Ambivalent Divinity

I've been working on Ambivalent Divinity or ABD since 2023, I go back and forth with it but I've never entirely forgotten about it at any point. Right now I mostly work on it at a weekly writing club that I go to, so progress is steady. I'm still doing the outline, but I'm nearing the end of the first volume of likely eight. I know that doesn't sound like much, but you can't begin to imagine the massive changes the series underwent in all these years, as I changed and grew and learnt. I think at least two of the years were just spent trying to make something stable that I didn't immediately scrap. 

It is so hard to condense all of it to a paragraph or two, I prefer to let my stories speak for me, but as an introduction...

The series is set in a modern day fantasy universe, there exists our normal world and, above it, heaven. It's not a 1:1 of christian heaven and isn't meant to be, its made up of 7 rings each with it's own responsibility in overseeing who dies and where. All death is manual and carried out by the angels. 

Angels are raised to think of themselves as nature, who must carry out their purpose lest the whole world fall apart. However, they can still feel empathy and guilt and any other human emotions (they are reborn humans, stripped of their memories), so every now and then, they may choose to defy destiny. 

Our protagonist, Azriel, is one of those people. It takes a very long time to piece together his full story in the books, but we know he's run away from heaven and is now being hunted down for both killing Principalities (beings of the third ring, ruling over the lower triad, rings 1-3) and partially as a consequence of that, disrupting the system, causing thousands of missed deaths. It's also implied that he killed a human he regrets. There is so much more to it but I'm not gonna tell youuuuu... 

We follow him, Ever - a very suspicious archangel who won't leave him alone, Kira - a rebellious fellow runaway, and Feray - who grew sick of the system and decided to chase Kira instead, running from the angels and until choosing to fight back, travelling up the 7 rings until they reach the Empyream.

It's a pretty cool fantasy, but above all, it's just a story about connections and the importance of empathy in these trying times.