A Note on the Three Classes of Vesperbane
The Pantheca of All Mantiskind is a reification of ideals informed by practicality. Foremost among them is a critique of the Democratic Alliance of Our Hope. The old alliance is universally considered a failure in birthing the Third Dominion. Syndic theory views this failure as an inevitable consequence of its systems; a fault of the fundamental antagonisms between vesperbane and civilians.
The Pantheca mitigates this by restricting first the political power of vesperbanes, barring them from ruling in the syndic party, and second the economic power of vesperbanes, barring them from membership in guilds. All vesperbanes were a part of the Vesperbane Stewartry, overseen by syndics, to be our stewarts, not warriors nor queens.
Depending on who you ask, the stewartry system was either an abject failure, or a functioning ideal astrayed from by the machinations of a pernicious few, a past to be returned to.
In truth, a pure stewartry system there never was. Even when the wise sisters brought Realignment, we would not consign all the noble clans and hardened mercenaries uniformly to death — and could not, for all the abominations and anomalies the Third Dominion wrought still lived. Thus, the cooperative would assist the nascent Pantheca, turn their lifetime-honed combat prowess to its defense, and be our wardens.
The Wardens program was a stopgap, an atavism. It would gradually wither away to the peaceful ideal of mere Stewartship.
Such peace has not come; defects and crepuscules abound, and the Kindling Dream requires teeth to excise these impediments.
And so, the Wardens program has seen extensions and expansions, the laws of the decree revised piecemeal by the courts.
Compared to other military forces, banewardens differ in having a fixed capacity which they cannot exceed, a consequence of their creation as a temporary measure. Perhaps “fixed” would be more accurate; it may change with need. In some provinces, the capacity is pegged to population, in others it must be raised by deliberate syndic vote, again and again.
Once the obsolesence of the Wardens was postponed indefinitely across the continent, this policy cracked opened the door for banes not as stringently bound as stewarts. Legally, Wardens fall directly under the command of provincial administrations, rather than the interprovincial Stewartry — and administrations can engage with guilds in a way the Stewarty does not and cannot.
With a new appetite for private use of vesperbane services, the demand grew and grew, even as the supply, as per syndic mandate, was bound by law.
These incentives were the impetus behind the creation of the mavericks program. Entirely freelance vesperbanes, overseen and regulated, but not commanded. (Notably, the maverick tax means they generate stewartry income, yet unlike stewarts, lack the drain of stipends.)
It’s a common misconception that mavericks are in some sense inherently criminal, or worse, some kind of officially recognized, legalized criminal class. Many syndics build careers on the notion of the maverick program being a hotbed of criminality, an offence to the founding principles of the Pantheca. This impression is not helped by the forgiveness claues, granting clemency and lenience to even criminal mavericks who assist against crepuscules and anomalies.
Nonetheless, mavericks are certainly capable of being productive, law-abiding vesperbanes, and many are.
Perhaps the biggest boon of the mavericks program was allowing the closest thing to a reconciliation with the clans since the purges and persecution following Realignment; the clans had never waned in their pride, chafing against the restrictions both the Stewartry and Wardens imposed.
(There is a last classification of vesperbanes not mentioned, that of the renegades, defecting from the Kindling Dream. But there’s little to clarify: they are the inherently criminal class.)
Remarks About Arete
Arete: roughly, karma, or satiation, or devotion, or fungible cooperation, or inverted debt. Measures the degree of equanimity or strife, not just between the vesper and bane, but between the vespers themselves, and within the vespers themselves.
Teach any promising vesperbane, and some time after mastering the instinctive techniques and moving on to cultivated expressions, a question is bound to reach their palps.
“What is arete?”
Some teachers, thus prompted, will give bad answers. Others will give no answers. And others still, in a similar vein, are honest enough to amend one of the former two with caveat that they do not know. These are the only three options. Now let us answer.
It is an nymphish essay indeed which begins by quoting the dictionary. Ngewa’s fourth edition defines arete as the substrate of vesperbane power and vesper communication, and cites Old Imperial for its etymology. This tracks with history; the Second Dominion was the first to truly endeavor a halfway empirical understanding of vespers, when the Disenthralled Rebellion still grounded itself mainly in mysticism.
