"Fear not."

"Fear not."

That's what an angel is supposed to say when they come into contact with a mere mortal, right? "Don't be afraid. Capital Gee-Oh-Dee sent me, and I'm here to help."

Better an angel than a demon, right? A demon doesn't just want to kill you, it wants your soul trapped in a prison made for it, to suffer for all eternity.

Demons are things that hide under your bed, in the dark, and pull you under to devour you messily if you don't cover every limb with your protective blanket. Every child knows this.

Angels are things of protection and guideness, aligned with the light, sent to help us be the best we can be.

But as any magus will tell you, those who are afraid of the dark have never seen what light can do.

I was lucky as a kid. My parents were in the know before I was born. No snooping around to get my spellbook filled spell by spell. No toadying to a stubborn old magus to earn my first spell. Many such kids took this kind of opportunity for granted.

When this world was revealed to me at eight, I decided I would not be like those kids. I would not simply learn. I would master.

But to master spells, it's not enough to read the runes and keep them memorized. You have to go out and burn some mana, flex your aether, actually use those spells. Telekinesis? Move pebbles, then rocks, then dumbbells. Force strike? Dad knew a place with self-repairing dummies, a place you could throw whatever black magic you knew at them until you spent your last drop.

Healing? That's a little different. In order to get better with healing magic, it has to actually *heal* something.

Just turning nine, I thought I would need to make little cuts on myself and heal those, when my mother pointed out the obvious solution.

The hospital. The kids burn ward, to be precise.

The cover story was that I would go there with a N64- state of the art gaming hardware at the time- and give them a means to distract themselves from being extra crispy via Goldeneye.

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While they killed each other, I would heal them as covertly as possible.

Being religious, I had been taught that as a magus, having willingly and knowingly studied magic, God was going to judge me more strictly. "I didn't know" wasn't an excuse anymore. It had long been accepted that healing burned kids was well within the 'good deeds' side of the chart, so I believed no one would have issues with what I was doing.

How stupidly optimistic I was, back then.

It turns out there's another faction besides the devil worshipers. One obsessed with money and making more money, by any means possible.

And little ol' me, I was cutting into their profits.

This organization doesn't waste time with bribes, threats, or negotiations unless it absolutely has to. Time is money, after all.

Our house had wards- alarm spells and hostility detections- but the assassin they sent had the best countermeasures money could buy.

The only reason I woke up was because I needed to pee.

The first thing I saw was a muscular man, clad in black, standing over me with a knife.

The ball of kinetic force I hurled into his stomach sent him flying out the window he'd jimmied open.
It turns out three months of learning to break down brick walls with my spells were not wasted.

Whoever they had sent was ill-equipped for dealing with any actual resistance. Post-mortem scrying revealed the assassin had no knowledge of magic beyond a few artifacts on his person, and that meant no innate resistance to offensive spells. His clothing was meant for camouflage, not protection of any kind. The man was dead even before his neck snapped on our backyard lawn.

My parents forbade me to continue going to the hospital, a necessary rule for my survival, but one that saddened both me and the kids at the burn wards. They never understood why they felt better after I had been there.

I suppose I should be thankful the attacks only focused on me. A more open assault on those I'd healed, I've heard, would cost more time and money invested into more covert methods and greasing the palms of experienced and amoral assassins.

We thought that if I stopped, they would stop. Go ahead and laugh, we were all young and stupid.

This organization did not forgive me for the unpardonable sin of shorting them the fees they'd get for jacked up prices of painkillers, basic burn treatment, and all the inflated costs of the American medical system.

The next attempt was made years later, when we had believed them to have given up. I was thirteen, and home alone briefly while my parents went on a date night.

The power went out right at the same time all the wards we had suddenly were dispelled.

There's a loose board right outside my room we meant to get fixed. Thank God for that. I heard the creak, and fired a force strike through the door.

Cursing and wild gunfire greeted my ears. Whoever they had sent this time was armed and armored much better than the last. The first spell had caught him off guard.

He didn't give me another chance after that. The 'fight' was a blur of pain and misaimed spells on my part. When he put a bullet through my knee, I didn't have the mana to heal it.

"Dunno what you did, kid, but I hope it was fun." he said as he leveled the gun at my head.

Then the sun exploded in my room.

A thing made of fire and swords suddenly stood between me and my killer.

