Stewartry
Greetings from the Vesperbane Stewartry.
You are receiving this letter in recognition of your outstanding performance on the highest level of the Syndic Civil Examination, and your particular responses on the psychological assessment. Estimates of your mental acuity score are over 50 (36 is average). This places you in the upper 1% of all mantids, (percipients and vesperbanes excluded).
For this reason, we would like to extend invitation for you to journey the nearest Stewartry college. There is one in every provincial capital. There you may enroll in a preparatory course before undertaking a final evaluation and becoming an initiate, and after years of study, gaining certification.
When you achieve your certification, the Stewartry offers a stipend of up to 250 bone piece monthly, and insurance against any ills that may befall you, and the honor of working among the brightest minds of the Pantheca towards its betterment.
After all, it is the Stewartry which upholds the Dream and it essential to the safety and health and peace of the Pantheca of All Mantiskind.
There are many paths available to you, if you choose to join us. Among the most prominent are:
- the hemotechnics who have mastered blood, and wield it for medicine and mending, promoting the recovery and flourishing of those from all walks of life. Those who follow this path must be of rigorous mind, able to attain a manyfold understanding of the mantid body and how it may go wrong.
- the dwimmerbanes who enchant lands and tools. They must have the cleverness and patience to design exacting mechanisms, and fix them when they fail.
- the rootnurses, fabricators of materials, capable of producing the hardiest armors and the most exquisite fashion alike. Given the time, they could build houses, or inanimate golems. And they can destroy. It takes a creativity and openness to be a rootnurse, and a certain indescribable quality.
And that’s hardly the all of them. There are metabanes, spellbranders, and keen-minded administrative banes. There are the knowledge-hunters who cultivate our understanding and weave new spells.
You need not worry if picking a single path is a daunting choice; you are given years to learn the arts, and may forego specialization even up till your countenancing.
Alliance laws dictates we must inform you that not all of your peers (roughly 80%) will survive to certification, but we’re sure that won’t be a problem for you. However, we must also inform you that by becoming a vesperbane you forego the right to ever becoming a syndic or represent a guild. Do consider this carefully; renunciation is common among vesperbanes.
All that aside, you would be a welcome addition to our ranks.
In service,
Arch-fiend Wanue, Frazermor College.
Wardens
Hark, child of the Pantheca.
All have been taught that when one has been saved by other, they have a duty which can only be fulfilled by rising up and saving yet another still. Those protected must protect another, and those who would ask for help should first help another.
The Vesperbane Wardens are the strongest among mantiskind. We have protected many; for all that we have saved and sacrificed, an offering is in order.
You are that offering.
The Pantheca is poised on the knife’s edge of chaos and death. Who upholds that balance? Who fights to deny those who would see it destroyed, see you destroyed?
The wilderness between towns is plagued with ravening monsters. In the shadows, renegades and defects plot. There are criminals and sabateurs in our cites, in your cities, bent to unravel what we all have coordinated to build.
The Wardens exist to keep the order and punish the wicked. To this end, we have been granted the awesome powers of the vespers. The blackbanes harness all the energic, destructive potential of enervation to craft magical bullets, blades and wards. The bloodbanes have turned their very bodies into weapons. Some of us can turn air, fire and lightning against their foes, and every day the inventive among us find stranger, more effective means of defense.
It takes years to turn recruits like you into able warriors. But when you are, you’ll be the among the guard stopping the criminals in the streets, patrolling the countryside for the safety of merchants, battling against treacherous renegades, vanquishing bat-birthed abominations, and defending the syndics.
The Alliance says we should tell you, not all of our hopefuls will survive our intense training. Less than one in eight, if you’re pessimistic. But we have no interest in the cowards who would be daunted by the failures of the unfit.
Will you defend the Alliance? Or would you lay and watch it wither?
Maverick Commission
The Maverick Commission sends you this letter because we know, and we’re interested.
We have no colleges or training grounds. Instead, we have mistresses and their apprentices. There is no hierarchy among mistresses; we’re a true syndicate and a true democracy, unlike the farce called the Alliance.
We are not defects, don’t worry. As any painter knows, a subject has no form without shadows, and we are the shadows.
