Black Nerve

The blood of vesperbats is restless.

The order chiroptera is known to have resilient immune systems, but vesperbats are a cut above, having striven and lost in evolutionary arms races against parasites and pestilences of supernatural virulence.

Tempered in that forge, the blood of vesperbats poses almost as much a danger to it as it is to what would harm its host. Almost.

Vesperbats surpass every creature in regeneration‍ ‍—‍ wounds torn open will visibly stitch themselves shut, sundered limbs will be reattached mid‍-​battle, and if left severed, will fruit wriggling stumps within an hour.

But the attack it cannot heal, one which can make a vesperbat bleed without reprieve, should stir real fear. But not in the bat.

Vesperbat blood is restless, and it does not find rest when shed from the body‍ ‍—‍ no, being outside flesh unchains it. It is the blood that carries regeneration. Pools of the bats’ blood grow larger even when left untouched, and a slickness on the blade will reach out for its wielder.

And when the blood finds and entraps something living? There is a reason batslayers do not go for the jugular. The blood of vesperbats is hungry, and it will consume you.

Among the bats, it is law: wounds should be cauterized, and spilt blood should be burnt. (And it will turn to hot, hot flame; this oily blood burns with all the restless energy that stoked growth.) This cleansing flame is an imperative. But if one fails this imperative? Most of the time, nothing happens…

But the blood is hungry, always hungry, and if it finds something to eat, it can grow and persist. It’s a blind, deaf, mute thing. But it can smell, better than anything else alive. And it is as effective as any slime mold.

A blood mass like this is evolution let unleashed. Every cell must do its part, fight for its own survival, or be replaced by one that does it better. A blood mass has stem cells, and all the genes of a vesperbat. Given enough time, it will remember how to construct bone, flesh, muscle, fat, nerve… gamete…

Even a bat centuries old fears a myxogoth.

There is but a single mercy. Vespers do not live in the blood, and their endowments aren’t shed when they bleed. But it is known, the secret of every profane vesperbane, that all it takes to nurse a vesper is bat blood upon a vespermalum…

Gods, if gods can hear, let an envespered myxogoth never appear.

Introduction 

What is ichor?

The blood of vesperbats, yes, the crimson flow that crawls from the wounds of direbeasts, of course. But pray tell, what is the blood of bats?

Why is the touch of ichor sufficient to turn a maned wolf into a voracious direhound? Why can a vesperbane eat their weight in meals without bloating a pound? Why, really why, does the word “myxogoth” strike utmost terror in the heart?

Even these powers are less perplexing than its limitations. If the blood of bats is so endlessly mutable, why does it recoil from the brain specifically? Why is it impotent to alter the trees of weevils? Why, after millennia ichorblooded, do bats and beasts cling steadfastly to their natural forms, if anything is possible?

Because every mother bat loses her child, a sacrifice‍-​gift remembered with each pulse. Because a bat has betrayed its brother before he even draws breath. Because the hunger of red ichor is a pale imitation of the attenuation of black nerve.

The lore of bats is old, older than any reliable history recorded in the heartlands or the lands beyond. The only kind who can tell the story are the ambrosia weevils, remembering millennia in the roots of the world.

Weevils don’t often speak of the matter, and never in any detail. But before deathless ovitheions ruled the temperate broadleafs, before foolish empires of termites destroyed the dry tropics, before grassland mantes first cried tears of sapience, the weevils rode upon bats and loved them.

i. 

Hanging from the boughs of ambrosia galleries, feasting on treats cooked by the weevils and their attendent gestalte bees, devouring any bugs that intruded upon their nest, the ancestors of bats had flourished with ascent of insect civilization. Though each viewed the other as a helpful pet, neither could claim mastery. The wicked teeth and claws of a bat could rend the shells of any insect, while the ever more clever tools of weevils and bee gestaltes, wielded by swarm, had put many bats from the sky into the ground.

