Hmm. There's a wrinkle related to taking God out of my Galaxy Tales books. Young Joseph and young Apollo both know who the Christian God is (for Apollo, it's through his mother, a Christian), and hearing a voice claiming to be God is not uncommon depending on your type of mental illness and the severity of it. Naturally, prophets of old also heard God. That meant I had an actual mystery: Are the boys really hearing God or is it all in their imagination?
But what reader is going to suspend disbelief when two potentially ill cousins both start hearing Saint Michael the Archangel, albeit starting at different times in their lives? Doesn't work. Even with two different archangels, it seems highly unlikely that two mentally ill boys growing up light years apart in entirely different societies would both start hearing archangels when there are so many other major biblical characters to choose from (e.g., Adam, Moses, David, etc.). Theoretically, Apollo could hear a Roman god, but that breaks the story completely, and I'm targeting a Christian audience.
One possibility is that Joseph and Apollo are in contact over Galaxinet from a young age, and Joseph (who is older) mentions St. Michael because that's who he's secretly hearing, and then Apollo starts to hear an archangel, too, but maybe a different one. That would allow me to use a simple, catchy series title like War of the Archangels or something similar. I don't know how to pull it off, though, since chapter one (their first appearance) is already complicated with a fast forward through three time periods, four ages for the boys, and the introduction of the supernatural being(s) for both. I had a bitch of a time making all of that understandable. Now throw in a war of words in the interstellar Royals Forum when the reader barely knows who they are, how they're related, and what age they are relative to each other while they're arguing.
Thoughts?