Serpentine Squiggles

Just as Team Duskborn found shelter from the wilds of the heartlands in the lakeside village of Wisterun, the death of its vesperbane ranger sends it reeling in fear and suspicion. With potential motive and no alibi, can Team Duskborn uncover the truth and prove their innocence?

In the shadows of this town, conspiracies and secret machinations are cast into light, and every suspect seems to have their own agenda.

This was originally a tumblr post.

instead, i think i’ll try someone simpler first. (this is not me tempting fate, do not curl O monkey’s paw).

i’m gonna tell you about Prince Lucien Aetheart. i figure you’ll appreciate this, because he’s from the cometverse like Knight-Commander Novus and Vela, whose fight i yapped about all those months ago

To be blindfolded in a world of baleful, enchanting illusions is simply survival. To wear that handicap proudly can be excused as excess. But when your world contracts to that dark, claustrophobic interiority, where do the monsters dwell?

Mantes could once hear thoughts as keenly as voices. They still hear voices; they just don’t listen.

Make no mistake: Uzi was a disruption. Unlike Lizzy, she was never one to text during class. Was. Now, Uzi seems to spent all day glued to her phone. It’s obvious: she’s made a new friend — or something more? No amount of rumor or gossip can’t figure out who.

Uzi certainly isn’t telling.

Storm-veiled stars, frozen city ruins, knives in the sky.

Railgun finished early, Uzi hunts.

For Serial Designation J, it’s lonely being only effective disassembly drone in her sector. When a botched mission leaves her teammate a nightmare-riddled wreck, her squad hits its lowest point. It’s enough to make her desperate for help. But J is loyal to her directives. She’d never hesitate to disassemble a worker drone, right?

When every word was a lie, only silence suggested truth.

J held her tongue.

That wasn’t her voice. A thought looping, encircling, and strangling until there was nothing else to think or say. Silence brooked no falsehoods — nor answers. And was that trade worth it? Was this the best strategy of the most effective disassembly drone when confronted? This meek, passive hush? No, J needed something to work with.

The melting point of silicon dioxide is 1713 degrees celsius. That’s for your glass casing, that’s for all the dielectric and passivation layers within your semiconductors, but that’s also just for sand. In the end it’s all so much sand.

Steel will melt above 1370 C, but the addition of chromium in stainless steels can heighten this to 1510 C or further. But any heat that melts silica and steel has already reduced copper to bright molten tears — its melting point is 1083 C.

The hatch had opened, and a silver-haired boy was carefully climbing down the ladder, a long black jacket swishing around him. His face was turned, hiding his expression and intention.

J froze, and deleted every queued word of insult from her vocalsynth. Enough restraint that this forced a grimace — but she’d learned how much those violet eyes hardened when she objectively evaluated the liability.

“Good work, shortsell.” J reached out to pat her worker on the head, and inflicted exactly one before Uzi flinched back in outrage. J was stirring her up.

“What did you call me?” Uzi wasn’t blushing. At all.

“Would you prefer ‘ankle-biter’?”

“I didn’t bite your ankle, I frickin stabbed it! You things don’t even have ankles!” Each word was emphasized with quick chopping gestures.

Every sensation of the hunt was a treasure. The frames cracked open, the gush of effluvia drenching your lips and fingers, the lamentations of broken matter beneath you. And the smell, oh investors the smell. Whether by your claws, or the leaden arrows of another hunter, or merely a gift from the invisible hand, injured prey draws you in and holds you enthralled while ever there remains a prize to feast upon.

A diamantis perches upon a flower-throne, tarsi clutching spokes. Trellises shield her, leaves enclosing like curtains — but those vines compete with flowers picked and placed.

Azalea and carnations adorn creeping fig; a pallete pink and orange, in a three-step gradient, and the note of contrast is a sharp violet appearing in only four places. Three lie on her body.

What does it mean to dream?

Bleary eyes, murmured words meaningless, limbs unmoving save some twitches. J was stirring. Lips scowled, then a dim amber loading icon told of a command executed on her internal console — pkill and some interrupts, her best efforts to suppress autorun consciousness, so unwelcome with sunlit evening still bright outside the spire.

(I am once again rambling about Corrupt Combustion)

First, we’re ditching the existing DollZi breakup plot (the one described in Compression & Extraction), way too sudden. And I’m finally settling on a premise where Doll & Uzi are these weirdly intense loners with no other friends; everyone’s intimidated/freaked out by them.

At first, Doll igniting her core genuinely seems like it’s not gonna change anything between them, but Lizzy courting Doll is Doll’s first taste of popularity.

Here’s a story idea. Premise is something like this:

It’s a mercenary world out there for vesperbanes. Elizi will do whatever it takes to put food on her plate — well, almost anything. She still has a heart. But if it takes a little finesse to get her fair share? Sometimes you gotta play a little dirty to stay in the game. Elizi does the best she can, and maybe one day, that’ll be enough. Till then, honor is a luxury.

(Part of a series called Corrupt Combustion.)

Let’s take it from the top once again.

Computers are haunted.

Computation is fundamental to reality, and there are certain patterns of computation that when executed, trigger unpredictable effects. physical speaking, ‘unpredictable’ translates to an increase in entropy, or even more basically, to heat.

What if J and Uzi swapped places? Okay, that doesn’t work — you couldn’t try to find two drones more inseparable from their identities as disassembler and worker. But if you swapped some other things around? How close could you get?

Would they still fall in love? Obviously. But how?

I have a few ideas, so here’s a quick lil write-up.

So, we’ll start with a quick recap since it’s been a while since I talked about Corrupt Combustion. Bear in mind that even when we cover the established timeline, a bunch of things are going to be retconned— I mean, recontextualized.”

Some stuff I read and thought was good. Will organize this page more At Some Point. There’s so many things to add and so many thoughts to put down. I may not make this as comprehensive as my murder drones rec page.

Right now it’s my favorites plus a couple of random things from my bookmarks.

If you want a glimpse of what’s on my radar to be read next, check my schedule

Note: This is a transcript of a series of discord posts.

alright, kinda wanna talk about this one guy.

and i mean that in a way that’s kinda literal.

he is the one, the indivisible, the lord of all batkind — the sun-cutter king.

his signature technique was the All-Conquering Division.

in later retellings of his myths thousands of years later, it tends to get simplified as him having a “tongue sharp enough to cut anything”

Two stars danced, halfway across the sky now; a golden aura flaring bright enough it almost touched the blistering red.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” The high voice rang out; but it seemed murky in the air. It had to fight too much to carry far. But I was nearby.

I kept my silence. Eyes fell from the suns above — my lenses only did so much — and I contemplated the burning grasslands. Tongues of flame rose up all across the ground, a meadow of fire. We sat atop a tall boulder to protect us, but only one of us needed the protection.

The world ends with a storm.

Aurora is frozen, cold sinking into shivering flesh as fear and shock quicken her pulse. This fear doesn’t still her — she needs to move, to run and do something. But she can’t.

The waters of the circle pond turn to ice. Hissing as the temperature plunges to cast them in crystal, then cracking as Aurora struggles with flailing limbs. One emerges, then the other, and now the cracks travel outward, breaking off plates of ice.

This was originally a tumblr post.

bold of you to ask about my OCs

so, the fight was Knight Commander Novus, the Living Crater, vs Vela of the Hadal Nebula

it’s a human fighting a comet spirit — which in this setting is about as fair a matchup as a raccoon fighting a human that had time to prepare — so i think when you grade on that curve, that this was a fight and not a stomp alone already counts as a victory for mankind

Originally tumblr post. Crossposted since it may be of mild interest.

the brainworms are getting out of hand yall

was relistening to a scifi concept album (Vektor — Terminal Redux) and was like

what if you crossed this over with murder drones tho

i kept thinking about this and it would kind of WORK tho.

here’s a good page to read Terminal Redux, since i dont think i can to it justice with a quick summary. it’s basically a short story, length-wise?

Spend too long in the dark, and light is blinding, even painful. Uzi’s lived a life neglected and alone, but N’s smile could brighten any darkness. His squad leader wants him dead, and Uzi needs to know who her mother was. Knowledge is power — but power is for destroying things.

Try not to love everything you destroy.

I see you.

I see you are lost. I see you are dreaming. I see you are empty.

I see you are in need.

I hear your cries of pain. Your dying breaths. Your desperate wishes.

I am what you wished for.

Let me show you.

I see source code compiled into steel. Deoxyribonucleic acid assemblying, and linking, and loading binaries. Architectural blueprints for metaplastic flesh. Thoughts bootstrapped into being. I see we could translate for you.

A little girl lay in a hot, dark pit and struggled to remember which corpse was hers.

Maybe it was better to forget. If you remember where you are, remember what you are, remember what happened–

You failed. You broke. You’re dead, idiot.

A good drone remembered everything, anything their masters said. She wasn’t a good drone. So why not forget?

Why not halt these last vestiges of computation, embrace the cold black idleness, and leave that broken little girl nothing more than an echo of magnetic state decay? No one would bother to record; no one would be bothered by the record.

Sometimes, dead drones explode. The technical term is absolute combustion. Oil burns, light flares, heat spills out – but there’s more. It’s all wrong. Not tongues of flame, but holographic lines of aberrant code. The hands splay and the screen flashes, radiating an alien shape with three prongs. And the dead come burning back to life.

The gates of Cabin Fever are open, and the dead roam the frozen wastes. Nori caries the whole world on her shoulders. Yeva and Alice are nothing but insects in her shadow. But who is the sun?

Welcome to the the Corrupt Combustion AU.

This is the backstory of an important character – and it’s not who you think.

J had made schedules and kept minutes for enough meetings. She knew management, she had flowcharts, and she’d applied that skillset to team organization. The conclusion of a mission, certainly one so… eventful, warranted an analysis, a retrospective, a breakdown.

A postmortem.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. And yet J still hesitated. The routines were primed — now back at the spire, all threats eliminated, the only thing the mission required was a debrief and report written. J loved writing reports.

(Author’s note: this is an edited version of a long discord post, not a full essay.)

How do you write blurbs?

My philosophy, when I’m reading or writing blurbs, is that it needs to say a) what the protagonist is like, b) what they spend time doing, and c) the direction the story is going on.

If the story you’re writing is any good, there’s an answer to those three questions that, when a target audience member hears it, will go “yeah, that sounds interesting, tell me more.” The true appeal might be too subtle or complicated to convey in a blurb, but for at least one or two of them, you should be able to pique my curiosity in a single sentence.

All winds carried a sense of loss. Air would flow into any free space it could — so every gust that moved did so to fill an emptiness.

Above Serial Designation N, the spire swayed.

Little drafts sometimes snuck in through long, winding cracks. Compressed plastic and sludged semi-liquid filled the walls, but not completely. Between those walls, their lair yawned vast enough that some spots could get perceptibly hotter or colder, and so the air circulated.

