Snuggly Serials

Black Nerve: Gathered Apocrypha

This document collects small bits of Black Nerve lore not directly related to other narratives, but which gives context on the world. This is very much a disorganized collection of vignettes, but I have organized them into five sections to give them some degree of coherency.

In general, I do not give “word of god”, and prefer not to exegete my work. All entries in this document assume some perspective within the heartlands, if only by implication.

This document will likely grow quickly out of date. New apocrypha is occasionally posted upon prompting on my discord: discord (dot) gg/gnfRhzqg.

Appendix A: Apocryphal Remarks

The following entries are general reference or otherwise don’t quite fit into other categories. It includes:

Not included here is a few sections so long they are placed in its own post. Among them are:

Ichor: Bats’ Blood

The blood of vesperbats is restless.

As an order, bats are known to have remarkably resilient immune systems, but vesperbats are a cut above, having fought and lost an evolutionary arms race against all manner of magical and mundane parasites.

At the end of all that development, the blood of vesperbats is almost as much a danger to it as it is to that which would harm it. Almost.

Vesperbats are known to have extraordinary regeneration — wounds torn open will visibly stitch themselves shut, sundered limbs have been reattached mid-battle, and severed appendages have fruited wriggling stumps after just a quarter hour.

But that which a bat cannot heal, that which makes a vesperbat bleed, that is true danger.

Vesperbat blood is restless, and this nature doesn’t change outside of the flesh — rather, being outside flesh unchains it. The blood has itself a mutagenic, regenerative nature. Pools of the bats’ blood grow larger even when left untouched, and a slickness on the blade will reach out for its wielder.

And when the blood finds or entraps something living? There is a reason you never go for the jugular when fighting a vesperbat. The blood of vesperbats is hungry, and it will consume you.

Among the bats, it is law: wounds should be cauterized, and spilt blood should be burnt. This is an imperative. But if one fails this imperative? Most of the time, nothing happens…

But the blood is hungry, always hungry, and if it finds something to eat, it can grow and persist. It’s a blind, deaf, mute thing. But it can smell, better than anything else alive. And it is as effective as any slime mold.

A blood mass like this is evolution let unleashed. Every cell must do its part, fight for its own survival, or be replaced by one that does it better. A blood mass has stem cells, and all the genes of a vesperbat. Given enough time, it will remember how to construct bone, flesh, muscle, fat, nerve… gamete…

Even the bats fear a myxogoth.

There is but a single mercy. Vespers aren’t stored in the blood, and the bats’ magical gifts thus aren’t shed when they bleed. But it is known, the secret of every profane vesperbane, that all it takes to grow a vesper is bat blood upon a malum…

Gods, if gods can hear, let an envespered myxogoth never appear.

A Note on the Three Classes of Vesperbane

The Pantheca of All Mantiskind is a reification of ideals informed by practicality. Foremost among them is a critique of the Democratic Alliance of Our Hope. The old alliance is universally considered a failure in birthing the Third Dominion as it had. Syndic theory views this failure as an inevitable consequence of its systems; a fault of the fundamental antagonisms between vesperbane and civilians.

The Pantheca mitigates this by restricting first the political power of vesperbanes, barring them from ruling in the syndic party, and second the economic power of vesperbanes, barring them from membership in guilds. All vesperbanes were a part of the Vesperbane Stewartry, overseen by syndics, to be our stewarts, not warriors nor queens.

Depending on who you ask, the stewartry system was either an abject failure, or a functioning ideal astrayed from by the machinations of a pernicious few, a past to be returned to.

In truth, a pure stewartry system there never was. Even when the wise sisters brought Realignment, we would not consign all the noble clans and hardened mercenaries uniformly to death — and could not, for all the abominations and anomalies the Third Dominion wrought still lived. Thus, the cooperative would assist the nascent Pantheca, turn their lifetime-honed combat prowess to its defense, and be our Wardens.

The Wardens program was a stopgap, an atavism. It would gradually wither away to the peaceful ideal of mere Stewartship.

Such peace has not come; defects and crepuscules abound, and the Dream requires teeth to excise these impediments.

And so, the Wardens program has seen extensions and expansions, the laws of the decree revised piecemeal by the courts.

Compared to other military forces Wardens differ in having a fixed capacity which they cannot exceed, a consequence of their creation as a temporary measure. Perhaps “fixed” would be more accurate; it may change with need. In some provinces, the capacity is pegged to population, in others it must be raised by deliberate syndic vote, again and again.

Once the obsolesence of the Wardens was postponed indefinitely across the continent, this policy cracked opened the door for banes not as stringently bound as stewarts. Legally, Wardens fall directly under the command of provincial administrations, rather than the interprovincial Stewartry — and administrations can engage with guilds in a way the Stewarty does not and cannot.

With a new appetite for private use of vesperbane services, the demand grew and grew, even as the supply, as per syndic mandate, was bound by law.
These incentives were the impetus behind the creation of the mavericks program. Entirely freelance vesperbanes, overseen and regulated, but not commanded. (Notably, the maverick tax means they generate stewartry income, yet unlike stewarts, lack the drain of stipends.)

It’s a common misconception that mavericks are in some sense inherently criminal, or worse, some kind of officially recognized, legalized criminal class. Many syndics build careers on the notion of the maverick program being a hotbed of criminality, an offence to the founding principles of the Pantheca. This impression is not helped by the forgiveness claues, granting clemency and lenience to even criminal mavericks who assist against crepuscules and anomalies.

Nonetheless, mavericks are certainly capable of being productive, law-abiding vesperbanes, and many are.

Perhaps the biggest boon of the mavericks program was allowing the closest thing to a reconciliation with the clans since the purges and persecution following Realignment; the clans had never waned in their pride, chafing against the restrictions both the Stewartry and Wardens imposed.

(There is a last classification of vesperbanes not mentioned, that of the renegades, defecting from the Dream. But there’s little to clarify: they are the inherently criminal class.)

Arete: roughly, karma, or satiation, or devotion, or fungible cooperation, or inverted debt. Measures the degree of equanimity or strife, not just between the vesper and bane, but between the vespers themselves, and within the vespers themselves.

Remarks About Arete

Teach any promising vesperbane, and some time after mastering the instinctive techniques and moving on to cultivated expressions, a question is bound to reach their palps.

“What is arete?”

Some teachers, thus prompted, will give bad answers. Others will give no answers. And others still, in a similar vein, are honest enough to amend one of the former two with caveat that they do not know. These are the only three options. Now let us answer.

It is an nymphish essay indeed which begins by quoting the dictionary. Ngewa’s fourth edition defines arete as the substrate of vesperbane power and vesper communication, and cites Old Imperial for its etymology. This tracks with history; the Second Dominion was the first to truly endeavor a halfway empirical understanding of vespers, when the Disenthralled Rebellion still grounded itself mainly in mysticism.

What does arete mean, in the language of Oosifea? It translates to excellence, virtue, a striving for the perfection of existence. But as diligent knowledge-hunters, we must interrogate this further. Famous is the example of old wingless strides, where ancient writings used ‘bat’ to mean ‘tyrant’, yet as language evolves, etymology unmoors from meaning. Not all bats are tyrants, and not all tyrants are bats. Is all arete excellent? Is all excellence arete?

What if we investigate arete itself? In the mnesis of vespers, their memory-lineage, as well as in the oldest fossilized claw-engravings of envespered bats, we find mention of the first lord-king of the vesperbats, an immense bat — immensely powerful, immensely old. His influence over the vespers granted him domination over the bats and he established the Myriad Kingdoms. Within the late culture of bats, there existed the superstition that to speak the name of a powerful bat was to invoke them. We can assume in more ancient times, this myth was taken even more seriously.

The first lord-king was peerless and wrathful, and thus ancient bats would live in fear of bothering him, even by speaking his name. This practice informed every reference to him, even millenia later — never a name, only the glyph ŪNMN or, modernly, with epithets like ‘the forgotten one’ or ‘the unnamed king’.

Curiously, this rabbit hole brings us right back to where we started, for every lord-king after the first is compared to to his example, and every bat considers themselves a king over their thrallwealth, the mantids who serve them. This gives us the etymology of the bats’ word for arete: ŪNMN, the secret glyph of royalty. So for the bats, arete is kingliness. But what does this mean?

Is a king necessarily noble, and so to be kingly is to act with high morality — thus vesperbanes losing arete-standing when faltering to oaths? Is a king the power he wields — thus high arete-standing granting vesperbanes power? Is a king necessarily granted power and legitimacy by his subjects? After all, a line commonly engraved with allusion to the king, thought to be a direct quotation: “Forever I am endebted to my vespers.” Is arete debt — thus spellbands encoding their contracts in arete?

Or perhaps we can take this bizarrely literally. Bear with us; nor bat nor vesper can think reasonably, as a mantis does, so we must be willing to consider the unreasonable. A king may mint coins with his face on them, and within a king’s demesnes, his power is everywhere felt. Could it be that arete is like a king, except when a bane holds arete, the thing that is like a king is not the bane, but the arete itself?

(An interesting fact about ancient battle-queens in the Protectorate of the Pure Council of the Most Honorable of Warriors: that honor was something measured and tracked to fascinating precision. A battle-queen has exactly seven times the honor of the lowest person, a Protected male. But honor is not something you are born with, or something you ‘earn’ with your acts. No, honor is something taken; with ritual acts of disrespect — and killing someone is quite the disrespect, if not the deepest. Could a similar principle hold? Is arete something taken — the fruit of death, even?)

As a final note, in the Book of Recollections, supposed testimony of the prophets attending to the nymphs of the dream, there is some recounting of the history of the vespers. One figure of note is the so-called Author of Arete, who brought order to the vespers with scales and double-entry accounting books. And who else might this be?

Who Brismati Yukli Is

It is a truth I think all will acknowledge, that specialization is the engine of modernity.

Take a tarsus full of shikare oil, and spread it over a slice of honeyloaf. Then, try spread the same amount over two, three, ten — you’ll note it becomes thin, insufficient, worse than nothing at all.

I think few with any connection to the moonspire will have failed to hear of a certain Yukli, privileged with Brismati genius. Arch-sovran before teneral! Student of the twelve arts! A brave, daring tiercel!

We are expected to be impressed to be led by a fledgling who, in reality, should still be in our lecture halls.

When a worker needs a warp-stricken leg healed, will she be impressed her medic can perform Umbra Dragon Invocation? When a mycobane lays the bricks for your house, will all his familiarity with the irrelevancies of red ichor and black nerve make you more confident in the structural integrity of his work? A long list of techniques impresses the novice, but the master cares about the time and focus required to hone. But perhaps we shouldn’t expect such patience from nymphs.

Specialization is the engine of modernity. Syndics coordinate, guilds trade, and stewarts maintain. It is well known how clueless our administrators are when it comes to basic facts of the vesperbane arts — why then, should we suffer (no, not just suffer, promote) the opposite, a vesperbane who argues about markets and censorship, as though his station concerns anything of the sort?

But let’s move off this point about specialization — I believe the word already on his and his supporter’s palps is ad hominem. Yes, supporters — or should I say devotees? fanatatics? If this were just one silly sovran, it would perhaps not be worth the ink. But the same prestigious name adorning so many (admittedly adequate) papers and monographs, also stamps self-published screeds and zines that circulate across the Stewartry.

In those works, I think, you get the picture of the real Yukli, the one unpolished by editors and peer review. You will find amateruish writing, regurgitated philosophical musings, and deeply ridiculous notions investigated with a credulity that borders on contrarianism.

Yukli thinks we could “double” the “intelligence” of every creature in the heartlands with our modern understanding of black nerve and red ichor — even more, that such an augmentation would be desirable. He has a way of questioning the vinculation laws — as though every kind of arthropod was, wanted to be, just a mantis with a diffferent bauplan, and law shouldn’t attend to objective biological and behavioral differences. Yukli has a few issues with biology, actually, seeming to think that soon hemotechnics could, should, would, concern themselves with radical reconfiguring of our appearances, our capacities, our genders. Utter vainity. And I think there is no fitting final illustration of that vainity than Yukli’s nymphly refrain. He loves to say “death is bad”, going as far as to claim that directing bloodbane resources to more important matters is actually one of the greatest deliberate causes of mass sentient death in history — I’m being more tactful. His original phrasing, of course, was much more inflammatory. It’s a comparison that easily flies back at the comparer; after all, none of us have forgotten the last cult of personality whose leader promised followers life eternal.

Now, the arch-sovran doesn’t have all six legs in fantasyland, of course. He’s made no secret of his deeply negative opinion of the vindicator’s guild and welkinism — and I think we all agree. But it’s another example of his nymphly naivety: a good arch-sovran should not make greater enemies of his opposition.

Yukli is a deeply silly, immature male, with an equally immature view of the world. He wants to think truth can reached by reducing everything to simple, unnuanced probabilities — even more, he wants morality itself — the thing empires have risen and fallen to discern — to be just a much of assigning ‘goodness numbers’ to outcomes.

But the outcome I give the most biggest goodness number is Yukli growing up a little before inflicting another word on the world. He should have stuck to writing papers, and I say that with the highest probablity I can make up.

(Source: a note passed around the moonspire citadel, author anonymous)

Agonwrought and Banewrought Endowments

Endowments are the unit of vesperbane power, and come in two forms, according to whose will conceived their design.

Agonwrought

An old proverb goes something like this. Two battle-queens alike were plagued by two vesperbanes ravaging their land. The first battle-queen gathered up a score of her finest warriors, and campaigned to slay the bane menacing their people. She succeeded, at the cost of a dozen and three of her warriors’ lives. The second battle-queen also gathered a score of her warriors, but endeavored to defeat the bane, granting them mercy if they swore never to enter her land again. She also succeeded, with only ten of her warriors dying.

Who, it then asks, made the wiser choice? The unintuitive answer conventionally given is that it is the first, after the ancient observation that a vesperbane nearly killed comes back stronger than before. Indeed, this idea has reached such prevalence to spawn compressed allusions simply saying “better to die killing a bane than to live to spare them”, or even the seemingly contradictory “kill a bane, save a life.”

Unlike so many folk beliefs about vesperbanes, there is not nothing here. As a studied phenomena, the term is agonwrought manifestation. There are innumerable cases: a vesperbane recovering from grave disfigurement heals severed limbs to find they grow back different; a vesperbane captured and starving in a cell manifesting the a means to escape; a vesperbane made sedentary, whether for convalesce, court martial, or assigned an stagnent field post, manifests new endowments, and an eagerness to use them.

The conjectured logic is clear and compelling: a vesperbane exposed to stress, whether as direct as near-lethal trauma or starvation, or as abstract as boredom and lack stimulation, may manifest new endowments as a result.

There’s a gaping hole in this theory, though. A vesperbane faced with life-threatening stakes is little more likely to manifest than baseline chance. There is similarly no boon for one who watches their comrades die in front of them. Endure the cruelties of some abuse subtler than assault, and what salvation comes? Stress in all three cases, undoubtedly, and yet.

But again, there’s not nothing where the theory is looking. It’s just focused on the wrong thing. Agonwrought manifestation isn’t caused by stress to the vesperbane, but to the vesper. It takes all of the vespers’ labor with ichor to heal severe trauma, while a starving body might try to excise the vespers before anything else; and in the last case, endowments were made to be used, and any boredom of an inactive vesperbane would be magnified for their vespers.

But distress, grief, helplessness? Would the vespers notice? Would it affect them?

Banewrought

By far the most important endowment, whose success has made itself present in every modern vespers’ genomic repertoire, is the claws of the oracle. Anatomically little more than sensitivity to the configuration of a hosts’ dactyls, its real power is the encoded association between specific configurations and the cryptic symbology of the arete substrate.

And encoded in arete is all the genomic sequence and all the oaths of blood and soul accessible to vespers, so the claws of the oracle thus grants vesperbanes the capacity to transfer or invent new sequences for the vespers’ consideration.

But of course, there’s an issue. With the claws of the oracles, any endowment can be proposed. But how to gain those claws without already having them? Some vesperbanes may gain them naturally, but agon manifestation is fickle. Relying upon it is wasteful; imagine the stewartry inducts a new vesperbane with aim of constructing bridges, and they instead they manifest to spit fire. You can’t build civilization atop alien whimsy.

It’s one of the seeming laws of vesper behavior that they never themselves produce of a means of communication or interaction, the claws (which, even then, are one-way) being the one outlier, for their obvious utility. Any means of proper feedback must be induced.

There is, however, a kind of vesperbane specialized in vesper interaction, who can induce manifestation of the claws. It’s as they say: vespers made the endowments, but mantids made the haruspex.

