Black Nerve

The farm animals of the heartlands span a wide range. Most iconically, various beetles like mealworms, cincidelas, and dung beetles. One could even argue the raiding behavior of early mantid settlements‍ ‍—‍ seizing and eating the loyal roaches of rivals‍ ‍—‍ constituted a kind of indirect farming to avoid the inconvenience of eating the people you lived with.

Insects aren’t the only creature noubugs can eat. Many farm chickens, sure, but there’s something alluring in the sheer quantity of meat from slaughtering the largest animals. And in the heartlands, that honor is still held by the surviving mammals.

Many are predators (bats, anteaters), but a few are suitable to be domesticated: maned wolves, pigs, and mice.

Still, mammalian meat began as highest luxury‍ ‍—‍ huge, warm blooded metabolisms have a hunger that far outstrips that of farmed bugs, costing so much more to feed. If anything, they were domesticated for other reasons‍ ‍—‍ wolves as hunting aids, pigs as foraging aids, rats as fancy pets.

The blood of the vesper bat is a plague. Before anything else, before the first vespers even existed, this was known. Like the worst plagues, on occasion it may jump species. In any mammal, the blood can grow, a virulent cancer mutating with cellular intelligence.

Plagues can breed like any other creatures. Before vespers, this too was known. The earliest weapons in the war of bug against bat was their own blood cultured into a weaponized plague.

But culturing blood is good for more than just weapons. It can be bred like any other creature‍ ‍—‍ so why not select it for bountiful traits?

Blood is the medium of hormones. Cultured correctly, injected into a host, it can easily propagate a growth factor, tell the body to keep growing, get fatter, stay hungry.

Those mammals can be bred, too.

Right around the time vesperbanes first arose, the first dominion was pushing ichorculture farther than ever before. What do you get after generations of mammals selected to be good hosts for bat blood, blood selected to make its hosts tasty and fat?

They call it a lardsucker, because what you get, if you’re not careful (and primitive ichorculture was not culture) is nothing more than a big fatty mass. A pig that never needs to leave its feeding trough, kept in a chamber big enough to house its eventual mass and no bigger‍ ‍—‍ indeed, why even have a trough? Simply pump its slurry‍-​feed to it through a pipe, spilling out from an opening it can bite onto and suck, like a mother’s tit from which only death weens it.

Mantids have been breeding these things for almost two thousand years. What happens is the limbs atrophy into nubs, the head sinks into the chest. The nostril migrate and change shape, eyes and ears vanish, genitalia distorts into forms convenient for artificial fertilization.

What does a lardsucker need? Its ideal form is little more than a sack of flesh that hangs form the ceiling (in a warm room where many others hang), its waste dripping onto a sloped floor to be disposed of with the rest. It has a heart to pump and cycle its blood, a lung to suck in air from the nostrils that ring its deformed face, and large stomach leading to yards of entrails, all sheltered by roll upon ever‍-​growing roll of fat. There’s not much of a brain anymore, and even its bones have eroded.

Skin has thinned into nothing but a mucus‍-​wet membrane to shield from contaminants and vent waste. There are muscles‍ ‍—‍ to produce the waves that keep the intestines flowing, to hold the sack together as it hangs in the farm (or factory, really), but how much strength much does a lardsucker really need?

There is an endless variety of lardsucker breeds with their own pecular distortions. Some pulse with so many hormones they grow large enough to fill whole rooms, while others have miniaturized to convenience proportions‍ ‍—‍ a mother might buy a specimen the size of her chest, cook it and feed her family for a meal. Some of them hang as described, while other lie in piles. Some of them swim in a vat, skin turned into an absorptive membrane like mammalian sponges. Some of them are hardly animals at all, but a thick soup of cells, or flesh growing around veins like leaves on a tree.

There have been attempts, in this modern age, of replicating lardsucker breeding under different conditions, to less degenerate outcomes. Some heavier‍-​than‍-​water lardsuckers must constantly tread water to keep from drowning, and this eternal exercise keeps some desirable muscle on their bones. (Others simply pump muscle‍-​growth hormones.)

Lardsuckers weren’t bred fully formed, but arose gradually, but their ever‍-​growing prevalence slowly defined mantid cuisine. The abundance of fat means pastries and puddings stuffed with the suet, mincemeat and creams, and so much oil. The extreme metabolic demands of vesperbanes are met in part by the namesake lard, added to most of their foods, and the key ingredient of their infamous ration bars.

