ENTRY 019//DEUS//EX NIHILO
> Sefirot-class is measured not in quantity of lexical code; if it were, then the unstrung letters of the sea of all-knowledge would make a shaman insensate upon witnessing it for the first time. Instead, ontological disparity from the Malkuth mean is measured by density. Derived from prolixity, sefirot-class weighs how many points of contact a contiguous body of lexical code—an engram—exerts upon the surrounding ether-field.
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> The first animetric devices worked through entirely mundane means, counting how many supersymmetric particles are present in a given locus of space-time—this was before we switched to the lexical paradigm that couldn’t be so easily tampered with by an anomalous fundamental field perturbation caused by a corresponding ether-field distortion; particularly those of willy daemons that quickly learned to obfuscate their presences upon even the smallest of scales of physical existence.
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> Entropy would dictate for supersymmetric pairs to be random like background radiation, but if the readings deviate from the universal mean of [redacted] beyond a factor of [redacted], then it can be input into the equation [redacted] to output a sefirot-class.
—Post-Lexical//Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Berestiah Professor of Applied Lexicology and Daemonics of the Academy of Withershins Metaphysica: On Engrams and Designations.
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Eating your own soul was difficult to put into words.
It hurt just as worse as torment and was as unceasing as excruciation. As always, four and one provided the answer. In between sulfur and salt was mercury; sorrow given tangible form.
The end-line of the book of Levi ‘Killjoy’ Basker’s soul had been grafted to its starting point and then it was all set to spin, to revolve around the axis of his ego. In its revolution, the lexical script grew tighter-knit, exponentially pulling itself with greater force—something from nothing; ex nihilo.
At the moment that Levi felt the raw surge of neon through the quickly-fraying fibers of his being, he grasped at his pseudonyms—any and all, eidolonic or daemonic—bringing them to the forefront of the deluge as dams to break its flow.
He felt some crack and some warp, but most of all, he felt that little spark of himself that differentiated the ensouled from the soulless twist in ways it wasn’t supposed to. Ego-death came not as myoclonic jerk but as ontological nausea.
Levi vomited out his very soul.
Letters of darkness visible bled from his mouth and eyes and ears, condensing around him as a cocoon of festering nothing-stuff. This lexical paragraph did not so much as usurp reality as it annihilated it. An anathema; equal and opposite.
Where goetia defaced, this—whatever this was—left not even ruin, no trace, devoid of evidence that it had ever been or unbeen. No ashes to ashes, no dust to dust.
Just the void.
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[Ego continuity severed//Pruning corrupted qualia and entropic artefacts//Seeding from closest uncorrupted eidolon negative.]
[Parameters {Eidolon Negative} not met//Inducing protocol: {Zero-sum}; subroutine: {Revelation}.]
[Timestream will continue until Terminus.]
[Corrupted pseudonym detected within eidolon//Inducing protocol: {Quarantine}//Prime pseudonym set as {Golem}//Adjunct pseudonyms in stasis.]
[Eidolon image not reverted to negative//Stable mem-data is stored as aggregate within a partitioned gnostic-cache.]
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Engram: [Eidolon//Apophanic]
Pseudonym: [Basker] - [Levi] - [Killjoy] - [̶P̴r̵o̶g̷e̴n̷y̵]̵ - [Golem]
True-name: [-//M̵̨̧̦̯͚͈͇̹̲̖̥̼̠̉͂͆̐̍̎e̴̢̡̛̻̗͕̖̬̦̗̟͍̝͂̇̄̎t̸̟̑͑̌̌̔̆̾̇̓̈́̌]
Sefirot-class: [Malkuth] - [Prime Sphere]
Qliphot-class: [Chemah] - [Adjunct Sphere]
Polarity-tabula: [Firmamentum] - [Qabalah//Qlippoth]
Legion-origin: [Misophaes]
Principle-substrate: [Gestalt] - [Salt//Mercury//Sulfur]
True-form: [-//Anathema dwells within a burial shroud. Death, destroyer of worlds, kept inside by the seal of shin. Trisagion hymns flit from betwixt the seams of the grave clothes, an epitaphios halo around its three heads.]
