The year was 1073 Vesper-Blessed.
In the second week of Scattered Flame, there was a run on three pharmacia in Wingrav, the beating heart of trade in the old, post-Liberation War Alliance. When the vaults emptied and crowds still waited for their bones and arete, the run hatched riots. By the end of the month, the oaths of ownership had been resworn, and the deeds for all three fell into a single pair of raptorials.
On 14 of Harvest Flame, Kaknev “Bloodlicker” Sweetdance was cornered by the knights of Wingrav. Bandit gangs preyed on merchants outside the walls of Wingrav, and Kaknev’s position as elusive ringleader was a whispered secret in the auricles of every voting warrior, but her elusiveness matched her notoriety. When they caught her, she was buying a bottle of the finest wine, and when the tribunal heard every argument, her case came down to one question: where did she get the money? Banditry, obviously — but then a witness produced the accounting books of Wingrav’s bloodiest arena. Kaknev was written as an investor, and the dividends let her off the hook. But who owned the arena, managed the books? The deeds bear a familiar name.
On 29 of Liar’s Flame, paper ships sailed from the east, arriving on the southern heartland shores. When the Brismati farseers spotted them weeks ago, a current of dread trickled through the Alliance — would the Queenlands start another war so soon? One bane rode out with the knights of Wingrav to meet the arriving euvespids. The ships sailed off a month later, heavier with gold, and the bane returned to Wingrav bearing contracts inked by a sealscribe. Her Authorial Majesty Vicilimenia had established trade relationships with a diamantis, an agreement the first of its kind. And who was this mantis?
You may sense a common variable lay between these three anecdotes.
Augran of Wingrav sought to build an empire. And in a literal sense, she had done it — she could marshal raw force, political incentive, abundant wealth, with a single stride. But there are things not attained through quick and lucrative deals: legacy, prestige, nobility. But that didn’t mean money couldn’t buy them.
The nobility of a bane and her descendents was a matter of aretology. Some slayed vesperbats, some devised brilliant techniques, some recieved reward for generations of service to the vespers. Vespers don’t tender the gilded bones bugs are fond of trading, and the arete record is famously, sacredly tamper-proof.
Peeragists traced forgotten lines of pedigree and descent. Augran, they revealed, pulsed with the blood of angels of Oosifea (a few drops, at least). For this, Wingrav minted a noble crest post-haste. (The peeragists retired early, and comfortably, even as historians debate their work.) Thus, the year 1028 V.B. marked the ascent a new clan: Gildenighter.
By the 1080s, the clan had sworn the foundationship oaths of one in five pharmacia throughout the alliance, alongside ownership of gladiatorial arenas, investments in merchant companies, and deniable associations with criminal organizations. They lived extravagant lives, through loans rather than liquid wealth. When the knights collected taxes, their accounting books told a dire story of debt and thin margins. The alliance couldn’t tax vaults in the Queenlands, after all.
The Gildenighters climbed to every sphere of power, their rise as meteoric as it was ruthless.
For a few decades, they lavished. Then in 1145, after just a few years of training, the knights of Wingrav relieved the heir apparent Egalgen of her provisional rank. Her skills neither exceeded nor lagged behind that of other aspirant knights. Rather, in the span of a single month, she went from capable fighter to paralyzed, struck motionless from the neck down.
Bloodletters could find diagnosis nor cure for the nerve damage, and Egalgen never recovered. Her mother, Augran the second, denies Egalgen any inheritance, granting it to her next daughter. Yet Egalgen’s case was not unique, only the first and most dramatic. Perhaps it was aggrieved by her choice of career, when so many of Gildenighters banes chose the sedentary life of a spellbinders managing pharmacia. Egalgen lived miserably and then died, her only legacy that this condition bears her name: Egalgen’s curse.
For decades, specters of weakness, numbness, and muscle spasms would haunt the clan. An unlucky few contracted that same total paralysis, and at length, the bloodletters named this no plague or disease, but a vespertine affliction. Egalgen’s curse crept through the whole clan, and eventually, a haruspex divined a cause.
