Icon missing; authorities baffled
Dateline: Temple Shores District, Khazigur; 24 Adelis' Month, 12090: A recent review by the Archbishop Harinn Lemmm of the Catalogon of the Celestials, specifically of the silver-and-gold artistic representations of the Celestii Magni adorning the Great Dome, has come up short one angel. The ritual is symbolically repeated seven times, and each time, rather than nine times nine or 72 angels, the count was the unlucky prime of 71. One of the angels is no longer to be found on the dome.
Traditionally the Catalogon is performed as a once-per-decade formality coinciding with a deep cleaning effort to remove a decade's worth of tarnish and soot dust from the icons of the dome and elsewhere, though the dome work is the most dangerous; two years ago, two workers fell to their death when a rope came loose while they were on a platform cleaning the top of the dome.
Most curious about the theft is that it is not immediately obvious which Celestial is no longer there; the perfect positioning shoulder to shoulder of each representation is unbroken, and the distance of the gap has actually decreased as well, from 72 inches between each figure on the fourth row, to just 71 inches, and commensurately across the third row of 27 as well; the top two rows of five and four respectively are unchanged. Mathematically this would suggest that not only is one angel no longer in the tableau but in fact the entire dome has shrunk by 3 feet exactly to accommodate the disappearance of an inch between 36 figures while still maintaining the symbolic and numerological distances, which are of enormous importance for the mystical arts.
The Archbishop did not care to speculate on the cause or meaning of this event, and could not say for certain which angel was missing, perhaps because the representations become progressively more generic as one moves from the top to the bottom of the dome. Nevertheless as the Holy Nine are as they have been since the icons were first installed early in the reign of Autarch Arsinoe IV in the deep and distant Imperial past, obviously the missing angel is not in those ranks, and the bottom row remains 36 angels, so by elimination we can see that the missing angel is in the third row, and a count of these shows that indeed only 26, an inauspicious number though at least not a prime number, remain.
Further investigations by your authors here, in the Archivists guild, suggest that the missing angel is one of Arsisiel's twin daughters, Auriel or Oriel. Determining which of the two would be impossible even under normal circumstances, as they uniquely are angels who are confused together by nature and by domain - one of lust, one of love.
We in the Archivists guild have unique access to documents in the Imperial past, and a series of installation blueprints shows that it would be nearly impossible for anyone to actually remove one of these icons, as they were forged on site from molds embedded in the reinforced silver dome sections, and then partially remelted while in place to fill in any seams between the sections; literally the only mundane option for removing any of them would be to first remove the entire dome which is now functionally a single unbroken bowl of reinforced silver, with the icons embedded an eighth of an inch deep; removal using normal means, if it were possible, would leave the imprint where the gold had been in the dome.
As such the only explanation, as unlikely as it sounds, is magical, if not miraculous.
The Archbishop is quick to point out that the meaning of this event is open to wide interpretation and obviously, to misinterpretation. While some changes in the rankings of the Celestials have changed over time, to the point that a few Celestials have been removed from the 72 and some added, the total number has remained the same. Changes have been made to update the dome to match the traditional rankings, but generally these are by small changes to the identifying accessories such as the saddle of Tzadkiel replacing the Axe of Eriezel, an angel of war who has since been moved to the more generic lower ranks. No changes have been made since the reworking of the false angel Ophidiel into the likeness of Arsisiel several millennia ago, a period conforming to the loss of Toz as an Imperial territory and subsequent hostilities between the two nations, Toz being a land particularly favored by the Angel of Serpents.
The religious authorities are obviously shaken by these events but are as yet unwilling to address the possibility that the number itself should be changed due to this event. Ironically, coincidentally, or perhaps entirely related to the event through some as-yet-unknown connection, Arsisiel is one of the newer additions, and it is his daughter angel who is missing.
The event has caused some panic among the general public, but the Autarch assures us that he will get to the bottom of these strange dealings, even if it requires him to call an audience with the Celestials themselves to receive a definitive answer.
The Archbishop has decided to perform another Catalogon if and when the angel, or a different one, reappears on the dome, even if the traditional passage of a decade of time has not occured at that point.
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