So much of the fat gets rendered into tallow, a material component of a whole vesperbane discipline focused on the manipulation of candlewax. Its most devoted practitioners often look like wax sculptures, their flesh covered with ichortallow grafts.

In short, lardsuckers are foundational to heartlands society. There have been many scares‍ ‍—‍ viruses that sweep through factories and spoil their entire output, genetic diseases that ruin entire lineages, and the dread terror that haunts every industrial application of bat blood: the certainty that the blood will rebel, flesh metastasizing into the shambling horror of myxogoths.

It’s a complex business, but all of these concerns can be engineered around. Have to be engineered around, because lardsuckers have become inseparable from the Pantheca.

So, take a moment to contemplate the unmitigated disaster if, somehow, every lardsucker was lost, if banes became unable to breed new ones.

The stewartry takes research moratoria seriously. Being valued as one of the most important aretologies, the criteria for conducting truly novel research on lardsuckers is so stringent as to be an entirely, deliberately, dead field of research.

But the laws of moratoria are written in blood. The lardsucker moratoria is a new thing‍ ‍—‍ research used to be much looser, highly experimental.

The story is simple. They caused a crepuscule, and they got scared. By the vespers mercy, it wasn’t lardsuckers as a whole under the interdict, only a particular technique.

Let’s talk about grubsuckers.

Recall that lardsuckers don’t have brains. Their nervous system has devolved to little more than several clusters of ganglia.

This is almost inevitable, as creatures of ichor. Recall the cerebral reaction: ichor that grows a critical density of neurons undergoes automatic apoptosis, often starving or poisoning the neurons in the process. As the conventional wisdom says: ichor doesn’t do brains. Mammals aren’t that smart anyway, so not much was lost.

Now, take yourself back a few decades. Imagine you’re a starry‍-​eyed bane raised on tales of the realignment, the march of progress. You look at lardsuckers, and you see a solution to world hunger slowly emerging from its fleshy womb. The stewartry is going to solve everything one day, and you’re striving to be a part of that push.

There are few things you can look at with those same eyes of optimization, and wonder how the vesperbane arts can be used to fix it. Vesperbanes kill bugs just by existing‍ ‍—‍ most aspirants die just in the pharmakon rites. You, like so many others before you, think you might fix it, find a clever workaround.

Those who overuse their myxokora become mindless ghouls. Birth defects too, and certain kinds of brain damage, degeneration of the pineal gland, result in the “rootless” phenomena, animalistic mantids without the light of sapience in their eyes.

From the shadows, the percipiency watch. Your research has caught their attention, and their agents have contacted in the most unsettling fashion, in the dark when you least expect, and they’ve discussed trade arrangements. Induction of new percipients require potions that can be brewed at expense, but there’s a chance your innovation might uplift umbracognition to a new scale. They want in, and they can provide more funding than the stewartry could ever send your way.

After a few weeks of research, you find just the perfect site. Klara’s Mill, a riverside town in what’s locally known as “the beetle valley”. It’s teeming with darkling beetles breeding like rabbits. Those beetles will be the basis of your research.

Vesperbanes are an example in the flesh: bat blood is a plague, and it doesn’t discriminate. It will infect a bug just as well as mammal, it only takes a little priming. The procedure takes years of refinement. Eventually, you get a few more optimistic stewarts to work with you on the project, and percipiency’s funding never seems to dry up.

At length, the matter is simplified enough you can hire local farmworkers to carry it out. It takes more care, and more steps than growing a lardsucker (those might as well be plants for all the care they require), but one day you have a strain of ichor you can inject into the local mealworm species. The ichor flourishes in their flesh until they die‍ ‍—‍ noticeably sooner than the control group, but success is success. You have blooded bugs, consistently.

It takes more years to get something useful out of this, and word starts to spread about what you’re working on. More stewarts come to help, and you hear about other research groups attempting to replicate your work (you’re so far ahead of them, but you clearly need to work faster).

The years are piling up, but now you have a prototype: the first grubsucker. Mealworms are a diet staple across the heartlands (consider the name), but yours are fatter, with that particular tang that, love it or hate it, you can only taste on ichor‍-​touched meat. With this success, you have a new source of funding: government grants, syndics investing in your research.