Except from the Eve of Realignment

Dominion and union alike have fallen, abandoning you, leaving us to plunge headfirst into this morass. Night has overtaken the heartlands, a night of war, a night of plagues, a night of disaster, a night of death. We reel, and recover, and brace ourselves, and we let the night continue. Insect and chimera dwindle…

A generation has been reared now knowing nothing but this sorry state. Will this be our evolution? Shall our destiny be an ever honed mastery of death, made creatures of this night, scrabbling for slivers of territory? Shall the nymphs go unmourned, their dream a fantasy?

No. Can you not coordinate? Can you not turn as sisters and rise? Let the call of treachery be unanswered.

March with me. By will of vesper and heart of mantis we will rise and build. March with me. With my eye at the helm and my sisters beside me, no army can withstand us. March with me, and this night will be dissolved. Our dreams will blaze forth as a firepit, and its walls we will build shall be such no bat nor bane can threaten you.

Answer my call. I will bring you peace. I will bring you dawn. I will bring you Pantheca.

Battle-queen Eothi Anthimati, founder of the wardens and the Pantheca’s first defect.

Land of Ants and Roaches

The heartlands is, first and foremost, the land of ants and roaches.

The Noble Roaches and the Spinner Ants comprise the majority sapient life in the heartlands, and most occupy professions translatable as ‘farmer’.

Noble Roaches are smaller, generally growing to be 50-80 cm. and standing 40-55 cm. Their name comes from their history: the Second Dominion cast a curse upon their kind that stunted their minds, making them slow and easily controlled, until the prophets’ will broke the curse, twisting it into something which instead uplifted them, returning clarity to their minds. They mature after about 10-14 years, and often live over 50. Mothers carry their young in a ootheca pouch that hangs from their abdomen, and nurse them with a milky secretion, which she can continue to produce for years after weening their young.

Noble roaches are preferentially herbivorous, but may eat meat. They typically farm grains and tubers, but can occupy many professions. They have long, highly sensitive antennae and developed sense of taste that make them excellent chefs. They speak by blowing air through their spiracles, and fine control of this makes them excellent singers and criers. They are gregarious and curious, easily and eagerly establishing friendly relations with other kinds.

Spinner Ants are a yet smaller eusocial kind. Workers are typically 35-55 cm. long and stand 15-25 cm when not upright. A naked spinner ant is notable for being the least intelligent creature recognized as sapient. Their memory, reasoning, and problem-solving abilities are comparable to maned wolves or salticids — which is to say, they are middling clever yet unsophisticated beasts. But when many spinner ants together establish a labyrinth, something remarkable happens. The basic behavior of a spinner ants colony is to gather plant matter (and in some cases carrion) and feed it to several cultivars of domesticated fungus. Some of these provide a labyrinth’s food supply (the ants are able to eat little else), but some serve an arguably greater purpose: growing the filaments the spinners weave into myweft.

Spinners are almost never seen naked. Instead, they are swaddled in great robes and gowns of myweft, and with one piece of fabric invariably found held near the ants’ head. With this stray piece, they will incessantly pull and tie its threads with their tarsi, lick it with wet palps or rub it with elbowed antennae, all as if in thrall to the many tics of a nervous wreck. But to the spinners, this animaweft is as much themself as the body which manipulates it. Ants instinctively manipulate their wefts much like how baby roaches will whine and hiss as to imitate the speech of their elders.

The arrangement, engraving, and scent of the myweft threads, then, act much like a kind of natural language. Thus, the seemingly nervous fretting of a spinner ant is much more like a scholar forever scribbling thoughts upon a page, reading them over and revising according to a learned grammar. It is through these myweft records that the spinner ants achieve their sapience, though some wonder if it merely a mindless facsimile, or if the unraveled instructions on each myweft is merely the written will of an unseen queen ant.

The ants adorn their labyrinths with banners and rugs of dyed myweft, their art and advertisement. Indeed, labyrinths get their name due to the ants’ fondness for constructing great mazes, both to deter invasions, and to test the worthiness of princesses and their prospective mates.

Besides the productions of food and textiles, the spinner ants make excellent archivists and scribes, and like many eusocials, coordinate well for large scale projects.

Unlike roaches, who have a natural affinity for mantids, the ants are much more alien and poorly understood. They share a deeper history with the euvespids.

Of Myxokora

Knowledge-hunting, that unceasing pursuit of truth to the ends of the realm, is not new. Diamantids two thousand years ago were just as us, with all of our curiosity and cleverness.

When the rites of pharmakon emerged, when mantids could drink the blood, eat the entrails, and breathe the souls of bats to become more, their minds immediately sought to understand and explain why.

Today, of course, we know the answer is vespers, and we call their chosen vesperbanes. To some this nomenclature is suspicious, particularly to those of the dream faith, who venerate the beings. ‘Vesperbane’ reads most obviously as the the bane of vespers — is that not a bad thing? But the truth is an etymological snarl.

We once thought the unnatural powers of a vesper bat was simply its own, like the curse of the tenebra moth, and when a order of mantids arose with will to slay them, they were, literally, the bane of the vesper bats: vesperbanes. But It’d be remiss to stop there. Passenger theory, which holds that bat and bane alike gain their power through some manner of chimerism with another race, was not seriously proposed and considered until the postwar period of the severed states. When it was increasingly accepted, of course, it was decided that if a vesper bat absent their passengers was a mere bat, then this addition component must be the vesper.

But if passenger theory was not always there, and not consensus till after thousand years of pharmakon, what were vesperbanes, in the archaic conception? It goes like this:

As a mythological figure, Aromethia was said to have gained new form as a result of her holy hericide. Her trespass against the godly bats, her arrogating of their supernatural birthright, brought her and caught her between worlds. Aromethia the thrall of Ylafenath was a mantis, but Aromethia the prophet was believed to be half-mantis, half-bat.

Every bat loses their child. So when, after a long campaign igniting the rebellion, Aromethia ate a husband and layed her ootheca, she found the husks of her brood stillborn. A sight familiar to so many clan mothers.

In her sorrow and mourning, she wrought an irreplicable endowment. We today would suppose this the long-theorized duskwrought manifestation, but to the ancients, it was divine intervention.

The Aromethia of legend bore no nymphs, but instead took the warm ichor of a slain god into her tarsi and wove it into a surrogate womb, which bore her the first myxokora, the prophet’s red child.

When her early demise drew near, Aromethia released her child, gave it to a successor. If a vesperbane is half-bat, and a myxokora is born of bats blood, then with this gift the chimerical marriage is sealed, and this defined the early conception of vesperbanes: the wielders of the wretched raptorials.

In truth, what’s more likely is that the myxokora was the first blood secret of our kind, and Aromethia in fact reared many children. Close to two millenia have passed since then, and perhaps four score generations. If Aromethia and her descendants remained fertile, it’s simply mathematical that almost all mantids in the heartlands are of her brood.

The Erotyle Enigma

Erotyles, the pleasing fungus beetles, are not recognized as an intelligent kind. It strikes some as odd, on reflection. In this age, enlightened and sheltered from the depredations of world-scars, so many now know of erotyles from tales alone: stories of beetles draped in wisp and cordyceps, sagely beasts who would encounter a troupe of bugs and kill all of them where they stand, save for the one who was kind enough to bow.

Easily dismissed as superstition or legend, but this skepticism is as incorrect as it is reflexive; erotyles are uniquely distinguished as a prey that reacts to intent, not behavior. They do not startle unless you mean them harm; they do not fall for ploys meant to trap them.

When the skeptic is augmented with this knowledge, the next step of intuition is to suppose this a cunning beast; adept at reading body language, keen to think a theory of mind. But this is not so; outside the domain of reading sophonts, they demonstrate no problem-solving or perceptive ability greater than other wild beetles. Faced with a direbeast, or even other wild insects, and its understanding seems meager indeed. But in the most decisive experiment yet conducted, when faced with a puppet controlled remotely by a vesperbane, its sense of intent failed it utterly.

It’s clear, in the end, what must be happening here. The mind rebels at the possibility, but the evidence speaks: each of these beetles must be a connectique of definite, if middling at best, development. A beetle with percipient faculties that exceed even that of most mantids — yes, they lack the tearful eyes of sapience, any useof tools or language, but is their mental sensitivity not evidence enough?

When viewed through the eyes of a distinguished percipient, the truth is a bit weirder. Paradoxically, it’s the very simplicity of the erotyle mind that grants them their abilities. The training of a true connectique does serve to elevate, but rather compensates for their intelligence.

Imagine a crowded room, bustling with the activity of a party or ball, conversations piled on top of conversations and drowning the whole house in a dull drone of interlocution. Now suppose your task was to overhear a neighbor’s argument. Quite the hopeless task, no?

But imagine your house was instead empty, silent but for the breathes and the creaking of wood. Favor your odds in this scenario?

A sapient mind is a roiling flux of enervate reactions and perturbations. A connectique might quiet this morass, still themselves to catch momently the ephemeral gust of enervate forces arising from another mind. But this state of emptiness a connectique strives with difficulty to attain is the natural state for an erotyle.

It’s so easy for to recognize the presence of intelligent intent when you lack any of your own.

Appendix B: Apocryphal History

The following entries detail various aspects of heartlands history. It includes:

Regarding Dragons

What is the Pantheca’s general stance on the dragons? Unequivocally in favor, blaming radical Welkinists for their death?

Regarding dragons, the matter is complicated.

We’ll speak a bit informally here. Suppose you have a friend, and your friend steals someone’s most prized possession. Then suppose your friend is then killed in retaliation. Killing not done in self-defense is heinous. But it’s not accurate to the complete picture to simply condemn that act alone, absent context. But suppose your friend is killed not for the theft, by the one she wronged, but by someone who simply hates her. Things quickly become complex and divergent.

Of course, we could continue making this analogy ever more complex for paragraphs more and not really draw a clean parallel to the situation of the dragons. Much of the needed point has already been made.

Without even getting into the question of whether dragons were intrinsically good or bad, one must acknowledge the facts about any vesperbat. Envespered bats kept hordes of mantids enthralled, used as servants, amusements, and food — or they made arrangements to have access to hordes of the bats that they submitted to. The grand lairs of the bats, the very heights their titans were able to ascend, would not have been possible without the mantids beneath them.

So when bats turned their vesper-endowed powers against the Kingdoms in service of the Disenthralled Rebellion, it must be acknowledged that the fact those bats had the power they did, whether inherited or personally extracted, is not morally neutral.

The Draconic Republic having the position in the world it did was, if not a crime itself, the shadow of many crimes. But the founders of the Alliance did not want vengeance, and believed justice and fairness could be arrived at as the gradual end-result of mutually agreed upon policies and contracts, through economics and laws.

But this was at the beginning, when the rebellion was becoming a nation and helping establish the Republic. Long after, once the Alliance coped with the assimilation of the refugees and remnants of Oosifea’s destroyed empire, there was emerging a very pronounced political split in the Alliance.

On one side, you have what would be inaccurate to call rebels, because they won. But they were very much defined by regard for the philosphies which founded the Alliance. On the other, you have what would innaccurate to call Dominionists, because the Dominion was gone. But they were very much defined by a nostalgia for the Second Dominion and a anxiety at the direction the rebels pushed.

Having established the inaccuracy of these names, we will continue to use them.

Part of the dominionists’ rhetoric served to paint the images of dragons we still live with today.

“How many ‘dragons’ simply called themselves that when Dlann, the archtitan, was vanquished?” “If the dragons so readily betrayed their own kind when the opportunity presented itself, how quickly will the they turn on creatures that are different entirely?” “Why should we trust them, when their sisters are still fighting us even now?”

These are the questions Dominionists asked. Settlements were still attacked by non-dragon bats, and defended by batslayers. Even the dragons themselves would occasionally be involved in violent exchanges with their fellow mantis. The dominionists emphasized this picture of dragons, calling them scorpions in our midst, every one of them an hourglass running down, the sand their patience at pretending to be civilized. When it’s gone, they could easily attack you and your family. “Can you defend yourself against a dragon?” they’d ask.

The sapience of vesperbats is often debated. The general consensus is that, as a consequence of their modified biology, vesperbats never stop developing. They grow ever larger — including their brains. Knowledge-hunters at the time codified scales and measures. A sexually mature vesperbat is about as intelligent as a clever beast or a first instar mantis. By the time they become elders, they are comparable to an adult mantis. (Some took this to its inevitable conclusion, and wondered if the oldest vesperbats are beyond even the smartest mantis. Generally, this was rejected as ridiculous.)

The rebels were hopeful that the dragons could be assimilated, become a accepted part of the Alliance. The dominionists wanted more extreme measures.

It cannot be denied that the presence of dragons presented problems. There were dragon attacks. And though the vanquishing of Dlann, the archtitan, was a turning point, throughout the existence of the Alliance, there remained bats to be vanquished. The lines between bat and dragon couldn’t not be drawn cleanly enough to assuage concerns.

And even on an economic level, vesperbats pose issues. Vesperbats are mammals, and possess uniquely active blood — kilogram for kilogram, they require more food than mantids, and the work they can do is not multiplied to match. Vesperbats are far, far more prone to disorder and disease. And quite simply, easing the tension between two species who are finally nearing the end of a conflict older than either of their civilizations is a task the fledgling alliance could not dream of succeeding.

Is the world more peaceful, with the dragons gone? Yes. Could the Alliance have built an accord between the two species, absent dominionist influence? Could the Alliance have dealt with the problems dragons posed, without granting batslayers judicial authority and no oversight, without coercive sterilization programs, without quelling insurgencies with shadowcalling and the old sanguine arts? Yes and yes. Was this the enabling prelude to one a indefensible genocide? Yes.

This is one of the many mistakes of the old alliance, and the syndics, every one of them a student of history, will reflect on them, learn from them, and uphold the Dream.

But there are no vesperbats in the heartlands. And that’s a good thing.

Why Nobility?

What is the publicly known history of the Wentalel monarchy? Are there other figurehead (or perceived-as-figurehead) monarchs in the Heartlands?

One thing that must be remarked upon. To a first approximation, no one in the heartlands likes monarchies.

To an Oosifean purist, a monarchy is a wasteful relic; in the most just era of the world, the God-empress was less a monarch than a locus of the natural order of the world, apex predator and stern mother as one. To any true believer in Aromethia or the later Dream, a monarchy is seen as the oppression it entails. To the syndics and scholars of the status quo, a monarchy is by definition undemocratic, and has no place in the Pantheca.

And to them all, there has only ever been one monarchy in the Heartlands, and its name was the Myriad Kingdoms.

So for that reason, it’s worth digressing further afield, and explaining just where nobility comes from.

This begins with the Third Dominion. The Third Dominion can’t properly be called a monarchy, due to its short history, tumultuous existance, and convuluted organization. More properly, it should be said this begins where the Third Dominion ends.

No one quite agrees where that starts exactly — some say the conflagration of the capital mount, some say the Night of Ashes, and all but the most contrarian say it was definitely before Clanshatter — but it’s better to think of these events as pieces of the dam breaking away; the water was always spilling through.

Thus, as the constituent polities collapsed, clan after clan defected from the Dominion. Confidence was lost, promises seemed unlikely to flower, and clans, alongside the odd clanless bane, decided it was better to look after themselves.

(What, precisely, is a clan? Fundamentally, a clan is simply debts and rights etched in arete, and distributed by the vespers as instructed. A clan is the energy stores and knowledge stores passed down, controlled by its claimants. It’s, to oversimplify, merely a class of property rights.)

No clan is an island, and for all that they would look after themselves, dealings still needed doing with the outside world. Thus, in the cadences of the previous era, the nature of many clans became that of mercenaries. City after city was left struggling as the empires they had furnished crumbled, and in desperation, agreements with clans were made for their protection.

Then, after years charged to defend a plot of land, it’s understandable to begin to feel a greater ownership over it. So the pattern one sees repeated is clans arrogating more control over the settlements they protected, their claims inarguable when backed by blood and black. Some historians coin the term ‘clan-states’ for the some arrangements that resulted. But most often, ownership was declared, and matters of administration left to those outside the clan.

This, then, is the argument the clans made when the revolutionaries came to their doorstep. These mantids are not subjects, but tenants. We are not lords, but leasers. These are not taxes, they are rents.

The responses are a diverse as the provinces. In some, such as the Land of Lakes and Rivers, the property was nevertheless seized for the common good. In others, such as Black Tiaga, the story is much the same, yet going as far as to kill outright those that resisted or undermined the new democratic project. In still others, such as the New Protectorate, the story is much the same, only they were killed for being vesperbanes, rather than property owners.

But in some, such as Plains Southern, they were begrudgingly accepted. But there’s a rub: if these are not sovereigns, but citizens exercising property rights, then they have to comply with greater laws. And by the laws of the Pantheca, envespered mantids cannot hold superpersonal property.

