ENTRY 013//GOETIA//WEEPING SORCERY
> Daemonolatry, psionics, weeping sorcery, alchemy; the occult arts are manifold in the 96th millennium. They blend into one another, seemingly distinct disciplines interfacing at their roots like mycelium. Each art, then, is just a fruiting body; a mushroom. Below, at the substrate, they are the same.
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> The human soul as fuel.
—Pre-Lexical//Post-Pandaemonium syncretic excerpt, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum; a compiled repository for common knowledge pertaining to 96th Millenium daemonics.
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The mouth of the beast of a megastructure was a manifold—there were as many openings as a black locust hive, swarming with humanity. Levi entered an entrance at random, walking leisurely.
Levi hid his appearance under a layer of neo-clothes running a masquerade protocol—projections of daemonic schema that made him look like a Pre-Pandaemonium rave participant. The visage was rather common among the Principalities so it didn't trigger any scanning subroutines in the local sub-ether.
The problem was his soul—his ego signature, in specific. You could change homunculi all you wanted but the bones would remain the same. The only thing that produced morphological changes to an eidolon’s sigs were time and stress.
An hour and four minutes of general vagrancy later, and Levi laughed out loud. His voice scraped against the souls closest to him, causing them to give him a wide berth but beyond that he was still in the clear.
I’ve been through enough traumatic shit that my ego-sigs are entirely unrecognizable by those on file.
Even the City’s infrastructure hadn’t called him out by name—he was effectively a ghost in the ether ecosystem.
His nerves unwound from the tight spiral they’d found themselves. Levi continued his recon; walking, talking and generally getting the lay of the land. He changed appearances often when in blind spots—there were no cameras, no optic feeds in the Pandaemonium. Instead, daemons were used as nothing more than glorified security and those were easy to skirt with the right know-how.
Low-level ontologics—often called psionics—could be used by anyone, grafted or completely baseline unlike goetics which required a mandatum function. Ego-radiation and misdirection were the most that one could do without daemonics or heavy lexical warping, but both were useful in reconnaissance. A little flare of ego there to direct engrams within the sub-ether traffic, a smoothed-over nous membrane here to make the dogs gloss over him; so on and so forth.
Levi chatted up the local daemon mill—minor stuff, foundation-class at best—and got wind of the construction that was happening to the megablock. Apparently, the weapons-cache had been a rush job done some two centuries ago and was being refitted with a thousand-or-so titanium screws to hold it in place for a few more decades until a dedicated architect could be brought on-site.
Lucky him—it was almost like the universe was handing this to Levi on a silver platter. He hadn’t even asked anyone for John the Baptist’s head and yet it was delivered all the same.
The woman complained and cursed like a sailor, livid at the block in the local sub-ether that made her gestating strains grow weak and stillborn. The titanium screws were physical, Malkuth matter but that didn’t mean that they didn’t interact with the lexical—there was alchemy in even the smallest, meanest of things.
“[Well, ma’am, don’t you worry—you’ll pay your rent on time today. I know the guy that owns the place; I’ll have a talk with her.]”
Levi’s voice was the susurrus of a serpent daemon offering a very juicy and not-at-all-suspect-or-forbidden fruit. Whether or not the woman would be thrown out of her Eden remained to be seen.
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Though Levi didn’t have an ether-diving suite of daemonics, he used basic ontologics derived from the [Nameless] grimoire to lead him to the underworks—the guts—of the megastructure. The flow of daemons, little whispers on the wind heard only with an empty mind, were easily ignored most of the time. A person would only pay daemonic infrastructure any sort of attention when they needed something out of the local sub-ether.
The ether of a Principality was cordoned off from the lexical universe at large—best practice, really, to avoid any apocalypse beasts slipping in and killing a few billions. Shamans, divers of the ether, were the Pandaemonium analogue of the netrunners of old, swimming through the mercurial sea that connected all those within a Principality’s walls. Daemonic schema tended towards a cybernetic visage from the leftover golden age’s influence on the zeitgeist.
A skeuomorph among many calcified within humanity’s collective consciousness.
The interstitial corridors of the megastructure finally gave way to Levi’s quarry. A skeleton crew was overseeing the installation of a titanium screw—it was monstrously long, a few hundred meters or so. Lexical paraphernalia of all kinds littered the workspace; from the glass tanks filled with daemonic-amniotic fluid on their backs to supply neon to their welders, to the corpulescent containment suits they wore to protect themselves from the occupational hazards such as heat and lexical warping.
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Levi knew then and there that those containment suits would be a boon to cracking the cache. Their striations were arranged so as to evoke pareidolia, forming glyphs and seals like reverse skin tags.
“[Sorry for the delay. Bossman said that she needed a git to suit up on site and run to a screw twenty meters up. It’s showing up as exceeding stress thresholds.]”
The workers gave each other a look, shrugged collectively and threw Levi a spare suit and welder like a man throws a dog a bone.
“Get at it, then. Before the boss rips you a new one.”