The revelation? Just as the Gildenighter clan extracted wealth from others, the vespers would extract in turn. As price for their fluidity in moving money, the vespers would steal fluidity of movement from their bodies. The wealthiest, most successful spellbinders of the clan, Augran’s line, were, to the last, frozen stiff.
By turn of the thirteenth century, Gildenighter nymphs increasingly didn’t hatch. Mothers needed to dug children from the ootheca. Never a clan of warriors, the Gildenighter persisted in spellbinding, but the curse stripped them of faith and prestige. They gained a reputation as blighted moneylenders, and survived chiefly from deep, offshore coffers.
For decades, the clan would desperately pursue absolution. They bought every remedy and theory offered by bloodletters. Some joined vesper cults. Some sought to puppet their own bodies with cordyceps techniques. A few leveraged their relationship with the Vicilimenia dynasty, and experimented with the euvespid’s agonizing tattoo inscriptions. Every possibility their remaining money and influence could buy.
Well-known were the curses which resisted all attempt to cure, but Egalgen’s could be fought off. (Perhaps this too was the form of the curse — for so long as hope persisted, their vaults would be mined to pay for treatment.)
As the century came to a close, two procedures had emerged as the most promising. Three, actually — for the fate could be averted through renunciation of the clan, unshackling oneself from the name and its false nobility. Few chose this route. For those that didn’t, the carefully-bred leeches of bloodletters could drink the malignant humors which rotted the muscles. Shock therapy from exposure to Clan Gaveldika’s electric techniques could reinvigorate the muscles, relieving the paralysis for a time.
Gildenighter, despite the wane, retained resources to refine these treatments. They raised a generation of leechbreeders, and intermarried with the Gaveldika. Their alienation from the Alliance’s high society deepened their connection with Vicilimenia’s dynasty and other polities of the Queenlands.
As the thirteenth century shuddered to an end, Gildenighter banes stood distinguished among the few mantes ever invited as guests of honor in the courts of a ovitheon, an old world euvespid god-queen. In her paper palace, the Vicilimenia’s grand-daughter had a aquarium maintained by seals, full of many wonderous creatures retrieved from the depths of the ocean with experimental submersible seal-ships. Trout bloated with the rosette agent, squid that danced and changed color, snapping shrimp that pretended to write and use tools.
Among these curiosities, one discovery would change heartlands history: a Gildenighter leechbreeder encountered an electric eel.
The clan paid handsomely for a clutch of these creatures to be shipped to the heartlands. Their biology unraveled as the mutant tongues of bat blood explored their bodies inside and out. As an inspiration and a reference, the Gildenighter clan yield its first piece of original technical property, over a century after its founding. Electricity, produced not with enervate but ichortouched flesh alone.
Soon came leeches breed to not only to drain foul humors, but inflict electrostimulation. In honor of their euvespid allies, the breed was named the Queen’s Eels. It should have been the triumphant return of the Gildenighter clan. Instead empowering them, it catalyzed the most precarious chapter of their history.
In 1303, the Alliance refused to recognize the technical property. It cited treacherous foreign influence from the euvespids; it cited infringment on the Gaveldika blood secret. Gildenighter had few friends remaining among the noble clans, and now the courts heard talk of revoking Gildenighter’s status entirely. Old, once-dismissed cases of money laundering and tax evasion began to be reconsidered.
This was the grave mistake of the Alliance; you see, Gildenighter had once ranked among the richest, most influential clans. Its star had waned, yes — but that simply meant they now merely stand very rich and very influential. They still controlled pharmacia; they still maintained connections with criminal organization.
And so much of their wealth lay in the Queenlands, not the Heartlands.
When Vicilimenia’s ships arrived in the south, so long ago, the Alliance feared a new invasion. They were relieved when the sailors sated themselves with trade. But ovitheons could lay plans that took generations to unfold.
