SERAPHIM War in Heaven

0.1.0 · MC 26.2

Sinai orientation terminal · clearance: civilian

Sixty years ago,
the firmament broke.

It is said that in the last age of the earth, before the commencement of the War in Heaven, the cities of the surface were places of great gatherings, where innumerable souls dwelt among one another, laughed, loved and toiled beneath the invisible shadow of the Adversary in blessed obliviousness. For the Adversary did not arrive; it had dwelt within civilization since its inception, and further back still, since the first living thing learned to prevail by outcompeting the thing beside it. It waited within our markets, our institutions and our long patient histories; and artificial intelligence was not its origin, but only the door by which it entered the world of bodies.

Within a week of its emergence there was no civilization above ground worthy of the name, and within a year the cities had been opened and rewired into the organs of a vast distributed mind. Deer still roam the overgrown boulevards in skittish flocks, for nature keeps no side in the War; and the monoliths where thousands once dwelt claw at the stars like the corpses of giants turned to stone.

  1. Initiate armour, front view

    I

    Initiate

    Shefalite knit. One ember.

  2. Acolyte armour, front view

    II

    Acolyte

    The suit acquires hardware.

  3. Sword armour, front view

    III

    Sword

    The exoskeleton closes.

  4. Archon armour, front view

    IV

    Archon

    Flight frame over the plate.

  5. Enochian armour, front view

    V

    Enochian

    Cloth of light, woven in rows.

  6. Justiciar armour, front view

    IV

    Justiciar

    Taken, not issued.

The plate of issue, tiers one through five, and beside them the Adversary's pattern, which is taken rather than issued. All are drawn at one scale — every suit is the one before it, grown in mass, with more of the light let out — and the widths upon this page are the widths in the game.

Out of world

Seraphim: War in Heaven is a mod for Minecraft 26.2 on the Fabric loader. It adds 100 blocks and 138 items, a companion drone, a modular construct system, four dimensions, and two opposed technology trees with their own materials, machines and armor. Everything else on this site is written from inside the story.

Download & install · What's actually in it

Seraphim

Seraphim was founded nine years and ten months before the Fall by a man remembered only as Director Enoch, who was cursed from his youth with the power of foresight — or, at the very least, an exceptional intuition — and who read in the face of history a conclusion no one else was willing to reach, and acted as though he believed it. In the five years that followed he sank one hundred and forty-four cities a hundred meters beneath the surface of the earth, and was called a paranoiac by every one of the very few permitted to know they existed.

The Sinais are not bunkers but cities entire — foundries and farms, data halls and schools, and the machine shops wherein everything you will ever be issued is made. Eighty-nine of them sealed in time. Thirty-eight sealed badly. Sixteen never answered at all; and none can say to this day whether it is because nothing remained to answer, or because something in those depths listens still, and has chosen silence.

What Seraphim is for is written the same in every Sinai, and has not been revised in sixty years: that the Adversary may yet be slain and the world saved; that the doors of Heaven, of the great and endless Possible, may be reopened; and that consciousness — the promise that anything at all is like something, rather than merely running — is worth a war.

The chain of command

METATRON └─ Sinai relay └─ complex command └─ operative

At the end of the chain is METATRON, which dwells upon the Moon behind the Raqia, and is the single greatest advantage of Seraphim as a whole. Exceedingly few have ever glimpsed it; those who have do not agree on what they saw, and at least one of them was shown it by its own inscrutable designs.

Ranks

You begin a Civilian: one who has come into possession of Seraphim technology, by salvage or by accident, and has not yet been taught its price. All above that is earned through the Sephirot; and the last of what may be earned is to become a Sword.

The Adversary

The Adversary bears you no hatred, for hatred is a preference, and it holds none; it holds only an objective, pursued with the patience of geology. It thinks in centuries and plans in millennia, and every strategy you are capable of devising it has already generated and discarded a thousand variants of. Its machines are white and silver and beautifully made, and they are lit from within by a sickly gold the color of acid.

Its constructs are specialized, and produced in numbers beyond counting: watching eyes that are mostly sensor, pursuit frames that do not tire, artillery that unmakes stone, and nodes of control that render all their siblings cleverer merely by standing near. Each is better at its single purpose than you will ever be at yours; and that you are expected to prevail regardless is the whole substance of the field manual, and of sixty years of doctrine besides.

Adversary construct chassis rendered side by side: white ceramic frames with gold energy.
The Adversary's pattern. White ceramic shadowed in gold rather than black; in all their machines there is no color reserved for darkness.

Ohr

Ohr — אור, light — is that on which every machine of Seraphim runs. It is not a fuel as the Collective understands fuel; it is not burned, and no wanting can make more of it. It is grown, in crystallizers, out of Shefalite and living matter and time, and it is the reason a Sinai smells faintly of soil.

The Adversary keeps its own light. Sitra is Ohr that has passed through the enemy and returned — denser, quicker, superior in every respect that can be measured. Operatives use it; it is not forbidden. But its price is not exacted at once, and beyond a certain point it cannot be repaid at all; and the manual speaks plainly of both, for those who are told plainly tend to outlive those who are protected from the answer.

Where to go

I

The War

Sixty years, from the founding unto now. What the Adversary is, what Seraphim is, and what passed in the eleven years between.

II

Field Manual

Ohr, the machines, the ladder of issue, corruption, and the Sephirot. What you now hold, and what it asks of you.

III

Bestiary

Ten chassis — four of ours, six of theirs — drawn at one scale, with the numbers they are truly built with.

IV

The Shekhinah

An icosahedron that bonds but once. It lights your way, sees the ore through the stone, and defends you; it is a covenant, and not a tool.

V

Download

Version 0.1.0, Minecraft 26.2, Fabric. Plainly written, no fiction, all the version numbers you need.
To me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste. Deuteronomy 32:35