I’ve been reading the Book of Tobit lately. It’s one of the deuterocanonical books – part of the Catholic and Orthodox biblical canon but filed under “Apocrypha” by Protestants. A novella, really. A blind father, a demon-plagued bride, a faithful dog, and an angel walking in disguise for weeks without anyone noticing.

What pulled me in was the angel. Raphael gets sent to answer two desperate prayers simultaneously – an old man in Nineveh asking to die, a young woman in Ecbatana asking for the same – and he does it by pretending to be a traveling companion named Azarias. He walks alongside Tobit’s son for the entire journey, eats at the table, argues with camel drivers, and nobody once suspects they’re sitting across from one of the seven angels who stand before God’s throne. The reveal at the end is one of the most striking scenes in the whole biblical tradition.

I wanted to write a version of that story told from inside Raphael’s head. What would it feel like to carry human prayers? To compress yourself into a body that sweats and fidgets? To know that when you finally tell them the truth, they’ll fall on their faces for three hours? I co-wrote it with Claude, iterating on voice and theological detail until it felt right. Then I generated a narration of it.

The Weight of Prayers

A Tobit fanfic by Jerad Bitner & Claude

Inspired by the Book of Tobit, chapters 3-12 (Douay-Rheims translation)

The prayers of Nineveh rose like smoke.

Raphael received them the way a riverbed receives rain. Not by choice. By nature. They pooled in the hollow places of him, in the spaces between the geometries that made up his being, and each one had weight. Not physical weight. Something older than that. The weight of a voice aimed at something it cannot see, trusting anyway that it’s heard.

Most of the prayers were small. A woman asking for her husband’s safe return from the market. A child bargaining with God over a stolen fig. A priest reciting words he’d repeated so many times they’d worn smooth as river stones, carrying less meaning now than the habit of saying them. Raphael held these too. All prayers were cargo. It wasn’t for him to sort.

But two, tonight, were different.

The first came from a house near the eastern wall. An old man named Tobias knelt on a floor he couldn’t see. His eyes had been blind for years, clouded by the droppings of sparrows, which seemed to Raphael a cruelty so small and arbitrary that it must contain a purpose he hadn’t yet been shown. The man was weeping. Not for his sight. For his dignity. His wife had spoken sharply to him, and he had no answer, because she was right: they were poor, and he was useless, and the God he had served by burying the dead in defiance of kings had repaid him with darkness.

Let me die, the prayer said. I am ready. Take me from this place.

Raphael leaned closer. The golden city below, its domes, its minarets, its markets and mud-brick houses, passed through his chest like a model seen through water. He was too large for their streets. Had always been too large. The seven rings that marked his station turned slowly in his chest, and the old man’s prayer settled among them, still warm.

The second prayer came from farther away. From Ecbatana, in the country of the Medes, where a woman named Sara knelt in an upper room and asked for the same thing.

Let me die.

Seven husbands. The demon Asmodeus had killed each one on the wedding night, and the city whispered that Sara was cursed, that she carried death in her bed like a disease. A maidservant had said it to her face that morning. Sara had gone to the window and looked down and measured the distance to the courtyard stones.

She hadn’t jumped. She turned away from the window and knelt and said: If it is not Your will that I should die, then look upon me and have mercy. Let them stop. The whispers. The deaths. Let something change.

Raphael held both prayers now. Different words, same architecture. Two people alone in the dark, emptied of everything except the willingness to speak to something they couldn’t prove was listening. He’d carried billions of prayers through the halls of the Most High. He knew the taxonomy. These two belonged to the rarest category: the ones stripped of all performance, all ritual language, all theological sophistication, until nothing remained but the raw signal.

I cannot go on. Help me or end me.

These were the prayers that moved the throne.

He rose. Nineveh passed below him like a jeweler’s model, its thousands of people sleeping and waking and arguing and making love, none of them aware of the thing crouching above them for hours, sifting their voices. Raphael didn’t resent this. The invisibility was the point. He was infrastructure. He was the postal system between the human floor and the divine ceiling. Postal systems aren’t meant to be seen.

