ENTRY 022//SIX-ONE-SIX//MARK OF THE BEAST
> All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
>
> And the study of revenge, immortal hate,
>
> And the courage to never submit or yield.
—Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, [Collective-Consciousness-Memory-Engram]: John Milton Paradise Lost.
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Engram: [Eidolon]
Pseudonym: [Basker] - [Levi] - [Killjoy] - [̶P̴r̵o̶g̷e̴n̷y̵]̵ - [Golem]
True-name: [-]
Qliphot-class: [Gehenna]
Polarity-tabula: [Qlippoth]
Principle-substrate: [Gestalt] - [Salt//Mercury//Sulfur]
True-form: [-]
Cicatrix: [Ecstasy], [Callous-Soles-Must-Walk-Upon-Thorns], [Sin-of-Census], [Number-of-the-Beast]
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Engram: [Eidolon//Subroutine//Cicatrix]
True-name: [-]
Cicatrix: [Number-of-the-Beast] {Six-one-six. Reaps shards of Mammon commensurate with the gematria of an ensouled entity’s prime pseudonym when egosyntonically felled. Bleeding incurs shards of Mammon to sublimate from salt-principle-substrate, subject to isopsephy of the eidolon’s sum pseudonyms; includes those of daemonic origin.}
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How does a person explain to another what they feel? Mostly, it’s through proxies—how the chest tightens with grief, how the muscles spasm with pain, how the lips spread out in joy.
Anger pulled his shoulder blades against his spine, scapula scraping against its cage. Anger made Levi want to hurt someone.
He knew this was because of Father, because of nature and nurture; the man used violence as a means of self-expression and had ingrained a set of rather dark instincts into his prodigy-turned-prodigal.
The innocent and guilty alike were his canvas; to be used and abused and discarded if the end product wasn’t profitable. Utterly despicable in all senses and connotations of the word. How such a soulless husk of a person could still have a soul meant that true-names did not separate man from beast.
People were animals. Their propensity for acting downright feral wasn’t all that different from other primates.
A mixture of shame and disgust welled up in Levi’s throat; phantoms eels that bade him to vomit against the truth of his soul. That Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker was not a good man. That he was the son to a petty, vindictive tyrant and thus cut from the same cloth; the imago, afterall, was formed as an image negative of your sire, its boundaries defined by those of the parent.
“[Like father, like son.]”
Six-hundred-and-sixteen justifications came and went, for and against Killjoy: that he’d quit the Family and all that he knew when he couldn’t stomach it anymore; that he’d stood by while vulnerable people were exploited; that he’d saved those he could; that he’d only done so when it was convenient.
But hard-to-swallow truths were often medicine coated in poison: they were outwardly bitter but inwardly therapeutic.
Anger made Levi want to hurt someone and that wasn't going to change any time soon—emotions could not so easily be corralled; they weren’t cattle. Neither would Killjoy cave to his base instincts and dole out senseless abuse to ease the lump in his throat.
Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker was not a good man but neither would he become Father.
He had the time to ruminate on all of this while he strangled a man to death.
This was not done senselessly—Levi was entirely within his right mind as he held the Mulligan in a rear naked choke, the daemonic circuits on his biceps firing at full tilt. The ganger wore a daemono-leather apron fitted with ampoules of ego-drugs; a butcher that treated living, breathing people no different than substrate to be sown with daemonic seed. He could not let the illicit daemon mill continue operation nor could he let the collaborators off the proverbial hook.
Justice stained the man’s teeth red, the tip of his tongue bitten off under his futile thrashing.
Asphyxiation took longer than the general populace thought it did; without breaking the trachea or putting pressure on the carotid, a man could struggle on for minutes before finally going into a sleep that he would not awake from.
For Levi it took four. He did not torture nor maim without reason—the ends were more important than the means up to a certain extent but not enough to justify wanton sadism. No senseless abuse but neither willful ignorance of past sins.
He brought the unconscious butcher to the cells and broke his neck before his victims, letting them see that their tormentor had his just deserts: a head put on backwards—where it rightly belonged given such a backwards mind. The ones not too broken to walk spat on his corpse on the way out. Had Levi not been their savior (and armed to the teeth with a whole host of daemons), they would have spat on him too for giving the butcher such a quick death.
Killjoy had redone his last ops to a T, raiding once again the three compounds. His only real divergence beyond some streamlining (foresight was 20//20 and all that) had been to leave the daemon mill before the new-world coppers caught him and threw him to the dogs in heaven. Even though it scraped to be so callous with the victims and aloof with a possible outbreak, the flipside was so much worse.
Six-one-six.
