Heaven is the highest realm in the architecture of creation. It is the seat of the thirteen Gods who built the worlds, and it is the place where divine law has its home. It does not appear on any mortal map. It is reached by no road. The Divine Angels who serve the Gods directly cross from it to the lower worlds when they must, and back again when their work is done, and to most mortals it is a word — an old one, increasingly unused.
Among its functions, one matters more than any other to the chronicle now beginning. When an angel dies cleanly — that is, when an angel is killed in the ordinary way an angel can be killed — its celestial essence rises and returns to Heaven. The essence is preserved. The death is not final in the way a mortal's death is final. The Archangel who lost the angel can mourn, can rebuild, can in time receive the essence back into the order.
Drexel's entire project is, at its core, an effort to make sure that essence never returns here again. He does not kill the angels he takes. He strips them, binds them into his staff through the Ember of the Abyss, and leaves them alive in the wrong place. Heaven, on the celestial system's own rules, cannot recover an angel that has not yet died. That is the wound.
