ENTRY 023//SABBATH//DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
> The umbilical cord of the New World is the collective consciousness.
>
> It is the only remnant connection to the womb in the sky. Through it, eidolons siphon information as nutrients and lexical energy as intravenous fluid. Through it, humanity remembers from whence it came.
>
> By it, humanity was undone. There was a poison in the medicine of Year Zero and it was known as religion.
>
> Belief concentrates as clout for a daemon. The innate connection to the world-soul that all new-world humans possess is ripe for these parasites. Once, monsters were simple fiction, now, they walk the streets of the Principalities within human skin.
—Post-Pandaemonium heretical excerpt, [Apokalyptein Codex].
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Not everyone had the mark of Mammon; lifespan was entirely dependent on how many shekels you had in your soul, immortality bought like any other commodity.
These two sentences might seem non-sequitur, and they are, but bear with it for a spell; it’ll all make sense when it does.
Egos radiate in the ether, they bend the fabric of the sea of all-knowledge no different than stars bend the space-time continuum in the physical universe. Structural stability falls prey to entropy; even stone turns to dust. Minds break over the centuries, irrevocably alien after millenia.
They no longer resemble a normal star undergoing fusion but instead pulsars, emitting electromagnetic waves throughout the ether. Mental illness is inevitable if you live long enough. No one remains sane throughout eternity.
And so, the lexical structures once tethered to their souls mutate under the radiation of their pulsar eidolons. The Legion of Enalia oversees the ether to detect these very same ego-sigs because of their propensity to incubate eudaemonia; dogs only enter open homes and all that.
Fallen into the depths of psychosis and without the ability to either buy or sell as the mark no longer recognizes them as human, the markless are driven to the byways. To the landfills where trash is thrown out and the protozoa of Misophaes fester, souring the wounds in their minds further still.
One of these forgotten were staked to Levi’s soul. A nameless, homeless, mentally ill man debased into a scavenger animal; stripped down to the bones of his soul to become nothing more than a resource.
Levi, in objective lived time, was older than most. How old exactly, he did not know. Ego-observer engrams didn’t pick up his sig as anything other than a Malkuth baseline due to the nameless grimoire; the discrepancy would be sure as four and one when Killjoy up and conjured one of his many daemons. But that could be chalked up to nothing more than psionics or an exotic engram suite—shamans and soul-divers were known for having psionic means to suppress ego-radiation.
All this rambling was to say that Levi should have gone well and truly insane a long, long, long time ago. Sure, he heard voices and suffered the odd hallucination here and there (and pangs of homicidal rage, ego-mastubatory monologuing and disorganized thoughts but those had been there before), but it wasn’t near enough to balance the scales with the opposing leviathan weight of a keter-class daemon.
The scales seemed tampered with. The operative word being ‘seemed’.
Everything clicked, red thread conjoining once lateral concepts vertically in a syzygy of schizophrenic proportions.
The universe was the pale-blind serpent’s entrails and that included its brain; the longer that Levi went in an iteration, the more his mind deteriorated. This was exponential until the seventh day of the tenth month of the fourth year since the Nexus, the nameless alley.
The closest that Killjoy had gotten to the Terminus was iteration six-one-six with the third archon Escariotes ending him just before the prophesied advent of the seventh day—the Sabbath.
He could repeat iterations however long he wanted until he reached the Terminus and would fight to the—what he reckoned was final—death with a devil of a g-d.
All the time in the corpse-world did not seem nearly enough with that on the horizon.
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It was on the sabbath that Levi brought out the contract paper to sign a binding oath with [Salamadara], the daemon previously known as [Glasya-Labolas].
Technically, the compact had already been done, writ in blood when the daemon had subsumed into his salt-principle-substrate during its awakening process in the antecedent iteration. Killjoy needed only to consummate the union before the second archon to properly establish a familiar bond.
