Zariel (ZAR-ee-el)

Zariel's original form was that of a beautiful solar with flawless skin, gold-feathered wings, and a blindfold covering her eyes.

Together with Geryon, Zariel was among the archdevils best known for their unmatched martial prowess. Such was her power that she could best a balor in one-on-one combat and only needed a few seconds afterwards to collect herself. Following her fall, she was enhanced with fiendish powers, such as the typical archdevil ability to alter her form. In addition, many of her powers gained a distinct fire motif: she could create fireballs and walls of fire at will, her weapons seared with hellish flame, and her magical stare could cause spontaneous combustion. Whereas typical solars had the ability to cast resurrection three times a day and could remove ailments such as disease, poison, blindness, or deafness with only a touch, Zariel had instead the power to cast finger of death three times per day and was endowed with a horrid, poisoning touch that inflicted the same conditions that an angelic healing touch would reverse.

Zariel's fall had also come with undeniable drawbacks. She lacked the divine awareness that allowed all solars to detect lies, as well as their truesight, instead possessing the devil power to see through magical darkness.

After her descent, she took on a more diabolical appearance: a halo of fire burned atop her head, and her angelic wings, ruined by flame, turned leathery. She had lost one of her hands and replaced it with a flail.

While Zariel was still an angel, she wielded a longsword that she later lost along with her hand during her original descent into Avernus. The Sword of Zariel, as it came to be known, was hidden by her most loyal general, Yael, and her hollyphant companion Lulu. The sword not only contained an angelic spark but had every ounce of a hollyphant's celestial energies poured into it, enough that a fortress against the evils of Avernus sprung up around the blade. The sentient artifact was capable of destroying the nigh-indestructible, although only the sword could decide who was worthy of wielding it, and attuning to its power caused an irrevocable physical and magical transformation into an idealized, angelic version of one's former self. Some time after her fall, Zariel managed to take the hammer Matalotok, an ancient weapon forged by Thrym, from the demon lord Kostchtchie, and started wielding it herself.

Among Zariel's dangerous weapons were her flying fortresses, massive basalt citadels that were usually repaired and serviced at the rusting Stygian Docks and fuelled by souls extracted directly from the River Styx. One such vehicle was a colossal structure shaped like a blade, a 450‑foot (140‑meter) tall fortress that was crewed by hundreds of devils and could be controlled telepathically only by Zariel herself.

Originally, Zariel was a solar under the command of the Morning Lord Lathander, her name, according to Reya Mantlemorn, meaning "Companion of Light". From the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia, Zariel was tasked with tracking the progress of the Blood War in Avernus, but from continued exposure to the conflict, she developed an obsession with the War and a taste for battle. Zariel was impetuous in nature, and couldn't ignore the desire to fight within her, but her requests were consistently blocked by her angelic peers.

Zariel believed that it was the responsibility of the angelic host to defeat evil, and was of the opinion that an assault from the hosts of Celestia could wipe out both sides of the Blood War in one stroke, freeing the multiverse from the fiends who destroyed each other and vast chunks of it in the process. Despite chastising her superiors for their stance as neutral observers, Zariel was repeatedly forbidden from entering the conflict. Zariel was frustrated by her their refusal to engage in the war, and drew the line when Yeenoghu slaughtered a village under her protection.

Late in the Year of the Bow, 1354 DR, Zariel defied her superiors and led the Hellriders of Elturel, a host of personally trained mortal allies, into Avernus, in the battle that became known as the Ride. Outnumbered by the devils, the army was defeated and the survivors fled in terror and shame. Asmodeus sent a delegation of osyluths to retrieve her unconscious body from underneath a mountain of the dead, whereupon the Lord of the Nine allowed her to recover and congratulated her. Zariel succumbed to the corrupting nature of Hell and Asmodeus made her an archdevil and dubbed her his champion.

Fall and Rise:
At some point, Bel managed to defeat Zariel and take her place as Archduke of Avernus. Through his tactical genius, he had become her faithful right hand, but Zariel had made a crucial mistake—she came to trust him. Using an unknown method possibly learnt from the tanar'ri, he imprisoned the forlorn lord in his Bronze Citadel while siphoning her power to increase his own infernal abilities. Zariel was constantly tortured by abishai servants of Bel, who continuously carved off bits of her flesh to feed their master for several centuries, with the new Lord of the First hoping to eventually reduce her into a mere soul shell.

Asmodeus had allowed Bel to rule so long as he kept fighting the Blood War, but had done so partially out of the knowledge that he'd be too busy with the Blood War to scheme against his peers. In fact, it was possible that Asmodeus was the one truly behind Zariel's defeat, and that rather than publicly demote her, he put the Dark Eight in charge. The pit fiend generals hunted down and imprisoned Zariel, and established Bel as a puppet Lord of the First in their stead.

