Tsel the Shadow of Death

By Pouya Sattari

Explore a world of angels, demons, and gods from the perspective of Tsel, an incarnation of Death. After Mot, the Canaanite God of Death is killed, his reincarnation is taken in by archangel Samael and demon Lilith and named Tsel. Follow Tsel throughout his childhood, up till his adulthood. Stuck in a double conspiracy between the angels and demons, Tsel finds power in knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pouya Sattari
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798424381232

Book preview

TSEL_FRONT_COVER.jpg

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Contents

Preface

Another Message to Humanity

Chapter 0: Death’s Chasm

Chapter 1: (Re)Birth

Chapter 2: Azrael’s Menagerie

Chapter 3: Mother of Monsters

Chapter 4: Angelic Chorus

Chapter 5: Battle of Broken Promises

Chapter 6: Flying Lessons

Chapter 7: The Watcher

Chapter 8: The School Under the Endless Sea

Chapter 9: Journey into Hell

Chapter 10: Gehenna

Chapter 11: Dreams of Doom

Chapter 12: Heaven Bordering Hell

Chapter 13: Angel Glass

Chapter 14: Goddess of Slaughter

Acknowledgments

Epilogue

Preface

I’ve been trying to become an author and finish my first book for thirteen years now, and finally I have succeeded. I’m deeply interested in the sciences, mythology, and fantasy, so I wanted to create a story that encapsulated all three. I did copious amounts of research into various mythologies in order to write this novel, something I often did in my spare time anyway. The myths I researched largely pertained to Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Canaanite, and Hindu stories, but I do plan to include other mythologies in future instalments.

Funnily enough, this story started out as a Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction, but because I refused to give up on it for all those years, it evolved into something else entirely. I did so because I wanted to create what I saw as the perfect story. True, there is no such thing and I make no claim that there are no issues with this first instalment that could not be ironed out without making drastic changes, but I hope to remedy the few problems that I am aware of with the release of the sequels.

There’s more I wish I could talk about in my journey of research and writing, but because they are sensitive topics, I’ll leave them out.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

In memory of the unnamed and forgotten...

Another Message to Humanity

Dear Homo sapiens sapiens,

As a fellow being born from the primordial chaos, I welcome you to my tales of the greater multiverse.

All beliefs are true. If you travel far enough in space-time and can somehow manage to survive such a journey, you can find a place where your perception of reality lines up perfectly with reality itself. But every single one of those perceptions of belief is also inevitably inaccurate by some margin, whether it’s the world you live in, or the imaginary one that happens to coincide with realities on other planes.

Remove all preconceptions of what you think is normal in the world. If only for the purpose of learning a lesson from the memories we, the Riders of the Apocalypse, bring from throughout infinity. But know that these were never the only version of events across space-time. Your Earth is, after all, only one out of 2.423*10^42 Earths that did not manage to set itself upon the correct path to eventually competing with interdimensional invaders several billion years from now. But that may still be corrected.

As one would expect, creatures born into three-and-a-half dimensions such as yourselves would have difficulty imagining the nature of extra-dimensional beings such as myself. I’m aware many of you humans are not the curious types of people, and understanding the intentions of higher beings may be above some of you, but that’s no excuse to hide that information from those of you with the desire to learn.

Who am I to be lecturing you? To get straight to the point, I am Death itself, though only one of many incarnations that happened to record my adventures in these books. I wish to share these stories with you humans, if for no other reason than someone might recognize my efforts.

Chapter 0:

Death’s Chasm

‘Do not go near the God of Death, for his yawning mouth is a chasm leading to an Endless Abyss,’ her brother had warned. But now, he was dead, consumed by that same abyss. And now, the Earth — this particular Earth — was without its Lord. Baal Hadad, God of Storms, Anat’s dear brother, was gone from this life.

Anat had wings of bronze, but she was not an angel. No, an angel is something else entirely. She was a goddess, the Goddess of War, and she was armed to the teeth. She left behind her collection of severed heads as they would be literal dead weight in the fight to come. Her bow strung, her swords sharpened, her focus on killing Mot, the God of Death. Whether in her mind it was justice or simply vengeance, I do not know.

She had buried her brother, Hadad, the previous day at the summit of Mount Zephon where his grand palace was located. The sun had blotted out as the Goddess of the Sun, Shapash, had descended from the heavens to assist with the funeral. Astarte, Hadad’s consort and the Canaanite Goddess of the Hunt, had attended as well.