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“You sure you don’t need anesthesia? Being awake through soul surgery compounds the formation of cicatrixes, warping and… well, it’s traumatic as all hell.”
“[Yes.]”
“Your funeral; any sign of eudaemonia and I put a salted bullet between your eyes."
Levi had returned to the soulstitcher with a heart filled to the brim with Mammon’s silver. Twenty-hundred-thousand shekels and change was enough to fully fill in any gaps in his arsenal with daemonic epoxy.
The Hyraia-splice inserted into [Glasya-Labolas] was allowed to fully mature to produce a Legion hybrid, a mule. As a consequence, it could not undergo parthenogenesis and make further copies of itself without excisement of one of the two contradictory Legion-origins. Levi did not cry over that spilt milk; he wasn’t going to run a daemon mill any time soon or ever really.
The sight of the surrogates was seared into his gray matter such that he could still see them when he closed his eyes. It haunted him just as much as six-one-six; for where one was quantity, the other was quality of human suffering.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The Bypochthonian sword was sold because of how much it reminded him of the daemon mill. Levi wanted to sell the [Iron-Judas] as well but the stitch convinced him otherwise. They subsumed most of the daemon’s prolixity into the [Grinning-Carapace], adding an accessory function into its specs that was almost as good as the original armament. The true-form crucifix had been embedded into the armor’s sternum like an image ripped straight from the Malleus Maleficarum; an old-world text that rivaled even the depravity of the archons and Their sycophants. The sheer amount of occult technologies derived from that accursed piece of literature was legion.
“You want me to splice some code to recanonize your kit’s ‘nyms?” The [Seamstress] asked. “Won’t be too hard to fit in your budget; the armament matrices—free of charge.”
Had it not been for the shekels in his soul, Levi would’ve thought the stitch had gotten a liking to him. Recanonization would be a boon against shamans trying to scry his daemons; the apocryphal pseudonyms would eventually be subsumed into the lexical architecture of their respective engrams, purging the weakness of mass-produced daemonics.
A nod from the surgical altar was echoed by the androgyne before they pulled down a pair of goggles pulsating with neon schema. The print-fabricator buzzed to life, sending pins and needles down Levi’s body; the stitch manifested a daemon made entirely of arms and hands, its fingers plucking at the string’s of his soul. Bronze settled atop his skin, flesh vaporized down to the subcutaneous layer and then filled in with occult circuitry. The subliminal ligature between daemonic true-form and the tattoos would regenerate any of the non-organic metal—like a reflection in a puddle, platonic ideal was translated, transplanted and superimposed atop physical matter.
The world followed in the wake of the soul.
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Engram: [Daemon]
Pseudonym: [Glasya-Labolas] - [Salamadara]
True-name: [C-A-A-C-R-I-N-O-L-A-A-S]
Sefirot-class: [Netzach]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Mulus] - [Aeria//Hyraia]
Designation: [Predation] - [Digits 0//5]
True-form: [An imp of serpents alights on vulture’s wings, an eye of vitriol within its throat. In its wake is a mane of eels, lined with suckers clicking close and open like barnacles, aching to leech blood so that it might beget even more. Dorsal spines erupt from the winged olm’s slippery back, lining a tail that ends in a vestigial, eyeless, screaming head.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Glasya-Labolas] {Vestigial lexical subroutine; apocryphal pseudonym will be subsumed into engramic architecture in three days and three nights.}
True-name: [C-A-A-C-R-I-N-O-L-A-A-S]
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Engram: [Daemon//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Salamadara] {Endows salt-principle-substrate with the perfunctory abilities of the engram’s true-form. Decreases the rate of pseudonym’s libidic consumption per ensouled entity egosyntonically exsanguinated, but increases daemonic burden upon the ego.}
True-name: [C-A-A-C-R-I-N-O-L-A-A-S]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]
Pseudonym: [White-Jackal] - [White-Widow]
True-name: [T-E-L-B-E-T-H]
Sefirot-class: [Netzach]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Chthonia]
Designation: [Polarization] - [Variables 0//2]
Principle-substrate: [Salt]
True-form: [The Parabola of the moon circles over the white-veiled bride. Its mouth is sewn shut with asbestos and from between the stitched-together slit, tongues of copper chloride fire exhaust. Salivary glands secrete cypric vitriol to bleach a nine-tongued lariat.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [White-Widow] {Endows salt-principle-substrate with the perfunctory abilities of the engram’s true-form, restricted to living breath. Equalizes sefirot-class between the master engram and engram(s) affected by datum, where the greater prolixity fraction donates excess code to reach the median.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]
Pseudonym: [̷I̶r̴o̷n̸-̸J̷u̷d̵a̵s̴]̵ - [Grinning-Carapace] - [Sabbathon]
