List of Books Banned in All Nine Provinces of the Pantheca
Note: the following books cannot be printed, distributed or possessed, as per syndic decree. The general pattern is that printing or otherwise making copies always yields a capital sentence iff convicted, whereas possession or distribution bears lighter punishment. One exception is the New Protectorate, where all crimes are treason and therefore carry negotiated capital punishments, and conviction can be expedited in potential violation of certain judicial ordinances. Another is the Plains Southern, where no crime carries mandatory capital punishment. Mount Greci has numerous additional clauses and exceptions regarding rights of knowledge and communication, obscuring matters even further.
For comparison, copies of all these texts can be found in the vaults of the Moonspire Citadel, the knowledge archives of the Percipiency, and within the Umbral Records.
All authors have been excised from the records of ancestors, though the names of some may still be learned.
The Brand, the Blood, and the Black: Impure Doctrines for a Superior Vesperbane.
Veritanym: ▘▟▚▟ ▘ ▗▗▙▟▗▘ ▜▙
Often found as 9 thick scrolls of parchment. Titles always include pure script, sometimes full titles.
Ancestors and Descendents
Veritanym: ▗ ▚▙▘▜▜▘▖▙▞▚ ▖▜▟▞
Thin volume, most often hemolymph-green. The welkinmark is always on the cover.
The Weevil-Worship in Arboreal Climes
Veritanym: ▗▝▞▜▙ ▟▘▘▛▙▛▟▛▜ ▘
Title looks handwritten, cover is green or brown with floral imagery.
Last of the Last: The Queen’s Revelation
Veritanym: ▛▖▗▖▛▙▙▜▖▖▚▙▙▟▟▜▟
Cover bears the crest of the Second Dominion.
The Plays of Falshalla
Veritanym: ▙▝▝▘▗▝▙▙▙▚▘▙▙▖▚▘▙
Most copies had paintings of Falshalla or other romantic imagery as covers.
Protocols of the Severed Council
Veritanym: ▚▜▘▘▝▖▗▚▖▘▞▝▞▟▝▚▟
A thin volume. Cover often shows a map of the pantheca, and nefarious figures crowding the edge.
The Wealth of Vespers: An Inquiry into the Nature and Mechanics of Arete
Veritanym: ▝▖▟▞▙▚▖▝▝▞▗▞▙▗▖▖▝
Covers often depitct bat-bone coins, bullions, and vespermala.
The Other Song of the Stars
Veritanym: ▛▗▗▝▝▗▚▞▝▜▜▘▚▝▛▟▛
Extant copies bear a cover depicting stars and eyes among a black space. Copies with other covers were all destroyed, and need not be described.
Poems For a Fallen Nation
Veritanym: ▗▜▝▜▚▖▖▛▗▛▝▚▗▙▚▚▜
Volumes are often manually copied, and lack many commonalities.
Our Redemption Has Come: A Study of Wingless Shamans and Prophets
Veritanym: ▙▗ ▟▝▜▞▝ ▖▟▝▖▞▖▟
Covers are often bare, but sometimes include depictions of tribal wingless mantids engaged in various rituals.
Welkin & Inferno: A Novel
Veritanym: ▗▟▞▖▖▝▝▛▚▟▜▞▝▗▘▖▟
Covers vary, but often depict a volcano erupting beneath a sky clear of even enervate.
Karkel’s Scathing Remark
Veritanym: ▙▛▜▗▖▙▛▘▙▜▖▟▞ ▖▜▚
A few pages in so many disparate forms to be impossible to generally recognize. A painting of a furless vesperbat is common. Four words are always present.
All Shall Align: The Truth of the Nymphs of Dream
Veritanym: ▞▝▝▜▛▙▚▖▗▛▝▞ ▜▚▟▜
Small green book. Cover shows the black moon over an ootheca.
Ages in Blood: A reconstruction of the ancient history from the termites to the sanguine age
Veritanym: ▛▚▝▖▚ ▞▖▚▗▘▟▛▜▜▚▟
Cover includes nonsense text in pure script and haruglyphs, and imagery of termite mounds, ancient monuments, and red cities with bats alongside mantids.
Protectorate of Whom?
Veritanym: ▝▟▚▞▝ ▚▟▙▖ ▟▚▖ ▛
More of a pamphlet. Front matter bears distinctive snurratre caricatures.
Oosifea Eternal
Veritanym: ▗▛▗▝▗▛▛▖▙ ▞▛▟▞▞▖
Cover always bears a likeless of the god-empress, if not a title.
After the Apocalypse: On the Origins and Metousiosis of Red Ichor
Veritanym: ▙▘▜▙▗▖▛▟▖▚ ▜ ▘ ▖▚
Thin book, sub 150 pages. Cover is adorned with a stylized myxogoth.
Die Pharmazie
Veritanym: ▖▙▙ ▟▗▞▚▟▚▚▞▘▝▙▖▖
Yellow book, cover bears only the title.
Purity Vindicated: The Crimes of Vesperbanes
Veritanym: ▜ ▘▘▙▟▜▟▝▖▘▜▜▚▗▜▛
Blue book. Some covers bear a sketch of a vesperbane impaled in the style of electrocruxifiction, others simply display a lady gazing distant, wielding a hammer.