Hadad’s body had been found at the gate to the underworld, which is why Shapash believed Mot to be responsible for his death. In addition, only a week ago Mot had threatened to consume the Baal as revenge for Hadad offering him to feed him simple food instead of what he craved: souls and flesh.

‘My appetite is like that of lions in the wilderness, like the longing of dolphins for the sea,’ Mot had said to Hadad before threatening to devour him. He could, for his mouth was vast enough to consume a god.

But then, why had a body been left behind? Anat did not question it. She searched the depths of the Nether-world looking for Hadad’s shade, but had found nothing after many years. Finally she had lost her patience with the death god.

Anat flew till she was high above the clouds and surveyed her brother’s lands, searching for the God of Death. First she turned her eyes towards the gate to the underworld at the base of the mountain where her brother’s corpse had been found. Mot was gone, but trails of destruction led away from the gate. One appeared fresher than the others; it led to a faraway desert, and so she followed it.

The desert was vast, like unto a dry ocean. There, Anat found Mot feasting upon the remains of a still-living sand dragon, his gaping mouth wide enough to encompass both earth and heaven, reaching to the very stars. She pressed her steel-bound feet together and dropped like a meteorite towards the earth, landing with a crash and demolishing Mot’s meal. The serpent-like god had sensed her presence at the last moment and ducked out of the way, but grew furious at the sight of the torrent of sands consuming his meal.

‘Who dares to intrude upon my feast?!’ Mot’s voice boomed ‘Niece Anat? I shall make bread of your bones for this!’ His body, which had been humanoid until that point, took a more serpentine shape similar to the dragon he was feasting upon.

In a flash, the two raced towards each other. Mot’s maw opened to the extreme and Anat’s many swords were drawn forth from her divine aura. She slashed at him. Then, with her free hands dug her fingernails along with the tips of her bronze wings into his flesh and slammed him head first into the pit she had made with her landing. He let the momentum carry him down into the sands and swam about like a fish in water. Just before his mouth closed around her from below, she leapt to the sky. He followed ever upward, forming shadowy wings on his back as he did, a black chasm rising from the bowels of the earth.

Anat zig-zagged out of the way, but Mot was relentless. She spun a sword rapidly in place and sent it flying into the death god’s cavernous throat. Though it dug into his flesh, he regenerated faster than it could hurt him. The sword passed into the abyss that was his mouth harmlessly. He burst past her and nearly took her leg. Circling back, he swiped at her with his tail, knocking her to the ground. The earth shook as she crashed, then shook even more as Mot’s massive body landed beside hers.

On and on the battle went. Again and again Mot would attempt to devour Anat, while Anat would make pirouettes and skillful dodges she had long since forgotten she had learned. His mouth drooled with deathly saliva, and his fangs blared to encompass her, but she dodged again. The hardest battle of her life was before her; no monster nor giant would compare to the God of Death. She called upon all the faith of her followers to help defeat Mot, and when he was weakening, he did the same. However, Mot’s followers only revered him out of fear for the afterlife, and so the prayers of his worshipers gave out before hers did.

Finally, after days of fighting, she caught him in a weakened state, thin and frail. With both hands on the hilt of her sword, she split his head open and didn’t stop until his whole body was cut in half. With her divine aura, she created a thousand swords, each sharper than the last, and minced Mot’s body into many tiny fragments. She gathered up the pieces with her aura, took them to a nearby village that had narrowly avoided their path of destruction and used the village pyre to burn him to ash, then took the ash to the millstone to grind Mot’s remains to dust. She spread that dust across the desert and left for the heavens, battered and bruised but victorious. Mot’s ashes would make that particular desert even more infertile towards life, and the one village of people had to move away in the coming years as Mot’s inescapable darkness spread to all corners of the plain.

Within seven years, both Hadad and Mot would be reborn and attempt revenge upon each other. El, God of Eternity, would prevent further escalation of the conflict, and peace would return amongst the Canaanite gods. All this would happen in most of the branchings of the timelines. However, in one version of reality out of the infinite more, Mot’s destruction at the hands of the war goddess was absolute, and where the Death god’s story ended, mine began.

Chapter 1:

(Re)Birth

The following events prior to my rebirth were told to me through my soul sight, also known as dark sense. How this sense of mine works in conjunction with my perfect memory will be explored later.

Still and silent, Azrael the Archangel of Retribution and Death floated above the sea of ash and dust where Mot’s remains had been scattered. Several pairs of wings stretched out of Azrael’s back. Each was longer than Azrael was tall, with plumage made of light.

Angels are genderless by default and with the exception of angels who take on a gendered parental role like the archangel Samael, I will be using they and them as their pronouns.

