The Origin of Oosifea

In the late chaos era, expansion of the ten thousand kingdoms of batkind and their practice of magically enthralling mantids had diven the ancestors of the welkinmarked into hiding. They barricaded themselves in a tiny pocket of land sheltered by the Welkin Peaks. These lands, now forgotten, are thought to be near what is now border between the Black Taiga and the Land of Mountains.

Their new home was rocky and hostile to vegetation: mantids and their noble roach servants struggled to farm it. And upon them was the added challenge of doing this while remaining inscrutable to any enthralled mantis scouts or bats flying overhead.

Some mantids rose up to become protectors of this last bastion, to fend off encroaching bats and their thralls. As their number grow and their organization congealed, they eventually exalted the strongest among them to rule. The name and banner they fell under was as The Pure Council of the Most Honorable of Battle​-​Queens.

They enforced a doctrine of purity. Fledgeling warriors were baptized in acid, and all were to shun association with fruiting fungus and mammalian blood, which were fonts of impurity. This included the sanguine weapons some tribes wielded with success against the bats. This included the Beauveria lymph​-​mold that was said to ward off black cordyceps.

The farmers and the common laborers – together the Protected caste – within this secluded land were made to fear and venerate these warriors, the Pure caste, that had risen up as their protectors. Many of the Protected imagos and nymphs were killed in ritual combat or punishment, and the warriors demanded tithes large enough that none of their number knew the hunger which dogged the farmers.

Despite or because of these policies, the Pure Council and its protectorate persisted while so many other winged tribes fell to vesperbat subjugation.

Oosifea was one of these warriors, born late in their history when they numbered in the thousands and labored under generations of a tradition.

She was a prodigy with the mace, and effortlessly rose through the ranks. There was just one caveat; she lacked respect for tradition and ritual when no one above her was looking, and sometimes even when they were. Her interpretation of purity was far from orthodox.

This was something most of the elders missed or ignored, but for those that did notice, over time they fell into into an informal bloc to oppose her rise.

Oosifea’s response was the turn her genius from combat to politics, and worm her influence into many of the council’s elders. Yet it was too little, too late, and she could do nothing to sway the faction opposed to her.

The informal leader of this faction was the matriarch of clan Snurratre, a staunchly orthodox family occupying many influential priestly positions.

Near her final instar, Oosifea disappeared, travelling outside the protectorate and seeking out one of the wandering tribes that still practiced the sanguine arts.

From them, she acquired a sword that could drink of blood of bats and use it to enhance its powers and its wielder.

When she returned, she was taken to the next battle pitched against a vesperbat — a common ritual for coming of age.

In this battle she achieved a feat unseen in generations. Rather than merely fending off and deterring the bats — which had become the strategy of the pure warriors to minimize loses — Oosifea killed a bat.

Were she anyone else, this success would have catapulted her to the outer circle of the council. But being Oosifea, her enemies sought to stymie her advancement. They did not grant her the rank of master.

All she could do was not to let her fury at this indignity show. She threw herself once more into the pursuit of battle, and with her sanguine blade she felled legions of thralls and adolescent bats.

Unbeknownst to anyone, she collected the corpses from these battles in order to investigate the source of vesperbats’ power and the mechanism behind the enthrallment of her conspecifics.

(And discover she did.)

She studied the sanguine lore in hopes of a weapon to surpass her sanguine blade, or a means to augment her body and wield power beyond any of her peers or elders.

(And augment she did.)

Oosifea’s brazen and continuous success in battle with the bats caught the attention of older bats mightier than the stranglers who braved the cursed and obscured land surrounding the Welkin Peak.

They deduced the existence of the council’s secret protectorate. They declared war.

Oosifea knew they would lose. But she had a plan. In her study she had discovered the means bats used to enthrall mantids.

If they turned this upon those peasants the Pure already trampled over, they could dispense with the gruesome demonstrations required to keep them docile and afraid.

If they turned this upon themselves, they could be rid of politics and inefficiency.

But Oosifea had spent too long wrapped up solitarily in her work. When the weaker minds of the council gazed upon her plans, they were revolted at her use of the necromantic arts of blood. They were disgusted at her advocacy for self​-​enthrallment.

She was declared Heresiarch, and exiled.

Her response was never forgotten: “So be it. I would rather rule as a queen of worms and rotten things than die a slave to your purity.”

Oosifea did not go alone. She implored those who had fought alongside her battle, and those with the sense know they could not handled a sustained conflict with the kingdoms of batkind.

One third of the pure council left with her.

Forcing the modified thrall spell on swaths of the Protected as they could before departing, they marched into the frozen north.

The legion marched from the snow​-​covered north and into what is now the Land of Lakes and Rivers. Here they took the offensive against the bats, assaulting their hunting grounds, slaying their elders, and capturing their hordes. Many of the Protected from the old country had not survived the trek, falling to starvation or cannibalism. Survival of the warriors loyal to Oosifea was prioritized, and as a result the population came out of it rather top heavy.