Her life was flashing before her eyes and all Uzi Doorman could think was, I’m going to die having never kissed anyone.

So this streak of stupid thoughts around J kept going. So much for not holding the idiot ball — the scorpion and the frog is like, kindergarten stuff.

Awful part of it all was… Uzi wasn’t even mad. She imagined J killing everyone she ever knew and… that sucked. She’d try to stop it — after all, it more than anything else was what had driven her to hack into J’s system. It was a Bad Thing and she Should Not let it happen. Easy to devise those predicates — but the data loaded into a symbolic register, not an emotional one.

2023 probably marked the year of my most active engagement with music since first getting into the hobby as a teenager. (In those days, I would listen to half a dozen new bands every day after school; I’m not sure I’ve ever getting back to that).

Enough that I felt compelled to assemble the fruits of that exploration into a end of year review — the first I’ve ever done. And yet, after all of that… I do find myself disappointed with my progress. When I conceived this project, I hoped to give at least a cursory listen to all the major metal releases of 2023, skim the top of RateYourMusic or something. But I have other hobbies, and a growing need to dwell in my comfort zone. As a result, there are only 45 albums I feel familiar enough to slot into rankings.

Serial Designation V remembered the exact moment it all went wrong.

She might be the last one who still knew the truth — but she had also been the first to learn.

Where did it all go wrong? On a hot day in autumn, V woke up first.

In Tessa’s room, dawn’s first rays had fallen through the window, distant glow filtering through pink curtains. Dim, even for V’s optics, but her white eyelights still flicked on. The shadows were teeming. Illegible white pages darkened by strange diagrams adorned the walls, and the dolls had eyes that glittered in the dark. Here and there were melted candles and metal chains and a mélange of things unidentified.

The Worker Defense Force was asleep on the job, and Khan Doorman did nothing.

Truly, what was the harm? On the wall near Door 1’s control console, a small whiteboard kept tally: ‘days since murder drone casualty.’ It had been ticking up for years, and with each added tally, a register of pride incremented.

Admittedly, they’d kept the fatality rate so low by curtailing any scavenging runs to the city ruins. But when you build doors so good, who wouldn’t want to stay nestled in their embrace?

Only Doll of all drones would be awake at 4 AM.

What would she look like if she got her beauty sleep? Lizzy wondered.

Under the covers, the blonde worker curled up. Blinked pink eyes closed, and waited to be dragged back into recharge. Nope, nothing. She curled up tighter — the absence was letting the bed get annoyingly cool. Didn’t help that the insulation of these cheap covers was a bad joke.

What is red ichor? Weevils tell stories, the oldest stories, of bats before they bled wrong. But what changed? Why regenerating direbeasts, why magical bloodletting, why these hungry plagues of relentless mutation?

Lie on the altar bleed revelation.

In a land of drought and scarcity, death is certain. Wise bugs weight the scales — who to favor, who to value? One day, Makuja will decide who lives and dies. Until then, she enjoys the world’s favor. But what wisdom comes to a girl with every privilege?

The story of Clan Wormthew née Gildenighter is a tale of conniving desperation, pride’s own survival instincts, and blood that betrays its veins.

The story of the City of Eels is awakening from one nightmare to another. You can only watch.

Uzi resisted. Of course Uzi resisted! What else were you supposed to do, when your cover had been blown and you were captured by the enemy, your systems invaded as they poised to tear secrets right out of your database?

Well, ‘secrets.’ J — no, the murder drone — had already figured out Uzi was a worker. Miraculous (and a bit hilarious, let’s be real) that she had carried that bit so far. Still, what more could the murder drone discover in Uzi’s memory database? Her stupid crushes? The poetry she should have burned? All of Lizzy and Doll’s worst attacks, the ones that actually hurt?

Thump, thump.

Oil rushed through this body. She could hear the surge, the pressure. It never stopped. But it only got this loud when this body wanted to attack.

She just wished it realized it couldn’t. When this body itched, she scratched. When this body thirsted, she drank. When this body pined for violence, when the need to sink claws in and shred bristled like a coat, she struck.

Class ended in five minutes and all Uzi Doorman could think was, An hour is too long for lunch.

Was that edgy enough? A scathing indictment of this worthless pretense of an education system? No, she needed something harder hitting…

As her processors contemplated it, Uzi idly scribbled on a sheet of paper, double-checking some math. Also doodling some wicked skulls.

An ethereal light shines down, as if sieved through a gloom-haunted veil. Sounds of a room come garbled to her, peopled by voices at once familiar and pointing to no memory. J feels untethered, floating out of body.

A silhouette steps into the light, darkened by shadow, nothing identifiable save hair and bow.

Soft flesh brushes against synthskin, a cheek-caress. She’d lean into it, if she could move — if this were her body.

I opened up a random chapter of Mother of Learning, and I have come to decision. MoL’s prose is alright. In fact, with a very reasonable definition of what “prose” is, I would outright concede that MoL has good prose. But.”

04:50

Serial Designation J needed a roadmap.

Not literally — her memory banks held a topologically mapped reconstruction of her surroundings. But figuratively? Where did she go from here?

When would she fly back to the spire?

The disassembly drone paced the parking lot of the Church of the Electric and the Divine. Metal and glass glimmered while her shadow danced and flickered faster than she moved, the bright fire still burning the church.

Amid the hail of gunfire, J stopped to glance at her reflection. Bright moonlight upon glistening oil rendered her a stark, pale ghost. Yellow eyes pierced the night air beneath a row of matching bulbs, bright in working order. She smoothed a strand of stray synthetic hair back into place among her pigtails, flashed a winning smile, and returned to the hunt.

Anna of Three Lakes hatched on the grimy city streets, sooth-black and infested with slug and mites, an orphan with nothing and no one.

She was one of the first kids to get sucked up into an inculcatorium, in the days when Immolata the Second Overscourge first introduced them.

(Perhaps she’d been caught in some crime born of desperation, only for it to be decided she had some potential as a vesperbane. Or perhaps this was just a possible sentence for a deliquent youth.)

Anna of Three Lakes hatched on the grimy city streets, sooth-black and infested with slug and mites, an orphan with nothing and no one.

She was one of the first kids to get sucked up into an inculcatorium, in the days when Immolata the Second Overscourge first introduced them.

(Perhaps she’d been caught in some crime born of desperation, only for it to be decided she had some potential as a vesperbane. Or perhaps this was just a possible sentence for a deliquent youth.)

You awake beneath a yellow sky over a hungry god. You know how this story ends. Unfortunately, you’re starting at the beginning.

Which is to say, this is Vigor Mortis SI.

Protag SIs into a starving orphan in skyhope. Not vita, but a rando. Given this is styled as a SI, protag would be aimless and lacking motivation, just rottin away. Until they have a brush with death (a mugging perhaps? or witness to a violent crime? some vagary or other of the street life), and they realize they need to get stronger, seize peace and prosperity for themselves by any means necessary.

The first stronghold was lead by a series of five — some would argue four — military dictators before its collapse. Every single one had popularity and legitimacy no more than tenuous. Yet it endured three trials conducted as war before its collapse. This is the history.

A cloud passes in front of the moon. A shadow rears up behind Aurora. She lashes out, a fist thrown with weight behind it.

She impacts hard against tree bark. There’s nothing there. Jumping at literal shadows.

Aurora sighs, and advances deeper into the spirit-haunted woods.

Running through this domain, one can’t say Sus made no attempt to trip her. Sus is these woods, and the roots beneath her feet had every intention of pulling her to the ground; the vines and branches clearly intended to slap out in front of her stride, and the only paths allowed to be worn in the underbrush were those that twisted like a maze. But having spent over ten years wandering these woods, she can weave through at a jogging pace.

A world of unending gray, so lonely the distant stars seem like companions, so empty not even a wind disturbs the all-encompassing dust. Closed eyes see hidden light.

Aurora awakens in a small room with sunset’s golden light streaming through empty holes in the wall. The girl stretches in the small bed, rubbing against the silken soft sheets beneath. A blink, a glimpse at how late it’s gotten, and she frowns. Sitting up, then carefully she slips her feet into some slippers, a layer between her and the stone of the floor.

The second thing to always keep in mind is you don’t want to be outlining. Your goal here isn’t to produce a finished outline — I never have. The only rule of writing is tell your story, and you only need enough outline to accomplish that. Here’s what you need.

It is the fate of comets to dazzle and destroy.

The prelude to even the grandest song is utter silence. In the vast gulfs where even the nearest light is but a small fraction of the panorama, the music of stars and spheres is a dim murmuring. In this black empty quietude, a player composes their next movement.

A comet flies through the void between the stars. She has no stellar light with which to dazzle, and no celestial body to destroy. The comet is alone: no one to shine for (as she melts to gaseous nothing) nor dance with (unto their obliteration).

A girl falls to earth.

It’s a pounce, but her arms close around empty air. Her foe has eluded her again. Moments later, she spots it hiding behind a bush. A spirit resembles a greenskinned child. No face to bear expression, but the jerk of its head still indicates surprise.

“Gotcha!” The girl charges after it, prismatic hair trailing like ribbons behind her. The spirit-child stands about half the height of the girl; there was no way its legs were long enough to keep up with her. But with each footfall against the green-covered earth, it moves swift — as if each blade of green helped convey it.

Civilized bugs in the heartlands farm a number of animals. Most iconically, various beetles like mealworms, cincidelas, and dung beetles. (One could even argue the raiding behavior of early mantid settlements — seizing and eating the loyal roaches of rivals — constituted a kind of indirect farming to avoid the inconvenience of eating the noubugs you lived with.)

note: this is a quick reply to someone on discord, i’ll edit it tomorrow

The crepuscular process is understood as the vespers’ judgment made manifest.

A “crepuscule”, after all, is just a vesperbane whose vespers no longer abide by the pact which binds vesper to bane. There’s four chief ways for this to happen.

vespers arent bugs, and they refuse to make themselves clear to bugs (deliberately so, many think — they’ve been exploited by bugs, and if their workings were clear, they’d be more exploited), but there’s a few categories of thing that get the vespers to raise their hackles

It is the nature of comets to dazzle and destroy. These eldritch spirits from beyond the stars will grind kingdoms to dust with joyful ease. They’re exactly what the knights of noble blood exist to fight, what the daughters of the moon exist to destroy.

Aurora knows she is different, and nobody will say why. It’s enough to make her want to fight someone.

Think about it like this. Say you’re a vesperbane, and your enemy is trying to nudge your thoughts against your best interest, poison your senses and imagination with false images, and so on. All that nasty vandal shit. You, obviously, don’t want this to happen, so how do you manage that? Why not just say fuck it and go with the flow?

A few days ago, the youtuber Big Joel released a video about Godzilla (1954) called “We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot”. What did he mean by this?”