Azrael’s hooded robes concealed two brightly glowing eyes which looked past two dark swords held before them by their aura. Many glowing swords of varying shapes and sizes appeared from Azrael’s halo as it stretched out in a circle in front of them. The swords methodically moved away from their body as they followed the flow of their mighty aura. The swords in the circle pointed towards its center, at which point was a black dot less than a millimeter in diameter.

Azrael touched their mercury beard and the tip of their finger felt a slight drag toward the center of the sphere of swords. They could also feel the slight warmth of their translucent skin being sapped by whatever invisible force was emanating from the center of the swords. A chill followed as they willed their aura to bring the two dark swords, which hadn’t followed the rest, closer. Both were longswords about three-quarters the height of the average human. One sword had a hilt that extended straight forward and back, this way and that into an X, and the other was the same except the sword’s blade and hilts were curved. Azrael extended a finger toward one and then the other, but did not touch. Instead, a concentrated halo of light extended from their finger towards both their tips.

Nothing happened — at least nothing visible to the human eye. At the level of their energy fields, the swords’ touch would eat away at Azrael’s aura of light. These swords had once belonged to Mot, the God of Death, though they were not his primary weapons. He had dropped them in his battle with Anat.

Curious, Azrael thought. This would not be the first time that Azrael had come across the elusive aether the angels had long searched for. Nor would it be the first time it had brought them such chills.

Azrael had called on two other angels to descend from the heavens above beyond the veil of grey smoke, the holy light having rapidly blinked out behind them in the same instant Azrael became aware of their presence. Azrael’s aura extended out to merge with Zaphkiel’s before they split off a moment later. Zaphkiel broadcast a message to Azrael to indicate that they understood their wishes and would follow them through with haste.

Zaphkiel was an archangel with giant rings of concentrated mist in a halo, similar in shape to those of the planet Saturn, continuously floating behind their wings. Zaphkiel took the swords into their aura while Samael took position on the opposite side of the circle of swords to Azrael. Zaphkiel was careful not to touch the swords directly with any of their appendages, only allowing their misty halo and its extension of aura to hold them farther than arms’ length away. Zaphkiel left the other two behind with another quick blink of light and they teleported away.

Shiny feathers covered the top half of Samael’s face in a mask that extended to the side of his head like small extra wings instead of ears, and he wore plain, white robes. Samael’s eyes appeared as two-dimensional projections on two of the mask’s feathers where a human’s eyes would be and displayed strength and bravery despite their strangeness. His hands were as massive as boulders, but he carried them around effortlessly.

As soon as Samael reached a position opposite to Azrael, more feathers on his wings and body rapidly and chaotically took on the same eye image before flitting back, all studying the black dot at the center of the swords. Occasionally one would flick to look at something far below the center of the circle: a beastly, vaguely humanoid shadowy silhouette left behind, surrounded by the remains of a great battle which left a permanent scar in the sea of ash, compressing that particular patch of dust perfectly flat. He didn’t give the silhouette more than a few glances.

‘Get ready,’ Azrael said to their comrade telepathically, their voice like a faraway echo.

Samael opened one out of two of his oversized fists and held the other back. He knew Azrael’s orders instinctually and immediately, as had Zaphkiel, and that was all the information either of them needed, for their minds were connected through the Allaya.

‘Kill it, kill it,’ repeated the other voices in the Allaya.

The Allaya is the mechanism by which all angels throughout the multiverse commune with each other, something like a hive-mind.

The two angels stayed completely silent as they both kept a close watch at the center of the circle. The black dot pulled smaller swirls of dust toward itself while the larger tides were pushed away, creating a large, empty space in the sea of ash. There was debris here and there moving slowly, most notably a flat rock that seemed to be cleanly sliced from the ground. They continued to stare at the small black dot, which had, in the meantime, grown ever so slightly.

Noticing a significant change in the dot’s size, Samael’s eye-feathers all flipped over at once. At the same time, Azrael’s swords of light started blasting the dot with laser-fire. Samael followed through, shooting fiery plasma from his oversized hands. The intensity and colour of the lasers started off low red, but soon they alternated till they were continuously hitting the dot with high-energy gamma rays and plasma from all sides precisely. Before too long, Azrael and Samael stopped as the dot and space around it pulsated till it suddenly grew ten-fold to fit in the palm of a human hand.

‘Wait,’ Azrael commanded.