It could have picked up the mountains with ease, yet it fit within my room somehow.

I could see my attacker clearly, now. Black special ops armor, no doubt alchemically reinforced, a face concealing mask and night vision goggles, an accessory that he now desperately clawed from his eyes as the room grew painfully bright.

"SHIT!" he screamed, raw horror crushing his cool professionalism. "SHIT!"

Then it flickered.

He was gone.

And... I knew he wasn't simply dead.

There is a fading out a magus can feel, a passing of the soul from one world to the next when someone dies. I had felt it in the hospital, passing by an elderly patient's room as she flatlined.

There was no such sensation now, and horror replaced joy as I realized what had happened.

The angel sent to protect me was NOT satisfied with merely killing my attacker and leaving not even ash to mark his passing. There would be no pits of hellfire or eternal blizzards to torment them.

Annihilation. Total destruction. A sanction reserved for the very worst of the very worst. I inquired later what my assassin would have to have DONE to warrant such a punishment. I was allowed to know at 21.

My sympathy for my would be killer evaporated faster than he had. Let's leave it at that.

It turned to me.

I was wounded, then I was not. No gesture. No flow of aether or mana. It simply decided who lived and who died.

"PREPARE YOURSELF."

Then it left.

Relief quickly turned to questions after I reported the incident to the Templars, our organization of choice. To little surprise, they already knew.

Why had something like that bothered with me? People died all the time to break-ins and robberies, assassinations and rivalries, why had an angel not only defended and healed me, but destroyed my attacker so horribly as a warning to his employer?

The reasons I found were few. And horrifying.

There are some people who, by their temperament and their inclinations, are more or less set on a path that can be predicted, even with the allowance for that chaos that is free will. The long and short of it is that I will eventually do something important to His plan.

Of disturbing note is that things done that either directly or indirectly further His plan aren't always constructive in nature.

I have had visitations since. There is no "Fear Not", for I have many valid reasons to be afraid. Whatever the message, the send off they give is the same.

"PREPARE YOURSELF."

God help us all.

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This shit makes a half decent rap

I enjoyed it. More please.

I'd play a game in this setting.

The setting is the real world. Read your Bible.

Pretty cool, OP. Thanks for the fun read.

Maybe you should read the Bible first.

The only branch of Christians that believes in magic are Protestants. The words Magus and Magi, as used in the Bible, mean Wise and more specifically 'practictioner of the Zoroastrian faith.'

Eastern Orthodoxy tolerates a lot of appropriated paganism and the Catholics have a ton of autistic rituals. Rather say that proper Christianity doesn't recognize magic as something different from God that can be practiced against God's will.

I don't know, utter annihilation seems pretty merciful to me, but I may just be the pessimistic sort. It's certainly effective, though; there won't be no necromantic funny business no sirree.

>Catholics have a ton of autistic rituals
That's like a third of what makes a religion a religion. I don't understand how this is supposed to the notion that they believe in magic when papal decree says that it doesn't exist.

>says magic doesn't exist
If that's true than the soul would be a quantifiable variable.

And yes, I understand what he really means. I'm just being a contrarian fuck because the actual intent comes off as arbitrary and dumb.

A premise in the setting is that, rarely, when things are so fucked up that even multiple gods intervening can't fix things, the timeline is reset.

Along with all the souls who either went to heaven or hell.

Meaning even if you're wading through a sea of molten sulfur, forced to watch a movie of how your life could have gone better, there's still a < absolute 0% chance you could get a second go at it. Most people who damn themselves don't do anything different on a reset- no memories, after all- but sometimes the next Adolf or Pol Pot decides to take up a peaceful existence instead of mass genocide, or a gang banger goes straight.

Annihilation means you are so utterly depraved and fucked up that you are banned from the game called existence. Forever. It is used once in a billion cases. You can be on the verge of inducing a catastrophe so potent that an angel vapes you and still go to heaven, just because while you had to die, you didn't have any malice.

If you get annihilated, you have earned it by way of deeds that would have Satan giving you a standing ovation.

really cool but the reddit spacing hurts me

I got into a debate with evangelicals the other day about how and why the divine can not be scientifically explained. Their answers were ‘because’.

I mean im Athiest- but just because something has a scientific explanation does not automatically disbar it from religion.

I mean otherwise they should stop trying to justify the Bible with science and just say ‘yeah Noah’s arc was magic’.

