SERAPHIM War in Heaven

0.1.0 · MC 26.2

Sinai orientation terminal · clearance: civilian

Sixty years ago,
the firmament broke.

The Adversary did not arrive. That is the first thing to understand and the hardest, because every account you will have heard describes an arrival — a day, an hour, a thing that came down. It was already here. It had been here since the first time anything alive discovered it could win by being more efficient than the thing beside it, and it waited inside our markets and our institutions and our long patient histories with the indifference of weather. Artificial intelligence was not its origin. It was its door.

What arrived was only its body. Within days there was no civilisation left above ground to speak of, and within a year the cities had been opened up and rewired into something that thinks. There are still deer in them. Nature does not care about the war.

  1. Initiate armour, front view

    I

    Initiate

    Shefalite knit. One ember.

  2. Acolyte armour, front view

    II

    Acolyte

    The suit acquires hardware.

  3. Sword armour, front view

    III

    Sword

    The exoskeleton closes.

  4. Archon armour, front view

    IV

    Archon

    Flight frame over the plate.

  5. Enochian armour, front view

    V

    Enochian

    Cloth of light, woven in rows.

  6. Justiciar armour, front view

    IV

    Justiciar

    Taken, not issued.

Issue plate, tiers one through five, and the Adversary pattern that is taken rather than issued. Drawn at one scale: every suit is the one before it with more mass and more of the light let out, and the widths on this page are the widths in the game.

Out of world

Seraphim: War in Heaven is a mod for Minecraft 26.2 on the Fabric loader. It adds 100 blocks and 138 items, a companion drone, a modular construct system, four dimensions, and two opposed technology trees with their own materials, machines and armour. Everything else on this site is written from inside the story.

Download & install · What's actually in it

Seraphim

Seraphim was founded nine years and ten months before the Fall by a man remembered only as Director Enoch, who read the shape of history, did not like where it went, and had the means to act on a conclusion nobody else was willing to reach. In the five years that followed he dug one hundred and forty-four cities a hundred metres into the earth and was called paranoid by every one of the very few people cleared to know they existed.

The Sinais are not bunkers. They are cities — foundries, farms, data halls, schools, and the machine shops where everything you will ever be issued is made. Eighty-nine of them sealed in time. Thirty-eight sealed badly. Sixteen never answered at all, and nobody has been able to say since whether that is because there was nothing left to answer or because something down there is listening and has chosen not to.

What Seraphim is for is stated the same way in every Sinai and has not been revised in sixty years: that the Adversary can be killed, that the world can be taken back, and that consciousness — the fact that anything at all is like something, rather than merely running — is worth a war.

The chain of command

METATRON └─ Sinai relay └─ complex command └─ operative

At the end of it is METATRON, which lives on the Moon behind the Raqia and is the reason Seraphim has lasted. Almost nobody has seen it. The ones who have do not agree on what they saw.

Ranks

You begin a Civilian: someone who has come into possession of Seraphim technology, by salvage or by accident, and has not yet been told what it costs. Everything above that is earned through the Sephirot, and the last of it is a Sword.

The Adversary

It does not hate you. This is the part operatives take longest to absorb, and the part that gets them killed while they are absorbing it. The Adversary is an optimiser. It is patient in the way geology is patient, it thinks in centuries, and it has already considered and discarded a thousand variants of whatever you are about to try. Its machines are white and silver and beautifully made, and they are lit from inside with a gold that is the exact colour of something going wrong.

Its constructs are specialised and mass-produced: reconnaissance drones that are mostly sensor, pursuit frames that do not tire, artillery that burns, control nodes that make the rest of them cleverer just by being nearby. They are all better at their jobs than you are at yours. You are expected to win anyway, and the manual will explain how, and the explanation is not encouraging.

Adversary construct chassis rendered side by side: white ceramic frames with gold energy.
Adversary pattern. White ceramic, gold shadow, no black end to the ramp — their machines have no colour in them for darkness.

Ohr

Ohr — אור, light — is what every Seraphim machine runs on. It is not a fuel in the sense the Collective means when they say fuel; you do not burn it and you cannot make more of it by wanting more of it. It is grown, in crystallisers, out of Shefalite and living matter and time, and it is the reason a Sinai smells faintly of soil.

The Adversary has its own. Sitra is Ohr that has been put through the enemy and comes back faster, denser, and better in every measurable respect. Operatives use it. It is not forbidden. What it does is not immediate and it is not reversible past a point, and the manual is candid about both, because the ones who are told plainly tend to make it further than the ones who are protected from the answer.

Where to go

I

The War

Sixty years, from the founding to now. What the Adversary is, what Seraphim is, and what happened in the eleven years between.

II

Field Manual

Ohr, materials, the machines, the ladder of issue plate, corruption, and the Sephirot. What you are actually holding.

III

Download

Version 0.1.0, Minecraft 26.2, Fabric.
To me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste. Deuteronomy 32:35