The angels watched closely as the small sphere’s surface pulsated to form a very basic humanoid face, arms, legs and wings. More details unfolded from within my body as it continued to slowly grow and look more humanoid. Light started bending around me once I was large enough, and then immediately Azrael was above me and the sea of ash. With sword in hand, Azrael stabbed downward into my left eye, and an intense light pulsed through the sword into my skull.

A scratching screech resounded from my tiny mouth before the outward explosion of dust suddenly bounced inwards into an implosion, creating a deafening silence instead. The surrounding ash pulled toward the black mass while the ash across the plane became still and flat as far as Samael’s many eyes could see. Light in the area bent around my body. Azrael flapped their wings powerfully to get away, while all matter and energy on my opposite side was blown away. The impact hit me, the singularity baby, so forcefully that it pushed the surrounding space-time back into place as Samael’s blow connected. His large fist had punched a hole in the surrounding dust and vapour.

Samael’s hand encased me as I wailed, his knuckles and palms being crushed by my remaining gravity in the process. It matters not, he thought, as tendons extended out of his arm and twisted around until his fist was three times as large and fully healed. He grabbed the ground below with his free arm outstretched to an impossible length and pulled. Samael built up energy and mass in his wings and body in an attempt to slam me downward. I stayed firmly in place as Samael simply tore his hand free and rocketed himself below.

Azrael, meanwhile, was forming an arsenal around themself and pointing every other pair of wings toward their target. Suddenly, clones known as superpositions burst from their body as they divided their seven-thousand wings to take only a single pair per superposition, each grabbing a nearby light weapon and going to attack me directly. Those with short-range weapons made several sweeping slashes and stabs at near light speed before suddenly disappearing after each attempted run. Two Azraels were left behind, overlapping each other. One continued to make clones while the other, floating slightly ahead, glowed more brightly as light gathered in the tips of their metallic feathers and more wings folded out of existence to point toward the baby.

As Azrael readied to fire again, a chunk of earth as wide as an asteroid emerged from below the sea of ash to come crashing into me. Azrael’s clones all merged back into place instantaneously, once again taking on one form with many wings. Their body’s light dimmed as they stood up straight and removed their hood, revealing their black eyes and white irises. Their face finally showed an emotion: surprise. Samael was below, and had thrown the rock, but that was not what had surprised Azrael. Samael had not immediately known Azrael’s communicated thoughts to cease the attack and study the anomaly instead.

My mass tore halfway into the chunk of earth, then my gravity field expanded and started to suck up the surrounding matter once again. Samael, seeing this, grabbed a nearby pebble and held it in his still enlarged palm. It glowed bright hot, then seemed to merge with his hand as both living and dead matter burned luminously. Samael grinned.

‘No!’ Azrael shouted with the last sliver of doubt in their mind. At that moment they had decided that I should be studied instead of destroyed.

Samael’s hand pulled back too late, and a solar flare shot out of where the pebble once fit into his palm. Instead of obliterating the stone with me inside, the whole mass was simultaneously flattened and knocked back. It reached the moon. Though there was no atmosphere, the shockwave from that resulting crash and following explosion could clearly be heard.

Azrael calmly approached the explosion, despite the raging fire and debris. It only blew their mercury hair back and undid their hood, revealing their handsome face. Any debris seemed to naturally miss them. Samael was behind them shortly, and they both soon felt the sudden lifting of a haze and a weight off their shoulders. Something in the air had changed.

Azrael communicated the situation, again without saying a word, or moving their lips this time successfully conveying exactly what they should do with little more than a thought through the Allaya. Samael proceeded ahead, and he stretched out his hand before a hole opened up on his elbow. Samael’s halo grew brighter as the raging fires around the angels started to dim, and before long they were completely out. Some rubble was still moving away, but that was of no concern to Samael. He approached the cracked ground and shoved his fist deep inside as it morphed to fill cracks and open a passage. Their head jolted slightly in surprise, and Azrael knew immediately what he had found.

As the final bits of rubble were moved around, Samael’s hand retracted back from its amoeba-like shape. What they found was no longer a foetus, but a newborn baby with wings and a tail… well, a baby with a crack in its face and its entire skeleton broken and flattened. Still, I cried once light shone on me.

Azrael held a hand solemnly over my head, and light began to fill my eyes and entire nervous system. The light fed into the broken bone fragments throughout my body, revealing the skeleton underneath my spectral flesh. Strings formed between the fragments as they were pulled back together, all as my dry wailing continued, apparently no longer dangerous like before. Once they stopped, the light in my nerves flushed out and into my bones, sealing them completely. As the light in my skull released outward, it pooled where my eyes would be, as well as within the now large scar left behind by Azrael’s sword.