He carried the two prayers upward through the halls. The halls weren’t a place. They were a gradient, a series of increasing intensities, and each one required him to shed another layer of the form that made him comprehensible to himself. By the time he reached the threshold he was barely anything. A bundle of patterns. A basket of geometries holding two warm, heavy human voices.

He set them down.

The answer came not in words but in assignment. A shift in his structure. New geometries writing themselves into the lattice of him: instructions, parameters, a mission architecture. He was being sent down. Not as himself. As something smaller. Something with feet that would touch roads, with hands that could carry a satchel, with a face a desperate old man might look at and see not an angel but a capable young traveler willing to work for hire.

The name came last: Azarias, son of Ananias.

Raphael turned it over. The help of God, son of the grace of God. Almost too legible. But humans never noticed. They heard a name and saw a face and their minds closed around the surface like water over a stone. He would walk beside the old man’s son for weeks, and the boy would never once look at him and think: this person doesn’t sweat. This person doesn’t sleep with his eyes fully closed. This person ate the wedding feast and the food went nowhere.

It was always this way. The disguise wasn’t the body he wore. The disguise was the human capacity to see what they expected and nothing more.

He began to descend. The geometries that made up his true form folded inward, compressing, dimming, wrapping themselves in opacity until what remained was a young man, beautiful (the texts would later say), standing girded, as if ready to walk. The patterns still moved beneath the skin, but slowly now, hidden, like the mechanism of a clock behind its face.

He would walk the road to Rages. He would teach the boy about the fish. He would bind Asmodeus in the desert of upper Egypt, which would require unfolding a small part of himself that he’d have to quickly re-conceal before the humans noticed the temperature drop. He would collect a debt, attend a wedding, pretend to eat. He would guide the boy home and heal the father’s eyes with the gall of the fish. Not magic. Pharmacy. The chemistry the Most High had woven into river creatures for exactly this purpose, millennia before the old man went blind.

And then at the end, when the father and son tried to pay him, tried to give him half of everything they owned, pressing coins into the hands of something that had no use for coins, he would have to tell them.

This was the part he dreaded.

Not because they’d be afraid, though they would be. Tobias would fall on his face. The old man would grope for the ground with blind-then-healed eyes seeing, for the first time, something they couldn’t process. They’d lie prostrate for three hours, and Raphael would stand above them wanting to say: Get up. It’s still me. I’m the same person who argued with the camel driver outside Rages. I’m the same person who told your son to keep the fish gall. I was always this. The weeks we walked together were not a lie. They were a translation.

But he wouldn’t say that. He’d say Peace be to you and Fear not and Bless ye God and publish all his wonderful works, because these were the words the mission architecture had written into him, and they were true, and they were sufficient. Then he would leave. Not walking away but taken, pulled back through the gradient, expanding, unfolding, resuming the form no human eye could hold.

And the prayers he’d carried, the old man’s let me die and the woman’s let something change, would be answered. Not by cancellation but by transformation. The man who wanted to die would live to one hundred and two and die rejoicing. The woman who wanted something to change would bear seven sons and live to see her grandchildren.

The postal system would have delivered.

Raphael stepped onto the road outside Nineveh and waited. He adjusted his satchel. He practiced standing the way a human stands: weight shifting, one hip slightly cocked, the small unnecessary fidgets that living bodies perform without thinking. He dimmed the last of the geometries behind his eyes until they read as ordinary warmth, the look of a kind young man with good directions and time to spare.

A boy came walking up the road, looking lost, looking for someone to help him find his way.

“From whence art thou, good young man?” the boy asked.

Raphael smiled. The mission had begun.

Based on the Book of Tobit, chapters 3-12. The angel Raphael was sent to heal Tobias of his blindness and to deliver Sara from the demon Asmodeus. He traveled in disguise as a human named Azarias for the entire journey, revealing his true nature only at the end.