ENTRY 007//EUDAEMONIA//SOUL-CANCER METASTASIS
> If a cicatrix is a calcified cyst within one’s lexical code, then eudaemonia is metastasis of daemonic cancer; it is fatal and it is ugly.
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> The only difference is that cancer doesn’t often induce violent and murderous psychotic episodes with delusions of grandeur.
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> The strangest and most disturbing part of it all is that the delusions all have the same core theme: that the host has become a g-d; the only difference is that the presentation of symptoms is dependent on cultural background and the grafted self-perpetuating engrams’ designations.
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> That daemons have earned their name from greco-roman near-deities seems almost recursive in logic. Eudaemonia, as a pandemic ontological-phenomenon, has only been observed since the name stuck in the global zeitgeist.
—Post-Lexical//Pre-Pandaemonium heterodox excerpt, Berestiah Professor of Applied Lexicology and Daemonics of the Academy of Withershins Metaphysica: On Engrams and Designations.
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Four [Imp]s and ten thousand shards later and Levi was beginning to lose the iron-clad restraint he had on his murderous tendencies; it would take him whole [Husk-fruit] maturation cycles before he got close enough to buying decent gear.
Inside a catacomb-partition—three meters tall by six meters wide—Levi looked himself in the eye through the mirror. He’d gotten himself better accommodations than a coffin. Much needed since he tended to keep goetics such as talismans with him and he’d rather not be shanked and sent to an early visit to the world-serpent.
His eyes… he never got quite used to them. Looking into those sulfurous orbs and the slitted pupils at their centers did not send Levi spiraling into the abyss, unlike the first few hundred times. There was still an unspoken pull when he found himself staring, but it was manageable. Though, he knew implicitly that he’d descend below if he gave into the reflection. [Recursion] was rather esoteric as designations came. Levi had asked around info-brokers for its specs and come up with a few leads; there were other daemons with the designation, but they were rather costly. Much more than he could afford with only thousands of shards.
Though [Recursion] as a designation existed, [Iteration] as an archonic datum did not. Levi did not risk drawing attention to himself by requesting information on a secret ninth datum, not when he had so much riding on this particular iteration.
Speaking of, this current iteration had been his longest so far at four months. The longer he stayed alive in a given [Iteration], the more that something began to feel wrong.
The feeling was like an ache in his bones or a fester in his bowels. Though most bodily functions had since been supplanted in the New World with the advent of artificial bodies, all drew implicitly on their ancestral memories—the collective unconscious; the compacted landfill within one’s soul, accessible for bursts of semantic knowledge of the world, be it old or new, and its workings.
The unsettling in his gut was worsening. A week ago, Levi had begun to start at the color yellow in his peripheral vision. Any neon schema, a Decarabia Legion advert or the like, and his head was on a swivel. Paranoia was a mind-killer, slowly whittling away at Levi’s wits.
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Two weeks passed and the paranoia only worsened. That was when the compulsions and intrusive thoughts started.
The call of the void did not whisper in his ear any longer; it screamed. It wept. It begged. Levi’s skin itched something fierce and no matter how hard he scratched, the itch seemed deeper than his bones.
He figured this out when he had accidentally reached the subcutaneous-layer with his bare nails—then on forward, he kept them short as can be.
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A fortnight later, the pressure inside his skull neared the bursting point, boiling his gray matter in scalding-hot dysphoria.
Killjoy wanted nothing more than to escape his paltry flesh; to rid himself of it. To kill himself and free his soul from the mortal coil.
The first signs of eudaemonia, Levi knew. It always began with paranoia—mental illnesses were strictly monitored in the Post-Pandaemonium world through ego-sigs for that exact reason. Sometimes it wasn’t so much an early-warning sign as it was a dog-whistle; daemons of ill repute—cacodaemons—preyed on the vulnerable of mind. The end result was the same as the classical manifestation of eudaemonia derived from exceeded negentropic capacitance or lexical warping.
Levi threw caution to the wind—he’d end up entering psychosis in less than a month anyway. Best that he spend the shards he had and go out guns blazing.
First he needed a daemon—netzach-class; weapons-grade.
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Killjoy communicated through a minor text engram, spectral words appearing in [Mr-Hands]’ peripheral vision schematics; presumably. Levi had hailed to the fixer’s ego-sig and established a connection but it was as if his words fell on deaf ears.
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“[I got a carefully-cultivated reputation to maintain. Can’t dole out charity or else every misbegotten shmuck of this dog-damned quadrant will be sniffing out for hand-outs and scraps.]”
Levi’s patience did not wane; it couldn’t. It had already hit the bottom of the abyss of Tehom a thousand deaths ago. He was snakebitten, the misfortune having been near never-ending since the chance encounter at the nameless alley.
Too many anxieties and too many fears—the constant paranoia of slipping up and having the archons finding him again, the encroaching eudaemonia, and the dread of the snake-eyed man’s plans. It all added up.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was only so much a man could take.