Killjoy gave them a lazy salute and suited up then and there.
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[Pseudo-ego sigs detected, establishing lexical ligature.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]
Pseudonym: [Bloatsuit]
True-name: [U-N-D-U-L-A-T-A]
Sefirot-class: [Hod]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Hyraia]
Designation: [Isolation] - [Strings 0//32]
Principle-substrate: [Salt]
True-form: [A suit of armor made of congealed brine. Gelatinous membranes cling like a second skin to that which would dwell within the hollow innards of the suit. Grown on the boughs of a dule tree, it smells of unkempt hair.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]
Pseudonym: [Crying-Weevil]
True-name: [S-E-R-A-N-I-T-H]
Sefirot-class: [Hod]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Enalia]
Designation: [Synthesis] - [Grave 0//1]
Principle-substrate: [Mercury]
True-form: [A beetleworm pupa, writhing in eight-legged peristalsis. Its mercurial tears eat away at noble metals, rendering them into amalgam. Cursed with larval stagnation, the leg-ridden wyrm is destined to shed a thousand-and-one husks, never to grow beyond itself.]
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The bloatsuit plugged into Levi’s ontology like a thousand-thousand ring-worms, itching something fierce. The neural-metaphysical dissonance buzzed before settling into the background radiation; the hairs on end did the same, white against white.
The welder was based on alchemical bonds rather than heat—it extruded a mercury compound that bound any metal to itself, turning temporarily malleable before flash-fusing into a stable state.
With the tools in hand, Killjoy climbed up into the belly of the beast.
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It took time for the amalgam to set. Before it fully hardened, it left materials structurally-weak, weak as clay. All Levi had to do was to part the layers by a daemon-clad hand till he reached the cache, burrowing and boring through like a termite within wood. He knew from the stolen memories approximately where he’d end up: the bathroom.
The bloatsuit integrated nicely with his invocations, layering them atop the suit to avoid complications—daemonics were old hand to 96th Millenium such that incompatibility was non-existent unless it was required.
The first thing Levi did was to veil himself with seals of shabiri and obfuscation talismans; goetia originating from the Legion of Leliouria. The Abyss Above, Dumah, the ether beyond the moon. It had many names and all came to express the same truth.
Nothingness stared back.
The darkness bore the worst of terrors; hallucinatory phosphene spreading like the spores of fruiting bodies as the mind searched in vain for patterns that simply weren’t there, tormenting itself with imagined phantoms.
There were eyes in the dark. But they are only your own, Levi repeated to himself, a mantra to protect against the coming storm clouds. Taking hold of the root of his tongue, the mandatum function chanted the words for him. The leviathan below spoke with its two-fold forked tongues.
“[May the eyesless moon hide me away in shabiri//May the ash of the dead stars mar my body gray from sight for blind is my witness.]”
Levi’s goetia, his weeping sorcery, fell upon him like tears in the sea of sorrow, settling against his soul and burdening it with guilt.
Killjoy rubbed his throat, the knots within threatening to spill out as sobs—goetia put pressure upon the imago, the higherform conscience that separated ensouled humanity from soulless animals. Each syllable uttered while under the influence of goetia tore at one’s moral fiber and sanity until they were rendered into an inconsolable mess. Neuroses and delusions of guilt would compound until either suicide or catatonic withdrawal from reality, whichever escape came first.
This kind of sorcery was a sin against existence itself, to subvert and defile it to your own design. Only the mad and the enlightened could wield goetia to its fullest potential.
Killjoy opened the door, a claustrophobic thing that folded in on itself inch-thick steel. Metal was common in a Principality, its ease of modification—lexically-speaking—its greatest boon. Metal conducted heat and energy better than wood and so wouldn’t spontaneously combust under the influence of neon.
The weapons cache was built as a large room with a central pillar; the thing pulsed with schema and engrams of all kinds swimming within, the beating heart of the compound’s lexical infrastructure. More rooms and dormitories were built physically unlinked, above and below the central room—a minor chariot circle had been inscribed on the pillar and would shift people to their destinations. Space, as always, was a premium.
Ten men were in the central room; six of them women and four of them possibly endowed with a prick (Levi hadn’t asked yet… he probably wouldn’t, given the conflict of interest; he came to kill these people, not to fuck them. Well, metaphorically speaking, perhaps.).
Levi went around the periphery of the room, placing talismans in strategic chokepoints and fallbacks. Two for negative pressure that would create implosions that would do negligible structural damage but a whole lot of personnel damage (contusions and the like) and eight for misdirection—ego-echoes and lesser seals of dementia and amnesia.
After placing the seals, Levi went back into the weapons cache’s bowels and used the welder to block the major lexical arteries with mercurial plaque. The conductive copper wires and coolant stopped working as they should as the once-disparate pipes melted into a single amalgamation.
With his preparations set, Killjoy returned to the central room to see everyone on edge—red, neon light flashed through the air to indicate a power out. They really are like bees, he thought. The juxtaposition of the grim morbidity of what he planned to do was not lost on him.
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