ENTRY 012//CENSUS//ALL DEATHS WEIGH THE SAME

> Of the daemons, there are eight that stand above all else; Their scope and power is such that They’ve been branded as the apocalypse or ‘g-d’ beasts. If They were ever to break free from their hosts, They’d do exactly as Their epithet describes. They’d turn the earth into salt and the seas into mercury; They’d turn the air into sulfur and the clouds into bromine.

>

> We found Them in the largest of the world-wounds; the reality-striations along the edges of the ragged spatial-temporal fabric were longer than some countries. When one of our more adventurous colleagues walked into one of the striations, they were twisted along a proximal axis that… they looked like fractals made of human flesh. It’s best I don’t describe their sorry states any more than that. We tried to put them out of their misery, but even their souls were warped. We contained our colleague inside a lead-lined coffin in the dead sea; the salinity helps to keep things out and keep them in.

>

> The daemons were slumbering inside some sort of cipher, some sort of seal. It was rapidly degrading; after we got the ontologic readings we had to make a choice. Our animetric devices had long since been of little use, beeping louder than geiger counters near an elephant’s foot. We had to switch to the prototype that worked entirely within lexical principles rather than physical ones.

>

> Their emanation levels—the lexical radiation of their pseudo-ego’s through the liquid medium of the ether—corresponds to the sefirot-class of keter; the apex of the existential ladder. It was only a theory—keter-class—until we found Them in the world-wounds.

>

> We’ve found eight of Them and have Them contained in eight hosts—four men and four women. They’ve held up against the leviathan weights that burden their souls, but we need a better solution; they won’t hold up for too long. Lead coffins and nine-hundred-and-twelve dead seas wouldn’t hold Them.

>

> There’s only so much a person can take from their own natures before they succumb to less-than-savory desires. I fear they’ll warp worse than the agent that touched the reality-striation. We had the daemons embedded directly into their shadow-engrams; there simply wasn’t any grimoire-lattice that could withstand the intense lexical pressure of keter-class.

>

> G-d forgive us, but we had the daemons staked directly to their souls.

—Post-Lexical, Pre-Pandaemonium Tetragrammaton excerpt, [Eschaton Codex].

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Levi’s awareness floated in the nothingness, suspended as if in the currents of the methane ocean of Hyraia. Xanthene-yellow script unwound from a spiral to form characters indecipherable to anything but a daemon. The leviathan below let go of the tip of its tail, and the ninth archon read its scales.

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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], [Sin-of-Census]

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Engram: [Eidolon//Subroutine//Cicatrix]

True-name: [-]

Cicatrix: [Sin-of-Census] {Born of a guilty conscience, [Sin-of-Census] tallies each and every life taken egosyntonically, be it in the immediate or the faraway, charting the cascading paths of causality to bear witness to the consequence of every action. Death of ensouled entities grants prolixity if egosyntonic parameter thereof is met; the poxility granted by this cicatrix is a lynchpin to the sulfur-principle-substrate and thus cannot be excised without severe deterioration of the eidolon’s structural integrity.}

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The alleyway with the nameless corpse felt cold, the ceranoplastic wet with humidity and the plascrete abrasive against Killjoy’s skin. He laid against the megastructure’s wall, its solidity the only thing that kept him upright as he repeated a number ‘x’ number of times where ‘x’ was the number itself.

He repeated the number as many times as itself; he could not resist the reflex, the compulsion.

Levi had black regrets staining his conscience. To forsake kith and kin, no matter how despicable they might be, was no easy thing to recover from. Your morality was informed by those around yourself—beyond shrugging off the belief that might makes right, tribalism and group cohesion bade him to love them as his own soul. Jacob ‘The Gorgon’ Basker had been his uncle—he’d gone out with Jakey for drinks countless times. The hypocorism now very much felt like hypocrisy.

Levi Basker had abandoned his family and now worked to bring their ruin. He’d murdered one of their number already.

He’d not only felt deep worthlessness from leaving but from not leaving soon enough. How many people had suffered because of him? Why had it taken so long for him to see through it all and see the suffering for what it was?

How could he have killed them? How many people mourned loved ones he had taken away? There was no excuse, no justification. And no permanent escape from the inner condemnation, the constant rumination, and the bone-deep self-loathing.

Alcohol, and sometimes even ego-drugs when it got bad enough in between gigs, numbed him to the sharp stones in his stomach. He’d gotten ulcers and Levi could not deny that he deserved them.