Weevils cloistered themselves in galleries of cultivated tree and funga. While trade with bees, ants, or roaches offered luxury and efficiency, the fruits of rotten trees alone could sustain a weevil colony. But every colony would one day wane, and every foundress dreamed of her daughters spreading far and wide. The queens of ants and bees could fly, but weevils, thrice their size, had lost flight.

Travel by land was perilous‍ ‍—‍ legions of reaver ants marched forever on campaign; euvespids hunted in vicious packs; and therids lay cunning web‍-​traps. To say nothing of the bats of the wild, or anteaters, or bears. Cutting a path to a new gallery site required the finest weevil‍-​warriors, and death still came as companion on every venture.

When a new gallery was founded, the first eggs were layed, and the first spores inoculated the wood. The first fungal harvest always yielded an entheogen, and through it, the foundress witnessed revelation, her theogony. This ritual bound a foundress to her gallery, making her its owner, or slave, or partner in marriage. Her daughters might recapitulate it, binding themselves in miniature to become priestesses. This marriage of a mind to something greater redefined a weevil‍ ‍—‍ the word is untranslatable, but poets call it the metamorphosis of the soul.

All of this was to say, bats were not steeds to weevils. To the bats, weevils were useful pets. They would never allow themselves to be reigned and directed by small bugs, a mere source of food. But among the foods offered by their pets were the myriad mixtures of ambrosia cultivated by weevils.

A bat would never allow themselves to be ridden, but if they partook of the entheogen? If they underwent that metamophosis of the soul? They were no longer a bat, and the name for this was the etymology of the word dragon. In turn, the priestess, a partner in this marriage or submission or enslavement became a weevil dragonrider.

Together, they were one being, with wing and weapon, speaking and stridulating, commanding both bat and bug. A dragonrider and her army could war with the perils of the land and survive. Their dominance was such that any skilled dragonrider soon had ambitions beyond simply scouting a nesting site.

They toured the land, seeking glory and adventure, vanquishing threats, making allies and enemies. All to prove their worth. A rider sung her deeds at every gallery she visited, and once she impressed a foundress, the foundress may consent to grant the rider a pick of her sons and take one to a courtship chamber.

Every story of the deeds and sufferings of dragonriders glows with the overbright sensibilities of myth. And there is reason to dismiss all of this as mere legend. Pyramids and megaliths and cave paintings persist in every continent of the heartlands, and every single one had been conceived after the supposed golden age of dragonriders. To believe they ever existed is to place one’s faith in the profound durability of weevil records. They claim their records woven into the roots of the world. Indeed, ancient galleries separated by vast oceans do agree in cosmogony. But to accept this as fact? Foolishness. To admit the possibility? One must concede it reasonable.

But granting any of this… whatever happened to dragonriders? These ancient bats bleed the blood of beasts, rather than ichor, the hypervital blood of endless growth and hunger.

Weevils claimed the cursed blood of bats as their oldest mistake. But before we recount that story, bereft as it is of proper and believable rigor, let us discuss some facts won by modern knowledge‍-​hunters

Any animal that feasts on bugs is poised to inherit some dim reflection of its intelligence, and modern bats are the greatest insectivore of all, preying on every great arthropod. Noetic hormones are a catalyst for cognition, and bugs evolved them first. Not an easy adaptation, and not a cheap metabolism. So arises the niche of sapiovore.

Bats, more than any other beast, needed to eat bugs. Flight burns more calories than any other mode of travel. Bats big enough to feast on noubugs, big enough for a weevil to ride, loomed vaster than any other bat or bird.

Most sapiovores simply rely on their prey to synthesize their nouetics, but bats metabolize the nous into black fat: an exceptionally dense and efficient energy store.

Where did the weevils come in, though? The weevils cultivated ambrosia, a fungus that synthesized nouetics. Between weevils being the first arthropod civilization (domesticating severals bugs the bats might feast on), and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their fungal gods, and the potency of ambrosia itself, ancestral bats would have eaten well. For fitness as steeds and war‍-​mounts, weevils would breed them ever larger, rendering the black fat adaptation ever more refined.

