ENTRY 001//THE BIRTH OF THE NINTH ANGEL//THE DEATH OF LEVI “KILLJOY” BASKER
> As humanity tamed fire, we’ve harnessed lightning. Prometheus to ourselves, we have learned the last and final energy source: phlogiston, nullpunktsenergie, ether, quanta, cosmic ichor, quintessence, the fifth element, call it what you will; lexical energy is latent potentiality and formless and thus can be made into anything—letters unstrung from the lexical sea.
—Post-Lexical//Pre-Pandaemonium heretical excerpt, Berestiah Professor of Applied Lexicology and Daemonics of the Academy of Withershins Metaphysica: On Engrams and Designations.
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A hand criss-crossed with silver blocked out the light beyond the curtain. Its skin was the color of fresh, pure coffee and the man to whom it belonged to was no less bitter. He burned those careless few that got too close. Coffee always smelled better than it tasted.
Levi woke on the day he was to die and thought nothing much of it. And though he did not know it yet—that he was going to meet his maker—the fact that he squirmed his way out of his coffin-cubicle to another dreary day in the life of nobody in particular was damn-near poetic.
People like him, down on their luck and thus rent, could only afford the cramped confines of a coffin-cubicle; catacombs of plastic and rubber and steel, fitted together like the honeycombs of insects long-since extinct. Levi’s rung of coffins was two boxes high and twenty boxes long, small in comparison to others of its ilk only because he’d paid more shards.
There were arcologies so large they could fit a million-million people in the same quadrant. A disgusting number of other living, breathing humans packed together like the slaughterhouse cattle of the Pre-Pandaemonium.
Ablutions and breath a tad less alcoholic later, Levi got himself onto a chariot-line; space was a luxury in Neo Babylon such that roads and metro-stations had been forgone long ago. Now, people made their way through the Sixth City by channels carved in the lexical universe as packets of information, powered by neon instead of electricity.
Levi’s physical being broke down into its constituent particles and was shunted across the ether to reconstitute ten-thousand miles away in a flash of daemonic schema—circuitry made of neon, this phenomenon was a skeuomorph among many calcified into humanity’s collective soul.
People had interacted with the digital light of Pre-Pandaemonium technology for so long that daemons and other lexical engrams took its form as a means of eidolon-daemon interface. Like vestigial organs, really, as dead-tech and its limitations were a rarity in the Post-Lexical world.
Levi got off the chariot-line and walked down the quadrant’s main artery-walkway: a thousand visible walkways met his eyes. Plascrete and steel all the way down to the neon-strewn fog below. Legion adverts littered every conceivable angle where a human would not need to see through. Most did not, in fact, need to see—their bodies on some autopilot engram or another as their minds soared in the ether in search of employment, entertainment or a mix of the two.
People strutted about in neo-clothes of base gray or some other neutral with colorful pipes and tubes threaded throughout; a reflection of Principality homogeneity and microcosm of urban design wrought in human flesh instead of plascrete. Their skin was similarly marked with neon and metal, augmented with foundation-class daemons to serve as tools of their trade—welding, construction, administration; for every task there was a patron daemon.
All twelve Tribes were well-represented with only a slight skew to Benjamin—skin the color of olive, hair curly and black, almond eyes, and long-lithe limbs numbered among the Sixth Tribe’s accolades; half of Levi’s Tribe-caste, Benjamin had to share him with Gad, the mercenary Ataroth Tribe.
There was a beauty in the sheer diversity of humanity and an equal and opposite disgust at the rampancy of Man itself. Not at the many forms it could take but the unfathomable number that it had spawned—one-trillion-and-two-hundred-sixty-billion souls and not counting.
Levi swam through the schools of people accumulated on the walkway, his head down but eyes open for pickpockets and the like. Suddenly, Levi found himself in the open ocean, the crowd having parted yet their whispers encircled him still.
“Dogs only enter open homes.”
“Serves them right—played with fire.”
“Daemons only enter open souls.”
Bound in a barrier of strobing red neon and mundane salt, two bodies lay on the ground. An exorcist, clad in the neon-coat regalia of their Legion, stood over them: a thug in Mulligan colors and a strewn pile of viscera—the scene reeked of eudaemonia and that wasn’t just an expression.
Sulfur burned Levi’s nostrils.
The Mulligan’s flesh was warped into oxidized copper, striations pulsing with light—either a badly done stitching or exceeded negescence; most likely both.
The Mulligan spasmed, the infestation of daemons within lashing out against the hastily-poured circle of salt. The legionnaire exorcist manifested their own daemon, a neon latticework etching itself into existence between them and the eudaemoniac Mulligan.
It had the silhouette of a woman with an ever-changing symbol in place of its head; its seventeen hands made signs in a hypnotizing rhythm, each one a word in a grand line of script—a common manifestation of the [Array] archetype, apt for lexical bindings and modular wards.
The daemons within the Mulligan retreated with a hissing cacophony; they’d entrenched themselves deep within his soul and the exorcist wouldn’t risk damaging it.
Not for some cause or moral code—no, it was a much simpler and utilitarian reason.
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There were no new souls born in the world of Pandaemonium. Were a fetus brought to term—unlikely as it was without a custom biopod or some other specialized facility—it’d be stillborn; vegetal and soulless. One-trillion-and-two-hundred-sixty-billion souls and not counting.
For a new person to be born, another had to die to source a soul; the old memories packed deeper within like a forgotten landfill to make space for more dross to be put inside, ad nauseam ad infinitum.
Though Levi had a spark of curiosity as to the exorcist’s methods of binding the plague of daemons within the Mulligan thug, he turned on his heels and made for another chariot-line.
That circle of salt, should it break, would spell his death.