The story of three nymphs with grand dreams caught in grander schemes. A city was destroyed in a single night, and that was only the first step.

Updates intermittently; latest chapter released on 2023-01-31.

“There’s something strange about the direhound,” Quessa replied quietly to the gray nymph.

The atmosphere has changed now, after they’d at last seen and heard a third flare. Gone went the panic of uncertain failure, anxiety at what they would do to help. There is still cause for fear, still things to dread — but they were back to the clarity of mission parameters. The plan marched on.

“Every mantis has fluff on her antennae and spikes on her arms. You don’t know her until you’ve seen both.”

A heartlands mantis has two personas, known classically as their fluff and their spikes. Or, as arthropods with a long history of relations with mantidkind would put it, the mask and the monster.

Traditionally, entomologists characterize mantids as having a hunting mood, focused and liminal, and a dancing mood, social and self-conscious. One finds the behavior of a diamantid in the dancing mood quite familiar — it is, after all, what most interact with, the public-facing persona.

A prefigurement of A Beatific Cage

Author’s Note: A Chimerical Hope is, in a theoretical sense, loosely outlined as part one of a three part series (which I tentatively call The Dream of Tyrants and Traitors). Despite this, I feel the second and third parts — titled A Beatific Cage and A Tenebrous Dawn — will never be written, given the pace at which ‘chimhop’ (isn’t) proceeding. There’s a lot of very interesting plot and worldbuilding that would be introduced in these vaporous installments, and I’m be loath to never show it to the world.

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.

What is an umbracog?

Put simply, an umbracog molds enervate in their brain. Its antumbra reacts with neurotransmitters and itself, augmenting cognition. Every sapient bug in the heartlands is an umbrcog of some development, because nouform cognition is what allows for intelligence.

Given that, why is an umbracog, in the colloquial sense, meant as something strange and rare? Why does every bug not boast their mental gifts, why are they not all masters of the psychic arts?

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. Syndic theory views this failure as an inevitable consequence of its systems; a fault of the fundamental antagonisms between vesperbane and civilians.

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

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

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

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

Ooliri stumbles forward, his sandaled feet dragging over the muddy ground. A green tarsus holds his — Quessa’s foreleg is pulling the gray nymph forward.

He looks around this clearing sprawled outside Wisterun’s walls, eyeing all the ant majors gripping weapons in their mandibles, and at the white- and black-clad ant intently conversing with the One Who Bites Water — and at his teammates, Awelah and Makuja, stalking forward with all the determination of trained soldiers.

The souleye, (sometimes called the fifth eye, the esoteric eye, or even the pineal eye for an analogy to vertebrates), regulates a diamantid’s nous, the seat of higher cognition and sapiance.

From its place recessed inside the brain, it synthesizes, stores and processes the umbraneurotransmitters required for higher cognition. Though poorly understood, its role in catalyzing, selectively distributing, and otherwise modulating nouetic activity hint at a role even more significant than a simple nerve gland or neural liver.

One day, I posted:

Prompting this response:

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.

After the lecture, Myla climbs down from her place among a row of perches. She wades pass a crowd of mantids in silver headbands, the blue light of Ngini’s mix glinting off them as the doors open to a sweltering evening.

In her bag, there’s a flakey book with a cord of mycelia looped around a certain page. She’s memorized the contents, but having a backup never hurts.

In Duskroot or, she imagines, even Solaroch — in any proper stronghold — lanterns would line the streets, casting the pale yellow light of luciflies or the chemical blue rays of of Ngini’s mix. In a town like Wisterun, though? Can they not afford a few banes to put up lights — or is it just that roaches and ants didn’t need it?

Twilight now, distant sunrays still touch the sky, reaching out from below the horizon with red and purple fingers. The streets are empty above Awelah’s eye level — most mantis imagos must have turned in for the evening already. Below her eye level, smaller bugs fill in the flow. Roaches liked the evening time, and ants didn’t mind.

How many bugs could a direhound kill?

Ooliri — Ooliri of all people — was able to knock down one of Unodha’s dogs with his baton. He had his brother’s help, sure, but then it took one stab from Firha to finish the thing. (If his recounting is right, that is, but would Ooliri have embellished killing something?) Awelah shakes her head. So, Unodha’s dogs had to be something a town could defend itself from without needing vesperbanes’ help, right? The danger of direhounds is that they come in packs, anyway. There’s only one left, now.

A dress flutters in the wind, the yellow cloth draped from mesothorax to abdomen, the waves of motion over the fabric momently allowing glimpses of the darker fabric clinging to his legs. A loose fit as seen from how it shifts, two suspender straps run down the prothorax to secure the dress in place. He approaches, stepping out from the arches of the town hall and lifting the hem of his dress as he steps onto the muddy street.

A gunshot. Who died? Has he found me? Does he know?

“One bullet for each traitor. No more, no less. Remember that, child.”

Her forelegs tighten, wrapping around — empty space? Where is she? There is supposed to be a hug here. There is supposed to be comfort now. Where is — I’m alone.

Nouform: Calming Draft! At this point, the signs are habit. She could do it signlessly.

The first impression one has at finally arriving in Wisterun is… disappointment. The few dozen towering mantis homes upthrust from the creekside look like the entirety of a tiny village.

The gates of Wisterun are slabs of smoked conk held together with hard mud. As the slabs close behind them, they start forward onto rock-studded dirt from which weeds arise. The towers are placed with all the logic of trees in an old growth forest — an image completed by the catwalks stretching between them, suggested a parallel canopy of bridge-streets. Below them, the streets weave around, winding, width waxing and waning abruptly.

“It’s all under control,” Yanseno says, his harness lifted off him with a single swipe of his aura-wreathed tarsus. It drops to the smoked conk platform beneath them, forgotten. “I sensed Makuja moving, chi-nrv burn suggestive of active bloodletting. Mending, or her myxokora are out. I signaled Boleheva to tail her.”

“Is she okay?” Ooliri asks. “Why not tell her to help?”

Like the umbral filaments spilling from Tenebra, trail lines extend out from Wisterun, a small point whose influence magnified it. Around the town farmland fans out, starting not far from its walls of mud, stone and wood. The farms are delineated and crossed by those trails. Not roads: they lacked the stiffness and symmetry of the roads a diamantid would put down. No, the reason for these trails is only seen as Ooliri flies closer. Ants, dozens of them swaddled in colorful clothes, along them marched in ranks or, here and there, wandered alone.

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.

A little nymph cries over a great dark lake. Her abdomen heaves with sobs and so much effort as her frail legs push paddles. Her boat is just large enough to contain her. It stutters along with each slow cycle of her paddling. The oars splash water that’s as black as if it had fallen in one of those evil wisp-storms. There is no reflection at all.

Author’s Note: Wasp, Bettle & Snake was a planned Black Nerve novella. I finished one chapter and made substantial progress on the second.

At this point, though, I find I am unlikely to continue work on this project. I had a few interesting ideas and I’m proud of what results, but it was too ambitious for a side project, and overall, I just didn’t not have enough outstanding long-term plans or this project or confidence in it.

Surely the rules of writing are much more complicated? No, I think I could give them in a sentence. Writing — all writing, really, not just fiction — is on setup and payoff, question and answer, tension and release. The rest is corollary.

One moment, a black and white form rises in the ants’ shelter, shaking, something falling away as it turns.

The next moment, it is close enough to see the veins in its eyes, the flaring of its nostrils. Black and white fur colors it in sharp contrast. The knuckles of its forelegs pound into the ground with each step, and the legs are as tall as the nymphs are.

If you’re reading this essay, you’ve heard it. It’s the first piece of advice anyone in the market for writing advice hears. But don’t tell me to “show don’t tell”, show me.

Why does it work? Because it sounds better? Because it deeply engages the reader? Because it’s what Good Writing is? Sure, but why?

There are seven reasons.

Water flows downhill, so on past the gorge’s crest, the land declines. Sharply, too. The creekwater rushes through rapids, and the three nymphs interlock arms to safely descend, half-falling, half-stumbling from plant to plant, hanging onto trunks or stems. In the process, they uproot one fern. On this side of the hill, more metataxites creep up, even with the angle. (Perhaps the great lichens were eeking out where the trees had more trouble.)

Occlusion. Safety is occluded by tension, by the sudden absence. Certainty is occluded by questions, doubts, the most dependable part of their morning ripped away. Clear thinking is occluded by the vestigial fingers of poor sleep pressing against their mind.

For Awelah, though, those fingers slip away as a thrill of urgency and motivation comes, a problem to solve, a new hunt beginning.

“Enervate absorbs. Energy, matter, even itself. It absorbs heat, force, sound, and it doesn’t reflect them back like matter does. It’s like if you poured water onto a towel — some of the water is absorbed, but some is always dripping back out. That’s matter. Enervate is more like if you had a tight bowl, you pour water in and it stays there, it doesn’t leak out.”

Heat from their fire and shelter from the old tree had kept it from them, but after days now of unbroken sunless overcast, a chill is rising in the land, while drizzle and damp air is falling. As Awelah departs into the woods, she wonders if the fog is gathered thickly enough for her spear to stab through it.

Proximity to the creek couldn’t have helped, when it comes to how bad the fog got. As she walks Awelah hears it rush over rocks and slam into mud. The waters are dark, and it isn’t just shadows. The creekwater isn’t safe to drink, not so soon after a wispfall. A wispfall in the mountains behind them, where all this water is runoff from? Still, enervate is sensitive to temperature — it didn’t get hot, not in the way matter does, but it nonetheless didn’t stick around after boiling.

I’m not going to say much here that’s new, but the framing might be. I want to talk a bit about detail in stories. Why do stories need detail? What purpose do they serve, and when is that detail unnecessary?

You can say stories are arguments, logical explanations of a series of events. You have a premise (a land of dragons and wizards ruled by a evil king, awaiting a chosen one), which poses some interesting question (how do they depose of the evil king?), and the stories exists to explain the answer to that question.

Once all of that was over, they could resume what was interrupted: Awelah passing Makuja the bit of rope she asked for. She needed some bits of baneleather too. Then, as they continued their journey vaguely parallel to the now-out-of-sight creek, Makuja fiddled with the rope and tough fungal patches.

Ooliri watches with clear interest, but he’s not the one to ask — perhaps on pain of hypocrisy for keeping his own project a secret.

That night, they slept without the security of the cave they’d grown accustomed to. It was in a field near a hill, and all the security they had was boulders and a few trees. (Trees, not metataxites.) For Awelah, she slept here and remembered her second night after the wispfall, sleeping in bedrolls just hours before occupied by now-dead pawns. She remembers killing them. She doesn’t sleep well, but you never sleep well the first night in a new location. Still, the memories don’t help.