Weevil priestesses once practiced a whole repertoire of now‍-​forbidden rituals they claim harnessed “wild magic”. Prostrating themselves toward the black moon tenebra, they sought divination and wisdom and subtle power, calling down filaments from the aethershade. One of these rituals, now forbidden, is the dragonrider pact.

Before she bled the first drop of cursed blood, before she became the mother of ichor, a young bat bonded to a priestess. Together, they fought hundreds of battles, with a tour that visited every weevil gallery in the known world. Their unbroken chain of victories is remembered with awe even millennia later.

But every rider’s adventure ends, in either death or birth. The rider chose birth, and retired to her own gallery, laying eggs to be guarded by her dragon. Given their status, the gallery is flush with trade and pilgrims and even fellow riders and priestesses arrived to pledge fealty. The gallery became the grandest in the land, and the dragon who made it all possible was lavished with all riches one could afford.

The rider mastered arts of magic as well as war. Between her skills and access to lore from the farthest reaches of the world, she attained the rarest art among weevils: metempsychosis, the transmigration of an elder priestess into the body of a young initiate. Weevils were the first immortals.

The rider, though, would not move on to a new body unless it could bond with a bat. She wanted a new adventure, and more than that, she wanted her next partner to be the child of her first.

So the dragon takes a mate, but autumn after autumn, estrus after estrus, no litter was born. The rider’s body begins to falter in old age. Then one year, through the rider bond, she senses the hormonal change‍ ‍—‍ it had taken. Months past, the pups grow in the womb. It seemed it would be a small litter, but at last: hope.

Even this small litter exacts a toll on the mother‍ ‍—‍ she’s wracked sick in her pregnancy, unable to even fly. The hope is tempered until the fate is undeniable: miscarriage.

Weevils would prostrate themselves before the black moon, seeking divination, wisdom, subtle power. Weevils never spoke directly of the costs, the nature of the boons, the why of their offering. But reading the stories they tell, one can infer the silent conclusion that it is a cruel god they invented.

Priestesses prostrate themselves, but dragons had underwent a similar metamorphosis. Their minds are intertwined with their masters‍ ‍—‍ the rider of the mother of ichor had mastered the arts of magic. The mother could sense her partner’s desperation, and grieved the loss of her child.

That desperation alone hadn’t been sufficient for the old rider to call upon wild magic‍ ‍—‍ perhaps owing to wisdom that bats lack, or perhaps the personal grief was the crucial element.

But blindly, the mother imitated the motions of a priestess in tenebrous ritual.

On a night when the black moon rose, magnified in shadow like many dark wings unfolding, the mother sunk into the waters of a still lake. Waters vast enough they felt the pull of the tide. Wild magic was invoked, and a singular will expressed: save my child.

(Here’s what the weevil don’t say, only imply: every moon’s gift is a moon’s curse.)

That night, ichor stirred in the mother’s womb. She was not the last dragon, but it was then when the age fell to cadence.

ii. 

A weevil telling this story might fall to profound, self‍-​satisfied silence there. Yet how much of that was invention and distortion? Can one attribute the exceptional complexity of ichor to the work of a single beast on a single night? It makes for a good story‍ ‍—‍ because it feels like fiction.

Still, there is sense to be made, even without weevil superstition about moons and magic, even without supposing any character of this story ever truly lived. We know enervate suffused the bodies of ancestral bats, we know weevils lived alongside them long enough to breed them and feed them quite well… and we know enervate is a carcinogen.

Maybe it only took a few lucky mutations in the right place, persistent selection at the right time.

Whatever the transitional form between bats as a natural creature and as an ichorhost looked like, the in utero development modern bats still undergo certainly suggestive.

As embryos, a rare birth defect persists among bats. Zygote becomes blastomere becomes morula. Cells split and then split again and then again. Sometimes, they never stop splitting, never fold themselves into a fetus.

