Zariel
Zariel was once an angel, but her impetuous nature and love of battle led to her fall. In her previous life, she was charged with observing the battles between devils and demons during the Divinity Wars, and tracking their progress. From this exposure, she grew obsessed with The Blood War, and a thirst for battle grew within her that she couldn’t ignore. In time, she became frustrated that she and the other angels were forced to remain spectators while the demons and devils battled. The hosts of Halcyon, she believed, could descend upon Acheron en masse and wipe both hordes of evil from the cosmos if they so desired.
After her repeated requests to join the fray were denied, her frustration overtook her, and she launched herself into the Blood War. Accompanied by a mob of mortal followers, she cut a swath through a legion of devils before their numbers overwhelmed her. A delegation of bone devils later dispatched to the site by Asmodeus recovered her unconscious form beneath a small mountain of her slaughtered enemies. After allowing her to recover in his personal residence, Asmodeus installed her as his champion in his infernal army.
A Fighting General
When Zariel supplanted the pit fiend Bel as general of his legions, that change signaled a major shift in the devils’ tactics. Zariel’s fiery temperament and reckless maneuvering stand in stark contrast to Bel’s approach, which relied on his expertise in logistics and defensive tactics to make steady but slow advances. Bel remains one of her chief lieutenants, and he doesn’t discourage her reckless tactics in the hope that she will overextend her forces and suffer a defeat that leads to her removal.
For now, though, the devils are fighting with a berserker fury under her charge. Zariel leads their offensives herself, and her unyielding resolve coupled with the fighting skill of her underlings has pushed nearly all the demonic invaders out of Avernus.
In the Hells
After the Coming of the Gods Zariel was further disillusioned. At first she had been hopeful that the gods would simply eliminate the demons altogether, crushing evil in one swift, mighty stroke. Instead, they were given dominion over their own demiplane, The Abyss, and she was banished along with the rest of the devils in The Planar Expulsion to The Hells.
It was then that Zariel turned from the gods and reaffirmed her commitment to the ideals of Asmodeus, specifically the concept that the only solution to the demon problem was completely and utterly wiping the stain of them from the universe. The powers of good, the celestial hosts, and the gods themselves were all weak and cowardly in her eyes, acting only in half measures. They failed to see the truth of the threat before them, but she saw it for what it was, and so did Asmodeus. A plague bent on destroying the cosmos in its entirety, and with the power to realize that goal. Well she would cut out the black spot on Empyrean, and cauterize the wound with her righteous fury.
Zariel is now the Archduke of Avernus, the first layer of The Hells, and she lives every day in perpetual battle with the unending demonic hordes of The Abyss, on the front lines of The Blood War.
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