Thus, a dilemma faced every noble clan: they may keep their holdings in arete, or keep their holdings in charter, but not both.*

The nobles of Wentalel, as you may imagine, took the latter option. And, to hear some tell it, there’s a certain high dedication in that choice, something honorable; they relinquished their magical power for the good of their people, so that they may remain benevolent directors of the city, and safeguard it against the rash neomania of the syndics.

The fascination many retain for the nobility is something one can observe in any city of the sort. They are the rich, the beautiful, and they are steadfast memorials: they are older than the Pantheca, and there’s a certain precedent in that age.

One hears many exclamations having to do with the goings-on of the nobles — “ah! was that not a splendid eastern dress the prince wore?” “oh! is that a half-winged the second-in-line is courting?” “have you seen the latest renovations to the noble gallery?” — in a way, the once-clan acts as a sort of unifier for the city.

That is, when it’s not instead dividing by matters of scandals, feuds: whether this heir is actually a bastard, or if this addition to the family has diluted the blood intolerably so.

But syndic placements are not inherited, can never be barred or bourne on the basis of purported pedigree. Any shares or stake a proprietor might have on a city’s land does not, can not, extend to any influence on its administration. The Pantheca is a democracy.

(*Of course, this is only true before the custodian clan loophole became enshrined as all-but-common-practice, but such it wasn’t when the Realignment reached Wentalel.)

Karkel, the White Dragon’s Antecedent

Is it known who stole Karkel’s power, leading them to realize how terrible the Myriad Kingdoms were?

To know Karkel, the ever-scoured, the living pyre, the white dragon, it is helpful to first understand what it means for a bat to be royal.

Bat development is commonly held to be a sort of hierarchy. Only when a bat achieves fertile blood, are they finally considered as adults. When they grow the umbral antlers, they are elders. When they bleed ichor, the blasphemous acme of blood and fulfillment of all its necromantic nature, they are titans. But royals may be the most nebulous of all of these. It exists, foremost, as precaution.

Bats, by their nature, will quarrel and hate. When adults fight, it may cost them lives. When elders fight, it may cost them lairs and thralls. When titans fight, it may cost all of them hunting grounds.

But there were titans of truly devastating power, whose techniques could do worse than rendering hunting grounds uninhabitable — who posed threat to all batkind.

Thus, the recognition of royalty. If one earns respect of a royal sufficient to allow one to partake of their blood, that one is a royal. If one can kill a royal and dare drink their blood, that one is a royal. And of course, if one can sleep hanging from the boughs of the queen’s blossoming throne and live to awaken, that one is a royal.

The certainty of mutual destruction alone is often enough to deter interroyal conflict. When this is not enough, but one law governs all royal bats: the one who would attack a fellow royal is not royal, and must face the wrath of all of them. In this way, peace was the privilege of the most powerful.

Being bloodborne, royalty is inherited, but remains dormant and invalid until titanhood. (A powerful parent is no guarantee of power — but if a future royal be weak, liable to be killed, it was a problem which solved itself.) There were titles for a royal heir that might be translated as ‘princeling’ or ‘princess’.

Before their turn, Karkel of burning fur was nascent royalty, a welcoming and pleasant princet buoyed by a rich inheritance. Rather than a lair, their demesne was as much a city, with vesperbats from around the kingdoms welcome to stay for one night. Hospitality and openness distinguishes Karkel, where so many bats were secretive and jealous. He won much fame with a particular recipe, widely shared, which we might translate as ‘roast effigy’ — in which thralls were cooked alive then served. Another famous dish was a cheese made with the milk of the mothers from the families’ vassal litters, occasionally embellished with their fermenting stillborn.

Indeed, Karkel was oft-nicknamed the chiropteran campfire. Something warm to gather around for meals — but campfires will burn those foolish enough to touch, and Karkel was not all ingratiating flattery. A visitor to their city was their subject, and they deftly, fatally struck down those who offended their princely pride.

After reaching apotheosis with titanhood, Karkel’s route to greater power — and their ultimate folly — was the tutorship of the plasma-lords. A fraternity whose arrogance — literally — knew no bounds, the plasma-lords ever sought to best their rivals, the devotees of a certain glowing metal. In their highest, mythic ambition, the plasma-lords aspired to chain the stars themselves, to breed them and wield them.

Karkel knew joy to join them, and pursue their highest ranks. A rotting and wizened plasma-lord took Karkel as apprentice, to teach them the arts of plasma, and assist with his research. One particular experiment was the creation of a plasma construct held inside a large sealed box — this allowed greater control of environmental conditions, the thick walls of the box limiting energy wasted.

Once the plasma-lord had gone in the box and demonstrated this a few times, he asked for Karkel to give it a try, and watched from outside. And Karkel succeeded — not for nothing had they survived when their royal blood was no secret. Their master was pleased, and commanded them to feed more into the plasma, make it hotter, more energetic.

And it grew out of control.

So Karkel sought to escape the box.

Their master did not let them out.

Many assassins had come for Karkel as a nascent royal, thirsty for their blood — but now, after having finally become truly royal, had one at last succeeded?

A truth later revealed, their master was no plasma-lord — though once he was. Rather, once his body was. The flesh was possessed, made puppet to a genetic apparition — by Tertöm, the ever-living, the ghost of pus and sperm. He’s invented and mastered the art of totipotence: peerless regeneration and metaplasia. But most troubling of all his titles, he was Tertöm once-royal; he was killed, and a dead royal is no royal. Weakened by the strain of returning, his royalty was thereafter denied.

Tertöm watched Karkel burn alive, and must have thought it an ironic fate. But he was not done with them.

Tertöm watched Karkel die many, many times. Melting, marinated in a vat of acid that burned when they climbed out into the air. Sliced into bits by knives and razor-thin bindings that peeled their flesh with every struggle. Frozen in expanses of ice where their attempt at wielding their flames melted it — only for them to drown and refreeze, engulfed. Infested with slugs and worms like some discarded piece of meat. Pricked and exsanguinated, milked for their coveted blood.

As each death approached, a choice came first. Karkel could die, finally, or endure Tertöm’s revival. Unfaltering, they made the same choice each time. Tertöm wanted to break them, and let them feel a few fractions of the pain and indignity he felt. Karkel gave in before they give up.

(With each revival, the blood of Karkel and of Tertöm grew ever intermixed.)

Tertöm molded Karkel into a weapon to oppose the royals. He wanted them to hate the royals’ cruelty and caprice. He wanted them to dream of a future in which they have all been slain, and perhaps Tertöm himself hangs from the queen’s boughs.

And Karkel was wielded. They were fried and sundered by Jejak’s thunder. They were pulveried by Tzic’zahd’s earth. They were obliterated by Dlann, the archtitan. They fought the nameless necromant, having their ichor tainted by more than Tertöm. They fought the one whom the vespers loved, and lose hold of even their symbionts. They fought the nightmare incarnate, descending into dark madness only reprieved by tearing off their antlers.

And then, at length, after failures piled up, Tertöm discarded Karkel as one would discard a used and ineffective tool. He took what he desires from their blood and endowments, and left the body in a desert to die. And there Karkel lay with a final death fast approaching, knowing that they alone were impotent to challenge the royals, that a dream of a new king hanging from the queen’s boughs was not theirs to realize.

That is the story the white dragon told, when one asks about their fall. There were natural followup questions: who or what saved them from their fate? What did they do about Tertöm — was there vengence? Most pointed of all: does your suffering and your atonement erase or outweigh the things you’ve done?

The white dragon would look on in pensive silence, and would not share an answer.

— Quotation from Here Be Tragedy, a history of the dragons. Not banned, but restricted, deemed an unreliable source by the Stewartry.

On the seven forsaker clans

Before the nymphs of the dream were put to volt, there were several clans who had produced prophets among their younger generation; indeed, the prominence of these individuals were the very leverage that lifted the nymphs a position of influence over banedom as a whole. Killed before they could bring about the promised alignment, with their dying breaths the nymphs are said to have spoken a curse for the false prophets who failed to avert their fate — to those who had forsaken them. The manifestation of this curse for each was unique, but in each case the result is a plight just short of a protracted, mortifying abolition.

Clan Thimithi suffers the Curse of Extinguished Flame. Newborn Thimithi were stripped of the resistance to flame their mothers grant them, and lacking that, the ashen ecdysis goes from painful to the leading cause of Thimithi mortality. At the same time, Thimithi were rendered infertile until their ashen ecdysis. Between these two grindstones, their number dwindled until, in the present day, they are a few members short of line extinction.

Clan Brismati suffers the Curse of Refracted Light. Now, pairings between two Brismati will never bear children, and the child of a Brismati and a half-Brismati will not have access to the blood secret. Occasionally, children will now find they lack one of the innate abilities their parent’s pierazeidos had boasted. Telescopic eyes and eidetic memory were once available to all Brismati, and are now exclusive to branches. By now, some abilities have been lost entirely.

Clan Fagé suffered the Curse of Devoured Tongues. Their blood secret was once the red tongue; but now it is no longer inherited by their children. Instead, it can only be inherited through cannibalism of one who possesses the blood secret. In the modern day, it’s now rarely thought of as a blood secret, though in some respects it still is.

Clan Gaveldika suffered the Curse of Grounded Equillibrium. Their blood secret was the creation of electrically charged bindings, both in a physical sense (for traps, restraint or torture), and in a metaphysical sense (making many of them accomplished spellbrands). Under this curse, power dwelled in them like volatile lightning. When facing a weaker opponent, energy and arete would be leeched out of a Gaveldika and into their opponent, empowering them until the Gaveldika was equal to or weaker than their opponent. Their electric bindings were similarly mutinous; no longer could they bind anyone at all, because the fungal strands would quickly ally themselves to their target.

Clan Gaveldika is no more. Their arete, having been laundered by nocturnes, has lost all of its value, with only miniscule amounts retaining the equalizing properties. Dissolution of their technical property has led to the proliferation of lightning affinity. Of their blood secret, little remains other than the eccentric “chain lightning technique”, a powerful bolt of aretaic lightning that can only target living banes; its potency can be scaled up with frightening ease, but never to the point where it’s immediately lethal to the target. It endows the target with the ability to subsequently cast chain lightning for themselves on a target of their choosing.

Clan Queleta suffered the Curse of Concentrated Purity. They bore the blood secret of alcohol affinity, with virtues such as countering virulent ichor and providing a imbuement fluid that didnt easily freeze. With the curse, they lost their immunity to drukenness, and the blood secret could not be inherited unless both parents possessed it. Within a century, every member of clan either failed to pass on the secret, or became inbred to the point of serious medical complication as they died off. After realignment, the clan left behind vesperbanehood entirely for symbolic noble status. Still to this day they make pretty good wine.

Clan Batros suffered a Curse no haruspice has put to name. They once held the blood secret of the shining wings, endowing them with a kind of flight, but once cursed, none were able to grow wings with a size of more than cosmetic significance. When it was discovered that the wings could be grafted and used by hosts outside the clan, its members were hunted. The Batroses went extinct before the mystery of their curse was puzzled out.

At the start, we mentioned that there were seven forsaker clans, but have only named seven. This is no mistake: there is record of seven curses in arete-records, but no one has made any sense of the seventh curse. There are three theories to explain it, ranging from benign to troubling to downright disturbing.

First is that, for structural or mnemonic reasons, there are seven entries and one of them is entirely superfluous. There were seven nymphs, and seven points in the septagrammaton, so it’s a suggestive theory. The indecipherable contents, then, could just be accumulated junk from generations of transmission, no sense to be made of it because it was nonsense, or the vesper equivalent of a tall tale. Second is that the seventh curse was devised and never bound to a target, often with the added speculation that it’s some contingency for later use. This theory is a favorite of the mystic imploring devotion in their flock, who assert that if we continue to stray from the vespers’ dream, if we do not do all we can to free them from their bondage, the seventh curse will befall us all, worse than anything visited upon the forsaker clans of times past. Woe to those who invoke the vespers’ wrath.

The final theory holds that the seventh curse exists and was delivered. The clan whom it targeted committed a crime so heinous, possessed a blood secret so repugnant, suffered devastation so complete, that in the wake, we can find no evidence they ever existed.

Woe to those who invoke the vespers’ wrath.

Appendix C: Apocryphal Lists

The following sections are lists of closely related things. It includes:

This is the longest appendix; should it be split?

The Thirteen Arts of Vesperbanes

A/N: This section is somewhat outdated. Nothing contained herein is egregiously noncanonical, but some terminology will be superseded.

A vesperbane is a mantis who has undergone the pharmakon rites to host vespers within their body. In return they are granted magical abilities — but to use them, the vespers must grow bespoke organs, the physical means to implement that magic. Vesperbanes’ abilities fall under three broad categories, and within those categories are the thirteen schools of magical techniques.

Umbra

Enervate is a paraphysical substance that in ways resembles a form of matter or energy, but follows has its own unique physics and chemistry, and complex interactions with normal matter. The short of it is enervate attenuates energy and enshrouds matter, and the long of it is far too long to get into here. Enervate exists in the environment — as an atmospheric layer far above, or bound and seeking escape from the heat of the mantle, and at length produced by deposits of precious nerve crystals. It’s generally not found nor produced within organisms, being corrosive to structured matter. Thus, a vesperbane wishing to manipulate enervate must acquire and maintain a store of it.

Umbrachanneling – school of the black enchanter

The umbrachanneler harness the power of enervate through precise siphoning or discharge. Any umbrachanneler necessarily wields great destructive power; matter dissolves in contact with enervate, an effect even a wretch can exploit. Barriers can be broken down, flesh deliquesced, and the very air itself turned deadly. But their true power comes from their implements, tools made from amalgams, and designed to be imbued with enervate. An umbrachanneler with access to implements is limited only by the imaginations and manufacturing of engineers. But this is not the only way — an umbrachanneler whose body has been augmented may imbue their chitin itself, so their raptorials inflict wicked wounds, or deflect projectiles with charged energate (the famous Et-Oosen’s Phare). Others may seek alchemy over engineering, pursuing new effects through pure enervate, like the dynamists who master telekinetic control of matter.

Umbradivination – school of the black sensor

To innate senses, enervate is the absence of form and light, the absence of sound, and olfactory pain more harsh than capsaicin, more aversive than denatonium. But to a novice sensor, species and saturation can be discerned. To an adept, form becomes visible as energy gardients beating waves across the surface, the resonance cascades of enervate spells in action become stridently audible. The master begins to witness the mystifying geometries that the mind that warps to comprehend. Even the greatest stealth erodes under the eyes of a trained sensor, but the true profit of umbradivination is scouting for nerve crystal deposits, and gaining forewarning of umbral storms.

(This is a school of some controversy, for those tributes and conscripts with any facility with it begin to encroach upon the blood secret of the Nibrissa clan, the black whiskers — an unrivaled sensory organ, that the clan would do much to ensure it is never rivaled.)

Umbrasynthesis – school of the black alchemist

When the Telesterion opened the epsilon gates, umbracraft changed irrevocably. Even as the low hanging fruit in other fields has been plucked, umbrasynthesis still seems ripe with new possibilities. Through the three routes of fission, fusion, and reaction, the marriage of enervate and matter begets endless forms most bewildering. This school is unique in that the parachemistry of enervate is accessible to the vesperless, provided the right tools and perhaps a laboratory. But the combat umbrasynth can — and must — mold enervate within her own body.

Umbraconjuration – school of the black summoner

If umbrachanneling is the mastery of matter, than umbraconjuration is the mastery of pure enervate. An umbraconjurer produces semistable constructs of enervate — a feat that’s been compared to conceiving, engineering and constructing a machine with nothing but the reckoning of your mind. A wretch conjurer can manage little more than the nerve missile technique, while a fiend might aspire to the tau-nrv whip or the rho-nrv devastator. And of course, no blackbane fails to respect the capstone: umbra dragon invocation, called the last word in umbraconjuration. But the most reliable of the conjurer’s techniques is the simple orb, for it’s the most stable form enervate can take while still allowing embellishments for utility.

(Of note is the Asetari clan, a clan descended from a wingless tribe, whose blood secret was the Astral Body: an autonomous conjuration one could mistake for a living creatures, and a family of mind projection technique that gave them fine control of these wraiths.)

Umbraprojection – school of the black witch

Enervate parachemistry has many parallels to matter, and one is the class of umbral neurotransmitters — some of which are naturally occuring. The theory is that sufficiently fine control of enervate would then give you direct influence over a organism’s brain. The reality is that not only is that level of fine control essentially impossible, neural connectomes are sufficiently unique that “illusions”, “telepathy”, or “geas” effects through means of umbraprojection are outright fiction or embellished legends. What umbraprojection is capable of is quite underwhelming. It excels at, beyond anything else, causing causing confusion, mental fog, and headaches. For the wretch projectionist, that often is the goal, but it requires a deft touch to do anything else. One of the most common midlevel abilities is stimulating regions whose function is highly conserved, for instance triggering a fear response.