When the Gildenighter matriach was invited to a meeting of three ovitheons, they discussed colonial expansion.
And the clan listened.
The war was over quickly — lasting from 1305 to 1309. The Queens’ invasion failed, or perhaps they grew bored of it, but the war ruined the Alliance. Remember, the Gildenighter clan was so adept at financial manipulation that the vespers themselves had cursed them over it. Thus, by thrusting them into the arm of the enemy, they’d been position to orchestrate economic devestation. The Alliance survived; it would be incorrect to say the Gildenighter clan was its undoing. But it was no coindience that when the third therid revolt sparked the first great arthropod war, the Alliance staggering into its next major conflict, it crumbled.
Across the ocean, the ovitheons shrugged off their failure and returned to remote, arcane machinations. The Gildenighter clan lacked that distance. They attempted high treason and failed, and the ovitheons didn’t like them so much to suffer them as refugees. The Alliance hunted them down for quick tribunals and summary executions.
So the clan scattered and fled, but their hunters had an easy pursuit. Without ministration of the Queen’s Eels, paralysis would take the Gildenighters. But how do you hide having fat electric eel-leeches hanging off your body?
Predation spurred adaptation, and the cleverest leechbreeders internalized their Queen’s Eels to blend in among laybugs. Maybe the technique had been sufficiently refined and streamlined, maybe selection effects filtered them, but where once a few members once specialized as eelbreeders, it became practiced among all the clan. Mothers would slowly transplant their eels into their children so as to adapt them to the burden, but once their vespers stirred, they were expected to grow their own before the paralysis claimed them.
By the late 1320s, the hunters rested, believing the line extinct, and the historical record was corrected: Augran had never descended from the angels after all.
The eelbreeding technique grew so widespread among surviving Gildenighters, so integral to survival, that soon a duskwrought endowment graced their line. In 1328, Egalgen’s curse claimed a young nymph in their first instar — so soon it should be fatal, as the child had not been taught the technique, and was too young to learn, and indeed was so young their body shouldn’t be able to withstand the toll of eels at all, according to the understanding passed down through the clan. But when the mother attempted desperately to transplant her eels anyway, she found the body already teeming with them.
Not every child after that hatched with innate eels, but the vespers’ strange insight slowly transformed the technique. The leeches grew thinner, more integrated into the body. Over the generations, the eels slowly replaced more and more the clan’s nervous system. All of their muscles became ichortouched.
Like that, Gildenighter survived the fall of the Alliance, wandering as a tribe of secretive mercenaries or bandits. In private, they never forget their name, recounting their history with pride, but to the world, they adopted new names, creating and discarding them as they wandered.
The clan, down to the last, all fight as exceptional warriors. Only slowly did anyone understand why. Between one brood and the next, one mother might train in a new weapon. Her second brood would then have a preternatural affinity for the weapon, while first brood did not. Many anecdotes like this piled up, and the clan came to understamd that their skills lay not in their bodies, but their eels.
After centuries viewing themselves as recipients of a terrible curse, even after generations refining the Queen’s Eels technique and viewing it as nothing more than a means to hide their disability, it became clear that they bear a true blood secret. Now a noble and bloody clan, they began exchanging eels among each other, and like that, trading skills like fashion. A secret language was developed, fragments of nervous systems able to pass messages.
The true power of the Queen’s Eels endowment was revealed when a powerful Gildenighter was cut down in battle. As they bleed out, they weaved a message into their eels, and directed them to crawl into the body of their foe. The eels devoured the nervous system, shredding the muscles like tissue, and wore the enemy’s chitin as clothes. Almost on instinct, the eels returned to the clan’s camp, eagerly crawling to safety in their brother’s body.
While every eelbreeder theorized and aspired, none ever quite attine true bodily possession. Eels could be trained to execute a sequence of actions, but without connection to their creator, no intelligent control could be exerted. Worse, the bodies of other banes quickly suffered from the presence of the eels, or reject them outright. Nor could they survive long in the bodies of laybugs, as they lack the batblood that pulses in banes.
