ENTRY 003//NO LIGHT//BUT RATHER DARKNESS VISIBLE
> Served only to discover sights of woe,
>
> Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
>
> And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
>
> That comes to all, but torture without end
>
> Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
>
> With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
—Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, [Collective-Consciousness-Memory-Engram]: John Milton Paradise Lost.
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Levi stumbled into the bathroom cell adhered to the side of the coffin arcology; a box like so many countless others, two meters squared.
The man in the mirror that looked back at him was not himself; instead, sulfurous-yellow eyes burned baleful in his skull—pounding in symphony with his heart, crying tar-like tears of coagulated, blackened blood from pyrite encrusted lacrimal ducts. Proving that the man in the mirror was nothing but a pale shadow, his skin had thinned and whitened to a corpse-like pallor—an old-world corpse, that is. Levi no longer resembled either the Tribe of Benjamin or Gad, but instead something else entirely. The skeleton remained but the flesh draped over it had changed, utterly.
He blinked sideways.
The disgust crawled its way up and out of Levi’s throat; he did not have more than a blink before he vomited right there where he stood.
Eels, pale and blind and wet-looking, squirmed on the ceranoplastic flooring; antibacterial properties due to micro-porous material construction did nothing to assuage the numb and dumb revulsion.
Like the serpentine daemon now grafted to Levi’s soul, the eels disappeared into the lexical, sublimating through matter and leaving the distinct odor of brimstone—sulfur, rotten eggs, burnt hair. All that was left to evidence their existence beyond lexically-derived hallucination was the tar-like sludge that pooled on the ceranoplastic floor and the burn of Levi’s esophagus.
A wet, raspy chuckle clawed its way out his throat. Then another; then another.
Levi laughed madly until his clear tears washed away the crusted tar and pyrite crystals stuck at the corner of his horizontally-nictitating eyelids. Slowly, without remembering when he fell to the ceranoplastic floor, he got up, still laughing. A product of mute, disbelieving shock.
Levi dared to look into the mirror once again: those xanthene-yellow eyes were no longer baleful but instead doleful. He looked into them and they looked back; again and again and again and again and again and again—
He opened his mouth and the serpent’s head resting within opened its own.
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Levi floated in the ether beyond the moon once again, disembodied from the world-serpent. There was no light in this place, but rather darkness visible—it caressed the scales of the leviathan beneath the earth, letting Levi know its face and feel its form through the conductive interstitial fluid, like a blind man to braille.
There, in the center of one of the perfect circles of the lemniscate circuit, Levi saw a neon brand, bright yellow as sulfur and dandelions. Strands unraveled from its mass to form script that Killjoy knew he could see even with his eyes closed, even if they had been gouged out from their sockets—they had been branded in the back of his skull, in his mind's eye.
In the lexicon of his very soul.
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Engram: [Grimoire//Eidolon]
Pseudonym: [Nameless]
True-name: [-//A-L-T-E-R-K-E]
Qliphot-class: [Gehenna]
Polarity-tabula: [Qlippoth]
Principle-substrate: [Gestalt] - [Salt//Mercury//Sulfur]
True-form: [A basal beast that bears the form of a ragged man but none of his higher intellect. Nameless, it begets no soul.]
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Grimoires, shortened from grimoire-lattices, were the interface medium between a man and their daemons. It was the fundament upon which you staked them to your immortal soul. They were wrought from a variety of sources—principle-substrates—from objects of old-world worship to emotionally resonating paraphernalia.
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The [Nameless] grimoire had been made by defiling a human soul so badly that it had begun to turn into a daemon; neon schema was only produced by self-propagating lexical engrams and eidolons were not among them. Beyond its profane origin, there was another incongruity: Levi did not recognize the polarity-tabula parameter. Killjoy hadn’t heard of the Gehenna qliphot-class either.
He knew its mythological connotations but beyond that Killjoy came up short. At least it was somewhat conceptually linked, no matter how tenuous; Gehenna was the land of the dead in multiple old-world abrahamic religions, an inversion of Malkuth. The interpretation of Gehenna that most fit with the term ‘qliphot’ was a rather obscure one that Levi knew due to sheer coincidence.
Old-World relics were worth more than their weight in shards if you had the right buyer. They could be used to make grimoire-lattices among other occult technologies. Of course, Levi couldn’t be blamed if he took a peek or two or ten at the forbidden knowledge before handing it over. Original sin was in his DNA.
