Is it known whether vesperbanes that have taken on a countenance sponsored by the Pantheca must swear any oaths upon doing so?
This question is a little confused.
“Sponsorship” generally refers to programs by Stewartry or the Wardens which fund vesperbane education, as other routes are either risky or financially inaccessible to the lower class. The recipients of sponsorships are not vesperbanes, and in general vesperbanes are not all (or mostly) previous recipients of sponsorships.
“Countenance” is a legal right to cultivate vespers, as the breeding and nursing of vespers is otherwise a dark gray area. Fundamentally, countenance is understood as something given to a vesperbane by a syndic coordinator. More practically, authority to establish countenance has been granted to the Stewartry, who have further extended that power to component or affiliate institutions like the Wardens or the Maverick program.
With all that background out of the way, yes, most institutions have swearing certain oaths of blood and soul as a prerequisite to them choosing to grant you countenance.
For most provinces’ Wardens program, this means swearing to protect the Pantheca and its inhabitants. By contrast, Stewarts vow aspiration to ideals of nonviolence and abstinence, and more depending on profession (e.g. medical hemotechnics to first do no harm, knowledge-hunters to be honest and forthcoming, etc). Mavericks are required little more than oaths to acknowledge the laws of the heartlands, sometimes not even that.
Are spellbrands skilled enough to supply such oaths sufficiently rare that this is impractical?
Spellbrands are not necessary for oaths, but helpful for the most complex. They aren’t especially rare or especially common.
What are Horkos survivors (or their vesper-piloted husks?) generally like?
When the vesperbat elders and titans were vanquished, and all the vestiges of their kingdoms reclaimed by mantids, batslayers then turned their attention to hunting or destroying crepuscles. It was not a significant change.
(Editor’s Note: Horkos being one of the three routes to going crepuscular.)
Modern vesperbane hunters spend their time dealing with renegades, monsters (either newly created by renegades or lingering from the third dominion), and crepuscules. That last one tends to be somewhere between the first two, at least when it’s a horkos crepuscule.
So no communication attempts, no demands; horkos tend to attack on sight?
They don’t need to attack on sight - if the presence of one spreads an virulent plague that ravages nearby towns, or one warps the wildlife with red ichor to render them potent and aggressive, or one collects the dead from graveyards to make use of mantid cadavers - danger doesnt mean direct aggression.
Regarding communication attempts, ordinary mantids - ordinary vesperbanes, even - aren’t, as a rule, running into crepuscules or surviving to tell about it. Crepuscules are engaged with by Wardens fireteams, whose debriefs are collected and collated by their strategists
Whether there are communication attempts or not is not a matter of common knowledge.
What are the other routes to becoming horkos, then?
The standard trichotomy among theorists is contradiction, malediction, and interdiction.
Contradiction the breaking of oaths sworn and becoming horkos.
Malediction was a technique that saw greatest use among the bats and by the disenthralled rebels against the bats. It’s a rare thing in modern times. Perhaps superceded by other means, or diminished significantly in effectiveness over the centuries. Some wonder if this is even a natural category, and not just a weaponized contradiction or interdiction.
Lastly, it would be wrong to say interdiction is what creates exclusion zones, because mantids create exclusion zones. It’s a bureaucratic designation, and vespers dont have everything to do with all of them. But there’s a correlation. An interdiction is a thought of as a vespertine transgression, the point where a technique or school of techniques has been taken too far and the vespers recoil. The caster of the technique and/or whatever they wrought is (often) bound to an area by the vespers’ will - which makes drawing map lines around it convenient. The art becomes a forbidden art, although what this means can vary.
How well-known are the many Maverick masters and mistresses (and their missions)?
The maverick commission is a fraction of a fraction (most mavericks are not associated with the commission), of a fraction (mavericks are a subset of vesperbanes) of a fraction (vesperbanes are a small minority).
Notably, Eifre is not even within the largest of these groups.
No organization by the name “maverick commission” is well known across the Pantheca, let alone any details of it. in most parts of the heartlands, the name may be spoken occasionally, but it is neither large nor obvious.
Members of the commission may have notoriety under their actual names, but any standing they have internal to the commission is secret.
Speaking of which, is it known what the “traveling suns” are?
