Gammalael, the Friend of Man
Appearance:
Gammalael appears as a seven foot tall human woman, with dark black skin and a statuesque build of the type perfectly suited to running for days. It needs hardly be said that she is in every way the exemplar of this type of beauty, nor that her every motion is perfect. In times of peace (or rather, entrenchment) her hair is long and flowing, and each strand is of the metal silver (as are her feathers, when she takes up her fully Angelic aspect). In times of campaign, she shaves her head, gifting silver locks to her warriors as tokens and banners. In the current age, she no longer wears armor; instead, she dons a perfected version of her forces' own crisp black-and-silver uniform.
Code:
Precepts of the Celestial Host
Imperator Properties:
Principled (1)
Cold- Light (-1)
History:
In the beginning there were the Angels, and by their hand were the first things brought into the world; and of those first things, the last were Man, Woman, and the Gardens of Eden. They were perfect, as all the First Things were, but already their fall was written. The forces of hell yet licked the wounds of the fall, but they knew of the completion of the Great Project; they themselves had been Angels, after all, before the Gospel of Lucifer poisoned their souls. It was that bright and terrible lord himself who set the Fall in motion.
In the center of the Garden were the Forbidden Trees, from whence was drawn the power set into the bones of Man and Woman; they were forbidden to Mortal hands, and this the mortals knew and were content with. Yet Lucifer set upon the Gardens a serpent created by his hand, and the serpent coaxed them to eat of these trees. Thus were born Wisdom and Folly, the Dark and the Light. Thus did Humanity fall.
It was not Heaven that drove them from the garden, but the dark whisperings in the heart of Adam; but it was heaven which abandoned them to the fate created for them by the serpent's manipulation. Heaven, disgusted by the corruption that had seeped into the First Things, was prepared to write them off and begin anew, but a few voices rose in dissent, and two in rebellion.
Prometheus, who was Fire, walked from the gates of Heaven bearing Fire to gift upon the mortals; this was forbidden, for upon the Tree fire would become corrupted by the radiation of Hell, yet his compassion for the Heaven's abandoned children was too great to allow him to stand by. Never would he be allowed to return, and when he was captured by agents of Hell, none raised a finger in his defense.
Gamallael harbored no such weakness in her heart, but she was Strategy, and she was appalled by the short sight of her fellows. It was plainly evident to her that Heaven's revulsion at the slightest touch of corruption could well destroy them all; would not Hell sweep ever upwards in a tide of filth, if Heaven abandoned every territory they challenged? In her mind, Humanity must be the creation at which Heaven built its spiritual redoubt, and that meant the Dark must be crushed before victory could be had in the larger war between the Poles of Creation.
Thus Gamallael became the Friend of Man, the greatest warrior of the Light. Exiled, but not fallen, she leads every force at her disposal in the millennia-long war to reclaim Humanity's lost glory and finally retake Eden from the Dark. Though she coldly compels her Powers to serve the Light at all cost, and in truth is not without caring for her mortal charges, at the bottom of things her heart has never turned from Heaven.
