ENTRY 006//SHEKELS//SHARDS OF MAMMON
> The only keter-class daemon whose true-name is publicly known is that of Mammon, held by the Second Archon of Marcation Shibbolethes. Sundered into shards, this prime daemon not only fuels but is the economy of Pandaemonium; and Shibbolethes is the richest entity therein, even amongst the eight archons, for She holds the most Mammonic shards.
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> Most denizens of the Sixth City call them shekels.
—Post-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Joseph “Mulligan” Basker Information Commons Request for Personality-Impregnation into Golem Sleeve: [Paris-PlasterTM Mark XIX].
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The most important part of an op was the preparation phase. Without good prep and gear, no matter how many daemons you had staked to your soul, sequencing was just an unlucky bullet away.
Levi needed kit and for that he needed shards. There wasn’t a single thing that couldn’t be bought with silver shekels in the Sixth City. First thing’s first: death’s got nothing on me, not any longer. Gonna get a risky job that pays more than what’s needed for a coffin and then we’ll see where we go from there.
Killjoy pushed off the steel railing, the Legion advert’s dataterms downloaded into his grimoire—useful that. The nine-hundred-and-eleven cycles had been more than just hedonism, with Levi relearning the ropes of having engrams grafted to his ontology. Though, mostly, they were just a blur of alcohol and synthetics. He hadn’t had a decent connection to the ether since three decades ago. Only way to go unnoticed in the Pandaemonium was to forgo any mark, be they shards or grimoire or daemon. The markless were little better than vagrants, easily forgotten in the ether as their prolixity never surpassed yesod-class; not enough shekels to warrant a shake-down.
Levi found that he didn’t care much for anonymity anymore; numb to the impossibility of death and without anything else to stave off boredom—quite the dangerous combination.
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An [Imp] daemon ran from Levi as he chased after it on pipes of copper, silver, and lead. One for water, one for liquid ether, and the last for waste. Condensation built throughout the metals, some of it evaporating, some of it frozen into rime, and some of it sublimating into strings of neon letters indecipherable to anything but an engram; no soulless artificial intelligence would have been able to make sense of the code.
Nothing but a daemon could read lexical cipher; which was strange why Levi had begun to discern… for lack of a better descriptor, patterns, in neon schema. Even soulstitchers did not directly touch upon fundamental code, using instead interpreter engrams as interfacing mediums between themselves and the ether. Usually, a shamanic daemon of some sort that manifested lexical constructs in a way understandable to the human mind—through semi-lucid visions, theophanies, and the like.
Killjoy slipped on the rime of a silver pipe that was twice as thick as his height and fell to his doom. A stupid mistake to become distracted while dancing on the knife’s edge between life and death, he knew.
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In the misophaesic//leiliouriac abyss, Levi’s awareness blossomed like light at the beginning of time. Xanthene neon unfurled to form script and the Ninth Archangel read the truth of the daemon branded onto his soul.
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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] - [Husk-fruit 1//1]
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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A new section appeared under [Shedskin]’s schematics, specifically connected to its archonic datum//dataterm.
Levi didn’t know how to make heads or tails—four, total, but that was a digression—of the change to the daemon’s schematics. [Recursion] as a designation wasn’t anywhere near common enough to beget any knowledge from the collective subconscious; nothing came to mind as Levi prodded at his embedded memories. Besides that, there were supposed to be only eight archonic datums and [Iteration] was not among those.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Then again, there were only supposed to be eight archons.
Daemons endowed their hosts with implicit knowledge on how to manifest their base power and understand their designation; there wasn’t much of a learning curve so much as there was an unbreakable ceiling—a daemon could not punch above their sefirot-class without very favorable odds and that was only within the same rung; a lower-rung daemon had no chance against its higher-rung brethren.
Levi only had the instincts on how to call upon [Shedskin]’s mandatum function; the ability to command lexical code through speech. A rare enough power—prized by soulstitchers and goetic sorcerers to ply their respective trades—but one wholly neutered by the other eight archons immediately sensing a new sibling having been brought into the fold.
What was an [Iteration] and why did its number go up to nine-hundred-and-twelve only to go back down again to zeroth and produce a subroutine in the form of a [Husk-fruit]? It was connected to the qliphoth tabula-polarity parameter, but how exactly remained to be seen.
