ENTRY 010//PANDAEMONIUM//WOMB IN THE VOID
> There are three principles which make up all things in existence. A combination of these three can make all else, material and immaterial, in the universe.
>
> They be salt, the principle of solidity; mercury, the principle of fluidity; and sulfur, the principle of sublimation. Salt is solid and it is like ash and dust; to it, all return. Mercury is fluid and it is like water and wind; evershifting, ever in motion, ever still. Sulfur is sublime and it is like fire and spirit; intangible and gaseous in form but no less capable of change, no less capable of destruction.
—Pre-Pandaemonium excerpt, Hermes Trismegistus Tabula Smaragdina.
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Why does a dying man, whose fate is inevitable, cling so desperately to life?
Killjoy didn’t know the answer to that stray thought; he only knew that being so full of adrenaline made his head pound and his teeth itch.
Why?
Levi felt a tad unclean as he frantically scavenged around his dead uncle’s soul for the access token belonging to his daemonic pistol. His speed wasn’t born of fear for lexical dissipation but instead the impending last stand. It took three days and three nights for a spirit to sublimate into the ether beyond the moon and re-enter the sequence of souls, partly because of mundane evaporation.
Killjoy had his only weapon sealed away—all daemons below judgment-class were subject to the terrifying power of table salt. How grand was the irony that extraplanar entities whose very existence bent the laws of physics had an achilles’ heel in the form of sodium chloride.
There, found it. Levi slotted in the engramic sig and felt it resonate, reaching out across the local sub-ether to connect to the pulsating-throbbing, and peculiarly veiny, pistol that laid inert on the ceranoplastic floor. Schema flashed in the back of his eyes, supplying him info on the weapon.
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]
Pseudonym: [Fanged-Toad]
True-name: [B-Y-L-Y-L]
Sefirot-class: [Yesod]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Chthonia]
Designation: [Injection] - [Semantics 0//10]
Principle-substrate: [Salt]
True-form: [A blue-skinned toad whose veins protrude, pulsating. A singular eye stares out, brimming yellow-white like a salt-fed fire. Within its maw lies the bite of a saponified asp. Its head is shaped like manhood, the cowl-glands flaring to ejaculate venom through prehensile fangs.]
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Levi inhaled, returning the pistol to its armament matrix now bound to his soul. A test-run to check for any corrupted artefacts within its lexical code. He exhaled, materializing the daemonic construct from his breath.
Daemonic armaments—the conjured kind that dwelled within a sympathetic matrix—needed breath to manifest. An exhale to make physical and an inhale to unravel. And those came weak and ragged from Killjoy. He’d have to fix that and fast.
Levi took an ampoule from his pockets, sending an ego probe into its lexical structure to disengage the lattice-mod. Like cutting off the Judge’s hair, the ampoule lost its durability, allowing Levi to break its hermetic glass neck and pour its contents down his gullet.
The liquid settled in the pit of his stomach like gasoline atop a bonfire. The heat cascading through his body coalesced within his wounds, cauterizing them shut and stabilizing him but otherwise doing nothing to alleviate his current condition—stung like the center of the sun and pain-killers were off the table because of the cicatrix.
An ash-wound potion was cheap enough to be a mainstay of any merc’s kit, but it wouldn’t work miracles. Besides those specifically stated within its prescribing label, of course. Legions were rather legalese when it came to these things.
With his wounds as managed as they could be, Levi took a look at his only ‘true’ weapon.
The sidearm wasn’t anything more than a civilian defense tool; it wouldn’t do nothin’ much. The daemonic pistol was a rather disgusting thing in its true-form to boot—unanswered prayers fromHell, it was ugly even in the waking world. But beggars can’t be choosers, so Levi would use it all the same.
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Killjoy had a plan brewing but, all the while, his scattered and pain-addled mind wandered back to the unanswered question.
Why does a dying man, whose fate is inevitable, cling so desperately to life? I’ve killed myself so many different ways and far more many times, and I’ve nothing else to gain here. So why do I persist?
Why?
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Three mulligans barged inside the room, finding Jacob’s congealed, clay-like blood but not his body; it fell atop them as the minor binding talisman let go of the corpse at Killjoy’s behest. Just a little spark of neon and a whisper from the world-serpent was enough to activate any goetic device near instantly.
