ENTRY 017//SEFIROT//BROKEN VESSELS
> Daemons are functions of the universe, given shape from cultural bias. Umbilically-corded to the onus of collective belief, self-perpetuating engrams gain clout from running, concurrently, in parallel mindscapes. A sort of cloud network operating on a gelatinous neural matrix rather than the ubiquitous copper and dead-tech of the past.
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> These viral engrams came into being when the wall between the lexical and physical worlds—the sefirot—was sundered, each daemon a fragment of the demolished transdimensional separatory membrane. Crystalline formations seeded from fractal shards of the underlying mechanisms of existence inside the formless fluid-solution known as the ether.
—Post-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Joseph “Mulligan” Basker Information Commons Request for Personality-Impregnation into Golem Sleeve: [Paris-PlasterTM Mark XIX].
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Levi hunted down the last of the Mulligans like dogs, and he couldn’t deny that he’d felt satisfaction from the violence. It was the height of hypocrisy given he’d been no better, if not worse, than them some thirty-odd years ago.
He knew all the justifications intimately, repeated ad nauseam on lonely nights after the schism. Just following orders. Just doing what you’re told. Don’t wanna get reprimanded. Don’t wanna get punished. Don’t wanna be a decent human being because I'm a spineless coward.
Sure, he could hide behind the decades. He could deny that this Levi was the same person as before but that would’ve been a lie. His pseudonyms, his core identities, were written in bold neon letters in his soul. Killjoy could not escape from the name ‘Basker’ no more than a single person could drink all of the sea of sorrow.
Killjoy stalked back towards the prisoners like a specter of vengeance, the dead bodies of their captors dragged along by daemonic tentacles, suckers siphoning their cerebrospinal fluid. Some of them were constructs of neon—gelatinous holographs—while others were physicalized and permanent mutations. He’d tried to cut one of the tendrils off only for two more to grow in its place. Shouldn’t have been so surprised given hydras called Hyraia home.
The first thing to do to set the prisoners free was to unravel the blood bindings that fed into the wards. The lexical ligature intersected in the ether like a tangled knot, a single indent within its undulating mass. The shaman’s ego-sig was weak but just enough remained to give Levi admin rights and activate the dissolution protocol; ten minutes later and the binding was no more, washed away into the sea of all-knowledge as nothing more than unstrung letters.
Levi sent out probing tendrils of [Narcissus] along the local sub-ether, connecting to the various cell’s locks and feeding them the access-tokens he’d plundered from the Mulligan corpses. The silver-iron composites melted into amalgam and receded into the grooves carved into the ceranoplastic floor.
After it was of no more use, Levi spat out the shaman’s soul like leftover tobacco. Having been untethered from its homunculus by [Narcissus], the eidolon was free to follow the sequence of souls and traverse along the roots of the Qabalah unto its next life.
More than she deserved. More than Levi himself deserved.
“[You are free to leave; the exit's that way. Your captors are dead except for a single one. Leave that one alone, I have plans for her.]”
The prisoners not too far gone into catatonia or psychosis shuffled their way to the exit as Levi watched over the writhing Mulligan knight. He’d have to euthanize the worst of the daemon mill’s victims and let their souls start over fresh.
There wasn’t a cure for that level of fucked-up—where the mind bent back unto itself, recursing away into atrophy and insanity. And on the off chance that they’d recover some semblance of rational thought, it would be so riddled with traumatic artefacts that the Churches would hunt them down to curb any possibility of an outbreak of eudaemonia. Cacodaemons would be attracted to their broken souls forevermore without sequencing, revictimization an inevitability in this life.
Death was the escape.
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Since so many of the lost souls had daemons embedded into them, Levi dragged their broken vessels into a circle of salt he’d hastily poured and called the cavalry before he put them out of their misery.
He used his bare hands; they had been irrevocably mutated into claws, keratinous growths corruscating outwards from his bone while suckers burst from his flesh. Skulls instantly were crushed like fragile cocoons under daemonic strength. There was no satisfaction from these deaths, only catharsis. Only release from this despicable mortal coil.
The signal that Levi sent traveled the lexical universe through repeater engrams to reach the Legion of Sorrows. He waited, with blood and brain matter and bone shards on his hands, for an exorcist to arrive on-site.
During the downtime, Levi was witness to the disembodied spirits being infected worse yet by the lexical viruses. Though grotesque and macabre, it was better than leaving the plague of daemons a foothold into physical reality without the ichor bindings to keep them in check.
Father showed him once, no more than a week incarnated in Malkuth, what an eudaemonia outbreak did to a quadrant. He’d handed ‘little’ Levi an iron and said “Put lead in between their eyes.”
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“It’s kinder than letting them suffer.” Was left unspoken but heavily implied. Father would never admit to any sort of empathy beyond the ounce needed to con someone from life, limb, and fortune.
“A daemon can wear the halo of an angel or the horns of a devil, but at their cores they are little more than beasts. They’d hollow you out—soul-eating maggots that they are—given the first chance.”