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The [Imp] daemon ran from Levi, nothing but a blur of neon schema—letters and lightning. Daemons tended not to manifest their true-forms in the Cities; most were domesticated cultivars of the proper monsters that roamed the Desolation—neutered permutations—and besides that, daemonic-suppression wards were inscribed into the lexical matrixes of the near-infinite mass of memetic matter that made up Neo Babylon.
Levi jumped a divide of two meters, his hand grasping the nearest protruding bit of metal. Instead of rime, his downfall came in the way of parasympathetic reflex; the pipe was boiling-hot.
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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Designation//Dataterms]
True-name: [L-I-V-A-Y-A-T-A-N]
Designation: [Recursion] - [Iteration 10//912] - [Husk-fruit 1//1]
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His legs pumped at all their might, the highest his malkuth-class homunculus body could output and Levi crossed the divide. He skidded along the slick pipes on the other side, a silent grin on his lips; he kept his teeth closed over his mouth lest he bring about eight inordinately-pissed siblings to smite him down.
With a hand held out and a talisman held in, Levi mummed with the world-serpent’s voice: “[Aleister’s Lesser Seal.]”
It took him nine whole [Iterations]—measurements of the time between being grafted to the pale-blind daemon and dying, he eventually surmised—to master some of his forked tongue. Levi still couldn’t speak, so no chit-chat for him, but some ontologics were still available. Mandatum functions were prized for a reason: they allowed the Post-Pandaemonium spellcraft of goetia to function.
Talismans—objects endowed with dead-code constructs and lesser engrams—could enact daemon-like subroutines such as binding arrays. They were limited in scope and flexibility, doing only what they were written to do.
The [Imp]’s false-form of neon schema was sucked into the slip of carbon-fiber laser-etched with lexical glyphs. The seal’s linework glowed copper-green—the daemon’s color; [Imps] were mischievous nature spirits and tended to run away from their bearers at the slightest slip-up. They also tended to self-propagate and self-manifest in whatever nook and cranny possible, even when the closest forest was one of metal and rust.
Goetia drew upon the daemon from which it co-opted its mandatum function; there was another price beyond a few drops of neon but it wasn’t worth discussing at the sefirot-class of yesod—foundation-class, the strata just beyond malkuth or false-class; the existential baseline, essentially.
Levi stalked back to his fixer—his connection through which he got the daemon-hunting job—daemon in hand. The thought brought a rare smile to his lips; still closed, of course.
He couldn’t risk waking the serpent coiled at the base of his tongue.
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The fixer was nymed [Mr-Hands]; he had seals and goetic-gnostic circles of shabiri plastered every which corner in his shop, cowling everything but his hands in blind darkness. The plascrete melted into the eigengrau to leave only the pair and the table upon which they rested, visible to most.
They were gold-plated cybernetics instead of daemonics. Strange, that. Dead-tech was nothing more than a curiosity—artifacts of a bygone age—due to its inability to connect to a Principality’s ether-web; the Pandaemonium equivalent of the internet where engrams swimmed in place of programs and quantum-coded daemons prowled in place of binary viruses.
Levi’s eyes saw through the illusion to witness the fixer’s true-form—note the phrasing. [Mr-Hands] was not a man at all but instead a daemon; an arachnid made of countless miniscule arthropods, a swarm echoing itself into a larger form. The dead-tech were simply lures to make humans more comfortable.
“[Get me ten more {Imp}s and you’ll have enough for a netzach. I’ll recommend you a stitcher I work with.]”
[Mr-Hands] spoke through a mandatum function like Levi; but where Killjoy’s voice was like a rasping and lilting serpent, the fixer’s was that of a thousand-thousand chittering insects tethered to an axis just out of sight.
The exchange rate between foundation-class and eminence-class daemons of equivalent prolixity-fractions was four-to-one; for every four imps, Levi shoulda gotten a single weapons-grade daemon. Killjoy was getting fleeced and he knew it.
He grinned and bore the humiliation that scraped against his ego. Better to turn the other cheek than lose control and murder the “man”. He’d seen Father do the latter far too often.
Levi nodded and turned on his heel to investigate the local ether and gentry for mentions of wild daemonlings.
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