FACECLAIM: MAX IRONS AGE: 28 SPECIES: HARPY OCCUPATION: Private Music Teacher ARRIVED: November 26, 2018 DECLARED
tw gore, violence, child dismemberment
The Church of the Messengers was a small church in Johnstown, Ohio. It was an unconventional church nestled in a secluded town, but it was the place that Raffe knew as home for nearly all of his life. He didn’t remember much about his life before, but he knew what he’d been told: he’d been left as a newborn on the front porch of the Conrads’ house in an Amish community seventy miles from Johnstown where he’d been raised as Jeremiah Conrad for the first six years of his life. After he’d sprouted wings, seemingly overnight, the community as a whole reacted in fear, insisting that the Conrads send him away– they were a peaceful people that didn’t want the trouble that would surely come from this. Someone had heard of a church that took in orphaned or abandoned children and they said he would be safe there, they said they had a contact that could get them in touch. The Messengers of God were there to get the boy four days later. Â
The church itself was not much of a church at all. It was comprised of six men who claimed to be arcangels from heaven. They were all named after the seven named angels in the bible (all except Raphael, which was the name given to little Jeremiah his very first day). They were, respectively, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Selaphiel, Raguel, and Barachiel. The church members themselves were made up of mostly human devotees, but occasionally there were a few angels that would stick around a while, but when they left, none of them ever came back. Intrigued, Raffe asked one day why the other angels never returned. That was when he learned the two vital rules of the Church of the Messengers. The first was that relationships with daughters of men was strictly forbidden. Any angel having a relationship with a human would become fallen and they would be cast from heaven and sent to the pits of hell until Judgment Day. The second was that though they were all called the Messengers of God, only one of them–Gabriel– actually spoke to God himself. Gabriel claimed that only the true messenger could be a vessel from which God could impose his will. The angels that Raffe had asked about? They had all fallen and were awaiting judgment in the pit.Â
None of this ever made much sense to Raffe, but he didn’t question it. Did it really make even less sense than being left on the front porch steps of a secluded Amish family’s home as a newborn? Not really. Instead, he was kept mostly alone as he grew, tutored by one of the members of the church. It was lonely, but he was kept busy, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Occasionally, kids would come into, and then presumably leave, the church’s orphanage program, but Raffe never saw them. He longed to play with other kids his age, but instead he was tutored with an aggressively religious curriculum and tirelessly taught how to be a warrior in his off time. One of the things Gabriel always preached about was the nearing apocalypse, and all that it would mean for the angels. After the apocalypse came Judgment Day, and their brothers that had fallen might rejoin them once again, so they were supposed to be preparing themselves for it. Hence, the fighting. All the time. The arcangels regularly sparred with each other to keep in fighting shape and Raffe excelled in it. At just eighteen, he was the one to beat– and he almost never was.Â
Over the years, Gabriel seemed to grow more and more assured that the apocalypse was near. They began to travel the state, moving from one small, secluded community to the next, preaching and recruiting people to join the church, promising glory in the life after. On one of these treks, somewhere between York and Ephrata, Raffe met Lucy. She was loud mouthed and obnoxious and he’d come to think of humans as unworthy and less than, so he hadn’t really given her much of a second glance. She was full of questions and he didn’t have the desire or the patience to answer them. But over the course of two weeks, she kept on, wore him down until he finally had to admit her charm was infectious. He tried, he really tried, to stay away from her because no daughter of man was worth falling, but in the end, it was one battle he was destined to lose. They began to see each other in secret and as they moved from city to city, she trailed along behind them. In their stolen moments, she’d tell him about her sister, how she was headed to a small town in North Carolina where she’d heard she might be living and though he should have seen it coming, he was taken completely by surprise when she asked him to come along. His immediate desire was to say yes, but instead, he decided to tell her the truth about what he was and why it was impossible for him to go with her.Â
That was the day he realized his entire life had been a lie.
Lucy, aghast at the reality Raffe had been living, opened his eyes to the world of supernaturals. She told him everything she knew, which was quite a lot since she was a witch herself and took him into the heavily populated towns he’d been conditioned to avoid to see the supernatural lifestyle for himself. Raffe struggled to rectify the world she was showing him with the one he’d lived in his entire life and the blow was devastating. Enraged, he returned to the Messengers with Lucy in tow, storming into the middle of what looked to be a meeting he was, once again, not a part of. He told the men he’d come to think of as brothers that he was leaving, that he knew the truth, and that nothing they could say would stop him. Gabriel pleaded with him to changed his mind, told him that Lucy was a demon from hell sent to test his faith and lead him off the path of righteousness. The sickest part was, there was a part of Raffe that began to doubt Lucy at Gabriel’s words, but he steeled himself and held firm with Lucy at his side.Â
In his haste to leave and unfamiliar with his surroundings, he headed towards the wrong door. The moment he opened it, he knew he shouldn’t have. He was hit with the overwhelming smell of formaldehyde and as he peered inside the room, the sight made him sick to his stomach. Children, at least a dozen of them, in various sized glass containers, some missing arms, some missing legs, but all with some sort of curling, scorpion-like tails sewn on to their midsections. Realization hit Raffe a half second before they were both cornered in the room with no way of escape: Gabriel and the others had been experimenting on the orphaned children, trying to create some sort of biblical locusts to start a false apocalypse. Gabriel stepped inside, frowning, and apologized, saying he had never meant for Raffe to see this. But now that he had, he couldn’t just let him go. Two more false angels stepped up behind him. And then everything went black.
When he awoke, they were in the same back room as before, but one of Raffe’s old human tutors was also there. Raffe frantically searched around for Lucy, and they landed on the shape of her at the back of the room where she sat on a chair with her arms bound behind her. She was crying, and her eyes were locked on his. It took him a minute to fully comprehend the scene, but when he did, he realized the human man, Obadiah, was pointing a gun at Lucy and his
 brothers were watching him with an encouraging eagerness. When Gabriel realized he was awake, he promised Raffe he was doing him a favor. He nodded to Obadiah once and before Raffe could even open his mouth to scream “No!”, the shot rang out across the small room. Overcome with rage, Raffe pulled free of his own restraints with a wild war cry. Operating on pure fury, he tore through the room like a hurricane. It wasn’t until he was the last one left standing in a room full of the bodies of all the people he’d ever loved did he realize what he’d done. He cradled Lucy in his arms for hours, apologizing and stroking her hair. When he could finally bear to pull himself away, he gently removed the necklace from around her neck, kissed her temple, and promised her that he’d finish what she started; he’d find her sister for her.Â
Raffe is often quiet and reserved. He likes to sit back and observe life, though it may stem more from his own desire to belong somewhere than general interest in the lives of strangers. He has a dry, sarcastic sense of humor, but his upbringing has made him a stickler for rules and order. He is a fierce warrior and a force to be reckoned with, but he’s extremely loyal and more than anything, just wants to feel like he belongs somewhere.
When his feathers began to molt and grow in black, Raffe realized why they’d used Obadiah to kill Lucy instead of just doing it themselves. He actually finds his black wings fitting because despite knowing the truth and having seen it with his own eyes, part of him thinks he’s fallen and he’s living in his own hell. He knows he has a lot to learn about who he truly is and he regularly finds himself slipping into the mindset of an arcangel despite his best efforts to leave that part of himself behind.
Most importantly, he was only ever introduced to basic technology and computers and smart phones are Raffe’s sworn enemies.
