ENTRY 021//[IGNOSIS]//THE CHARIOT-SWORD OF EDEN
> The order of the sefirot are as follows, from highest emanation to the lowest; known as the path of the flaming sword. When Samael, the archangel of the first archon Adonaios, shone its light upon the broken world, it sundered down the chaos into order with Aphelion the chariot-sword.
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> From crown to kingdom, from head to foot, there are four rungs. Keter stands alone at the apex of the first rung, emanating chokmah and then binah in the second rung. From binah emanates chesed and gevurah in the third rung. Gevurah gives way to the half-rung of tifereth which stands between the third and the fourth rungs. From tifereth flows netzach and then hod of the fourth rung. Below the fourth rung is the fundament of yesod, neither last nor first.
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> Below all emanations as the lowest lies Malkuth the False-World.
—Post-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Joseph “Mulligan” Basker Information Commons Request for Personality-Impregnation into Golem Sleeve: [Paris-PlasterTM Mark XIX].
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[Saklas] wasn’t much of an angel-wrestler, He knew. That title belonged to Abraxas’ High Priest, [Jacob]; the Eighth Principality was named Neo Penuel, afterall. It made its name on subduing divinity.
Erastes kept distance all throughout the fight, knowing that close-combat was to fly too close to the sun. When Death saw that Erastes would not approach, Its animal cunning redirected to escaping instead. It wanted to reap souls and if this one would not come then It would find others; three mouths to feed.
As the angel of the abyss raced towards the threshold, so did [Saklas], no sword in hand.
A strip of grave cloth grazed the tetragramic seals of Erastes’ vestments.
That was all it took.
The sigils of any given occult technology were not, in and of themselves, special; their connotations in the collective unconscious were. They produced a sort of superimposed quantum object—a lexical engram. Through this liminal knot, this entanglement, the manifest miracles of the New World were done.
What was Death but the right hand of the Tetragrammaton? Of G-d Himself.
[Saklas] once archonic vestments became a burial shroud, the angel before Him disappearing as He Himself became It. Causality broke and when it returned, only the angel remained.
It went on to devour, to extinguish, six-hundred-and-sixteen-million souls. Not six-hundred-and-fifteen-million; not six-hundred-and-seventeen-million, but six-hundred-and-sixteen-million living, breathing humans.
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The Effigy of Razors cut through the flesh of space and time to reach a tifereth-class daemonic manifestation. He was the only of the archons to not be entangled with something else, ever the dutiful guard dog of a g-d.
In the third quadrant of the Sixth City, He appeared as if He always was before the entity—the readings detailed It as a tetragramic anomaly of the Misophaes Legion, with a negative prolixity reaching almost gevurah-class. A single apophony would descend the entity to the negative third rung; to the qlippothic equivalent of a Judge.
A single thought from Perdition destroyed the entirety of the quadrant down into a clean twelve-million cubits cubed of black alabaster; the fundament upon which a quadrant was built. The air self-annihilated under a sea of microscopic razors, scouring the entity’s burial shroud skin into ever-recursing cloth. There was no bone in that thing, no soul.
It screeched with three gaping maws from which six-hundred-and-sixteen daemons of the Fester came—maggot-headed vultures and eyeless albino serpents and protean olms and locusts with the faces of men. Mutilated space from the Effigy’s influence provided more entry points for the fiends and their eventual end; the cuts were on the fundamental level, spatial fabric folded until it reached the razor’s edge of unquantifiable sharpness, rendering daemonic pseudo-matter into non-contiguous fractals that sublimated back into the void from whence they came.
The mass death only emboldened the anomaly as It screeched once more, uselessly. It was now nothing more than a tattered, logorrhea-stricken burial shroud. The Judas Daemon’s ferric teeth were unceasing in their feast, ripping apart the unending cloth as fast as it came into existence ex nihilo. An irresistible force met an unmoving object; Death Itself and the guillotine now at odds.
This stagnant state of affairs continued for four years, ten months and six days. Escariotes was, afterall, the least patient of His siblings; wrath had fermented in His heart until He could not bear It within any more.
“[Now Ehud had made a double-edged sword a cubit long.]” Escariotes said, conjuring the armament in tandem with an enochian spell.
The sin of wrath’s armor fissured at the chest under the immense heat of the earth’s bowels, molten slag as viscera and magma in place of effluvia. The third archon drew Aphelion from the crucible of His very heart; the chariot-sword of Eden, stolen from Adonaios, was renamed [Ignosis] and imprisoned within the Warmonger’s ribcage
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]
Pseudonym: [Ignosis] - [Aphelion]
True-name: [I-A-H-A-T]
Sefirot-class: [Da’ath]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Decarabia]
Designation: [Elision] - [Digits 0//2]
Principle-substrate: [Sublimate] - [Sulfur//Salt]
True-form: [An eye in superposition stands still in the ether at the center of the sun. It is the protoschema of the cherubim and ophanim, a sphere of winged chariot-wheels of phlogiston, each spoke a wandering star of heaven. In the revolution of its skein, the empyrean axis is unseen.]
