On the Ifrit and Their Kin
Of the three Choirs of Fallen Angels, the Ifrit (as well as their close relations which are instead called djinn, mariads, and other similar things) are the most wholly distant from humanity and its concerns. They have to their names more ruined lands and buried cities than either cousin Choir, but only on the rarest occasions did they spare a thought for the hundreds and thousands dying by their hands. Among the Fallen, they are the most rarely dealt with and the most often bound, and in this even the warlocks and pagans of the most savage lands show they are blessed with a modicum of sense.
An Angel falls for the love of the world, fascination and obsession with some aspect or medium of the Gods’ creation growing until it wholly consumes them, their pure and numinous being becoming enmired in and inextricable from the object of their preoccupation. Thus the Titan who consumes a kingdom for the bulk required by the grand and awe-some body of mortal flesh and scale which best expresses her vanity. Thus the Faerie, shattering his Soul into masks which so perfectly suit each actor in the intrigues which so compelled him. Thus, though simpler and in a sense more virtuous, the Ifrit, so wholly struck by the beauty of the wildfire that it kindles his own Heart in turn.
An Ifrit (meant in the broader sense) is the union of the Exalted and the Base, the numinous essence of the Angel taking the coarse stuff of which Creation was sculpted into himself, until rushing water and rough sand have worn away all that was transcendent in them. Each has their heart consumed with some Element in particular, and in turn takes it in its most apocalyptic guise as their Mantle. An Ifrit may be sandstorm or inferno, but never crackling hearth or nurturing sun; they are Sublime things, but not Beautiful ones.
Within the wildfire, hurricane, blizzard, or other particular Mantle an Ifrit might wear there does hide something akin to a body, but it is both fragile and diffuse. Even should a mortal knight brave the Mantle and face an Ifrit directly, he would find lead and steel equally impotent without some Blessing or Enchantment to bolster them. That the Ifrit would be equally incapable of striking him is little consolation, when directing and focusing the fury of their Mantle is the Choir’s simplest and most trivial Miracle.
An Ifrit may gather themselves into a more coherent form, just as they may by expression of Will subdue and divert the fury of their Mantle, but only the rarest few can make themselves truly solid, or assume even the pretence of a mortal seeming. Will, for that matter, is a thing in short supply for any member of the Choir, for the violence of their Fall does great damage to it, leaving them creatures of sudden impulse and violent passion.
It is little surprise, then, that in ancient days and savage lands they were reckoned as great and violent gods, with remote shrines maintained for great bribes and sacrifices to be left, should they then be satisfied and return the way they came. Such pagan rites persist even among Her Celestial Majesty’s subjects, in those wild places where Ifrit were oft-encountered within the span of memory. Most infamously, it is a truth acknowledged by even the most indulgent censor that every merchant crew, and no few of those ostensibly sworn to fight for Her Celestial Majesty’s glory, has at least one occasion filled a boat with food and treasure to push toward some especially storm-wracked horizon. Dark tales of crewmen picked by lot or passengers seized and bound to include among such offerings are denied most strenuously by Lord Admiral and merchant prince alike, and all inquiries into the matter most violently stymied.
It is upon the Seas, most often the Boreal within the Inner World, and upon at least a half-dozen of the Outer Seas, that Imperial Subjects are most likely to encounter an Ifrit, for they tolerate the solid, the stable and the Sacred most poorly. The great exceptions are among the Southern Marches, where some number of the Angelic host once invoked in the Third Crusade to scour the Lich-Kings and Reapers of Old Abhari from Creation grew too fond as the wind and fire which were their blades. A scattered few have caused great upset on occasion in those haunted lands, and it is thought that at least one yet remains among its further wastelands.
