“We are none of us from Keter, Great Majesty,” Athal said, bowing low. “All of us chose to become Hosts upon our coming of age, learning the trade of that choice. It is a rare thing for our service to be called upon, and a great honour.”

My eyes narrowed.

“You were born in Hell,” I said.

“A strange thing to call the Serenity, honoured one,” the man murmured.

- Book 4, Chapter 33: Keter

---

The Seraphim felt shallowly but broadly, like an ocean three feet deep. Even after several millennia she was not sure why they had been made to feel at all. There was a time she’d thought they might once have been like her, learning just a little too much about the underpinnings of Creation to be allowed to muck about by the Gods, but she’d since stumbled over proof they had been created. Her best guess was that even limited emotional capacity improved their ability to learn and adapt to the ever-changing mores of mortals.

...

“You can resurrect him,” she said.

Immediate anger. A reward, a prize, when the man was undeserving? Not fond of the idea at all, which was no surprise when it ran contrary to their nature. That was fine. She’d talked so many ancient monsters into their deaths she’d forgotten most of them.

“You’re insisting on thinking of it as a reward,” Yara of Nowhere said, clicking her tongue, “but does it have to be? Think of it not as bringing him back but as moving him.”

Caution again, but they were listening.

“Exile,” she smiled. “That’s a punishment, isn’t it?”

...

“We’ll send him somewhere out of the way,” she told them, smile broadening. “A Hell, yeah? Let him do Above some good dying.”

...

He landed in the grass.

It was soft against his bare feet, and though there was no sun in the sky above there was no lack of light. The breeze had him pulling his frayed diplomat’s robes close on his haggard frame, eyes blinking numbly as he realized he was seeing again. With his own eyes. He was breathing with lungs, shivering with skin. There was the scent of dung on the wind, and somewhere ahead a long field of barley. Beyond it, at the edge of the horizon, he glimpsed the sloping silhouettes of a village. People. His mind was open, never to be closed again, and so he could not help but Receive the sight of them.

He had seen this place before. Green land stretching in every direction, an endless expanse of villages and fields and rivers. Men and women and children that never went far from the place of their birth, taught that they were to be content and peaceful with mother’s milk. There were no dangers, no dooms, nothing to fear in the Serenity. Only one beautiful day after another, until one day you breathed your last and the Fair King called your mortal coil to the Lands Beyond. Some would have called it a paradise, a place without sickness or war.

Anaxares the Diplomat called it a lie.

- Book 7, Interlude: Legends I

---

Keter was, after all, fortified against extra-dimensional intrusions in ways that no other place on Calernia was. It was not only a matter of wards, though those defending the Crown of the Dead had been cleverly made and were nearly impossible to break. The wards themselves were a sphere that enveloped the city but they fed into a root-like system of escapements that meant overloading them would require so much power as to be effectively impossible. Trismegistus had then taken an additional precaution by having the physical anchors for them deep underground, to the extent that Masego believed them to be surrounded by magma.

Yet not even that had been enough for the lich, who had at some point decided to methodically annihilate every speck of Keter’s mirror in Arcadia. Not only was access barred, there was nowhere to cross from. Masego was unfortunately unsure quite how this had been accomplished – demons were his best guess – but instead of a crossing point in Arcadia all that could be found was interstitial void, an empty liminal space.

- Book 7, Interlude: Legends II

---

“You told me the dead always rise in the Serenity,” I called out to Ranger.

It was one of the many ways the Hidden Horror had turned the Hell into his personal fiefdom, Hye Su had explained.

...

The Hells were not the same as Creation, rules were not as firm here. And when you were powerful enough they could even be changed: how else would even a powerful mage like Dead King have been able to rule a Hell for so long? Which meant that somewhere in the Serenity an entity was loose that was capable of bending those rules.

- Book 7, Chapter 64: Gehenna