Eventually, Bel fell out of favor with Asmodeus after his inability to successfully repel a demonic invasion of Avernus, his overly cautious methods having proved inadequate to deal with the encroaching Abyssal offenses. Following Bel's demotion, Zariel was reinstated and reclaimed her title as Lord of Avernus before nearly driving all the demons out of Hell with her unrelenting offense.

Shortly after her reinstatement as Archduchess in the late 15th century DR, Zariel allied herself with the Red Wizards of Thay at the time of Severin Silrajin's attempt to summon Tiamat into Toril. She assisted in their efforts by sending out mortal agents and by facilitating rituals of devil summoning. Her efforts, however, were opposed by Bel and his allies, who instead wished to keep Tiamat in Avernus.

Zariel's Revenge:
Zariel never forgot those who deserted the battlefield during her failed invasion of Avernus and had long been waiting to exact her revenge. Such an opportunity arose in the Year of the Seductive Cambion, 1444 DR, when a vampire lord conquered the city of Elturel and a Tormite priest by the name of Thavius Kreeg called out to any power to save his city, a call answered by the Lord of Avernus. The instant his plea was made, Zariel emerged from a pillar of fire, offering him a deal he readily accepted. Zariel gave Thavius a tool known as the Solar Insidiator, more commonly known as the Companion, a glowing sphere as radiant as the sun that bathed Elturel in holy light, destroying the vampire lord's army and sending him back to the shadows.

Thavius took credit for the appearance of the Companion and was hailed as a saviour, rising to become the High Overseer under which the holy nation of Elturgard blossomed. The price for this salvation however was later damnation, as well Thavius knew. In the Year of Three Ships Sailing, 1492 DR, after politically conspiring to weaken the neighbouring city of Baldur's Gate and ensure his own safety, Thavius watched from a safe distance as the radiant sun Zariel had provided transformed into a black orb crackling with lightning. The Solar Insidiator ripped Elturel from the Material Plane and transported it and its inhabitants (all previously made to swear an oath to protect it by Kreeg and therefore included in the deal with the city itself) directly into Avernus, leaving only a crater behind.

Even after damning an entire city, Zariel's ultimate plan had not yet come to fruition. Elturel was simply one in a list of cities she planned to drag down to the Hells, as beyond her desire for vengeance she had the pragmatic intent to use the citizens as fodder in her prosecution of the Blood War. She had already made a deal with her devout disciple Thalamra Vanthampur, whereby the current rulership of her next target, Baldur's Gate, would fall and she would become the Grand Duke, paving the way for the fall of that metropolis as well. Important to said plan was the Shield of the Hidden Lord, the artifact in which Gargauth was trapped and which had contributed to the moral decay of Baldur's Gate for years and was going to be used by Thavius and Thalamra to doom the city in much the same way as the last.

Elturel and its devastated populace would have immediately fallen under Zariel's control if not for intensified attacks by demonic forces from the River Styx once it appeared, requiring Zariel's forces to focus on keeping them from overrunning it. Even so, the city was slowly and erratically being pulled down by chains into the Styx, whereupon, without outside intervention, it would permanently merge with the Nine Hells. Fortunately, a group of adventurers managed to save the city from total damnation, yet Zariel remained the Archduchess of Avernus even after Elturel was released from its chains and returned to the Material Plane, her moral fate unclear.

On a Founders' Day in the late 15th century, Zariel was summoned onto Waterdeep's Field of Triumph. She, in turn, summoned a host of devils and bid them spread chaos in the city. Waterdeep briefly became a battlefield in the Blood War, as demons were attracted by the sudden presence of devils. Zariel hoped that strong adventurers would appear to defeat the fiendish invasion, and that she could lure or blackmail them into her service. A group of adventurers, commanded by Blackstaff Vajra Safahr to restore order to the city, was able to defeat Zariel and banish her back to the Nine Hells.

Zariel was notorious for her foul temper, with her poor emotional control impeding her ability to act rationally and pragmatically, as exemplified by her refusal to play politics. Her approach of charging headfirst into dangerous situations led by her righteous wrath was the opposite of the carefully calculating Bel. He was, at heart, a realist, aware that the infinite nature of demonkind left him only capable of a stalemate against their innumerable horde. Zariel, despite her cynicism, was an idealist; she genuinely believed that a mere host of mortals would fare well in Avernus, only for a great number of them to flee from the fear-radiating fiends.

The nature of Hell was to corrupt, and Avernus in particular specialized in the abuse of a flaw that frequently affected angels: hubris. Angels had a sense of infallibility about their actions, and Zariel's anger was only further inflamed by the righteousness with which she perceived it. Asmodeus praised her for the strength of her convictions, but it was her unswerving rage that had cemented her downfall. She had become so zealously hell-bent on fighting that she was willing to abandon her principles and sacrifice the very innocent lives she had once sworn to protect in order to destroy the demonic menace.