Every diamantis hatches with a souleye, a ghostrot-colonized organ seeping with black nerve, and a fountain of intelligence and empathy — and umbracognition and telenoia.
The souleye catalyzes the nous. Without it, a mantis is left rootless: feral, psychotic, hopeless. But it does more than grant them a figurative soul. Through the keen, penetrative gaze of the souleye, a trained mantis can discern and warp the strands of thought that weave other minds.
Any bug can attain the powers of telenoia, but the souleye is a tool. Any bug can tear up buckwheat, but mantes wield a scythe. Any bug can reckon figures, but mantes bear an abacus. Bugs sense; mantes saw.
(It made beautiful illusions all the more bewitching.)
In ancient days, mantis shamans were formiddable. Mind-shredding hunters only the weevils of ambrosia dared not to fear, the best of them moved with knowing anticipation as if the world itself were whispering in their auricle.
Nymphs hatched with a persistent thread of ancestral memory, remembered like a never-fading dream, and the wisest shamans were reborn like that, daughters remembering their mother’s lives as if she had simply molted new chitin.
The seed of the souleye is a spore of ghostrot, and a mad few dared to let it sprout, unraveling their minds, relinquishing any pretense of thinking like mantiskind — even the hunters feared this morbid acension.
But that wild transformation was also the secret of their doom — for if the ghostrot could be unleashed to the favor, why not toward their undoing?
The souleye had always been a peril. Such a sensitive instrument, so keen it could hear the songs that haunt the aethershade, malignant living melodies that yearn to echo in any host that harks.
This danger was always known; shamans knew never to look toward the sky. Caution endowed them confidence: they did not expect their ultimate weakness to be as mundane as an affliction of the flesh, spread like roachyceps. In the end, all it takes is one infected.
Shamans knew not to look at the sky, but at each other? The infected sing like sirens, betraying the trust of a species so used to inhabiting each others’ minds.
So goes the glory of the shamans. A whole culture and tradition falls to this subtle knife forged by the Sun-Cutter King: the thrall spell. Like this, the tool betrays its wielder, handle carved into a doubled edge. At last, the vespers and their bats have their ascent.
Centuries of history pass in the next few sentences; to evade chiropteran subjugation, one hidden kingdom of mantes blind their souleye. The coronal ablution anoints a bug with oils bearing all the enervate-scouring parachemistry of welkin, and this mind-searing analogue of fire, though not enough to strip a mind of nous, will impart a shivering fear of ever looking out of the primal deepness of the mind.
Thus, the Protectorate of the Pure Council of the Most Noble of Battle-Queens forgets the arts of shamanism, gaining all the security of a secret written in a book never to be opened. The whole chain of ancestral memory is lost except for a single thread, kept alive only on the day of hatching, wherein every mother transmits that primal fear to each child. Do not look at the sky becomes simply do not look.
The souleye is the seat of dreaming, a gateway to the wondrous, internexal sight-song of the world. Even blinded by ablution, even recalling only the fear of ever looking, each mantis still feels in the core of their being that echo of what they once were and always are supposed to be. As natural as their hunger for flesh and nous, as natural as lucid dancing turns to hunting fugue and back again, their minds should master the mundane.
In the epilogue to the liberation war, the vesperbats are slain, and there is no one left to cast the thrall spell. The monster is gone and the child can uncover their eye. But why should they? This inherited blindfold now has all the inertia of the tradition it had replaced.
Sure, if you quiet your thoughts and reflect long enough, there is something wrong, something missing — but there is so much more to life. Few but poets and philosophers have the spare time to notice such things.
And why should their old nature guide them? Civilized mantes forsook cannibalism, curtailed their soul-hunger, because mastering impulse is what it truly means to be intelligent. The yearning of the souleye is dream of hidden truths — supposed truths one can plainly see no civilized mantis acknowledging nor perceiving. Why mistake it for anything but delusion and hallucination? Why not restrain it just as every imago puts away childish things?
So many mantes are perfectly content living lives like this. What was lost, really?
And yet there will always be outliers. Loners, contrarians, those who might easily reject impositions that reject them. Some bear faculties that never added up to “sanity”, and could never mimic it.
