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You’d think that the insanity had reached its crescendo by now with the moon having grown eyes but you, like me, would be wrong.
Voices—old, young, middle-aged, man, woman, child, infirm, healthy, deep, resonant, airy, nasally, commanding, meek—melded in a dyssynchronous cacophony that came from inside our skulls.
The voices, they tore through us and we knew from whence they came: the amygdala, the core of our simian brains. Like parasitic, helminth worms they burrowed through our gray matter and laid their eggs. Like spores they festered until they fully took root and then developed fruiting bodies, blooming in the ether.
The voices grew quiet as words took their place, carved in the black under our eyelids.
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[Setting subliminal circuitry//Implanting nous in entity matrix//Collapsing commissural tracts of ontology.]
[Omniglot integration successful//Conception stabilized//Generating ontological transcript.]
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The words were written in a universal script, a mesh of all languages current and bygone and that would never be—omniglot.
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Entity: [Omniglot//Moonscorched]
Sphera: [Golgotha], [Luna], [Empyrea]
Para-class: [Red]
Esoterica: [Stygia]
Hubris: [The-Fish-Dies-By-The-Mouth]
Reliquary: [-]
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Each and every line of pseudo compute-code was a manifest allotrope of my ontology, detailing my very being as if it wasn’t deserving of anything more than a spreadsheet.
I knew instinctively how to query for more information, a nudge of intent enough to lay bare my own soul to myself. I went through each and every entry possible, manic energy coursing through my every cell.
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Sphera: [Golgotha]
Ignosis: [The sphera of {Golgotha} is that of the {Tower}, humanity’s collective cradle. The old-world is now a corpse before the vultures fighting over the would-be easy pickings. All born on the face of the earth after the {Flood} but anteceding the {Syzygy}, are known as the {Omniglot}.]
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Sphera: [Luna]
Gnosis: [The sphera of {Luna} is that of the {Termina}, the many-eyed moon upon which all realities converge. Lunar phases convey influence to the given sphera each moon is bound to. Eclipses or new moons are bound to the sphera of {Lethea}; waxing crescents moons are bound to the sphera of {Akasha}; waxing gibbous moons are bound to the sphera of {Mercuria}; crescendos or full moons are bound to the sphera of {Empyrea}; waning gibbous moons are bound to the sphera of {Amazona}; waning crescent moons are bound to the sphera of {Hypnagogia}.]
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Sphera: [Empyrea]
Ignosis: [The sphera of {Empyrea} is that of the {All-Devouring-Eye}, a singularity of fire that seeks to blind all in its terrible glory and transform them into starving angels. Its fiery tongues are kept from consuming the world by the {Termina}, providing light to {Year-Zero}; entities bathed under the gaze of a full moon undergo metamorphosis into a messenger of {Empyrea}.]
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
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Sphera: [Lethea]
Ignosis: [The sphera of {Lethea} is that of the {Anathema}, entropy given shape that seeks to return all to the cold womb of the void. When the moonless night comes and the {Termina} slips into the waters of the abyss, the nothing-things that dwell adjacent the vacuum gain the ability to enter {Golgotha} through shadows.]
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Sphera: [Akasha]
Ignosis: [The sphera of {Akasha} is that of the {Leviathan}, the great beast that seeks to consume everything but the sky so that it might swim through it on a thousand-thousand fish wings. When the moonless night gives way to the crescent sickle, bodies of water become portals into the endless ether where titanic eels prowl.]
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Sphera: [Mercuria]
Ignosis: [The sphera of {Mercuria} is that of the {Amalgam}, the amorphous-contiguous realm of living silver that seeks to leech the metal of every world. When the gibbous moon nears the crescendo, {Termina} will weep mercury from five hollow eyes.]
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Sphera: [Amazona]
Ignosis: [The sphera of {Amazona} is that of the {Corpse-Flower}, an angiosperm that knows naught but famine and seeks to colonize all realities to bear the last blossom before all goes dark forevermore under its deathly spores. When the influence of the {All-Devouring-Eye} wanes, the {Corpse-Flower} feeds off its light to breach through the veil and settle its roots into a new locus of {Golgotha}.]
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Sphera: [Hypnagogia]
Ignosis: [The sphera of {Hypnagogia} is that of the {Demiurge}, the last living sophont of their bygone world that seeks new realities to experiment upon. Just before the {Termina} falls asleep, the shadows of cogs and mechanical contraptions spasm on the skin of the near-dreaming moon.}
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Every word multiplied the electric current of anxiety in my teeth, until my bones vibrated in abject paranoia—there were the eyes of many alien things on all of us right now, caressing the napes of our amalgamate necks with their accursed sight.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and would’ve jumped out of my skin had I possessed any.
“Mary, there’s a tower under the [Termina].”
I didn’t even question the weird turn of phrase—that name along with many others have been electro-plated on my soul; old familiar friends now.
Under the gaze of the five-eyed moon, a cylinder of black alabaster sprung up halfway to the [Termina].
It was then that I understood, implicit knowledge crystallizing into an apophany: the [Tower] would slowly grow with each passing moment until it reached its terminal position at the end of [Year-Zero].
Then and only then would a victor of this manifold-front war would be decided—the observer, the [Seneschal], would null any non-conforming reality and reform the earth in their image. How’d I know this? The same way all other humans did: through the voiceless whisper of our collective world-soul.
It was like the shadow of a great monolith, somehow bigger than the sum of its parts.
And I was a single cog of this great machine. We all were.
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It must’ve been deep into the night that our band of ten discussed our different ontologies and what they meant for us going forward.
“[Sword-Logic] is a slow-building sort of power, but with the right conditions I think it can act as another one of our trump cards.”
That had been Maharaja—Raj or Rex, for short. He was like me, with a foot in the doors between two worlds as the second-generation son of Sindhuan immigrants.
That metaphor didn’t quite work anymore, what with seven or more antithetical universes colliding into our own.
We went back and forth testing out and rehashing our moon-given powers—the ontological transcript provided by the [Omniglot] gave us a better feel for what our new capabilities entailed. The roots of our souls interfaced with the mycelium of [Esoterica], implanting instincts as to their perfunctory use, but—like any deal with the Devil—it was best that we had it in writing.
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Esoterica: [Stygia]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Stygia} derives from the sphera of {Empyrea} and {Lethea}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of skin to the platonic ideals of non-existence and annihilation.]
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Hubris: [The-Fish-Dies-By-The-Mouth]
Ignosis: [The hubris of {The-Fish-Dies-By-The-Mouth} derives from the sphera of {Empyrea} and {Akasha}; establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the esoterica of {Stygia} to the ontological concept of true-name.]
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So far, I hadn’t laid down all my cards. I didn’t wag my tongue and make a fool of myself by describing line-by-line my [Hubris]; that was just asking for trouble. If a person uttered my full name, I’d lose my invulnerability—whether temporarily or entirely remained to be seen and I intended to keep it that way.
Instead, my achilles heel became cardiovascular endurance—which, in a roundabout manner, it kind of was. Nothing may be able to pierce my skin, but I still had the stamina of a chronically sunlight-deprived theoretical physics major.
Funny that—studied so much about light but never got any myself.
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