The pineal eye, named for analogy to a structure in vesperbats, regulates a diamantid’s psi-nerve activity. From its place within the brain, it produces, stores and metabolizes the amalgam neurotransmitters required for higher cognition, and its role in catalyzing them anew, selectively distributing them, and otherwise modulating activity hint at a role even more significant than a simple nerve gland or neural liver.
Anatomically, the pineal eye resembles an ocelli warped and imbued with black nerve. Indeed, one can be sure of this origin: diamantids have only two external ocelli, where even diamantid’s closest evolutionary relatives, the noble roaches, have three. This suggests the pineal eye underwent profound evolution in a remarkably short time.
Evolution for what purpose? With some certainty, diamantids can credit their very minds to the work of this small black remnant of an eye. Damage to the pineal gland yields a number of disorders, culminating in the infamous and terminal “rootless” affliction. A rootless diamantis lacks any higher sapiance at all, only the pained, frenzied faculties of an animal.
There’s more to discuss on this topic — the coronal ablution, ubiquitous in modernity, and its impact on pineal functioning; the surprising role of theca-guarding in the mental development of pre-hatched mantids; as well as wraith-forms and the chorus resonance, being the very dangers ablution and theca-guarding shield nymphs against. But this is not an exposition on the pineal eye: we are here to instead discuss the treacherous snake-rose.
Commonly dubbed the cursed eye of the beholden, the ophisrhodon is an unstable mutation of the pineal gland endowed by the vespers, and inherited by clan Anthimati. Like some disorders of the pineal, the ophisrhodon is passed matrilineally. Still, for some years after hatching, the ophisrhodon remains enclosed within the user’s brain, functioning just as a normal pineal gland. It grows faster than it should, bloating and suffusing the brain in psi-nerve to a degree that any physician would remark as anomalous. At some point, the flux from their dormant ophisrhodon’s activity heightens, extending outwards to directly influence and be influenced by their surroundings — particularly other minds.
These dim gropings are a pale shadow of true nouprojection; even laybugs resist it without issue. Nonetheless, the affect strikes most as off-putting, creepy. This easily alienates the user from most they encounter. Yet if someone is undaunted, persists in interaction until they trust and are trusted by the user, they slowly adapt to the psychic flux. The one affected, the target, grows to associate this sensation with the user, and if trust in the user grows strong enough, consciously or unconsciously the target relents, granting the ophisrhodon greater and greater influence.
Call this a debt-bond. A dormant ophisrhodon takes months to forge such a connection. If successful, the target becomes beholden to the user. This means, for mere dormant ophisrhodon, the debt-bond conveys vaguely the moods and intents of the target and the user, so long as they are within a certain range. This range increases with development. As each adapts to it, they begin to intuitively sense the other’s moods — even rising to the point of seeming to know what the other is thinking.
Eventually, one of two things will happen: either the target dies, or one betrays the other. Once either condition is met, the ophisrhodon advances to a new stage of development. Note this requirement is disjunctive, not conjunctive — understandably nevertheless, it lends credence to misapprehension that manifesting the ophisrhodon entails treachery, even to the point of killing the one you trust the most. But death is not needed, and the ‘betrayal’ may be outright enmity, but also simply an intense moment where the target fails the user when needed them most (being unable to save one another in combat, for instance). Still, the belief that the heart of the ophisrhodon is treachery means any manifestation can be taken as proof of betrayal — a self-fulling notion.
A matured ophisrhodon bursts violently from the middle of the head of the user, a process know as ‘flowering’, a bloody and agonizing affair.
Free from the brain, a newly flowered ophisrhodon rises from the forehead on a thorned stalk, and quickly grows to a size impossible to fit back in the soon-healed exit wound. Upon the stalk sits the eye-flower. A dull red orb when inactive, the central eye is at first surrounded by two sharply-tipped fangs, points dripping jet black poison. Ringing the eye beneath the fangs are row after row of sable petals that shimmer in the light.
If the flowering condition was taken as a betrayal, the debt-bond will be immediately revoked. In first constructing the debt-bond, the influence of the ophisrhodon has altered the pineal glands of the beholden, turning the target’s pineal eye into debt-seeds.
Revocation triggers the sprouting of the target’s debt-seed, a thin stalk and small flower bursting from the head of the beholden: a rhodet in bloom. For a non-Anthimati, this means death; if the beholden isn’t already dead, or soon to be killed in retribution, removal of the pineal gland will surely result in rootlessness.
