You check your spam folder. There’s mostly politics and penises. Some expired Groupons. One appears to be a newsletter you never signed up for. The sender field reads: “arch-dark@4p0cryph4.com.” The subject line:
“Ex nihilo, non omnia. De omnibus daemonibus!”
Normally, you’d ignore it, but you’ve been feeling more lately. As in a doubling of yourself, an increase in hidden energy. You’ve been feeling as though you’re watching an invisible storm from afar.
You click the subject line and your browser navigates to “http://waw.4p0cryph4.com/Beginners_Guide.” You look around to see who’s in your seven-person cubicle. But it’s Pizza Friday, and they’re all down the street, so if it’s porn, it will be in the system but you’ll be able to close it before anyone sees engorgement.
In life, there are all sorts of unseen enemies. Sometimes they’re cancer. Sometimes they’re demons. The worst are the cancer demons. They smoke-em-up-Johnny for you, lump you crazy, hump you up weirder than meatloaf.
The only way to defeat these demons is to become one.
Don’t worry. This is the fun part.
The great thing about turning demon is demons have no rules. You can swaddle yourself in the darkness of you, in your pure existence.
I’d suggest the following forms: Photonic, The Antler, Galactic, or The Dank. Those are usually the best bang for your buck. Find them in our apocrypha wiki.
The page looks jank, full of rough pixels. It looks like it was designed around the time you graduated high school. The page’s creator is probably a forty- year-old surrounded by wood paneling with safety glasses and gray thinning hair living as sad as you, but deeper, due to their age and an unescapable 70’s color palette.
You wonder why you just had that thought. Where the strange judgment came from. Something has you off. You’re on edge, uncomfortable.
You click the blue, jagged-font hyperlink, the underline running below all four demon forms. You arrive at some wiki page with no timestamp and references you can’t make sense of. You notice that a few pixels scattered over the screen appear to vibrate. Almost phasing into your world.
Photonic
Yes, hologram danger. But think laser (of course). Think duality—wave and particle. Diffraction, reflection. Passing through others without your quantum state collapsing. Some say God is a Photonic demon, Jesus too, and that is very likely.
Note: Combine with crystals and lenses for focus, or spread as an ambient flicker. Consider a burning glitter, razor gleams. Your greatest advantage: the spectrums.
The Antler
The mystery of obscene collections of head-thorns. The whole cycle, growth with necrosis filigree.
For instance: a rush of frothing malamutes, asphyxiation by glow-moss carpets, rat farms, eel clouds, a tide of falcons misting with plague rain, organs sprouting excruciating lilies, bath tubs and kitchen sinks erupting with tentacles and blood and venom and teeth and ray spines, and all manners in which nature can declare “BAD-BITCH OVERLORD” all over your world.
The Antler is life in fast-motion—a YouTube video of a fox decomposing in seconds, the birth of a cicada a popped blink.
To put it simply: imagine a deer. Then center on the blacks of its eyes. Expand. Keep the antlers crowned above. Keep expanding until all that is around you is the blackness of spaces haloed by growth and bone, and you will find yourself emitting that pale green light of nature’s endless denticles along with a desire to fill all that blackness with something new.
Galactic
Elements at their most raw are the most strange. Small things made vast, epic in the core of near-infinite expansion. Extreme heat and chill. These are what fuel the flux of the unknown burn-swirl. The short of it: radiations, magnetic fields, gravitational waves, superheated light and dust, vacuums and great ponds of abyss. All of these things exist in the everyday in terrifying multitudes from the mega to atomic scale.
Remember: an unfolding, not transforming.
Utility: Your eyes flow with bright blue plasma, your fingers streak dark matter flecked with white and blue across your bathroom wall, accelerating the expansion of your shower walls, spiraling toothpaste onto brush, and rippling the medicine-cabinet mirrors. Magnetic storms pixel out of your body, ruining the greatest LAN party of 1999. The auroras of your feet spike and simmer along your path of dark energy, the path of the awesome speckled nebula of what you’ve become.
The Dank
This form can only be described in terms of abyss. Darkness is its own body, is everywhere people believe they see absence. Between your brain and your skull, there is darkness. You’ll find darkness inside your mouth, under your TV, inside your computer, just behind your eyes. Everywhere light can’t be. What we know is mostly darkness. This is what you will be.
The only power that rivals its ability to become infinite is light, for whether sopped in blazing beam or the dankest of darkness, a body melts or drowns just the same. That is the endless secret of darkness: it is another light and the greater area of this reality.
Understanding this unlocks an energy closest to your potential.
The Dank is a choice that will never leave you. Accepting this form releases a cold energy from which you cannot warm, and from which you will not hanker to. It asks the most out of these four, for darkness is where people find themselves, either in solace or psychosis.
The page wavers from light to dark. It does so over such a long span of time that it takes a few minutes to notice. At the bottom of the page, a link blinks flanked by a trio of exclamation points on each side.
Your head has started to feel cold. Sweat begins to bubble lightly on your back as your breathing labors. You realize you are no longer in control of your feet or hands when your cursor hovers on the blinking blue and clicks without your feeling any of it.
!!!DISCLAIMER!!!
Turning demon is far from Rubik’s cube or television. This is another instance in life where you become your choices.
What you were fades and leaves. The change is just that.
This is trying coke for the first time. This is a hit and run, a confrontation with what you are capable of.
If you are able to view this website, it’s because you have potential. Or you’re a cyber-demon. Otherwise, it’s Wingdings and broken links.
I believe in you, dear reader. I believe in your ability to accept terror, to be crippled in order to learn new ways to rise.
Cancer is terror, the way it hits slow and fast all at the same time. Look for any unnatural bloat, a tenacious exceeding of capacity, the black clog. They permeate through more than smoke or asbestos ceilings, this screen or Little Boy.
Look for us in the field. Look for stray glint, bug-mutts, space gone local, or arch-dark. Consult our forums and the rest of the wiki.
This has been your Beginning Guide to Demon.
All images courtesy of Eliot Gardepe.