Umbramodulation – school of the black wizard

Umbramodulation is two things: an untested theory of theorectical umbral physics, and what actually exists, a grab bag of strange tricks and impractical techniques mainly cared for by researchers. There are anomalous properties of certain low entropy amalgam crystals — there are well-known deviations in cohesion coefficients and the mystery of the phase index. Modulation theory holds that enervate species aren’t black boxes of inherent properties, but all properties of the myriad enervate species are determined by the vibration of the bonds of the fundamental constituents of enervate. And moreover, that those properties can be altered without fission, fusion, or reaction, through the theorized mechanism of modulation.

There are no combat umbramodulators, and little application has been discovered. But there’s the hope that one day, there’ll be a breakthrough…

Ichor

Red ichor is the blood of the vesperbat, the creature whom vespers originally evolved to bond with. Vesperbat blood is hyperactive, able to grow and mutate at staggering rates. The bats have evolved natural mechanisms to corral their blood, but when it’s freed of the flesh, its mercurial nature is unleashed. But through skillful use of ichor, endless possibilities for the manipulation of biology open up — and indeed, everything any vesperbane has done required ichor to birth the vespers, grow their endowments. There is a name for when the use of ichor fails, and that word is myxogoth.

Haemoaugmentation – school of the red healer

It’s the natural inclination of anyone given facility with biology itself: heal the sick and broken, and uplift all to a new standard of health. And indeed, control of red ichor is a route to mending wound and revising the body, but the reality is far less glamorous. Per hayflick regulation, haemoaugmentation is no cure to ageing, and ichor-derived grafts require constant work to escape the necrotic, cancerous fate of all bat blood.

Haemodiagnosis – school of the red peeragist

By name, haemodiagnosis would almost seem a subfield of haemoaugmentation. After all, how could one heal without first diagnosing the malady? But this school concerned more than mere triaging — a haemodiagnostic’s aim is to understand biology on the deepest levels, down to the sequencing of gene tendencies and mapping metabolic pathways. A skilled haemodiagnostic could reconstruct someone’s appearance from a drop of their lymph. Any developmental weakpoint you have becomes visible to them. And moreover, vespers spoke with blood before ever arete existed, and echoes still remain. The forbidden techniques of haemodiagnostics allows understanding blood secrets as no one else can — and stealing them.

Haemofabrication – school of the red pharmacist

Organs and tissues derived from metaplasia of ichor have longevity problems, and a way to sidestep this is to make ichor the process, rather than the product. The most obvious application of haemofabrication is synthesizing chemicals, but haemofabricates, controversially, also use their skills to create anti-vesperbane weapons. Haemofabrication is subject to some definition issues — is a graft that amounts to an advanced bandage (that is, a temporary measure until the body heals on its own) an instance of haemofabrication? More controversially, ichor-derivatives, such as ichortallow, blur the line between fabrication, augmentation, and genesis, but have often been placed on this side of the divide.

Haemogenesis – school of the red breeder

No school of vesperbane arts has been subject to more sanctions than haemogenesis. In short, haemogenesis is the growth of organisms with red ichor. There are two broad approaches — one, the easiest, is to shape and possess an existing organism. Mammals are the most receptive host, and the result is termed a dire animal. The other is to mold the creature of raw ichor. A note is to be made of the creation of self-reproducing threats, an act that warrants immediate sanction. There are two means of accomplishing this — through a kind of budding, where blood is sloughed from one creature to form another, or through what amounts to sex re-derived from first principles. The latter carries the extreme risk of bypassing hayflick regulation, and is the act of a true renegade.

Vesper

The chimerae of twin hungers, the vesper live within the intensities of a vesperbane, stoking their hunger and surviving off an excess intake of food, relying on the vesperbanes for reproduction.

Aretecraft – school of the vile medium

Arete is the medium of communication, inheritance and exchange between vespers. When one grasps the arcane rules, one may take part in the interlocution. A student of aretecraft may inscribe techniques and endowments (for genomes can be quite lengthy) so that they may be easily granted to other vesperbanes. An adept may become fluent enough to forge binding vespertine oaths, or perhaps become an exhumer of ancient knowledge buried in the arete-record. By far the most common application of aretecraft is the eduction of chi-nrv — because for all the information it contains, arete is also a means of sealing energy.

Mycocraft – school of the vile artificer

The kingdoms of life diverged long, long ago, but the separation was much more recent for kingdom fungi and kingdom animalia, than either for kingdom plant. This reflects in how ichor often struggles to affect trees, while having much facility with mycelium. The school of mycocraft is the most pedestrian, as its primary end is inoculating substrate with a fungus that consumes it over the course of hours or days, before being specially treated to form unique materials, such as the cheap banestone of buildings, or the baneleather soldiers are guarded with. Mycocraft can also be used to manipulate the earth by directing a mycelia mass to growth within it. Combined with ichor-augmentation, a combat mycobane could gain advantageous control of the battlefield.

Dwimmercraft – school of the vile theurgist

Would it be more accurate to introduce dwimmercraft as a list of applications, or a list of crepuscular interdicts? It may be true that haemogenesis is the school most sanctioned by the stewartry, but by the vespers themselves, no school has seen more restrictions and penalties than this. The idea is simple. The nature of the vesper-bond is endowments granted — but why should endowments be only in the body? Dwimmercraft, then, is the creation of sustained endowment-type effects outside the body of a vesperbane. The easiest way to power an effect like that, of course, is ejecting a vesper to act as the ‘ghost in the machine’. More abstractly, dwimmercraft is the manipulation of vespers. There are some effects which fall under this school only by this refinement of the definition — the Broodseer’s Eye, for example, seems an ordinary bodily endowment to the uninitiated. The most iconic effects of dwimmercraft are the creation of golems, or those wards which protect us from the obliteration fields.

Lists of Overscourges of the Wardens

Overscourge of the Windborne Stronghold: Astere Navera, whose breath is black winds. A neurochanneling genius — at first, she was only a stewartry student studying nitrogen-inducing amalgams. So-called aerochannelers are known to create simple semistable constructs such as vortex rings, but Navera pioneered techniques that discovered and then addressed the problem of phase-turbulence, and her mastery of aerochanneling now resembles neuroconjuring, and some of her feats have verged on shadowcalling.

Overscourge of the Frozen Swamp Stronghold: Miksi Apo, who is one and many. According to some, an utterly unremarkable vesperbane propelled to height by a single fluke. While all mantids are capable of parthenogenesis, Miski is 1) capable of it at will, 2) seemingly always produces full-clones, without chromosomal crossover, and 3) according to the vespers, all of Miksi’s children are Miksi, and share an arete-standing. Through further endowments, the Miksi-brood grow preternaturally quickly, and all seemingly share a capacity to communicate on a level deeper than language, granting something resembling the “hive minds” attributed to the eusocial kinds or national henosis dreamed of by the second dominion.

Overscourge of the Mountain’s Crown Stronghold: Relewan, the bulwark. A dark, hulking figure who might be mistaken for a haemogen’d chimera, or a diminutive vesperbat. Relewan’s hide cannot be burned by fire, dissolved with acid, or deliquesced with enervate. When attempting to be cut, smashed, pierced, or otherwise kinetically damaged, the response resembles annealed specimens of ultradense metals found only in tiny quantities. Relewan’s body, by means of a adaptation endowment incomprehensible enough to be a nascent blood secret, devises accumulating resistance to anything which damages her. The one exception is the exception to any art of vesperbanes: but even welkinflame does not smite her as readily as it does others. Relewan is a vesperbane of renown good humor and pleasant mannerism, and in battle, fiercely protective of all her wardens — few even among the overscourges take to the front lines as readily. Yet there are umbral anomalies that give this giant pause, and she is unwilling or unable to face them.

Overscourge of the Three Lakes Stronghold: Tima Gansbrood, the poor sod. A few decades ago, the stronghold (formerly the Great Western Stronghold) was led by Alemar, a charismatic firebrand who breathed inspiration in the wardens’ ranks. It was dangerous unity, particularly in a land that had borne empires, clan-states and the grip of third dominion in short order. Alemar was a radical — an extremist, in the language of the syndics. Their countenance was revoked, and rather than oppose the Pantheca, they accepted execution. Since then, the land of lakes and rivers has witnessed no fewer than a dozen overscourges, all killed just years after gaining the title. Rather than a protracted spate of assassinations, this seems a consequence of Alemar being deposed before naming a successor, rendering subsequent claimants all syndic appointments, and they have yet to choose a vesperbane capable of leading the province for any length of time before seeing death in the line of duty.

Overscourge of the Cursed Taiga Stronghold: Battle-queen Asfal Oovela, of the umbral arsenal. A common refrain among umbrachannelers is that common weapons are a dead end, that ultimately hitting things with imbued shadowsteel is too limited for high level use. Oovela is sometimes cited as a counterexample: a scourge-level vesperbane whose approach to combat is just that. But it’s not so simple. The thing that truly sets Oovela appart is a mastery of a high level umbrachanneling technique now classified by some as umbramodulation: a reversible phase-perturbation that completely suppresses the normal force. What this means, practically, is that when even apparently unarmed, Oovela is capable of materializing weapons in a moment, seemingly from nowhere. It’s not an effect unheard of for blackbanes to utilize, and parallel spaces are a known, if headache-inducing, application of enervate engineering — but Oovela applies it with alacrity, effortlessly able to strike with six different weapons in the span of a few moments, relying on umbrakinesis to save her the trouble of weapon-movements that do not serve the central goal of striking her foe.

Overscourge of the Bleedweb Stronghold: Sir Ol-Nahan, the unfettered, scion of clan Pelamn. Ol-Nahan is a haruspex. He has no eyes, compound nor ocelli. In the sockets lies a mix of those growths of swelling blood-pustules common to plaguespitters, and ordinary flesh, wounded and rotting. Around his neck, he has fastened a pulsating sac which seems both his harusign and a dweomer of the common Broodseer’s Eye endowment. Ol-Nahan has taken the endowment to a new height, and he is hypercognizent of the presence and state of vespers, enervate, or ichor in a large radius around him. Ol-Nahan is some 63 years old, extremely old for a mantis, let alone a vesperbane. Despite his age, he remains rather spry.
There are outlands forces just beyond the border of Greenweb that would march inland — Ol-Nahan politely declines them. The land of Frozen Swamp maintains that it has a right to the therids’ ancestral land in Greenweb. Ol-Nahan disagrees.

Overscourge of the Vile Blood Stronghold: Lady Uhraquls Setesbrood, the vampire. In ages past, vampirism was a phenotype that existed among the bats, its members shunned and exiled even among the myriad kingdoms. With the ephemerality of even living bat-blood, such a rare gene tendency was thought irrecoverable — and then it re-emerged.
The Lady herself is a mystery; we know ‘Uhraquls Setesbrood’ was a civilian who died on the front lines of the second arthropod war — and burried generations separate now from then. Yet decades ago, she came to the Pantheca’s attention, a creature of warlust. Uhraquls led a fleet of renegade pirates who raided the northeastern coast, rising in threat level from B- to A- and verging on S-rank — until, under strange circumstances, the then-overscourge of what was then called the Isle of Green Mist stronghold named her the successor, granting her special countenance, and died a year later. The province now lies embroiled a civil war, Uhraquls purging defects in the ranks of the wardens. This is the only province of the Pantheca without a standing Vindicator presence, and it’s a candidate for expulsion: for years, the administrative council has lacked sufficient members to reach quorum, several high ranking syndics having died.
Uraquls, in addition to her mastery of blood, wields an dweomer amalgam blade pulsing red and black which invites imperial comparison. She’s always seen draped in a regal leather full-coat, and one rumor has it that underneath is fur, while others claim she is flawlessly beautiful, unmarred by the cancers of haemotechnics. Her blood, when injected into mantids, can transform them into a furry chimera termed a gargoyle. The province is policed by a shadow-legion of her loyal gargoyles. Because an overscourge of the Wardens would not flagrantly violate the laws of the Pantheca, we can conclude, per the Ordinance Against Sapient Hyperservitude, that these are not thralls.

Overscourge of the Ocean’s Depth Stronghold: Lehen Ibotheca, the mother-architect: There are some vesperbanes whom they say who have evaded interdicts only by the grace of the ancestors. Lehen doesn’t believe in ancestors, only the caution and foresight of her own genius. And indeed, one can see why a mantis would be skeptical of higher powers when, by some metrics, they can create them. Lehen’s art is war-beasts, constructs of ichor that must be engineered as much as grown. Lehen, in accordance to haemogenesis regulation, has never created anything self-replicating — but the spirit of those regulations is to limit the damage a vesperbane can do. When a bane’s fruits can bat aside houses with a sweep of its tail, that it can bear no children is a small solace. Lehen was trained among the renown Mountain Country haemotechnics glutted on the blood of the Sanguine Depths — but when she was promoted, it came caveated with a relocation to the United Isles — perhaps to free the continent of the terror of Lehen’s beasts. As overscourge of the isles, her creations are the answers to the pirates and sea-anomalies that would sever them from the continent, as well as the only counterargument to Uhraquls ever-arrogating territory claims.

Overscourge of the New Protectorate of the Descendants of Snurratre: no one. This is the only province without a wardens division, and hence, without an overscourge.

Author’s note: the following section is especially old compared to others; it may not longer be necessarily canonical.

A Few Exclusion Zones

Declassifier’s note: a distinction is to be drawn between interdicts and exclusions, as the two are frequently conflated in popular imagining. ‘Exclusion zone’ is a political designation, whereas an ‘interdiction zone’ are a magical phenomena, caused by crepuscules, the vespertine singularities which often result in unbreakable taboos. But not every exclusion mandate concerns vespers, and not every crepuscule, nor even every crepuscular interdict, is confined to a fixed area. But there is frequent overlap between the two.

The Obliteration Fields (annihilation magic interdict, plains southern). The infamous antimatter exclusion zone, the Obliteration Fields are what’s known as a failed exclusion, a broken crepuscule. They’re also perhaps the oldest crepuscule — and in fact misconceived to be the first; but this is impossible to know for sure, as crepuscules decay, and any that might have been contemporaneous with or older than the OFEZ would leave little trace of their existence.

The OFEZ formed at the end of the titanomachy, following the vanquishing of Dlann, the archtitan, heir of the ineffable mantle, and lord-king of all bats. He was one of the last royals to be excised from the heartlands, and till that day none had challenged his throne for centuries.

The annihilation arts were the purview of vesperbats, because the energy costs were too crippling to be paid by mantids. Dlann, the archtitan, had been the peerless master of anihiliation magic, and by the time of his demise, actually the last such master. Some say he was the first, too, but this isn’t true — interrogated bats are on record saying he was taught, but by whom or what, there is no conjecture and no candidates.

The annihilation arts allows one to summon antimatter. It is — was — truly formidable, and in truth, had the vespers not saved us, diamantids would have lost to Dlann, the archtitan, and fell back forever under chiropteran subjugation.

But there was a prophecy in the flesh, white dragon inspiration embodied in opposing vesperbane, and though the details of that spell are lost to history, it is known Dlann, the archtitan, attempted to defy it.

Dlann’s defiance was punished with madness, and he may have died. But in the last moments anyone remembers, Dlann, the archtitan, fought with a desperation he never would have dared otherwise.

You see, there’s a quirk to the annihilation arts that few knew. Dlann didn’t know it, until the end. As said, it takes a lot of energy to summon just a little antimatter. And it takes even more energy to summon even a little more antimatter. But the curve’s not as tight as it should be. By summoning enough antimatter, it’s possible to regain more energy from its annihilation than was expended to bring it forth, and this is exactly what Dlann did in the Obliteration Fields.

The OFEZ is considered a failed crepuscule because we attribute certain protectiveness to the crepuscular process — it’s believed that it’s a manifestation of the Dream itself. We believe interdictions act to shield us from the consequences of dangerous arts. Yet Dlann’s Defiance failed in this. Even with Annihilation Magic taboo’d outside of the fields, the gradual annihilation of the air still bathed the surrounding countryside in radiation, and created a vacuum which sucked in more of the atmosphere.

Had Brismati Lakon, the copy-bane, the queen of a thousand tricks, not been among the fighting force, this would have lead to a VK-class end of the world scenario. But Lakon was infamous for being able to reproduce any technique she had seen, even in a single battle, and here she became the first and last mantis to wield annihilation magic, utilizing the rampant ambient energy. With the help of magnetic techniques she had copied previously, Lakon crafted vast dweomers to contain the magic and she willingly became a crepuscule so that her wards would outlast her.