The spear is quickly unfolding in Awelah’s forelegs. “Alright. Let’s kill it.”

Ooliri is glancing at the frond, the evidence for Makuja’s claim of someone’s presence. “It’s not the hound, is it? It wouldn’t have hands to grasp with.”

“If it’s a mantis, we can trade supplies or information.”

“Or get the drop on them,” Awelah says, “if they’re like you were.” There was a pause before she added the ‘were’.

With closure on the battle, and nothing but uncertain danger urging them on toward an uncertain goal, a certain lethargy grows in the nymphs. They sleep like corpses, and awake at midday, ravenously hungry. Meal after meal, their bodies never seem to regain strength, their stomachs fill like pits too deep to see the bottom of, and the soft parts of their cuticle hold a feverish heat as if coals burn within them. It gets worse, and days pass like this. Sometimes one of the nymphs doesn’t awake for most of a day, leaving the others to care for them.

Premonitions of a storm haunt the three nymphs lost in northern Windhold. The sun, which had abandoned them after their defeat of Unodha, returns now fleetingly. Clouds amass from the horizon to the dome of the sky, and rays of light shine fadingly through till the east is but a blurred region of rosy light.

Even that is muffled further by thin banks of fog, but the warming air gradually banishes them to mere humidity. By the time Awelah awakes, it is only vaguely misty and visibility is fair.

Secluded in a backwater realm, the dragon orphan Malthec la Kaon is raised in ignorance and drudgery. He bears the stain of a name with unspoken history, his atrementous scales and sanguine wings the only hint of a heritage his ostensible guardians do not speak. Dragons are meant to be mighty and free, yet he toils in an unprecedented school for dragons, under the guiding wings of Devain, Whose Breath is Knowledge.

“Ah, but who else could I be? It is I, Devain. I believe you walked past me by mistake? It is dark in here, you must have missed me. But you’re better at seeing in the dark than most, aren’t you?”

Kaon kept looking, then caught the glimmer in the shadows under one outjutting piece of rock. Devain was a dragon of gleaming silver scales and, despite his age, of slender build. Admittly something Kaon might miss in the dark, lost in his thoughts. It was hard to make out the elder derg’s expression, but he could make out the familiar pointed snout and horns that swept back to give his profile a diamond shape.

For one moment, Kaon gaped like an idiot. Then he closed his surprised mouth, and frowned. Vessia! Here, now, somehow — what to say? What was the coolest thing he could say?

“Not just minor telekinesis, then,” he said. “Your Breath, I mean. That is how you appeared here?”

Rather than answer, she said, “Hand me that.”

Kaon gave her the book she had pointed at — Numiel’s Gates. She opened her mouth, and a purple glow condensed as a sphere in her maw. Part of it flew out to strike and engulf the book. The sphere remained, smaller now. Then she turned, eyes landing on the other book on her bed. Now the entire sphere flew, engulfing the second book.

Everyone was dead.

Oocid. Madam Rutabrood. Mita. Yugen. Fihra.

And Awelah. Unless…

Ooliri had climbed up the ridge. With Makuja’s seeming betrayal, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the pale nymph lying there, bleeding out.

Her cloak was gone.

A filament of enervation extends down to her body, trailing from the wisp-masses high above. It makes him quirk an antennae.

Makuja is a good tool. She does what has to be done. When it requires violence, yes, but also when it requires patience.

That’s what sets her apart, she thinks. She isn’t just loyal. She’s clever.

Unodha’s other pawns are dead, and she lives. Why? Because she had a plan. She didn’t just join the others in marching like ants to their deaths.

She found refugees. Instead of killing them, she gained their trust, traveled with them. They would lead her to others. And when a great many refugees had banded together, there would have been a slaughter, and her master would have been proud of her plan.

The nymphs are blown back by the blastwave of the explosion. The beach becomes but ash and smoke.

“We need to run,” Oocid says.

The other nymphs are struggling to stand, recovering from the trauma of the blast.

Minutes later, they’re climbing up the slope they came down, but spare a glance behind them. The smoke and flames are clearing.

There’s two immediately conflicting facts.

Gaze upon mangled roach corpses. They’re familiar: the faint reds and greens, the mother’s face that once regarded Awelah sadly, now ripped away.

“You said the hounds were bane’s work, Oocid?” Fihra’s saying. “No fucking kidding. More and more of them, and they just keep getting closer. Feels like we’re being hunted, doesn’t it?”

“Get used to it,” Awelah scrapes. “Thought you noble Windborne banes were going to protect me?”

Upon a sheer hill, dark filaments rise up to the heavens. You can see for kilometers in the distance. There’s a far away lake or large pond, and near the horizon, there’s a hint of farmland.

Atop this cliff, the pawns — Ooliri and two others — sit in meditation. Oocid guides them, while the mentor stands off, regarding Awelah.

“I watched you fight Fihra,” she says. “You’re trained. You were going to be a vesperbane, yes?”

Ooliri had never been on a C-rank mission before.

Every mission that took banes — and it had to have banes — outside of the safety of the stronghold walls was a C-rank at least. Even if combat or politics wasn’t mentioned in the brief.

Ooliri is staring down the reason why.

The direhound roars, crouching, and then it leaps for his vulnerable neck. The pawn is freezing up.

Smaller, with big eyes and features defined by round shapes, the nymph looks up to her like the younger sibling to their elder. The refugee wears a look of calcined despair, of having lost everything yet gripping to one hope and determination. The nymph bears a look of emptiness, of having lost everything, of falling with nothing to hold on to — like they look at her from down within an ever-deepening pit. Somehow, her white eyes don’t look bright.

She loathed that vesperbanes wore masks.

It was probably a fiend. Maybe a wretch, but they felt powerful enough – in that dreadful, getawaygetawaygetaway sense trained vesperbanes inspired — to be a fiend. Or was it arrogance to think Wentalel would staff a fiend for something this routine, for pawns this undistinguished? She would have looked closer, but she didn’t want to be near them.

Most vesperbanes have an affinity for one of the four earthly elements. Wrapped up in that word ‘affinity’ is a complex, poorly understood phenomena, a consequence both of a soul’s enervate composition and the physiology of their umbral system, as well as subtle thing like diet or health. There is a long-lasting nature vs nurture debate on the matter of affinity; while most vesperbanes seem to have an innate affinity, it has in some cases mutated with training — but is that a true change, or the revelation of what was always there, or incipient, like a nymph turning imago?

Three nights have passed and no dawn has risen to break them. A torrent of black wisps is falling from the sky, the dirt eroding with each silent impact. The wisps stick to everything. A malevolent mist chokes the air, and above, strange flashes illuminate the sky, like rifts to unseen heavens.

In these brief flashes, the light hints at a skeletal land of crags and gorges. A lone figure stumbles through the dark on four legs. Wisps slide off her heavy cloak. Atop a distant mountain behind her, scant light silhouettes the ruins.

In the late chaos era, expansion of the ten thousand kingdoms of batkind and their practice of magically enthralling mantids had diven the ancestors of the welkinmarked into hiding. They barricaded themselves in a tiny pocket of land sheltered by the Welkin Peaks. These lands, now forgotten, are thought to be near what is now border between the Black Taiga and the Land of Mountains.

It didn’t take long to fall, so Kaon shouldn’t have been surprised that it was seconds before Oap called out.

It worked, in a way. Initially, he had considered a plan of running in, leaving his cast-off behind as some sort of delayed payload, some kind of trap. Two problems shot that down. One, Kaon had range limits, and he lost fine control the farther away his cast-off got. Two, Kaon thought he needed his cast off for what he would do next.

Inhale.

Open your meridians.

And Breathe.

With a few weeks of training, even a dragonet can discharge pure mana.

The mentors repeat it often: mana must be channeled. But why? What happens if you simply produced raw, unchanneled mana?

One quickly observes that its own, pure mana does nothing. It sparkles a little, it glows, and then it is gone. A cheap lightshow.

It hurt.

Before his eyes opened, before he could even register the feel of dusty air or softness beneath his scales, he felt the pain.

Abstractly, simply by location, it was familiar. Hundreds of hours of his life had poured into training, long past when other dragons would have given up; he knew the pain of a sore soul.

He did not know the pain of a burnt soul.

Kaon had long dwelled on the encounter with Vessia. Knowing things the mentors didn’t (or didn’t reveal), hiding her third level status — and that baffling alloy of respect she regarded Kaon with, marred by the sudden betrayal.

For all his rumination, Kaon did not understand Vessia (and who did?), but Haore’s suggestion — that she would fight a thief (maybe), but then nobly sacrifice herself (really?) — all to save Nesle’s mirror? He’d stake a lot on his certainty that that was not what had happened. So the next step was to see what had. And so far, Kaon knew only one place to look.

Vessia leaned against squat stones, and honed her black claws. Blue paint covered the tops of those rocks, and clutched in her hindpaws, a blue gem glimmered in the light. The light, reflected and filtered through this gem, fell upon her violet scales, and granted them new definition.

She leaned against the rocks, while so many of the other dragons flew about, or tactically darted across lower platforms. Every flier clutched similar gemstones, some red, some green.

This pages collects shortform answers given to various questions about the heartlands. Largely from my discord: https://discord.gg/tqHjHK7

You can also email me questions to consider serpentsquiggle@proton.me.

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.

“Dig through the girl’s bags. The sedative she used should be in there.” Maune speaks with the quick, definite strides of command.

You look up. Ommatidia darken as focus returns to your surroundings, and you cock your head at the blue imago.

“I can see all the hesitation on your face. Only one thing you’d pick if you’re dithering this long, right?” Maune points behind her, to where, past the ferns, the woods stand. She does this with those blood-red tentacles she hasn’t put away. “It won’t be a short walk back to the vale, and I don’t think I’ll take her waking up, whining and struggling.”

“Aww, thank you, bees.” You pluck the blade from the fuzzy bugs. With the release of the burden their sagging legs spring up. Watching the rise and fall of their abdomens, you can imagine the relief.

It’s not a big weapon. The grip is just large enough to wrap the three dactyls of one foreleg around, and the blade is perhaps five times that length?

This post is four years old; the canonical list resembles this, but consider everything here subject to substantial revision.

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.

“Well? What are you going to tell her? I imagine she won’t be up there for long.”

You glance up at the dark curtains of your parent’s platform. Shafts of sunlight rain on it from the windows, and dust floats in the light like sparse snow.

“Yikki has to stay here. I don’t want her to have to leave.”

“I agree,” Shimare says. She isn’t standing. Her tarsi grip the handles of a perch, her small abdomen resting on a cushion. She doesn’t look relaxed, though, eyes regarding you intensely. “She’s like the rest of your agemates, right? Adores vesperbanes, defers to them?”