What does arete mean, in the language of Oosifea? It translates to excellence, virtue, a striving for the perfection of existence. But as diligent knowledge-hunters, we must interrogate this further. Famous is the example of old wingless strides, where ancient writings used ‘bat’ to mean ‘tyrant’, yet as language evolves, etymology unmoors from meaning. Not all bats are tyrants, and not all tyrants are bats. Is all arete excellent? Is all excellence arete?
What if we investigate arete itself? In the mnesis of vespers, their memory-lineage, as well as in the oldest fossilized claw-engravings of envespered bats, we find mention of the first lord-king of the vesperbats, an immense bat — immensely powerful, immensely old. His influence over the vespers granted him domination over the bats and he established the Myriad Kingdoms. Within the late culture of bats, there existed the superstition that to speak the name of a powerful bat was to invoke them. We can assume in more ancient times, this myth was taken even more seriously.
The first lord-king was peerless and wrathful, and thus ancient bats would live in fear of bothering him, even by speaking his name. This practice informed every reference to him, even millenia later — never a name, only the glyph ŪNMN or, modernly, with epithets like ‘the forgotten one’ or ‘the unnamed king’.
Curiously, this rabbit hole brings us right back to where we started, for every lord-king after the first is compared to to his example, and every bat considers themselves a king over their thrallwealth, the mantids who serve them. This gives us the etymology of the bats’ word for arete: ŪNMN, the secret glyph of royalty. So for the bats, arete is kingliness. But what does this mean?
Is a king necessarily noble, and so to be kingly is to act with high morality — thus vesperbanes losing arete-standing when faltering to oaths? Is a king the power he wields — thus high arete-standing granting vesperbanes power? Is a king necessarily granted power and legitimacy by his subjects? After all, a line commonly engraved with allusion to the king, thought to be a direct quotation: “Forever I am endebted to my vespers.” Is arete debt — thus spellbands encoding their contracts in arete?
Or perhaps we can take this bizarrely literally. Bear with us; nor bat nor vesper can think reasonably, as a mantis does, so we must be willing to consider the unreasonable. A king may mint coins with his face on them, and within a king’s demesnes, his power is everywhere felt. Could it be that arete is like a king, except when a bane holds arete, the thing that is like a king is not the bane, but the arete itself?
(An interesting fact about ancient battle-queens in the Protectorate of the Pure Council of the Most Honorable of Warriors: that honor was something measured and tracked to fascinating precision. A battle-queen has exactly seven times the honor of the lowest person, a Protected male. But honor is not something you are born with, or something you ‘earn’ with your acts. No, honor is something taken; with ritual acts of disrespect — and killing someone is quite the disrespect, if not the deepest. Could a similar principle hold? Is arete something taken — the fruit of death, even?)
As a final note, in the Book of Recollections, supposed testimony of the prophets attending to the nymphs of the dream, there is some recounting of the history of the vespers. One figure of note is the so-called Author of Arete, who brought order to the vespers with scales and double-entry accounting books. And who else might this be?
Who Brismati Yukli Is
It is a truth I think all will acknowledge, that specialization is the engine of modernity.
Take a tarsus full of shikare oil, and spread it over a slice of honeyloaf. Then, try spread the same amount over two, three, ten — you’ll note it becomes thin, insufficient, worse than nothing at all.
I think few with any connection to the moonspire will have failed to hear of a certain Yukli, privileged with Brismati genius. Arch-sovran before teneral! Student of the twelve arts! A brave, daring tiercel!
We are expected to be impressed to be led by a fledgling who, in reality, should still be in our lecture halls.
When a worker needs a warp-stricken leg healed, will she be impressed her medic can perform Umbra Dragon Invocation? When a mycobane lays the bricks for your house, will all his familiarity with the irrelevancies of red ichor and black nerve make you more confident in the structural integrity of his work? A long list of techniques impresses the novice, but the master cares about the time and focus required to hone. But perhaps we shouldn’t expect such patience from nymphs.
Specialization is the engine of modernity. Syndics coordinate, guilds trade, and stewarts maintain. It is well known how clueless our administrators are when it comes to basic facts of the vesperbane arts — why then, should we suffer (no, not just suffer, promote) the opposite, a vesperbane who argues about markets and censorship, as though his station concerns anything of the sort?
