Celestis

The Celestis were formerly an elite group of Celestial Intervention Agency operatives who became conceptual entities. ]] At the dawn of the Last Great Time War, the Celestis quickly concluded that in a time-active conflict, a defeat wouldn’t simply destroy them, but create a very different version of the Web of Time in which they’d never existed. Terrified, indignant and suddenly aware of their own mortality, they excised themselves from history as a “precaution”. Now they exist as little more than ghosts, impotent, self-obsessed Lords of an imaginary domain, only manifesting themselves in god-forms designed to terrorise and intimidate those individuals who’ve been tricked into worshipping them. Loathed by the Time Lords and demonised throughout history as traitors.

That they still refer to themselves as Lords says a lot about the deluded, almost pathological nature of the Celestis. To the rest of the Spiral Politic, they’re so monstrously corrupt that even when they try to manifest themselves as human (even supposedly beautiful) forms, there’s something distinctly sickly about them. Like the Faction Paradox, the Celestis are children of the Time Lords who fell from grace, fallen gods who rejected the protocols of the Time Lords in the face of the War and created their own base of operations outside space and time. But whereas the Faction might be considered to have an agenda, a justification for rebelling, even a sense of humour, the Celestis represent nothing but self-interest taken to its most perverse extremes, to the point where they are barely even recognisable as life in the accepted sense of the word.

Always obsessed with titles and with status, the Celestis have frequently referred to their corrupt bloodline as the Celestial House, but in truth, its members were taken from many of the Time Lords and ceased to have any biological link to Gallifrey when they founded their own powerbase in Mictlan. Most of the Celestis were politicians, members of the more active and ruthless intervention groups that appeared on Gallifrey in the millennia leading up to the War: the first generation to renounce the status quo of the ruling Houses, but instead of confronting the House elders openly, the interventionists took to using subterfuge, manipulation, conspiracy… even perhaps, assassination. They believed it was Gallifrey’s place to intervene in the affairs of the Spiral Politic and that the structure of history should be routinely re-made to suit the Houses’ own ends. Though officially, the Ruling Houses never agreed to such drastic measures, many of the interventionist groups amassed power in the final Pre-War centuries, whispering in the elite and covertly influencing the Presidency. It’s known that more than one retro-active genocide was committed during the “golden age” of these groups, entire cultures erased from history in blatant breach of the protocols.

If a historian were to be generous, he or she could claim that the future Celestis did this in the name of Gallifrey, purely to defend their own people. But given what they later became, there’s no reason to be generous. It’s more likely that the interventionists were principally driven by ambition. No other groups on Gallifrey so ruthlessly demanded that the Houses should be like Gods, or rather, that in front of the lesser species, they should present themselves as Gods. And when it became clear that the war was approaching, that the Houses were about to face an enemy just as divine, the interventionists were the first to take the easy way out.

It wasn’t so much that the elder members of the bloodlines realised they might die in the War, although this was shocking enough. But to think that everything, your House, your society, your culture had ever produced might be reduced from history altogether… there’s no possible comfort in such a thought, no resonance of “we may be doomed, but we had a good run”, because if a culture is removed from history altogether, then there was no “run”. Faced with this appalling possibility, most of the Houses armed themselves for warfare, convinced (after so many generations of unquestionable rule) that they would emerge victorious and that they had to win. Yet the interventionists saw themselves as beyond the law, even of the Presidency: they told themselves that if it was unthinkable for the Houses to be wiped from history, then it was doubly unthinkable for it to happen to their kind. They were the elite, were they not? Weren’t they the most pragmatic, most cunning, most able to present a God-like façade to the lesser races?