Levi called out the daemon swimming within the waters of his soul, manifesting its true-form; previously impossible without the awakening of its pseudo-nous and ego. The daemon slipped out from his living breath in streamers of neon circuitry, transmuting air to form a temporary vessel of dark matter; an olm with the wings of a vulture and a mane of copulating eels. It was a tiny, alien thing, settling on Levi’s shoulder like a cat in a serpent's body.
“[Live by the sword, die by the sword.]” The imp of serpents said, its voice made up of clicking noises and trills. It would have been precious if not for the ominous proverb that dripped with consummate bloodlust.
“[A kindred spirit.]” Levi responded back, his white teeth turned scarlet against the harsh neon light radiated by the daemon within the dimly-lit catacomb.
Killjoy brought the flexible glass paper towards the daemonling, silver neon schema firing throughout the near-invisible circuits embedded inside the contract—it formed the begamoth of Mammon. The specifics and finer details of the contract had already been taken care of, the wrinkles smoothed out whenever [Salamadara] chafed against the would-be leash.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
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Engram: [Daemon//Contract]
Pseudonym: [Parabola-Moth]
True-name: [S-H-A-B-B-A-T]
Sefirot-class: [Netzach]
Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]
Legion-origin: [Lunalia]
Designation: [Compulsion] - [Token 0//2]
Principle-substrate: [Volatile] - [Mercury//Sulfur]
True-form: [From the broken mosaic of heaven, six-hundred-and-sixty-six glass shard moths emerge. They form a möbius strip of chains revolving around the Parabola of the moon. The leftover adamant chrysalides of fallen angels are stuck to their wings.]
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Engram: [Daemon//Contract//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Parabola-Moth] {Forms a master-familiar pseudonym pair and establishes subliminal ligature between two engrams; violation thereof imposes structural damage to the offending engram(s) at either end of the ligature.}
True-name: [S-H-A-B-B-A-T]
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Instincts ingrained over ninety-sixth-thousand-years resurfaced as the olm ripped a single feather from its wings with an eel-like appendage. It handed the daemonic writing implement to Levi. He pricked himself with the quill and then wrote his and his familiar’s pseudonyms on the [Parabola-Moth]’s transparent surface with their conjoined lifeblood.
The red was stark at first but quickly rusted and then silvered, settling into the contract’s lexical architecture. The daemonic paper folded like phantom origami into a tesseract cocoon, then shattered and reconfigured into infinitesimal glass shard moths that dove into Killjoy and [Salamadara]’s bodies as if fish into water. Ripples were left in their wake, corruscating along Levi’s skin until they went still.
Levi knew their number as he knew his own soul; three-hundred-and-thirty-three, the schema composing their forms whispered the doom-nothings of forbidden heaven in his mind’s eye. His right palm burned like white-hot brands were pressed to the bone, like silver was being poured into the neverending vessel of the mark of Mammon that came interwoven into all homunculi, scouring his very soul all the while.
He felt chains clink along in the ether as the subliminal ligature cooled down and set, binding Levi ‘Killjoy’ Basker and the imp of serpents [Salamadara] the winged olm as one soul. He was rather curious as to whether the contract would persist between iterations, but he’d only find that out once someone put a bullet in between his eyes.
Levi was planning on just that, too.
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Engram: [Daemon//Contract//Subroutine//Pseudonym]
Pseudonym: [Ophidian] {For from the serpent’s root, a seraph shall come forth. Endows salt-principle-substrate with the ability to catalyze libido via combustion of blood; ego burden is inversely commensurate with nearness to ego-death.}
True-name: [S-H-A-B-B-A-T]
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Many daemons and soul-scars interacted with mammonic shards, especially those originating from the Fallen Heaven of Lunalia; spirits of greed that could use shards interchangeably with neon as an energy source or as an aphrodisiac to enhance libido and thus energy generation at the source.
The syncretic Church of Avarice functioned as a bank to stash your earthly and unearthly possessions—be they shekels, old-world relics, or high-spec daemonics—somewhere safe.