Still, a great many terrible things could be accomplished by eels slipping into an target. With Gildenighter considered a casualty of the old Alliance, there was no suspicion other than xenophobia and no curiosity other than technique-greed, for the wandering tribe that emerged from nowhere. Throughout the sundered states, they became known as the Wormthew Clan.
Rumor and legend of them spread as the fifteeth century unfolds. Ultimately though, this fearsome “Wormthew” clan faded into the background of spooks that haunted the heartlands. The first vesperbanes, and the bats before them, had from the beginning wielded infectious attacks; this was not a new vector, and competent banes devised techniques to ward off eels. Wormthew banes could share skills, yes, but the most powerful banes were never those best at swinging swords.
The Wormthews inherited the ruthlessness of the Gildenighters, and their quest to exploit this blood secret soon sought a new avenue. The barrier to possessing resisting banes was that their bodies eventually broke or refused them — but what if your eels crawled into corpses? Corpses lack brains, making this seem, at first flush, a worse puppetstrings technique. And then someone combined it cordyceps reanimation techniques.
Cordyceps zombies were shambling things, forever limited by a creator’s forethought and creativity in designing behaviors. Wormthew banes, though, could simply gift skills like a piece of equipment. In short order, they outperform the scant masters of cordyceps, fielding hordes not only more skilled and flexible, but simply more powerful by dint of eelthews.
Nonethless, eelzombies were a tactical technique, not a strategic one. Corpse preservation was another limit on zombies, after all, and combine that with the toll of eelblood? A horde of eelzombies could not be expected to survive a single battle — though rarely would that battle be lost.
Already, the terrifying reputation of the Wormthews meant they made fast friends with “vermin clans” like Ichneumon and Culicida, but this new interest in necromancy garnered the attention of Dominion revivalists wishing to make real Oosifea’s promise of life eternal. Demagogues preeched and plotted in the opening decade of the sixteenth centuries, and clan Wormthew, though never central, never stood far from the heart of their influence.
It was arguable whether the Alliance fell because of the Gildenighters. It cannot be argued whether the Third Dominion rose because of the Wormthews.
You see, eelzombies made terrible soldiers, but they made excellent servants.
Further, the Third Dominion’s most critical initial supporters were the azklepiads, whose blood ministration revolutionized sanguine healing. But the same blood that healed the sick could preserve corpses and fuel the Queen’s Eels. Bodies would be surgically enhanced then woven with eels, and thus were born the eelstitched.
As the corpses were able to last longer and longer while possessed by eels, a nuance was discovered. Remember, generations ago the Queen’s Eels were miniturized to hide inside their hosts’ body. The Gildenlighter clan then manifested a blood secret to innately spawn eels — but it did more than that. Their bodies became able to naturally generate electrical power to fuel the eels. Essentially, much of the electricity production, synthesized acids and charged chemicals, migrated out of the eels and into their hosts. As a result, eels would become nonfunctional within days outside their hosts, exhausting a supply of energy.
Thus, the last innovation to define eelstitched: a galvanic surge of lightning brings them to life. Implanted generators hummed and sustained them.
Like this, the 1520s saw the nascent Third Dominion revolutionize its agriculture and manufacturing. Fields and factories were reanimated with a new class of worker created at scale. When the new state turned to conquest, the character of war changed; every body recovered from a battle could be turned into more eelstitched.
The Wormthew clan had regained its honor, and sat at the helm of the successor to the Alliance. They were indepensible, not only as the masters of a quasi-industrial machine, not only as a clan of warriors that had essentially been refining a shared pool of skills without pause for generations, but before long, as spies. Though possession may be impossible, they grew subtle with their use of eel ride-alongs. Targets could be implanted without their knowing; eels could be trained to only execute their instructions given certain signals.
The Third Dominon could be defined by the reckless zeal with which they exploited and plumbed the depths of blood secrets, and the Queen’s Eels were but another example.