But let’s move off this point about specialization — I believe the word already on his and his supporter’s palps is ad hominem. Yes, supporters — or should I say devotees? fanatatics? If this were just one silly sovran, it would perhaps not be worth the ink. But the same prestigious name adorning so many (admittedly adequate) papers and monographs, also stamps self-published screeds and zines that circulate across the Stewartry.
In those works, I think, you get the picture of the real Yukli, the one unpolished by editors and peer review. You will find amateruish writing, regurgitated philosophical musings, and deeply ridiculous notions investigated with a credulity that borders on contrarianism.
Yukli thinks we could “double” the “intelligence” of every creature in the heartlands with our modern understanding of black nerve and red ichor — even more, that such an augmentation would be desirable. He has a way of questioning the vinculation laws — as though every kind of arthropod was, wanted to be, just a mantis with a diffferent bauplan, and law shouldn’t attend to objective biological and behavioral differences. Yukli has a few issues with biology, actually, seeming to think that soon hemotechnics could, should, would, concern themselves with radical reconfiguring of our appearances, our capacities, our genders. Utter vainity. And I think there is no fitting final illustration of that vainity than Yukli’s nymphly refrain. He loves to say “death is bad”, going as far as to claim that directing bloodbane resources to more important matters is actually one of the greatest deliberate causes of mass sentient death in history — I’m being more tactful. His original phrasing, of course, was much more inflammatory. It’s a comparison that easily flies back at the comparer; after all, none of us have forgotten the last cult of personality whose leader promised followers life eternal.
Now, the arch-sovran doesn’t have all six legs in fantasyland, of course. He’s made no secret of his deeply negative opinion of the vindicator’s guild and welkinism — and I think we all agree. But it’s another example of his nymphly naivety: a good arch-sovran should not make greater enemies of his opposition.
Yukli is a deeply silly, immature male, with an equally immature view of the world. He wants to think truth can reached by reducing everything to simple, unnuanced probabilities — even more, he wants morality itself — the thing empires have risen and fallen to discern — to be just a much of assigning ‘goodness numbers’ to outcomes.
But the outcome I give the most biggest goodness number is Yukli growing up a little before inflicting another word on the world. He should have stuck to writing papers, and I say that with the highest probablity I can make up.
(Source: a note passed around the moonspire citadel, author anonymous)
Agonwrought and Banewrought Endowments
Endowments are the unit of vesperbane power, and come in two forms, according to whose will conceived their design.
Agonwrought
An old proverb goes something like this. Two battle-queens alike were plagued by two vesperbanes ravaging their land. The first battle-queen gathered up a score of her finest warriors, and campaigned to slay the bane menacing their people. She succeeded, at the cost of a dozen and three of her warriors’ lives. The second battle-queen also gathered a score of her warriors, but endeavored to defeat the bane, granting them mercy if they swore never to enter her land again. She also succeeded, with only ten of her warriors dying.
Who, it then asks, made the wiser choice? The unintuitive answer conventionally given is that it is the first, after the ancient observation that a vesperbane nearly killed comes back stronger than before. Indeed, this idea has reached such prevalence to spawn compressed allusions simply saying “better to die killing a bane than to live to spare them”, or even the seemingly contradictory “kill a bane, save a life.”
Unlike so many folk beliefs about vesperbanes, there is not nothing here. As a studied phenomena, the term is agonwrought manifestation. There are innumerable cases: a vesperbane recovering from grave disfigurement heals severed limbs to find they grow back different; a vesperbane captured and starving in a cell manifesting the a means to escape; a vesperbane made sedentary, whether for convalesce, court martial, or assigned an stagnent field post, manifests new endowments, and an eagerness to use them.
The conjectured logic is clear and compelling: a vesperbane exposed to stress, whether as direct as near-lethal trauma or starvation, or as abstract as boredom and lack stimulation, may manifest new endowments as a result.
There’s a gaping hole in this theory, though. A vesperbane faced with life-threatening stakes is little more likely to manifest than baseline chance. There is similarly no boon for one who watches their comrades die in front of them. Endure the cruelties of some abuse subtler than assault, and what salvation comes? Stress in all three cases, undoubtedly, and yet.