The escape had always been temporary, just a night or two, but now he’d never have it again. Now, Levi knew just how many souls he’d snuffed out. The number was lower than he’d feared and higher than he was comfortable living with—but the serpent would deny him escape as the scars on his soul would deny him drunkenness.

There, under the rawest expression of his being, lay a pain-inducing number that he would never forget. He couldn’t forget. It was stuck on repeat at the back of his mind like an old-world dead-tech compact disk.

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Whenever Levi closed his eyes, [Sin-of-Census] welcomed him with open arms that would not let go once they got a hold of you.

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Homicides: [47 Eidolons] {Deaths wrought by the bearer's own hand or indirectly through premeditated means and orders as an extension of the self.}

Apathies: [10345 Eidolons] {Deaths that could have been prevented or were brought to bear through inaction.}

Ego-deaths: [2737 Iterations//3 Husk-fruit maturation cycles.] {Deaths of the self.}

Prolixity: [13,129 Characters] {All deaths weigh the same. Those dead by the bearer’s hand, those dead by the bearer’s inaction, and that of the bearer itself; each death of an ensouled entity reaps a single character.}

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The worst part was that, all-in-all, the numbers were rather low when compared against the other gangers of Neo Babylon. But still, the bar was so low you’d trip on it—only thing lower was fallen, low Heaven.

Killjoy had already thought of himself as a lodestone for death and suffering and that cicatrix now confirmed it in glaring, neon letters. The soul-scar was retroactive to boot, granting increased lexical mass the same way some people lucked into being grandfathered into some inheritance or another. And like an absurdly wealthy estate, it was built on the broken backs of others.

Though he hated himself for it, Levi planned to add a lot more to the numbers tallied by [Sin-of-Census]. Doing nothing would otherwise add even more—inaction would cause deaths all the same. Just being alive would passively add to the character count of the lexicon of his soul, the process no different than reflexive osmosis.

Levi was an archon now, the weight of responsibility so much heavier than that of guilt no matter that he didn’t choose to be bound to the leviathan below. When you had the power to change the world for the better, you had no excuse to squander it. Either give it to another or gird your loins—affluence was zero-sum; for one to have it, another must not.

He’d bear any increase to the census so long as he could put a stop to Father and others of his ilk. He had no excuse not to put the monster down. Levi hoped that he’d not become a greater monster in doing so.

Dogs in Heaven, how he hoped against hope. He wasn’t able to kill himself anymore—he’d have to live with everything he’d done whether he wanted to or not. Sure, it was all partitioned into its own iteration but Levi would know.

He’d remember—the scar written on his soul would make sure of it even if he developed dementia. He’d have to contend with a Hell of his own making.

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After scrounging up enough funds through daemon hunting, Killjoy returned to the soulstitcher from the penultimate iteration, an androgyne with the lexical call sign of [Seamstress]. The names of Neo Babylon—any Principality, really—were not necessarily given names. Humans were only mortal so long as they were poor; shards could buy a new golem-sleeve, Tribe and all. And so, go long enough living and you’d find yourself becoming a different person altogether from the one you’d been incarnated as.

Names changed with the centuries; sometimes slowly morphing and keeping vestigial parts of the parental nym, sometimes being born anew entirely with monikers and the like. The [Seamstress]’ sobriquet was the latter—go long enough doing the same thing and Levi reckoned he’d go by his trade rather than his name, too.

Unfortunately, [Murderer] was already long-since taken beyond being overused by the young and dumb.

The androgyne was aHelluva stitch—no bleedover whatsoever, in this iteration or the one before the last, even with an apparatus presenting high levels of structural instability. Stressed lexical architecture tended to melt into itself and absorb what should be disparate parts into a singular cannibalistic amalgam; that the stitch could weave a weapons-grade daemon into an already ragged tapestry was a testament to their hard-earned skill.

They were easy on the eyes to boot, but Levi was avoiding intimate relations altogether—don’t stick your dick in crazy was well intentioned advice and he intended to follow through with it in a roundabout way. He was entirely too unstable and preferred not to subject others to his particular brand of insanity. Dicks, pricks and whatever else was off the table for a long time if not forever.

It was already enough that he had to suffer himself—best not not drag another into this.

With a slightly modified [Glasya-Labolas] daemon snuggly fit into his soul, Levi made his way to one of three rather sensitive compounds.

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The first was a weapon’s cache. Entirely too useful to leave for last, it’d help him finish another compound before he succumbed to eudaemonia—quicker iterations tended to stress his apparatus less. Levi had shaven off a good few days on getting a daemon this time around with the practice and foreknowledge.