In both potency and abundance, the Third Dominion had a treasury of techniques exceeding any other nation, and the Wormthew clan had attained a position unchallengable — but why hold back, when the goal was to conquer the whole heartlands, to crown yourself masters of life and death, to purge all weakness from the world and leave only greatness?
(And why stop at the Heartlands? When the Third Dominion marched on the Queenlands, the hives would tremble, and the dynasties would regret forsaking the Gildenighters.)
Yet every eelstitched broke down eventually. The remains could be digested and fed to captured prisoners and undesirables who’d be turned into eelstitched next, but could they do better?
Another decade let the Azklepiads refine blood ministry until cordyceps could be deprecated entirely, and the eeling procedure took living patients. Banes could still resist, but laybugs? They could be turned into the perfect slaves.
Low ranking Wormthews were tasked with learning the skills that would later be employed by the eelstitched, and slowly they pushed the envelop of what eelstitched were capable of, streamlining the process. Eventually, the two lines intersected, and the eeling procedure could be performed by eelstitched themselves — they could make more of themselves, so long as a Wormthew bane provided a continuous supply of Queen’s Eels.
Thus were dug the first eeling pits. Stagnant pools of water in which eels swam freely. Bodies floated in the pool, and eels would occasionally slither in and operate. Manufacturing eelstitched became as simple as capturing slaves and tossing them into the pits.
In 1542, deviations began. It was unclear whether a young Wormthew bane made a mistake or miscalculation, whether an eel deviated from instruction, or whether a malicious actor interfered. However it happened, an eeling pit captured a Wormthew. For months, no one noticed. But the eeling pit’s stitched production deviated from its quotas. It produced fewer servants, and more and more “instrumental” stitched, whose purpose was to maintain the eeling pit and gather new patients. This pit soon exhausted the flow from nearby camps.
So it began abducting citizens of the Third Dominion.
Wormthew banes were dispatched in to control it. The first time, they succeed. But eeling pits litered the countryside, and here and there, the deviations continued. With enough time, the wrong confluence of variable grew certain. Say a pit produced soldiers in addition to a growing mainenance crew. Then, when the wormthew banes marched in for a routine shutdown of a deviant pit, the mass of eelstitched overpowered them, restraining them, turning them to so much breeding stock. An army amassed. Only the Wormthew could control them, but every time they go in, you court a failure, and every eeled Wormthew made the problem so, so much worse.
(Perhaps some began to understand what it had felt like to fight a war against the Third Dominion.)
Now, eelstitched could never match high level vesperbanes. Cutting down hundreds of coordinated bodies could get nightmarish, but the most powerful vesperbanes were themselves nightmares. It would take one word spoken in the morning to clan matriach Thanata Thimithi, and by nightfall a metastatic eeling pit would be nothing but steam and charred bodies.
No, destroying the pits wasn’t the problem. Or rather, it was — destroy the pits, and how many resources had you cost the Dominion? What happened if the eels abducted important people — remember, modern eelstitched were still alive. You could remove the eels. Shouldn’t you save those lives?
This was the dilemma that made the eel wars so agonizing.
Years passed, deviations accelerated, and the Dominion lost entire cities before the calculus became clear. The Dominion rose because of the eelstitched. But if it clung to them, continued to rely on them? It would fall to them.
A secret council, a consultation with the angels, and the decision was cast: the Wormthew clan, whether they planned this or not, were traitors to the Dominion. In 1548, a purge began.
The clan fought back. Simple self-defense. Immediately, the purge worsened the eel wars, because a Wormthew could flee to an eeling pit and deliberately turn its recurive processes to expansion. If a deviant pit was a threat, try a pit with actual, malicious intelligence driving it. But again, the Third Dominion had the Thimithi, a clan with secret techniques specifically designed for mass extermination. It wasn’t a question of if they’d win the eel wars, but what it’d cost.