Today, everyone knows of the Obliteration Fields, and at night they can be seen from tens of kilometers off, limned by bright flashes when tiny fluctuations in the dweomers leak miniscule puffs of swiftly-annihilated air. The land surrounding the zone is an inhospitable, irradiated waste. Inside Lakon’s wards, the land and air is gone, and the near-vacuum of the zone is stalked by the hounds of Dlann, fell beasts adapted to the zone and hungry for matter as they float and watch us.

The Bogs of Eden (unknown interdict, land of swamps): By all rights, the Frozen Swamp stronghold should be a bit player, if not completely subsumed by its neighbors. It’s a tiny, unwanted addendum to the Pantheca, just north of all the fertile farmland lake country controls. It’s so far east that it’s practically the outlands, with all the danger and destruction that entails. All of its rivers either go southeast into the vast land of lakes and rivers (a nation hungry for expansion, embargoing swamp when annexation fell through), or run directly south into the territory of the Bleedweb Stronghold (a partner in vicious civil war). And to the north, the land of quiet frost.

But Frosthold’s saving grace is what’s come to be called the bogs of eden. It’s providence is sketchy; some say it was once the den of a cabal of drugdealers, or the secret base of the pirates who dogged the lakes and rivers south, or home to a tribe of cannibals. Other sources claim all pairs of the above. It’s not even known if frozen swamp’s vesperbanes ever did anything about them, or if it was the merely the crepuscule which did them in. Swamp is dreadfully, if understandably, secretive about the bogs.

What is known is what’s implied. First, suffice it to say that inducting and maintaining vesperbanes requires certain votives. Frosthold’s proximity to the outlands gives them enviable access to one half of the necessary votives. The other half can be created — is created — by the nations at a certain cost. But the mathematics of its production are harsh. Trying to tighten the numbers, push it further, leads to ruin (as Vilehold can attest), and trying to circumvent it with vesperbane arts has always, without exception, eventually lead to crepuscules.

And that’s almost certainly just what happened in the Bogs of Eden. But perhaps it’s another broken crepuscule, except broken in a way we could exploit. Regardless, the fact of the matter is the Bogs must produce those coveted votives, as Frosthold shoulders a fraction of the costs the other nations must pay, yet has a disproporationely large vesperbane presence for its size — rivaling its larger neighbor, Bleedhold — and is, furthermore, one of the chief exporters of those votives.

(Haruspices have been consulted to get the opinion of the vespers, in hope that it reveals anything. A few neotic gynes are said to be aware of it, said to decry it as a bastion of ugliness; some haruspices demand the stewartry destroy it, and more moderate at least ask for a embargo.)

Black Pudding Exclusion Zone (research moratorium, enervated wastes): Failed myxogoth breeding experiment.

The Endless Perpendicular (total banishment interdict, land of mountains): Banishment was an advanced art known to a few arch-fiends before its exclusion. The theory of it was simple, using the matter-repulsing properties of upsilon-nrv to rip apart matter with extradimensional forces, often resulting in an implosive or explosive effect. The ideal was total banishment, which had no destructive consequences on inert matter. In combat, this is largely useless, equivalent to exposing a foe to vacuum for a few seconds or minutes. But it was pursued as a promising avenue of “teleportation”-like effects, before it went crepuscular.

Drugs are suspected to be involved. Alcohol, or perhaps some hallucinogen. Regardless of why it happened, someone tried to banish a river.

It was perhaps the most perfect banishment that had ever been attempted. Performed near what used to be a waterfall, the huge quantity of upsilon-nrv forced the waters to flow extradimensionally fourthward, perpendicular to the material hyperplane.

It should have been a stupid stunt that quickly burnt itself out. But as the water and the enervate inducing it ascended further and further fourthward, something reached down. The flow of water was stoked, the enervate renewed from sources indecipherable, and the now-unidentifiable vesperbane arch-fiend was engulfed in the most violent crepuscule on record. Their body instantly transmutated into stone, the surrounding area was explosively suffused with enervate reinforcing the exclusion. Yet the river still empties into the abyss even now.

An attempt was made to dam the river upstream to arrest the flow, and at first it seemed to work. Then waters started flowing back down, and they were different. The dam was destroyed.

If your vessel is warded against enervation (something like a submersible works), it is possible to sail the Endless Perpendicular. The farthest anyone has gone is less than half a kilometer in. Those who dared more did not return.

In modern times the region around Endless Perpendicular is victim to constant fog and rain as a fraction of the water falters on its journey into the extradimensional abyss and whatever awaits up there.

(Some describe the Endless Perpendicular as some manner of boundless pit, but this is ridiculous. Banishment acts against extradimensional gravity. The direction it goes could only be up.)

Vrilsekh / The City Wrought Whole (███████ encryption, land of lakes):
[DATA EXPUNGED].

Sanguine Depths (hemotectonic exclusion zone, land of mountains): The blood of vesperbats is restless. It teems with replenishing stem cells and the stolen genetic secrets of a thousand species, granting it a notoriously regenerating, mutagenic nature. Separated from its host, it’s well known as the humble healing potion when chemically defanged, and as the dreaded myxogoth when it is unleashed.

Tsic’zahd was one of the fourteen royal vesperbats. When a vesperbat has lived for centuries and garnered dozens of vespers, they become an elder. When — if — those centuries are grown to millennia and and the ranks of its vespers multiply to match, they become titans. The royals were beyond even titans. During the era of hope, most ascended or were slain. Tsic’zahd suffered a worse fate.

She wielded the earth with a singular deftness and understanding. Silicon-manipulating shatter-birds were common, masters of ferromagnetic metals too numerous to name, and even crystals had their acolytes. But none had synthesized the myriad geomantic arts so thoroughly as she.

Her feet became burrowing claws and she took to dwelling underground. In her reign as a titan, she would slumber for years and awaken with an appetite to devour cities. She haunted mines and caves.

When she took her place as a royal — lasting but a few decades as such — Tsic’zahd had evolved to something greater. Her attunement to the earth was complete; and one could witness her touring the land atop a vast shard of the earth which she willed to fly. Those who displeased her were met with ravines torn open, countrysides shattered, and melodic earthquakes like a song of a chthonic instrument. But most stunning of all, she no longer had fur, instead she lived within a shining visage of gold and obsidian.

Her final will was to take this transformation to the extreme. Royals, as a rule, were huge. “Mountainous” describes the lot of them. But Tsic’zahd was like an entire ridge. Some might say she wished to make this comparison literal. To have bones of stone, flesh of metal, a mind of semiconducting minerals… to breathe the soil, and pump magma through her veins. In short, achieve unity with the land.

She succeeded all these save one, which was her folly. When she tried to reshape her circulatory system, this displeased her blood, and it grew mutinous and rebelled.

And perhaps it killed her, or now leaves her trapped in unending torment. She no longer has a mouth with which to tell.

Regardless, the result we’re left with is that in the Sanguine Depths, blood is a geological phenomena. It grows here, nourished by the heat of the earth or something more subtle. And it nourishes in turn those predators who can hunt the ichor which crawls and feeds.

And there lurks also what has crawled forth from her womb, wretched things in whom lingers some inheritance.

Some call these depths the land of mountains’ own bog of eden, but the bogs never fought back. The bogs don’t scream.

Crimson Wind (motile anomaly, various locations): Shadowcalling is a restricted magic, forbidden from ever being used for combat against mantids within the heartlands. Its only ordained ends are those in service of the stability and prosperity of the theca of mantiskind. Averting the crimson winds is one such end.

Crimson slime is visible as a titular reddening of waters soon after the rain comes. Most often a pond, but any wet humid place suffices. Unlike the conventional myxogoths, the crimson slime is colonial, even free-living, more than it forms a single unified organism. Crimson slime consumes all living matter in its chosen body of water — anything digestible and plenty that’s not will be turned to the creation of more slime — and when all is exhausted, they desiccate themselves into lighter-than-air cysts, forming a crunchy brown film. The cysts rise with evaporating water to ride the air. If the winds carry the cysts to another body of water, the process repeats. But if the winds carry them above the cloud layer, they can form pale pink wisps. The elevation awakens the cysts, and in the desert of the sky, there is only one food source. The cysts consume themselves. It’s the optimal time for cannibalism; in a pond there are other resources to exploit together, but in the clouds, every conspecific eliminated is a lineage culled from competition in the next pond. Naturally, the cysts will fall as precipitation, and begin the process anew when they land.

Crimson slime has been exterminated down to a few extant populations, spared for the sake of science and the poultices they ingredient. Crimson slime is never to fall upon a ranch or major city, and it is through adept, extensive use of shadowcalling and fiendflame that in the Pantheca, they never have or will.

Vehna’s Abyss (omicron enervate interdict, interstitial waters): These days, they call it the helldive expedition, when they speak of it at all, but before it was doomed, it was Mission A0677, codename ‘hyperpressure’, and it was only a demonstration, only a proof of concept. It cost enough to feed several cities for several years, and it failed.

It was tried not out of desperation, but out of the premonition of desperation. We will need a breakthrough. The number of moratoria and exclusions and crepuscules was only climbing, and there were now things roaming the outlands with hides and shells hardened against gamma-laced blades and wretched raptorials. And this is only the point of the knife.

And so, in a rare, properly unheard of feat of cooperation, this operation was staffed with vesperbane and vindicator, and it’s aim was simple: take a submersible down to the bottom of the deepest trench they could find, build a base with water-repusling wards and oxygen-productive algae, and breach the delta barrier finally.

It’s not fair to say that beta and gamma enervate’s parachemistry is exhausted; every year we discover new reactions and species. But we have the lay of the land, and we’re sure nothing game-changing lay in its combinatoric space. Delta parachemistry is more promising, but surface pumps can’t consistently bring to bear the pressures that incur gamma fusion. (Meanwhile, attempts at delta fusion run face-first into the epsilon defect, and the pump explodes. If this mission was really a success, they thought, perhaps we could see the mythic, theorized omega-nrv thought to result from delta fusion.)

There were transmissions up until the final day. The water grew denser quicker than they expected. There was already an vast expanse of enervate at the bottom of the oceans (academics had conjectured such, but none were bold enough to suggest an entire landscape of the stuff. And none expected it to be so gorgeously geometrical.) The fauna were so, so much large than you have any right to expect; the trenches should ecological deserts, not rainforests. And so went the calvalcade of bizarre reports befuddling all anticipation.

Intercession from something garbled the reports shortly before they stopped altogether. We can only guess what could have gone wrong — guesses too unprofessional to reproduce here. And there are still those theorists who say nothing was wrong with the mission, that it would work, it will work, we just have to send another team down, one who won’t make idiot mistakes. Clearly the addled vesperbanes were the only problem. Clearly the meddling vindicators were the only problem. Clearly—

Enervate scrying reproduces exactly the vast expanses of hardened gamma and delta enervate the group reported, and the mist of what was once omicron enervate. Deeper examination shows thousands of spheres lining the deep of the trench, all to the specification the team was charged with constructing, but too numerous to all be their work. They’re like a myriad suns in the abyss, or so many moons in miniature encrusting the dark.

The sensors can never pin down their position with precision. All reports of their arrangement and distance seem to conflict.

List of Books Banned in All Nine Provinces of the Pantheca

Note: the following books cannot be printed, distributed or possessed, as per syndic decree. The general pattern is that printing or otherwise making copies always yields a capital sentence iff convicted, whereas possession or distribution bears lighter punishment. One exception is the New Protectorate, where all crimes are treason and therefore carry negotiated capital punishments, and conviction can be expedited in potential violation of certain judicial ordinances. Another is the Plains Southern, where no crime carries mandatory capital punishment. Mount Greci has numerous additional clauses and exceptions regarding rights of knowledge and communication, obscuring matters even further.

For comparison, copies of all these texts can be found in the vaults of the Moonspire Citadel, the knowledge archives of the Percipiency, and within the Umbral Records.

All authors have been excised from the records of ancestors, though the names of some may still be learned.

The Brand, the Blood, and the Black: Impure Doctrines for a Superior Vesperbane.

Veritanym: ▘▟▚▟ ▘ ▗▗▙▟▗▘ ▜▙
Often found as 9 thick scrolls of parchment. Titles always include pure script, sometimes full titles.

Ancestors and Descendents

Veritanym: ▗ ▚▙▘▜▜▘▖▙▞▚ ▖▜▟▞
Thin volume, most often hemolymph-green. The welkinmark is always on the cover.

The Weevil-Worship in Arboreal Climes

Veritanym: ▗▝▞▜▙ ▟▘▘▛▙▛▟▛▜ ▘
Title looks handwritten, cover is green or brown with floral imagery.

Last of the Last: The Queen’s Revelation

Veritanym: ▛▖▗▖▛▙▙▜▖▖▚▙▙▟▟▜▟
Cover bears the crest of the Second Dominion.

The Plays of Falshalla

Veritanym: ▙▝▝▘▗▝▙▙▙▚▘▙▙▖▚▘▙
Most copies had paintings of Falshalla or other romantic imagery as covers.

Protocols of the Severed Council

Veritanym: ▚▜▘▘▝▖▗▚▖▘▞▝▞▟▝▚▟
A thin volume. Cover often shows a map of the pantheca, and nefarious figures crowding the edge.

The Wealth of Vespers: An Inquiry into the Nature and Mechanics of Arete

Veritanym: ▝▖▟▞▙▚▖▝▝▞▗▞▙▗▖▖▝
Covers often depitct bat-bone coins, bullions, and vespermala.

The Other Song of the Stars

Veritanym: ▛▗▗▝▝▗▚▞▝▜▜▘▚▝▛▟▛
Extant copies bear a cover depicting stars and eyes among a black space. Copies with other covers were all destroyed, and need not be described.

Poems For a Fallen Nation

Veritanym: ▗▜▝▜▚▖▖▛▗▛▝▚▗▙▚▚▜
Volumes are often manually copied, and lack many commonalities.

Our Redemption Has Come: A Study of Wingless Shamans and Prophets

Veritanym: ▙▗ ▟▝▜▞▝ ▖▟▝▖▞▖▟
Covers are often bare, but sometimes include depictions of tribal wingless mantids engaged in various rituals.

Welkin & Inferno: A Novel

Veritanym: ▗▟▞▖▖▝▝▛▚▟▜▞▝▗▘▖▟
Covers vary, but often depict a volcano erupting beneath a sky clear of even enervate.

Karkel’s Scathing Remark

Veritanym: ▙▛▜▗▖▙▛▘▙▜▖▟▞ ▖▜▚
A few pages in so many disparate forms to be impossible to generally recognize. A painting of a furless vesperbat is common. Four words are always present.

All Shall Align: The Truth of the Nymphs of Dream

Veritanym: ▞▝▝▜▛▙▚▖▗▛▝▞ ▜▚▟▜
Small green book. Cover shows the black moon over an ootheca.

Ages in Blood: A reconstruction of the ancient history from the termites to the sanguine age

Veritanym: ▛▚▝▖▚ ▞▖▚▗▘▟▛▜▜▚▟
Cover includes nonsense text in pure script and haruglyphs, and imagery of termite mounds, ancient monuments, and red cities with bats alongside mantids.

Protectorate of Whom?

Veritanym: ▝▟▚▞▝ ▚▟▙▖ ▟▚▖ ▛
More of a pamphlet. Front matter bears distinctive snurratre caricatures.

Oosifea Eternal

Veritanym: ▗▛▗▝▗▛▛▖▙ ▞▛▟▞▞▖
Cover always bears a likeless of the god-empress, if not a title.

After the Apocalypse: On the Origins and Metousiosis of Red Ichor

Veritanym: ▙▘▜▙▗▖▛▟▖▚ ▜ ▘ ▖▚
Thin book, sub 150 pages. Cover is adorned with a stylized myxogoth.

Die Pharmazie

Veritanym: ▖▙▙ ▟▗▞▚▟▚▚▞▘▝▙▖▖
Yellow book, cover bears only the title.

Purity Vindicated: The Crimes of Vesperbanes

Veritanym: ▜ ▘▘▙▟▜▟▝▖▘▜▜▚▗▜▛
Blue book. Some covers bear a sketch of a vesperbane impaled in the style of electrocruxifiction, others simply display a lady gazing distant, wielding a hammer.

Third Dominion in Retrospect

Veritanym: ▚▚▜▟ ▗▛▙▙▗▝▗▙▗ ▗▚
Thick monograph with a red cover.