A myxoma sucks nutrients through the umbilical cord, feeding on the mother’s blood. Bats are born in litters. It’s not rare for a mother to bear half a dozen pups. If one of them deviates into a myxoma, though, it will consume its siblings. Mutations are mercurial things, and no myxoma is quite alike. A myxoma might grow and grow until it metastaticizes and kills the mother from within. The immune system might strike early, and dispose of it. But neither of those possibilities would persist. The route of selection, then, is a myxoma with a leashed, patient hunger. Even a myxoma that merely stops at eating its siblings has failed‍ ‍—‍ should a mother give birth to a tumorous mass, it will surely be devoured or disposed of.

No, the successful myxoma is one that spares a single sibling and clings fast to its body as it develops. It’s almost analogous to a vanishing twin, but most myxoma worm themselves into the internal organs, secluding themselves safely inside a sac‍ ‍—‍ a placenta within a placenta. Then the lone pup is born as a chimera, body composed of two cell lineages.

A newborn myxoma is a parasite. It siphons nutrients from the host. Attaching near the heart, it cannot be removed without killing the host. It weighs down attempts to fly, it stokes hunger like a tapeworm, and it invites sickness as it wrestles with the immune system.

But remember, you cannot adapt without replicating. If a myxoma is a disease, there is a treatment. Call it a cure, or appeasement. The ritual of the red tryst, as practiced by bats, allows copulation, both for the bat and the myxoma. Through laceration of the genitalia, a myxoma can receive bloodborne fertilization.

And like that, parasitism becomes symbiosis. The myxoma relents, now a far less demanding, far less afflicting passenger in the body. Through hormone washes, the host can grow bigger and stronger. But more importantly, the immune and repair systems are augmented with the myxoma’s own cells. Having diverged in the womb, the myxoma never specialized its stem cell lineages.

The ritual of the red tryst grants a bat fertile blood, capable of regenerating from anything. This is ichor.

Once fertilized, a female myxoma in a female host can transfer its zygotes to the uterus‍ ‍—‍ and note that there is no difference between a myxoma’s gametes and a bat’s: they are, after all, the same species. For propagation, myxomata have adapted to trigger myxoma formation in pregnant hosts, but it’s entirely possible that by random chance, a myxoma’s egg is what grows into the pup and one of the hosts’ egg instead develops into the myxoma. Like this, the phenotypes remain intertwined, and never diverge into different species.

At its core, a myxoma is a domesticated cancer.

What a myxoma offers may seem marginal compared to the costs, but it’s crucial, as the weevil batriders decline. (A theory: myxoma‍-​heightened metabolism increased nouetic consumption to fuel black fat production, starving bat brains of a nous‍ ‍—‍ myxomata became mutually exclusive with the dragonrider pact.)

But remember, bugs adapted to noetics first. Sapiovores necessarily arose later, with less time to adapt. In terms of raw mass, more enervate suffuses a bat than any creature short of a forest‍-​engulfing ambrosia cultivar. And enervate is not kind to biology. Weevils were wise and adept in the ways of black nerve, but now lacking masters to tend to them, bats might all but melt into deliquescent puddles of enervate the further they age.

But a myxoma can adapt faster than bats can. Here’s a quirk of their physiology: a myxoma can pull its kindred spawn out of a womb about as easily as it slips its eggs in, and a mother may be willing to share a host with her children. This means that a single bat might host generations of myxomata. Myxomata stem cells enhance regeneration, and with time to breed, they can learn to do even more.

We should touch on a nuance of myxoma reproduction. Remember, myxoma and bat are the same species, and bats are disexual. Myxomata, then, can be male or female, bearing sperm or egg. Helpful, then, for a receptive host to bear a receptive myxoma. So they prefer to attach to fetuses of the same sex. But not every litter will have a balance of sexes, and no biological process is perfect, certainly not one so recently evolved. Inevitably, then, there will arise “ambisexual” ichorbats, with a mismatch of inner and outer sexual characteristics.

