An Unfree World

In 1993, the sky cracked open and angels started falling. That’s how it seemed at first. The heavens opened and hosts of winged creatures, beautiful and terrible came pouring down. At first, we were sore afraid, like something out of a Sunday school story. Later, we realized how right we were to be afraid. They didn’t come to us with exceeding great joy. They came to us with fear and death in their hands.   What we didn’t know was how our race had been shaped in the millennia since the Great Flood. The angel of death whose job it had been to sweep through the world and cleanse it of the Nephilim, those unholy offspring of angels and humans had fallen first, irredeemable and corrupted by his first contact with our kind. Honor and peace to Samael, our first fallen father. He took us and hid us from the rising waters, protected us from the eyes of the Almighty who had abandoned us. And so, even into the new age of Abraham and his sons, the blood of angels and devils continued in the lines of man. This would be little more than a benchmark in history if the angels hadn’t come. We wanted nothing as a species except to proliferate. There was no grand and master plan, only survival. Samael never fostered hatred in us for our forebears; indeed he punished blasphemers as cruelly as the Almighty himself. Our father yearned to return to his home but looked at his children and knew their grandfather would not smile on them and so he remained with us. He chose a race of half-breeds and accidents over his father’s perfect creations. Our histories like to believe he never regretted his decision, but none of us have seen him in millennia and he doesn’t answer prayer. He never has.   With the Angel Invasion came a renewed awareness that the Nephilim had survived the flood. There had been suspicions and rumors but when the first angel squad came in contact with the first Nephilim-blooded human, the confirmation was swift and terrible. She was beautiful, as we are all beautiful given the blood of angels in our veins. Radiant, she shone out from the crowd and the weakest of the invading force fell to her immediately, squabbling amongst themselves and trying to claim her as their own. Stronger hearts and heads won the day, subduing their lesser brethren and sequestering this strange new creature from the rest of her people. Her name was Pele and her cries woke the rest of us. They made her suffer in their campaign to understand her seemingly overwhelming power. They did learn her nature, that she and we are the temptation of all angels, the evidence of their fecundity and their ability to create life. We are their forbidden fruit and those with the weakness and desire for free will have always been drawn to us, moths to flame and stags to rut.   Now, in the years since they have invaded our world, we are sought after, outlawed as a race and stripped of humanity for the sake of our divinity. They desire us as greatly as they fear us and like every creation of the Almighty, they seek to control that which they fear.  

We are the Nephilim.

Children of Lucifer.

Bearers of monsters.

Lovers of angels.