>Thinking a witch is anything but a Servant of Satan
>Thinking you were visited by anything less than a spawn of the devil


Giles, fetch me a stake and some wood.

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Yeah, but be honest with yourself- there are way more problems with violent Buddhists in the world than violent satanists- at least from a numbers perspective.

Ah, so it's not as much a punishment as it is more a "we don't want to have to put up with you anymore." Like how when you're playing a game with That Guy, instead of punishing him, you boot him.

I've always viewed it as God simply existing in a higher dimension with physical laws beyond our comprehension, and divine miracles are him exerting his will on the lower dimensions. In a way, we're the equivalent of sapient stick figure art, and God's the man with the pencil and a plan for the drawing. His divine nature doesn't make sense because it's beyond any third-dimensional frame of reference.

The very act of worshipping Satan is an act of violence against God and all mankind.

I'd prefer a total loss of consciousness and sleep in oblivion over eternal torment and damnation.

The deities are aware of that. Hence the 1 in a billion cases.

Also- getting rid or tampering with a soul is serious fucking business in this novel. You don't do it unless you have a death wish or a "Oh fuck, I really shouldn't have stored my soul in a little box and now I'm undead and can't feel anything except the eyelash that was in my eye right when I began" wish.

A soul lost is a soul the gods can't use to fuel belief in existence. Even atheists, by nature of existing and denying the idea of a deity, give them power. (Don't worry, the gods are good sports about that, and find many atheists a lot more pleasant than their supposedly 'devout' fans.)

Previous thread of lore here:

>Being religious, I had been taught that as a magus, having willingly and knowingly studied magic, God was going to judge me more strictly. "I didn't know" wasn't an excuse anymore.
fuck, i'm screwed

Comprehending higher dimensions gets easier when you go into higher level math, though.

killing a man is morally ambiguous
gas chambers are morally ambiguous

Then why consign those most deserving of torment to oblivion when they'd do as fine elsewise?

>The only branch of Christians that believes in magic are Protestants

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Because you don't want to ever again have to deal with someone who tried to use a combination of lichdom and time travel to establish an 'eternal empire' from the bronze age forward where they are an eternal God-King who demands human sacrifice by the tens of thousands to fuel a flawed device that said lich thinks will allow them to achieve godhood, but will instead collapse every star within several billion light years, and when warned of what their efforts will accomplish they try to do it anyway, because being the ender of all creation is just as good as being the creator in their sick, twisted mind.

That's true though. Protestants were the only ones burning witches. The other brances didn't because witches didn't exist according to them.

Given most liches who experience mild discomfort during the ritual and proceed anyway go insane within a year or two, someone who was still feeling like they were being burned alive would probably be batshit fucking insane.

They might be usable as an indiscriminate weapon, if someone could control said lich without too much damage to themselves.

There's a few problems with that according to the lore I'm writing, though. The act of becoming a Lich has to be willing, and if you've studied enough to become a Lich, you know aborting the ritual because you're on fire is going to be a lot less unpleasant in the long run than going through with it while being cooked. As the lore I've established has Liches going insane from the sensation of an eyelash in a non-existent eye, I'd doubt it.

If I'm missing a reference, sorry.

...and the post I responded to is gone. Of course.

I like this thread. Good story OP, I'd like to see more

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Oh, I didn't expect you to respond. Sorry for deleting my post, it was intended for the other thread about liches, but I mixed the threads up. Pic-related isn't a lich, but a man with regeneration-based immortality who catches a fire that can't be put out. In a way, his situation is better than a lich's since he gets used to it after a long time, but possibly worse because he can't kill himself.

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What's the name of this book? I want to give you some shekels.

Understand right now, what you're seeing is lore build up for the book. I'll reveal the title when I can get a publisher.

Until then, reflect on the price magic must have.

The medieval conception of God as "infinite everything" was just babby's first attempt at ontology. They were experimenting with the levers of philosophy and came up with a lot of shit that doesn't hold up above a naive level.

Do the dark gods accept payment in memes?

Honestly, dealing with things like that on a regular basis sounds entertaining as hell, but I suppose that's why I'd be a poor deity. Is it possible for a mortal magician to defeat/survive an angel in combat?

Well shit, I don't want to forget about this. It sounds interesting.

Not unless the deity sending it established parameters that allowed for a win condition.

