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.

• affliction. essentially, magic cancer. sometimes your vespers just get sick, profoundly sick, and shit goes badly wrong
• contradiction. you break too many oaths (or the fundamental oath, the septagrammaton), and are punished. this one is usually pretty boring; mostly the vespers just eat you, or sometimes they eat your pineal gland and turn you into a mindless animal, perhaps influenced by their will
• malediction. haruspices can achieve this various certain high level curses. nasty stuff, but pretty similar to the above
• transgression. this is what we’re really concerned with a transgression is when you do something that’s not technically against any oaths (well, some translations of the septagrammaton are pretty broad…), and the vespers hotfix a judgment.

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

• world​-​ending threats. this is believed to be the reason for the crepuscule of Dlann, the archtitan, which resides in the Annihilation Arts Exclusion Zone
• vesper tampering: new means of breeding vespers are often excluded, as are attempts to meddle in the fundamental nature of vespers. (famously, this is the theory that explains the Bogs of Eden, as well as lesser known zones like the easily​-​confused pair of Meta​-​Vesper exclusion zone and Mega​-​Vesper Exclusion Zone)
• ichor virulence. this is a difficult theory to formulate, because it needs to explain why plagues and myxogoths aren’t excluded. but there’s a certain compelling similarity between the Black Pudding EZ (failed myxogoth breeding experiment), the Hemotechtonic EZ (the titan Tzic’zahd attempted to pump magma through her veins), and the
• mental influence. this explains the smiting of God​-​empress Oosifea (though theorized, the National Henosis EZ has never been discovered), the Whalesong EZ, and the abominable City of Eels
• unchecked growth: dont have examples offhand, but i can imagine some crazy fungus growth would go here

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

• non​-​confined crepuscules. the chief example is the hemotectonic. the hemotectonic is an EZ because that’s where tzic’zahd is, and she can no longer move, and all its phenomena are originate in her. in general, there are a number of zones that are simply focalized to some source that could move, but simply doesn’t. the crepuscule has no ability to actually enforce the confinement; it happens naturally
• soft confinement: think about the Dwimmermeal EZ. what actually makes it an EZ? if you try to create a dwimmermeal, it’s tabooed and your vespers delete the instruction. if you take a grubsucker form the zone, it dies and decomposes. overall, these effects can be modestly replicated: taboos require nothing but coordination among vespers. grubsuckers are made by vespers, so of course the vespers can just designed them to self destruct at certain compass cordinates. what’s important here, is there’s nothing metaphysical about this zone; in a certain sense, it’s a “fake” EZ

(||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||)

• hard confinement: the omicron EZ is the foremost example of this. you cannot derive omicron​-​nrv anywhere; the reactions don’t seem to work. if you create omnicron​-​nrv in the zone, attempt to bring the mass pass the zone boundary results in force applied on the mass, dragging it backwards. hard confinement is rare, and seems to exclusively confine things that are, well, easy to confine. there are plenty of zones where enervate species are confined. there’s a zone where a certain radioative isotope is confined. there’s even a zone where a protein is confined. attempted to synthesize it outside the zone will see it dissolve, albeit with some delay.

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.