ENTRY 002//HYPOSTASIS//THE REALITY OF RULERS
> Eight cities of Man. Eight archons, one for every cardinal sin. Eight Principalities; each bound to a star, each bound to a sphere. Eight and not seven. Eight and not nine. Eight daemons of the highest emanation, one for every cardinal virtue.
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> The First Principality of Superbia belongs to the Archon of Desiccation Adonaios whose sphere is Sol—Pseudonyms: Vainglory, the Sin of Hubris, the Gilded Fool and the Feller of Man. Known as Neo Sidonia, the First City is walled in gold and rests atop Mount Sinai; the highest mountain of the Desolation where the red sun eternally rains down fire and brimstone upon the earth.
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> The Second Principality of Avaritia belongs to the Archon of Marcation Shibbolethes whose sphere is Luna—Pseudonyms: Avidity, the Sin of Greed, the Silver Usurer and the Shatterer of Mammon. Known as Neo Jericho, the Second City is walled in sterling and rests upon the Parabola of the moon; the broken fragments of Heaven that orbit the desolate earth.
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> The Third Principality of Ira belongs to the Archon of Perdition Escariotes whose sphere is Mars—Pseudonyms: Acrimony, the Sin of Wrath, the Ferric Umbolith and the Effigy of Razors. Known as Neo Zarethan, the Third City is walled in iron and rests within Atlas Telamon; the very center of the desolate earth where tephra-scaled worms swim through heavy molten slag as though water.
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> The Fourth Principality of Tristitia belongs to the Archon of Rendition Wodenaios whose sphere is Mercury—Pseudonyms: Melancholy, the Sin of Sorrow, the Quicksilverfish and the Mirror of Begamoth. Known as Neo Macedonia, the Fourth City is walled in amalgam and rests afloat the Sea of Sorrow; the mercurial ocean where the ether bleeds into physical reality.
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> The Fifth Principality of Acedia belongs to the Archon of Stagnation Abrisene whose sphere is Saturn—Pseudonyms: Anhedonia, the Sin of Sloth, the Leaden Idol and the Bride of the Iconoclast. Known as Neo Nazareth, the Fifth City is walled in antimony and rests suspended in the ether beyond the moon opposite the Parabola as a lead coffin; one-thousand-and-one glyphs of zayin are inscribed upon its surface to protect from the nothing-waters of the dead universe.
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> The Sixth Principality of Luxuria belongs to the Archon of Fornication Astaphaios whose sphere is Venus—Pseudonyms: Cupidity, the Sin of Lust, the Cypric Cynic and the Sin-eater. Known as Neo Babylon, the Sixth City is walled in verdigris and rests at the bottom of the Omniglot Tower of Babel as its gates; hanging gardens that sprout cultivars of daemons encircle the Omniglot like grape vines.
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> The Seventh Principality of Gula belongs to the Archon of Consumption Sabazios whose sphere is Uranus—Pseudonyms: Famine, the Sin of Gluttony, the Stagnum Sodomite and the Black Locust. Known as Neo Eschaton, the Seventh City is walled in white lead and rests amid the boiling waters of Dudael; the methane ocean where bearded leviathans of asbestos slumber in the deepest fathoms of the Desolation.
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> The Eighth Principality of Envidia belongs to the Archon of Exaltation Abraxas whose sphere is Golgotha—Pseudonyms: Malice, the Sin of Envy, the Telluric King and Killer of the Tetragrammaton. Known as Neo Penuel, the Eighth City is walled in bismuth and rests on the back of Behemoth the beast that forever wanders Duidain; east of the garden of Eden.
—Post-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Joseph “Mulligan” Basker Information Commons Request for Personality-Impregnation into Golem Sleeve: [Paris-PlasterTM Mark XIX].
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A flash of white at the corner of his vision bade Levi to duck and roll; the daemon dove back into matter as Levi’s head turned on a swivel greased by icy-acid fear. They danced like this, serpent and mouse, until Levi could dance no more.
He was never much of a dancer, he knew.
The serpentine daemon swam through the lexical universe and emerged just beneath Levi’s left foot. It wormed its way into him, body and soul, burrowing deep and embedding itself, coiling around his tongue—the locus of a man’s soul was not his heart, neither his brain, but instead his tongue; words survived long past the speaker’s death. Ten words could make a man wage war against his brother. Seven could make a woman blind with love. Four were enough to express the deepest truth. One was found wanting to explain nothing.