You cannot buy or inherit your way into the Commission; it is up to a mistress if she will have you as an apprentice. Among those mistresses all hopefuls should be aware are:
- the Mistress of Shadows awaits days deep within the cold caverns of the western Black Tiaga. If you can find her, she will consider you.
- the Mistress of Savagery expects you to make your way to the isle in the lake of blood, bringing no clothes, no tool save a knife, and no affects of civilization. If you can hold your own amongst the crawling, hungry denizens of the island for a month, she will consider you.
- the Mistress of Murder claims an imposter sits on the throne in Wentalel. Dispose of them, and she will consider you.
- the Master of Misfortune dislikes the West Greenweb Trading Company and their arrogant refusal of a certain insurance. Make them regret it, and he will consider you.
- the Mistress of Lies has already deceived you. If you can fool one of her apprentices in turn, she will consider you
- the Mistress of Wiles has many apprentices and and many friends. she’ll consider anyone whom they recommend
- the Master of Minds seeks one who has seen the truth. If you know, he will likewise.
- the Mistress of Pets will consider anyone whom her familiar approves of.
- the Mistress of Artifice seeks a certain termite artifact reactive to the position of the travelling suns. Find it, bring it to her, and she will consider you.
There are a many mistresses besides these, too insignificant to bear listing. There are sure to be plenty in your province. If you’re too weak to be worthy of one of the esteemed mistresses — you probably are — one of those lesser mistresses may take you. There’s only a little shame in it; after all, the strong need the weak.
If any of this interests you, the mantis in the white mask will tell you where your local commission next will gather, and you may take the next step.
If it does not interest you, you may burn this letter and speak not a syllable of this to another soul.
In all cases, this letter will disappear. And if you break silence, so will you.
Oh, and a piece of wisdom: keep yourself safe. If we have to save you, you belong to us. Such is the hero’s right. This, you may tell others.
Vindicator’s Guild
The heartlands need you.
There is a parasite infecting these lands, and, just as a primitive doctor prescribes leeches, the powers that be have deemed them necessary to stave off some lesser ill.
We lack the foul cunning of they, but we have our own means and mission.
We are the Vindicators of Welkin, and we carry out the sacred duty of ridding the world of vespers and those they infest.
The premise of any life should be to at least keep a balance with the world, something even the low creatures of the world fulfil. Vesperbanes by nature subvert the scales. They kill mantids just by existing.
Every day lives are claimed in the vesperbanes’ games of power. Our nymphs are driven like beetles into the ranks of the Wardens only to be killed by the thousands to build their armies. Our land is scarred by the remnants of their transgressions even the vespers won’t allow.
But how can mere mantids stand against them? Vindicators are blessed from beyond. We have the engineered tools and defenses, steel that can shatter stone and umbral amalgams even the vesperbanes can’t achieve. We have the holy welkinflame which consumes the black nerve which courses through fiends.
And at night, we can see the victory of our empyrean conflagration shining from the ruins of the Third Dominion’s so-called “Capital Triumphant”.
We watch the watchmants, we are the ones who protect the common mantis from these incarnate demons who supposedly protect us.
But we are few, and unlike the Wardens or Stewartry, the Alliance is miserly in supporting us.
The heartlands ache, and the sacred duty calls.
Please, heed the call.
…
We will not waste words, and we will not belabor the obvious.
You want an answer, and we have answers. You loathe the secrets of this world. You hate the ignorance you were born into and the computational limitations of your mind. We offer you escape.
There are vast conspiracies under the façade. There are dark things dwelling and stirring in the minds and imaginations of mantiskind, conniving to fly free. Your suspicious were correct. You were not paranoid. You were not delusional. The world runs deeper than the depths, and like you, we long to descend.
It will hurt. Our insights are the finest scalpels and the bitterest pills. Your mind will break, but you are the part that will survive. You will need to become wizened and subtle. Your mind will be more cultivated than any monk, and put to better use.
Many claim to serve the Pantheca — the bureaucratic Stewartry, the dogmatic Wardens, the shadows Maverick, and the Vindicators — but we do the work no one else is capable of. Observing, archiving, anticipating.
The truth was not made in our image, and so we remake ourselves as the truth. If knowledge hurts, we will bear it. If knowledge threatens, we will mitigate. If knowledge is absent, we will find what belongs.
We dwell in places deeper, darker than the shadows. We are the Percipiency. Those who look will not find us. Those who understand will join us.