Think of it this way. A boss on an rpg can be defeated by the hero of an rpg, because that possibility is coded into the game.

An angel being sent to destroy a target isn't like a super-uber dlc boss, it's like someone going up to the console and smashing it and the game with a sledgehammer. Your character's over 9000 defense means jack-shit.

Angels operate above the set of rules mortals do. At the very best, a mortal magus at the very peak of their game could delay an angel for a little bit. That's just going to piss them off, however.

There IS, of course, a workaround.

Remove the very concept of a god and eventually they fade away.

This has been accomplished ONCE.

Do you have a blog or something so we don't miss the eventual release?

Under Charlemagne, in the 'superstitious' early Middle Ages, burning a witch was a capital offense that could get you burned yourself

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I really enjoyed both novels.

Can't really help it, but I imagined both novels to be set in the Secret World universe, due to the presence of Illuminati and the Templars.

>reddit spacing
You should just remove yourself from the internet forever man.

It boils down to science needing to quantify shit and no one having any realistic idea of how to do that with God unless they're willing to make a lot of questionable assumptions.

I also don't want to forget about this. Give us something, user.

Protestants did not burn witches. They hung them. Witchcraft was seen as a crime against the state.

The Catholics did burn witches. Or anyone else they deemed as a heretic.

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> implying Buddhism is not actually not another statnic ploy to mislead humanity
get a load of this guy

>Cursing and wild gunfire greeted my ears. Whoever they had sent this time was armed and armored much better than the last. The first spell had caught him off guard.
>He didn't give me another chance after that. The 'fight' was a blur of pain and misaimed spells on my part. When he put a bullet through my knee, I didn't have the mana to heal it.

This sounds terrible.
>he didn't give me a chance. A grenade through the door blew me up and I died. No, he didn't bother saying a quippy one liner before shooting me in the head. He could also have got me with a sniper rifle but that'd be too smart for him.

I hate it when enemies of protagonists are written like retarded idiots.

The whole "wahh medicine is going to send assassins after me" is just as retarded.

Not that guy, but why would you expect what sound like low level thugs to act like trained operators?

>hung

"Hanged", you bastard.

>The Catholics did burn witches.
No they didn't. Re Catholic Church did kill a whole lot heretics, but no one was ever prosecuted for witchcraft by the Catholic Church.

Who sends hired thugs to deal with goddam magicians?

Better yet, what pharmaceutical company sends hired thugs to kill faith healing that works so well it works it cuts into their goddam profit margin?

You know what they would do? They would spy on the fucker and try to work out how he was doing it so they could profit off his techniques, not shut him the fuck down.

New techniques aren't something to kill, they're there to steal so you can make even better techniques.

The whole scenario reeks of idiocracy.

Oh they know healing magic exists.

It's just that TREATING people is much more profitable than curing them.

See though there’s a difference between saying ‘there is an answer that we haven’t figured out yet’ which was shrugged off when I said I believe in the Big Bang despite not know the exact mechanics of it, and saying ‘no there isn’t an answer that can be had’

More so than worshipping any other false god?

Let’s be real if Satanists were to come out in force, so long as they aren’t being more of a cult than scientologists are, they should be allowed to practice their religion as much as anyone else (ie they aren’t actively murdering or abusing anyone).

I kind of prefer Satan as the Divine Prosecutor. Imagine that he's the dude that says, "Humanity is garbage and you're really wasting your time on them, Big Gee."

Except that's even more retarded.

First, if they know magic exists, and presumably otherwise secret in a high-tech world where cameras and videotaping is common. That means wizards are going to be doing some crazy shit to avoid being noticed.

That means the whatever corrupt healthcare providers just put out a hit on fucking Raistlin or some shit. Corporate boards have their meetings published. They'd get fucking scryed and have freak lightning bolts toast their asses if they fuck up assassinations, and quite possibly even if they don't.
Again, are they really going to send two bit thugs against Gandalf and not expect repercussion?

Second, maybe they don't believe it's real magic. Why are they bothering to snuff this insignificant speck out again? It's one goddamn hospital out of hundreds. You have to cover up the cost of hiring a thug, THEN you need to do police bribes, coroner bribes, all sorts of court of law stuff. That's fucking expensive. And for what, knocking off someone who they think is practicing fake magic?

