ENTRY 011//USURY//CHURCH OF AVARICE

> The mark of the beast of Shibbolethes comes ingrained in all homunculi; its circuitry, physical and lexical, rests within the right hand and the forehead, respectively. The right hand for control over the shekels within one’s shadow-engram and the forehead to stake them to the soul.

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> You cannot buy nor sell; you cannot swear nor hold contract; you cannot function as a member of society within the Principalities without the mark of Mammon.

—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 Mulligan syndicate had its unscrupulous hands in a little bit of everything in the third quadrant. From drug distillation to human trafficking and the like, there wasn’t a single black market that was absent of Killjoy’s former cronies.

Levi stalked resource caches and lower-level grifts—he had the big picture from pilfering the info inside Jacob’s soul but he still needed some finer details. He did not graft a daemon in this iteration, forgoing raw power for the veil of nameless anonymity.

When weak, feign strength. When strong, feign weakness, Father spoke into his ear. His wisdom made a lump of Levi’s throat, reminding him of all his mistakes and regrets.

Killjoy stamped down the wriggling snake of doubt inside his mind, pinning his mental heel on its neck and snuffing it out—for now. He could ignore the festering emotions for a time, but he’d have to pay their due, inevitably. Bottled-down and suppressed feelings had steep interest rates. Levi knew this intimately.

It was in a run-down loan-shark’s shack that Killjoy found his first scent of blood: usury, the lending of any shards to be paid back with interest, was done only under the Third Archon Shibbolethe’s blessing.

Usually, this meant that organizations had to have a representative of Avarice on hand if they wanted to conduct that kind of business above twenty-five-thousand shards. The loan-shark was offering a usury of twenty-four-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine shards in a very steep interest. Just enough to sweep under the radar of the Church but not near enough to escape its reach should the operation catch even a grazing glimpse of Her attention.

With this in mind, Levi bought a low-quality recording engram—it was all dead-code and ridden with parasitic artefacts; barely past false-class but more than enough to damn the lone-shark. With the recording in hand—correction: soul—Killjoy made his way to the closest Church of Avarice.

He scratched the mark on his right palm, the cold silver tracery of fractals depicting a moth of broken glass—Mammon, the shattered princeps-class daemon whose true-name was [S-H-A-Q-A-L].

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On his walk to the Avaritian Church, Killjoy couldn’t help but ruminate and chew over dark thoughts that were best left where they belong—the dark.

Though Levi had been groomed to be the next Mulligan since his incarnation, he did not have the advantage of information on the syndicate—not any more, that is. After Father found out that he’d been letting people go and had been sabotaging the bottom line, Joseph excommunicated Killjoy; that meant changing any sensitive access-tokens, spreading the news of betrayal far and wide, changing up fronts, and overall just patching-over any vulnerabilities.

He could still see Father’s enraged, snarling face if he closed his eyes.

Why he hadn’t killed Levi not even Levi knew; it just wasn’t characteristic with a man that did not so much resort to violence as much as gladly employ it at every possible venue. Joseph had once murdered his output of fifty years with his bare hands because they’d developed a cicatrix after a rival syndicate had them tortured. A cicatrix that made sex an impossibility. Connect the dots and the picture you got was a heinous one, even for Sixth City standards.

That Killjoy could recall that without much pause didn’t say good things about Joseph, in specific, and Neo Babylon in general. Everything after the Creche had been downhill—only the lexically unborn had any sort of reprieve in the Pandaemonium.

But, maybe—just maybe—it didn’t have to be so. There was a new archon in town.

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Where most buildings were plascrete and ceranoplastic, the syncretic Churches were old-world marble and their particular brand of archonic metal—Avarice’s was silver. The archons did not ask nor demand nor even expect worship but sycophants arose just the same in Their name; like leeches, the archons fed on the offered adulation—you could not hold worship to anything but the Eight. Lexical clout added mass to engrams, enhancing them and their scope; hence, why religion was kept on a short, choking leash.