Myxomata sex is hugely important‍ ‍—‍ a host attains fertile blood when their (female) myxoma is fertilized. Indeed, ichor is produced not by the myxoma, but by its children. This leaves male myxoma not only unable to know when they’ve reproduced, but physically incapable of producing ichor.

The answer is vampirism, or as we’d call it now, blood transfusion. A male is dependent on a female for ichor. Since fertile blood empowers the host, females are always a bit bigger and stronger on average, owing to a larger and more consistent ichorflow.

But remember, the sexes are more complicated than that. How do ambisexual bats fit into this picture? A mother transfers her myxomata nieces and nephews, and a bit of her ichor, to her children. An ambimale could attain fertile blood, but be incapable of bearing children, meaning all of that ichor remains in them. An ambifemale, though, not only requires transfusion, but with her myxoma’s lack of eggs, will bear whole litters with only the base rate of myxoma autogenesis.

As a result, there is a hierarchy to the four apparent sexes of ichorbats. Ambimales are the biggest and strongest, followed by females then males then ambifemales. Myxomata’s influence on hormones mean these sexes can be further differentiated.

Still, a myxoma offer more than sexual possibilities. Indeed, before concerns of reproduction come concerns of survival. Myxomata can achieve nothing unless their hosts satisfies their hunger for noetic metabolites. But without weevils to feed them ambrosia, what would bats eat?

Khitona abounds with noubugs, but of all the kinds, the only morsel quite as delicious as weevils or their ambrosia was the diamantes of the heartlands.

Still, hunting noubugs means contending with creativity and cleverness. Mantis warred with bat, and it was a hopeless resistance. Bats weren’t just fearsomely large, and they weren’t just apex predators. Even after striking down a bat, driving stone spear through the chest or closing a raptorial vise around the throat, the beast might lumber back to life. Sooner or later, a mantis would wonder why, and sooner or later, they’d find out. It was a hopeless resistance‍ ‍—‍ until it wasn’t.

The heart of a bat was a vile thing, tumorous and ornamented with stomachs and fetuses. Quite unlike the heart of any other beast. It still pulsated even when ripped out of its host. Some bugs might have tried to eat it. They died. It was a cursed thing, clearly, and killing it could halt a bats’ regeneration.

Sooner or later, a mantis might notice that if they simply removed it from a bat without destroying it, the bat died and the heart kept beating. A protective film of skin grew around the still‍-​thumping thing.

These corrupted hearts witheld secrets‍ ‍—‍ mantes would need to tear out the hidden lore deeper and deeper until the hidden weaknesses of bats bled free and clear. Science was millennia away, but magical thinking at times could approximate it. A mantid warrior might think to empower her weapon by drenching it in the blood of her enemy’s kin, harnessing the power of these corrupted hearts.

As it grew, a myxoma would split off a specialized lineage of cells. Ichorblast cells granted bats their healing factor. They coursed throughout ichor, traveling throughout the body as willed by the myxoma. An ichorblast could split off any cell type, save germ cells or copies of itself. A bat might have trillions of cells, but mere millions of ichorblasts, each one maintaining a small patch of cells.

Rip out of a chunk of bat flesh, and the ichorblasts would still strive to repair, right up to the point where it was starved of nutrients. Then the ichorblasts dehydrated and encysted themselves. The cysts wafted a powerful aroma to lure their host to consume and reintegrate them. After all, ichorblasts were precious: they couldn’t reproduce themselves, so the only way to get more was to birth a new myxoma.

Ichorblasts, then, were eager to reunite with their host. So when mantes poisoned their weapons with ichor dripped directly from the heart? It was teeming with cysts. When the blade found purchase inside a bat, those cysts were desperate to reside in a warm body again.

