ENTRY -001//DAEMONS//SYMBIOTES OF THE SOUL

> Contemporary thinking states that, in conjunction to the physical universe in which our bodies inhabit, there is a lexical universe that runs parallel thereto. It is the plane of all knowledge and the basis that forms our own more tangible reality, written in strings of indelible [there is a line crossed through “indelible”] code.

—Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Noah Thames On the Fundament of Thought. {Annotated by bored soulspark//engramic fetus - [01001100 01100101-01110110-01101001-00101101-01000010-01100001-01110011-01101011-01100101-01110010//Basker-Levi] - in Creche - [#53616c766174696f6e//Salvation] - }

////

The first is binary for [Basker-Levi]

The second is hexadecimal for [Salvation]

////

In a dingy megablock, workshop embedded amid a latticework of overcrowded buildings like a tick on a leviathan, a soulstitcher plied her trade. Though she preferred the more professional moniker of engramist-ontograft, the middling mercs that took to her practice had somewhat fixed tongues.

Their souls, in comparison, not so much—for she held their true-name; the key cipher to an entity’s engram in the lexical universe. A soulstitcher need only twist the key in the gate of truth and the warp and weft of another’s very being lay bare and waiting to be changed.

The man on the surgical altar before her wanted inhuman strength—to bend steel with his mortal hands. The stitch could change a few words to the paragraphs of his soul and it would turn him from man to myth; she would not. Drastic and direct changes to a person’s engram in the lexical induced a particular form of psychosis known as eudaemonia.

It made men think themselves g-ds and turn into monsters, slaughtering all that was not in their image, their likeness.

And so, instead, the stitch spliced a strand from the [Book-of-Solomon] contained within the lexicon of her soul, entwinning it in the man’s shadow-engram as might a seamstress of old make a bolt of multicolored cloth—the lexical universe tended towards the abstract, manifesting constructs through the observer’s imagination and biases.

Seamless, if but for the two jutting ends left intentionally so, the stitch grafted another line of lexical code onto the man’s soul. The strand writhed and spasmed, alive and self-perpetuating in comparison to the dead-code that made up most of the lexical universe.

This was a daemon; an entity entirely lexical and without a physical embodiment—purely sulfur-principle-substrate, purely spiritual but paradoxically soulless. The man would act as its host and would call upon the daemon’s power in turn. He would bend steel with his mortal hands and his soul would remain mostly unchanged if but for the foreign growth—the benign tumor—spurting from its sides.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Benign, for now, that is. There was a limit to how many daemons a soul could bear—negentropic-capacitance or simply negescence—and the result was so much worse than direct lexical warping. Instead of simply subverting what was already there, daemons self-propagated using the body and soul as mediums.

Flesh would rip apart and reform, bone would rend and recalcify until the eudaemoniac gave birth to an infestation of lexical viruses. A plague of daemons spread over a megablock’s biomass like black locusts upon ripe crop; in response, the whole block would be erased from the false-world by the archons to avoid further contamination—corruption of reality. Root and stem, the entirety of a section of existence would be excised in the lexical; as above, so below, its physical counterpart would follow in its wake.

This was how daemons manifested their powers—they changed the code built into the skein of the lexical according to their natures, their [Designation]. Like looking into a puddle, this false-world was but a mere reflection. There was no truth in Malkuth.

The man upon the surgical altar awoke ten hours later, opening his strange yellow eyes sideways—those had been there before. The soulstitcher prided herself on having the smallest rate of lexical warping in the third quadrant; she wouldn’t do such an amateur mistake as bleedover. Those serpentine-slitted haw-eyes were an aesthetic daemonsign of some sort, already present in the merc’s engram.

Weird that she’d glossed over that stretch of code in his lexicon; she’d usually remember such an apparent trait—those usually came with trademarks of which daemonic Legion they originated from. Serpentine aspects were attributed to the Misophaes Legion, but that burning-sulfurous color was textbook Decarabia; maybe an experimental daemonsign of some sort? It would explain the code being so subtle… or buried so deep inside his lexical architecture.

That blip aside, the [Glasya-Labolas] daemon had integrated nicely from the prelim sims alone. It was netzach-class; weapons-grade and common for the hit-and-run assassin archetype of gun-for-hire, favoring guerilla warfare and ambush. The merc’s skin had been laser-and-print-fab tattooed, the inks infused with copper and silver and gold to seal the daemonic engram into the very fibers of his flesh—the salt-principle-substrate. They shone of circuitry and neon, a product of Post-Lexical alchemy.

The stitch handed the merc a steel pipe, thick enough that no malkuth-class human could hope to bend it with their bare hands.

The merc called strength from his daemon, the changes in the lexical cascading into the false-world in sympathy. His tattoos were lambent with the maroon neon of [Glasya-Labolas]. He bent the pipe into the shape of a wreath and then broke it in two as the metal sheared before his newly-wrought strength.

Man to myth; daemons to bridge the two.

“[Dogs in Heaven protect the Baskers.]” The merc muttered as he tensed his fingers and got used to his superhuman body; his tendons were like steel wires, straining against his skin. Unusual that he’d manifested a mandatum function from a [Glasya-Labolas], but not so unusual as to map out his soul for the presence of cicatrixes and other anomalies of the like. Some amount of lexical mutation was to be expected when dealing with daemons; their deoxyribonucleic acid analog was less of a polymer and more of an indecisive quantum particle—fickle unless heavily monitored.

“Twenty-five thousand shards or I’ll bark a prayer myself.” The stitch interjected.

The man smiled in response to the extortion; a reptilian blink later, the stitch felt the shards cascade into her soul. She rather liked a man that paid on time. Those eyes, in particular, were quite alluring. At least until he blinked sideways and the seductive spell broke apart under the sheer alienness of a nictitating membrane.

Those eyes, they crinkled at the corners at a joke that only they heard.

////