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It was exotic matter trapped in the shape of a blade; the phantom flesh of a dark star, a class of primordial celestial bodies now long since lost to the ashes of time. [Ignosis] shone not by itself for it was invisible to the naked eye. Its incandescence instead was a product of the mutual-annihilation of antimatter emissions and gamma radiation brought on by the decay of its non-fusible, normative matter.
Ultraviolet solar flares emanated from [Ignosis], an electromagnetic field carved into the space-time continuum like chariot wheels of subliminal fire. Creation itself ripped apart under the paradoxical charge, parity, and time symmetry of the sword of Eden.
“[I have brought a message of Abraxas to you.]” Said the archon, His voice like the parting of the red sea; severance made into sound that would deafen any with ears to hear and blind any with eyes to see. To witness Perdition was to be before the final threshold, that fine line in between one and zero.
The third archon Escariotes brought to bear [Ignosis] and smote down the avatar, the incarnation, the manifest form of Death Itself. There was no visible change but the disappearance of the Misophaesic angel. No lightning, no fire; like the exotic matter of the chariot-sword of Eden, the possessed burial shroud was now unseen.
The dead universe no longer recognized the anomaly as existing and so It was not.
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The memories injected into his nous from the gnostic-cache were like a second-hand nightmare dream. A recording with far too many artefacts and corrupted frames.
Levi was trapped within the skin of a monster, seeing through three maws instead of two eyes. The Angel of Death consumed by touching a person’s forehead, in between the eyes, upon the glabella—the third eye opened as the two closed. It did this oh so very slowly, soul by soul, unseen as its ego radiation rotted away at the fundament of reality to bear locusts with the weeping faces of eyeless men.
One million souls for each netzach-class daemon it spawned.
It wasn’t a countless number to [Sin-of-Census]; Killjoy knew, down to the deepest, darkest pit of his sinner’s soul, how many people died by his//Its hand. They were not considered just homicides but also apathies—that spoke to Levi being able to do something—anything—to stop the senseless killing.
He strained and whirled on the chains that bound him but it was for naught. That iteration of the dead universe was no longer there—gone—reabsorbed into the womb in the void.
Abject horror settled on him like a blanket of lead and self-loathing.
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In the ether below the firmament, Levi’s ego entered turmoil. He couldn’t live with the blood on his hands; it was just too much. The weight of six-one-six million souls made his mind fold in on itself, disassociating to numb the mad agony and black regret.
He should’ve known better—anything and everything given by the viper-eyed man was fruit of the poisonous tree.
If only he’d endured until his eventual death. If only he hadn’t accepted the viper-eyed man’s deal. If only. If only. If only.
Levi had escaped from the grasp of the adulants yet had returned to catatonia all the same. He came up to Malkuth to die of dehydration and then plunge back into the great deep of tehom once again, rocking back and forth with arms around his knees.
This anhedonic cycle, of ignorance until death, continued for six-hundred-and-sixteen million times. Not six-hundred-and-seventeen million; not six-hundred-and-fifteen million, but six-hundred-and-sixteen million times.
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Homicides: [-615,999,935 Eidolons] {Deaths wrought by the bearer's own hand or indirectly through premeditated means and orders as an extension of the self.}
Apathies: [-615,989,653 Eidolons] {Deaths that could have been prevented or were brought to bear through inaction.}
Ego-deaths: [-616,002,737 Iterations//675,425 Husk-fruit maturation cycles] {Deaths of the self.}
Prolixity: [-1,847,992,325 Characters// -307,998,721 Words// -30,799,872 Verses// -2,566,656 Paragraphs// -17,111 Lexicons// -34 Libraries//] {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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An eon of drinking from the Lethean river later, Levi came to his senses in the nameless alley. No longer mute, no longer deaf, no longer blind. He saw the nameless body of the man without a name, witnessing the true horror of what had happened to him.
The only way to give any semblance of reparation to iteration six-one-six and countless other victims was to kill [Progenitor] at the Terminus. This was the only rationale that kept Levi together, that pulled the shattered, jagged glass shards of his psyche into something recognizably functional.
The cloak of death that weighed down his very being made each step away from the alley a lesson in atlassian perseverance and sisyphean repentance.
Each step was better than dead but was harder than living.
The viper-eyed man’s bill was due and Levi would be there to see it paid with interest. He didn’t know yet how but he had all the time in the corpse-world. Four years, ten months and six days multiplied by infinity until the [Progenitor] would return at the Terminus, the end of all threads.
First, Levi would rid the third quadrant of Joseph ‘the Mulligan’ Basker. Baby steps and all before he faced a g-d.
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