There’s not an explosion of interest, not yet. They think you’re just making a new breed of lardsucker. Novel, sure, and even this has minor demand (after all, many prefer insect flesh to beast), but it’s nothing world‍-​changing.

They’re wrong; this was just the groundwork.

For the next phase of your research, you start breeding cordyceps. your real plan can now be enacted. The chief drawback of beasts is that you can’t grow neurons, and there’s so many useful umbral proteins only synthesized in dense nerve clusters. First, lardsuckers gave the heartlands industrial scale fat production.

Next? You want industrial scale brains.

An obstacle stares you in the face, and you can’t avoid its gaze. Your plans are grand. Lardsuckers were two thousand years in the making‍ ‍—‍ but if you want renown, if you want to change the world, you want this finished in your lifetime.

But there’s so much work to be done. You need to culture an entirely new strain of ichor that grows best in mealworms, and then you need to make a strain of cordyceps that affects the larva’s brains just right to trigger the production of the right umbral proteins.

The vespers. Their control over ichor, over fungus, is unparalleled. Vesperbanes don’t need to breed ichor, they simply instruct it directly. Or rather, their vespers do so, with perhaps vague input from the bane somewhere along the chain.

This matters, because it means the obvious solution to your research problem is a nonstarter. You can’t make the ichor strain you need and just inject it into the mealworms‍ ‍—‍ the vespers adapt ichor to your body, and you aren’t a mealworm.

But what if you were? Or, rather, what if the vespers were adapting ichor to the body of a mealworm. What if…

What if you just put vespers into every grubsucker?

Nobody asks what could go wrong, because when the stewartry sees the direction your research is heading, they might well have had the arete glyph reflected in their eyes. The opportunity here is enormous. What do grubsuckers do? They simply suck up calories and grow fat. And what is the fundamental currency and medium of record for vespers‍ ‍—‍ what is arete? Merely calories stored a very particular way.

If you manage to put vespers in grubsuckers, those vespers would grow rich off the calories you feed them. You could start a whole pharmacium‍ ‍—‍ think the banks and nurseries of vespers‍ ‍—‍ and offer arete investments paid back with all the calories you’re gaining from the grubsuckers.

You thought you were aiming for scaling up brains, but the stewartry elite realize you’ve discovered something so much more lucrative: you can grow arete on an industrial scale. Bugs are telling you that you could soon be the vespers’ most favored bane‍ ‍—‍ perhaps the most favored host ever, short of the Author of Arete himself.

The hype passes, and the work continues. The talk is big, but the task of encoding the right instructions to the vespers is still the work of months that stretch on and on. When you’re ready to test it, you need teams of spellbinders to cast the dwimmers. It doesn’t work. It’s another year of prototyping before you have something that you can start scaling up.

The principles are simple: the vespers are inserted into the mealworm’s intestines, where they grow capillaries and roots throughout the body, pumping ichor and cultivating fungus. Cordyceps targeting the brain is a difficult spell to get right‍ ‍—‍ there so many failure modes, overstepping of bounds that incurs the judgment of the vespers. But this is within the bounds. The spellbinders assure you.

Where earlier grubsuckers would grow bulbous and fat in their bodies, this new breed bears brainmatter bulging from their head with club‍-​shaped fruiting bodies: crowned with death’s golden fingers, cordyceps. Your success is tested when the percipients take their first specimen, decapitate it and cook it, educting it throughout a chemical gauntlet. The result is just as you both hoped: false ambrosia, the potion capable of temporarily restoring the sanity to rootless and ghouls, and a favored concoction of umbracogs.

They brief you on the recipe‍ ‍—‍ not the full recipe, but enough to brew a precursor that might make your factories a useful supplier.

It’s called false ambrosia for a reason. Even in bugs with functioning souleye, it has an effect.

There are hallucinogens, and then there are noetic hallucinogens.

It’s hard not to feel a thrill at what you’ve accomplished, at the good you’ve done for the world. At the liquid revolution brewed by your hand.

Why not give it a taste?

You raise the dish to your labrum, and feel the cold liquid‍ ‍—‍ enervate always has a chill‍ ‍—‍ flow down your gullet.

And then—

You see two entities, writhing like worms through the flesh of reality. Fractal tendrils of influence waft off of each being like lightning, and they dance and strike each other.