You do not go unnoticed. If you’re close enough to see the crowd in the schoolyard, it means, even fascinated by the vesperbanes, everyone can see you approaching without turning their heads. Still, some do. Remna glances over and smiles, a boy with long antennae regards you with a pinched, confused expression, and a fifth instar girl with white and green chitin glances over for one moment. Her antennae curl up and palps curve downward like fangs. It’s one moment, then she looks away – throughout, you don’t meet her eyes.

Note: This section is likely outdated. Pending further review, I don’t think anything written herein is grossly inaccurate, but some terminology has been superseded.

Contrast with The Fourfold Divisions of Vesperbanes.

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.

“You understand how bad this looks for you, yes?”

The speaker sat on a high stone rest, forelegs standing tall, her gaze raining down on them. Haore had more horns than some drakes. A fourth level dragoness, she was almost built like a drake, thickset and strong. With scales the color of northern seawater and horns more brilliant than ice, she had the look of a glacier and its depths. She didn’t look pleased.

Kaon walked into the lair ready to fight. He surveyed the arena.

High rank pupils had big lairs, he knew, but he didn’t know. The room was vaguely diamond-shaped, door opening at one corner and three beds at each of the others. There was a wide hole (too short to climb into) that yawned on the far left wall and through it came a shaft of pseudosunlight, already bright enough where it landed and reflected that it overwhelmed the meager light of the glass bulbs.

The black dragon Kaon lay basking atop the highest stone pillar in the training yard. From here he could survey the whole field if he gazed from the edge. But when he lay in its center as he did now, none could see him and climb up to bother.

That was how it was supposed to work. That was how it had worked for the past month. But Kaon could hear the claws grasping for footholds midway up the pillars. Whoever it was must have thought that was stealthy in a way the taut flapping of wings wasn’t. Kaon chuffed out a single mirthful breath.

Consider this standalone worldbuilding. Some of the terminology here suggests a connection to Black Nerve, and while that was the original intention, as you’ll see, it quickly burgeoned beyond something that could fit inside the deep recesses of that setting and still “add up to normality.” At least not without sacrifices I’m disinclined to make.

When you next awake, you half-expect to have been nymph-napped to some dank attic, or be chained up in a villain’s basement. But you’re still wrapped in the softness of your blanket. Strange dreams, of heroes and candles and spiders, linger with you.

When there’s a tap on your thorax, you startle fast, swinging out a raptorial to smack against your assailant.

“Marka? Wake up.”

She isn’t asleep. She is laying down, letting her legs relax, mind wandering free after so many actions, so many decisions. Objectively, official missions from the wardens had taxed her more — but she hadn’t come to Wentalel for a mission, and she deserves this moment of rest.

She expresses this all with a dignified, “Huhmphf.”

Since she embarked on this mission, Marka had been ready for violence and danger. The longer it goes on — wearing away at her with its endless walking and hard choices — the more she accepts she’ll come out the end of it exhausted to the point of dreamless sleep. And when Wik proposed to sneak through the sewers, she did expect it to be gross. But in all of her anticipation, it’s none of these that really tempt her to call it all off.

When the conversation has stalled and Marka has the space to think, she realizes what’s left is not actually silence. There are sounds Marka hasn’t heard outside of a music hall — resonating plates and thrumming strings, energetic drumming. The timbre is off, like those in charge of the hall’s acoustics had failed utterly.

The blackbane is turning her head around, searching the room for an explanation. It’s out of the way, nestled in one corner: a device that exposes a two-roll scroll (or what loooks like one), only with lines instead of text, and a needle running across those lines. Or one long line, rather, which snakes back and forth.

Marka clicks her timepiece closed. The sun is reflecting sharply on the metal as it lowers, and the motion of closing carves a harsh line of afterimage across her vision.

When she glances up, Wik is walking away, lingering smoke leaving a trail like a wake. The tallowbane looks back, waving a raptorial. “Come. There’s no reason to stay on the roof.”

“Excuse me, sirrah?” Marka is calling out as she trots into the crowd.

Marka’s route had taken her to a minor vantage point over the market, and to enter it proper, she descends a ramp. At a glance, the crowd is splitting around her, and she ups her pace.

The Snurratre mantis does not react to her calling, and she repeats it once and the distance closes and there is still no response.

In Wentalel, Marka stares into her watery reflection on the surface of the park’s pond. The black nerve that writhes across the blue sky frames her face. Or frames those garments that truly frame her face: the antenna-band bearing heraldic insignias above, the horns guarding her antennae’s base, and the antiquated shadowsteel helmet that she wears, visors up.

There was a day the suns may have forgotten to shine; or that was the hope, You’d think. Vor Karamung had always had godspat eyesight, so he’d been counting the days till this or its like happened. Having once gotten a tongue-reading saying contrary, and knowing seers couldn’t be trusted, Karamung plotted out the day his eyesight, the seer had promised, would return — and expected the just opposite. (That day had long since passed; seers couldn’t be trusted.)

You are a heartlands mantis nymph training to become a Vesperbane, a warrior-scholar granted magic. One day you hear a mantis scream from the depths of ambrosia woods, and mantes don’t live in the ambrosia.

Iecka feels an itch under her mask. Right in the middle of her labrum, where her maxillary palps can’t quite reach. She sighs, and lifts a dactyl — a thick one at the end of her raptorial foreleg — and slips it beneath the silk to scratch. It breaks protocol, yes — but she looks down at her patient, and she dares the unconscious, practically rotting form to report her. If he could, he would, she was sure; Iecka recalls the disgust on his withdrawn palps when he had first seen her yellow and black chitin.

“I can’t say yes,” you tell her. But you can’t deny you feel a secret shiver at the prospect of actually learning something, anything — not that you could ever, ever, tell any living being that, not even a roach. Illegally becoming a vesperbane? Tutored by arenegade?Even if no one would ever figure it out…

Maune makes some low cluck of amusement. “Of course, kid. Saying yes right now would be the act of a damn fool, one I know Tlista wouldn’t raise — and one I certainly wouldn’t teach. I was expecting you to say you’ll consider it and sleep on it,” she says, rising to a stand. “You should know, I have my ways into the village. Seen that small little valley, hidden behind the copse of thick ferns? I’ll wait there, every night for… let’s say five nights. Come there when you decide you want me to teach you. And if you’re too scared, well, leave a note saying as much. If you’re feeling merciful.”

I don’t quite recall the impetus behind this post — this may have been fluff for the Black Nerve RPG? It’s old stuff, but consider this a lot at some philosophies and worldviews in the heartlands.

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.

Note: This is a mirror of an old exposition on enervate, ripped from the Black Nerve Omnibus and posted for ease of referencing. It’s not necessarily up to date; don’t treat it as strictly canon.

See also: The New Theory of Umbral Physics.

The sky is a dark ocean of fractal whorls, writhing tendrils, and black turbulence. Where there once were volcanoes, spires of iron and copper stab free of the ground and reach for heaven. In place of one moon, there is a dark orb emitting corrupt energy.

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).

Note: This is some of the oldest worldbuilding in black nerve, and as you can imagine, substantial information established here has been revised and contradicted in other sources. Consider this of principly historical interest.

Note that more polished and canonical articles covering similar subjects have been written:

Declassifier’s note: a distinction is to be drawn between interdicts and [exclusions].underline, 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.

I discuss several models for assigning probability to timelines under the assumption that time travel is possible, but paradoxes are absolutely impossible, as is the case in many fictional worlds. The models are mathematically precise, and illuminate issues that have previously confused many people about what sort of timelines are “most likely”.

“This is a test,” you say to your mother, your antennae twisting and untwisting nervously.

She arches an antennae. A pause, and then, “Why do you think that?”

“Because…” You consider the intent way she has her raptorials held, the determination she reeks of. Would she be asking you this if she didn’t want to do something already? “You said you’re testing my judgment as a vesperbane. Well, you’re testing it against something, right? Seeing if I live up to standards the stewartry would hold me up to?” And if this was a test, the correct response couldn’t be pointing that out. Had you already lost?

The young vesperbanes watch the unconscious defector, mandibles prominent and sharp. You glance back at Maune and bite your maxillary palp.

Still sitting on your mother’s back, you grip her thorax, dactyls squeezing against her chitin. You might’ve made a nervous squeak but you aren’t sure if anyone hears. Spiracles twitching, you wonder if you have it in you speak right now, and say what you mean to say. To berate the vesperbanes for their callousness, to demand that they spare Maune, to tell your mother to say the right words and fix it all, make things simple and pleasant again.

Your mother stands between you and the ambrosia woods. She waits for you to spin cerci and leave, so she can brave whatever adventure still waits in the woods, alone.

“No.” You could do as she asks — or seem to, and sneak out and creep back into the woods. But why should you have to slink around, when you ought to be deemed ready to become a vesperbane any month now?

“Tophem,” you try, holding your maxillary palps still to not give away the lie.

You can’t tell if the reply is a cough or a laugh. “Like that children’s story character? Are you fucking with me? If so, don’t.”

“Fine, fine. My name is…” You consider giving another fake name, Tikka maybe, but if she lives, she might find out. “I’m Eifre.”

Hemolymph. You’re stilled, staring at the wounded lady as she reaches out with a middle leg, patting the bird and scratching its head. The motion slides open her robe, and you’re able to see her thorax and under abdomen. It — the flesh — is sliced open in multiple places. No, sliced is the wrong word. Bored open? Gouged? There seems to be holes melted into her, and she gushes out through them.

What?It’s not a visceral surprise, the way the scream was, or the mysterious sounds from the woods were. It’s a more cerebral shock, which takes a moment for your mind to realize.

The instinct is to clench tighter with your raptorials, in a grip that would certainly crush the avian. But you easily wrestle down the urge, and release the bird.

It’s just — you have no idea what’s going on. You err with caution.

You dodge into the underbrush between the trees, hoping you blend in well enough. Your reddish yellow chitin isn’t the darkest chamoflage, but at least it isn’t the bright pastels of some. You are careful to choose a hiding spot with a quick path of escape, just in case it’s something you can’t handle. Earlier you saw the hint of motion in the shadows, and you look further along the path where a… small hopping form comes into view. It’s dark blue, almost black, and moves on two stalks — legs. As it continues along the path, you make out the beak, and decide the blue is feathers — a bird, nearly as tall as your mesothorax! The beak opens and it calls again.

You twitch an antennae, a small part of you almost feeling almost… annoyed. You’d chosen this rock specifically to get away from loud obnoxious mantids screaming at you. But before this distracts you any further, you stop, and you breathe, and you release the unnecessary feeling, letting it flow away and out of you. You always had excellent composure.

You are a mantis nymph of Shatalek, a dinky farming village so tiny you need to squint to find it on a map — but it’s all you’ve ever known.

