Daemonpunk//Renascence

Pandaemonium—the face of the earth is a wasteland of salt and sulfur, mercury and metastasized reality, called the Desolation; nothing grows and the sun is gluttonous. There is no night but instead meridian-noons and mourning-dusks; the former scours flesh from bone and turns bone to ash in the flash-vaporization of its apocalyptic zenith and the latter denatures the proteins of the skin until it is sloughs-off like the shed of a serpent and irradiates blood to its boiling point.

In between the shadow of this valley of death, only the Eight Principalities persist, mankind hidden away from the Desolation in these arks of techno-and-daemonological make. Most call them the Eight Cities; edifices of the corpse-world staked by the imperial banner of the Eighth Archon of Exaltation Abraxas. Though overtly ruled by the archons, most day-to-day operations are overseen by the Legions—daemons incorporated and passed down in politico-power struggles; zaibatsus of the New World.

In the Sixth City of Neo Babylon, Levi “Killjoy” Basker—just another merc among the masses without a voice—is grafted to a daemon he did not want. Strangely, that makes him both honest and a liar, concurrently. Follow his journey from dog to g-d as he braves the violence and depravity of a world long since dead but still kicking; from the mutagenic and soul-warping powers of daemonolatry to the weeping sorcery of goetia that wracks suicidal guilt upon even the toughest of souls, Levi will need every tool—no matter how despicable—at his disposal to challenge the millenia-long status quo.

Even then it will kill him nine-hundred-and-twelve times over.

The king is dead.//Long live the king.

Progression fantasy in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk hellscape where the internet—the ether, the maelstrom, the sea of sorrow, the collective unconscious, the shadow-soul of humanity—has become host to daemons that seek to corrupt your immortal soul.

So, not that different from now.

The world-building leans heavily on esoterica such as real world demonology, kabbalastic philosophy, gnosticisim, Lovecraft’s many works, Jungian psychology, etcetera. ImaginePersona//Shin Megami Tenseiif it was infinitely darker and the personas//demons therein were eldritch beings whose very presence warps reality to suit a twisted ethos that begets insanity by simply witnessing them, breaking apart human souls into fractals by sight alone.

Deleterious effects on cognition, retrograde continuity made possible through a sleeping apocalypse beast, esoteric mutations that transmute flesh into the innefable, quantum paradoxes that render consensus reality zero-sum, ontological surgery that can amputate shadows from the body and implant the corpses of dead g-ds into one’s very being, madness-inducing horrors beyond//within human imagination; all that good, literary-psychedelic stuff.

Give it a try. You will most certainly regret it.