Gabriel

The human half of the pair who stopped Vazroth, and one of the two gods the saga's whole structure hangs from.

Who he is

White cloth of clean leather, a rapier, and a presence that gives off "a calming sense of peace, as if everything would be okay" (ch. 4). Lucifer's opposite in every register: calm against chaos, precision against fury.

They bicker like people who have known each other far too long. Gabriel calls him Lucy, Lucifer calls him Gabby, and neither will stop first.

The ascension

Facing an orb large enough to level the settlement, neither of them ran. What came was not magic or light but "something deeper. Something real. Their souls, bared to the universe" (ch. 4).

Gabriel's wounds closed and his rapier reformed as pure divine energy. His movements afterwards are described as "the will of fate itself".

GBR: You ever think we were meant for more than this? LCF: Always.

and after:

VTH: You shouldn't be able to- GBR: We shouldn't be mortals either.

What he chose not to do

He did not kill Vazroth. He bound him into narration, which he calls "a punishment fitting of his hunger for control" (ch. 5).

Why he stopped acting

He and Lucifer became Guardians of Earth and then found they could not use it.

GBR: We rose. Guardians of Earth. But we can't act directly anymore. LCF: Too much light, too much fire, we'd shatter the balance. (ch. 5)

So they need hands, eyes, and hearts instead: fourteen disciples, seven each. Gabriel's seven are the Heavenly Virtues. See ../lore/the-fourteen.md.

He grants Blook's ending

Ch. 236. Blook walks to the higher reaches to ask to become mortal, and Gabriel is already there.

GBR: I felt you approaching. I assumed you'd come to ask something, eventually. I confess I expected it sooner. BLK: I wasn't ready sooner. GBR: No. I imagine you weren't.

He does not talk Blook out of it and he does not talk him into it. He states the terms twice and asks once.

The first term is the forgetting:

GBR: Every name, every memory, everything you have ever held across more years than I think even I could properly measure. It will not return to you. Not in this life, and you will not remember enough to know there was ever anything to mourn the loss of.

The second term is new information, and it is the one nothing else in the saga has stated:

GBR: You understand it will not be a full life either. What you are, unmade and remade into something mortal, will not carry the full span that those born into mortality typically receive. There is a cost to becoming something you were never originally built to be. The borrowed time will be shorter than you might hope.

Then:

GBR: And you still want this. BLK: I still want this. GBR: Then let's begin.

The chapter closes on his face: "the particular warmth deepening into something that looked, for just a moment, almost like pride."

This is consistent with ch. 5, where Gabriel and Lucifer sentence Vazroth to be a narrator and Gabriel names the prison as the one Blook once wielded. Gabriel put a narrator in, and Gabriel takes one out.

What ch. 47 says he is

A journal entry three centuries later, written by somebody carrying Zero's memories, places him in the Prologue's cosmology.

They are the echoes of Zero himself, fragments of his heroic nature, his refusal to yield, his willingness to sacrifice everything for the preservation of what is good and right.

And gives the reason he and Lucifer cannot stand aside:

Gabriel and Lucifer fight against Vazroth because they must, because it is literally in their nature to do so. They are the universe's immune system, activated by the presence of something that would destroy it all.

That reframes ch. 5. He and Lucifer did not choose restraint and then find it inconvenient. They are a response, and Vazroth is what they are a response to. See ../lore/the-fragment-theory.md.

Open questions

• What he was before ch. 4. Both of them speak of "the old times" and of being rusty "after all this time", which places a whole history before the saga starts.
• Whether the shortened lifespan is why Blook is still alive but memoryless in the far future notes, or whether it means he is not.
• What he is by Arthur's era, centuries later, and whether anybody still worships or remembers him.