them directly.  Because of the enormous potential for accidental violation of the masquerade intrinsic to such concentrations of demonic magic, even Dark Liege does not encourage their growth or activity, since too many repeated violations of the Treaty of the Rift can imperil even him.  After all, the Librarian has not actively struck at him, but very well could if he were seen deliberately breaking the Treaty she wrote and he signed.
The final and least threatening covens are those formed by demons who flee to Earth not to murder angels and ogres, or to lead whole cities to Hell, but to get away from the endless dreariness of torturing people who can’t fight back.  These hedonistic circles of revelers and demons are the only sort in which more than one demon might be found.  Most demons are quite territorial, and those who undertake the years of effort needed to forge a coven even more so.  However, all demons can feel boredom, and a party with nobody else in it is no party at all.  Thus, some hedonistic covens have as many as a shocking six demons in them, all of them determined to find as many ways to amuse themselves with the luxuries and entertainments of humankind as possible.  These are hard to locate, since they do not actively recruit sinners to their ranks.  Instead, the hedonistic covens slowly accumulate mortals who are attracted to their fun lifestyle, slowly corrupted into the demons’ service, notice as much, and decide to keep going anyway to squeeze some final enjoyment out of life before an eternity of bitter torture.  The human members of these covens are not the eager soul-sellers or desperate slaves of most covens, nor the dark warlocks of Magic Circles, but helpless thrill-seekers and addicts.  An angel who stumbles across such a coven often has more luck breaking these than they would a more covert or militaristic coven, since its human members are often there out of boredom or resigned horror, rather than blackmail or pacts.  More than one hedonistic coven has suddenly collapsed because a kind Choral showed its human members how to save their own souls and still find great pleasure in life, leaving abruptly unaccompanied demons to wonder what in the world just happened.

The ultimate irony is that the entire concept of soul-selling is ultimately hollow.  Souls are not a currency to be traded and exchanged.  A person who has signed a binding magical contract with a demon still has their soul all along.  Any physical changes they experience are the result of the magic of the demon taking root in their flesh and mind, not due to the absence of a soul.  The mechanisms of soul dispersal after death work independently of the desires of any demon, and even Patron can’t redirect them.  Thus, a person who ‘sells’ their soul to a demon is completely unchanged except as the result of whatever terms they signed.  Theoretically, a person could serve in the retinue of a demon for a hundred years and still go to heaven, so long as they are careful not to accrue a taint on their soul in the process.  Demons, of course, do not let anybody know this.

Those who accompany angels as friends and allies, however, are not desperate to save their own souls.  These rare few humans are usually former Repentant who managed to learn the hidden criteria for heaven and hell.  Some mortals resent the heavens for hiding such things, although none are unintuitive to those humans who take time to ease the suffering of the human condition.  Other mortals see the grim responsibility of such secrecy, and offer their aid.  They may be teachers in high drug use areas who steer children away from addiction with the subtle help of Sprites sending strength to the children’s families, or police officers who spend money out of their own pockets to buy food and socks for the homeless, and enjoy the sweet, rewarding dreams of approving Chorals.  Others speak with their angelic allies in person or even share lodgings with them, learning at the feet of God’s children how to move the Earth experiment along without hurting its oblivious participants.  Although angels in human form can theoretically lie with mortals, there is little reason to do so thanks to their reproductive incompatibility and far longer lives, and so angels who befriend humans personally usually encourage those mortals to start families of their own if they really want one.  Sometimes, these mortals ask for selective amnesia so that they are not burdened with the knowledge of heaven and hell after their time of aid to the angels is over, and those who start a family that the angel does not want to know about heaven and hell receive it invariably.  Although memories of meeting and speaking with the angel are thus removed, the moral advice that angel passed along endures, so those who were once allied with an angel are vastly more likely to move on to heaven after death.
Understandably, this targeted amnesia is a burden and a sadness to the angel.  Patron, for his occasional faults, is a good and loving father who would like nothing more than for all humans to see their immense and holy opportunity to serve as the templates for an entire universe of life.  However, so long as Earth is under attack by demons and ogres, it cannot be.  Thus, no matter how many tears they shed, angels usually must eventually erase selected memories of those mortals who enter into their temporary service or alliance.  Of course, being angels, the temptation to keep mortals as a coven of their own is a small one.  The thing that defines those who stayed loyal to Creator when Dark Liege broke away is their willingness to see Creator’s plan to its logical end, no matter how burdensome, rather than throw it off and indulge in cruelty.
However, some angels find themselves unable or unwilling to part with their human allies.  Being the inherently emotional and caring people they are, some angels who find themselves accumulating a retinue of obedient mortals simply can’t bring themselves to jettison them, sometimes years after they joined.  This can create lengthy gaps of memory in the minds of those mortals, sometimes leaving them unable to find work or start families.  Sometimes Patron simply sends another, less attached angel to erase their minds, but sometimes he recruits them instead, after feigning their deaths with their consent.  These mortals, no more than few thousand worldwide, serve as spies and soldiers of Heaven, often congregating at the behest of angels who provide them with discreet means of long-range communication.  They throw themselves into their holy tasks with fearless abandon, secure in the knowledge that they serve the only god worth knowing.  Of course, this zealotry is very hard to distinguish from the actions of War Circles, and so Patron allows this only in the direst and rarest of circumstances, such as the sealing of the Mortis Vault in Rome in 1732, or the sinking of the Atchar in the First World War, both suicide missions.
Thus, most mortals who retain their full memory of angels are simply friends, who learned of the angel’s cover identity and befriended them.  Most angels who bond with mortals that way are relieved at having a mortal to talk to, since communicating directly with the heavens is challenging for most angels not of the eldest ranks.  These mortals are bankers, street sweepers, farmers, and sailors, ordinary folks who happen to have made a friend in heaven, and are usually of those rare sorts who are able to handle the truth about humanity’s secret purpose.  However, angels being the creatures of morality and ethics they are, angels rarely invoke the aid of their human friends, lest they be put in harm’s way.  Naturally, there are significant benefits to being such a mortal.  The friends of Chorals especially benefit, since Chorals can instantly heal any spiritual wounds that the mortal may have suffered (such as exposure to the eldritch energies of ogre mages or demon warlocks).  The allies of Shields and Whirlwinds might have been traumatized veterans or crash survivors found homeless or derelict near the homes those angels inhabit on their covert ops, and slowly brought to health and knowledge by the angel out of compassion.  Sprites rarely befriend humans, since it is their job to influence mortals without them knowing it, but Sprites assigned to specific geographical territories may grow close to park rangers or geologists who protect those lands.

Most angels interpret the occasional friendship that arises between angels and mortals as a positive sign on the net.  After all, the entire point of Earth is to give humanity a chance to naturally evolve into a species that is able to biologically and philosophically endure the knowledge of their own status as a template for all life, and to eventually learn of divine powers without requiring them to get by.  If angels and mortals can build lasting friendships with each other, isn’t that a step in the right direction?  Some angelic purists see this as a danger, though, given the fact that humans who meet angels inevitably need to forget them, or ask for favors.  This is part of why Chorals exist: to ensure that those humans who aren’t ready for such knowledge and responsibility can return to blissful ignorance.