When the user recovers from flowering, they will discover the ability to activate the ophisrhodon at will with but a minute flexure of their enervate. This causes the eye to light up with a baleful red glow, flowing lines of enervate stretching between the fangs. Pointing the ophisrhodon at a mantid’s head, the glowing eye senses and scans the psi-nerve in the target’s brain. The user parses the brain-image intuitively, picking out moods and other coarse details with exceptional ease. (A projectique might take years of tireless study to replicate a neophyte ophisrhodon user’s analysis.)
Many ophisrhodon users report that it feels as though the eye itself is whispering in their mind, telling them the secrets of how to grill and manipulate bugs. And a user’s feats of ‘mind-reading’ often take the form of grilling, interrogation — as even a detailed scan of a brain is no perfect revelation of its meaning, but an exceptionally useful reference. Still, the ophisrhodon has unparalleled ability to memorize neuron-circuits and classify firing patterns, and the accuracy of its parsing will continually rise with training.
But with that training, the user soon discovers that their newfound clairvoyance is not free, as no technique is. As they scan mantids, as they consult with their beholden (if they still have them), indeed even as they do nothing more than live, they will find the petals of their ophisrhodon wilting and falling away. The petals are highly concentrated, crystalized psi-nerve proteins; the ophisrhodon consumes them to fuel its abilities. Once the ophisrhodon flowers, the user loses the ability to produce them themself.
They gain the ability to create more beholden, however. Rather than the slow process of adapting a close comrade, the user can bite a target, the venom consisting of the very psi-nerve enzymes required to alter a pineal gland into a debt-seed, marking them as beholden. However, the need for consent of some sort never goes away. An unwilling target subject to the venom will feel terrible headaches, but the venom nor the ophisrhodon is sufficient to overcome the resistance. Even submission to duress is insufficient: without the target feeling relaxed and positively disposed toward the user, the process will not take, and the attempt will bear no fruit.
Once the user successfully beholds a target, their rhodet slowly develops. This process has benefits for the target; they are granted resistance to nouprojection from anyone but the ophisrhodon user, to a degree comparable to low level distortique training.
The debt-bond seeks out and attaches itself to parts of the brain associated with the user. As it grows, it readily accepts and transmits signals from the user. In practice, this manifests as if the user were a voice in the target’s brain, able to converse with them telepathically. When the debt-bond is active in this way, it’s visibly manifest in the form of dark lines flowing and crossing the surface of the target’s compound eyes.
If and when the user revokes the debt-seed, the rhodet can be enfoldened within the closing petals of their ophisrhodon. This destroys the rhodet, consuming its mass and nerve; with this act, petals are regenerated. How many petals are regained increases with greater development of the debt-seed. If the user simply allows their eye to bite their beholden, and thereby extract the psi-nerve, they can replenish petals without killing their beholden — but this is much less efficient. (A user might even try killing someone who has never submitted to their eye, try extracting psi-nerve from a laic brain. As the ophisrhodon uses its own bespoke proteins the beholden are entrained to produce, this is so much less efficient still.)
The ophisrhodon is born of mutation, and no two are quite alike. For this reason, the rhodets of another user are not always fully compatible; trying to consume them will be less efficient, if it doesn’t outright impair the functioning of the user’s ophisrhodon.
Still, the user must obtain more petals somehow: the ophisrhodon requires psi-nerve for its operation; the ophisrhodon cannot produce enough psi-nerve on its own to sustain itself; the ophisrhodon is the user’s pineal eye, and without a pineal eye, a mantis becomes rootless and feral.
(The ophisrhodon is the eye of nouprojection — one wonders if the user’s thoughts are even their own, or forever entrained by the cursed eye chained to it.)
Should the user consume enough rhodets, they will find their gaze growing stronger for it. The range, fidelity, and efficacy of the eye will climb higher and higher. The number of debt-bonds they can maintain at once increases. This progression is earmarked by the emergences of more and more fangs.
With three fangs, the user gains the ability to not just passively observe brains, but project an aura sufficient to influence them, nudging thoughts and entraining cognition. (This effect interferes with the debt-bonding technique, and a beholden cannot be created when under the influence of ophisrhodon projection.)
With four fangs, the nature of the debt-bond is transformed, removing its range limitation entirely; the user becomes able to receive and transmit information to their beholden from anywhere in the world, albeit with an added delay. (The effective range still exists and inside that range, there is no added delay.) Though poorly understood, the ophisrhodon’s extended range is a product of growing powerful enough to project a signal upon the celestial umbrasphere, through which it is propagated.
With five fangs, the nature of the ophisrhodon’s mutation comes under the user’s control, allowing access to the most powerful ophisrhodon techniques. In general, this allows them to further empower their beholden, and interfere with another’s ophisrhodon, to the point of being able to outright disable another’s ophisrhodon if the disparity in power is sufficient. The user gains the ability to consume ophisrhodons as if they were rhodets.