All of this is preamble; suffice it to say a much larger labor force would be required to build cities and monuments fit for Oosifea and her followers.

So she broaded the use of thrall spell.

To support such an institution, an ideology was needed. The lie Oosifea told her legion was that the thralls were fundamentally corrupted by the bats. They were molded to serve. They could never be trusted stand side by side with us. They were essentially animals.

Oosifea’s campaign against the bats proceeded with devastating success. Envespered bats struggle to coordinate, and in them practical wisdom is slow to accumulate. So much of the organization and logistics of a bats’ grounds relied on their enthralled servants, and with the growing skill of Oosifea’s saboteurs, most battles are won long before she arrives with blade in grasp.

Something had to give, and it was the bats’ pride. In a sense, they recognized her as one of them. A culture of honor, measuring status in martial prowess and material excess, they found something familiar in the absolute loyalty Oosifea enforced in her subjects, the avarice with which she pursued blood and land, and her ferocity in battle.

So a peace fell between Oosifea and the bats, and when asked to name it, she took pride in the shame cast upon her. Oosifea’s land was christened the Heretic’s Dominion, and she its queen. History remembers it as the First Dominion.

Challengers still came, as was their custom, and with their blood she fed her blade and maintained the secret sanguine augmentations she had given herself. Within Oosifea’s lifetime, she saw the beginning of the disenthralled rebellion. They discovered that vespers could be brought to maturity within a mantis, and thus, in essence, the slaves stole magic from the bats. This ritual not only granted magic power to a mantis, but broke the thrall spell that bound them. And, minds cleared, they wanted to be free.

Oosifea did not care for the liberation of her fellow mantis. She was free of the bats – and the keen eyed rebel could observe her tyranny, and find it scarcely different from that of the bats. Indeed, in ways they found it worse. To the bats, mantids were tools or pets or livestock, but to Oosifea they truly were bound: they must venerate her, they must enact her will, and they must conform to her tastes. And that was merely the privilege of the winged. In the Dominion, the wingless sometimes found hope in the prospect of death from overwork, sparing them the bite of the scourge or the sting of the acids their masters used to cleanse them.

These envespered mantids were synonymous with the wingless thralls. So Oosifea borrowed a mindset from the pure council whose ideas she had abandoned. To her populace, she decreed the transformation a corruption, and these vesperbanes who fight for freedom as grisly abominations.

She assisted the bats in tamping down on this rebellion — an act that solidified her as an equal to them. Slowly, she roused her nation, a populace that has grown vast within the numerous lands she controled. She conscripted of them, instilling in them hatred and a thirst for the glory of combat. She honed her personal power, employing manifold secrets learned from the sanguine tribes, and she reached heights of biological perfection no mantis has before known.

Oosifea sought to influence subtly. Her support of the bats was logistical and by proxy. She does not make an immediate enemy of the rebels.

And her strategy was deep: rather than seeking to decisively eliminate the threat the rebels posed, she secretly shaped the course of the conflict and patterns of engagement so that the rebels could weaken the bats.

But, the queen of heretics had a weakness.

Blood is a fickle thing. Unbeknownst to Oosifea, the rebels sought out the tribes she herself had learned from, inquiring for any means to defeat her.

And there was one. They unearthed an ancient pestilence, a scourge that had fell the upon the bats long ago and brought them to the brink of extinction.

The blood tribes speak of it as the internecine iatrogenesis. The vespers call it revelation sickness. The blood itself knows it as the metousiosis.

To the bats, it is the apocalypse plague.

It had not been contracted in an interval too long to measure. Centuries, millenia – mantids lacked the words to speak of it. The arts to revive it were forbidden. One argument convinced the tribe – that, in Oosifea’s irreverent self​-​study of blood, she would rediscover them herself, and she would not hesitate to wield them. Cooperation secured, they began to scheme.

The plan that worked ran simply. A young bat would be infected in the apocalypse plague, and sent off to challenge Oosifea.

With confidence the queen easily felled the challenger, but the disease he brought with him was a threat the tyrant had never before faced.

But she hadn’t study blood for decades to die so simply.

The thing to be understood about the apocalypse plague is that at its core, it is a self​-​modifying disease. And with the selection pressures of infection, the emergence of a certain cunning that could be likened to intelligence was inevitable.

Oosifea’s struggle against the apocalypse plague was more akin to a deadly tactical game than more conventional medical treatments. No matter what counter she employed, however, the apocalypse plague found new ways to slips past. Hiding inert within her cells, fragmenting itself across her body to reunify at a later time – yet despite all of its success, at its core the plague was not intelligent, merely a creature of mechanical instinct bred to propagate maximally. It was a chimera of chaos and self​-​feedback. Oosifea was convinced she could, should, triumph over it.

Within weeks, the winged queen no longer made appearances in public, her once perfect visage now marred by a patchwork of necrotic flesh and tumorous hyperplasia.

This degeneration did not cease. Eventually Oosifea accepted that she would have to abandon her body. As her flesh melted into blood, worms and infection, she had aides extract her brain. She stole away from her palace into a secret underground lab none knew of.