The traveling suns are celestial objects almost visible with the naked eye at night which move like planetary satelites, yet emit their own light.
They are recorded as an anomaly in the Stewarty’s archives, for when consulting the astronomical tablets of ancient wingless civilizations, there is no indication of these objects existing — inexplicable, given their otherwise detailed recording and understanding of astronomy.
What was Karkel’s Scathing Remark? Whose minds did they change?
Here is the context:
Oosifea Shadow-crown, the genius of war, the heresiarch vindicated, the queen of worms, the one exalted yet returned, the god-empress of mantiskind, predates all vesperbanes. She was of the Pure Council — in fact, she had been destined for its deepest circles. But she was blocked by the maneuvering of weak, political wills and her genius was exiled rather than exalted.
So in the era of chaos, before Aromethia had brought hope, Oosifea mastered the old sanguine arts, without the aid of vespers. (In fact, she is the dividing line between the old sanguine arts and what vesperbanes today practice — every haemotechnic owes her a debt of inheritance.)
After her palingenesis, after years embroiled in war with the Disenthralled Rebellion, Oosifea did something none of her creed dared. (Though in fact, it is the very kind of act that had first defined her.) She looked beyond the blind dogma of purity doctrine, to consider what others hated, what others were basely disgusted by.
She sought out the vespers. She underwent the pharmakon rights.
Her devoted were told this new revelation of her will, a manifestation of her beneficence: she would bring welkin purity to even the vespers.
This way, she ascended to an apotheosis of power. She revised the pharmakon rights into a ritual of her own devising, the angelic process. After then, Oosifea and her angels of war, heralding the advance of the Second Dominion, seemed an empire utterly unstoppable.
Oosifea had made alliances with the Myriad Kingdoms — to them she was the bat of brudeyama, the chiropteran in chitin.
So when an insistent vesperbat, rising in prominence as quick as a weevil’s season-tree, sought audience with the god-queen, she indulged them. They were stripped of everything to stand before her, and watched by her mightiest angels for threat. But they only needed their words.
Just four words, a rhetorical question.
And the vespers destroyed everything Oosifea had built.
That bat’s name was Karkel the second, so for this reason those words that passed between they and she are called Karkel’s Scathing Remark. But today, it’s more likely to recognize this bat as the white dragon.
Bat-mantid negotiations: which side needed to learn the other’s language for Karkel to make a comprehensible Scathing Remark? (Most likely mantids hissing to approximate the vesperbat language, or just each side learning the other’s language so that they understand it, but cannot speak it due to morphology)
By the time Karkel arrived, Oosifea had spent many more years dealing with bats than most mantids ever spend alive.
Just to confirm: both Karkel and Brismati Lakon sacrificed themselves in the battle against Dlann?
If so, is it known how they managed to get Karkel’s body (or at least their blood) out of the OFEZ, so as to anoint the nymphs? Did Karkel share their ichor around prior to the battle?
Lakon sacrificed herself. Karkel’s sacrifice was more metaphorical, producing the so-called white dragon inspiration, arete sundered into a million pieces, each one a fragment of their power, gifted to a fighter in the battle to sustain them.
History is not the clearest on what happens next to the white dragon in the flesh, having been reduced to a shadow of former power — for it is known how the oldest bats’ biology begins to depend on the vespers.
And given that the white dragon became something of a religious figure, the reality becomes further obscured.
Did they survive the long interval from the fall of Lord-king Dlann, the archtitan, to the time of sundered states? Did they perish in flesh, but by the vespers, through their sacrifice, become something more metaphysical? It has been proposed, with deep manipulation of arete, that their gift (some of which survived after the battle) could have been used to reordinate the blood of another into the blood of karkel
Or perhaps the simpler suggestion is truth, that blood was drawn and preserved. But any biological material would be hard pressed to survive that long, let alone the mercurial blood of vesperbats. And among bats, the drawing of blood is no small thing. They prefer to keep their blood in their bodies, and one who would carelessly disrespect their blood, treat basely it like milk to be drunk or oil to be used, is a dangerous and wicked kind of deviant.
Perhaps the simplest solution of all is dissolution, and to agree with the iconoclasts who propose the foundational story of the Kindling Dream’s disciples is a foundational myth — and indeed, this is one of the arguments they marshal to attack the absurdity of the faith.