The blind-pale snake snapped its jaws around the locus of Lev’s soul and bit into his tongue, severing it, taking its place, digesting it to become part of him. It was a base and he, the fat, saponifying Levi to become pure like soap. His flesh in the false world swelled and warped in sympathy to the change done to his lexical being.
His tongue felt heavy and different, but it still felt his. He need only speak and the daemon would make his words manifest; Levi knew this intrinsically, the engram having endowed him with perfunctory knowledge of its designation.
[Recursion] the serpent whispered into his ear and he took a bite of the forbidden fruit then and there—for iron by itself can draw a man to use it. The only way to remove a temptation was to give in.
“[Levi—]” He spoke in tongues, in the voice of humanity’s collective soul.
He did not finish the prayer yet the g-ds came all the same; all eight archons, Abraxas Himself, appeared before him and struck Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker down like the dog that he was. Their keter-class daemons excised him from existence, root and stem; all he saw before he knew no more was the tell-tale flash of neon that accompanied daemonic manifestations. Only, the schema burned with the fire of a thousand-thousand-thousand dying suns—keter-class was given to only eight daemons.
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He awoke in the ether beyond the moon and below the firmament: the limbo between the abyss and arcadia, Heaven and Hell, Keter and Tehom. Take your pick of whatever dichotomous afterlife belief system of the Pre-Pandaemonium and divide it by two; you’d get the exact coordinates of this place.
There, in the squalid dark where it was said only the Misophaes Legion of daemons roamed, a gargantuan and two-headed serpent swam in a perfect circle, twofold. It devoured its own tail twice-over, forming the sign of the sefirot and the qliphot—husk and fruit; root and tree. It was blind with milky-white, lumpy and distorted scales over whole bone where there should have been the riven seams of sockets.
On closer inspection the scales were not simple scales at all. They were faces, each and every one of them an iteration of Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker.
Levi realized, then, his predicament: he looked out through a single one of these scales, the only one with eyes. He saw through eyes of xanthene-yellow, crying sublime tears of bromine. He knew intrinsically the number of faces on the two-headed serpent—one trillion-and-two-hundred-sixty-billion and not counting; the exact number of human souls on Pandaemonium.
Time did not pass linearly in the ether beyond the moon and below the firmament. A blink and eternity later—four and ten—the two-headed snake ate itself into oblivion and Levi fell asleep.
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Levi awoke to the moment after he had bonded with the serpentine daemon—it stood at the base of his tongue, beckoning him to call on it, to draw it forth to impose its image upon the false world.
Levi resisted for ten, excruciating seconds before he gave in again, the daemon’s presence thick in his throat; the archons came once more and struck him down.
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They say that it's a privilege to witness divinity. To see your g-d in all Their glory.
Heaven and Its angels were not kind.
They were ugly and petty and no better than dogs. Levi came to hate his eight cruel g-ds. He knew Them intimately now, knew Them by the touch of Their souls against his own as They returned him to the void from whence he came—Misophaes. Each archon bore a halo with Their respective archdaemon behind Them like a shadow; the smallest could blot out the gluttonous sun and dwarf the very earth, space bending around them as it did with a singularity.
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The First Archon, Desiccation, known as Adonaios was a man of the Tribe of Judas. He had fair, golden hair and eyes like the brightest of sapphires that shone against his sun-kissed skin. His halo burned the brightest among the Eight, for He was the conflagration and His shadow, the holocaust. The lion sin of hubris stood stark naked, proud as the day He was born.
The Fool always had a haughty little smirk on His lips as He threw Levi into the furnace-mouth of His archdaemon Samael the Black Sun itself; a seraph that flew on wings of fire that obscured all but its empty right hand. It had been immolated down to carbonized gristle and charred bones.
The Second Archon, Marcation, known as Shibbolethes was a woman of the Tribe of Simon. She had black, silken hair and jet-black eyes veiled with an epicanthic fold set against chrysanthemum skin. Her halo was broken in six-hundred-and-sixty-six places, cold as thirty shekels of silver and the ether of the moon. She wore a vestige of sendal to cover Her nakedness and expose the dragon-greed that stained Her very soul.
