Caelum
“Beyond the veil of realities, chaos and order dance and I hold the reins. Treading lightly upon the fabric of worlds, I am the arbiter of destinies. Crowned or crownless.”
~ Caelum
“I think I’m going to find a different kind of story. After I help them. Consider this my last supper with you, Count. I don’t know what will happen when they use the throne. Nor will I stop them either.”
~ Caelum, departing Castle Daluege
Caelum Real Form
Caelum Real Form
Caelum Real Form Full Body
Caelum Real Form Full Body
Demon / Messiah / Kotoamatsukami / Hitorigami
Male
Was the Messiah of the cycle, tasked with collecting the menorah and resetting the world across uncountable iterations. Then resided at Castle Daluege as a guest of Count Yuliy Daluege, spending his time between cycles reading trying to develope his own Reason.
Before the first cycle, before the heavens had a name or the reed plains had taken form, Caelum came into being not through intention but through the space intention left open. Kamimusubi and Takamimusubi had set a reed seed into the primordial waters, expecting something they could account for. What arose instead was a will that belonged to no one, Umashiashikabihikoji, whom the turning ages would also call Caelum, the Star Child. Amenominakanushi, avatar of the Great Will, recognized him for what he was immediately and pressed his mark into the child’s nature: Messiah, the Messianic Archetype entire.
Fearful of what they had inadvertently produced, Kamimusubi and Takamimusubi struck pieces from him in an attempt to diminish him. It did not work. Caelum did not diminish. In a desperate attempt at placation they gathered one of the broken pieces, which had taken the form of a five-candle menorah, and told him to protect it with everything he was. He placed it within himself and kept it there. The other four pieces fell into the forming world and became wills of their own separate menorah, separate beings, made of his substance but belonging only to themselves. His brothers. His sisters.
He was given a task. Collect the menorah. Use the Throne of Creation. Reset the world. Begin again.
He did this an uncountable number of times. He killed angels, demons, gods. At the end of every cycle he faced his brothers and sisters, the menorah beings made from pieces of himself, and ended them, because the task required it and he did not look away from what the task required. He took up the Throne of Creation and reset the world and stepped into the new one the way a traveler steps into a room he has furnished himself.
Then he stopped.
There was no particular cycle that broke him. He simply arrived at the end of one, the Throne before him and the weight of everything behind him, and did not move toward it. When Kamimusubi and Takamimusubi came demanding he continue, he erased them from every cycle that had been and every cycle that would be, from causality and from the places beyond causality alike. They would not return through any means any being had ever devised.
Amenominakanushi sent Ishtar. She fell. Polaris followed. She fell. Canopus, the Divine Order of the Universe wrapped in the Four Prime Factors, came last. He fell too, his administrative system dismantled, his Prime Factors erased, no cycle left to return through.
With no one else capable of the task, Adam Kadmon; the Primordial Man, the Fifth Being, the perfect vessel of the Messianic Archetype, took up the mantle. He was relentless in a way that was different from everything Caelum had faced before, not fated or assigned but native to his nature. As soon as a new cycle opened Adam Kadmon was already moving, already hunting the menorah, giving creation no room to breathe. They met across many cycles as equals, both able to conquer the other. Until Caelum did once and for all. He erased not just Adam Kadmon but the archetypal necessity that had made him possible, the slot in the pattern the Primordial Man had occupied. In the Tree of Life and its Four Worlds, across every branch and emanation, Adam Kadmon simply was not.
The cycle had no shepherd. Creation, for the first time since the reed seed had been placed in the water, had no one coming to end it.
Caelum found his way to Castle Daluege.
Count Yuliy Daluege spoke with him for a long time the first night and gave him a room. The boy chose one at the end of the long hall in the east wing, north-facing, looking out over the forest rather than the road. He said he preferred to see things that were not going anywhere. The enchantments on his door, placed outward rather than inward, were not for him. They were for anyone who came looking.
And they did come. Mortals shaped by fate into something the cycle required, arriving cycle after cycle to take the menorah from within him. He permitted this each time, because something in him did not wish to be the thing that broke what the world was trying to become, even if what it was trying to become was only another version of what it had always been. At the start of each new cycle the Count woke with his memory restored, a gift given quietly and without ceremony, and walked to the east wing, and knocked, and the boy told him to come in, and the book was already open.
This continued until the Crownless Kings arrived. They were not messiahs. They moved toward the castle with the quality of people making decisions rather than people following a fate, and they asked not to reset the cycle but to end it entirely, to make a world without the Throne, without the machinery of heaven, without the Great Will’s hand moving through everything that existed. He told them to leave. When they asked for the menorah he fought them and they lost. They came back and spoke with him, and he heard in what they said something he had not heard across all his cycles: the possibility of something genuinely new.
He gave them the menorah.
He sat with the Count through the weeks that followed, reading differently than he had read before, with curiosity rather than familiarity. When the Count asked if he would help the Crownless Kings, he was quiet for a long time before the Count asked him the question he had never properly asked himself: whether he wanted them to succeed.
When the Crownless Kings reached the Throne, Caelum left the castle to fight alongside them against the Great Will itself. His last words to the Count before departing were a request: if there was a world after this, the Count should find him there and he would tell him about all of it.
- Carries a five-candle menorah within himself, a piece broken from his own being by Kamimusubi and Takamimusubi at the beginning of creation.
- Has retained his memories across every cycle, a continuity no other being in the cosmology shares.
- Gives Count Yuliy Daluege his memories back at the start of each new cycle as a matter of course, without ceremony.
- The enchantments on his room in Castle Daluege face outward. They are not for him.
- Has never killed a mortal turned messiah who came for the menorah. He has said that if he wanted them dead, he would make them dead.