The Blackened Dimensions

Veritanym: ▞▜▜▛▖ ▝▚▖▙▙▜▙▚ ▙▚
Black pages with white text. Pages are composed of an enervate amalgam; curiously, not dangerous.

Ars grammatica sanguinis
Veritanym: (minting an arete-signature for this work was deemed unwise)
Old and rotting. Extant copies were printed by Second or Third Dominion, bound in the chitin and flesh of noble roaches or wingless mantids.

A Stewartry Division’s Recommended Reading List

  • The Hosts’ Handbook: Your First Days as Vesperbane
  • Pantheca: History’s Final Chapter
  • Markets and Excess: The Progress of Money from Barter to Guilds
  • The Kindred: a novel
  • i=er₄: The Impact of Impact Theory
  • The Sapid Sex
  • Beyond Lineage: A Brief Introduction to Ichor’s Gene Tendencies
  • Nor Thralls Nor Swarm: On the Nature of Mantis, or Lack Thereof
  • Noble Roaches: Civilization’s Unsung Foundation
  • The Welkin Weakness: How the Marked Hear Without Listening
  • Some Myths About Vespers
  • Dodging the Hammer: How to Avoid a Vindicator’s Wrath
  • Syndics: Advance Guard or Popular Tyrants?
  • Scorpions and Drought: Surviving the Reaping Black
  • The Evolution of Interspecies Dependence

(source unknown; date unknown)

Six Doctrines

Hope Doctrine

The world is a cage, and the greatest hope is freedom.

The Hope Doctrine is an opposition to slavery, imprisonment and coercion. The ideal world is one where every mantid pulses with the blood of freedom, and should never fear that it stop. The best one can do is to relish in what freedom you have, never restrict or encroach upon the freedom of others, and strive to dissolve chains.

The idol of the Hope Doctrine is Aromethia, the first vesperbane, who stole vesper magic from the ancient bats that enthralled mantiskind. With this act began a centuries-long rebellion, and the era of chaos ended.

The Hope Doctrine is the most common philosophy among vesperbanes.

Dream Doctrine

The world is oppressive, but we can dream of equality.

The Dream Doctrine is a dissatisfaction with the hierarchy and suffering of the world, and the lines dividing the sentient species. The ideal world is one where all the old debts and prejudices are stripped away, and at the deepest, this is something every being surely desires.

The idols of the Dream Doctrine are the nymphs of the dream, wingless martyrs who were prophecy-in-the-flesh. They traveled the land healing the injured and the damned, and they unraveled and undermined the massive accumulated power of vesperbane clans in the event known as clanshatter. They spoke reverently of a coming emergence, but before it ever came to pass, their bodies were sundered by mercenaries from the Gaveldika clan.

Kaos Doctrine

The world is a lie, and the surest path to truth is chaos.

The Kaos Doctrine is a recognition that the laws and customs of the land are futile exercises, a diversion. There are natural courses of development that are as inexorable as the path of water carving rivers down hillsides. The strong devour may the weak, and this is just. Power and will may bend and break the world, and this is always beautiful, be it in service of cruelty or valor. The ancient, natural order may be restored, and it should be.

The Kaos Doctrine submits itself to no higher authority or idealistic sentiment. There is no end goal of the path, but she who would wear a crown of death and perch on a throne of entropy is as fine an example as any.

There are no true idols of the Kaos Doctrine, but in its adherrents there is a particular respect for the God-Empress Oosifea, the mother of the second dominion, the queen of worms. She invented ichor manipulation from nothing in order to claw her way back from a fate worse than death, birthing herself a new body. Afterwards, she ruled for centuries, ushering her empire to ever grander heights of power and prominence as she sat above and pulled puppet strings.

Welkin Doctrine

The world is a test, and those deemed worthy are only those who do not tarnish themselves further.

The Welkin Doctrine asserts that we have already been corrupted, be it by some terrible sin in antiquity, by some grand external source like the umbral moon, or in some metaphysical way, by fact of incarnating in material form. There is truth to all of them. Life is a menagerie of temptation and subversion, and the best one can strive for is to resist, to remain steadfast and cultivate integrity of self. One should never forget their imperfections, and never let them consume oneself.

There is no idol of the welkin doctrine, not one that has ever know mortal form — because no mantis could ever be deserving of that adoration. Regard is paid to the noble vindicators, risking harm and heart to smite such ineluctably corrupt beings as bats, vesperbanes, or weevils. Consideration is to be paid to the hierophants who speak the doctrine outward to new minds or deeper into those who know. And heed to is be paid to the words of those know have knelt long before the blue fires of welkin, and what they have seen.

Mind Doctrine

The world is dead matter, and the only thing worthy of respect is the mind.

The Mind Doctrine holds that there is nothing sacred about the universe or its nature, nothing but parts and particles to be rearranged by beings bestowed with intelligence. No heed should be paid to atavisms such as nations, religions, or prejudice. Conscious minds should regard other conscious minds, and judge one another solely on their instantiation of drives of intelligence: curiosity, self-improvement, and the acquisition of wisdom.

The idol of the Mind Doctrine is Brismati Yukli, arch-sovran of the university of Greci. He is the youngest vesperbane to be awarded the title of arch-sovran, and spearheaded entire fields of research into the physics of black nerve, the phylogeny of red ichor, and the nature of vespers. In between writing these textbooks and academic papers, he pens influential philosophical treatises that have given rise to a free-thinking contingent — a rebellious intellectual movement which scoffs at being called a doctrine.

Peace Doctrine

The world is fine. The only problems are extremists and belligerents who disturb the peace.

The Peace Doctrine holds that cooler heads will prevail, and the best one can do is leave things to settle back into their equillibrium. From the era of chaos came the alliance of hope, and from the horrors of the third dominion came the Pantheca of Mantiskind. In the end, the better angels of our nature assert themselves, and things returned to normal. One should be skeptical of drastic change, and reluctant to throw yourself to this side or that in base ideological matters.

The idol of the Peace Doctrine is First Coordinator, whose administration reigned in the squabbling of vindicator and vesperbane, creating the stewartry system as a compromise. She cemented the decorum and process now considered inherent in the syndic class. Over decades with her influence, compacts were drawn with the tribal therids in the canyons, a few industrious megapoli of the euvespids, and rights were granted to roaches, until the then-new Pantheca could truly be considered a new alliance in the minds of most.

Five Letters of Recruitment

Stewartry

Greetings from the Vesperbane Stewartry.

You are receiving this letter in recognition of your outstanding performance on the highest level of the Syndic Civil Examination, and your particular responses on the psychological assessment. Estimates of your mental acuity score are over 50 (36 is average). This places you in the upper 1% of all mantids, (percipients and vesperbanes excluded).

For this reason, we would like to extend invitation for you to journey the nearest Stewartry college. There is one in every provincial capital. There you may enroll in a preparatory course before undertaking a final evaluation and becoming an initiate, and after years of study, gaining certification.

When you achieve your certification, the Stewartry offers a stipend of up to 250 bone piece monthly, and insurance against any ills that may befall you, and the honor of working among the brightest minds of the Pantheca towards its betterment.

After all, it is the Stewartry which upholds the Dream and it essential to the safety and health and peace of the Pantheca of All Mantiskind.

There are many paths available to you, if you choose to join us. Among the most prominent are:

  • the hemotechnics who have mastered blood, and wield it for medicine and mending, promoting the recovery and flourishing of those from all walks of life. Those who follow this path must be of rigorous mind, able to attain a manyfold understanding of the mantid body and how it may go wrong.
  • the dwimmerbanes who enchant lands and tools. They must have the cleverness and patience to design exacting mechanisms, and fix them when they fail.
  • the rootnurses, fabricators of materials, capable of producing the hardiest armors and the most exquisite fashion alike. Given the time, they could build houses, or inanimate golems. And they can destroy. It takes a creativity and openness to be a rootnurse, and a certain indescribable quality.

And that’s hardly the all of them. There are metabanes, spellbranders, and keen-minded administrative banes. There are the knowledge-hunters who cultivate our understanding and weave new spells.

You need not worry if picking a single path is a daunting choice; you are given years to learn the arts, and may forego specialization even up till your countenancing.

Alliance laws dictates we must inform you that not all of your peers (roughly 80%) will survive to certification, but we’re sure that won’t be a problem for you. However, we must also inform you that by becoming a vesperbane you forego the right to ever becoming a syndic or represent a guild. Do consider this carefully; renunciation is common among vesperbanes.

All that aside, you would be a welcome addition to our ranks.

In service,

Arch-fiend Wanue, Frazermor College.

Wardens

Hark, child of the Pantheca.

All have been taught that when one has been saved by other, they have a duty which can only be fulfilled by rising up and saving yet another still. Those protected must protect another, and those who would ask for help should first help another.

The Vesperbane Wardens are the strongest among mantiskind. We have protected many; for all that we have saved and sacrificed, an offering is in order.

You are that offering.

The Pantheca is poised on the knife’s edge of chaos and death. Who upholds that balance? Who fights to deny those who would see it destroyed, see you destroyed?

The wilderness between towns is plagued with ravening monsters. In the shadows, renegades and defects plot. There are criminals and sabateurs in our cites, in your cities, bent to unravel what we all have coordinated to build.

The Wardens exist to keep the order and punish the wicked. To this end, we have been granted the awesome powers of the vespers. The blackbanes harness all the energic, destructive potential of enervation to craft magical bullets, blades and wards. The bloodbanes have turned their very bodies into weapons. Some of us can turn air, fire and lightning against their foes, and every day the inventive among us find stranger, more effective means of defense.

It takes years to turn recruits like you into able warriors. But when you are, you’ll be the among the guard stopping the criminals in the streets, patrolling the countryside for the safety of merchants, battling against treacherous renegades, vanquishing bat-birthed abominations, and defending the syndics.

The Alliance says we should tell you, not all of our hopefuls will survive our intense training. Less than one in eight, if you’re pessimistic. But we have no interest in the cowards who would be daunted by the failures of the unfit.

Will you defend the Alliance? Or would you lay and watch it wither?

Maverick Commission

The Maverick Commission sends you this letter because we know, and we’re interested.

We have no colleges or training grounds. Instead, we have mistresses and their apprentices. There is no hierarchy among mistresses; we’re a true syndicate and a true democracy, unlike the farce called the Alliance.

We are not defects, don’t worry. As any painter knows, a subject has no form without shadows, and we are the shadows.

You cannot buy or inherit your way into the Commission; it is up to a mistress if she will have you as an apprentice. Among those mistresses all hopefuls should be aware are:

  • the Mistress of Shadows awaits days deep within the cold caverns of the western Black Tiaga. If you can find her, she will consider you.
  • the Mistress of Savagery expects you to make your way to the isle in the lake of blood, bringing no clothes, no tool save a knife, and no affects of civilization. If you can hold your own amongst the crawling, hungry denizens of the island for a month, she will consider you.
  • the Mistress of Murder claims an imposter sits on the throne in Wentalel. Dispose of them, and she will consider you.
  • the Master of Misfortune dislikes the West Greenweb Trading Company and their arrogant refusal of a certain insurance. Make them regret it, and he will consider you.
  • the Mistress of Lies has already deceived you. If you can fool one of her apprentices in turn, she will consider you
  • the Mistress of Wiles has many apprentices and and many friends. she’ll consider anyone whom they recommend
  • the Master of Minds seeks one who has seen the truth. If you know, he will likewise.
  • the Mistress of Pets will consider anyone whom her familiar approves of.
  • the Mistress of Artifice seeks a certain termite artifact reactive to the position of the travelling suns. Find it, bring it to her, and she will consider you.

There are a many mistresses besides these, too insignificant to bear listing. There are sure to be plenty in your province. If you’re too weak to be worthy of one of the esteemed mistresses — you probably are — one of those lesser mistresses may take you. There’s only a little shame in it; after all, the strong need the weak.

If any of this interests you, the mantis in the white mask will tell you where your local commission next will gather, and you may take the next step.

If it does not interest you, you may burn this letter and speak not a syllable of this to another soul.

In all cases, this letter will disappear. And if you break silence, so will you.

Oh, and a piece of wisdom: keep yourself safe. If we have to save you, you belong to us. Such is the hero’s right. This, you may tell others.

Vindicator’s Guild

The heartlands need you.

There is a parasite infecting these lands, and, just as a primitive doctor prescribes leeches, the powers that be have deemed them necessary to stave off some lesser ill.

We lack the foul cunning of they, but we have our own means and mission.

We are the Vindicators of Welkin, and we carry out the sacred duty of ridding the world of vespers and those they infest.

The premise of any life should be to at least keep a balance with the world, something even the low creatures of the world fulfil. Vesperbanes by nature subvert the scales. They kill mantids just by existing.

Every day lives are claimed in the vesperbanes’ games of power. Our nymphs are driven like beetles into the ranks of the Wardens only to be killed by the thousands to build their armies. Our land is scarred by the remnants of their transgressions even the vespers won’t allow.

But how can mere mantids stand against them? Vindicators are blessed from beyond. We have the engineered tools and defenses, steel that can shatter stone and umbral amalgams even the vesperbanes can’t achieve. We have the holy welkinflame which consumes the black nerve which courses through fiends.

And at night, we can see the victory of our empyrean conflagration shining from the ruins of the Third Dominion’s so-called “Capital Triumphant”.

We watch the watchmants, we are the ones who protect the common mantis from these incarnate demons who supposedly protect us.

But we are few, and unlike the Wardens or Stewartry, the Alliance is miserly in supporting us.

The heartlands ache, and the sacred duty calls.

Please, heed the call.

…

We will not waste words, and we will not belabor the obvious.

You want an answer, and we have answers. You loathe the secrets of this world. You hate the ignorance you were born into and the computational limitations of your mind. We offer you escape.

There are vast conspiracies under the façade. There are dark things dwelling and stirring in the minds and imaginations of mantiskind, conniving to fly free. Your suspicious were correct. You were not paranoid. You were not delusional. The world runs deeper than the depths, and like you, we long to descend.

It will hurt. Our insights are the finest scalpels and the bitterest pills. Your mind will break, but you are the part that will survive. You will need to become wizened and subtle. Your mind will be more cultivated than any monk, and put to better use.

Many claim to serve the Pantheca — the bureaucratic Stewartry, the dogmatic Wardens, the shadows Maverick, and the Vindicators — but we do the work no one else is capable of. Observing, archiving, anticipating.

The truth was not made in our image, and so we remake ourselves as the truth. If knowledge hurts, we will bear it. If knowledge threatens, we will mitigate. If knowledge is absent, we will find what belongs.

We dwell in places deeper, darker than the shadows. We are the Percipiency. Those who look will not find us. Those who understand will join us.

Endowments and Techniques

Endowments

Expression: Vespertheca
Prevalence: common to all members of Vesperis vulgaris
Endowments:

  • Vespercrypt
    • Look: swollen nodule of ileal flesh, blotched black and red like lichen.
    • Desc: An invagination of the small intestine housing a single vesper. Around it, the altered flesh is wrinkled and covered with extruded filaments to absorb nutrients
  • Central Thallus
    • Look: Thin cord which attach to the dorsal nerve fiber. Sometimes pierces inner walls or organs, resulting in scars.
    • Desc: conveys the endowed sensorium and recieves cogitation impulses. The connection between vesper and bane.
  • Peripheral Thalli
    • Look: Thick cords that run variously throughout the body, connecting to nidal sites.
    • Desc: Each transports nutrients and impulses from the crypt to a nidus, which distributes them to subordinated endowments.

Expression: Umbral Meridians
Prevalence: all members of V. vulgaris
Endowments:

  • Umbracelium
    • Look: Long black hairs threading all inner cavities of a vesperbane.
    • Desc: Conducts enervate from the soul to crypts or nidi, or to endowed outlets.
  • Umbral Sinuses
    • Look: A system of sinuses, glands, ducts and resevoirs, often filled with a gray translucent fluid.
    • Desc: The so-called ‘wet enervate’ produced and used by vespebanes owes to the presence of umbral slime, a kind of mucus amalgam vespers can produce. It attracts and binds to enervate, and this way umbral slime greatly reduces the dangers of temporarily storing and manipulating enervate outside the soul.
      Umbral slime is flushed to the site of umbral wounds, and mitigates damage until the umbracelium siphons the enervate.
  • Umbral Sheaths
    • Look: When inactive, chitin is darkened, with many small holes visible on very close examination. When active, typically obscured by enervate.
    • Desc: Myriad pores coat the cuticle, and release a film of umbral slime. Allows claws, raptorial spines, or mandibles to deliver enervate with each strike. Allows chitin to absorb incoming strikes or enervate. Umbral slime preserves the temperature-sensitive enervate through a kind of evaporative cooling through oxidation. When the slime is reabsorbed, the dry coating remains. This ‘gray ash’ to most smells unpleasant, though bitter and stinging rather than repugnant. Among banes familiar with certain mammalian ichor-hosts, they’re also called ‘sweat flakes’.

