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Angels burst into subliminal fire when I decapitated them, shuffling the tormented humans off this mortal coil. Their faces were forever burnt into a pale rictus of abject excruciation, each and every one of them.
Their deaths were not a mercy as the souls trapped within were not set free. Instead, we felt each and every weight that beat in their chests sublimate into [Empyrea] in a flash of hellfire.
It was just a blink into the all-consuming conflagration but that blink was enough to cull one of our number as they devolved into a gibbering mess of immolated bone and charred grisle. Ten became nine.
“[Burn for Us.]”
When the Eye gazed at us through the temporary looking glass, its presence passing over us like the heat haze of an open oven, the collective soul of humanity stared back, unflinching. We might be oh so very tiny, individually, but our gestalt stood just as tall as the Outsiders.
“[We are Legion.]”
Cornered animals fought back.
The window winked out from existence as [Golgotha] re-established its authority upon consensus reality, even if just so.
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[Setting subliminal circuitry//Implanting nous in entity matrix//Collapsing commissural tracts of ontology.]
[Omniglot integration successful//Conception stabilized//Antipodal artefacts purged//Generating ontological transcript.]
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From then on, we came to know our enemies by their souls, having tasted their blood on our [Omniglot] tongue.
The next choir of angels we happened upon marked themselves upon the black at the back of our eyes, laying bare their commandments and sins in pseudo-computer-code.
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Entity: [Moonscorched//Omniglot]
Sphera: [Golgotha], [Luna], [Empyrea]
Para-class: [Red]
Esoterica: [Eclipse-of-Moths]
Hubris: [Running-Water]
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Esoterica: [Moth]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of [Eclipse-of-Moths] is derived from the sphera of [Luna] and [Empyrea]; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of hunger to the platonic ideals of combustion and annihilation.]
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Hubris: [Running-Water]
Ignosis: [The hubris of [Running-Water] is derived from the sphera of [Luna] and [Golgotha]; establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of dissolution to the platonic ideal of running water.]
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Some things, though, were not possible to divine, even with the monolith.
We had to parse whatever a para-class was somewhat on our own.
The [Omniglot] transcribed a whole lot but some concepts were not to be spoken directly of, instead danced around and fumbled with in the dark to give you its true-name in image-negative form. You felt them in your breast, in your bones, in your soul.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
In this manner, we learned to swim rather than sink real quick. Context clues and battle experience with other Outsider anomalies became the accretion disk for our singularities of paracausal knowledge—each foe, independent of sphera, was separated into a spectrum of the electromagnetic.
Red-class was the basis, the mean of the Outsiders, and a step removed from the Old World. A sort of Supernatural-LightTM, these anomalies were the pawns, the foot-soldiers of Armageddon.
Orange-class was like static electricity: interplanar friction given will. It crackled against our metaphysical senses, distinctly Other. If red had been pawns, then these were knights—wily, yes, but still manageable.
Yellow-class was observably and manifestly paracausal—the human mind could argue for the possibility of large insects, but it could not deny the paradoxical, eldritch presence of yellow-class entities. Just a stare from one was alien enough to feel it on your skin like heat. Yellow were the bishops—they had a whole lot of diagonal and strange vectors of attack that took some getting used to but were rarer in number than the comparatively innumerable pawns. The chess metaphor kinda broke down because orange-class and yellow-class were not one-to-one in the quantity department.
Yellow-class was where our experience ended. Anything above it was as of yet to be discovered but we sure as the monolith knew that there were more. The [All-Devouring-Eye]’s presence registered leagues above our highest fathom of orange-yellow; we hadn’t even seen pure yellow and the hybrid para-class was deadly enough that we had to employ an abundance of caution after the first instance of an anomaly that strong had nearly killed me.
Nine became eight.
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Entity: [Protoplast//Omniglot]
Sphera: [Antediluvia], [Luna], [Golgotha]
Para-class: [Orange-Yellow]
Esoterica: [Famine]
Hubris: [Anhedonia]
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Esoterica: [Famine]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Famine} derives from the sphera of {Antediluvia} and {Luna}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of hunger to the platonic ideals of assimilation and non-existence.]
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Hubris: [Anhedonia]
Ignosis: [The hubris of {Anhedonia} derives from the sphera of {Golgotha} and {Luna}, establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of cessation to the platonic ideal of temperature.]
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Sphera: [Antediluvia]
Ignosis: [The sphere of {Antediluvia} is that of the {Ark-Of-The-All-Life}, a twisted reflection of {Golgotha}’s ancient life-forms and what they might’ve evolved into had the {Flood} not ceased the spread of their spores from titanic fruiting bodies that rivaled even the largest of mountains. Being an alternate, pruned branch of primordial {Golgotha}, this sphere’s mycelium is not so confined by the {Termina}’s influence, coterminating with consensus reality in interdimensional apertures known as {Fingers}.]
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So far as we knew, Antediluvians could not infect humans.
So far. As we. Knew.
The abomination that could pierce the armor of my skin and made me somehow more sleepless than before, was what we now called a ‘reaper’. The danse-macabre-motif was hard to let go of considering how anomalies of [Antedilluvia] seemed purpose-made to kill us.
It was once a spider. Now, it was the size of a minivan, and red with needle-hairs thick as pencils. It walked on pedipalps because the entirety of its thorax was now dominated by a maw of gargantuan size.
We hadn’t noticed the damn thing until it was too late. The reaper hid on a web of blood-red mycelium, pouncing on the ninth member of our group, a moonscorched by the name of Noah.
He was eaten alive, screams reverberating in the proximal-space of the Antedilluvian’s bowels. An entire man wasn’t supposed to fit in that small a space; Noah had been dragged into whatever Hell that arachnophobia-given-realized-form had crawled out of.
Needle-like hairs burst out from the orange-yellow-class anomaly, puncturing straight through my esoterica like it was nothing—technically, it was and so were the needles, their paradoxes colliding and canceling each other out like two negative integers.
Baozhai, a black-haired exchange student from Huon-Keang with a crow’s penchant for all things shiny, was the first to take initiative. Her esoterica was rather like my own, transforming her ontological concept of skin. She was branded with a pattern not dissimilar to henna, eye-like spots unfolding in the manner of a mandala with an underlying iridescence when the light caught Bao just right.
For some odd reason, the nick-name always made her blush.
Her skin rippled, a thousand-thousand moth’s wings extricating from her body to waylay the reaper. Whenever a moth touched the Antediluvian’s needle-hair, it burst into iridescent dust.
Once enough particles were present in a three-by-three-by-three sphere, they combusted into a corona of Empyrean fire. Fungal-red legs that looked like malformed fingers of clay fell to the ground.
“Ewww, it’s still moving.”
Indeed, the anomaly still somehow clung to life. But quickly, the thing stilled as if flash-frozen.
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