Eeling Pit #59 lies near the southern coast of the heartlands. The eels swam in a resevoir of water siphoned from a river rushing to the sea. Centuries ago, that resevoir was built and provided water to the capital city of Wingrav. It had a new name now, sacked in the great war, but more bugs now — the Third Dominon liked to pack populations tight.
As the purge reached a climax, the last matriarch of the Wormthew clan, battle-queen Welgauth of Two Bodies, fled to Pit #59.
Welgauth had hatched from her mother’s third brood, but bested every elder daughter in sworn duels. To appearances, she is the first Wormthew to master possession, but a component of her Two Body Technique relied on umbracognition to send orders an oathbound slave. In her rout to Pit #59, Welgauth pushed the Two Body Technique further than ever, possessing dozens of her family.
They traveled in the dark of night, and dug a secret underground chamber, entrace beneath the waters of the resevoir. The telltale sign of a deviant eeling pit was a spike in activity, so Welgauth carefully controled the eel population and stitched production — if anything, growth and output seemed to slow.
The matriach used all the subtlety of a spy master to lure in bodies through partial possession. She grew her horde unseen deep in the waters of the resevoir. All this stealth, she knew, only bought her time — the Dominion was done with eels, and every pit would be cleansed by year’s end. It was a matter of time. But all she needed was time.
You seen, the Wormthew clan — or rather, the Gildenighter clan — were proud of their history, and never forgot it They recounted the stories in private. Before the Third Dominion, before the fall of the old Alliance, before any Queen’s Eels, the Gildenighter clan were oathbound to pharmacia, and manipulated arete accounting. They were spellbinders, and the first techniques ever passed down through the clan were for writing contracts.
Gildenighter had pride. When the vespers cursed their line, they could have renounced their name to be free of it. When the Alliance sought execution, an exception existed — they would withdraw the blade, and allow you to walk away, stripped of your name and vespers. When the clan wandered for generations without a home, they could have forgotten their history.
But the Wormthew clan was composed of all those who did not, and Welgauth was the greatest of them.
Here, in Pit #59, on with the might of the Third Dominion coming to undo everything they’d reclaimed, the matriach did the unthinkable.
Welgauth signed a contract reliquishing their veritanym, their clanwealth, all their technical property. The Gildenighter clan was never noble, and now their pretensions were null and void, and everything bound to that name was now the right of all vesperbanes.
But remember — the vespers cursed that name. That name was no more. Thus, the curse could be gifted like all of the relinquished wealth.
The final act of Welgauth of Two Bodies was drafting a particularly tricky contract, a trap. A curse fell upon anyone who dared consume her blood.
And remember, the Queen’s Eels were spawned of blood. Through this masterfully written contract, anyone whom the eels infected ran afoul of its trapped clauses. Once, the eeling procedure had been deemed ineffective on vesperbanes — now, within the waters of Pit #59, it become immediately crippling.
Welgauth couldn’t hide the growing biomass forever, and once she’d sworn her last oath, she no longer needed to. When the extermination squads arrived in early 1549, eels slithered into their bodies. Prepared for this, the exterminators immediately casted techniques to resist the eeling procedure. It worked, and the eels died. Then the contract triggered, and the banes succumbed rapidly to Egalgen’s curse, muscles rotting, nervous system atrophying. Helpless, the next eels slithered in, finding no resistance.
Command called off the extermination squads, and the strategists dithered over what to do, piecing together the situation. They couldn’t send vesperbanes anywhere near the pit. Stiched still plucked laybugs from the countryside, and the city that drunk from the resevoir found eel eggs in the water. They erected a banestone wall around the ruined city, declared its citizens already dead. Guards shot dead anything that shambled near the border of the Wingrav Exclusion Zone. Then they waited.
Welgauth never emerged from the depths. But vesperbanes struck by the contract never emerged from the depths, either.
When haruspices were called in, and their readings confirm the theory. Within those walls — populated only by lurching zombies, bloody worms and a few minds left paralyzed, watching, and remembering — lies the Augron crepuscule, a confinement zone for a leechbreeding taboo.
But it’s better known today as the City of Eels.