(As always, I tried to make this compatible with as much as I could)
(Continued from <">A History of Hell)
A beginning.
The tale of the Twin Serpents is only half told. After the Sundering, when
Ahriman and his minions tumbled into Baator's deepest pit, the other was
freed to wing into Heaven.
Jazirian sniffed around. "I am Good," it said, "And this plane is Good. All
that is not Me is Evil, so therefore this plane is Me."
Jazirian explored some more. "This plane does not feel like Me. I must find
Myself."
Jazirian grasped its tail in its mouth and closed its eyes. Suspended in
the air, it did not move for some time. Jazirian's followers decided to meet
the locals and make a new life for themselves.
Like Baator, the Celestial Mount was already well-populated, by zoveri, by
Bahamut and his dragons, by ki-rin, tuen'rin, lammasu, shedu, foo dogs,
incarnates, per, noctrals, lawful-good beholders, dwarven spirits being
forged in Erackinor, the Caverns of Eternal Flame, and the archons.
No one knows the orgin of the archons. Some claim they were made by the
Guardinals as part of a program to convert Law to Pure Good. Some claim they
were created by children of Jazirian before the Fall. There is also one
word, with no context, possibly related to one of the above theories:
Yaldabaoth. Regardless, they seem to predate the arrival of the coatl and
the Logoi, who are the Words of Jazirian transformed into aasimon.
Sometime before history began, the modron hierarchy was at war with a
spider-like creature.
It may have been a rogue modron or a stray personification that had gone mad.
During the war, a faction arose among the
vaati that claimed that endless war would never defeat Chaos, and that
protection should be their first priority. These dissidents spread across
the multiverse to become the Protectors.
After the war, with most of the vaati extinct, some of the Protectors
retreated to Arcadia to become the buseni, dedicated to driving improper
influences from their perfect plane.
The creators of the archons, ancient long-since ascended beings known only as
the Aeons, draw partially from the vaati and partially from the guardinals to
create the archons, a mixture of the forms of Law and Good that would protect
the multiverse the aeons left behind. The guardinals themselves draw
partially from the human archetype (the Man Rune) and partly from the animal
(the Beast Rune, which finds its expression primarily in the Beastlands) to
create their forms.
Reactions:
"The archons," sneers an Athar. "They think they're so good, busily
converting innocent souls into more of their kind when they could be
concentrating on ascending beyond, into the pleroma, Absolute Spirit, the
Great Unknown. They hold their victims into this multiverse of death and
pain."
"Would you have them not exist?" counters the Hardhead. "Regardless of the
existence or nonexistence of this Great Unknown you natter on about, the
archons do a great deal of good by involving themselves with the multiverse
instead of cowardly retreating from it. They're bodisattvas, not villains."
"It should be a matter of individual choice! All souls in Mount Celestia
become lantern archons, whether they will it or no!"
"Individual choice doesn't create peace. Sometimes you have to swallow your
own selfish goals for the good of All."
The birth of the asuras.
Amnon was a peculiar Power, half god and half archon, officially part of the
middle ranks of Mount Celestia's hierarchy. At some point in his evolution,
Amnon became insatiably greedy for power, and used magic to completely drain
the aasimon Vohu Manah of her memories.
Absolom, who some claim once had other names (even that he was Varuna, Surya, or Ahura Mazda) seized control of
the celestial armies and used them to hunt Amnon down and slay him. For so severely disobeying protocol, Absolom was
exiled from the Mountain. He became an asuras, the first of his kind.
The asuras often storm out of the planes of conflict, succeed in taking over
heaven, and drive the devas and archons out. The devas then appeal to the
higher powers, who appear to defeat the asuras, driving them back to the
middle worlds, and reestablishing the asuras/archon balance of power.
The Great Deluge.
At some point, the fiends discovered the Prime Material Plane, and the first
great invasion of it began. The floodgates of Lunia were opened. Many
species, including the great dinosaurs, died out in some worlds, but the
fiendish invasion was halted. A cautious treaty was made, bound into the
fabric of the astral conduits by the combined thoughts of all the plane-borne
races that existed at the time, forcing fiends to remain in the lower planes
unless summoned. In return, the archons would not leave their plane at all,
except on missions involving collecting souls. The eladrin first appeared at
this point, creatures of living deception who could do what the archons could
not. At this point, the lammasu and shedu left the formal ranks of the
archons in order that they could enter the Prime. Many of them entered the
service of other deities: this was, directly or in reaction to this, the
origin of the sphinxes, lamias, manticores, minotaurs, and chimeras.
The Present:
The rulers of the archons tend to be much more patient and subtle than those of the baatezu, allowing the gods to control
most of the activity on the Mount. Jazirian has long since come out of its introspection, but works in secret.
Leibniz said:
"As we have shown above that there is a perfect harmony between the two realms in nature, one of efficient, and the other of final causes, we should here notice also another harmony between the physical realm of nature and the moral realm of grace..."
Sounds like monadic devas to me. There's also stuff about reward and punishment. Leibniz apparently considers a monad (Entelechies) to be a simple kind of soul, so monadic devas might shepherd primal soul-stuff from the Ethereal or Positive Energy Plane to the outer planes.
I still don't know what "movanic" is. The closest I've found so far is "movant", "one that makes an applicaton or petition to a court of law or to a judge with the intention of obtaining a favorable ruling." Kind of an advocate for humanity?
"Monadic" refers to things with a valence of one - that can combine with one other thing. This includes intransitive verbs like "arrive" or "appear." Monadic devas can thus bring up to one word with them from Jazirian's realm.
Astral devas have a valence of three. Monavic (monastic?) devas have a valence of two.
Monadic devas are guardians of the fundamental elements of nature. They are assigned to the inner planes, and to Temporal Prime.
Shemyaza was a monadic deva, being the guardian of the One Name. Or he was a solar, the guardian of many Names, and is hunting them down to safekeep in Pelion.
Shemyaza was part of a sect in ancient Mount Celestia called the Watchers or Grigori. They believed that mortals needed to be carefully tutored and controlled. They were judged heretical by the Hebdomad (the ruling council of tome archons) and banished along with their aasimar descendents. Iadalbaoth, another one of the Watchers, was once ruler of the throne archons and now leads groups of fiends.
An earlier sect on the Mount of Holies was the Primordials. They were in favor of fighting against or ministering to celestials, elementals, and so forth, but balked at helping mortals, who were just beginning to appear in the planes. "Why should beings of spirit bow before creatures of flesh?" was the question asked by the Primordials' leader Iblis, a solar who as a monadic deva had spent a lot of time warring with wicked creatures from the plane of Elemental Fire. The Primordials, too, were banished by the Hebdomad's decree.
Similarly, the group called the Omnion urged concordance between the celestial races, and the Tobit, made up of shedu and celestial lammasu, urged the archons to stay completely independent of outsiders. In the end the Omnion was transformed into hosts of asuras, and the Tobit formally left the archon race, most of them degenerating into sphinxes, lamias, and chimerae.
Nessus sucks and drains at the other outer planes. It devours belief and gives nothing back. It's the end of the Styx, where the river flows into oblivion. It first drained the lawfulness from the yugoloths against their will, forcing them to also purge the chaos from themselves - those who refused became the gehreleths. Then Baator pulled the exiled archons toward it; only the bright asuras escaped (excepting lost Ath).