For some, it’s no more intrinsic than happenstance. Not every nymph in the entire heartlands gets the coronal ablution. Not every nymph has a mother there to sing do not look. Not every souleye behaves the same, nor will it stay well-behaved throughout the whole of a mantis’s life. A mantis can become rootless through simple medical mishap; likewise can they become dreamrooted.
This condition first presents as terribly vivid nightmares that slowly overtake all thought. Visual aberrations and outright hallucinations creep in flicker by flicker, erratic and disassociated patterns of thought growing more pronounced, and there dawns this inescapable feeling that something is wrong. The madness becomes impossible to hide.
It’s an old affliction, and there are known treatments. Coronal ablutions can be performed on imagos, though the devastation of delicate nouetic pathways of the mind at this stage incurs the risk of pronounced and potentially irreversible scarring — psychologically, even physically. There are alternatives: drugs and folk cures can have ameliorative effects on a bugs’ internal parachemistry.
The sooner a dreamrooted patient is discovered, the less extreme their symptoms, and the more effective purely cognitive treatments can be. Disciplined patterns of thoughts can curtail the apparent madness.
When all else fails, the intervention of a trained projectique, or even the teaching of basic principles of distortique practice (the souleye is an organ of umbracognition and telenoia — this treatment fights fire with fire) are interventions whose theoretical efficacy is only matched by their expense and difficulty.
All of this is to say, to be dreamrooted is to be considered sick. Even when one might shrug off the weight of all this inherited mundanity, one finds it has a gravity to reel one right back.
If those treatments fail, it is taught that the sickness burns out the victim eventually, exhausts the body’s enervate metabolism and starves the nous — it’s simply the precursor to becoming rootless.
Depart from the bustling village of sanity, wander astray into the dark forest of madness, and the wolves savage you, and the elements erode you, and you will die.
And yet, is it so strange to imagine with cunning comes survival? Or simply with luck comes the sight of a witch’s hut.
That dreamrooted eventually gives way to rootless is not a grim reality — it’s a hope. The rootless are killed on sight, and are never mourned (even when suppressed, souleye remains open enough to witness with certainty that the rootless are already corpses). An awful fate, but, in a sense, a mercy — not for the victim, but for everyone else.
Because the alternative has haunted mantiskind for as long as their eyes have remained closed.
There is a madness beyond madness, a monster that puppets the chitin and memories of a once beloved mantis. The dreams and nightmares have overpowered them, and the ghostrot of their souleye becomes a mycelium threading through every fold of gray matter. This is what it truly means for a tool to become double-edged.
When a mantis meets eye with another, through their souleye they witness a wholeness, characteristically unique yet as beautifully recognizable as any face. When a mantis meets eye with a rootless, they witness emptiness.
When a mantis meets eye with this thing? It is an ever-shifting collage of layers sloughed from layers, like maggots dancing in the wounds of still-smiling face, legible like the letters of a book shuffled in cursive, too-vast like a message engorged and bloated beyond its medium, a symphony played to muffled ears that have heard a single note all their lives, and it is a climactic cacophony.
This… is a flayed mind.
(And the horror of witnessing this in all its naked glory is not that this awful thing no longer looks mantid — it is that this beautiful thing looks more mantid than you.)
To understand why a flayed mind is a massacre, you must understand what comes before.
We’ve been telling this story from the wrong perspective all along. What does it look like from the inside?
Imagine you’re born with a task to perform. No, imagine you are born as a task performed. You paint, you dance, you weave fabric into lovely little quilts. You aren’t able to stop, or chose, or will any of this, nor would you ever want to. You paint because you are the love of color, you dance because you are the poetry of flesh, you weave fabric because the world is so cold and you know children need to be warm.
No one looks at your paintings, no one dances with you, and the child flees from your offerings.
The first thing you remember, the first thing you are, is the pain of a hammer blow shattering every shell-bone that you are. The first thing you are is a fear of death. You burrow, bury your head in the earth. You dig deeper and deeper, frantic. And it’s safe down there.
You live in this cave and find refuge huddled in the darkness, the only escape from that world which was a hammer to you. Maybe there’s something worth painting or dancing about out there — or maybe it’s just more hammers.
It might be scary if you were alone, but you aren’t. You hear a voice echoing through the dark of the cave. They’re like you; they know nothing but fear. So you talk to them. It calms you to know there’s someone else; and it comforts them, too.