But again, there’s not nothing where the theory is looking. It’s just focused on the wrong thing. Agonwrought manifestation isn’t caused by stress to the vesperbane, but to the vesper. It takes all of the vespers’ labor with ichor to heal severe trauma, while a starving body might try to excise the vespers before anything else; and in the last case, endowments were made to be used, and any boredom of an inactive vesperbane would be magnified for their vespers.
But distress, grief, helplessness? Would the vespers notice? Would it affect them?
Banewrought
By far the most important endowment, whose success has made itself present in every modern vespers’ genomic repertoire, is the claws of the oracle. Anatomically little more than sensitivity to the configuration of a hosts’ dactyls, its real power is the encoded association between specific configurations and the cryptic symbology of the arete substrate.
And encoded in arete is all the genomic sequence and all the oaths of blood and soul accessible to vespers, so the claws of the oracle thus grants vesperbanes the capacity to transfer or invent new sequences for the vespers’ consideration.
But of course, there’s an issue. With the claws of the oracles, any endowment can be proposed. But how to gain those claws without already having them? Some vesperbanes may gain them naturally, but agon manifestation is fickle. Relying upon it is wasteful; imagine the stewartry inducts a new vesperbane with aim of constructing bridges, and they instead they manifest to spit fire. You can’t build civilization atop alien whimsy.
It’s one of the seeming laws of vesper behavior that they never themselves produce of a means of communication or interaction, the claws (which, even then, are one-way) being the one outlier, for their obvious utility. Any means of proper feedback must be induced.
There is, however, a kind of vesperbane specialized in vesper interaction, who can induce manifestation of the claws. It’s as they say: vespers made the endowments, but mantids made the haruspex.
Except from the Eve of Realignment
Dominion and union alike have fallen, abandoning you, leaving us to plunge headfirst into this morass. Night has overtaken the heartlands, a night of war, a night of plagues, a night of disaster, a night of death. We reel, and recover, and brace ourselves, and we let the night continue. Insect and chimera dwindle…
A generation has been reared now knowing nothing but this sorry state. Will this be our evolution? Shall our destiny be an ever honed mastery of death, made creatures of this night, scrabbling for slivers of territory? Shall the nymphs go unmourned, their dream a fantasy?
No. Can you not coordinate? Can you not turn as sisters and rise? Let the call of treachery be unanswered.
March with me. By will of vesper and heart of mantis we will rise and build. March with me. With my eye at the helm and my sisters beside me, no army can withstand us. March with me, and this night will be dissolved. Our dreams will blaze forth as a firepit, and its walls we will build shall be such no bat nor bane can threaten you.
Answer my call. I will bring you peace. I will bring you dawn. I will bring you Pantheca.
— Battle-queen Eothi Anthimati, founder of the wardens and the Pantheca’s first defect.
Land of Ants and Roaches
The heartlands is, first and foremost, the land of ants and roaches.
The Noble Roaches and the Spinner Ants comprise the majority sapient life in the heartlands, and most occupy professions translatable as ‘farmer’.
Noble Roaches are smaller, generally growing to be 50-80 cm. and standing 40-55 cm. Their name comes from their history: the Second Dominion cast a curse upon their kind that stunted their minds, making them slow and easily controlled, until the prophets’ will broke the curse, twisting it into something which instead uplifted them, returning clarity to their minds. They mature after about 10-14 years, and often live over 50. Mothers carry their young in a ootheca pouch that hangs from their abdomen, and nurse them with a milky secretion, which she can continue to produce for years after weening their young.
Noble roaches are preferentially herbivorous, but may eat meat. They typically farm grains and tubers, but can occupy many professions. They have long, highly sensitive antennae and developed sense of taste that make them excellent chefs. They speak by blowing air through their spiracles, and fine control of this makes them excellent singers and criers. They are gregarious and curious, easily and eagerly establishing friendly relations with other kinds.
Spinner Ants are a yet smaller eusocial kind. Workers are typically 35-55 cm. long and stand 15-25 cm when not upright. A naked spinner ant is notable for being the least intelligent creature recognized as sapient. Their memory, reasoning, and problem-solving abilities are comparable to maned wolves or salticids — which is to say, they are middling clever yet unsophisticated beasts. But when many spinner ants together establish a labyrinth, something remarkable happens. The basic behavior of a spinner ants colony is to gather plant matter (and in some cases carrion) and feed it to several cultivars of domesticated fungus. Some of these provide a labyrinth’s food supply (the ants are able to eat little else), but some serve an arguably greater purpose: growing the filaments the spinners weave into myweft.