[Mr-Hands] wasn’t even a shard easier budge, so Levi had to simply overpower the daemon with sheer quantity of quarry. He didn’t resort to threatening because the leviathan below was rather fickle on when it decided to lend him a hand. Killjoy couldn’t count on the archangel’s whims aligning with his own.

Instead of being a walled complex oriented horizontally on a large pane of plascrete, the weapon’s cache was a vertical parasite embedded onto a megastructure coated in ceranoplastic—this low in the quadrant gave way to humidity that would otherwise rust bare plascrete over the millenia.

Black alabaster windows crisscrossed with carbon-fiber proved to be the only entry points from the outside. Beneath the ceranoplastic skin was meters-thick plascrete reinforced with titanium rebar bones. A complex circulatory system of glyphs and seals pumped lexical blood throughout the foreign growth plastered onto the megastructure.

Levi didn’t have near enough know-how to crack the cryptography of the wards, so it was from within that he’d have to enter the weapon’s cache.

“[No choice but through the belly of the beast.]” Killjoy told himself as he slid down the opposing megastructure’s frictionless ceranoplastic wall—it was kilometers tall and slick with humidity to boot.

Every few meters, Killjoy invoked suction cups anywhere his exposed skin made contact with the wall. The Seamstress had spliced a strain of Hyraia-Legion daemon onto [Glasya-Labolas]; not enough to beckon a true-name change and reset his rapport with the daemon, but just enough to slightly morph its true-form’s qualities. Mostly, it was some strands of superflory code that would melt under too much stress—a rush job.

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Engram: [Daemon]

Pseudonym: [Glasya-Labolas]

True-name: [C-A-A-C-R-I-N-O-L-A-A-S]

Sefirot-class: [Netzach]

Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]

Legion-origin: [Aeria//H̸y̶r̷a̵i̵a̵]

Designation: [Predation] - [Digits 0//5]

True-form: [A cherubic hound flys on vulture’s wings, forward-facing eyes festering with asp’s venom. Quills erupt from the cherub-hound’s scaled back, lining a serpentine spine that shimmers under moonlight like gossamer. The clarion call from the vocal sac under its gilled throat shackles the soul and legs both. Talons, curved and sickle-like, ache to reap blood so that it might beget even more—t̶h̷e̸ ̶u̷n̴d̶e̷r̸s̸i̴d̴e̷ ̴o̴f̴ ̴e̵a̴c̸h̵ ̴d̵i̵g̶i̸t̵ ̶i̴s̵ ̷c̴o̵a̴t̵e̷d̶ ̴i̴n̵ ̷c̵i̸r̶c̷u̵l̵a̶r̴,̶ ̷a̸d̷h̴e̸s̷i̴v̶e̵ ̶s̴u̴c̵k̵e̴r̸s̷;̸ ̶c̸o̴m̸p̷o̵s̴e̷d̶ ̴o̵f̵ ̴c̷h̴i̴t̷i̵n̴o̴u̸s̵ ̴c̶u̴t̶i̴c̸l̶e̷,̵ ̷l̷a̷m̵p̷r̶e̴y̴ ̵m̴o̵u̴t̵h̷s̵ ̷s̷e̶r̵r̸a̸t̵e̵d̴ ̸a̷n̵d̴ ̴p̵o̸i̴n̸t̵e̷d̴ ̴b̴a̵c̷k̵w̸a̷r̵d̷s̴ ̵l̴i̸k̶e̶ ̷w̴h̷a̶l̷e̵-̷t̴e̷e̶t̶h̴.]

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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Pseudonym]

Pseudonym: [Glasya-Labolas] {Endows salt-principle-substrate with the perfunctory abilities of the engram’s true-form; decreases the rate of pseudonym’s libidic consumption per ensouled entity egosyntonically felled, but increases daemonic burden upon the ego.}

True-name: [C-A-A-C-R-I-N-O-L-A-A-S]

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The modification was a wax sculpture; beautifully sculpted but no less ephemeral. A little body heat and it’d dissolve. The same had happened with an intact daemon once he had drained his neon dry—the fight with Jacob “the Gorgon” Basker—and he wondered what mutations would arise once he passed its tolerance level, its negescence.

Would the superfluous code melt into burning wax and coat him in suckers? Would it corrupt the entirety of the engram’s salt-principle-substrate and morph the daemon from Aeria to Hyraia, from the ether below the moon to the ether at the depths of the ocean?

Levi’d find out. Of that, at least, he was certain.

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