ENTRY 005//CICATRIX//SCARS OF THE SOUL
> Within the engram known as an eidolon—a soul, a lexical psyche—is a number of discrete mental constructs. Yes, one’s ontology includes the body for no one is a “part” but instead a “whole”; nonetheless, for the purpose of simplicity of explanation, let us forget about physicality.
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> Viewed topographically, the ego is the middle-layer of the human psyche—bound to the principle-substrate of fluid mercury, it is meant to conduct and connect the disparate id and imago, like interstitial tissue anchors muscle to bone. Sometimes, a foreign body can embed itself into this mercurial matrix; the soul, to defend itself, calcifies around the foreign body, forming a lexical cyst. A cicatrix.
—Post-Lexical//Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt Berestiah Professor of Applied Lexicology and Daemonics of the Academy of Withershins Metaphysica: On Engrams and Designations.
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As bad habits went, dying didn’t seem so bad; not when death was no longer an eternal destination but instead just another crossroads for Levi to pass through. Sure, souls were bound to the sequence, so there was no ‘true’ death in the Pandaemonium viewed through a lexical-engramic perspective, but from an egotistical lens, the cessation of one’s being still held sway.
Identity-fragmentation, nulling, sequencing; call it what you will—having all of your memories and your core personality erased was just death by another name.
Levi stumbled out of the alley once more, a near-delirious chuckle snaking its way out of his mouth. He avoided speech with anyone, his voice no longer without danger—a single word could unravel existence and restitch it to his design. It would also call upon the archons to smite him down.
Levi heaved, just a tad closer to insanity, at the thought: all the powers of a g-d, at the tip of a dog’s tongue; so very close yet so far away. It was a special sort of living Hell that Levi found himself in.
Without worry of death by another name, but confined to the third quadrant as he was with his prolixity—his lexical mass—so weighed down by the gargantuan leech attached to his soul, Levi wandered in search of… something. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, yet—but he’d find it.
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Levi found death.
It took him all of three weeks before he collapsed of exhaustion and died in the gutters of Neo Babylon. Twenty four days for starvation to eat away at the last of his body’s salt. Homunculi, colloquially called golem-sleeves, were the artificial bodies of the New World, and required only three things to function: sodium chloride, drinkable water, and breathable air. Salt to bind the soul to what should have been lifeless clay; water to prevent the vessel from turning dry and fracturing into pottery shards; and inhalation as a means to bring in strands of lexical energy.
Much like the rest of the Pandaemonium, your flesh was not real, not truly; it was a fabrication, a simulacra, a facsimile. False made to think it was real. Air was free, water was cheap, but salt was expensive—far too luxurious when Levi spent most of his shekels on drugs.
He’d partied like there was no tomorrow—it was only a false death away, afterall.
Levi stumbled out of the alley again, leaving a cold, nameless body behind. This vicious cycle, of hedonism until death, happened another nine-hundred-and-eleven times.
Nine-hundred-and-eleven; not nine-hundred-and-twelve, not nine-hundred-and-ten, but nine-hundred-and-eleven times.
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Once you do something enough times, especially something that rewards easily and with open hands, you become numb to it. Levi had specifically avoided the ego-drugs—he did not want to see the results of what would happen to an archon strung out on soul narcotics—but all else? Fair game.
Lives and deaths blurred into one another such that the span of time was nothing more than a smear in his mind’s eye. If Killjoy could put it into words, it would be the following arrangement: “One is too many; a thousand is not enough.”
Like seeing the face of eternity, his soul had grown callous to the debauchery—nothing went through like it once had, now distant. He couldn’t feel.
Levi jumped off the closest walkway he found, deciding to start over fresh. The mist of the descent chilled him to his unfeeling heart. He never even realized when he died, the splat instantaneous with him diving head first.
He’d never questioned how strange it must be to commit suicide so nonchalantly until now; that was colder than the mist of the quadrant’s lower hydroponics layer. More abrupt than the splat.
Thankfully, no one would have to clean him off the ceranoplastic; the world dissolved into a thousand-thousand-thousand strings of unfathomable letters, giving way to consummate nothingness.
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In the darkness visible of nine times the space that measures day and night, Levi awoke to the world-soul; that ancient serpent that circled the waters around existence. Whose intestines held the universe, both substance and shadow.
At the center of one of the lemniscate’s circuits, a spiral of neon unwound to form a hybrid of holy script and pseudo computer-code. It stunk of Low Heaven and High Hell; ozone and sulfur.
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Engram: [Eidolon]
Pseudonym: [Basker] - [Levi] - [Killjoy] - [Progeny]
True-name: [-]
Sefirot-class: [Malkuth]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Principle-substrate: [Gestalt] - [Salt//Mercury//Sulfur]
True-form: [-]
Cicatrix: [Ecstasy], [Callous-Soles-Must-Walk-Upon-Thorns]
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Engram: [Eidolon//Subroutine//Cicatrix]
True-name: [-]
Cicatrix: [Callous-Soles-Must-Walk-Upon-Thorns] {One is too many; a thousand is not enough. Physical substances no longer traverse the divide between flesh and ego, salt and mercury; sublime substances are heightened twofold in their effect upon the mercurial and sulfuric principle-substrates.}
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The lexicon of Killjoy’s being told him a story he did want to hear but very much needed to. There was no escaping the label when your very soul called you an addict. Kinda hard to be in denial when your own reflection deems it fit to hold an intervention.
Killjoy’s rock-bottom had been none other than the lowest abyss of Tehom Itself.
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Levi dragged his feet as he walked from the alley because he couldn’t get drunk no more. That is, without dabbling in ego-drugs. Though classified as “sublime” substances, they did sinister things to a man, rotting them from the inside-out; Levi rathered not find out what eudaemonia would do to a host with a keter-class daemon.
The sheer death and destruction that netzach-class and below daemons could subject a quadrant to was scary enough. Keter-class could affect a whole City—nine-hundred million-billion square kilometers.
As he leaned against a steel railing, Legion adverts inscribed upon it in neon, Levi breathed-in the cold, night air eternal to Neo Babylon. He looked down at the fog-strewn walkway of the third quadrant and found himself having some proper dangerous thoughts.
Not of suicide—that was no danger to him any more than ego-death was to an archon. Instead, he had begun to realize that he could right some past wrongs. He’d never stood up to any sort of injustice, be it from the Mulligan syndicate endemic to the third quadrant or the Legions; that’d be certain death.
Unfortunately, death was no longer certain for Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker.
If he couldn’t get drunk off drink anymore, he’d get drunk off violence.
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