Levi could feel the pseudo-ego radiating off of the Church like heat from a fire; so many daemons worked in concert to ward and maintain the building’s infrastructure that it was almost a living thing. Malkuth-class baselines without a grimoire would not be able to perceive the ether field distortion—it wasn’t near disparate enough, ontologically, from false-world entities.

The large wooden doors, higher than ten men, were open and Levi entered through; the Church was expansive and set with marble pillars that held up a vaulted ceiling covered in daemonic schema and laminated in silver. The alchemical conduits were a work of art and artifice—a means to flaunt wealth and the beating heart of the Church’s lexical infrastructure.

The hairs on the back of Levi’s neck stood up the moment he stepped through the Church’s threshold. You are watched, a little voice told him, barely a susurrus.

His exceeded lexical mass—the prolixity of the lexicon of his soul—had not yet been detected. He’d need to be denatured into his constituent particles for the Hound to find him. No, this was the normal feeling of being within any given archonic edifice; the security subroutines of the daemons, though passive in nature, exerted pressure on the ego. A means for both vigilance and warning—be on your best behavior for you are watched, the little voice repeated.

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Twenty-four hundred meters from the entrance was a lesser angel, a sanctified representative of the archons. Killjoy would have to deal with Them to execute his scheme. Or be executed, whichever happened.

Before having the world-serpent staked to his soul, he would have never even thought of using an archonite as a means to an end. Now? Now Levi blinked sideways once to steel himself and then twice to gird his loins.

The archonites serve the archons; should they not also serve the Ninth? A little voice in the back of his head whispered. Levi felt—with a certainty that no contrary evidence could dispel—that the voice’s tongue was scaled and its tongue’s tongue was forked.

The space between him and the lesser angel was warped, stretching from twenty-four hundred meters to twenty-four hundred kilometers; a means to test the faithful and to give the heretics a chance to reconsider. Reality increased in flux the closer that Levi came, the walls bending like they were the event horizons to the blackhole of Their divinity.

The long pilgrimage would’ve broken lesser men; perception could only be toyed with for so long before the mind buckled under its own weight. Psychosis, like all forms of insanity, was viciously cyclical—it input, it fed into itself, self-propagating and self-perpetuating.

All in all, the little journey didn’t strain him too much—like a jaunt into the black between iterations, the ether below the earth and beyond the moon.

Killjoy walked unto the silent saint that lay indolently on Their throne of white and silver. The marble was not just streaked with ashen deposits of calcium carbonate but instead had been lexically-modified to have veins of the archonic metal threaded throughout itself.

Killjoy kneeled before the angel as the formless pressure of the Church sharpened to a point at his jugular. Lesser men would have fallen into a boneless heap, but he contended with only acid reflux and a serious case of impending doom. This a malkuth-class baseline would have been able to feel.

Tifereth-class; sol-class, it was the first sefirot level to endow a halo—daemonic schema so condensed that its light blinded the very soul.

“[You are before {Pronoia} the Prosperity of Forethought, sanctified by Shibbolethes to oversee the Church of Avarice in the third-quadrant of the Sixth Principality of Cyprus-Babylonia. What is your business, mortal?]”

Their voice radiated with ego resplendent, dripped with mercury and melted silver. It was poison to the ears and the sanity; it whispered a nine-hundred-and-twelve sweet nothings, that the world conspired to do good.

The tiniest sliver of a shard of a fragment of a g-d’s ego paid attention to him, then. A single stray thought from the saint would kill him. Saints were divinity five-times removed but divinity just the same.

Killjoy did not repeat the same mistake twice.

Levi paid obeisance, touching his forehead in benediction with two fingers as he sent a tithing of all his paltry shards. Schema the color silver bloomed and withered between him and the saint, a chain of fractals and rapidly-sublimating glass. He’d gotten only eighteen-thousand-four-hundred-and-fifty-seven shekels this iteration with daemon-hunting; the surveillance of his former cronies had cost him time and time was money.