True-name: [A-G-A-R-O-T]
Sefirot-class: [Netzach]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabbalah]
Legion-origin: [Leliouria]
Designation: [Metamorphosis] - [Variables 0//8]
Principle-substrate: [Amalgam] - [Salt//Mercury]
True-form: [A desiccated insectile husk floats suspended in the void, grinning at starless oblivion. Embedded within its chest is a crucifix ordained by eight lamentations. Apsides of unseen spheres align in conjunction to reveal the nothing-thing gestating within.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Sabbathon] {Endows salt-principle-substrate with the perfunctory abilities of the engram’s true-form, restricted within the epidermal layer. Decreases datum ego burden per ensouled entity egosyntonically blinded up to a factor of eight.}
True-name: [A-G-A-R-O-T]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]
Pseudonym: [Narcissus] - [Caravaggio]
True-name: [S-Y-T-R-Y]
Sefirot-class: [Netzach]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Hyraia]
Designation: [Reflection] - [Token 0//1]
Principle-substrate: [Sulfur]
True-form: [A myrrh flower of asphodel blooms on spring’s virgin tears. It steals the beauty from the eye of its beholder to add to its own. Sulfate pollen first burns the nostrils before it blinds the soul insensate.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Armament//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Caravaggio] {Endows sulfur-principle-substrate with the perfunctory abilities of engram’s true-form. Use of datum creates a discrete ego instance that can bear a singular engram up to origin-engram’s sefirot-class.}
True-name: [S-Y-T-R-Y]
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The more daemons you had staked to your soul, the more they weighed you down.
Levi felt that weight as a migraine, a skull-splitting headache that unfurled along his temples as if bone was merely a suggestion, easily pierced to bloom the fungus festering inside. It would subside as his soul’s immune response died down; he’d undergone the last few daemon implantations including this one without any sort of ego-drugs to ease the process for reasons that amounted to the three numerals separated by three dashes stamped on the back of his left hand. The palm bore Mammon and the flipside bore six-one-six.
Parts of his body were cannibalized by their respective daemons, the circuitry on his skin not enough to contain them as the viral engrams bled into his organs, mutating them in accordance to their true-forms. This was expected—the stitch told Levi as much. Some daemon-signs were apparent while others were hidden away under layers of tissue. Armaments were more susceptible to producing apparent daemonic traits than unbound daemons as well, further compounding on the morphological changes Levi experienced.
His blood was no longer white as it had been after the pale-blind serpent took the place of his tongue; it was now red as sin, absolutely reeking of iron like an old-world slaughterhouse. The winged olm [Salamadara] saturated his bloodstream with oxygen, increasing aerobic endurance and allowing for bursts of hysterical strength at baseline even without active invocation.
[White-Widow] dwelled inside his lungs, asbestos interwoven into his bronchioles; a draught of air brought the pistol to his hand in a blaze of salted sparks while inhalation sucked it back in. Neon circuitry still fired on his skin during the act of evocation, blue as the vault of the pre-apocalypse sky. Fire would not scorch his fiberglass-laced lungs and smoke was just as good as fresh air; airborne toxins could be absorbed by the root of his lungs like water and then injected into the next shot of the Chthonic gun as retaliation. As daemon-signs went, the white-veiled bride’s was top notch; the only down-side was making Levi’s voice hoarse and terrible, laughter more akin to manic asthma.
Which wasn’t a down-side at all for someone with a penchant for threatening and intimidation.
[Sabbathon] tanned a good deal of his hide gray, his jaw the most apparent as his face morphed into a perpetual serpent’s grin. Calling on the daemonic armament made his skin slough-off into plates of dead epidermis thick enough to stop an old-world machete. More neon could be supplied to the engram to continually renew the armor and shed wounds up to the subcutaneous layer. Only viscera remained unaffected.
Levi prodded at the ferric crucifix embedded into his chest, the cold metal at odds with his warm flesh as if a leech that fed on his warmth. He confirmed that he could still feel his heart beneath the daemon and its circuitry; it was still there but distant.
[Caravaggio]’s change was the most esoteric of them all; the daemon took root in Levi’s reflection rather than his flesh and bones. Looking into the metal surfaces of the soul-stitcher's practice did not show him as he was but instead through a haze of hallucinogenic pollen the color of dandelions.
The dysphoria from the daemon-signs was unnerving as someone that Levi did not recognize looked back at him through the reflection, the psychedelia compounding the egodystonic traits. Had he not planned to end this iteration with death, the sheer disparity of change would fester into delusion.
The voices weren’t getting any easier to ignore either.
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