Levi shot two with a single pull of the trigger before the third pulled out their own sidearm and then Levi knew no more—anticlimactic way to die, really, but it was to be expected from the severe blood loss and pain shock. His last recollection before the black below consumed him was not even a bang, but a flash of yellow.
He wasn’t quite sure if it was the point of no return of psychosis—the blooming stage of eudaemonia—or just an exotic bullet-casing from the other man’s gun. His own shots burned with sodium to produce that distinct coloration as well. But Levi hadn’t fired twice.
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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 11//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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When Levi awoke to the serpent, this time he did not look without—to the scales that housed the face of every soul—but instead to within. That darkness visible was no simple interstitial fluid, it was amniotic.
The fetal-engramic form of his bare soul floated there, ebbing in the nothing-waters. A scattering of rotating shells gravitating a lightless shadow-core—a soulspark; the gestating larvae of human psyches before they were ensouled into a physical vessel, a golem-sleeve. Left to fester and to soak in the memory of the collective-consciousness cradle, soulsparks were only mature enough to incarnate once they had at least one-hundred years been pickling in lexical brine.
This liminal space was like the womb in the sky in that it laid bare an eidolon. Where the Cradle had been nurturing, this place was a denaturing acid bath. It was a barren and gluttonous uterus that would sooner devour any zygote than let it be brought to bear; the Pandaemonium rendered in true-form.
Levi’s apophony lasted only as long as an eternal blink, four and one; eleven and nine.
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Levi gasped a breath as he came to in the nameless alley—he’d thought himself numb to death; he was not. The adrenaline of the life-and-death fight lingered even after his death.
His teeth itched deep at their roots and he felt cold and jittery like he was hopped up on synth stimulants; this would be the closest that Levi would forever be to a high given his cicatrix.
Levi broke his metacarpals and phalanges against the megastructure’s plascrete wall—a punch with a baseline body to any new-world material was like a child throwing tantrums: they’d only hurt themselves.
The frustration was unlike anything Levi had ever felt.
An archon stuck inside a mortal’s body—a huskshell of barely any worth—it was stifling. Betrayed by himself, by what should have seen him through thick and thin. A g-d does not fear, he found himself whispering inside his skull. He caught the thought and cold went down his spine: eudaemonia.
It had followed him after death. It should have wiped the slate clean.
Strangely, the fear didn’t last long; the lack of any real consequences numbed Levi to what should have broken him twice-over. He’d been through worse the first nine-hundred-and-twelve times he was excised from existence by the archons.
He’d suffer through this, too. Not unscathed, but not dead either—couldn’t kill Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker any longer.
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Killjoy breathed in and out, slowly as he dared. He looked at himself in the mirror, shades covering his eyes from themselves—sun-glasses of any kind were a fashion statement in the Pandaemonium, given that no sun breached a Principality’s walls. No sun but the first archon, that is, but Desiccation was an outlier.
Levi hadn’t done anything to hide his xanthene-yellow and sideways-blinking eyes before now. He’d avoided mirrors, what with the dysphoria that came with seeing something that was not him looking back, scraping against his soul.
The chromophobia wasn’t near traumatic enough to form a cicatrix inside his ego, but it was… limiting, certainly. Levi could kill a man, could render him into bloodied clay and a shattered psyche yet now he balked at the color yellow.
The human mind was a finicky-fickle thing, that was certain.
Killjoy reevaluated his plans: with his daemonically-inflated ego, he had to scale down his ambitions lest he bite off more than he could chew; he wasn’t pale-blind and twice-tailed, so he couldn’t quite manage swallowing a whole universe just yet.
Eudaemonia was more commonly narcissistic-euphoric in presentation rather than depressive-dysphoric, so that meant that those afflicted with it often had superbic senses of self worth—it made dogs think themselves g-ds.
And so, with the information he’d pillaged from Jacob’s soul, Levi started plotting-out his next hits. He confined himself to only locales that could be blitzed with a single netzach-class daemon—he’d not risk straining his negentropic-capacitance any further since he discovered there was bleedover between [Iterations].
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