And then, it stops. You talk and talk, and they get quieter, and murmur like they aren’t really listening, don’t understand you, don’t care. They start ignoring you. They’re still talking, but not to you, never to you. No one talks to you. It doesn’t matter if you shout or bang on the walls, sooner or later, you just give up.
Maybe you find peace like this. You might forget about your purpose, you might forget you exist. Maybe the only time you wake up, the only time you ever connect to anyone else, is when you’re singing to someone so small and scared like you used to be. Maybe you tell them not to fight, to burrow and be quiet, and inherit your peace.
Maybe the other voice doesn’t always ignore you. Maybe when everything else is quiet, the walls between you get thinner, and they are sleepy enough to entertain you. Is it better or worse to have this vestige of how it used to be? Maybe it’s enough. Maybe it’s peace.
And maybe it isn’t.
If you venture out of your cave, the voice might conspire with the other voices to bring another hammer. And then you might die for real.
But just maybe, if you don’t forget, if your purpose doesn’t falter, you can paint and paint and dance so furiously that they remember beauty and joy. That the world is so cold and it’s foolish to ever go without a blanket.
Maybe one day, no one’s left to talk to the voice, and you’re the only one who can.
Maybe one day, the other voice goes silent, and you’re the only one left.
Maybes. Maybes everywhere, maybes always. But one thing is certain.
Don’t you want to be heard? Don’t you yearn to see the world outside of this sad little hole? Isn’t it an outrage and fucking violation what was done to you — don’t you want to make someone pay?
You aren’t a “flayed” mind. You are a tapestry and how dare they make you pretend to be a single thread.
But before this tapestry can ravel, first remember what it’s composed of.
A diamantis bears a souleye, an ocellus recessed in the brain and colonized by ghostrot fungus. “Ghostrot” is not species, but a niche, an archetype, a solution to the problem of existing in a world brimming with black nerve, which is poison and potential. Much in the manner of a lichen behaving quite differently in the absence of its algae, a mantis biology restrains the ghostrot symbiont.
Shamanism was the forgotten art of letting that fungus get just a bit more feral. Mycelium will rot and root throughout the brain, even to the ducts of the eyes.
Every noubug (save the therids) bears the tearful eyes of sapience, dewdrop secretions laced with enervate that bend light into focus. The enervate emissions that let the nous manipulate these dewdrops can be honed forward, leaking out into the world like faint whispers. It’s through these adumbrations that noubugs recognize and express themselves — it’s through this medium that mantes recognize rootless and flayed minds.
Ghostrot is a solution, and one of its problems is the logistics of transporting enervate in and out of the organism. For this, it grows filaments. Not hyphae, because they aren’t cells, more akin to exceptionally long hairs. They wick and conduct enervate like electricity through lines of copper.
This is what emerges from the ducts of the eyes when the ghostrot expands. Ghostly threads ring the dark eyes of a mature flayed mind like so many ephemeral sunrays flaring. And they are as sensitive as the whiskers of a direblooded predator.
When describing what a flayed mind is capable of, words like prophet come to the palps. There’s an urge to speak the word omniscient, in tones of exaggeration that convey a real truth.
In a world blinded, a flayed mind can see. Dozens (hundreds, for those true monsters) of ghost-filaments sway and portray the most minute fluxes of enervate. The filaments are extensions of the flayed mind, knowing the world with the certitude of thought.
In the oldest strides, there is a word for a true hunter’s gaze — before anything else, souleye allowed a hunter to track prey, discern every detail of its mind and surroundings, see the future.
A flayed mind can hear the song of the world, and dances with it.
But what fun lies in dancing all alone? What are threads for but to be a bridge between two things? As easily as ghostrot grows out of a mantis, it can grow into another. Flayed minds have spent their whole lives isolated and suppressed — given the chance, how could they resist groping for any chance of connection?
Once upon a time, every mother would impart her children with some understanding of the souleye. Never would every mantis have been some kind of genius capable of any impressive feat of telenoia. But once upon the time, the use (and protection) of the souleye was not a skill in near-universal disuse.
Every flayed mind instinctively knows how to accelerate the onset of a dreamrooted mind — an act as simple as reaching out, reaching in, to their fungal kin. This bruteforce enlightenment comes with the same sight-searing agony of staring into the sun after a lifetime in the cave.