Third Dominion in Retrospect
Veritanym: ▚▚▜▟ ▗▛▙▙▗▝▗▙▗ ▗▚
Thick monograph with a red cover.
The Blackened Dimensions
Veritanym: ▞▜▜▛▖ ▝▚▖▙▙▜▙▚ ▙▚
Black pages with white text. Pages are composed of an enervate amalgam; curiously, not dangerous.
Ars grammatica sanguinis
Veritanym: (minting an arete-signature for this work was deemed unwise)
Old and rotting. Extant copies were printed by Second or Third Dominion, bound in the chitin and flesh of noble roaches or wingless mantids.
A Stewartry Division’s Recommended Reading List
- The Hosts’ Handbook: Your First Days as Vesperbane
- Pantheca: History’s Final Chapter
- Markets and Excess: The Progress of Money from Barter to Guilds
- The Kindred: a novel
- i=er₄: The Impact of Impact Theory
- The Sapid Sex
- Beyond Lineage: A Brief Introduction to Ichor’s Gene Tendencies
- Nor Thralls Nor Swarm: On the Nature of Mantis, or Lack Thereof
- Noble Roaches: Civilization’s Unsung Foundation
- The Welkin Weakness: How the Marked Hear Without Listening
- Some Myths About Vespers
- Dodging the Hammer: How to Avoid a Vindicator’s Wrath
- Syndics: Advance Guard or Popular Tyrants?
- Scorpions and Drought: Surviving the Reaping Black
- The Evolution of Interspecies Dependence
(source unknown; date unknown)
Septagrammaton
By this sacrifice, I swear sevenfold.
- I shall welcome the vespers into my vessel as I would a guest into my home. They shall not hunger, for fat nor nerve nor blood nor lore.
- I shall not impose alterations upon my guests by any means. I shall not deny them the safety of my vessel, nor saddle them with the duties of the host.
- I shall not through the blood of revelation bring forth a myxogoth, and I shall not contract the first plague.
- I shall not bethrall myself to the weevils’ ambrosia, nor subject my guests to the same.
- I shall not attain unnatural dominion over another hosts.
- I shall not wield black nerve to aggrieve the scars of the world, nor open them anew.
- I shall not avert a prophecy in the flesh, nor shirk a brand of fertile penance, nor defile a vault of fat and truth, and never shall I break an oath of blood and soul.
— The Septagrammaton, the most binding oath sworn by all vesperbanes.
Vesper Cartomancy
Vesper cartomancy has a long history, and a still dubious grounding in practical reality. Regardless of its efficacy, it’s cultural cachet means it present a wealth of symbols for haruspices to draw upon, even when their means of introspection are not “divinatory” in nature. The standard card set consists of eighteen ‘nature’ cards, and a stripped down set of twenty four suited ‘affair’ cards. The possible nature cards have four components. The ‘face reading’, meaning its name and card art; the ‘main reading’ which is the simple interpretation of its concept; the ‘side reading’ an opposed or supplementary interpretation of its concept; and the ‘deep reading’, which unifies or extends the other readings.
- The Waning: poverty; saturation; replacement of one thing with another
- The Roots: connection; worldly influence; inescapable or entrenched systems
- The Union: similarity; inadequate compromise; consideration of a shared need or common enemy
- The Half-Chaste: virginity; courtship; moderation in or focus on an aspect
- The Broodmother: inheritance; division; points from which many paths unfold
- The Outward Spiral: creation; repetition; desires that cannot be satisfied
- The Harem: gregariousness; obligation; long term and large scale relations
- The Falsity: negation; defiance; separation from necessary/meaningful aspects
- The Debtchild: duality; opportunity; histories that constrain futures
- The Library: collection; excess; unexpected answers or relations between things
- The Glutton: simple desires; variety; pasts or futures of scarcity
- The Divulger: revelation; exchange; things that can be spread
- The Temptress: promises; inspiration; frustrating and incomplete solutions
- The Nascent Blank: beginnings; emptiness; potentials lost or unlikely
- The Fertile Secret: gossip; double meanings; things without collective understanding
- The Rainfall: generosity; wrathfulness; reconnections after diasphora or returns from great distance
- The Prostrate: awareness; submission; unnatural transformations
- The Surgeon: repair; suffering; extensions or liftings of burdens
For the affair cards, the four suits are:
- Books: relating to information, procedures, history, culture, congregation & coordination.
- Hearts: relating to flesh, energy, heat, projects and artworks
- Caps: relating to growth, influence both violent and social, the mind
- Wisps: relating to the world, destruction, things that can be harnessed
The are six distinct values in each suit, broken down as Negation, Absence, (potentially multiple) Presence cards, Paucity, Moderation, and Abundance.
Thus, to give a bane a vesper reading, each of their vespers is assigned a nature card in some permutation (whether by aleatoric cartomancy, or reliable haruspicy), and then the vespers’ interrelation, or responses to inquiries are characterized by affair cards.