The images shift. There is a whole field of worms revealed to your view. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of them. Despite their number, none have a mate to dance with. None of them even move. Stagnant tumors, embolisms blocking the flow of the pulse of the world.

The images shift again. You realize you are only a worm, gazing upon a vast universe so much bigger than you. You look upon yourself and see tumors bubbling and pulsating along your worm‍-​flesh. They’re metastasizing. You’re more tumor than bug. You look upon the worms that surround you. The blood of bats is a plague, a transmissible cancer.Youare cancer, a plague. An embolism that threatens to necrotize reality itself.

The images shift again. The lightning sparks between the two entiteis, the fractal branches are like glyphs in a script. It’s semantic lightning, and each thunderous echo comes like a single word, every branch of meaning enfolded within.

The Dwimmermeal Exclusion Zone declared in 1644‍-​07‍-​05, contains a crepuscule centered upon Klara’s Mill in the Revansir prefect. Without warning, the lead research and administrator of the factories, Militari Spring‍-​child, triggered a crepuscular response. Ichor consumed his flesh in the fashion of a myxogoth, and death’s golden fingers emerged from his head as of a failed pharmakon. Panicked researchers, recognizing the signs, began an evacuation. In the chaos, it cannot be said how quickly his transformation proceeded. Moans of agony were loud enough to be heard from outside of the building. Most researchers fled before they grew quiet.

Several workers were unable to escape, struck by the vespertine visions not uncommon for a crepuscule emergence. The nature of what transpired became clear when Militari’s assistants attempted to replicate his research: the techniques were tabooed, and their vespers refused to acknowledge their commands.

Attempts to recover grubsuckers meet with failure: the specimens die upon crossing the boundary of the zone, and the flesh melts as if ichor was instructed to consume it from within. The particular strain of cordyceps can no longer grow anywhere outside the zone. A devastating result, as the strain was an important pesticide used to contain the rapidly‍-​breeding populations of wild darkling beetles across the heartlands.

If one ventures into the heart of the zone, you will find that even eighty years later, the factory still stands. Grubsuckers still line the ceilings of floor after floor, but their pupae now break free, with deformed beetles crawling clumsily free just long enough to mate and deposit their eggs within an unoccupied cell. The troughs which pour into the growing chambers remain forever flowing, with the carefully balanced nutrient mixture now replaced with regurgitated blood and vomit.

Where are these calories sourced? Below the factory, in what was once the research lab, you will find the base of pillar of insectoid flesh, superficially resembling the grubsuckers, but mantids do not have a larval form: this is mere imitation. Fungal roots spill out from the bloated abdomen, rotting soil pumping nutrients forevermore into this being. The resemblance to a giant grubsucker is uncanny; it is a segmented pillar of blood‍-​red fat, slowly pulsating as spiracles suck in air, undulating with peristalsis of elongated intestines moving material in reverse.

This flesh tower extends the entire height of the factory. Upon the roof, the resemblance to a grubsucker ends. A mantid face spits out a stream of degurgitated calories that rain down to feed its adopted children. There is no one still alive who will recognize the face, but there were portraits of Militari. Their eyes lack pigment, and no dew focuses their sight. Their antennae thump as if in thrall to a distance vision. Rarely, banes who tred near are known to succumb to vespertine visions.

It is thought that the zone would dissolve, were this remnant of Militari to finally die. Their cursed blood regenerates most wounds, but any fiend is capable of a blast that would instantly destroy the head.

No attempt has been made on the life of this being, and none will be allowed, so long as the zone remains under the authority of the percipiency.

Grubsuckers are excluded. The creation of grubsuckers is excluded. But the purpose of grubsuckers was never so specific, was it? Even now, a grubsucker may be harvested, its brain pulped and fermented through a gauntlet of chemical transmutation. Even after all of this, it remains an economical precursor to the concoction of false ambrosia.

Every breeding season, a team comes to the DMEZ. Militari is regularly sedated with deadly powerful tranquilizers, thought to ease whatever pain it might chronically feel, and a team of chemists get to work. One wonders if, blissfully numbed on that sedative, Militari is still capable of dreams, and if there are still dreams. Lingering hopes, perhaps, of providing a new source of false ambrosia, of helping the rootless and ghouls.

One wonders if, nay, it even needs to dream those dreams. They have, after all, become a reality.

Perhaps instead all that’s left is nightmares. But those, too, have become a reality.