Due to the mutating nature of the ophisrhodon, many ophisrhodons have diverged enough in their fundamental architecture that consuming an ophisrhodon mainly serves at best as a hard to digest source of petals. The subtle differences between ophisrhodons creates a kind of dissonance, a clashing, and the main mass of the eye must be discarded. But if the ophisrhodons are closely related enough (a parent and their child; two siblings), they are “attuned”, then they can merge in a profound way. Doing this is a pathway to achieving the ultimate stage of ophisrhodon evolution: the ophisrhodon akmí, the snake with ten interleaved fangs, secret and elusive to even the Anthimati. It represents an increase in power more dramatic than any stage before it, however it also represents a great increase in the petals requires to sustain it. A user of the ophisrhodon akmí is bound to forever ration the use of their eyes, consume the rhodets of many, lest they lose their sight and their mind.
The akmí grants several abilities beyond that achievable with a base ophisrhodon. The users gains fine control of their venom, allowing them to control it when not even inside a body. Made of psi-nerve, the venom becomes like a mind of its own for the ophisrhodon’s purpose, and an exceptionally plastic one of that. This allows them to perform phantasma, creating enervate constructs piloted by their manipulated venom.
Inside a brain, their venom potency has increased to the point of allowing them to subject a target to a state of total sensory control called optasia. The user is able to accelerate the target’s perception of time and speed of thought, enabling them to experience hours of time in this dream-world in seconds.
The old Anthmati are burning, ever burning. In retribution for their role in the atrocity that was the Third Dominion, clan Thimithi cast upon them a profound flame said to burn their very bloodline. Extant Anthimati members are shielded from this effect by arete-bindings created by the second overscourge. However, when the users reaches the stage of akmí, these bindings weaken, making them ever susceptible to the fate that dogs bearers of the ophisrhodon, of their blood secret burning to ash and leaving them mindless. But with care, these metaphysical flames are coraled, corrupted and fueled by the black nerve of the ophisrhodon in the technique of phlegethon, a black flame that can burn even the firewalking Thimithi.
With the akmí, the ability to project onto the celestial umbrasphere has gone even further, allowing the user to manipulate certain world-scars. Through the celestial umbrasphere, it’s possible to make contact with something beyond, something vast. Not even the Anthimati know the truth; some suspect every surviving ophisrhodon maintains an affinity for whatever allowed two Anthimati alone to survive the Night of Ashes that consumed the rest of them in blessed flames.
Through this connection, the user is said to gain the ability of kairos, allowing them to “turn reality into illusion and illusion into reality.” In practice, this means that when the user is poised to suffer some unacceptable tragedy, most often a certain death, they are granted a detailed vision of this possible future before it happens (reality into illusion) and the knowledge to avert it (illusion into reality). In all supposed cases, this ability has only triggered once.
When the user is most desperate for more power, they gain the ability to make a dark pact, binding themselves in a similar way to their beholden are bound. In return, they will dream and hear the what’s call the selene melodia, a grand cosmic pattern, a sentient song beyond their comprehension. They can only partial replicate it, but that fragment they are able to replicate becomes a powerful technique unique to them. Examples of selene melodia include:
The Aubade of the Aureole allowed the user to replicate kairos indefinitely. This pact was bound by the user’s faith in her own righteousness: so long as she didn’t falter in pursuit of her goal, the vision of kairos remained clear in her mind, granting her a path to overcome any obstacle. (It was never the easiest path; it is always one that will test her conviction.)
The Dead Sun Dirge allows the user to transmigrate a form of his mind into his beholden. If he should die, his mind would remain anchored, granting him immortality. His pact is an unwavering belief in his singular importance: he must be willing to cut down any living thing if they should stand in his way. He must maintain this state of mind always; if he falters from that belief for even a second, his mind-copies would disappear instantly.
The Etude for the Emptiness allows the user to cancel out any umbraflux with destructive interference, negating techniques that require projection and stilling enervate construct. A word of utter silence. This pact is bound by the user’s authority and legitimacy. The user must act as the highest king, submitting to no authority, advancing no end that does not serve the ultimate good of his kingdom. Should the user forsake his duties, shirk his responsibility, he will speak the word of silence and find that nothing listens.
The Song of Cynosure allows the user’s venom to enter mantids, beholding them without imparting a debt-seed. Through this modified venom, the user gains knowledge of how to convince the target of anything, and the ability to impart certainty in anything the target believes. This pact is bound by the user’s own credence. She cannot convince a bug of something she doesn’t believe, nor impart any greater certainty. If she stops believing in what she’s preached, her spell on her followers will break.
Snuggly Serials 