The serpent coiled at the base of Levi’s tongue hissed, echoing his indignation along the skein of existence, plucking at the sequences of the lexical universe like harp’s strings. The fixer’s false hands trembled as did the rest of the Malkuth matter in a ten meter radius around Levi.
When Killjoy looked into the darkness, he felt it shake and came to feel satisfaction in its fear.
“[Pay me my wages or I’ll exact them just the same. A lowly mutt like myself would rather not bite the hand that feeds.]”
Levi growled and the universe rumbled with him, grounding together its lexical equivalent of tectonic plates in the wake of his ego. The vibrations resonated at the pitch of his archonic voice, denaturing reality into malleable clay.
Mold it to your design, a little voice told him.
Killjoy knew, intrinsically, the waveform’s exact equation down to the nine possible algorithms needed to solve it. He knew as well the fractal that could be derived from the waveform—it was the lemniscate brand; forever spiraling, forever repeating, forever consuming itself; devoid of beginning and without end.
A single word and the world would bend around Him. The genesis of a sentence began to form inside his throat and was promptly snuffed inside the cradle.
Killjoy shut up with a snap of his jaws. He ended up biting the tip of the serpent’s nose off. He swallowed the writhing piece of soap-flesh instead of spitting it out, afraid of bringing further attention to himself. Any living biomass unconnected from his golem-sleeve’s continuity was subject to mutation; those eels hadn’t been the only time that a piece of Levi had morphed into a pseudo-daemon.
Silence spoke louder than words this time as Killjoy let [Mr-Hands] stew in the implication of the threat. Beyond the illusion, the millions of spiderlings swarmed atop one another in a frenzy, the gestalt appearance they bore unraveling under the prey response. They were rendered back into what they truly were: insolent insects.
Staredowns were so much easier when you could blink.
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There was a silver lining in dealing with [Mr-Hands]’ pyrite: Levi found out he could speak again, although for brief stints only—it was like staring into his reflection; there was a pull that could be resisted. Killjoy was rather fond of his voice, narcissism notwithstanding.
Neither the nameless grimoire or the keter-class daemon sealed onto Levi’s soul had alerted the soulstitcher. From the prelim sims and the general mapping seance, it was as if Levi’s shadow-engram was that of a baseline, ungrafted malkuth-class man.
His lexical mass was only detectable by City infrastructure, then; a freelance and non-Legionnaire engramist wouldn’t be able to scry that Levi had the equivalent of an apocalyptic venereal wart on his soul.
Which only made Killjoy all the more curious, so he brought up its specs in his peripherals; he hadn’t delved as deep into the archdaemon’s schematics as he should have before—the prime pseudonym, in specific, was one such forgotten detail.
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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Shedskin] {Endows sulfur-principle-substrate with the ability to decouple from its salt-principle-substrate.}
True-name: [L-I-V-A-Y-A-T-A-N]
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…It was a suicide switch. An on-demand, kill-yourself button was burnt onto the apocalypse beast’s lexical shadow. Though absurd, there were a number of convenient uses in terminating an iteration early.
From stopping any mem-data meddling to something like the recursive Hell of the nameless alley, suicide was, seemingly, the answer.
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[Glasya-Labolas] was, as daemons went, decent. Cultivated from a Desolation strain of bloodshed and ambush daemon, [Glasya-Labolas] was well-rounded—augmented strength, obfuscation and cloaking capabilities, minor ego-radiation subroutines among other functions; there wasn’t much that the daemon couldn’t do. It only lacked a dependable ranged vector of attack.
Levi made his way down the walkways, navigating at times the pipes and even bare plascrete; his new daemon-grafted marks helped no small amount in the whole ordeal. Calling down strength from his daemon, Killjoy dug furrows into the megastructure with his fingers as he descended, sliding down its walls; the friction between his neon-reinforced skin and the plascrete was enough to melt the lexically-modded, memetic material.
A kick off the plascrete sent Levi into a flip; he landed on a lead pipe with a diameter larger than his height twice over.
Below him lay a minor Mulligan compound embedded into the plascrete mass of the third quadrant—a refinery; blackmarket but still mundane, it didn’t make any ego-drugs so it was mostly left ignored by the authorities.
Hell inside the sun, even if it had been an ego-drug distillery, so long as it did not produce in excess or dabble in dysphoric-class sublimes, neither the Legions or the archons cared. Maybe an illegal daemon mill would pique the interest of an exorcist errant—an independent that flitted between the guilds—or a large enough unsanctioned brothel; Astaphaios the Archon of Fornication was the only one entitled to run bordellos and the like.
The thought of the goat sin prodded still-raw wounds in Killjoy’s psyche, and he quickly changed mental tracks, refocusing on the here and now.
Levi stalked down the forest of neocement and metal roots, observing the movement of the guards all the while. The wards would go off the moment he stepped foot inside the compound without the proper identity-token, so he had to be efficient.
Strike hard and fast, he told himself, his mental voice that of his father’s. The irony was not lost on Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker.
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