Lastly; it's HUGELY profitable to cure people. You just FUCKING RAISE THE PRICE OF THE CURE. Steal this bitch's magic, train some folks in it, SELL HIGH PRICED MEDICINE TO RICH FOLK and KEEP TREATING THE POOR SCHMUCKS. Expensive short term business that makes a lot of dough in the first place and hurts your business in the long run is EXACTLY the sort of scheme money-making corrupt executives would think of first.

This has zero economic sense for the medical business side at all. It's a terrible, terrible strawman of an antagonist system that makes everyone else in this work look like retards by association.

The Pharaoh had magicians who command 'secret arts' in his retinue in Exodus who are able to do the same sorts of things as Moses' miracles, which is part of why he's unimpressed and disbelieving. They're even able to undo one or two of the seven plagues, like the horde of frogs.

It's not just an organization dedicated to jacking up healthcare, it's basically a cult centered on making money.

Critique does have merit, though. It will be considered.

I got this.

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>Be God
>Send your emissary
>You know it's going to fail, but you do it anyway, because that's just how it's going to go
>Whatever, send in the frogs
>Go back to the crossword for a little while
>Look back at the situation
>Pair of knuckleheads managed to stop your frogs
>Put the crossword aside
>Switch the frogs out for fire
>Watch with great interest to see if the knuckleheads ever stop freaking out and hiding

I know Christians don’t like the word magic, but can someone tell me why the plagues and parting the sea, and the coming back to life aren’t magic? No cheating.

Because magic is a subtype of the supernatural within that mythology. A specific thing, rather than a generic term for 'Everything normal humans can't do'. Miracles are not magic because they are god acting, which is a fundamental force of the universe, rather than someone invoking magical power.

>No cheating

...what would be cheating here?

Calm your tits.

>First, if they know magic exists, and presumably otherwise secret in a high-tech world where cameras and videotaping is common. That means wizards are going to be doing some crazy shit to avoid being noticed.
OP mentioned organisations like Illuminate and Templars existing. I'd imagine they try to keep the magic shit from becoming public knowledge.

>Second, maybe they don't believe it's real magic. Why are they bothering to snuff this insignificant speck out again? It's one goddamn hospital out of hundreds. You have to cover up the cost of hiring a thug, THEN you need to do police bribes, coroner bribes, all sorts of court of law stuff. That's fucking expensive. And for what, knocking off someone who they think is practicing fake magic?

My first point applies here as well. Why would some huge corporation want some kid practising magic in public, if they themselves know of magic and quite possibly employ it somewhere in their organisation?

>Lastly; it's HUGELY profitable to cure people. You just FUCKING RAISE THE PRICE OF THE CURE. Steal this bitch's magic, train some folks in it, SELL HIGH PRICED MEDICINE TO RICH FOLK and KEEP TREATING THE POOR SCHMUCKS. Expensive short term business that makes a lot of dough in the first place and hurts your business in the long run is EXACTLY the sort of scheme money-making corrupt executives would think of first.

If you are planning on stealing someone's trade secrets, do you let them parade them for all the people to see, or do you copy it and keep it hidden?

Magic is software property, miracles are hardware property.

What you are doing.

>it’s not magic because

You put in some effort- but I mean magic is ‘what we can’t explain through science’ and god I am frequently told cannot be explained by science (which is weird given how Evangelicals try to prove Noah’s arc and creationism with faux-science).

Saying ‘God parting the Red Sea was a natural force that cannot be explained by science or physics’ is a way to dodge calling it magic when it’s pretty much just magic.

Mind you saying ‘god could be explained by science we just haven’t gotten there yet’ is a different answer that I can accept. I just find the wavering between ‘it’s not magic, or science’ and all that disingenuous. Commit to one of the other.

IRL conspiracies rarely stay hidden for long. Way too many moving pieces. We may not get the full picture, but most reasonable people would land close to the truth.

Which leads to the weird phenomona of conspiracy nuts being unwilling to look at actual conspiracies.
Run that by me again.

>"Hanged", you bastard.
Thank you for the clarification.

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>Run that by me again.
Magic is using the rules that are already set in place, in-universe.
Miracles is god/s rewriting existence.

Kinda like winning a game by invoking some obscure rule from several expansions ago that never got removed, or just straight out punching your opponent outside the game and then declaring yourself the winner.

That makes God even more Magic in my mind.