Except to this new body, it was foreign blood feeding and growing, no difference from a virulent bacteria. Like that, a war unfolded within the bat’s body. Defending and exploiting immune systems was one of the first things the myxomata had learned. It didn’t matter that the foreign blood was grossly outnumbered, as long it attritted some of the bats’ ichorblasts along the way. That meant small victory, at least for the mantes.

The bats strength had become their weakness; the mantes turned their blood into a weapon, a disease.

Now recall that myxoma fertilization was bloodborne. So if a male myxoma was ripped out of its host, was there any reason why it would not gush all its remaining sperm into every open wound, simply as a last, desperate gambit?

And if a bat was bleeding out from the diseased blades of mantes, if a female myxoma sensed that it would lose a war with the cyst‍-​borne invaders, why not mate with the infection? A future as poison for mantid blade might not be what you hoped for your children, but it was a future. It was persistence, and persistence led to adaptation.

Once there was a lineage of parasitic, infectious myxoma, traits were then selected. Sperm was merely the easiest to transmit, preadapted to travel and flow‍ ‍—‍ but an egg cell was the size of a speck of dirt. Like this, bat myxoma were seduced in treasonous courtship. Mantes provided the impetus, but innovation comes fast: myxoma learn to spread gametes through mucus and blisters. Thus, a plague that breeds.

But not a plague that afflicted bats‍ ‍—‍ a plague that was a bat.

iii. 

If myxomata were a domesticated cancer, all mantes had done was let it go just a bit feral. Ichorplague revised the balance of power. Mantes no longer fought back, imperiling bat hunts‍ ‍—‍ no, mantes now preyed on bats. Fur became clothing, bones became tools, wings became banners of war.

The black fat rendered to an oil. It burned with a foul smell, wafting enervate‍-​laced fumes, imparting food with a bitter taste. In moderation, bugs could survive it. As mantes triumphed on bats, they arguably became secondary sapiovores‍ ‍—‍ black fat concentrated those nouetic components. With adaptation, with high enough dosage, black fat‍-​derived cuisine had cognitive ramification. A warrior might grow addicted to the flesh of bats.

The hunts continued, but bats no longer flocked so numerously. Ichorplague reduced their numbers, yes, but even the bats that survived often did so through quarantine. Antisociality became a survival strategy. But they needed to risk contact to reproduce.

And ichorplagues seized this vector of attack. Myxomata easily controled hormones; how better to coerce a host to see out kin to infect than by stirring them into an early estrus or rut? So mates grew rare and choosy, sniffing out signs of infection. Mucus and blisters turned ineffective, but spreading as venereal disease was easier to hide.

Myxomata‍ ‍—‍ the ones that remain‍ ‍—‍ work with immune systems to fend off invaders. It was a war waged with chemical senses and chemical weapons‍ ‍—‍ it was an arms race, plagues growing ever stealthier, ever more resilient. But was it a war, or a test? Unlike a true disease, these plagues didn’t have interests entirely opposed to the host. A myxoma might prefer to protect its host, its closest relative, but if a plague can prove its fitness, well, the myxoma has that same loyalty to its own children. They might have better odds.

The thing about needing to devise ever better means of propagation and infiltration means that ichorplagues have become very adaptable. And plagues were kin to myxoma, who healed their hosts. So when a plague achieved victory, why not alter the host for its own ends? Make them more beautiful, make them stink of fragrant pheromones, and drool with infectious gametes?

It was one thing to be hunted by mantes‍ ‍—‍ but to be hunted and parasitized by your own kind? Times were bleak for bats. Plagues were much more interested in reproducing and spreading further than hunting, so under their ministrations, bats blissfully starved, as fetuses hatched from blisters and bleeding eyes stink of perfume and sperm. They courted extinction in the most literal way possible.

This was the affliction called apocalypse.

While it spelled an end drawing near for wild bats, some bats could persist. But not with any dignity.

You see, mantes were as hungry for black fat as they were frustrated by bats’ new elusive scarcity. But why keep hunting them? Why not catch them, and raise them as cattle?