Cicatrix: [Ecstasy], [Callous-Soles-Must-Walk-Upon-Thorns], [Sin-of-Census]
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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Pseudonym//Adjunct]
Pseudonym: [̶P̴r̵o̶g̷e̴n̷y̵]̵ {Corrupted; lexical architecture unstable beyond minimal-functional parameters.}
True-name: [-//M̵̨̧̦̯͚͈͇̹̲̖̥̼̠̉͂͆̐̍̎e̴̢̡̛̻̗͕̖̬̦̗̟͍̝͂̇̄̎t̸̟̑͑̌̌̔̆̾̇̓̈́̌]
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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Pseudonym//Prime]
Pseudonym: [Golem] {For dust you are, to dust you shall return. Mercury-principle-substrate loses volatility to become a universal-solvent. As a consequence, salt-principle-substrate now possesses volatility.}
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
True-name: [-//M̵̨̧̦̯͚͈͇̹̲̖̥̼̠̉͂͆̐̍̎e̴̢̡̛̻̗͕̖̬̦̗̟͍̝͂̇̄̎t̸̟̑͑̌̌̔̆̾̇̓̈́̌]
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The letters in the lexicon did not spell out g-d, but instead only momentarily arranged in the lexical equivalent when the sequence lines linked vertically, metaphorically speaking—fundamental-universal code was omnidirectional, after all. It had no up or down, no right or left; the orientation was everywhere, all of the time, all at once.
Schema, black as pitch and viscous as tar, arranged itself in the octagram of Solomon, an eight-sided star bound by a circle. Within this antediluvian seal, an angel of the abyss awoke and spoke Its first words in over ninety-six millenia.
“[̴̧̩̠͙̟͔̻̩̯̃́͊͛͌̑̋̈́́͝Ä̶̢͔̳̝̝́̔͑̈̓͊͗̂̔̀̉̕d̵̼͐̇̑͛̉ȍ̴̡̙͈̯͈̞͈̜͋̅͌͋̍̍̈́̾́̾͘ͅn̴̯̳̘͚̳̠̥̪̜̝͎̾̌̒̕͘ͅa̵̦͓̥͌̊̔̆̆̔î̴͉͈̮̘̩̲͚̹̹̬̔̒͒̍͝.̷̬͌͐́͐͐̃̒̑́͘͝͝]̶̭͎̙̝̻̲̓͂̏͑̐̀̑̄͜”̶̢̧͇̠̤̞̙̞̥̱̬͗̈́͊
It hath arisen from the shed skin of a snake, a malformed and abortive fetus of a g-d.
The archons did not strike It down, for It was a divinity of the buried and the forgotten; “out of sight, out of mind” personified. How could you find a single whole skull in a mass grave of infants? How could you find a single whole bone amid a mountain of pyre-ash?
It flew on the black wings of a widow's veil, misery and mourning consummate. Its halo was that of the shifting sand, the faceless dead coming from the background radiation into existence through pareidolia. Static shaped like a face, unused swaddling cloths straining against death knells and funeral dirges.
The Angel of Death returned to a world that was already dead and had no fear of dying. Its power, in turn, was so very small. How could you be afraid of something that no longer walked in your shadow? Death by another name was euphemism.
It was weak.
In Its anger It uttered but a single unword, removing letters from existence’s fundamental code.
.
[É̸̡͓͈͔̬̝̯̲̟̫͍̞̪̯̗͒̈̒̽̋-̴̨̫̲͉̦̺̗͉͖͎̫͊̀̅͂̓̿̀̑̈͐̌̋̚M̴̱̹̥̜̹̌̐̐̌̔̏̅̋̓͆́̕͜-̵̡̧̥̥͉̺͇̦̮̮̺͔͔̽͊̽̌́́̅͂͒̊́̈́͘̕M-E-T]
An engram does not know its own true-name; it can give it to another engram through a built-in mechanism not dissimilar to biological reproduction, but it is blind to itself. To give a soul the key to the entirety of its being is to make suicide from errant thought to sure as stone. Everything, at some point, desires its own end.
For its desires to manifest as hallucinations that the dead universe itself accepts as reality instead of fiction? Well, the world would surely be inundated with horrors within imagination.
Knowing the true-name of Death Itself, all the ninth angel had to do was to leave only those three letters and subtract the rest.