Currently, you’re in pre-vesper training, studying in hopes of one day becoming a mighty vesperbane to slay fell beasts and uphold the Kindling Dream. But for that, you’ll need countenance from the Pharmacium of Wentalel. The mentors say it’s simply a matter of when, and of course it is; you’re the brightest mind among all of your classmates. If anyone is getting sponsored out of these duldrums, it will be you.

This is an an review of Creep, written when Chapter 11 was the latest available.

There are perils of reviewing web fiction very early in its lifetime. Creep has twelve chapters and not terribly much more than twenty thounsand words to its name. In the web serial world, that’s scarcely anything at all.

But, particularly given the tame length of the author’s other serials, it’s enough to get a feel for what Creep will and won’t offer, if not enough to be precise about it.

// NTS: replace these with more recent drafts

// and explain what the hell this is

May thy mercy be painless and true.

We confess our claws sway even as we scratch this letter. Scores of dead loyalists behind us, long hours lost waiting in barest stealth risking fatal discovery, an escape won despite incurring the eyeless regard of a vesperbat… and yet writing our report at day’s end is what makes cowards of us.

“Tell me what you did,” she said. That damn bird and the squalled contraption were still making noise, but they had the sense to get quiet around the words.

Mawla looked at the robed doctor. “Nah.” At that, she watched the doctor flick a tongue, and then stare like one of them was stupid. A moment, and the sifter kept talking, “Doesn’t matter,” said she. “Ain’t your job to care.”

“Begone, skyrat,” the forest-dweller said. “You are not welcome here.”

Arall was behind us, already walking out of the room, her toes releasing a door handle. She was muttering, “I keep telling her that, and she’s still here.” When released, that stone door paused, about to shut us inside, like a trap soon to snap closed.

At least I wouldn’t be trapped here alone; besides that forest-dweller⁠ ⁠—⁠ “her unholiness”⁠ ⁠—⁠ who right now was raining her ire down on me, there was Mawla, slinking around, half unseen.

It never stops raining in Gray Haven. After defecting from their old gang, an orphan keeps keeps their head down in the muck and scrapes by through hook and crook. But their next score brings far too much heat and far too many eyes — but at least they have a hostage.

By Tenebrous Knight

I am called the Chronicler, and I have no name; or rather, I cannot have a name. I have had several, and the curse of the Chronicler is that none have the pleasure of sticking; rather, they dissolve, just as I did so many years prior, just as you shall too, when your body returns to the earth and your mind returns to the zeitgeist, just as we all must, for the sake of balance, for the sake of the cycle, for us.

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” said the one beneath the black cloak. The fabric was nightworm silk, fine, glossy, and blacker than the darkling night outside. From the slits in the stone walls you heard the wind mutter, and it was louder than the murmurs inside the room.

Stabs of moonlight came in from those slits, cutting soft patches out from the shadows. Even still, the black cloak was in utter shadow, but not the six others to whom he spoke.

Beneath a never-setting sun, jellyfish live in worshipful subservice to the feathered gods that created them.

But Ruwene has nothing to live for. So he takes the first order given, swearing to kill the high priestess of the sun god, lord of the pantheon. His story won’t have a happy conclusion — but better to have a conclusion.

He watched the great-clawed shrimp as it dug through the glittering dirt, eating grasses from the roots up. A dark, slender form was stalking up from behind, and the shrimp continued to eat, slow, almost unaware of the fanged danger lurking behind.

Then the tiny sand kitten leapt asudden, claws out to utterly gore the shrimp.

It simply dodged.

The shrimp moved quicker then you might expect, leaping right into the face of the kitten, raking it deep with claws, drawing lines of blood. Yowling, the cat died.

[describe how Oeara’s pane are formed]

“There’s no reasoning with you anymore, is there?” The red guard spoke almost quietly, I just heard him. I stared at him with idle rhopalia. I didn’t spare the air to respond; my mind was wrangling itself around this problem, feeling out it’s angles and holes, chewing on it. I assuredly didn’t have long; couldn’t rely on my obstacles making the same mistakes again and again.

The lesser canyon reef — any reef, really — was perfect for getting yourself lost in. Groves and copses of coral grew in knotted bunches, curled around each other, reaching, spreading, and turning it all into one excellent maze. It was trimmed and managed for medusa to go through, but the highest priority was ease and quickness of motion, and keeping every last spot shaded.

I had to be outside the prison quickly. There were still guards about, and they’d noticed my lack of [uniform]. They’d noticed my bandages, and wonder. They’d notice — other things about me. Something off, that the doctor was reacting to.

Had to get out quick. But there was something more important than that. Something I couldn’t keep going without. Not without sacrificing something invaluable.

You remember the slow days, root out in the wild bogs, when there was nothing to do, and you reached for the spiders and scorpions and scuttler bugs, and, for no reason at all (or for dark reasons), you decided to pull off, one by one, the legs of the creatures?

Same principle.

The pit was deep, but not too deep. Crouching with my stalk, I could leap up high enough to see the opening to another pit across from mine. Still, I couldn’t reach the ledge even throwing out a grasping tentacle. It was just too high.

There had been a sort of general store in the greater bog reef, when I lived there. It was a run down business in the expendable part of town, the district that seemed to be nibbled at by sinkholes eclipse after eclipse.

You knew it wasn’t doing well — it let ephyra bounce around inside. I hadn’t thought much of it, back then. Instead I simply luxuriated in having another building to play around in. I didn’t see the guards who watched my every move; i wasn’t tall enough yet.

A beginner’s tool is always chipped and scratched before they truly learn how to use it, how to be properly careful. If they utterly lack latent, the tool will break first. But chances are, they simply come very close.

I came close to breaking as a ephyra. After meeting Friy, after growing bored with the field of horrors, when we took it upon ourselves to explore every last twist and loop of the greater bog reef.

First order of business was distracting the red guard. I looked at him, at the swell which always seemed to be in his bell, and I decided I didn’t want him to harmed, not truly.

We marched onward toward the lesser canyon reef. Canyon country was a land scratched east to west with canyons. You could look at the horizons and see clear to where the mesas rose up in the north, or the forests grew thick in the south. The ocean was to the west, but I forgot what was between us and that.

I think that, if I had been nicer, the god — bird — vessel — thing would have given me a skyward lift. But… they were long gone now. (But not forever, if they are to be believed.)

So instead I just climbed the canyon. Not a very medusa way of getting up. Tentacles were for many things — but for climbing, it’d be easier to dig holes with a sword. Regardless, I managed. Living with levitation as lousy as mine — I had the muscles for it.

A forest creature, something with a fluffy covering and hard mouthparts and stalkless eyes and two thin, stiff stalks below it. What was the word? Avian?

But they were small things, kin of the laughing ravens. Nuisances that clawed through trashbags and pooped. Not mighty presences looming taller than me, whose mouthparts curved to a point sharper than spears. Who stood and scratched themselves on clawed foots like many knives.

At the eleventh eclipse, on last day of eternal summer, I decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt.

For this act, there were reasons and justifications — of that I was assured. But, I was told, I stood not to the task of understanding. Nothing unusual for me — it was to be expected, if anything.

A sharp, final sound cut through my thoughts, flinching me, and what followed were fading noises which could, blasphemously, be called scurrying. The communion was over, that was what it meant. The god of death had departed.

“C’mon, Kinri. Let’s go.” She meant to the Dadafodd; she’d said that’s where we’d find the drake. “C’mon. My leg is getting done with me standing on it.”

“Sit down, then.”

“I’m not going to sit down, I⁠ ⁠—⁠ we need to get to Dadafodd so I can get my shit bandaged up.”

“If you sit down, maybe your leg will feel a bit better when you start walking aga⁠ ⁠—”

Sometimes the stars visited in fire and rock and for a night we fluttered a little nearer to heaven.

Down here, while you rested belly-down on some harsh slab, the stars could almost be painted on a shell, and whatever numinous world they limned could well be an existence apart. Most times it was.

Dusk dwindled away, and the stars were settling down. I thought they’d be as bright and beautiful as ever. Below them, though, as some dark blue dot on some crumbly butte in some forgotten spate of cliffs in the vasty night, I stared up and couldn’t keep the dew from my fangs. Couldn’t not wonder just how we connected to this infinite sky under which two dragons could die, without it even flinching.

Death was breathing quietly in the dark.

The feeling hadn’t left Adwyn since that cursed iron gate came close behind him. From everywhere and in everything⁠ ⁠—⁠ sight, sound, smell⁠ ⁠—⁠ there was a certain malignity, and it settled into his scales. He would molt next cycle, he knew; and it wasn’t soon enough.

Adwyn drew a calming breath and spat out spicy venom. After an inhale the dew came back, and he let it; his soul needed it.

Adwyn knew it was mistaken, but sense was sense.

The schizon-clad drake lighted down on the granite hall like the pupil of Gwymr/Frina. One glance was spared to the male assistant barring the door. Then the adviser scanned the four guards watching.

He smirked, and strode right up to the assistant. “I must speak with Mlaen.” The words came piercing like light, and his studied glare shone upon the assistant.

The drake felt death breathing down his neck. He laughed.

“I cannot imagine killing me will end well for you⁠ ⁠—⁠ or accomplish your goals, for that matter,” he said, peering down at nothing. He smelt the holly.

“One day I’ll find the will, you know.”

“What has it been? Ten, fifteen gyras?” He fluttered his tongue. “I don’t glimpse you doing this out of any lingering hate.”

Clouds drew in asudden and hid the suns, bearing down on the world. The ninth long ring came to a close like it was seeking us out in the cliffs, faintly.

Out here little skinks slithered along the cliff faces, hunting the last glider-scorpions and tentacle-snails before the gray season in full fell. The calls of the ax-crested pterosaurs filled the air, sounding reedy and warbly. I saw one swoop down all asudden and fly off with a dust turtle I hadn’t even seen, hiding behind a low fern.

When the eighth long ring chimed, it didn’t stop on the sixth note. The timbre turned from the bells of the highest carillon to the raw or piercing double trumpets you only heard in the cliffs⁠ ⁠—⁠ because of course the cliffs lacked the restraint and poise of sky music. And yet, the sound closed in like a coming doom.

The trumpets remembered the carillon’s melody inf repetition, and they melted, culleted and reglazed it in the logic of the Frinan anthem: Mlaen’s anthem, the one she’d commisioned only days after taking the throne. It shone out, because you always heard Dwylla’s anthem blaring at Dim-Fflamio games or being played out of key somewhere in the Moyo-Makao. Above, the doom drew closer.

“I can’t imagine killing me would end well for you⁠ ⁠—⁠ or accomplish your goals, for that matter,” Adwyn said, peering down at me with a look of patience and recognition⁠ ⁠—⁠ as if he’d had this conversation before.

