The facts are slippery.
It isn't bad enough to be kept in the dark. It isn't bad enough to be distrusted by those who would expect you to lay down your lives in their service. The worst thing is that fact, much like history, is consistently changing to justify what is happening in the present. Given enough time, what little we know of our motivations might change also.
Here is what is currently true:
The Creator began it all, long ago, but not as long as people think. Angels went to revolutionary war and turned upon their brothers recently in comparison, but not as recently as people think. And more recently still, but long before anything remembered by written history, something horrible, something from Outside, began coming for our Gods. They were indiscriminate and brutal in their ambition, sedate and sympathetic in their dominating success. They still are.
This battle for the survival of the Divines that form the conceptual pillars of existence rages, invisible and incomprehensible, several planes of existence above that experienced by the unEnNobled eye. And this war is where the Powers come in.
Occupied with this new war, Gods that once effortlessly directed events now find themselves taxed, unable to defend themselves while governing their Estates. In this time of need, many of the Pillars of Creation have gifted mortal beings with aspects of themselves, granting them limited sovereignty over the individual components of Creation while the Gods themselves are absent.
Malquiel is our God, and an old one, though I doubt his name has ever been spoken in any church you've ever been to. His Estates are three: Perception, Ignorance, and Life. And as of very recently, he has taken three mortal men, and given each stewardship over one of his Estates, in all its physical and intangible extent. Made Powers out of them.
This is the story of their lives. For all that they are worth.
This is the tale of their Allegiance.