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Levi returned from work at the Sheol-Totekamon Incorporated Legalese Bio-engineering plant—S.T.I.L.L.B.O.R.N. was written in neon on each and every one of its walls. The plant cultivated slabs of meat grown on ivory trees like grotesque, old-world fruit—daemonics provided an answer for every need or want rooted in the hot, suffocating darkness of the human psyche. A Chthonia Legion subsidiary, the work was dirty and grueling.
Anything to pay the bills in between freelance ops. The Tribe of Gad’s moniker—the soldiers of fortune—was rather apt toward Levi’s natural inclinations. The archons didn’t break the mold when They made him. They kept it to make one-hundred-and-five-billion more of the like with slight variations.
He made his way back, mood sullen at the extra shift he’d done—the Mulligans had culled a worker and that woman’s work load was felt as it was redistributed to everyone at the S.T.I.L.L.B.O.R.N. plant. The crime syndicate’s presence was festering, growing.
There was a Mulligan thug on every corner in the third quadrant; their movements were frenetic for reasons that Levi could have rightly deduced but had no skin in. Not any longer and not ever again.
It was at the lower rungs of Neo Babylon, on his way back to his coffin, that Levi caught a strange sight in his peripherals: in an alley sputtering off from the promenade, two men stood still, looking into each other’s eyes.
One had mad-wide eyes with bloodshot sclera. The other had eyes like a snake, yellow through-and-through and slitted. The man with the serpentine eyes blinked sideways. A Decarabia daemonsign, here of all places? Strange to see a devil so far from Hell.
“Ah, here we are.” He said, voice soft like a susurration from the vents of a dying dead-tech coolant system. “Again. At the Nexus—the common meeting point from which all threads originate.” The man looked into the other’s eyes. “[And all threads die.]”
The man with the bloodshot eyes, naked and marred with grime, fell boneless to the plascrete floor of the alley. Levi had no grimoire-interface grafted onto his ontology—not anymore—so he could not truly know whether the man had been sequenced. Couldn’t feel his ego’s presence in the ether.
Those eyes, though. That man was dead, looking into nowhere in particular; looking into his next life.
“To source a soul, another must die to free the spirit from its vessel.” The man with those yellow eyes quoted, his voice lecture-like and bored. There was a practice to his words, like he’d spoken them over and over and over again, a thousand-thousand-thousand times tenfold.
Neon rose up from the nameless man’s corpse in staccato strings of pseudo-code, his soul laid bare in stigmatic schema. It burned xanthene-yellow; twice in the same day, sulfur stung Levi’s nostrils.
Shock and horror found its way onto Levi’s face; shadow-engrams, eidolons, souls—call them what you will—they did not manifest physically. In daemonic schema, much less so. This was the domain, the [Designation], of daemons. A man could not materialize the ether of his soul much less than he could drink the whole of the mercurial ocean.
And yet the neon circuitry was there, right in front of Levi’s eyes. It coalesced into a tight spiral, depicting a serpent eating its own tail. Schema was fractal in nature; ever-flowing, ever-repeating—self-perpetuating; self-propagating.
The spiral tightened until it hovered over the yellow-eyed man’s hand.
It was then that Levi’s wits came back to him and he began to turn around to run; he found himself stuck in place, an immaterial hand holding him still by the throat of his soul. That a lexical constrictor of its ilk had slithered its way around his ontology and suppressed it without Levi knowing until it was too late? It was absurd; it was impossible. There had been no accompanying spike of lexical mass despite the clear disparity of being between Levi and the yellow-eyed man.
There was only so much cognitive dissonance a man could take before he became catatonic—a world-view broken could not be mended back whole.
The man with the viper eyes opened his mouth, a tongue covered in pale scales resting inside. He brought his other hand, the one without the schematic brand, into the cavity and pulled; an undulating eel-like thing thrashed in his grip.
The leftover roots of his tongue spasmed, bleeding a leucistic liquid that quickly congealed back into a scaled head formed of soap—Levi now realized that it wasn’t a tongue at all that the man had inside his mouth. It was a serpent.
The mouth inside his mouth opened wide to reveal no teeth but instead a gaping, unfathomable black. It spoke, repeating-reverberating his words across the ether of the lexical universe to enact a working of his will.
“[Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals.]
[You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.]
[And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush our head, and you will strike his heel.]”
After two must come three; Levi’s already-broken grasp of reality shattered like dry corpse-clay. No one in Pandaemonium quoted scripture of any sect or caste; no one with a want to still remain upon the face of the earth, that is. Iconoclasty and agnosticism was the norm; the archons Themselves would descend from the Heavens to strike down any that transgressed against the High Precepts.
And yet, the man spoke and remained unstricken from the face of the world.
He brought the spiral of schema upon the pale-blind daemonic serpent, branding it with its recursive likeness: a snake upon a snake upon a snake.
Emotion, something beyond apathy but not nearly human, flashed on the stranger’s face.
“On the seventh day of the tenth month of the fourth year, I will return. Look for my signs in the Heavens and the Earth; brother against brother and father against son. I will see you at the Terminus, Levi ‘Killjoy’ Basker.”
The stranger let go of the wriggling daemon and fell backwards, arms open in a waiting embrace; his shadow devoured him like the waters of the abyss beneath the firmament before it, too, was gone as if it never were.
The pressure levied against Levi’s soul sublimated, dispersing into formless ether, and he took a shaky step back. Wait, the daemon—where is it?
He glimpsed the last segment of a leucistic tail diving into solid plascrete like it was liquid; a ripple emanated from where the daemon had dived as sweat beaded in thick globules on Levi’s brow.
A single droplet fell to the dirty ground.
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