Killjoy rummaged around the Mulligan knight’s soul as watched the spiritual equivalent of an immune response happen within the circle of salt; the ego calcified and turned dormant as a means to protect its nous, its core.
Levi took the access-tokens and ciphers through threat from her; he could just as well throw the Mulligan into the circle of salt and let the daemons do as their soulless natures dictated. It wasn’t baseless. Levi had done just that with the other nine Mulligan corpses, feeding them to the charnel Hell of their own making.
He had brought some containment seals that worked up to netzach-class so he could take the woman’s engrams with him, armaments and all. Unanesthetized surgery of the soul was one of the worst torments; Levi knew as much. He ripped out the daemons from her ego without care, leaving behind artefact-roots of lexical code that would fester if not treated soon.
Already, Killjoy could see her eyes beginning to change into those of a cuttlefish, the pupil of a leviathan of Hyraia. Daemonsigns were controlled mutations; purposeful grafting of true-form qualities. This was not that. Like a prion disease, her proteins would slowly warp to fit the new lines of lexical code infecting her soul.
“[You may leave.]” Killjoy told her as he put the stolen engrams into stasis within the containment seals. The talismans themselves went into a hermetic pouch made of leather taken from a bestial daemon’s true-form.
The Mulligan stumbled her way out the compound, wounded in body and mind and soul.
He couldn’t quite muster any semblance of remorse for what he did to her. Cold pragmatism and hot fury both bade him to disregard the humanity, the personhood, of the Mulligans that guarded the daemon mill.
Killjoy wasn’t stupid. He knew he wasn’t any better.
Levi prodded at [Sin-of-Census], rechecking its count even though he hadn’t killed anyone in ten minutes.
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Homicides: [66 Eidolons] {Deaths wrought by the bearer's own hand or indirectly through premeditated means and orders as an extension of the self.}
Apathies: [10347 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: [13,150 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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Killjoy went over the numbers, again and again, prodding around the mouth ulcer in his soul with his serpent’s-maw tongue. He was shaken out of his rumination not halfway through the apathies.
A halo erupted in the ether and Levi, for the first time in a long while, felt fear.
It was a residual thing, like the cold dread of Father finding him but so much worse—magnitudes greater. Father couldn’t do what eight cruel g-ds did. He wasn’t all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful.
In comparison to the archons, Joseph was downright all-benevolent.
The daemon mill’s walls peeled back like the carapace of a durian fruit, exposing it to the angel suspended in mid-air. Levi was not expecting to see Them so soon after the last visit. Strange to see a magistrate of the Parabola Legion leading a bunch of sorrows; some politicking shenanigans were sure to be afoot.
[Pronoia] was affixed in space, Their wings digging into the flesh of reality to hold Them statically aloft.
“[Kneel.]”
Levi did as he was told, his three hearts beating in concert, one after the other to pulse adrenaline-laden blood throughout his veins. The pressure of the saint’s soul beat down upon his nape, standing its white hairs on end but otherwise doing nothing much beyond that.
Lower sefirot-class exorcists stormed into the daemon mill and clamped shut a large silver shackle around Killjoy’s neck. It was a bulky artifice and heavy too. Crimson red neon oozed from its grooves before the device shunted ten hypodermic needles into his body, anchoring itself into flesh and soul both. Lexical ligature spread throughout the ether, binding Levi’s ontology with an utterly complex mix of goetia, ichor, and daemonics. He could not access his grimoire at all and much less feel anything beyond his immediate body and the daemon grafted to it; the cherub hound was in the beginnings of compact-formation and thus couldn’t be entirely locked away from his grasp. The [Subsumption] protocol was active to boot, binding [Glasya-Labolas] inextricably into his being.
With his libido suppressed, he generated no neon; the cherub hound was a blade sheathed inside a scabbard with plascrete. Once a formidable weapon, now just dead weight.
The Enalia exorcists dragged him into a chariot—the new-world equivalent of a vehicle, used to transport dangerous quantities through the ether. Levi did not see what happened to the victims inside the circle of salt but he knew that it wasn’t a pretty picture.
Fool’s gold that it was, he only hoped that they’d find some peace in their next lives. The world owed them as much.
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It was a good thing that Levi let the other prisoners go instead of giving them to the exorcists, he reckoned as the chariot experienced transdimensional turbulence as it traveled through the ether.
He’d sent info-packets detailing several good stitchers that would remove the mammonic moth-seeds free of charge; they were valuable on their own to warrant it. The soulstitchers would most likely offer plastic surgery, of the body and soul both, to help the victims move on with their lives as well.
Killjoy had no faith in the Legions to do anything other than sequencing.
The transport came to a sudden calm as it breached through the veil to re-enter physical reality. Levi knew that this iteration was likely botched, but had remained to see if he could salvage something else from it—the arms from the weapons-cache were valuable things and would be a hassle to reacquire.
When the exorcists dragged him by the chains punctured into his soul towards an edifice to the Church of Luxuria, he came to regret not killing himself sooner.
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