According to a gnostic manuscript that had been the only surviving text of a heretical, old-world sect, Gehenna was an upside-down, liminal space where the ground was lifeless ash and the sky was the earth as seen from below on a discus cosmological model. At the center, in place of sun or moon, were the roots of the tree of all-knowledge—the Qliphoth—that caught the souls of the dead and bade them down unto Gehenna.
Uncaring to Levi’s confusion, the xanthene script wove like arcs of electricity emitted by intense plasma, reconfiguring itself to show him another aspect of his ontology.
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Engram: [Eidolon]
Pseudonym: [Basker] - [Levi] - [Killjoy]
True-name: [-]
Sefirot-class: [Malkuth]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Principle-substrate: [Gestalt] - [Salt//Mercury//Sulfur]
True-form: [-]
Cicatrix: [Ecstasy]
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Now, the polarity-tabula parameter began to make some sense. Levi recognized the word ‘Qabalah’—it referred to a phenomenon known as the ‘tree of knowledge', an emergent property of the lexical universe as it pertained to its density and configuration on a macro scale. Most of the dimension, like physical reality, was empty and devoid of substance, its spiritual pseudo-matter congregating through an attractive force homologue known as prolixity.
Letters strung together made words; words bound together to form verses; verses morphed into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into lexicons, lexicons into libraries, then libraries into libraries of libraries, so on and so forth unto infinity.
The lexical universe, if gazed at from really far away and with a near-blind squint, looked like substrate riddled with fungal roots not dissimilar to Pre-Pandaemonium galaxy filaments before the last stars had succumbed to entropic heat-death. Chariot-lines piggy-backed off of the Qabalah’s mycelium network to propel matter along the ether; it was cheaper to follow the path of least resistance, afterall.
The qliphot, then, was to the Qliphoth what the sefirot were to the Qabalah—hollow fruits, husks borne on the root-boughs of the tree of death. A sort of shadow sefirot-class that measured negative lexical mass. Like antimatter to matter, it was the same shape but different charge.
As of yet unproven and borderline-schizophrenic hypotheses aside, Levi had scryed his soul a good few times before so he knew for a fact that he did not possess the [Progeny] pseudonym; at least not until the nameless alley. Neither had he been called by that pseudonym, making it an impossibility to coalesce as an engramic subroutine within his eidolon.
Any yet, here it was. It existed like a recursive and viral bit of code that depended on recurring references to itself to which it could never truly pinpoint its locus of origin.
Levi prodded at the pseudonym with imaginary digits, bringing up its specs; daemonics were rather intuitive on the user-interface side of things. Where there was a will, there was a way with soul-tech—this was rather literal, erring to a philosophy of mind over matter.
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Engram: [Eidolon//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
True-name: [-]
Pseudonym: [Progeny] {Blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh form pseudo-daemons; spawning thereof is exponentially commensurate with stimulation of the id and limited by the amount of salt-principle-substrate available for parthenogenesis. Biological tissue that constitutes the prime continuity of the body and inert, nonorganic matter are not affected.}
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The pseudonym was as grave as a scar on his soul if not worse. This sort of thing was only produced by having a thousand-thousand-thousand people cursing your name for countless eternities.
Only the most vile of monsters with a victim count that needed exponents to properly express would bear an accursed soul-epithet of this magnitude.
If Levi hadn’t been confounded before, he certainly was now. Killjoy wasn’t a good man by any means or stretch of the word, but he wasn’t this. His kills couldn’t have surpassed the double digits, much less could his reputation have ever been this bad.
For the third and last time, the neon schema rewove and rewound itself.
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Engram: [Daemon]
Pseudonym: [Shedskin]
True-name: [L-I-V-A-Y-A-T-A-N]
Sefirot-class: [Keter] - [Prime Sphere]
Qliphot-class: [Tehom] - [Adjunct Sphere]
Polarity-tabula: [Firmamentum] - [Qabalah//Qliphoth]
Legion-origin: [Leliouria//Misophaes]
Designation: [Recursion] - [Iteration 0//912]
True-form: [A serpent in lemniscate circuits the ether beyond the moon and below the firmament. It is twin-headed and twice-tailed, blind and eyeless, pale-skinned, each scale the face of every soul. Insensate in the throes of autocannibalism, the universe is its entrails.]
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It was then, as Levi read through the daemon’s sefirot-class that he came to know just how deep in Haguel’s waste he had fallen.
“Fuck,” Levi ‘Killjoy’ Basker yelled, his wail whisper-thin. No matter how much he tried to scream within, it always came out frustratingly weak compared to the sound he intended to make.
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