Expression: Sanguine Vessels
Prevalence: all modern members of V. vulgaris
Endowments:

  • Haemohyphae:
    • Look: An red, anastomatic network like the tunnels and tracks of many worms throughout the body.
    • Desc: Conveys ichor and ichor-regulating hormones and lymph to various sites in the body. Induces metaplasia for subendowment flesh altering, or for the development of endowments.
  • Red Spleen
    • Look: a bloated bulb of flesh squeezed between vital organs, often marred by growths and discontinuities.
    • Desc: resevoir of ichor.

Expression: Wretched Raptorials
Prevalence: common among most cultivated pedigrees of V. vulgaris
Endowments:

  • Raptorial
    • Look: A wet red tentacle, flexible and ever-shifting enough to be called liquid muscle.
    • Desc: a supernumary limb made almost purely of ichor. Somehow, fashioned into a weapon like this, the virulent erosion of bat blood is assuaged.
  • Nidal Ganglion:
    • Desc: Banes often have more than one, and even just one has more articulations than any natural limb, let alone accounting for its transformative nature. Low level directing of raptorials is typically done by a cluster of nerve cells in the associated nidus.
  • The Teeth:
    • Look: can resemble spines, mandibles, scales, bones, and other multitudes wrought by ichor.
    • Desc: because the growing of bones or marrow triggers a crepuscule response, most hard anatomy in any wretched raptorial is actually homologous to teeth or claws, even when grown in the unrecognizable shape of vertebrate internals.
      Extant variations: red spear, red blade, red shield, red flail, red spines, red tendrils, red chrysalis, red child. Of particular note are the red spines (detachable spines are lauched with great force, like missiles), the red chrysalis (engulfs entire body), and the red child (entirely detachable, semi-autonomous).

Expression: Lips of the Conjuror

Prevalence: occurs among cultivated pedigrees of V. vulgaris

  • Look: an opening in the flesh crowded with instruments distantly resembling palps, tongues and lips. Where they aren’t enervate-black, they are wet and drip with many muscuses.
  • Desc: advanced enervate constructs, such as even the simple nerve missile or melter ball, require delicate arrangement and molding of enervate for stability and effect. The lips of the conjuror accomplish this.

Techniques

Above the mental evaluations — the loyalty and mastery of heartlands history expected of all vesperbanes — any pawn hopeful to ascend to the rank of wretch should learn at least three of the wretched fundamentals. These are not the true fundamentals — the ability to siphon, metabolize, and discharge enervate; the ability to ingest red ichor without putrefying internally; or to nurse the vespers without being impaled from within by their white fingers. Those are a matter of course, implicit in any survival of the pharmakon rites.

Aura Form Techniques:

  • Bane blast: the user charges their tarsi with enervate, feeding it to bursting with energy. They then unleash a blast of concussive force. This is often accompanied by a spray of enervate, and the shape, range, and intensity of the blast are among the many variables distinguishing each vesperbane’s style.
  • Force grip: the user charges their tarsi with enervate, starving it of energy until it hungrily leeches at the world. Doneat the feet, this allows to cling to even vertical surfaces, in addition to its combat grappling potential.
  • Beta compass: the user releases a dark wave of enervation, which alternately self-attract into lines like dark rivers, or branch out like lightning. If enervate is nearby, the lines will curve toward them, allowing this technique to locate enervate bodies.

Umbra form techniques:

  • Melter ball: the first word in umbraconjuration, the user shapes a mass of enervate into a membrane-bound glob. It can be thrown, and when the membrane in broken, the enervate within is released, deliquescing the target.
  • Shell shroud: the user coats their own chitin in enervate, and charging it so that it softens the force of blows and the blunts the effect of enervate attacks.

Ichor form techniques:

  • Mending clot: the user directs the flow of ichor in their body, closing wounds with blood hormonally signaled to coagulate and birth the vivid red flesh characteristic of ichor metaplasia. Effective for flesh wounds, but applied to tissues of more advanced function, the result is simply structural.
  • Chyma bleed: the user prepares a spongy mass of flesh within their body, densely packed with hemolymph. When suffering blood loss, the mass can be compressed, ‘bleeding’ a flow of replacement life fluid to stave off unconsciousness
  • Ooze child: the user casts off a mass of ichor capable of sustaining itself, often resembling a slime mold (or with skill, a kind of liquid worm or slug). If thrown upon a foe, the ooze may bore into their flesh and squeeze inside to sup on their innards. Being born of the users’ blood, the ooze may also serve as a model, mirroring their body’s reaction to substances (useful for identifying poisons).

Rhiza form techniques:

  • Legersnare: The user weaves the filaments of their cultivated mycelium into tough ropes of hyphae. These growths crawl overtop their chitin like vines. When this technique is prepared, the filaments are compacted and dried, killing that part of the fungal mass. Thus, the user has no special control over their legersnares, but through dexterity and skill, they are capable of quickly creating tripwires, nets, and restraints. The user can grow barbs along the rope in places, allowing it to attach securely. With enough skill, traps can be made in the heat of battle, meaning engagements with foes unable to parse their sleight of hand or keep the user occupied end with them bound and harmless. Even without this chicanery, the legersnare offers all the utility of a rope, including functioning as a kind of grappling hook.
  • Shatter Dust: the user prepares special spores. When the spores land on chitin, they adhere and begin to form tiny appressoria to pierce the chitin. The target experience this as a kind of itching that escalates in pain, but it requires vigorous scrubbing to be free of it. As the spores dig into the chitin, it is weakened, making it increasing vulnerable to physical trauma. If the spores are not all removed, the result in a mundane fungal infection. If the ‘dust’ reaches sensitive membranes, the results are more dehibiliating.
  • Mycospike: The user grows a large appressoria at the tip of a root. When pressed to a surface, the appressoria can penetrable any armor short of metal, but due to the slowness and steadiness required, it typically requires restraining the target first (if only by grasping them with the hand equipped with the mycospike). The mycospike can penetrate any armor short of metal.

By this sacrifice, I swear sevenfold.

  1. I shall welcome the vespers into my vessel as I would a guest into my home. They shall not hunger, for fat nor nerve nor blood nor lore.
  2. I shall not impose alterations upon my guests by any means. I shall not deny them the safety of my vessel, nor saddle them with the duties of the host.
  3. I shall not through the blood of revelation bring forth a myxogoth, and I shall not contract the first plague.
  4. I shall not bethrall myself to the weevils’ ambrosia, nor subject my guests to the same.
  5. I shall not attain unnatural dominion over another hosts.
  6. I shall not wield black nerve to aggrieve the scars of the world, nor open them anew.
  7. I shall not avert a prophecy in the flesh, nor shirk a brand of fertile penance, nor defile a vault of fat and truth, and never shall I break an oath of blood and soul.
The Septagrammaton, the most binding oath sworn by all vesperbanes.

Vesper Cartomancy

Vesper cartomancy has a long history, and a still dubious grounding in practical reality. Regardless of its efficacy, it’s cultural cachet means it present a wealth of symbols for haruspices to draw upon, even when their means of introspection are not “divinatory” in nature. The standard card set consists of eighteen ‘nature’ cards, and a stripped down set of twenty four suited ‘affair’ cards. The possible nature cards have four components. The ‘face reading’, meaning its name and card art; the ‘main reading’ which is the simple interpretation of its concept; the ‘side reading’ an opposed or supplementary interpretation of its concept; and the ‘deep reading’, which unifies or extends the other readings.

  • The Waning: poverty; saturation; replacement of one thing with another
  • The Roots: connection; worldly influence; inescapable or entrenched systems
  • The Union: similarity; inadequate compromise; consideration of a shared need or common enemy
  • The Half-Chaste: virginity; courtship; moderation in or focus on an aspect
  • The Broodmother: inheritance; division; points from which many paths unfold
  • The Outward Spiral: creation; repetition; desires that cannot be satisfied
  • The Harem: gregariousness; obligation; long term and large scale relations
  • The Falsity: negation; defiance; separation from necessary/meaningful aspects
  • The Debtchild: duality; opportunity; histories that constrain futures
  • The Library: collection; excess; unexpected answers or relations between things
  • The Glutton: simple desires; variety; pasts or futures of scarcity
  • The Divulger: revelation; exchange; things that can be spread
  • The Temptress: promises; inspiration; frustrating and incomplete solutions
  • The Nascent Blank: beginnings; emptiness; potentials lost or unlikely
  • The Fertile Secret: gossip; double meanings; things without collective understanding
  • The Rainfall: generosity; wrathfulness; reconnections after diasphora or returns from great distance
  • The Prostrate: awareness; submission; unnatural transformations
  • The Surgeon: repair; suffering; extensions or liftings of burdens

For the affair cards, the four suits are:

  • Books: relating to information, procedures, history, culture, congregation & coordination.
  • Hearts: relating to flesh, energy, heat, projects and artworks
  • Caps: relating to growth, influence both violent and social, the mind
  • Wisps: relating to the world, destruction, things that can be harnessed

The are six distinct values in each suit, broken down as Negation, Absence, (potentially multiple) Presence cards, Paucity, Moderation, and Abundance.

Thus, to give a bane a vesper reading, each of their vespers is assigned a nature card in some permutation (whether by aleatoric cartomancy, or reliable haruspicy), and then the vespers’ interrelation, or responses to inquiries are characterized by affair cards.

Appendix D: Apocryphal Answers

This section collates several short answers given to various questions about the heartlands. Too many answers are given to list briefly and for now, I won’t.

Is it known whether vesperbanes that have taken on a countenance sponsored by the Pantheca must swear any oaths upon doing so?

This question is a little confused.

“Sponsorship” generally refers to programs by Stewartry or the Wardens which fund vesperbane education, as other routes are either risky or financially inaccessible to the lower class. The recipients of sponsorships are not vesperbanes, and in general vesperbanes are not all (or mostly) previous recipients of sponsorships.

“Countenance” is a legal right to cultivate vespers, as the breeding and nursing of vespers is otherwise a capital crime. Fundamentally, countenance is understood as something given to a vesperbane by a syndic coordinator. More practically, authority to establish countenance has been granted to the Stewartry, who have further extended that power to component or affiliate institutions like the Wardens or the Maverick program.

With all that background out of the way, yes, most institutions have swearing certain oaths of blood and soul as a prerequisite to them choosing to grant you countenance.

For most provinces’ Wardens program, this means swearing to protect the Pantheca and its inhabitants. By contrast, Stewarts vow aspiration to ideals of nonviolence and abstinence, and more depending on profession (e.g. medical hemotechnics to first do no harm, knowledge-hunters to be honest and forthcoming, etc). Mavericks are required little more than oaths to acknowledge the laws of the heartlands, sometimes not even that.

Are spellbrands skilled enough to supply such oaths sufficiently rare that this is impractical?

Spellbrands are not necessary for oaths, but helpful for the most complex. They aren’t especially rare or especially common.

What are Horkos survivors (or their vesper-piloted husks?) generally like?

When the vesperbat elders and titans were vanquished, and all the vestiges of their kingdoms reclaimed by mantids, batslayers then turned their attention to hunting or destroying crepuscles. It was not a significant change.

(Horkos being one of the three routes to going crepuscular.)
Modern vesperbane hunters spend their time dealing with renegades, monsters (either newly created by renegades or lingering from the third dominion), and crepuscules. That last one tends to be somewhere between the first two, at least when it’s a horkos crepuscule.

So no communication attempts, no demands; horkos tend to attack on sight?

They don’t need to attack on sight – if the presence of one spreads an virulent plague that ravages nearby towns, or one warps the wildlife with red ichor to render them potent and aggressive, or one collects the dead from graveyards to make use of mantid cadavers – danger doesnt mean direct aggression.

Regarding communication attempts, ordinary mantids – ordinary vesperbanes, even – aren’t, as a rule, running into crepuscules or surviving to tell about it. Crepuscules are engaged with by Wardens fireteams, whose debriefs are collected and collated by their strategists

Whether there are communication attempts or not is not a matter of common knowledge.

What are the other routes to becoming horkos, then?

The standard trichotomy among theorists is contradiction, malediction, and interdiction.

Contradiction the breaking of oaths sworn and becoming horkos.

Malediction was a technique that saw greatest use among the bats and by the disenthralled rebels against the bats. It’s a rare thing in modern times. Perhaps superceded by other means, or diminished significantly in effectiveness over the centuries. Some wonder if this is even a natural category, and not just a weaponized contradiction or interdiction.

Lastly, it would be wrong to say interdiction is what creates exclusion zones, because mantids create exclusion zones. It’s a bureaucratic designation, and vespers dont have everything to do with all of them. But there’s a correlation. An interdiction is a thought of as a vespertine transgression, the point where a technique or school of techniques has been taken too far and the vespers recoil. The caster of the technique and/or whatever they wrought is (often) bound to an area by the vespers’ will – which makes drawing map lines around it convenient. The art becomes a forbidden art, although what this means can vary.

How well-known are the many Maverick masters and mistresses (and their missions)?

The maverick commission is a fraction of a fraction (most mavericks are not associated with the commission), of a fraction (mavericks are a subset of vesperbanes) of a fraction (vesperbanes are a small minority).

Notably, Eifre is not even within the largest of these groups.

No organization by the name “maverick commission” is well known across the Pantheca, let alone any details of it. in most parts of the heartlands, the name may be spoken occasionally, but it is neither large nor obvious.

Members of the commission may have notoriety under their actual names, but any standing they have internal to the commission is secret.

Speaking of which, is it known what the “traveling suns” are?

The traveling suns are celestial objects almost visible with the naked eye at night which move like planetary satelites, yet emit their own light.

They are recorded as an anomaly in the Stewarty’s archives, for when consulting the astronomical tablets of ancient wingless civilizations, there is no indication of these objects existing — inexplicable, given their otherwise detailed recording and understanding of astronomy.

What was Karkel’s Scathing Remark? Whose minds did they change?

Here is the context:

Oosifea Shadow-crown, the genius of war, the heresiarch vindicated, the queen of worms, the one exalted yet returned, the god-empress of mantiskind, predates all vesperbanes. She was of the Pure Council — in fact, she had been destined for its deepest circles. But she was blocked by the maneuvering of weak, political wills and her genius was exiled rather than exalted.

So in the era of chaos, before Aromethia had brought hope, Oosifea mastered the old sanguine arts, without the aid of vespers. (In fact, she is the dividing line between the old sanguine arts and what vesperbanes today practice — every haemotechnic owes her a debt of inheritance.)

After her palingenesis, after years embroiled in war with the Disenthralled Rebellion, Oosifea did something none of her creed dared. (Though in fact, it is the very kind of act that had first defined her.) She looked beyond the blind dogma of purity doctrine, to consider what others hated, what others were basely disgusted by.

She sought out the vespers. She underwent the pharmakon rights.

Her devoted were told this new revelation of her will, a manifestation of her beneficence: she would bring welkin purity to even the vespers.

This way, she ascended to an apotheosis of power. She revised the pharmakon rights into a ritual of her own devising, the angelic process. After then, Oosifea and her angels of war, heralding the advance of the Second Dominion, seemed an empire utterly unstoppable.

Oosifea had made alliances with the Myriad Kingdoms — to them she was the bat of brudeyama, the chiropteran in chitin.

So when an insistent vesperbat, rising in prominence as quick as a weevil’s season-tree, sought audience with the god-queen, she indulged them. They were stripped of everything to stand before her, and watched by her mightiest angels for threat. But they only needed their words.

Just four words, a rhetorical question.

And the vespers destroyed everything Oosifea had built.

That bat’s name was Karkel the second, so for this reason those words that passed between they and she are called Karkel’s Scathing Remark. But today, it’s more likely to recognize this bat as the white dragon.

Bat-mantid negotiations: which side needed to learn the other’s language for Karkel to make a comprehensible Scathing Remark? (Most likely mantids hissing to approximate the vesperbat language, or just each side learning the other’s language so that they understand it, but cannot speak it due to morphology)

By the time Karkel arrived, Oosifea had spent many more years dealing with bats than most mantids ever spend alive.

Just to confirm: both Karkel and Brismati Lakon sacrificed themselves in the battle against Dlann?

If so, is it known how they managed to get Karkel’s body (or at least their blood) out of the OFEZ, so as to anoint the nymphs? Did Karkel share their ichor around prior to the battle?

Lakon sacrificed herself. Karkel’s sacrifice was more metaphorical, producing the so-called white dragon inspiration, arete sundered into a million pieces, each one a fragment of their power, gifted to a fighter in the battle to sustain them.