The Usurer had the dispassionate, mercenary disposition of a woman accustomed to this sort of thing as She consigned his soul away to Mammon; an agathodaemon that took the form of a moth wrought of fractured glass. It did not consume him like Samael, instead rending him into infinitesimal shards of spirit.
The Third Archon, Perdition, known as Escariotes was a man of the Tribe of Gad. He had curly, brown hair wreathed upon his temples as almond-shaped bismuth eyes rusted upon his bronze skin. He had no halo but instead an ferric crown of thorns; castigation for He had stolen a sword that was not His to wield. The Effigy of Razors wore a thousand-thousand plundered blades welded together as armor.
The Warmonger was stoic as He ripped Levi’s being into tatters, scouring every last inch with the ferric teeth of the archdaemon of Asmodeus; wrath showed on the Judas Daemon’s face, but not on that of its patron. It was a four-armed and night-skinned asura, in each hand an urumi; a whip blade of flexible, flaying steel. The Judas Daemon was the closest of the archangels to mankind, taking the form of an ishim; for there was no vice more rooted to the human soul than violence. All other sins flowed through it, inexorably—the wanton disregard for the suffering you inflicted.
The Fourth Archon, Rendition, known as Wodenaios was a man of the Tribe of Kohath. He had a fiery mane of hair and sleepless cinnabon eyes buried deep into sea-foam skin. His halo flowed like argent water for He shed it as sorrow from His lacrimal ducts. The Fisher of Men wore armor like the Effigy but wrought of living silver instead of dead iron.
The Mourner cried silently as He drowned Levi in a sea of mercury, cocooning him within the archdaemon Melanchora’s web. Of all the archons, Levi held contempt for this hypocrite the most. The larval erelim assimilated Levi’s soul within its amalgamate body, a single face among a thousand-thousand others.
The Fifth Archon, Stagnation, known as Abrisene was of the Tribe of Zebulun. They had no visible hair and eyes hidden behind a faceless mask of davening scrolls affixed to skin that was neither sun nor moon but instead the indeterminate nothingness in between. Their halo did not burn with light but instead darkness visible, a necrotic abscess borne in the fabric of reality. The sin of sloth wore the Abyss Above like vestments, velvet void hiding away all that They were, even Their shadow.
The Apostate did not show Their face as They fed Levi to the unimaginable nothing-thing of Abbadon. The archdaemon was nightmare made flesh, pale limbs melded together in the form of the ophanim; concentric wheels of cadaverous origin revolving around the eye of a singularity. They unfurled, contorting into a thousand-thousand dead men’s hands that dragged Levi kicking and clawing and screaming into the unfathomable depths of its all-devouring eye; he came to recognize it as Leliouria.
The Sixth Archon, Fornication, known as Astaphaios was a woman of the Tribe of Benjamin. She had wild, thick hair and wolfish-yellow eyes flirting with olive skin. Her halo shone with horns of light like a thousandfold stag. Lust consummate wore a diaphanous dress of scarlet, of Babylon, with a goat idol in the crux of her breast.
The Gomorrahean had a ravenous expression on Her face, bliss bleeding red on Her cheeks as She gored Levi’s soul with the countless antlers of Morrigain. Where the Mourner fomented hate in Levi’s heart, the Gomorrahean taught him fear; the Goat Idol was a daemon of defilement, a shrike that bore its prey not upon thorns but instead its own horns. Of the archangels, Morrigain was the second closest to mankind—a cherubim—taking a humanoid body plan if tainted by bestial influence. Like a satyr, it walked upon cloven hooves and had three faces and three mouths; one upon its breast, one in place of the navel, and one in between its legs. A prehensile tongue covered in backwards barbs came from the nether-face, ending in a keratinous proboscis.
Levi had felt that thing scrape against the uterine walls of his ontology, injecting viral lexical code like venom. It was a violation of which the word “heinous” was found wanting to describe the depths of its depravity. Millions of mooncalf homunculi spawned from the fecundation, tearing apart his being—be it flesh or spirit—from the inside out as they were born.
The Seventh Archon, Consumption, known as Sabazios was a woman of the Tribe of Issachar. She had ashen hair and eyes white as stagnum plastered upon marble skin. Her halo was a magnesium inferno that sought to consume all that ever was, all that ever would be, and all that is. The sin of gluttony wore a cloak of asbestos, the edges crystalizing into thin filaments under the duress of Her unburning.