What are shadowcallers? Are they a subtype of blackbane?
Enervate flows in a vast weave through the air far above us, and churns through the molten catacombs beneath us. There is nothing special about the terrestrial or celestial neuropheres, just umbral physics writ large. What then, would happen were you to manipulate those flows as any blackbane does in minature?
Today, these are questions one may wonder the answers to. But in our banished past, throughout the wars that defined the era of hope and the era of evil, they were facts of life. The titans of old, and their mantid heirs, had no hesitation in wielding what meteorological and tectonic techniques they devised.
This discipline, such as the sovrans have codified it, is now called shadowcalling.
You may find something to awe at, in the notion of a mere animal summoning forth hurricanes, tearing open chasms. But that is the point of the knife. The true damage comes after, when the great forces subside, salting the earth with enervation in their wake. Umbral dissolution is an agony scarcely fit for one’s enemies, let alone innocents. To flood a city with enervation is to starve the pantheca of one more settlement, a price already yearly paid.
For this reason, even the principles of shadowcalling are deeply restricted, used only by those stewarts charged to predict, divert, or mitigate umbral anomalies and disasters.
There is an impression among some, made popular by traitors and subversives, that syndic moratoria and censors are matters of political convenience, or worse, tools of oppression. But there are few better examples than shadowcalling to show why the restrictions are not decadence or abuse. There are atrocities written in the will of the vespers, which even the crepuscular process cannot shield us from. Secrecy is our first line of defense.
What is known of reaver ants?
There are some kinds which are inimical to the flourishing of other kinds. The prime example is the reaver ant. The reavers are gnawing destruction, Where locusts were seasonal at worst, and great cicada emergences can be separated by decades, the reavers are an ever present, insatiable tide which leaves depletion and devastation in its wake.
Reavers have no home, and no respect for the homes of others. Their nomad hordes are sometimes called tribes, but bear closer resemblance to an army forever on campaign.
They raid the nests of bees and euvespids, the webs of therids, mantid cities and roach huts. The workers will tear the inhabitants apart with powerful mandibles, and devour them. By instinct and mimicry, they have grasped the coarsest of tool use and construction, and will demolish buildings and seize implements to render temporary or mobile makeshift structures.
Some reaver bands rise above this sheer savagery, and their depredations are more in the manner of banditry than total war — and with the selection effect of the worst reavers being exterminated by ever more effective armies, this trait grows more prominent in modern times.
A rare few bands have had their animalistic cruelty tempered or dulled by chance, and a glimmer of respect or empathy exists in their black hearts. They to an extent cooperate with the Pantheca, and in cases act as escorts for trade caravans — or rarest of all, are the caravans themselves. And some assist the Pantheca in efforts to defeat or civilize the feral reavers.
Many reaver bands practice a kind of mutilation or surgery, altering their bodies with inorganic implants or accessories. The true nature of these are not understood, and the even the quasi-vinculated reaver bands will not reveal. By these means, their venerated warriors can match even experienced vesperbanes. These formic grafts are rumored to have been given to non-reavers in some instances, with unknown outcomes.
Are E’yama and the Song of the Stars (regular, not Other) Welkinist concepts? What do they represent?
The story was once told like this:
All bugs were originally one kind, and were all like wild beasts. Thoughtless, and with no sense of relation besides mating.
Then, a song came down from the stars, granting the bugs purposeful minds. They gained the ability to understand and care for each other. The brightest among them even learned to imitate that song, and this was called language
As they learned love and duty, the bugs became more selfless, more unified. Some would sacrifice their lives for the whole, or work tirelessly for the benefit of all. There was a harmony to it all.
Ants, bees, termites, they all grew weak and dependent on each other.
But among them was one bug, a worker not yet named E’yama, who served her nest and fed its queen. But once, in her duty, she grew hungry. Rather than prioritizing her queen or her brood as was expected, she fed herself instead. And for any of her fellow bug that saw or questioned this, she slew them, and devoured their still-writhing bodies. Her ultimate betrayal was killing her queen, and becoming gravid with young herself — something profane, an act reserved for queens only.
The other nests, when they learned of this, made their workers sterile and mindless so that another betrayal of the sort could never again occur.