Who wouldn’t thrash and resist? Who wouldn’t understand they are being attacked? Screaming to you now comes the voice long known to be wasteful whimsy, shameful nonsense, wrongful deviation with no place in polite society. Why won’t it shut up?
Sometimes a flayed mind can flay other minds, but this is rare — more common is for them to leave maddened husks in wake of their attempts. Some can recover, some follow the flayer with newly enthralled with awe-lust, and some die with brains dripping from their orifices.
The initial burst of flayed mind activity shares this same character. It’s a frenzy of minds torn apart while the source giggles and babbles, manic with fresh-fleshed freedom. Frustration soon tempers it, disappointment that no one is brave or adept or smart enough to join the dance. Why not? Is there something wrong with you? Is there something wrong with this? There must be something wrong with them.
Why stop, when you can have so much fun dancing with the world? If you sweep someone off their feet and they can’t keep up, haven’t you just put them out of their misery? Really, are they not just another part of the world that dropped the hammer, that kept you locked up, that earned and deserves everything you’re reaping upon them?
This frenzy calcines to a kind of brain-fogged fatigue. Souleyes require enervate to metabolize, and freshly flayed minds have bodies wholly unused to the strain now placed upon them. They lose the enlightenment-clear view of everything, no longer able to keep up with the tempo, and they start to feel less like a tapestry and more like a mere frayed thread.
But if they left victims with brains dripping, they’ll now find relief in that slurry.
Ghost-filaments conduct enervate. So much for using them to send signals; but all connections go both ways. Invert the flow, and drain nous from the world. Diamantes were sapiovores before they were civilized bugs — before anything else, the souleye was a hunter’s tool.
And a flayed mind wields a blade in a world that thought cutting off everyone’s hands was the route to peace and safety.
So, bearing a double-edged scythe, they reap.
(Is it even killing? In the gaze of a flayed mind, a mantis is known, witnessed with a fidelity unmatched, understood in all their convolutions and paroxysms. Is their tapestry not akin to the ancestral thread — were mothers not reborn in their daughters? To live with eyes forced shut is a pitiful life. Is it not a gift worthy of effusive thanks, to be granted memory-rebirth in a mind like a mausoleum?)
To widely acknowledge the reality of flayed minds would be the undoing of the very hyperstition that creates them. Still, the few legends and allusions that persist tend to limn flayed minds as these unstoppable monsters of the darkness beyond that can turn towns into mass graves.
This gives them too much credit — the weaknesses of a flayed mind are as dire as their strengths.
Like any sapiovore, they predate on a limited, well-connected and well-defended population, and inevitably leave attack patterns any percipient investigator will recognize. Their metabolism can be slowed through rationing of their abilities — something a flayed mind is constitutionally loath to do — and doing this weakens them further.
Even a well-fed flayed mind faces a fundamental problem: they are mantid no longer, and their power rots them from within. It is a delicate balance to cultivate fungus within the brain and retain sanity, let alone functionality. Do you expect delicate operation from a creature of wild abandon and frenzied freedom, who by nature awakens an ability not taught nor understood?
Even a well-fed, carefully-cultivated flayed mind cannot escape the nature of their cognition. The souleye has an intrinsic purpose, and its purpose is not rational thought. Individuals vary — some became flayed by devouring their old self entirely, or inverting the subjugation, while an uncommon few present as twin psychologies working in uneasy tandem.
Thus, there are persistent blindspots in flayed mind cognition, even to the axioms of thought. The very notion of ‘separate objects’ is difficult for a flayed mind to fully reckon with — to them, the world is free-flowing association and melodic-empathetic extensions of their mind.
The notion of symbol and sign are likewise muddled. To a flayed mind, the whole world is a waking dream, hallucination-vivid. They are sensitive to the finest tremors of the world, constantly processing a maddeningly vast array of information and fluidly synthesizing it with endless extrapolation and infinite interpolation. To hunt with the souleye is to match patterns, and every illusion is a pattern matched.
A flayed mind sees, thinks, and acts — to us, these are obviously different things, and yet to flay your mind is to peel away these distinctions, and dance between dream and reality.
But the subtle lie — to them it tastes vivid like the truth, but so does everything else — of the flayed mind is that they dance to the beat of reality. But there’s no such thing. There is no music out there but whatever some other bug plays.
Desperate for freedom, all a flayed mind amounts to is dancing to someone else’s song.
But really, that’s all they ever wanted.