As a representative of Shibbolethes, the saint knew from who, when, and where from Levi had received his mammonic shards—They could trace the exact path of hands that the shekels had passed through and so They knew that he’d given Them all he had to give. All he ever owned.

Simply put: they knew how Levi had gotten his shards—unsanctioned daemon hunting was illegal but not strictly enforced when dealing with foundation-class entities. Netzach-class and above were monitored more strictly and left to legionnaire exorcists.

The archons and their saints perpetuated their pair of virtue and vice to the extreme. The greed of money and the selflessness of charity were both part of the doctrine of Marcation—two sides, same coin. Either would see you in good graces with the Church. The only true sin was apathy; the only true sin was not playing their game.

The saint, enshrouded in colorless light that blinded the soul, made silence for ten minutes and four seconds. Though Levi could have seen through Their veil, he didn’t—putting his xanthene-yellow eyes anywhere but the reflective marble floor would have meant death.

So Levi looked at the saint through the reflection instead—he was a sneaky and contrarian bastard, he knew. He’d rebel against authority even to his detriment like it was his very own personal archonic vice. He wondered what its virtue pair would be, the inverse reflection of rebellion that was both equal and opposite.

The daemon of Shibbolethes was a fractured moth, the mature stage of the larval quicksilverfish of Wodenaios, and so Her saint followed a similar theme: They wore a translucent veil like the husk of a cocoon, like the diaphanous wings of a begamoth. Their skin, in contrast, was the smooth olive of the tribe of Gad with curly, brown hair that was cut to the length of the ears. Their nose was aquiline with almond-shaped eyes.

Levi didn’t look at the rest of Their form, rather intent on letting Them keep their propriety. That veil was see-through, leaving nothing to the imagination.

“[You may pray before my altar.]”

Levi pressed his forehead to the cold mirror of the marble floor as he sent the lesser recording engram to the saint of Shibbolethes.

Twelve minutes and ten seconds later, They spoke.

“[You may stand. And you may leave.]”

With that, Levi did as he was bid and left, a pool of sweat on the marble floor and poorer than a widow. The return was rather quick in comparison to the long pilgrimage; a single step saw him back to the entrance.

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Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker was a happy man.

Today, that is. Usually, he had a mean mug on that could scare even a daemon from highHell. Not today, though. Even though he’d slept on the street for ten days and ten nights, the bare plascrete having left lumps in his lower back that would transcend iterations, he was a damn happy man.

An exorcist—netzach-class going by the ego emanating off them like heat off an ignited oil-spill—had broken down the loan-shark’s door and charged in. The woman was currently in shackles of neo-sodium, iron stakes biting into the flesh of her tongue to silence any incantation.

That part quickly spoiled Levi’s fun; the ease and banality with which legionnaires and saints alike took to brutality was… Killjoy didn’t quite have a word for it other than ‘sickening’.

Then again, he’d killed six—or was it seven?—people a half-month ago.

He didn’t even remember their number or their faces. He’d killed them without a thought afterward until now. Even though they returned to life within the wake of his death, Levi had snuffed out souls. He’d put people through pain and suffering.

And he’d do it again if it meant putting a stop to Joseph “The Mulligan” Basker.

“[Apple don’t fall too far from the tree.]” Levi said, breaking his characteristic muteness. He spoke sparingly, his voice though somewhat regained still reverberated his ego and imposed it on the false-world. A slip and he’d call the g-ds of this world to him.

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In the wake of the exorcist’s shake-down—the loan-shark had been executed and her soul hollowed-out to be impregnated by another ego—Levi observed the Mulligan syndicate’s movements. The tactic had been one favored by Father. ‘Shake the hive and give the bees something to find.’ His voice wasn’t gravely but instead smooth, without a nick on its edge—sharp as the Effigy of Razors Himself. ‘In their desperation, they’ll reinforce their vulnerabilities first; look to where the bees clump together the thickest and when the hive’s buzzing dies down, strike there.

‘It’ll be their fault.’

As Levi died of starvation on a grime-covered street of plascrete he muttered a phrase over-and-over again.

“[It’s your fault.]”

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