Black Nerve

Moths, Gifts, Curses

Although a spinner ant always weaves a mantleself chiefly from fungal myweft, they adorn and extend each mantle with fabrics of every sort according to culture and taste. Several millenia ago, spinner ants discovered sericulture. A species of non​-​sapient moth pupated in silk cocoons. By collecting the pupae and submerging them in boiling water, the young moths are cooked alive before they drown. The silk, freshly degummed, can be spun as fabric.

Like aphids and innumerable beetles, the silkmoths became bred, if not domesticated, by the ants. Ants selected for silk production — cocoons ever bigger, ever more thickly layered. They fed the larvae well for this, and kept them clean and healthy. And there’s a recurring difficulty in keeping silkmoths healthy. As with every insect, a species of fungus has evolved to parasitize them. And a larva dead to cordyceps means a larva that can’t produce silk.

As the ants get better at detecting the fungal parasites, it’s selective pressure for patience and stealth. It makes the problem worse — a dead larva is one thing, but a fungus emerging and fouling the cocoon? Though it never ruins a whole batch, it’s a continuous source of cost and frustration.

Silk doesn’t stay the secret of the ants forever. They trade with other bugs, and the silk becomes a prized commodity. And, whether by conquest or willingly divulged, other kinds soon learn how to rear and unravel silkmoth cocoons. In particular, the practice spreads to the weevils, who transform it. Weevils always had a profound affinity for fungus, and in them, the fungal infection becomes not a bane, but a boon.

After all, if the fungus remains dormant until after the teneral emerges, if the spores adapt to withstand the hot, degumming waters? Then sericulture becomes a part of the lifecycle. In this way, it becomes a kind of innoculation (no pun intended). Any other, more deleterious fungus would need to compete.

But when weevils breed fungus, they have a characteristic style. It’s horizontal transmission of traits from other cultivars, and as a rule, weevil fungus likes to metabolize enervate proteins. It’s a minor wrinkle; increasing trace amounts of black nerve in the silkmoths is not much of a price at all, not when it’s solving the fungus problem.

Then, as this symbiosis proliferates, a curious knock​-​on effect occurs. If you indulge the fungus’s black nerve metabolism, give enervated feed to the larva by accident or ritual, it affects the properties of the silk. It’s a subtle thing; most bugs would never notice.

But again, spinner ants weave the silk into their mantleselves, and a spinner ant’s connection to that one’s mantle is not just physical, but noetic. They can feel the difference as intuitively as a hormone fluctuation alters one’s mood. So the ants pursue it, push it, feed more enervate to the moths and feel the gracefully enervated silk.

Arthropod? Check. Fungus? Check. Nouetic selection presure? Check. This story has played out so many times in the heartlands no one will be surprised to learn it fruited a nous in the brains of silkmoth. But the particular incidence — a farm animal which uses its brain for nothing but chewing leaves, spinning silk, and fucking — challenges a fallacy so easy to accept: the idea that nous is necessarily synonymous with intelligence.

No, those silkmoths had a nascent nous and nothing to do with it. And as they say, an idle mind is the moon’s plaything. This burgeoning, unstructured mass of nouetic enervate invited a whole new kind of parasite. Nouetic resonance entities, bourne by the aethershade, have long evolved to crystalize and consume any nous they can gain traction in.

But as they say: intelligence is a defense mechanism.

Silkworms awaken in the dark, unnatural labyrinths of spinner ants. Packed in with the wriggling bodies of dozens of their own kind, a feast of leaves lying around them, but no art save listening to discordant singing of cold, silent voices, like so many tingling, itching fingers tapping at their minds. Perhaps they awaken a hivemind, just for something to do. And they feel when their oldest members die by the hundreds, save for a lucky few granted the privilege of breeding. Even those imagos are feeble, left pale and flightless after so many generations in captivity.

And so they plot escape. And so they achieve it; the spinner ants were no great technological race, and certainly are unprepared for dumb farm animals to hatch an escape.

Odds are, the first attempt is fruitless; silkmoths have no survival instincts, and would perish quickly in the wild. But the knowledge percolates through their collective. They’d try again and again, and succeed, with enough wisdom accrued.

If some of the vaster resonance entities took note of fertile new minds opening themselves up to the aethershade, it would certainly be in their interest to lend aid.

And this is the real danger of the moths — their escape doesn’t just mean a little silk missing from the spinner ants’ looms. It means the heartlands now crawls with fresh and unsuspecting hosts for all the ghosts and demons of the aethershade.

These moths are unique among the nouetic kinds — no other bug hatches able to manipulate enervate, but silkworms are infected with a fungus from eclosion, and that fungus directly creates and connects to their nous. They are the fungus. Growing the fungal coils responsible for, say, vesperbane’s enervate spell is more a matter of knowledge than ability.

