ENTRY 004//LEIZUZIEL//THE HOUND OF AZAZEL

> The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.

—Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, [Collective-Consciousness-Memory-Engram]: Erwin Schrödinger Mind and Matter.

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Levi awoke from Leliouria when the serpent ate itself into oblivion. Causality had been broken, he knew, as two distinct sets of memories overlapped in his recollection—that he had looked into the serpent’s unfathomable maw and fell into limbo and that he had never got up from the ceranoplastic floor at all.

Both realities converged, breaking the false-world’s paltry chain of cause and effect; with Levi as the observer—or, more accurately, the keter-class leviathan daemon below the earth—a single consequence had been made true: that of him never getting up from the ground.

Nine hours passed and that remained true, no matter how many people knocked at the bathroom-cell’s door. It was his prison and refuge, the world outside its confines too much to bear.

Ten hours and four minutes later, Levi got up from the floor, still a shard lost; listless, he roamed his arcology’s quadrant until he found himself at a chariot-line. He did not question whether he should have used the translator kiosk with his shadow weighed down with an apocalypse beast—he should have never woken up that day, at all, he would later surmise.

“Prolixity exceeded. Remain in locus and wait for the arrival of Judge [Leizuziel].” A heraldic daemon bleated through the ether, its engramic subroutines blazing with neon. In sympathy to the grand circuit the daemon was connected to, Levi was promptly excised from reality into a sub-domain of existence—a liminal-proximal space of mirrors; broken, whole, and backended with mercury; there was every configuration of his reflection looking back at him. A single common thread bound all of them to Levi: namely, the wide-eyed fear which served to make that dog-damned sulfur-yellow all the more evident.

No matter which direction he ran, Levi did not move an inch. In thisHellscape where his only company was his own face, Levi almost missed the ether beyond//below the moon//earth—almost.

An indeterminate amount of time later, a maw opened up in the field of glass, its lipless mouth made of shards and silver wire. From the black of its unfathomable gullet, a judge came: They were twice as tall as Levi, a halo of blazing horns blinding Their face.

Should have been blinding Their face from Levi, but instead they were only blinding Themselves. Levi saw through the veil of colorless light, the sulfur of his eyes burning at the effort—it was not a conscious choice, more a reflex of muscles both real and false.

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Judge Leizuziel’s face was that of a hound; a long snout, piercing steel-gray eyes and with ears held high, the judge’s chimeral status was as evident as four and one.

Levi’s stomach dropped the last span it had left before the abyss of Tehom.

He stood before the Hound of Azazel Himself; exorcist, gevurah-class; judgment class. It was said that below the archons stood their archangels, and below their archangels, their judges.

Levi stood before divinity thrice-removed but divinity nonetheless. He did not have pleasant memories with the dogs of Heaven.

“[Well, what do we have here?]” The Hound rasped amusedly, His voice reverberating through the liminal space where Levi was trapped in, inducing a chiming resonance that rattled the teeth. The sefirot-class disparity should have sent Levi, a malkuth baseline, reeling to the shard-laden ground of the proximal space. Should have made the very fibers of his being buckle before the higherform existence.

Instead, the Hound’s bark broke upon a soul that had witnessed the face of eternity. Before the leviathan below, Leizuziel was nothing but His namesake: a dog pretender at playing g-d.

The Hound’s steel-gray eyes narrowed, a spike of lexical mass and a flash of neon all the warning that Levi had before he died the umpteenth time in a single day.

His soul may have been made of sturdier stuff but Levi’s body was still flesh, blood, bone, and guts; a mortal before a herald of divinity was as his namesake: becoming of death and nothing else.

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Leizuziel, the Hound of the Scapegoat of Astaphaios, High Judge of the Sixth City, quoted William Blake as the world broke down around Him. The proximal-liminal space inverted like the prolapsing stomach of a frog; reality purged itself into oblivion.

“[Did He who made the Lamb make Thee?]”

The Hound would have never courted so closely with disaster with a direct mention of the Tetragrammaton before today—the second coming of Ragnarök//Revelation. Abraxas would have flayed Him to the bare bones of his soul, but not even the Deicide would survive this.

This was not a g-d that could be killed.

As the nothing-waters came to claim every last soul, Leizuziel, the Twice-Headed Jackal, knew then that He did not deserve the epithet. He was a pale shadow of the greater thing before Him.

A leviathan arose from the ether below the earth to devour its own tail, twice-over. It uncoupled from itself and in its maw was the salvation of unbecoming. He recognized both faces stamped upon the serpent’s foreheads.

The man, the soul He had just snuffed out with a flick of His ego, was no one other than the herald to an archon; the Ninth Archangel.

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In the darkness visible of the world-serpent, Levi began to think that he had picked up quite the vicious habit: dying.

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