Servitors of Death with Songs of Fruition.

[Matthias Wasser]

Originally Posted by ISNorden

I imagine a more dignified domain...a mausoleum with memorials to celestial heroes, those angels soul-killed while in good standing. It might be surrounded by a garden full of plants associated with death and burials in different cultures. Since most new arrivals to Heaven are souls of the dead, I'd place the whole domain fairly close to the Pearly Gates--just inside the walls somewhere. Does that sound appropriate to your version of Azrael too, Mathias?

I'm imagining a long street that extends from the Pearly Gates to Jacob's Ladder, starting out as a celebration of liberation from the flesh and continuing on as an enticement towards liberation from identity. The most fully selfless souls tend to just march from one end to the other, unaware that there are other parts of Heaven or that there are souls unsaved. Much of this street has been decorated as Rocket describes over time, but the underlying architecture is as the rest of the Cathedral - vast and situated between the Vale and Groves. It is a reminder of the inevitability of annihilation - an unending landscape of tombs, celebratory or mournful or both according to Heaven's judgment, not only for persons but for ideas, nations, species, ages, parts of the same. An angel can search here for an image of itself - a monument forming itself out of a floor of bone, but whether to indicate its end in soul death or Falling cannot quite be made out - for damnation is equivalent to annihilation in the Cathedral's logic; either way, such a thing can no longer be found in the symphony. Like the Library, the Mausoleum is a repository of knowledge - but while the Library seeks to be understood, the Mausoleum can only display that which no longer has a context to make itself explicable. Monuments to dead languages, philosophies, and cultures indicate that something was once here, but something that, if it could be described, would no longer be dead.