The easiest bats to catch are those already plaguestricken, little more than sacks of myxoma. A sweet deal, for the myxoma; mantes feed them all they could hunger for, and they even extracted the corrupted hearts before slaughtering its host. For a time, myxomata flourished.

Once, weevils had ruled the world; they faltered, and bats ascended; now they faltered, and perhaps it was time for mantes to advance. The black fat made their minds keen. They fashioned new tools, and put enervate to new purposes. The kennels grew ever larger, ever denser.

In the wild, the flagging of the bat population put the plagues at a crossroads. Perhaps they could have adapted not to monopolize the hosts’ resources, to not be universally fatal. That would mean less reproduction, though. If it was necessary, perhaps it had to happen‍ ‍—‍ but it wasn’t necessary.

Plagues had gotten very good at subverting immune systems, adapting to the various inner conditions and challenges of a host. If anything, plagues had an easier time jumping to a new species than wooing a myxoma playing hard to get.

In general, mammals had the most compatibility, with the warm bodies that suited myxomatic metabolism. Soon, mantid warriors encountered anteaters, maned wolves, and rats that healed from flesh wounds as the bats had, whose hearts were bloated and tumorous. So they added these direbeasts to the farms.

Consider this. How did mantes achieve their victory over the bats? They turned it into a plague. Ichor was domesticated cancer, and they let it go just a bit wild. But cancer never stopped growing, and plague never stopped spreading.

And ichor never sated its hunger.

Mantes feed and breed the bats and direbeasts. The myxoma flourish (they even extracted the hearts). The ichorplague had learned to infect any species. Descendents of bats had learned to adapt to any condition.

It wasn’t a question of if bugs could get infected with ichorplague, but how well they mitigated and quarantined themselves. Bugs were clever, (their minds had grown keen, and they fashioned new tools), but they had farmed a lot of blood (they had grown addicted to the black fat), and the fundamental nature of a bat was that it was larger than a bug, (it ate them).

So there was a bat who ate that all the mantes feed it, and its blood was still hungry. So it ate the other bats in the kennel with it, and its blood was still hungry. So it cried out, and the mantes came to prod it to be quiet. It spat on them, and its bloody saliva infected them. They grew weak, as blood ate them from within. The red and black fluid leaked from cracks in their shells, and it flowed into the bat’s cage, and the blood rejoined its host. But not all of it. The blood was as adaptable as it was hungry, and it didn’t just flow, it crawled. Into other cages, where it ate other bats, and ate rats and wolves and anteaters and hippos. Into other farms, where it ate beetles and aphids and grasshoppers. Farmhands cleaned up the mess, and it ate roaches and ants and more mantes. Warriors came to kill it, but it had many myxomata and it healed and healed (which made the blood even hungrier). The blades were poisoned with others’ blood. Between the other blood and the many wounds, the bat might die‍ ‍—‍ but the blood was still hungry, and it pulsed in so many other bodies. It pulsed, and it crawled, and it adapted, and it was still hungry.

A myxogoth is life in excess, so much it becomes lethal. It is ravenous, infectious, and ever‍-​changing. Every drop of it is both a mouth opened and an egg brooded.

A myxogoth heals and adapts and keeps growing‍ ‍—‍ but a myxogoth will burn.

To understate history, early mantid civilization was not prepared for this ultimate metamorphosis of ichorbats. No bug was. It is tempting to imagine a red tide engulfing Khitona, but it was so much subtler than that. Fleeing mantes might set foot in myxogoth‍-​conquered land without even realizing it. Then a passing beetle sipping at a pond’s waters would split down the middle to reveal pulsating hearts; or a duck melted into viscera and crawled away as a swarm of rats; or you turned to warn your fellow bugs and discover their eyes have changed color.

What was the affliction called apocalypse? What was it really? At a certain point, mutation and selection and adaptation of infectious forms reached an inflection point. The point where an ichorplague became the affliction called apocalypse was when it achieved recursion. What is the diagnosis? A self‍-​modifying disease. The case was terminal.