The Sodomite was aloof. Of all the pains of death inflicted upon his soul, the Black Locust was the worst. Not even the Goat Idol could contend with the slivers of fiberglass that embedded like roots into his ego before pulling apart and spreading his being thin like a macabre dream-catcher; his body, in contrast, turned into a pillar of salt for having transgressed in looking directly upon Her divinity. Consumption’s archdaemon was Barbatos the Bearded Leviathan whose entirety were filament-hairs of amphibole; a hashmallim of rotted amber that swam within the methane sea of Dudael.
The Eighth Archon, Exaltation, known as Abraxas was a man of the Tribe of Ephraim. His hair coagulated into thick dreadlocks and His eyes were stark gray against skin rich as volcanic ash soil. A halo of atlassian weight settled upon the shoulders of the World-Bearer but the King of Malkuth did not buckle nor bow. The sin of envy wore samite and a varnish of viscous pitch to seal the tips of His dreads.
The Deicide worried Levi the most; He knew. Between each death, His brows grew tighter knit. His archdaemon Behemoth grew more inventive each time as it compressed Levi’s soul into more compact and unusual shapes. The Beast that Arose from the Earth was a lamb-horned nephilim without wings. It bore a hide like a dry lake bed, cracking into scales; Desolation incarnate.
The archons worked in tandem and concurrently. Levi only came to know Their respective modus operandi through a thousand-thousand-thousand deaths.
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[Ego continuity severed//Pruning corrupted qualia and entropic artefacts//Seeding from closest uncorrupted eidolon negative.]
[Parameters {Eidolon Negative} met//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}.]
[Multiple concurrent timestreams detected//Collapsing superfluous continuities//Setting prime iteration//Prime iteration set as {Renascence}.]
[Multiple foreign ego signatures detected within nous//Breach imminent//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}; subroutine: {Zeroth}.]
[Eidolon image reverted to negative//Stable mem-data is stored as aggregate within a partitioned gnostic-cache.]
[...]
[Ego continuity severed//Pruning corrupted qualia and entropic artefacts//Seeding from closest uncorrupted eidolon negative.]
[Parameters {Eidolon Negative} met//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}.]
[Multiple concurrent timestreams detected//Collapsing superfluous continuities//Setting prime iteration//Prime iteration set as {Renascence}.]
[Multiple foreign ego signatures detected within nous//Breach imminent//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}; subroutine: {Zeroth}.]
[Eidolon image reverted to negative//Stable mem-data is stored as aggregate within a partitioned gnostic-cache.]
[...]
[Ego continuity severed//Pruning corrupted qualia and entropic artefacts//Seeding from closest uncorrupted eidolon negative.]
[Parameters {Eidolon Negative} met//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}.]
[Multiple concurrent timestreams detected//Collapsing superfluous continuities//Setting prime iteration//Prime iteration set as {Renascence}.]
[Multiple foreign ego signatures detected within nous//Breach imminent//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}; subroutine: {Zeroth}.]
[Eidolon image reverted to negative//Stable mem-data is stored as aggregate within a partitioned gnostic-cache.]
[...]
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From the ether beyond the moon and below the firmament to Abraxas Himself killing him, Levi teetered on the edge of madness. He never fully descended into psychosis—the pale-blind daemon staked to his soul did not let him; it brought him back from the brink, again and again. There simply wasn’t enough time for eudaemonia to set in.
Or, perhaps, it already had. Levi was beginning to suspect that Hell wasn’t in the center of the sun at all, but instead just another place on earth. It was right here, in just another one of the thousands of alleys of the fifth promenade of the third quadrant of the Sixth Principality. The archon of Decarabia—of the Tartarus of Sol itself—was here, afterall.
There were worse fates than death. Levi experienced total excisement from reality, be it real or false, again and again so many times that he came to recognize its feel against the face of his soul—there were no words to describe its totality but a singular arrangement of four and one: salt in the sinuses; torment.
The sweet numbness of oblivion was denied to him, each second he further resisted the call to draw upon the daemon growing. An eternity and a blink later, he came to in the same alley he had died so many times in; Levi did not heed the daemonic compulsion.
It was there, in the burn at the back of his eyes and ache of his throat; present but not stronger than him. The compulsion broke against the lexicon of his soul like waves upon the rocks—he’d gazed upon the face of eternity and no daemon would find purchase upon his tongue.
Levi stumbled out of the alley, the cold, nameless body left behind.
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