Wastelands are where an Ifrit might generally be found, whether sought out or simply forming around them. In the Piper’s Wake of Dread Balam, an Ifrit who retains a semblance of virtue scours the land as dancing pillars of endless flame, his violent curiosity spent naming all the ways goblins and demonspawn might burn. In the endless, glacial desolation beyond the Stedry, the Western Wind carves endless palaces of ice and stone, populated in turns by the dead preserved by driest air and those sealed within sculpted tombs of ice. In the endless and nigh-lifeless steppe between Soyai and Esheri, there is an eternal storm of choking dust which the pagans thereof say has the seeming of stampeding horses on the grandest scale, thunder their hoofbeats and lightning their breath. A past Hierarch, wishing to enumerate and name every Angel to descend from on High, had archives emptied and histories compared, and announced that one hundred and three Ifrit had Fallen unto the Inner World since the Creation. That number has grown by some number in the centuries since, but it has been reduced by far more. In these later days, at most a dozen remain.
Some number of them have been slain, their Mantles usurped by demon or Wyrm or their heart shattered or pierced by mortal heroism and wiles. As many or more have simply followed their own whims beyond the Inner World, for they are ever flighty and beguiled by novelties. Some small fraction also, it must be said, remain free and present but simply choose to pass the present age in slumber. Yet the greatest part of the reduction, and by no small margin, lies in the number of Ifrit now bound, Damned, or otherwise entrapped and entombed.
Ifrit are mighty, but crudely and blatantly so, the greater number of them by far raging across the land without subtlety or artifice. That their violent passions do no true damage to Creation itself, that in fact they are in a spiritual sense the least dangerous Choir of their kin, has never been a great comfort to those mortal souls forced to suffer their careless depredations. Thus, wherever shamans and wisewomen have made themselves kings and queens, and among every race who have learned or stolen the Binding arts, it was for the pacifying of an Ifrit that these sorceries were first used. This is done most often through trickery and guile, for the great and simple passions of the Ifrit leave them nigh-helpless matching wits against the clever and the brave. Grand temples and forgotten ruins alike dot the Inner World, within them a chest, urn or sarcophagus which has for centuries contained a, by now surely mad, Ifrit who once menaced its builders. Some are instead bound to some trial or task that leaves them so lessened to be harmless, as the scouring, flesh-stripping gale which has raced for years beyond counting between seven bronze bells in the Joyri’s wooded vales, capable of naught else until he causes all seven to ring as one. Some, those most skillfully and greedily bound, are instead forced into their binder’s service, or else compelled to labor in some particular manner for whoever holds the talisman which binds them. This might be a blunt and dangerous thing, as with the Everstorm trapped within a bag of woven unicorn fur, free to give voice to her fury for a day and a night whenever she is loosed, or the Glassblower of the Topaz Sea, whose vengeance against the heirs and kin of the shamans who bound him is forever delayed, so long as there never passes a single breath not spent crafting some new bauble or wonder for them.
The cleverest and most puissant binders instead break the Ifrit’s weathered Will entirely, subjecting them instead to their own disciplines. This is so rare among pagans that their number might be counted on one hand, and the King of Joyri’s witch-consort, by whose will his mountain-palace was built in a moon and a day, is the only to now walk the Inner World. Four in five, or more, of the Ifrit to ever be so thoroughly bound suffered so by the decree of Her Celestial Majesty’s august ancestors, Damned for their defiance of the Heavens and their trespasses and depredations against the Throne and its subjects. It cannot be known without doubt, but among the College of Binders it is generally held that in fact more (once-)Ifrit now writhe within the Sundry Hells than rage freely altogether, across both Inner World and Outer Seas.
Should such a Devil be the issue which requires the Inspectorate’s attention, then know it is naught but a grand and mighty sword in the hand of its caller, who, whatever their other crimes, has trespassed against Her Celestial Majesty’s privileges and usurped a quantum of her authority over the Damned to so use them. Should it instead be a wholly wild Ifrit, then it may well know agents of the Throne by sigil and livery, and react with rage of surpassing violence or the spite born of fear to their presence. Thankfully, without special effort no mortal is likely to draw such close attention, and so it is best to ensure that both you and your surrounds are prepared for the reaction before you provoke it.
-Inspector-General Lady Valeria St-Claire, ‘An Incomplete Bestiary of the Enemies of Heaven”