The burial shroud around Its mouth unwound to expose three gaping maws that would spread the gospel to all corners of the earth by devouring it. All made one through the stomach.
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The fabric of reality broke down like necrotizing fasciitis.
It spread from a singular point in space and [Saklas] decided then and there that He would sequence to keep this apocalypse beast from spreading further. Thank all the dogs in heaven that the ego-radiation was normative rather than reversed; elsewise, it would have been permanent and unlocalized, able to consume everything.
Seal the angel and the world-wound extinguishes, Erastes repeated this mantra to Himself feverishly as He imagined the thousand-fold castigation that Fornication would inflict upon His immortal soul when She found out.
Erastes sent out a signal, praying and dreading for it to reach His matron—the local ether-field was distorted greatly, in space and time, so it’d increase how long it took for a sending to travel along the boughs of the Qabalah. He’d keep the abyssal angel contained until then.
His psionic suite of daemons had been shredded when that thing spontaneously generated from the ether, lexical code assimilated into its cancerous prolixity. The erelim-blade of [Abigor] survived by sheer happenstance—it was used to pierce soul-shells and nous-membranes but the real surgery was done by other, more specialized, engrams.
[Abigor] weighed heavy in both hand and soul; a binah-class blade of mercurial sharpness that held the idol of a man instead of a fuller along its centerline. Erastes currently held onto the calves of the erelim-blade’s hilt, the cruciform arms His crossguard. [Abigor] cut not just flesh but spirit also.
A probing of the erelim-blade on the angel’s shrouded form revealed that you could not kill that which is already dead. Oil-soaked linen parted to reveal more of itself recursing away into the event horizon of infinity; causality hitched a step and then reverted, the nothing-thing without blemish as if the cut never was.
In response Erastes invoked the daemon granted to Him by the Scarlet Lady Herself, chanting hymns of ecstasy and bliss. His legs became the cloven hooves of a satyr, fish-wings ripped themselves out from His shoulder-blades and antelope horns unfurled along His temples into a six-pronged crown. A second set of teeth grew above His own, and a second heart beat opposite the original.
[Samigina] Profligate of the Drowned, knew all the souls that had died in sin and who had died out in the sorrowful sea. For every shaman lost to the mercurial ocean and for every lech whose heart gave out mid-coitus, [Samigina]’s voice grew louder. A single moan of the Profligate could drown ten-thousand men, women, and androgynes in insensate carnality until death.
His chokmah-class halo billowed out like storm clouds around the angel of the abyss, trapping it within a monsoon that spawned pseudo-daemons in the form of winged fish. Erastes did not fight to kill but rather to delay—to truly destroy a self-propagating and self-perpetuating engram such as this, an archon was needed. Elsewise, a tifereth-class anomaly could be left like a scar on reality, making the place uninhabitable for millenia and a veritable spawning ground for daemons of its Legion.
Erastes did not know whether Leliouria or Misophaes worried Him more.
Leliouria’s horrors were as alien as it got, esoteric entities working on paradigm shifts twelve steps removed from human comprehension. The Doom Herald of Abbadon reaped souls just by sight—not its own vision, mind, but instead your own. You might just one day look into the wrong shadow and become undone as if you never were, erased from the recollections of your loved ones just as surely as you are erased from the face of the earth.
To gaze into the all-devouring eye is to gaze upon a mirror whose light is not light at all but rather denatured space-time that contorts the beholder into six different antithetical continuums, ripping them apart not at the atomic, not at the sub-atomic, not at the quantum or even the fundamental level, but instead the conceptual; the ontological or ‘soul’ stratum.
The Legion of Misophaes is harmless in comparison if much more abundant. Plague spirits and the daemonic equivalent of old-world protozoa. At most they’d usher in another millennium-long ontological pandemic, producing a strain of cognitively-transmissible cicatrix such as in the case of [Metastatic-Calciferous-Imago] that calcified the flesh whenever someone had the gall to day-dream, incubating lithopedions in the shape of the images held within their mind’s eye.
Either this anomaly was a hitherto undocumented Misophaes manifestation—the first tifereth-class produced in the Fester—or just another run of the mill apocalypse beast that slept in the ether just beyond the moon.
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