Sorcerer
Atop tall towers clawing against the black sky of Hell, the Sorcerers of the Court of the Seven-Headed Serpent perform rituals and spells to advance the schemes and machinations of their lords. They meditate in the scrying chambers, and the eerie sound of their insane chanting echoes throughout their lord’s fiefdom. It is their ululating cries that summon their Lord’s warbands to battle.
A mighty devil lord might have thousands of Sorcerers under their command. Each is formed from a tiny sliver of a fallen angel that shattered after being cast out of Heaven. Not truly dead or alive, they exist at the exact moment when their original divine life ended. They have lost all the original seraphic gifts their original whole form once had, but thanks to their celestial origins, no matter how fallen and diminished, they possess the potential for channeling great power, acting as conduits of magic.
The Sorcerers study their secret spells of destruction and manipulation from ancient tablets found atop many-peaked and unsettling mountains of Hell, for just as YHWH gave his laws atop of the Holy Mountain, so does Hell provide its power to its dark arts from pinnacles of Hell. To find the tablets, the Sorcerers use blind augurs and soothsayers who wandered too far to seek enlightenment and found damnation instead. After listening to the clues of their diviners, Sorcerers study the ancient lore and ever-shifting maps of Hell that fills their blasphemous libraries. When the time and place is discerned, a great expedition is mounted to discover one of these priceless tablets.
“Do not turn to sorcerers or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them: I am the LORD your God.”
— New Orthodox Syncretic Bible
It may take decades or centuries or even millennia to find the tablet (for time in Hell flows in uneven waves shifting back and forth), and the wilds of Hell are ever-changing and filled with many strange and deadly creatures. When the expedition reaches the appointed mountain, the Sorcerer must climb to the top alone. The mountain’s crown is ringed with standing stones that hum with a coiled power, and above the stones, a great pillar of smoke hangs like an abscess in the sky, and fell voices whisper from it. The Sorcerer enters the ring praying to his dark masters that he will return with the prized tablet. Then the presence in the smoke judges them: most are found unworthy and the tablet melts their body over seven years, draining its tarnished divinity to enhance the spells inscribed on the tablet for a more worthy Sorcerer to find.
In the rare case of when a Sorcerer returns with one of these tablets, armies of demon-scribes must translate and decipher what it does. Oftentimes the results are catastrophic. It is not uncommon for one of the archdevils keep and its surrounding fiefdom to be completely annihilated by the power found in these tablets. But some are successful, and the Sorcerer becomes a mighty master of Goetic spells of the tablet, their spells powered by the suffering of wretched mortals the Court buys from the Hell’s markers or acquires as tithe from their mortal followers. Each Sorcerer specializes in a school of one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Sorcerers come in many forms, and manipulate their own bodies to better cast the mighty spells they are charged with. Some have many arms, others multiple heads, or countless alterations and terrible improvements, some self administered, others by force, based on the whims of the archdevil and their cabal of High Sorcerers who lead their Goetic strategy. Sorcerer’s feet do not touch ground -a distant echo of their angelic past, but instead float across the battlefields of No Man’s Land, chanting the cruel gospel of Hell as they advance. Their dark wisdom and cunning makes them equally capable of leading one of Court’s warbands, or acting as advisors to one of the nobles of the Court as they stride forth into the mortal realms.