Black Nerve

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

Notes on Crepuscules

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

a question one might ask is why crepuscule? if vespers dont like a technique, why not stamp it out entirely? why set aside a few square miles where it can run free?

after decades of theorizing and debate, one of the most compelling explanations is a compromise. sure, vespers “want” to punish the bane who transgressed against their vision, but every bane is host to number of vespers. those vespers have “rights”. crepuscules are rarely sudden things. endowments are beautiful things tot he vespers, and the means to perform some transgressive technique might’ve been the work of years, their entire life. how any vesper feel, if their magnum opus, the endowment that was supposed to go down in the arete records and their shining accomplishment, turned out to be a tool of transgression, not through any of fault of your own (to the extent vespers have faults), but the manipulations of their hosts?

crepusules are allowed to exist as a mercy to the vespers who unwittingly brought it about

(what judgment undergirds what gets crepuscularized and what does? some theorize vespertine ‘arbiters’ that make such judgment, many counting them seven in number, their brain matching patterns (seven nymphs of the dream; seven laws in the septagrammaton). no conclusive evidence of arbitraries has arisen. some believed the archons, figureheads of a bat cult in the waning days of the myriad kingdoms, had the power of creating crepuscules at will. only myths of archons survive, their existence is debated, and their feats are considered alongside those of other messianic figures.)

the other question to ask is how.

in this sense, there are three types of crepuscular confinements

(||the text also describes the dwimmermeal crepuscule as causing darkling beetle cordyceps to just not work anywhere outside the zone. i’ve got nothing; idk how they actually manage that. will prolly retcon that||)

what unifies these effects is that every target of hard confinement is something with a particular oscillation mode that can be targeted

the source of hard confinement is difficult to understand, partially because the most promsing theories hinge on planar physics, those enervate fields which permeate the whole planet. a notoriously difficult thing to get research clearance for, because the elemental planes are forbidden topics.

indeed, hard confinement is believed by many to be a phenomena almost unrelated to the vespers — at best, they are believed to be able to occasionally call upon it, but certain confinements seem to predate the development of agriculture, and several have seemingly no relation to aretology.

what is the force behind hard confinement? certainly no arthropological power.