Levi did just this in preparation for a bullet in between his eyes. He rather preferred not bankrupting himself. Those shekels had been hard-earned if ill-gotten, and the [Mark-of-the-Beast] was a rather gluttonous cicatrix when it came into play. Killjoy only kept a small enough number of shards to act as a buffer so that he didn’t bleed neon like a stuck pig.
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Testing newly-bound daemonics through the fires of the crucible of combat was asking for a fate worse than death. ‘Been there, done that’ was all the forethought that Killjoy allowed himself to have as he prepared to enter a deathmatch in the biggest colosseum franchise in the Pandaemonium. Not even the seventh day, the sabbath, stopped the primal flow of blood through the beating heart of humanity’s most base desire: violence.
The Crucible of Bypochthonia was the only edifice to the faith of the sin of wrath. There was no official priesthood consecrated to the Third Archon but those that competed in the Crucible. Once a year, the reigning champion fought to the death with Escariotes Himself. Par for the course, they inevitably died but were reincarnated into a speciality homunculus spec'd for nothing but warfare and gifted an ishim, an asura-daemon of molten slag, from the lowest bowels of the earth.
A joint venture of Bypochthonia and Leliouria, [Katabasis] was a near-daemon of an artificial man that could break plascrete with its bare, Malkuth-class hands. Its blood was stygian in nature, black as the eye of a singularity, inflicting the boiling cold of pure entropy upon any that would shed it. Its flesh was wrought of the same primordial clay that made Adam, making wounds done to any part of the body as equal. There was no differentiation between cells such that losing the head did not hinder cognition as the rest of the Ship-of-Theseus body picked up the slack—a sympathetic matrix the likes of which was near-impossible to endow into a false-class entity without ascension to a higher sefira (the singular of the plural sefirot).
Levi had his eyes on that prize with greed approaching that of Mammon. But that would have to wait until after Father was put down like the rabid, mad dog that he was. Just wasn’t ethical to let an animal like that suffer or, less facetiously, others suffer him.
A hollow, wide cylinder of black alabaster caged Killjoy and another pit bull within the deathmatch as spectral spectators traversed the local sub-ether to witness the bloodshed. With all the viciousness of a Roman amphitheater, the neon ghosts raved and jeered and cheered—hungry, thirsting and lusting for a good show of broken bones and exposed viscera.
Statues of the Eight and effigies of the executioner-angels of Bypochthonia surrounded the walls like the damned begging at the gates of Hell. And like both, they were trapped without escape. The only way out was through the fires of the Crucible.
The opposing combatant, [Hippolytus] was a heavy-set woman, muscle not so much corded as braided and then packed as densely as physically possible—well, given the heavy presence of daemonsigns, physical impossibility was a mere suggestion in the face of beings whose very presence warped reality.
She wore no armor but her muscles and the colors of Abraxas, her body an armament unto itself. Levi had thought himself too laissez-faire with daemonic bleed-over but compared to [Hippolytus] he was naught but a larva. A worm pretender before the serpent.
The colors marked her as a Legionnaire exorcist, an angel-catcher if going by the alchemical sigil of sulfur bound in an octahedron. They specialized in braving the ether beyond the moon in hermetic chariot-vessels to capture daemons of rarified air—holocaust-devils, heavenly moths, ophanim, and seraphs; if there was a beast in the void to be had, an angel-catcher would have it.
“[Combatants, steel yourselves.]” A heraldic daemon bleated out, interrupting Levi’s vomit of consciousness. Its voice was that of a choir being murdered with an ax, syllables decapitated into gurgles.
[Hippolytus]—hypocorism: Lytus—took a low tackler’s stance like an old-world wrestler, ready to leap into the fray. Black tongues of fire licked her head to toe, forming the biggest accretions of infernal saliva around her nine-fingered, double-jointed hands.
Killjoy choked out a wheezing breath in response, his abdominal muscles cinching and spasming before a lung woven with unburning, asbestos thread.
He was itching for a good fight.
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