They could have stayed on Gallifrey to fight in the War. They could, like Faction Paradox, have simply left to find a different solution. They didn’t. They simply didn’t think that they could take the risk. Instead- in a move which other cultures have seen as either truly devious or utterly insane- they decided to escape from the risk of being removed from history by removing themselves from history, albeit in a carefully-engineered way. It was known that, with the correct application of technology, an individual or object could be put into a forced paradox state, in which that object was removed from the timeline as if it had never been there in the first place. Yet, although this process removed the object’s matter from the universe, an observer in a null-universe could still remember its existence. Therefore, the memetic mass of the object- its meaning, its importance, its ability to be comprehended- remained. The object survived, but as a pure concept of itself, as a shadow of understanding, with no physical mass. It was the same principle which would, once the War started, be used to create conceptual entities. But suppose, said the future Celestis, just suppose we did that to ourselves. Even if Gallifrey fell, we’d be safe. And beings like us, Lord and Ladies of creation that we are… even without bodies, surely we could still hold court?

There’s no record of exactly how the Celestis engineered their mass-removal from history. Of course there isn’t: there’s no record of them ever having existed as conceptual entities, although it is clear that they did just from the current status. Thus was Mictlan founded. Unsurprisingly, the Celestis are remembered on Gallifrey as traitors. They’re seen as having abandoned the Time Lords in their hour of need and yet the Celestis, in their arrogance, see themselves as merely being realistic. It seemed somewhat ironic, given that they’re now barely “real” anymore. And although they might be reviled at home, in the rest of the Spiral Politic, they’re largely dreaded, at least where they have made themselves known. They may only exist as concept, as God-ideas ruling their citadel on the outer skin of the universe, but that doesn’t mean that they’re harmless. These aren’t the loa of the Faction Paradox, invisible and intangible presences which only attack if roused. Wherever there are sentient minds to perceive them the Celestis can manifest themselves in quite a noticeable way. Each Lord has an entire “wardrobe” of god-forms, bodies sculpted out of the ideas of the lesser races, usually designed to prove the Celestis’ own superiority. They have manifested themselves as devils and carved idols, as stone faced gargoyles and many armed things with mythic monstrous faces; they’ve appeared as Gods of War, with elaborate and grotesque skins of armour; they’ve even tried (occasionally) to appear as beautiful and angelic, although their beauty is so limited that this barely comes off.

But these little Gods need worshippers. As the Celestis only exists as a network of ideas, they need minds which can perceive and understand them. Still bound by tradition and protocol- albeit their own- their usual tactic is to appear before members of the lesser species in a typically imposing form and offer them a Faustian bargain. As the Celestis have rudimentary control over life and death, it’s within their power to say (offer) a subject an extended life-span, on the understanding that when they do die, they will be “downloaded” to Mictlan to act as the Celestis’ servants in perpetuity.

It’s hardly surprising that the Celestis elicit such disgust from those who encounter them and as they rely on the perceptions of others, this disgust only causes further corruption of their forms. But the Celestis hardly seem to care. Still believing themselves above the material universe rather than dependent on it, they sit comfortably on their thrones in the towers and fortresses of Mictlan, watching events in the outer universe ( or rather the inside universe, as Mictlan exists on its outer conceptual edge), like the bored Gods they believe themselves to be. In truth, they have little effect on the War, perhaps being too terrified to involve themselves in the universe they so readily escaped, but in recent years, these Lords who see the War as a kind of game have begun to interfere and take sides. Although the Celestis have occasionally helped Gallifrey in this way, the fact that they have also supplied the enemy with conceptual entities is seen by most of the Houses as proof that the Celestis are vile, parasitic, betrayers and many units of the House Military are duty-bound by their codes of honour to destroy any “spineless monstrosities” who might be discovered in the warzone.

Of course, simply killing one of the Celestis’ god-forms would achieve very little: it is notoriously difficult to shoot and idea and as a result, the Celestis might be considered to be a War-era power which has come the closest to actual immortality. Besides, the Lords and Ladies themselves rarely leave Mictlan, doing most of their work via their proxies, the Investigators. But an Investigator in combat is a very worrying prospect in itself.

They also created the Anarchitects, a form of conceptual entity.