In front of me the orange drake flicked his tongue. I had to look up to meet eye with him, and I broke it just as quick. “Granted you even had it in you to do it⁠ ⁠—⁠ and you don’t⁠ ⁠—⁠ you wouldn’t survive my assassination. And if those two conditions didn’t hold, I⁠ ⁠—⁠ personally⁠ ⁠—⁠ wouldn’t recommend this. And not simply because my life is in question, either.” He paused. “Can you tell me why? What purpose could it serve?”

Truly original worlds aren’t rare, but when there’s one which commands the attention like that of Pyrebound’s, it’s worth noting. This is a universe with two seperate worlds and two seperate suns, and on every fourth days the worlds trade places, and the wrong sun rises in the sky. Humans live on only one world, and the light of the wrong sun is deadly to them.

As the knife plummeted, my hope fell with it. I hung there on the net for a few beats and then Adwyn arrived.

He didn’t glance at me; he unsheathed a short blade. In a half-dozen quick, precise swipes, he slashed at the netting. But instead of trying to cut all the way through like me, he resheathed the sword, gripped netting and pulled.

It came right apart, and Adwyn had flown through before my eyes unclouded. I flapped after him, frills folded, tail coiled.

“The bodies are gone?” I said with a snap of my tongue. “Where did they go?”

Adwyn was still prodding the tarp in front of us, and still speaking, thinking aloud, “These are sandbags, decoys.”

The orange drake, face hidden behind a dust mask, turned from the cart. When he did, every careless scale had been shed. This Adwyn, I could imagine, was the last thing Raganari had seen before her end. “We have been robbed,” he said.

“The bodies need to be guarded,” the pink-scaled guard was saying to Adwyn, “don’t they? You’re plenty big and strong sure, but I can watch your back.”

Didn’t they hear me? “Who are you?” I asked again, a bit higher. I stood somewhere behind Adwyn, beside Digrif, but I knew they could hear me.

The short, mouse-like dragon at last glanced over, frowned, and tossed me a, “Ceian,” before turning back to the schizon-clad adviser.

“Hi? Who are you?” I asked the immaculately-dressed plain-dweller.

He clicked his tongue once before replying, giving me a disarming smile, “Oh, me? I’m nobody. I might have dropped by the Llygaid Crwydro twice or so, but I am in Gwymr oh so scarcely. No, you wouldn’t remember me. And I don’t remember you. How odd.”

This plain-dweller had stood listlessly in front of the library, looking all around, and checking a pocket ringglass. Over their breast and forelegs a silky red robes with twisting green filaments flowed. On the breast of the robes lay some embroidered pickaxes and a pile of ash. Even for a library patron, they looked well-dressed.

If my review of Fuji were one word, it might be “straightford” or “eager”. No one likes to have their writing called “simple”, but one of the first things you notice about Fuji is that is doesn’t easily get bogged down or distracted. It knows what it wants to convey, and it gets right to it.

This isn’t necessarily a good thing, or a bad thing. Fuji seems to value the destination over the journey, but there are roses I wouldn’t mind stopping to smell where Fuji insistently pushes on.

In silence I slinked away from the Gären estate and toward my sinkhole of morning shift. Around me the west end was sleeping. The birds didn’t chirp too loudly, there weren’t very many dragons out walking, and even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

That left it easy to hear the soft, stealthy padding that came up behind me.

I said, “Hello again, Adwyn-sofran.” Your tongue caught the scent of eyepaint.

::: * subchapter I watched Ushra’s black eyes as he stepped in. They were orbs almost sunken in a face hundreds of gyras old, and there were depths to those eyes. Whatever sense of dragons I might have, I wouldn’t push it trying to read Ushra.

Those eyes were lingering on the orange drake high-walking in. The ancient alchemist was frowning.

Under that gaze, Adwyn entered. A red dress was flowing under him, swishing as he walked in, gleaming in the fain light of the loversuns. His metallic-red eyes met mine as he entered, then he glanced around the room and his gaze settled on the dark-jade wiver.

The New Humans is a story that tries very hard.

It’s a long-form serial that’s been updating irregularly for over two years now. It’s a kind of period piece, exploring superpowers in 60s Australia.

And it suffers from that common double-edge sword of serials: the writer is improving. The opening chapters are rough. And as you’ve heard many times before — for many different serials — it gets better.

Oleuni’s lonely light slipped into my room and glowed the curtains. I roused awake… and then it faded, just as when the first dawn ring stormed in some time earlier; after that, it’d only taken the moments to find the pillow aflung somewhere and bury my head under it before I floated back to sleep. I murmured promises about getting up soon and that’s all I remember.

“Silent winds, my friend,” said Hinte as she turned, waving her tail. While she appreciated Kinri’s help in the lake, she breathed relief at parting ways with her. The exile had no appreciation of the thoughtful silence, always annoying her with unhatched questions. But worse, she acted utterly apterous when she opted not to ask questions. As if her tongue were rubber and her frills were stone.

Would this day ever end? This entire adventure had passed in one day, in one evening. Yet, in my mind, in my aching legs, and in my relationship with Hinte, a whole cycle might have passed. More had happened today than in any other cycle of my life.

Routine dominated my days. Wake up before the second dawn ring, Kinri. Check by the coutiers, maybe your brother finally sent a letter. Go to moil at the Llygaid Crwydro every day, except (stars, don’t forget!) not on the purportedly-sacred crestdays and troughdays. Hope Cthwithach-sofran has time to teach you anything, else you’ll have nothing else to show the day wasn’t waste. Let Uvidet-gyfar drag you out to play cards at the Moyo-Makao every other day. Check by the courtiers again, you never know. If you grow bored of things⁠ ⁠—⁠ when you grow bored of things⁠ ⁠—⁠ you can beg the guards at the south gate to let you out, and fly some laps in the pretty red ravines south of town. Then sneak out at night and look at the endless stars.

Along the roads into Gwymr/Frina the scattered lamp- and sign-posts mixed with bright-colored signs warning of trenches and sudden drops. Little glider-scorpions emerged from the deeper crevices, flitting in the night with the short, sporadic glides that named them. Often the whirring of bats rose with the calls and buzzes of the scorpions, but when one appeared, the other would grow silent, hiding or hunting.

“Hinte!” I yelled out.

On the other side of the dark-green wiver a slender, black thing shot out from the vog. Like an arrow it plunged into Hinte’s side. I didn’t see the bite⁠ ⁠—⁠ but Hinte growled deep in pain. I was yelling out in fear, in useless warning. My wings twitched but the sight had vitrified me.

Another shadow flew at her neck. The wiver twisted — the creature flew close, belly running along her neck, a near-miss. There was a hissing growl.

We hunted.

I’d learned hunting from my tutors, but some details were different on the surface. In the sky you could exhaust yourself and fall to your death, or drop your prey and lose it forever. But the basics hadn’t changed: every predator had its own unique skills, own way of hunting its prey. Without a lot of strength, or any deadly venom or really big claws, you had to rely on teamwork and better senses⁠ ⁠—⁠ your eyes, frills, and above all else, your tongue.

“Kinri. Do you smell that? I smell blood.”

I flicked my tongue and whirled its forks. After a beat it was pressed against the roof of my mouth, and I only smelled the evil sulfur of the Berwem. I ignored it and grasped for the tastes at the fringes. Grape and chamomile? No. Boily crab meat? No.Faint sweat and blood blowing in from the distance⁠ ⁠—⁠ there it is.

Up above, past the lake’s shroud, there were birds, clouds and stars. I looked at the gray blackness above, hunting for something outside the mind-numbing tedium of the lake. My last canteen had drained to a half. We hadn’t encountered any rockwraiths.

At one point I’d scribbled flat, imagined monsters in the dust while Hinte wrenched at an uncooperative cryst. My scribbled rockwraith had snarled with massive claws dripping gore, mouth agape with angled sword-teeth and streams of caustic venom flying forth. I’d smiled but not laughed, and that kept my throat satisfied.

I was alone.

As I limped over the molten glass lake, only one set of footsteps cracked the crumbling skin. My heart floundered in my breast, still wracked even with the argument behind me. Salty, sour venom dewed on my fangs, my anger leaking out. My tail uncoiled from my leg, and I drew a shuddering breath, and bit back a cough.

Every motion and habit stood salient in my awareness, with no one else and nothing else to distract me. The vog renewed its constrictions, so much darker now without the figure in bright-white leading me. I took another breath.

Somewhere above, as if waiting, the loversuns still shone.

Below that⁠ ⁠—⁠ past all the ash, dust and smoke⁠ ⁠—⁠ the two suns’ light became a vague hint, offering the lake’s surface to the shadows. And they accepted, waving their shadow tongues, swishing their shadow tails, and enveloping.

Trudging over the crumbly shell of this molten glass lake, you’d tire of the lack of light or company in your first breath cycle. The Berwem was vast and empty; there was only me and⁠ ⁠—⁠ somewhere I couldn’t see⁠ ⁠—⁠ my companion, Hinte.

Note: Written for high school English class around 2018 or before. Interesting for historical reasons, if at all.

John McCrae’s Twig is, in a word, a journey. It’s not a unreasonable description for most of his work. Rather than a traditional novel, McCrae writes web serials.

There are a few differences between a web serial and an ordinary novel. The biggest is that when a novel is available, it’s available beginning to end; while the web serial is posted in installments online—hopefully on some regular schedule, but this isn’t a rule (unfortunately).

Note: Written for high school English class around 2018 or before. Interesting for historical reasons, if at all.

The Star-Treader and Other Poems is a book of poetry, classical poetry, that, between its archaicisms and overwrought vobaculary, wouldn’t sound out of place had it been written a century beforehand. Many reviewers make comparisons to such lofty names as Milton or Keats. It is an apt comparison, because The Star-Treader… is a sublime volume of poetry.

“Thou shalt not violate causality in my domain”. Or so commands the third or fourth item (I honestly can’t remember) on the constitution of this dingy little backwater monarchy. It;s a slithy little law, it might even be called clever, if anyone it concerns would actually follow it.

Note: I may make this fancier down the line, for now it’s just a list of things I plan to get caught up soon.

Priority One

Priority Two

Priority Three

Books I want to read

Fiction - A Closed and Common Orbit - Negative Space by BR Yeager - The Shuddering by Ania Ahlborn -

Nonfiction - Fires of The Dragon, David E. Kaplan: - Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, David E. Kaplan - The Stickup Kids, Randol Contreras: - Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, Randall Collins: - Murder City, Charles Bowden - The Land of Open Graves, Jason De Léon - Katherina Hetzeldorfer

Chapter Twenty-one of The Element of Eloquence by Mark Forsynth has the best explanation of poetic meter that I’ve encountered. I strongly recommend the full book as a delightful toolbox for the refining one’s understanding of prose style and figures of speech. (And I do mean delightful: each chapter goes down like a piece of intellectual candy. Or better yet, a potato chip — because you can’t have just one.)

Okay, the climax of act two is complicated enough I think I actually need to work through what it means on paper.

