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Why Shouldn’t Parasites Rule the World? in The Serpent’s Track 2026-02-20 a blogpost 2k words
By far my favorite plotline, and something I so desperately want to see executed better, is the parasitoid singularity.
This can take a lot of forms. Probably the most recognizable is when it leans mostly to the “singularity” side. This is the hard takeoff of misaligned artificial intelligence. Skynet, universal paperclips, and so forth. AI spreading itself across every medium it has access to, replicating and infecting computers, then leveraging its newly gathered swarm to expand its access further to gather even more resources, loop while true, break only when the planet’s devoured.
A Glossary for Vermin in Vermin Cathexis 2026-02-10 In definitional cathexis 4k words
Meanings for the terminology used in various writings in the dark fantasy series, Vermin Cathexis.
Traitor-Mastering in Verminous Experiments 2026-02-09 Posted on an anonymous binding board 2k words
:: Be me :: thrallborne. :: Vectored by a master infiltrator. :: stealthy as fuck :: slipped right into the summer palace :: infested a princess. :: Court never figured it out! :: Three instars pass :: fending for myself :: totally parasite-mastering. :: One day a hive nurse shows up, starts tending to me :: it’s another infiltrator. :: Court’s face when princess’s favorite maid was a bug and no one noticed.
One to the Light, Swarm to the Shadows in Verminous Experiments 2026-02-09 Where a single bug crawls, a hive lies unseen 5k words
Golden sky hung above as horizon enveloped sun. Gilded like kintsugi, shining between shards of darkling clouds. This twilight might well have been night already — that suited me.
I crawled up the tower, claws of my tarsi hooking into brickwork. Human alchemists loved this plain white stone. What was it that drew such empire-wide devotion — the symbolic purity? As if this tower wasn’t a stain on forest that predated it. Even where it wasn’t garrish white stone, it was angular iron bars flecked with red.
On the Emotions of Thralls in Verminous Experiments 2026-02-09 Digression concerning abnormal psychological spectra 2k words
For a mortal enthralled to a chrylurk’s will, one’s mind is not one’s own. Trivial wisdom, oft quoted. But for all its overpreached banality, few have reckoned with what this truly means. Chrylurk subjugation is no less than a challenge — a refutation, an annihilation — of the human condition. Beyond human! Subjectivity itself ought experience a profound vertigo in the face of the thralls.
Selected Ideaspawn in Verminous Experiments 2026-02-07 Brief, scattered pieces of Vermin Cathexis Writing 6k words
Alchemy is about change. Not decay, not erosion: the art of transmutation wroughts new order from components sacrificed. At its core, alchemy is change for the better — the fuel of transmutation, then, is hope.
Whenever an organism burns with dreams, wishes, ambitions, a little mote of alchemical essence is created. Call this cathexis. This bundle persists in the body for a time, absorbing energy from the world, before its eventual dissolution, whereupon it releases more energy than was spent to fuel it.
Restless, Enwrapped, Rotten in Verminous Experiments 2026-02-02 Of Sleep and Other Kinds of Death 3k words
Sleep is another kind of rot, Ava thought. Her dreams had changed. Images hung around. Shapes carved into her sight, afterimage of a some blinding glare. Colors bleed from the forms, as hazy as smoke in still air. Maybe blowing out some long sigh of relief — maybe achieving that relief, first — would be what banished them, but Ava was suffocating.
Entiotic Notes in Vermin Cathexis 2026-02-01 Incomplete thoughts and works in progress for Vermin Cathexis 4k words
What does every hive need? Its pair of mated queens, of course. Feral queens must attend all the needs of chrylurk biology by their own hand, but this is demanding work. Once she bears a brood, that burden can be shared.
At first each chrylurk drone would have the same gamut of responsibilities — casting their own shell, weaving their own webs, securing their own prey, constructing their own quarters. All save the conceiving and laying of new entiotes
Consort In Recapitulation in Verminous Experiments 2026-01-26 Ravel and Waken 2k words
You awaken in chrysalis. Your mind hangs by a web, our web, our embrace. Like dewdrops rolling down threads, your dreams are pulsing-sliding along silk lines, and our dreams enjoin and subsume. Your sleep is long, and the accord has washed all vestiges of you into us — tucked safe, in care unending — leaving you blank as a palimpsest. Upon this canvas we shall paint you.
A Living Transmutation in Verminous Experiments 2026-01-17 The Rules of Alchemy and How They’re Broken 2k words
The first law of alchemy defines the chain of emanation. Through dreaming, matter begets essence; through alchemy, essence begets limina; through transmutation, limina begets matter. This is a chain and not a loop, as enforced by the second law of alchemy: It entails that alchemization and transmutation are governed by opposing fields whose energy values must have a product of zero at all points in space. Thus, the “transmutation of dreams” would be a phenomena as paradoxical as a machine perpetually in motion.