But E’yama and her brood evaded any retaliation, and she raised them to become hunters of bug. She disdained the slavering collectives that become of other nests, and her children kept their individuality and self-interest.
For this, the heartlands mantis is otherwise known as Brudeyama — the traitor’s spawn. As an exalted ancestor, she asks that her children keep to this one axiom: defect the undiscerning.
((The story warps across cultures, its details ever-shifting. In some, E’yama was wrongly sentenced to death, and this was her rebellion. In some, it was not a song, but a black mist. In some, particularly those cultures most influenced the subjugation of bats or other kinds, E’yama’s defection was not noble, and her sins stain all her children.
((Knowledge-hunters are divided on whether the story is truly the fruit of welkinism — it’s certainly a part of the core codices, but does it originate in the Pure Council, or was it incorporated by any of the many empires and expansion campaigns? It’s a topic where opinions are formed as much by bias as by fact.))
What is known of scorpions?
What is known of spiders? Like spiders, ‘scorpions’ is not a species. It’s an order.
There’s the common stinger-serpent, a family of small or sometimes moderately small solitary predators which crawl through the underbrush hunting small prey like lizards or birds.
There’s the canyon-dwelling fat-tail, whose venom is sought by some haemotechnics.
By reports, there once lived a kind of furry scorpion in the snowy lands near and north of modern day frozen swamp. They mutually congregated to overwinter, and in some instances held territory jointly. They competed with the therids, and being inferior in might or organization, were pushed to undesirable fringes. When the Victor’s Conquest saw mantids temporarily occupy this land in pursuit of the last bat kings, attempts were made for peace with these snow scorpions, but communications continually broke down, and their aggressive, territorial nature earned them the bats’ treatment, which they were not equipped to endure. After the first arthropod war, snow scorpion become a rare traveler’s tale. After the second, there has been no sighting more credible than hearsay, even as therids and mantids expanded the land of frozen swamp; they are extinct.
The largest remaining species of scorpion is the reaper scorpion, an apex predator adapted to the enervated wasteland of the reaping black. Its hide is remarkable armor, its stinger a fearsome weapon, but its menace commensurate with the beasts of the third dominion. Even an accomplished hunter may not wish to brave an encounter with a reaper scorpion, even to poach this natural bounty. There are many reasons the reaping black is not the heartlands, and no state has ever lain true claim to its domain, and so many of them begin and end with the chelicerae of this being of black malice.
Does the Pantheca’s claim of belonging to “all mantiskind” include other continents? Is this likely to be used as a pretext for conquest?
It means all mantids have a kindred right to citizenship in the Pantheca.
The Pantheca is not an empire, and does not conquer territories. It does extend aid in the form of trade agreements or stabilizing military presence to tribes in the outlands and, in theory, antipodes.
Also, who was the Gold Dragon?
Gold is heavy, rare metal. By mass preference, enervate is closely drawn to the densiest elements. So despite its beauty, being shiny and untarnishing, gold is commonly used as an expensive sort of purifier, drawing destructive enervate out of other bodies and into it. The association, then, is as something noble, self-sacrificing.
The story of the gold dragon and his gambit is a simple one, an old tale from the days of the liberation war, its details faded until only the key beats remain. A bat was slain and their thrallwealth was liberated, those mantids fleeing to safety in the south. But in response, a small contingent of bats had mobilized to scour the countryside for refugees. The one remembered as the gold dragon came forth, claiming to be they who slew the bat and scattered their horde. It was days’ distraction, enough to secure an escape for the refugees. The story of that sacrifice went with them, this moment being a core touchstone in the rebellion’s conception of dragons.
(The game of gold dragon’s gambit requires at least three players (ideally more) and one dealer (often called the interrogator). Each player gets dealt a few cards, and each turn they commit one of them. Whichever card is highest is sacrificed, and the dealer takes it back. The next highest card is saved, remaining face down in front of that player. If a player played a card that isnt saved or sacrificed, they have the option to sacrifice their card anyway and point at another player, making them save their card. Either way, the cards that werent saved or sacrificed get returned to the players’ hand, and another turn begins. A player is typically out of the game when they lose all their cards, or save a certain number (often three), and the game is over when all players are out. The last player, of course, ends up sacrificing all their remaining cards.)