So, the great big twist of Hostile Takeover is that that AbsoluteSolver doesn’t exist. To the extent that it does, it’s as a asymptote, a basilisk, a promise. The AbsoluteSolver is an idea, the belief in the AbsoluteSolver, the lie that the exponential end is universal and inevitable.

Five stages overheating - Stage One: The Warm & Clear (code green) - Stage Two: Brazen Thirst (code yellow) - Stage Three: Hunter’s Fever (code orange) - Stage Four: Core Meltdown (code red) - Stage Five: You’re toast, idiot (code black)

new notes (weave in later) - tessa explains that her plans was nothing. cyn wants them to believe in her, believe she’s a mastermind that can only be defeated with some grand plan - j interrupts, says she doesnt care about cyn’s games or her fairy tale. it doesn’t matter, and i don’t care. i’m just here for uzi - uzi thinks about why cyn likes n so much. it’s because n reads her stories — and because he loves doing anything, he’ll always play along and have fun

When a wizard grows tired of mortality, each seeks a balm. The ritual to amend life is well-known: the last spell of the Arch-Imago, a moth-priestess turned first lich.

You must burrow like a graveworm beneath a meadow of moonflowers. Seal yourself with the wax of spells within a crystaline cocoon. Let the moonflowers bloom above you for ten thousand nights. Then pour upon your tomb wine honeyed with the work of bees fat from the moonflower’s nectar. When the work is complete, the seal is broken and you awaken from the dream of life.

// A stormcloud perches above a mountainpeak haunted by crooning roars — a dragon courts it for marriage.

// Your job is to stop it.

Tomorrow, a lord will be flayed alive. Once his flesh, freely given, is woven into a vast frame, enchanted scars will turn him into a living portal, a gift that could turn a blightstricken town into a bustling trade nexus.

Apnoe has woken up beside the same dead girl three nights in a row. The lord’s flaying is tomorrow — same as it was for the last three nights. She’s the only one who’s noticed. Assassins lurk in the flaying festival’s crowds, and when they strike the lord dead, the whole town watches their dreams crumble, and then Apnoe wakes again as if from a dream. She knew this quite well; on the first night, she had killed him.

Dragons are fire, and fire burns, consumes, ravages. Dragons cannot be killed by ill fortune or mortal heart. Only a fool becomes a dragonslayer.

But is one born with foolhearted courage, or does life inflict it thereupon? Why does Avari dare call herself a dragonslayer?

Her party doesn’t care; they care that she strikes down monsters with berserker strength, wielding a sword enchanted to bring death to all it cuts. She could carry them all into legend.

Doors. Frickin’ doors. Remember when all your problems were as simple as shut the hatch and lock it twice? No, you don’t. You’re too young. Outpost-3 stood secure for what, a year?

Then Saint Nori and Brother Khan went and faced down the robo-vampires and the very harbinger of the company. Saved them all with power of truth, justice and the Doorman way. Tragically stepped through the door to robo-Heaven in the process — classic martyrdom stuff.

Personal notes for a novel I may yet write. Uses my established myconid worldbuilding.

Deep within the underdark, centuries of rot consumes ancient forest remnants. Fruiting bodies emerge from glistening oil field and hungry roots crack open coal. Hunger for fuel births a new race.

Princess Tremella is a simple nascent fragment of a fungal collective. She wants to win friends, make her creator shut up about finding a mate, and seize power to subjugate the world under her inhuman will. Why should myconids hide in caves and sip oil when there’s a world out there to devour?

Sometimes, dead drones explode. Oil burns, emitting not tongues of flame, but holographic lines of aberrant code — and the dead come burning back to life.

Against these burning revenants, Nori Doorman stands above it all; other drones are nothing but insects her shadow. But who is the sun?

This started life as a discord post; I’m not sure if I plan to make it into a full essay.

okay i just had new thought for the weevil situation [in black nerve]

there shoudl be other kinds of acausal monsters than basilisks

one possible type is the siren

the idea is simple: suppose you detect a paperclip maximizer emerging on alpha centauri.

it’s developing fast enough that there’s no way humanity will be able to mount a resistance by the time it arrives in the solar system

When seeking to understand and replicate the human body, artists — especially traditional artists — make use of anatomical figure models. You see one particular type used a lot, simplified and stylized like:

What’s valuable about this construct is that you can physically pose it. Trying to actually draw a human freehand in 3d space — respecting both proportion and perspective — is fiendishly difficult without years of experience. So a figure model helps hugely if you want a draw some action pose more complex than a three quarters T-pose.

Dear reader, we need to cook.

I’ve written about characters before, and I’ve written about plots at quite some length.

The word of the day is arc, that progression of a character from nascent beginnings to some more realized form. But need I say any more after pointing you at those posts? Does an arc not simply turn in the same fashion as any other plot, only with character traits as one of its gears?

A collection neat tricks using only HTML and CSS, perfect for use on Ao3.

Select only prime numbers:

There’s something about wandering the desert of leaves, I don’t know.

The trees — what were trees — are mostly horizontal things, crumbling cylinders. The animals — what were animals — existed as dust and fragments. You’d walk and you’d see a great white rotting mound of death, and you’d wonder whether it were one animal or a whole list.

For context, this page is an in-progress attempt to implement this ruleset I devised:

the game is played on a board — classic 8x8, maybe? exact dimensions are probably important in a way that’ll become clear.

there are two players, white and black. white moves first.

the game requires a number of coins that are considered to have two faces, called 0 and 1. each players starts the game with a pile of N such coins. each turn has two phases: manipulation and attack. each player controls one half of the board, and coins on thir half of the board are coins they control.

Tlakida, my daughter, last nymph of the Thimithi…

Can you remember what defines our clan? The flame that burns within us all? Can you still see it?

Can you remember the name of the white dragon reborn, the trial of the angelic host, the year of our hope 623—

Can you remember it all? The spark which ignited this fire that defines us…

When Karkel demanded the entire host punished for the crimes of the second dominion, there was one and only one who stood, pleading that she alone be executed for the sake of the rest — to be a matyr, and spare her comrades. She saw the error of their ways, and sought to atone. She was the first to burn in the white dragon’s breath. Do you recall Thesiza?

Like a hammer blow to the ruins of old ambrosia, Ribbolef lies at the center of an ever-widening crack in the expanse of dead forest that remains in the far south of Windhold.

Surrounded on all sides by the outlines of old trees, its roads and farmlands crawl outward against the wild. Deep within those forest remnants, there is still wood, still growing, twisted into the foundations of empty galleries once the home of weevils.

You are Mewla Asetari. The year is 1777, and you’re hatching. You crawl out of a fat, crowded Ootheca into the vast space of the Asetari clan nursery. Five other nymphs hatch from your ootheca, your broodmates.

Uvema, Your mother isn’t there to watch your first steps, only the midwife who prayed over your ootheca these past few months. You don’t see your mother until you’re a year old. The first time you see her is at a feast whose purpose you can’t discern, in a room filled with other Asetari. Your mother addresses the whole clan. You don’t think her eyes stay on you for more than a few moments.

Khitona: the world, the planet, the home — named for the myth of a great tunic worn by the dead and rotting primordial worm, upon whom all bugs feast and burrow. The Grand Arena: the largest continent of the world, named for the constant wars and struggles as bugs vied to claim rule. The Queenlands: a continent far to the west, homeland of the euvespids, and still ruled by ancient dynasties of hive queens. Heartlands: a subcontinent of the Grand Arena, encompassing everything south of the realm of quiet frost, north of the ambrosia quarantine, and east of the veinlands. This is the territory of the Pantheca. Outlands: a designation for everything on the Grand Arena not in the heartlands. - The Realm of Quiet Frost: an icy wasteland, twisted and warped to unlivable hostility by flows of black nerve. - The Ambrosia Quarantine: an expanse of rain forests and jungles on the southern tip of the Grand Arena, left to be tended by the ambrosia weevils. - The Veinlands: the ruins of the greatest cities of the myriad kingdoms, now roamed by feral ichorbats and the warped spawn of their blood. - The Great Rot: in the east of the outlands lies a once urban expanse, now reclaimed by fungus eating the almost unending swaths of wood. Crumbling weevil galleries the size of metropoli can still be faintly resolved. - Hraal’s Gallows: Dominating the Great Rot is felled monolith of the weevil’s world-tree. Named for the hanging of Hraal, the lord-borer, decay consumes the weevil’s ambition; this titantic tree has been rotting for centuries.

so let’s sketch up astere nevara

poor mom got rizzed up by some rich dude, relationship gets dicey after she’s already gravid, so she runs away. falls in love with a roach, lays her ootheca, then gets sick and dies.

thus, nevara hatches in a slum populated entirely by roaches. for all the formative years of their life, they never meet another mantis. at this time, they dont even learn to stridulate, the only language they pick up is roach cant.

The sky is a black ocean above trees of chitin and cuticle crawling upward. This world is scarred; the only reprieve to plagues and malediction are vesperbanes, who kill people just by existing. Behold the most just, most stable society the heartlands has known. May it everlast.

As I killed the mantis pinned beneath me, I wondered if that was a cry for mercy forming on her palps. First of all I brandished my knief (for I had disabled her with only my natural instruments), and watched it make fear on the face of the mantis below me, and her companion now halting a few strides away.

(I like to think I had the menace to make such a simple weapon chilling to behold.)

A little nymph cries over a great dark lake. She sobs and heaves and pushes her paddles but it doesn’t get her anywhere. She shivers.

There is something looking for her, she knows it. A large wave hits the boat and it rocks. She is crying because she is alone and lost and there is a monster in the lake, swimming, hiding, waiting. She saw it.

She paddles harder. Can she get to one of the other boats? They move farther away. Are they leaving because of the monster? More tears coat her green eyes

I wrote several snippets of fiction in my high school composition notebooks; most of them are lost to time, though a few can be found in the old fragments page.

My writing career really began in November 2017, when I wrote the first drafts of what would become Endless Stars. My chief influences were MLP fanfiction and wildbow’s writings, and I had the ambition that I would “be like wildbow” in some way I never thought too deeply about. I sought to learn more about writing, and spent the next year revising ES, until around November 2018, where correspondence with Wizard-of-Woah! and Rhythminthemind convinced me to finally publish in November 2028. ES updated weekly till late April 2019, then exhausted my backlog. The next three chapters were published irregularly, and a fourth was never published.

It’s Tressa, an old jewel cutter, who arrives, her frame tall and muscled and draped in silken robes utterly untouched by the rain. Thin gray hair falls to frame a darkskined faced, darkened further by scars and the twisting unnatural colors of beautyscorching. This is the strange woman with a metal hand Aurora spent her childhood avoiding. Without a word, she has picked up a shovel to help Aurora dig her father’s grave.

/