Empyrean

Solars may be the most powerful angels, the ne plus ultra of pure Good.  But there’s something special about empyreans.  Because they serve outside the usual chain of command—often as secret agents—they are free to act in ways that the regular choirs may not.  Because each empyrean tends to have a tie to a specific deity, they are considered movers and shakers in both the celestial and infernal realms.  Because they predate mortal life (and unlike solars, their ranks are not replenished by either mortal souls or angelic promotion), they truly take the long view in their plots, plans, and alliances. And because there are only ever a set number of empyreans, the loss of one is always a momentous event (even though a new empyrean will eventually be born to take its place).

And then of course, there are the empyrean paragons, who rival even the solars in power and who each have unique abilities determined by their patron deity’s portfolio.  All in all, these are powerful agents of Good—sometimes secret agents, sometimes free agents, but always working on the side of the Light.  (Unless of course, one of them falls…)

Truly ancient beings, empyreans usually refuse calling spells.  So why has one been answering the fire priests of Tarquin?  Adventurers are dispatched to the colossus-guarded port city to find out.  Have the miserly, mercenary priests turned over a new leaf and embraced the song of the Choir?  Do they have some powerful artifact binding the angel to them?  Or is there some far deeper and more ancient celestial plan in play?

There has never been a god of vampires before.  Indeed, one of the defining features of vampirism on Terna is that the undead are loathsome in the eyes of the gods—even the evil deities resent vampires for diverting souls meant for the Black Court’s dark palaces.  But somehow, a vampire has recently ascended to godhood…and worse yet, he has claimed one of the few beings in the multiverse who could thwart him, the empyrean Paragon of the Dawn, as an enslaved thrall.

To save sorcery, adventurers must kill an agent of Good.  When the Paragon of the Blood was slain, the damage to the Arcane Flow was so great that good-hearted sorcerers began to lose their powers.  Worse yet, the new paragon born in her place, the Paragon of the Blaze, serves a god of invention…and gunpowder.  Adventurers who wish to save sorcery may be forced eliminate this new empyrean, ideally so that the eight gods of magic can pour their energies into the birth of the next great angel.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 24–25