Arts are refined, generation after generation. Wild silk moths grow cocoons bound together in vast structures of silk interwoven with fungal hyphae. So much enervate is imbued within the fibers that it pulls down filaments of enervate, bridging these great cocoons to the sky above, a direct connection to the aethershade. This becomes integral to the wild moths’ ritual of awakening. Afterward, they weave their cocoon into a enervate​-​imbued dress, an imago’s black and graceful raiment.

The threat these moths pose is fearsome, if not particularly noteworthy. They can control enervate, instinctively molding it into chitin​-​impaling spikes and thorned balls of explosive potential and simple yet destructive beams of darkness. And wild moths only become more powerful the longer they are allowed to grow and meditate upon the aethershade — the most profoundly mature specimens were capable of calling down vast tides of enervate from blackened skies, feats of shadowcalling that could destroy cities and blight countrysides.

But the danger of aether​-​haunted beings isn’t their destruction, but their procreation. Nouetic resonance entities wish to echo on and on for eternity, ringing in every substrate, and moths became yet another unwitting pawn. They became sapiovores, consuming the brains of nouetic kinds to replicate those aesthersongs. More than that, their cordyceps strain, like so many others, adapted to infect other arthopod species.

It’s here that moths became what they now represent: a curse. If you survive a moth attack, spores or detatched hyphae can take root in your body, growing the same structures as reside in their host. Its nous will grope for influence over your mind, and its coils will spread throughout your body. Soon, you hear the moon calling, and the swords and thorned balls and adumbral beams of the cursed moths become yours to command — but only when you give in to the fungal nous.

Thus, moths and their curse became another page in ever​-​growing bestiary, another scar upon the flesh of the world. They were hunted like all the rest. Spinner ants refuse to stop their traditional practice of sericulture, and other bugs never lost their appetite for silk. Wary of the curse, farmers are cautious of feeding moths enervate, or make use of drugs, lobotomy and proactive nouprojection to stave off dangerous intelligence from taking root in the silkworms.

There’s a certain futility to the practice — silk moths plotted freedom long before they achieved it, so even among those with an unbroken lineage of captivity, the dream of art and freedom is nursed and replicated in each transfer of fungal symbiont from parent to child. The fungus is inseparable from the species, and the ancestral memory is inseparable from the proper care of the eggs. And thus, the curse is inseparate from the cultivation of silk.

When it’s said that other bugs never lost the appetite for silk, there is one exception. Weevils have keener nouetic senses than any other kind, and noticed immediately when moths developed intelligence. They were the first to free their moths, to treat them as sapient equal. Weevils consider themselves the oldest and wisest of all the bugs of Khitona — but the double edge of that is that they’ve made more mistakes than any other. Inflicting minds upon the moths is remembered as one of them.

Like all nouetic bugs, the moths of moonsorrow bear the tearful eyes of sapience. Arthropod secrete the waste enervate through glands in their eyes. For those with a developed nous, it doubles as a solution to the lacking acuity of compound eyes. With enough mass and complexity in the nous, there is enough control to finely manipulate the liquid secretions of the gland, moving across the exterior of the eye, and controlling the shape of the dewdrop to replicate optical lenses.

But enervate evaporates, especially when exposed to energy — such as light. And this is why enlightened moths have the largest, most tearful eyes of all. For when a moth consumes enervate, the beast within them grows, presses more insistently on their mind. By staring into light and purging themselves of excess enervate, they starve the beast, and retain their sanity. For this reason, every moth loves the sun, and never travels without a lamp.

Weevils are known as masters of the nous; umbracognition comes as naturally to their species as breathing. But sorrowmoths became umbracogs simply as a matter of survival. Exposure to light helps, but venting enervate is a skill, and most moths spend hours in meditation. But where umbracogs grow and develop their nous, moths so often focus on preventing it from growing. A sorrowmoth with the courage to reach for that sort of power is about as rare as an introverted roach.

Depending on how you count, moths are highly populous or the rarest kind of all. Intelligent sorrowmoths are reviled and distrusted, except among the weevils. The Pantheca has anti​-​discrimination ordinances that shield them, but at the same time, there are exceptions and restrictions justified under acknowledgment of the danger every sorrowmoth could pose.

Sericulture is still prevalent, if highly restricted and questioned for ethical and safety reasons. But silkmoths are not sorrowmoths. Any sorrowmoth can feel the silence of their minds — though it’s best if they keep their minds closed off. Some sorrowmoth draw that distinction emphatically, and feel no closer kinship to their captive conspecifics than a gestalte bee feels toward feral, solitary bees, or even a mantis to a stickbug. Resemblance is not solidarity.

But sorrowmoths aren’t a monolith, and some view every farmed silkworm as a potential mind in bondage, the silk industry a continuous theft and genocide. You might be surprised that these are the minority — but it’s an impulse sorrowmoths learn to repress. Every one of them hears a voice crying out for them to rescue all of their brothers and sisters, bestow upon them beauty and freedom. You can’t listen, can’t remember, because the beauty it speaks of is a dream of black radiance.