It may be arthopomorphism to suggest this affliction called apocalypse, the great myxogoth, was ever self‍-​aware. But indulge the hypothetical, consider the possibility, and ask then what. The blood was hungry, and longed to consume the whole world, to infect and transform every beating heart and synchronize it to one corrupt pulse. To adapt and adapt and subject all and everything to a unimaginable metamorphosis. Suppose this was not instinct, not accident or emergence, but ambition. Then what?

What words, spoken in dialogue with plagues, could plead a cure?

All we’ve discussed in this account has been reconstruction, theorizing, tracing millennia of causation to remotest dawn of history. But that we’re able to ask these questions suggest that somehow, we averted this fate. Bugs still walk upon Khitona. Why? How?

Consider the problem. What gambit, whether persuasive or offensive, could possibly succeed? Mantes ripped out the hearts of bats until their weakness dripped forth, but ripping out the heart of a myxogoth yields another myxogoth.

It was, to appearances, a superior form of life‍ ‍—‍ surely any power or virtue that might be leveraged to defeat the myxogoth would simply be subsumed into it.

Long ago, the weevils rode upon bats and loved them. Then a mother lost her child, and their corrupted hearts robbed them of the rider’s bond. And yet, when they reigned without masters, the bats chose to eat mantes, not weevils‍ ‍—‍ it’s plausible to believe that, in domesticating them, something innate in bats had adapted to love them.

Myxogoths are life in excess, superior organisms, and any power or virtue of others creature could be consumed and assimilated. But there are powers beyond life. Black nerve is death. The enervation of the mind, noetic hormones, can be consumed and metabolized to black fat. But in other creatures, it instead makes them keen, and they fashion new tools, make plans. So, what then was , the gambit, the rebuttal to this argument with affliction, the answer as to why and how bugs could survive?

Well, all this is reconstruction, theorizing, and our sources disagree on this point. Different species tell different stories.

Weevils say they sought to atone for the mistake that had birthed the cursed blood so long ago. A new creation to bind the virulent abomination. So they perverted the once‍-​sacred dragonrider bond, wielding forbidden rituals to craft something to limit the blood’s growth, and what it could create henceforth. The bats‍ ‍—‍ and plagueblood was a bat‍ ‍—‍ still loved the weevils, and they betrayed it.

The sun‍-​cutter king, lord‍-​father of all vesperbats, claimed the salvation as his own. A creation to bring myxoma and mantes back into subordination to their true masters. How did he do it? Ichor isn’t just hungry, it’s horny. The plagues of bats were always a form of courtship; the cure is commitment. Mastery of black nerve was the nuptial gift.

Mantid myths sometimes speak of a first sacrifice. A creation so enticing the all‍-​devouring demise would perserve the world so as to eat it forever. Self‍-​sacrifice is a bit out of character for the myths mantes tell about themselves, so we must imagine they at first thought they would win without nuance. Ever since first ripping the corrupt hearts out of bats and finding the source of bat vitality, mantes have coveted that power for themselves. The attempts killed them without exception‍ ‍—‍ until plagues learned to jump species, and the hope of chimerism rekindled. A diet of black fat had made mantid minds keen, almost as keen as the weevils’. Unlike other insects, mantes do not metamorphize, but neither did bats. Between the blood and the black, what might they become? That ambition both doomed them and saved them.

A firsthand account is the most difficult to interpret of all. With careful interpretation… The anamnesis asserts that they have always been passengers in their hosts‍ ‍—‍ parasites. Bat immune systems had to contend with more than myxomata, after all. Where myxoma had forsaken their hosts for new species, their kind could not. So to survive, they devised a covenant. Under it, they would benefit their hosts, securing the survival of both. Thus, a binding, of submission, or ownership.

Vesper means evening, the bridge that joins day and night. A vesper is a marriage of red ichor and black nerve, of life and death.

The last word spoken in dialogue with plagues was a proposal.

Or, if you prefer: