ENTRY 018//THALAMUS-CORTEX//LIMBIC RESONANCE
> The brain processes emotional distress and physical pain through the same neural pathways. Nerve endings to spinal cord to brain stem reticular formation and then to the somatosensory cortex; this is the only divergence in pathing between tissue damage and mental agony. The rest of the interpretation, indifferent to origin, happens within the limbic system and neocortex.
>
> Sticks and stones may break your bones but words pierce directly to the soul.
—Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Noah Thames On the Fundament of Thought.
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No angel descended from on high to save Levi ‘Killjoy’ Basker.
The devils in priest’s cloth rummaged around his body and soul for their answers. These adulants to the sin of lust thought themselves rather inventive in their methods of torture and inquisition. Ontological exploratory surgery while awake and unanesthetized—ironic given what Levi had done to the Mulligan—to more mundane but no less profane means.
Levi had been through worse by worse. Their own matron had gored his very being with the horns of the Goat Idol Morrigain itself. Though grunts escaped his lips and his spine contorted under the pain, none of it reached his ego proper.
Waves against the rocks. He endured like the pale-blind serpent below the earth; eternal, uncaring, catatonic.
The withdrawal from reality came rather easy to the ninth archon as his mortal mind buckled under its own weight. Perception could only be toyed with for so long. Psychosis, like all forms of insanity, was viciously cyclical—it input, it fed into itself, self-propagating and self-perpetuating, self-recursing.
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The delirium of a thousand death-dreams.
They say that your life flashes before your eyes as death descends upon you with vulture’s wings. They—whoever was the first sod to put those words in that particular order—are not wrong.
The Church of Luxuria knew how to keep a person on the knife’s edge of life and death; they did so to better find a chink in the shell of a soul, to find purchase into the muscle of the ego and devour it whole like a clam.
They struck a raw nerve in Levi’s imago, sparking a memory chain buried soul-deep.
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There were no childhoods in the Pandaemonium.
Before being shoved into a physical form, the closest thing to a probationary period was the Cradle. There, in the womb in the sky, an eidolon got to witness a pale shadow of life through collective-con-mem-engrams; the ken of a bygone age.
From literary classics to quantum theory, from religious scripture sanitized of the Tetragrammaton to chat-boards on the tail-end of the twentieth century. Everything, anything, all of the time for an entire century. The knowledge was at the tips of your soul’s tongue, easily tasted and nearly-freely given; only the goings-on of the New World required your sire to pay shekels for the information-commons request.
Levi enjoyed photographs of the stars.
They had long since turned to ash, the night sky an empty void of entropic heat-death.
There was just something so beautiful about those dots of light. Even their deaths, before the Loneliness took hold, gave birth to life. Their corpses either became the building blocks of life-bearing planets or turned into the axis upon which galaxies might affix themselves upon, to coalesce as celestial superbodies. Above or below, it did not matter.
Now, with the fabric of space so far stretched and atoms so very isolated from each other, there was no light in the dead universe.
That was the first time that Levi had suffered the melancholy that accompanied loss.
It was not the last.
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High Priest Erastes, known divinely as [Saklas], was at a loss for words.
Four months ago, the Church of Our Lady Lust had captured an eudaemoniac for questioning. The abduction itself wasn’t what gave Him pause as Neo Babylon fell under Her jurisdiction. The citizens within lived by Her suffering.
Four months and seventeen days later, and they’d yet to breach into his nous.
More precisely, the adulants of lust had only found pathways into a false lexical cache that held animal-like mem-data. Hours of qualia of digging through the byways and sewers, of lusting after rot and the like.
That particular detail had been like a slap to the face. The mortal had made the priests, though indirectly, eat metaphorical shit.
Erastes stood before the pest in the flesh. The man hung suspended on occult-etched metal; his limbs the tangents on an enochian circle. Him, a Vitruvian Man.
The High Priest Himself, Emissary of the Scapegoat, would find out wherein this wretched creature dwelled a soul. He unsheathed [Abigor] the erelim-blade with an exhale and went on to carve his pound of flesh.
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Father was not a good man.
Levi had known this before being born. The ganger had been forthright on what possessing the pseudonym [Basker] meant and came with. Joseph had given Levi the option to re-enter the sequence rather than incarnate into the Mulligan syndicate.
It was the last time the man had shown a nano-gram of humanity.
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Convulsions racked the foundations of his being.
[Shedskin] was unresponsive to his touch, ignoring his pleas. Killjoy now suspected that the viper-eyed man had made the pseudonym’s activation purposefully failure prone if the user was ontologically-suppressed just to spite him.
Lexical ligature pulled the distinct and disparate parts of his apparatus apart to bare the furthest recesses of Levi ‘Killjoy’ Basker. Probing tendrils of ego wiggled around, penetrating vulnerabilities to scry his true-name, the cipher by which he could be changed. The key to his very soul.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
What they always found was the false cipher [-//A-L-T-E-R-K-E]. All roads within his eidolon led to this nameless Rome. Even the roots of the cherub hound, now inextricably enmeshed with his salt-principle-substrate, led to the grimoire engram bound in human leather. Had it not been for the soulless beast, Levi would have long since succumbed and lost his own.
When the tendrils could not breach the wounds they’d inflicted on his eidolon, they began to pull with greater force, prying at the shell of his psyche. The pain was somehow worse than that of the archons but for the simple fact that where the Eight sought to kill, the adulants kept him alive if barely.
Salt in the sinuses was bearable when compared to sulfur on the tongue. Torment was nothing to excruciation.
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Alexis was the output to Joseph’s input.
The androgyne was the closest person to a mother that Levi ever had. They’d been there for him through thick and thin, high hell and no water, for nearly three decades since he’d incarnated. They were the Mulligan’s right-hand lieutenant for half a century; the lead head of the shamanic division of the syndicate, responsible for vital lexical architecture and data-scraping.
Father had executed them in front of the entire syndicate when Levi was absent from the third quadrant on a hit against a rival gang.
Levi’s last, fading spark of hope in his fellow man was extinguished when he found out what happened through the grape-vine. Father hadn’t even told him himself.
When confronted, all that Joseph had to say were ten words.
“Useless as an output. Spilled syndicate secrets. Had to die.”
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[Ego continuity violated//Pruning corrupted qualia and entropic artefacts//Seeding from closest uncorrupted eidolon negative.]
[Parameters {Eidolon Negative} met//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}.]
[Timestream stable//Prime iteration previously set as {Renascence}//Sorting further input.]
[Multiple foreign ego signatures detected within proximity of nous//Breach likelihood beyond margin of acceptability//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}; subroutine: {Zeroth}.]
[Eidolon image reverted to negative//Stable mem-data is stored as aggregate within a partitioned gnostic-cache.]
[...]
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Insensate from the world above, Levi fell to that one below.
He thrashed in tandem with the serpent.
There, he learned why its throes and seizures looked peristaltic in nature.
It was like him; unconscious. Blind and deaf and mute as it devoured itself. It was the universe; smooth muscle under peristalsis.
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[...]
[Ego continuity violated//Pruning corrupted qualia and entropic artefacts//Seeding from closest uncorrupted eidolon negative.]
[Parameters {Eidolon Negative} met//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}.]
[Timestream stable//Prime iteration previously set as {Renascence}//Sorting further input.]
[Multiple foreign ego signatures detected within proximity of nous//Breach likelihood beyond margin of acceptability//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}; subroutine: {Zeroth}.]
[Eidolon image reverted to negative//Stable mem-data is stored as aggregate within a partitioned gnostic-cache.]
[...]
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The cherub hound was a loyal dog to its master. Throughout the entirety of the ‘enhanced interrogation’, it stood by Levi’s side, licking at his hand with a phantom tongue. The adulants couldn’t take away the emotional support daemon while they tortured him, at least.
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There was nothing that Levi could do to break loose from the grasp of the dance of limbo; a tortuous choreomania inflicted upon his very soul. He was returned in fits to Malkuth only to fall to the abyss as a means to escape the wretched pain.
Killjoy did not like it—humiliating as it was—but he cried out, sobbing without lacrimal ducts in the liminal realm of the world-serpent. It was just too much. Even the Son of Man had cried out under excruciation.
For a lull, Levi escaped the pain through sheer shock and disbelief.
Direct mentions to the Tetragrammaton were so taboo, so deeply ingrained into the collective psyche, that it took great effort to even utter them. Old-world dead g-ds could be mentioned much more easily but those with recency or ties to the divinity of the archons could not even be thought of, consciously. They were but implicit memories, echoes of shadows.
Which was why Levi stopped crying and looked out into the nothing-waters with suspicion. You couldn’t actively think of the Tetragrammaton, much less speak it out loud. The epithet he’d sworn under duress begged the question as to how Levi did just that. The collective consciousness anchored to the mind both ways, tugging it back from the four unspoken names and their derivatives like the chains of a geas.
The escape did not last, returning Levi to the waking world only to plunge him back into the ether below.
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[...]
[Parameter {Repeated ego continuity violation} met//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}; subroutine: {Zeroth}; accessory function: {Limbic-Resonance}//Establishing subliminal ligature.]
[Subliminal ligature established to eidolon; pseudonym: {Progenitor}//Awaiting input from eidolon, pseudonym: {Progenitor}.]
[...]
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Yellow eyes opened in the abyss, staring across the gulf between the twin heads, curious as to what kind of recursion [Progeny] had gotten caught up in this time. Annoying to be awoken from a slumber that dwarfed the age of the dead universe.
On reading the lexicon, annoyance turned to curiosity. The cicatrix [Sin-of-Census] piqued [Progenitor]’s interest; alas, it was useless with a positive lexical polarity. That would have to be rectified before the soul-scar was of any use.
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[...]
[Lexical cache; pseudonym: {Latria} received from eidolon: pseudonym: {Progenitor} through subliminal ligature//Unpacking data//Encryption detected//decryption cipher needed.]
[...]
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The [Progenitor] kept a closed fist around the decryption cipher until [Progeny] begged on nonexistent hands and knees like a dog before scraps.
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[...]
[Decryption cipher; pseudonym: {Latria} received from eidolon; pseudonym: {Progenitor} through subliminal ligature//Decryption cipher; pseudonym: {Latria} accepted by lexical cache//Decrypting data//Unpacking data.]
[...]
[Data unpacked//Lexical cache; pseudonym: {Golem}.]
[Pseudonym: {Golem} compatible with lexical architecture of eidolon; pseudonym: {Levi-Killjoy-Basker}//Accept pseudonym: {Golem}?]
[...]
[Pseudonym accepted.]
[...]
[Parameter {Pseudonym: [Golem]} met//Inducing protocol {Doelia}//Sending lexical cache; pseudonym {Theomania} from eidolon; pseudonym: {Levi-Killjoy-Basker] to eidolon; pseudonym: {Progenitor} through subliminal ligature.]
[Lexical cache; pseudonym: {Theophania} received from eidolon; pseudonym: {Progenitor}//Unpacking data.]
[...]
[Data unpacked//Lexical cache; pseudonym {Ouroboros}.]
[Pseudonym: {Ouroboros} compatible with lexical architecture of daemon; pseudonym: {Shedskin}//Accept pseudonym: {Ouroboros}?]
[...]
[Pseudonym accepted.]
[...]
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Eons; one second. Eternities; a blink. Catatonic mutterings begging for the pain to stop were unanswered to those above. And only them.
Levi had prayed but a g-d did answer his pleas.
Yet, like all deities, the dog was a capricious and cruel effigy of Its own ego.
It whispered a name of the serpent across the darkness.
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Engram: [Daemon]
Pseudonym: [Shedskin] - [Ouroboros]
True-name: [L-I-V-A-Y-A-T-A-N]
Sefirot-class: [Keter] - [Prime Sphere]
Qliphot-class: [Tehom] - [Adjunct Sphere]
Polarity-tabula: [Firmamentum] - [Qabalah//Qliphoth]
Legion-origin: [Leliouria//Misophaes]
Designation: [Recursion] - [Iteration 12//912] - [Husk-fruit 0//1]
True-form: [A serpent in lemniscate circuits the ether beyond the moon and below the firmament. It is twin-headed and twice-tailed, blind and eyeless, pale-skinned, each scale the face of every soul. Insensate in the throes of autocannibalism, the universe is its entrails.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Ouroboros] {The all is one. Endows sulfur-principle-substrate with an aspect of the engram’s true-form; catalyzes libido via lexical autophagy, extinguishing the ego.}
True-name: [L-I-V-A-Y-A-T-A-N]
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Levi fed the tail-end of his being down the throat of his soul and when he awoke in Maluth he was no longer a measly dog but instead a g-d.
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