ENTRY 014//CHRYSALIS//UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
> Daemons go through four stages of maturation not unlike moths.
>
> Their first stage is larval; daemons, independent of strain and Legion, are vulnerable and rather impressionable. They are more easily molded by outside influences and can be modified without risk to parthenogenesis by a skilled engramist. Larval daemons are not to be brought into an uncontrolled or antithetical environment lest they warp and develop in unexpected and detrimental ways. Daemonic maladaptation is not treatable after the third stage of maturation.
>
> The second stage is pupal, known as the scabbard-stage; daemons have absorbed enough lexical code from their hosts and environments and begin to assimilate it into their body of knowledge. Where the first stage required exposure and time, the second requires an abrupt lexical shock of sorts; to awaken a daemon from its scabbard, its cocoon, is by no means guaranteed. This stage marks a threshold, a bottleneck, between the mean and the great.
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> Once a daemon has their nous and pseudo-ego awakened, they reach the third stage known aptly as the imago-stage. They have broken open from their cocoons into their adult forms. Daemons are soulless engrams and so perform symbiosis with a soul to receive what they lack; imago-stage daemons form daemonic pacts with their hosts, interfacing soul-to-pseudo-ego.
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> This is where the stories of ‘deals with devils’ come from. Adult daemons are, on average, centuries old, having been passed down and cultivated through familial lines or bargained from one hand to another. They are known to be quite wily and cunning in establishing the terms and conditions of their compacts.
>
> The fourth stage is known as incubation and it requires an adult daemon to split itself into smaller, strain-identical, shards. Daemons are, afterall, fractal in nature. They can break down into themselves so long as they have achieved imago-stage.
—Pre-Lexical//Post-Pandaemonium syncretic excerpt, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum; a compiled repository for common knowledge pertaining to 96th Millenium daemonics.
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Levi borrowed the cherub hound’s talons. Neon flared along the grooves carved into his ontology, coalescing into constructs of gelatinous light and daemonic schema on top of his digits. The claws settled within his being like a leviathan’s bones at the bottom of the methane ocean of Hyraia; they were where they belonged.
He knew it shouldn’t have felt so natural—his self-image was warping under the daemon’s influence, resonating with it and morphing as they neared synchronicity.
-////Designation: [Predation] - [Digits 1//6]////-
-////Lexical energy reserve: [95%] {Construct sublimation in effect.}////-
Killjoy walked among them, a wolf among the sheep whose own wool was pulled over their very eyes.
Reality-bending of any kind—be it psionics, goetia or daemonics—all worked on the conceptual level; the lexical was built like a dictionary where the meanings of its words overlapped and thus produced amalgamate superconcepts or oversouls to which each term belonged to. Id est, Levi’s talismans didn’t simply make him blend into the environment but to annul most sensory outputs he’d produce, blinding reality itself to his presence.
Levi stabbed the closest individual through the neck. Having studied a bit on where the optimal place to stab someone is for a quick and mostly painless death, Killjoy was already onto his next victim—he wasn’t going to mince his words and cloud what he did under euphemism; Levi came here for premeditated murder.
By the third death, the spell of shabiri broke under the increased strain and Levi’s ego-radiation was resisted—he wasn’t a sorcerer of any renown, just knew enough fundamentals to make use of a daemon properly. And he did so right then and there.
Levi’s mouth opened and within it, his scaled tongue opened its own maw. The unfathomable spiral madness that was the tongue-within-the-tongue laced the cherub-hound’s voice like embalming fluid laced angel dust—an astringent and disconcerting undertone.
The resulting clarion call paralyzed all those within the cache; the wards had been a double-edged blade, directing the sound and its accompanying ego-radiation to within the confined space. Walls didn’t just keep things out, they also kept them in.
-////Designation: [Predation] - [Digits 1//6]////-
-////Lexical energy reserve: [87%] {Construct sublimation in effect but quartered; pseudonym: [Glasya-labolas], subroutine: [Bloodlust] active; pseudonym: [Glasya-labolas], subroutine: [Ego-Radiation], protocol: [Clarion] active.}////-
With the stragglers stunned, Levi dashed to the closest one.
It’ll be your fault, a little voice repeated in the back of his head, mumbling a particular set of numbers that totaled nearly thirteen thousand.
Killjoy’s steps were heavy, laden with guilt—the cost of goetics compounded on already-present vulnerabilities. Killjoy would have to find a soulstitcher to put him back together after this iteration, he knew. The trauma backlash would be severe enough to send him into catatonia for dozens of jaunts to the serpent below creation.
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The ganger did not have enough time to fully draw a weapon from his soul—an exhale was required for that and Levi was on top of him in a blink. Killjoy stabbed the man through the diaphragm with an upturned claw, fully ending any possibility of reprisal. The deformed and keratinous talons scraped against the ribcage and spine as they sought to delve deeper into the meat.
That was all they were, then. Levi had rendered them into objects in his mind before the breach—justifications of all sorts flitting through him, then—and now he rendered them into objects in the real world; skeletons whose flesh melted away into the clay-casts of their prospective homunculi.
