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Eli burst into the subliminal hellfire we came to recognize as that of [Empyrea] filtered through the many-eyed moon. The enigmatic energy coalesced into a shape like a supernova being dragged into a newborn, voracious singularity.
She did not transform into an angel but instead an idol that could fit into your hand, floating at chest height above the nuclear shadow she left on the concrete. The idol was a stone carving of a tongue inlaid with amber crystal to form an esoteric circuit that thrummed with reality-warping power.
Words branded themselves into the backs of our eyelids.
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Entity: [Paradox//Idol]
Sphera: [Golgotha], [Hypnagogia], [Lethea]
Para-class: [Red-Aphelion]
Esoterica: [Zarathustra]
Hubris: [Nihil]
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Esoterica: [Zarathustra]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Zarathustra} derives from the sphera of {Golgotha} and {Hypnagogia}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of speech to the platonic ideals of authority and retroactive continuity.]
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Hubris: [Nihil]
Ignosis: [The hubris of {Nihil} derives from the sphera of {Lethea}; establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of a tongue to the platonic ideals of non-existence and retroactive discontinuity.]
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Johnny reached out to his sister’s last memento, barely grazing the idol before a flash of black-alabaster lightning manifested from the ether in between worlds to bathe him in paradox given form. When our eyes and minds returned to being able to comprehend reality, the observer-event had already run its course, integrating the paradox-idol with John McCarthy’s ontology.
It was then that we became intrinsically aware of the weight that he now carried, heavier than our own. Our perception could not help but consider the man more real than the rest of the world, more solid in his place within Jacob’s Ladder.
At our collective stares, Johnny joked that ‘it’s the Eiru blood’ in his customary sign language—the Twins had both been born mute, afterall.
The echo of weight disappeared as soon as it came and then we went back to fighting angels hellbent on feeding us to the moon.
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I wrote all of my memories on a concrete wall that would reset to zero in thirteen minutes. I wasn’t in Heaven nor even Hell but instead a limbo that would not let me go.
I am doomed to repeat the same year again and again.
I thought that I was given this chance to save them but even when I protected everyone, when I fought and won against the apogee-class avatars of the invading, cannibalistic Outsider realities, I was returned here.
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The Moswetuset Institute of Technology’s parking lot.
I opened the door to my shitty Corolla, the tokyo-drift-neon-green paint flaking off like a lizard’s dead scales. I felt much the same.
The pavement hurt as it dug into my bare knees, my skirt pooling around my legs. Didn’t even remember how I went from sitting in the car to the fetal-position level of despair, but here I-fucking-was.
I shakily got up from my knees once again, pressing the glass shards of my broken will together and then melting them into a semblance of humanity under the heat of dogged rage.
You’d think that you’d become numb to the horror of seeing so much death. That would’ve been preferable to having your heartstrings plucked out, again and again. I didn’t do this for them anymore but to make the wretched pain stop—bleeding heart and all.
“Once more, into the breach.” I whispered with a mad sort of gallows humor.
Well, a madder sort.
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Entity: [Moonscorched//Omniglot]
Sphera: [Golgotha], [Luna], [Empyrea]
Para-class: [Yellow-White]
Esoterica: [Narcissus]
Hubris: [Eisoptrophobia]
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Esoterica: [Mirror-Mirror]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Narcissus} derives from the sphere of {Empyrea}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of a tongue to the platonic ideals of desire and mirage.]
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Hubris: [Eisoptrophobia]
Ignosis: [The hubris of {Eisoptrophobia} derives from the sphera of {Golgotha} and {Luna}; establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of dissolution to the platonic ideal of shadows-within-a-reflection.]
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Then came the seraphim, leviathans of melded-together humans that swam suspended on thin air. Their sinuous bodies were lined with Empyrean eyes, black of sclera with a golden band for an iris. They had no pupils, soulless things that they were.
Those that neared the river blinked out of existence but there was more than enough to go around even after the decimation.
The moonscorched leviathans had great big jaws, just large enough to swallow a limb whole. When they opened their maws, we saw Heaven—it was so alluring, that purifying fire that extinguished the soul and the worries that come with sentience.
If only the seraphim knew that we’d never believe, never hold even a shred of hope, for paradise after the Hell we’ve been through. A beaten dog does not so easily trust.
I ran at the serpentine, six-winged angel, blank rage in my heart. Not blind rage, not black rage but blank rage. The kind where you can barely remember why you were so angry in the first place, only that you want to punch through some drywall.
Jaws with fingers for teeth clamped down around me as I stabbed, uncaring. The nails couldn’t touch me directly, instead only grasping the infinite nothingness of my esoterica. I had become numb ever since the eclipse, not able to feel touch, not able to feel hot nor cold on my non-existent skin.
No matter with how much pressure I hugged myself in that long night, I did not feel a thing.
Now, I relished in that numbness, that blankness, that oblivion.
[Lethea] wrapped around me in that moment as my soul resonated with its concepts.
If my skin was the nothingness, then I did not truly exist and for the moment that I blinked my eyes, I was naught but a ghost.
When consensus reality opened its eyes once again to my existence, I stood atop the leviathan, [Death-Prayer] left within its throat.
Didn’t matter—its flesh was white as unfinished drywall, and I punched through it.
Flesh parted as I serrated it along the axis of infinity, momentarily transforming my skin into a razor whose sharpness was that of an event horizon.
I pulled out a throng of still-beating heart-flesh colored Empyrean gold.
I came to hate that odious color.
I wrapped my hands around the amalgam of hearts that once belonged to different people. I wrapped my skin around it and in that little space no larger than a single one of my closed fists, the universe could not see.
And I was the only observer.
My hands tightened until they couldn’t possibly hold all that matter in such a tight space without producing a black-hole.
When I opened my hands, there was nothing in them.
The heartless leviathan hit the ground like the Tower of Babel.
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