ENTRY 000//NAMELESS GRIMOIRE//BOUND IN HUMAN LEATHER

> Ten sefirot of nothingness. Ten and not nine. Ten and not eleven. Ten sefirot of nothingness.

—Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Ebrahim Kuzari Sefer Yetzirah [Book of Formation].

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Nameless scrounged in its usual places: the forgotten and fetid spills of the byways. Though it had two legs like a man, nameless was nothing more than a base beast—given no name, nameless had no soul; only dead-code made up its engram in the lexical.

It overturned a pile in its search for the scented rot; a dirty face with closed eyes came awake in an instant—so much muck clung to that mug that not even its Tribe could be deciphered without a really quite long wash. Nameless reeled back from the man as his eyes tracked the pitious being.

“[Be not afraid.]” He said, his voice tinged with the aspect of the serpent—lilting and dangerous. His eyes drew in nameless’ own, magnetic in their pull. They were xanthous yellow, entirely—no delineation between sclera and iris with a slit in place of a round pupil.

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The man rose up from the dross as the trash fell around him in turn but he did not stand like a man. Instead, the world bent around him, reality accommodating the image in his mind’s eye—that he already stood and always had. Physical existence was the mirror of a puddle. A pale shadow, a puppet reflection, a falsehood.

The soul dictated, the flesh followed in its wake. He thought; therefore, he was.

He had long matted locks around his shoulders and a rash of beard on his cheeks. Where the rest of him was dull, his eyes were sharp; they skinned nameless to its bones, leaving it paralyzed—a rat before the viper.

“I’ve always wondered why need we bind daemons to grimoires.” The man said, clearly not speaking to nameless though those eyes bore into its own. “Why not stake them directly to our souls?”

“Eudaemonia.” He himself answered, spitting the word from his forked tongue with disgust. “So little faith—we brand all those that have seen beyond the veil as crazed; nothing more than madmen and lunatics.”

He chuckled, grim and without any mirth.

“They are not entirely wrong—Heaven is on the moon and Hell is inside the sun.”

The man blinked sideways and nameless cowered.

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