Her brain was suspended in a vat of vesperbat blood. In place of her spinal chord, she grew bespoke organs that could interface with the blood, commanding its metabolism and manipulating its genetics.

Oosifea had brought with her only the most loyal and mindlessly devoted of followers. They were instructed daily to deposit a slurry of lard and starch that could easily be metabolized, and they were given the tools to extract and dispose of waste from the blood. This secret lab became a temple, and she its sleeping god.

The administration of the Winged Dominion were told nothing of the circumstances of Oosifea’s disappearance, nor given any instructions. The only words spoken were: “I shall return.”

With the throne vacated, the Dominion was in disarray. It was then that the descendants of the Pure Council opted to send missionaries across the heartlands to convert the astrayed daughters of exile.

istless without their queen, Oosifea’s followers took readily to their preaching. And, ignorant prior of the rebellion, the missionaries listened rapt to talk of wingless degeneracy. The Dominion learned orthodoxy, and the Pure Council learned hatred.

Slowly, this fusion of purity doctrine and pteryist ideology overtook the dominion. In the following generation, the balance of power shifted. The fanaticism that invited Oosifea’s favor and saw one promoted to prominence was at odds with the diligence the pure church cultivated.

The old guard of exiles felt the hegemony moving past them. And of the missionaries — well, the Snurratre clan maintained and even expanded its provenience when Oosifea and her devotees were exiled from the council. They were well represented among the arriving missionaries, and commanded among them a few positions of authority.

To the displaced Oosifea​-​loyalists, a certain interpretation was immediate. It was the Snurratre who conspired against their queens accession to the deep circles of the pure council. And now they have invaded her dominion in her abscence. They sought to dismantle what she’d built; this was obvious to them.

Oosifea, meanwhile, remained as a bodiless brain in a vat as years turned to decades. She spent this time singularly focused on means to cure herself and escape. She exhaustively investigated the properties of vesperbat blood, sequencing its genome. She apprehended reaction​-​diffusion systems, metabolic pathways, and the mechanics of life itself.

But this utter isolation and obsessive deddication took its toll. Suspended in the blood, the very act of absorbing nutrients and diffusing waste was a conscious act of outstanding complexity. If she still had a body, this would be equivalent to every breath and heartbeat, every contraction of smooth muscle for digestion, and every response of the immune system was a deliberate effort as complex as solving diophantine equations without pen and paper or digits on which to count.

Madness overtook her, and the zealots in her temple bore the brunt of this. On days she would torment them with cryptic, belligerent pronouncements. She would command them to mutilate themselves or slaughter each other.

At length lucidity would return to her, and she could continue her grand work.

Oosifea grew to understand the growth and development of life better than any mantis before her. To her the principles of selection and evolution became apparent. Before long, even the secrets of ontogeny could not be withheld from her. She found her quarry.

Her struggles against the latent apocalypse plague reached a climax. It still dogged her, but her newfound understanding gave her power over its proliferation. Triumphantly, she manipulated its evolution, coaxing it to fuse symbiotically with her, a union she thought nearly as profound as when the first eukaryotes ensnared the mitochondrion.

Moments after this success, she is run through with a revelatory thought. Could she do the same for mantids? Guide their evolution towards an apotheotic form, mold them into biologically perfect vessels for her will?

The first subjects for this experiment were the beleaguered devotees of her temple. She forced them to breed and train and execute any among them she deemed too weak.

The fruits of this labor were not satisfactory. In generations, she found the population maligned by defects and disease.

She had her devotees raid nearby villages for males to add to the breeding population, and after mounting failure, took to meddling directly in their genome.

Her goal in all of this was to produce a vessel into which she could transplant her brain, and, at decades last, return to the world and retake her dominion.

She provoked a pregnancy in the one devotee which had disappointed her least. Only years remained now; in months the ootheca would be layed, and the nymphs would emerge and be reared such that would one them could inherit her.

When all this was done, she dismissed the temple’s population, sending them out to herald her return.

She walked the length of her former dominion on road to Vrilsehk, its capital. She struck a compelling figure: even without her thorax fully erect she stood heads taller than the bulkiest ladies. Her utterly smooth, vivid chitin gleamed in the sunlight. She wielded a hammer about as big as a mantis itself.

At each town she passed she sought the descendants of those who had maintained their loyalty and believed in her return. She challenged the priest​-​queen who ruled at each settlement, and summarily executed any who did not kneel.

When she arrived at Vrilsehk, she found a Snurratre matriarch perched on her throne. In an instant, the head was dashed against the walls the wall in a explosion of gore.

While her followers busied themselves cleaning up that mess and subduing any other dissidents, Oosifea investigated the lands the dominion now occupied.

She found that her… regents… had made concessions to the bats and to the rebels, and the dominion now occupied at best half the area it once had.

She sent runners out with news of impending war, and toyed with the idea of renaming the Wingless Dominion to Oosifea’s Empire.