Levi killed a woman with a backhand to the carotid, neon-constructs flaring as they drew a thick gout of arterial spray. She fell clutching her throat ineffectually—it hadn’t been a clean cut, but instead a rending. No ash-wound potion could stabilize that.
The last four had finally shaken-off their temporary tonic paralysis, diving behind cover and exhaling weapons from their spirits with shaky breaths. Levi would kill them just the same.
The first to return fire was a woman in Legion attire, a faceless mask of Leliouria on her head—it was cast of a smooth, skin-like polymer that was cold to the touch. It had no eyes, no nose, and no ears; only a line for a mouth that went from ear to nonexistent ear. She could still see through it, evident by the good aim; she caught Levi in the belly, nicking something vital all the while.
Whatever it was, the adrenaline and focus made the pain distant. Probably a ruptured organ or some such. He could get it patched up with the stitch, too. The body followed in the wake of the soul; mind over matter.
Levi sprinted the last meters toward the wannabe Leliouric Legionnaire under a cover of feathers—they broke like brittle ice, refracting light around him like the accretion disk of a singularity. His feet pounded the bare, plascrete floor, his form a blur. Bullets grazed him as if he ran through a bramble-thicket of lead and sulfur.
-////Designation: [Predation] - [Digits 2//6]////-
-////Lexical energy reserve: [54%] {Construct sublimation in effect but quartered; pseudonym: [Glasya-labolas], subroutine: [Bloodlust] active; pseudonym: [Glasya-labolas], subroutine: [Obfuscation], protocol: [Moonveil] active.}////-
Levi dropped the veil when he had the faceless mask dangling from his claws, the accompanying body writhing with. He had hung the woman on his talons by the chin like an old-world pig on the butcher’s hook; he could feel her tongue spasming on the tips of his phantom digits.
There were four targets left. Levi had been inside the cache for a minute and a half.
Killjoy dismissed the construct overlaid onto the bloatsuit to dislodge the corpse before he pulled another veil back atop himself and crawled the walls on all fours like a beast. Suction cups grew from the flesh of the bloatsuit and not just that; the intense draw of neon was beginning to warp the armament, fractal feathers erupting along its arms. Levi wasn’t yet in overdraw, it was just a lower sefirot-class than the cherub-hound.
Levi activated all four lesser seals of implosion simultaneously. They created zones of negative pressure that churned the surrounding furniture and paraphernalia, taking the arm of a man off by twisting it out from the socket. The sound of rending cartilage and fracturing bone was like music to his ears.
Whether that thought came from him or [Glasya-labolas] didn’t matter. Both options meant the point of no return in the violent descent into psychosis.
With Killjoy high and above the mess, he relaxed imagined muscles and dropped down on vulture’s wings. The gangers had been thrown this way and that; they were disoriented, aiming and pulling the trigger on their own. The perfect cytokine storm.
-////Designation: [Predation] - [Digits 2//6]////-
-////Lexical energy reserve: [54%] {Construct sublimation in effect but quartered; pseudonym: [Glasya-labolas], subroutine: [Bloodlust] active.}////-
He fell a heel against a man’s nape, breaking his neck in the process; three more stragglers left.
Levi walked over the battered body, the bones beneath him crunching, to a woman nursing a gash on her head from flying furniture. She looked up and caught sight of him before he ripped open her trachea. And then there were two.
The last survivor in any fighting condition was wise and dropped their side piece. Levi did not bother to pick it up, instead just kicking it far and away. Long-range recall wasn’t in the specs of a [White-Jackal]. Maybe I ought to nab it, though. I always liked the Chthonia Legion’s arms.
A man bled out to death ten paces behind Killjoy; he felt his last breath on the hairs of his nape, transmitted through the local sub-ether. Any messages sent would take far too long to be of any use without the signal-repeater engram within the central pillar; Levi had made sure to clog up the infrastructure to cripple it for that reason alone.
The cherub hound staked to his soul opened its vulture’s wings in exaltation of the hunt. Its daemonic nous and pseudo-ego stirred, enticed by the heavy smell of copper and slaughter. Killjoy’s rapport with the daemon was increasing faster than it should have, the clout of the previous iterations still, seemingly, fresh; by the end of this run, Levi would have fully awoken the domesticated strain into something more.
The thought was shelved for another time as Levi stared down the last survivor. She did not shake, nerves of steel freezing her body in place. The slight tremor of her mandible highlighted the adrenaline and cortisol that Levi realized he could now smell.
It smelled acidic and tasted like the meat of a prey animal that knew it was about to die.
Killjoy walked nice and slow to the woman, a Mulligan in the syndicate's heraldic colors; black and blue. She had daemonsign scales crawling along the contours of her face like lizards sunbathing in the desert, the colors reminiscent of Bypochtonia, the Legion of Beasts, the Duidain.
A little more information wouldn’t hurt.
Him, that is. Unfortunately, Father had taught his son far too well.
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