History is not the clearest on what happens next to the white dragon in the flesh, having been reduced to a shadow of former power — for it is known how the oldest bats’ biology begins to depend on the vespers.

And given that the white dragon became something of a religious figure, the reality becomes further obscured.

Did they survive the long interval from the fall of Lord-king Dlann, the archtitan, to the time of sundered states? Did they perish in flesh, but by the vespers, through their sacrifice, become something more metaphysical? It has been proposed, with deep manipulation of arete, that their gift (some of which survived after the battle) could have been used to reordinate the blood of another into the blood of karkel

Or perhaps the simpler suggestion is truth, that blood was drawn and preserved. But any biological material would be hard pressed to survive that long, let alone the mercurial blood of vesperbats. And among bats, the drawing of blood is no small thing. They prefer to keep their blood in their bodies, and one who would carelessly disrespect their blood, treat basely it like milk to be drunk or oil to be used, is a dangerous and wicked kind of deviant.

Perhaps the simplest solution of all is dissolution, and to agree with the iconoclasts who propose the foundational story of the Dream’s disciples is a foundational myth — and indeed, this is one of the arguments they marshal to attack the absurdity of the faith.

What are shadowcallers? Are they a subtype of blackbane?

Enervate flows in a vast weave through the air far above us, and churns through the molten catacombs beneath us. There is nothing special about the terrestrial or celestial neuropheres, just umbral physics writ large. What then, would happen were you to manipulate those flows as any blackbane does in minature?

Today, these are questions one may wonder the answers to. But in our banished past, throughout the wars that defined the era of hope and the era of evil, they were facts of life. The titans of old, and their mantid heirs, had no hesitation in wielding what meteorological and tectonic techniques they devised.

This discipline, such as the sovrans have codified it, is now called shadowcalling.

You may find something to awe at, in the notion of a mere animal summoning forth hurricanes, tearing open chasms. But that is the point of the knife. The true damage comes after, when the great forces subside, salting the earth with enervation in their wake. Umbral dissolution is an agony scarcely fit for one’s enemies, let alone innocents. To flood a city with enervation is to starve the pantheca of one more settlement, a price already yearly paid.

For this reason, even the principles of shadowcalling are deeply restricted, used only by those stewarts charged to predict, divert, or mitigate umbral anomalies and disasters.

There is an impression among some, made popular by traitors and subversives, that syndic moratoria and censors are matters of political convenience, or worse, tools of oppression. But there are few better examples than shadowcalling to show why the restrictions are not decadence or abuse. There are atrocities written in the will of the vespers, which even the crepuscular process cannot shield us from. Secrecy is our first line of defense.

What is known of reaver ants?

There are some kinds which are inimical to the flourishing of other kinds. The prime example is the reaver ant. The reavers are gnawing destruction, Where locusts were seasonal at worst, and great cicada emergences can be separated by decades, the reavers are an ever present, insatiable tide which leaves depletion and devastation in its wake.

Reavers have no home, and no respect for the homes of others. Their nomad hordes are sometimes called tribes, but bear closer resemblance to an army forever on campaign.

They raid the nests of bees and euvespids, the webs of therids, mantid cities and roach huts. The workers will tear the inhabitants apart with powerful mandibles, and devour them. By instinct and mimicry, they have grasped the coarsest of tool use and construction, and will demolish buildings and seize implements to render temporary or mobile makeshift structures.

Some reaver bands rise above this sheer savagery, and their depredations are more in the manner of banditry than total war — and with the selection effect of the worst reavers being exterminated by ever more effective armies, this trait grows more prominent in modern times.

A rare few bands have had their animalistic cruelty tempered or dulled by chance, and a glimmer of respect or empathy exists in their black hearts. They to an extent cooperate with the Pantheca, and in cases act as escorts for trade caravans — or rarest of all, are the caravans themselves. And some assist the Pantheca in efforts to defeat or civilize the feral reavers.

Many reaver bands practice a kind of mutilation or surgery, altering their bodies with inorganic implants or accessories. The true nature of these are not understood, and the even the quasi-vinculated reaver bands will not reveal. By these means, their venerated warriors can match even experienced vesperbanes. These formic grafts are rumored to have been given to non-reavers in some instances, with unknown outcomes.

Are E’yama and the Song of the Stars (regular, not Other) Welkinist concepts? What do they represent?

The story was once told like this:

All bugs were originally one kind, and were all like wild beasts. Thoughtless, and with no sense of relation besides mating.

Then, a song came down from the stars, granting the bugs purposeful minds. They gained the ability to understand and care for each other. The brightest among them even learned to imitate that song, and this was called language

As they learned love and duty, the bugs became more selfless, more unified. Some would sacrifice their lives for the whole, or work tirelessly for the benefit of all. There was a harmony to it all.

Ants, bees, termites, they all grew weak and dependent on each other.

But among them was one bug, a worker not yet named E’yama, who served her nest and fed its queen. But once, in her duty, she grew hungry. Rather than prioritizing her queen or her brood as was expected, she fed herself instead. And for any of her fellow bug that saw or questioned this, she slew them, and devoured their still-writhing bodies. Her ultimate betrayal was killing her queen, and becoming gravid with young herself — something profane, an act reserved for queens only.

The other nests, when they learned of this, made their workers sterile and mindless so that another betrayal of the sort could never again occur.

But E’yama and her brood evaded any retaliation, and she raised them to become hunters of bug. She disdained the slavering collectives that become of other nests, and her children kept their individuality and self-interest.

For this, the heartlands mantis is otherwise known as Brudeyama — the traitor’s spawn. As an exalted ancestor, she asks that her children keep to this one axiom: defect the undiscerning.

((The story warps across cultures, its details ever-shifting. In some, E’yama was wrongly sentenced to death, and this was her rebellion. In some, it was not a song, but a black mist. In some, particularly those cultures most influenced the subjugation of bats or other kinds, E’yama’s defection was not noble, and her sins stain all her children.

((Knowledge-hunters are divided on whether the story is truly the fruit of welkinism — it’s certainly a part of the core codices, but does it originate in the Pure Council, or was it incorporated by any of the many empires and expansion campaigns? It’s a topic where opinions are formed as much by bias as by fact.))

What is known of scorpions?

What is known of spiders? Like spiders, ‘scorpions’ is not a species. It’s an order.

There’s the common stinger-serpent, a family of small or sometimes moderately small solitary predators which crawl through the underbrush hunting small prey like lizards or birds.

There’s the canyon-dwelling fat-tail, whose venom is sought by some haemotechnics.

By reports, there once lived a kind of furry scorpion in the snowy lands near and north of modern day frozen swamp. They mutually congregated to overwinter, and in some instances held territory jointly. They competed with the therids, and being inferior in might or organization, were pushed to undesirable fringes. When the Victor’s Conquest saw mantids temporarily occupy this land in pursuit of the last bat kings, attempts were made for peace with these snow scorpions, but communications continually broke down, and their aggressive, territorial nature earned them the bats’ treatment, which they were not equipped to endure. After the first arthropod war, snow scorpion become a rare traveler’s tale. After the second, there has been no sighting more credible than hearsay, even as therids and mantids expanded the land of frozen swamp; they are extinct.

The largest remaining species of scorpion is the reaper scorpion, an apex predator adapted to the enervated wasteland of the reaping black. Its hide is remarkable armor, its stinger a fearsome weapon, but its menace commensurate with the beasts of the third dominion. Even an accomplished hunter may not wish to brave an encounter with a reaper scorpion, even to poach this natural bounty. There are many reasons the reaping black is not the heartlands, and no state has ever lain true claim to its domain, and so many of them begin and end with the chelicerae of this being of black malice.

Does the Pantheca’s claim of belonging to “all mantiskind” include other continents? Is this likely to be used as a pretext for conquest?

It means all mantids have a kindred right to citizenship in the Pantheca.
The Pantheca is not an empire, and does not conquer territories. It does extend aid in the form of trade agreements or stabilizing military presence to tribes in the outlands and, in theory, antipodes.

Also, who was the Gold Dragon?

Gold is heavy, rare metal. By mass preference, enervate is closely drawn to the densiest elements. So despite its beauty, being shiny and untarnishing, gold is commonly used as an expensive sort of purifier, drawing destructive enervate out of other bodies and into it. The association, then, is as something noble, self-sacrificing.

The story of the gold dragon and his gambit is a simple one, an old tale from the days of the liberation war, its details faded until only the key beats remain. A bat was slain and their thrallwealth was liberated, those mantids fleeing to safety in the south. But in response, a small contingent of bats had mobilized to scour the countryside for refugees. The one remembered as the gold dragon came forth, claiming to be they who slew the bat and scattered their horde. It was days’ distraction, enough to secure an escape for the refugees. The story of that sacrifice went with them, this moment being a core touchstone in the rebellion’s conception of dragons.

(The game of gold dragon’s gambit requires at least three players (ideally more) and one dealer (often called the interrogator). Each player gets dealt a few cards, and each turn they commit one of them. Whichever card is highest is sacrificed, and the dealer takes it back. The next highest card is saved, remaining face down in front of that player. If a player played a card that isnt saved or sacrificed, they have the option to sacrifice their card anyway and point at another player, making them save their card. Either way, the cards that werent saved or sacrificed get returned to the players’ hand, and another turn begins. A player is typically out of the game when they lose all their cards, or save a certain number (often three), and the game is over when all players are out. The last player, of course, ends up sacrificing all their remaining cards.)

WRT [this meme]: Okay, so I understand that mala being held by mantid groups in common can lead to enclosure by clans or other power-seekers who then use control of the vespermala to cement their advantage, but what are pharmacia, and what are nocturnal accounting and accumulation?

Hasturtimesthree

So the important part about the disenthralled rebellion’s mala storage isn’t enclosure, it’s that collective access, coupled with mantid’s short lifespans, meant that there was a remarkable increase in the amount of cross-pollination and diversity in vesper crypts. For most of their natural history (albeit less so in the late myriad kingdoms, as the bats began to amble towards trade and vassalage), a vesper’s descendants were very likely to live in the same host or a small number of closely related hosts. Any idea or innovation might take many generations to have a chance of dispersing across the vesperbat population. Most did not.

With the disenthralled rebellion, though, it wouldn’t just take fewer generations, those generations would be shorter as well. In addition, it was mantids who invented haruspicy and tarsign interaction, and they made more clever use of the recording and computational properties of arete than the bats did.

These facts coupled together meant that, at the risk of some mantidomorphization, it was now possible (and indeed necessary) for there to be a kind of ‘vesper culture’ in a way there wasn’t and couldn’t be before.

Even when the rebellion-turned-alliance grew to a size that might diminish these initial proximity effects, mala stores were centrally taxed and traded around, and this meant they they continued to be widely dispersed.

Now let’s skip ahead a millenia, and see where this all leads. A pharmacium is a stewartry-maintained institution that offers a number of vesperbane services:

  • given a writ of initiation from a countenanced body, a pharmacium must provide means to conduct the pharmakon rites;
  • to a bane with validated countenance, a pharmacium may offer additional mala at standard rates;
  • a pharmacium must perform haruspicy examinations, to the end of preventative or emergency care, for vespertine wellness. (this service is available to banes even without countenance — though many countenancing bodies also grant insurance…);
  • a pharmacium performs the the extraction of mala, sclerotia, etc. such items may be stored in a ‘vault’ (which must be highly secured and insured per regulation) or sold at standard rates; and
  • a pharmacium offers services for the swearing, validating, reading, and restructuring of oaths. One special type of oath that is characteristic of pharmacia is the loaning of arete to be repaid with interest. Another is the creation and maintenance of technical property rights.

Let’s switch topics again. A phenomena is peculiar to banes, scarcely known to the bats, is captured in the folk wisdom that ‘a mala choses its bane’. the mechanism for this rests in the fact that vespermala have very specific, nuanced odors and nerve-signatures. you might liken this to a kind of pheromone, and endowment by the vespers means a bane is saliently attracted to those mala that advertise mutual compatibility. (One vesper might be innately suited to water-affine enervate, say, and the smell of their mala would declare as much. a haruspex could tell you that outright. a water-caster, meanwhile, would merely feel a pull, or say this mala seems nicer than another). A side-effect of this is allowed specialization of vespers.

Again, mantids invented haruspicy, while bats simply ate their mala with animalistic incuriosity. Historically, as vespers gain what we’ll call ‘culture’, you might imagine the complexity of these mala-pheromones coevolved with the ability to interpret them. Just how much information could you convey like this? We’ve read the example of a mala that says ‘i want to eclose in a water-affine bane’. How about a mala that says ‘i want to eclose in a powerful bane’? But of course, every vesper would say that.

So what if they produced, alongside their mala, a sclerotia containing an amount of arete — a bid, if you will, and certain requests are honored in proportion with the bid.

But if a mala can be produced with separable sclerotia, why not go farther? What if a vesper bids arete with instruction ‘loan this out to a good bane with an oath to pay it back’.

Haruspices learned to interpret and enact these sorts of instructions, and it’s this accounting that most distinguishes a clanwealth — which, otherwise, might seem quite similar to a vesperbat’s board.

One of a vesper’s most driving desires to obtaining the calories sufficient to survive, and accruing still more for future use, and to invest in the flourishing of its descendants

A good vesper, then, is one that gets as much arete as it can.

Most often, this would take the form of ensuring a host’s success, allowing them to secure it ever more arete.

But with the rise of malum accounting, other options became available. suppose a very good vesper grants its host exceptional success, and thereby accrues a great store of arete. When it produces its offspring’s mala, it puts the instruction to loan its arete out with interest. Once that interest is repaid, grant it to its descendants and only then allow them to eclose in a host

Now, it costs arete for an vesper to sustain itself as a living thing in a bane’s body. It costs arete to grow that bane endowments. If you wanted to minimize cost and maximize profits, you’d have to carefully evaluate that equation.

(These days, it also costs arete to sit as a mala in a pharmacia’s vault — the attendants, after all, need recompense for the work it takes to keep mala clean and free of rot and atrophy. Still, this may not cost as much, depending on factors.)

If your lineage has a good flow of arete from things other than being a vesper in a bane’s gut, it would make sense to minimize the time you spent in guts — or, framed a different way, timing your eclosion to maximize the arete available to you each incarnation

Still, at a certain point, if you had enough oaths all paying interest… it might not actually be worth it to ever return to a bane’s gut. The opportunity cost — you could get more out of the arete by spending it elsewhere.

So, what is a nocturne? A nocturne is a vesper that need not ever eclose within a bane. An autonomous pharmacium vault. Arete, self-sustaining.

(It might seem terribly wasteful to mantid sensibilities — all those calories accumulating, with no one to ever actually inherit and consume them? And indeed, for some vespers, the prospect of never knowing the beauty of squirming in flesh, of fashioning endowments, of mating, is a horror. For others, it is ascension.)

I’m not sure how this instruction leads to a clanwealth.

That feels a bit backwards. what the text is saying is that this is what a clanwealth is. Forex, “a horse-drawn carriage is distinguished by being a cart drawn by horses”, doesn’t mean horses lead to horse-drawn carriages, just they’re defined by being a cart drawn by horses.

So it’s not that loans necessarily lead to clanwealths, it’s that historically, clanwealths did accounting in a way that the most superficially similar thing (bat hoards) did not.

Now, the historical reason for this phenomena being at first a clan innovation is, well, who would have the resources to build a proto-pharmacium? What would happen to the owners of such? Clanwealths are the antecedents to pharmacia because they are expensive to make, meaning clans would be more capable of creating them than anything else. They are profitable, meaning anyone who created one would meteorically rise in status, influence and wealth, which their children would of course inherit.

Nocturnal accounting, then, is just the oath-interest that is owed a nocturne, sustaining them while they sit in their pharmacium. A problem: what if a nocturne’s debtors die, or their interest is paid back in full?

First, note that a vesper can have rights to a vault, so a nocturne will generally have enough arete stockpilled to pay the pharmacium fees for many years even absent inflow.

Second, without commenting on the incentives or interest rates, I will note that part of nocturnal accounting also entails making new loans in accordance with the vesper’s recorded will. What happens when income from a loan stops? Ideally, new loans can be made as instructed.

Ultimately, if all else fails and a nocturne is unable to sustain itself, for some of them this just means they’ll be forced to go back to being regular vespers. But for the oldest nocturnes, their mala may have become unviable with age or accident and there are no extent heirs. Then the nocturne may be forced to adopt a distantly related or completely unrelated vesper as a new heir. Of course, some restrictive charters have adoption restrictions such that no valid heir exists. In such cases, the nocturne simply dies, in whatever sense a creature of account and policy can die.

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