The two angels watched on as my crying faded, no longer a danger to them. Whatever force that was protecting me in my foetal stage had subsided.

Chapter 2:

Azrael’s Menagerie

Within the confines of the multiverse, it is possible for two seemingly opposing facts to both be true. As such, the time at which the events of this book take place are simultaneously in your universe’s future — long after its death — and in its past— before its birth. How this may be is due to the shape of time in the greater multiverse taking on more than a linear, one-dimensional fashion. It is not quite circular; more spiral-shaped.

The seeds of a world, otherwise known as black or white holes, may give rise to a new universe either at the beginning or end of its lifetime. And time can flow back or forth, or both ways at once. The matter becomes even more complex once dimensions above the traditional three-and-a-half are taken into consideration.

A godly city appeared before my eyes, bright and beautiful, spanning the entirety of a world. The ecumenopolis, Kosar, was approximately 1.17 times the size of your Earth. A sea of aurora hung over its sky, so massive that when it first appeared from afar, like clouds in the distance, it barely seemed to move at all right until we breached the world’s orbit. The aurora connected to an outpouring fountain of light from the center of the world. Below that were millions of buildings made from crystal and marble, glass and mirrors, fiber-wires, strange skyscraper-sized computers, and lights emanating colours outside of a human’s visible spectrum.

Unusually, Azrael and Samael did not receive a greeting, as the area they were travelling to had been evacuated. Behind the three of us waited great choirs of angels, neatly and strategically positioned among other angelic structures spanning a wall of fully mined and industrialised asteroids orbiting Kosar, collectively having formed a web wider than the world below.

We descended into the city of circuitry and almost immediately were dropping down to a building that looked like a towering Parthenon. So large it was that, as we approached, the shape of the building was no longer distinguishable. The two archangels and I faced a wide chasm of empty space between two of the massive pillars, at the end of which there was a bright light. As we approached, the light inverted and encompassed us all.

We found ourselves in another plane of existence where the large chamber we had entered from suddenly seemed impossibly far away behind us. Azrael had disappeared without a trace. Samael and I then went even further in, and despite his speed, he did not appear to be moving at all among the nothingness. We stopped what felt like a lifetime later. Samael bowed deeply, but with no sense of up or down, it looked as if he was just crouching in midair.

He extended his left hand to reveal a white cube. It opened up like a symmetric puzzle box to reveal myself upon his oversized palm. I was blinded briefly, but soon was able to see outside his fist in a limited range. I could also see into myself, as though my vision was reflected in on my body as well, despite having only two forward-facing eyes. My body covered most of that otherworldly vision. It was as though I had an invisible antenna and camera on my head. My aura-sense had in fact been revealing information about the surface of my body to my brain, as well as showing me my surroundings in a limited range regardless of whether I could traditionally see them. The box was meant to dull my senses, but little did the angels know that I had been seeing the world through their eyes until I was released from the cube.

Shapes took form in the distance till they became five different near-incomprehensible masses. Five angels appeared above us, all so large and with wings so wide that they had to stand kilometers apart in a circle.

One was Azrael having taken on a grander form, now having many shining engravings on their light armour, robes, and translucent skin. Even their aura had markings floating about it, each of which, as far as I could tell, were unique. As they watched over me with their infinite gaze, my senses spun and I felt as though I were in five places at once.

‘It’s time to discuss what to do with it,’ Azrael’s voice burst forth.

Uriel had six wings. They held a fiery sword, and their halo extended outwards into the form of a sun. Their robes flowed about like a sea of flames wafting about ever so slightly at the pressure of built up energy from the nuclear fusion occurring within their body. The Angel of Presence had two stars as eyes that watched my child self with all the ferocity appropriate to their fiery existence. Similar to Azrael and the other three, sacred texts appeared about them and their aura in various languages.

‘You should have destroyed it when it was still a foetus,’ Uriel said, their voice as warm as gentle summer air. ‘No matter; with all five of us here we can solve this most anomalous problem.’

Michael, with their armour seemingly having grown naturally from their body with no distinguishable border between skin and metal, seemed the most apprehensive towards me. On their back, the Archangel of Fortune and Protection carried a large shield curved on either side and a sword nestled in its middle, both bearing markings appropriate to their position among God’s most elite angels. Their skin was a glowing ivory, and their metallic wings had a golden sheen to their feathers. Their eyes and mouth were bathed in light as the crevices of their skull seemed to show an opposite reaction to being enclosed from the