Spinners are almost never seen naked. Instead, they are swaddled in great robes and gowns of myweft, and with one piece of fabric invariably found held near the ants’ head. With this stray piece, they will incessantly pull and tie its threads with their tarsi, lick it with wet palps or rub it with elbowed antennae, all as if in thrall to the many tics of a nervous wreck. But to the spinners, this animaweft is as much themself as the body which manipulates it. Ants instinctively manipulate their wefts much like how baby roaches will whine and hiss as to imitate the speech of their elders.
The arrangement, engraving, and scent of the myweft threads, then, act much like a kind of natural language. Thus, the seemingly nervous fretting of a spinner ant is much more like a scholar forever scribbling thoughts upon a page, reading them over and revising according to a learned grammar. It is through these myweft records that the spinner ants achieve their sapience, though some wonder if it merely a mindless facsimile, or if the unraveled instructions on each myweft is merely the written will of an unseen queen ant.
The ants adorn their labyrinths with banners and rugs of dyed myweft, their art and advertisement. Indeed, labyrinths get their name due to the ants’ fondness for constructing great mazes, both to deter invasions, and to test the worthiness of princesses and their prospective mates.
Besides the productions of food and textiles, the spinner ants make excellent archivists and scribes, and like many eusocials, coordinate well for large scale projects.
Unlike roaches, who have a natural affinity for mantids, the ants are much more alien and poorly understood. They share a deeper history with the euvespids.
Of Myxokora
Knowledge-hunting, that unceasing pursuit of truth to the ends of the realm, is not new. Diamantids two thousand years ago were just as us, with all of our curiosity and cleverness.
When the rites of pharmakon emerged, when mantids could drink the blood, eat the entrails, and breathe the souls of bats to become more, their minds immediately sought to understand and explain why.
Today, of course, we know the answer is vespers, and we call their chosen vesperbanes. To some this nomenclature is suspicious, particularly to those of the dream faith, who venerate the beings. ‘Vesperbane’ reads most obviously as the the bane of vespers — is that not a bad thing? But the truth is an etymological snarl.
We once thought the unnatural powers of a vesper bat was simply its own, like the curse of the tenebra moth, and when a order of mantids arose with will to slay them, they were, literally, the bane of the vesper bats: vesperbanes. But It’d be remiss to stop there. Passenger theory, which holds that bat and bane alike gain their power through some manner of chimerism with another race, was not seriously proposed and considered until the postwar period of the severed states. When it was increasingly accepted, of course, it was decided that if a vesper bat absent their passengers was a mere bat, then this addition component must be the vesper.
But if passenger theory was not always there, and not consensus till after thousand years of pharmakon, what were vesperbanes, in the archaic conception? It goes like this:
As a mythological figure, Aromethia was said to have gained new form as a result of her holy hericide. Her trespass against the godly bats, her arrogating of their supernatural birthright, brought her and caught her between worlds. Aromethia the thrall of Ylafenath was a mantis, but Aromethia the prophet was believed to be half-mantis, half-bat.
Every bat loses their child. So when, after a long campaign igniting the rebellion, Aromethia ate a husband and layed her ootheca, she found the husks of her brood stillborn. A sight familiar to so many clan mothers.
In her sorrow and mourning, she wrought an irreplicable endowment. We today would suppose this the long-theorized duskwrought manifestation, but to the ancients, it was divine intervention.
The Aromethia of legend bore no nymphs, but instead took the warm ichor of a slain god into her tarsi and wove it into a surrogate womb, which bore her the first myxokora, the prophet’s red child.
When her early demise drew near, Aromethia released her child, gave it to a successor. If a vesperbane is half-bat, and a myxokora is born of bats blood, then with this gift the chimerical marriage is sealed, and this defined the early conception of vesperbanes: the wielders of the wretched raptorials.
In truth, what’s more likely is that the myxokora was the first blood secret of our kind, and Aromethia in fact reared many children. Close to two millenia have passed since then, and perhaps four score generations. If Aromethia and her descendants remained fertile, it’s simply mathematical that almost all mantids in the heartlands are of her brood.
The Erotyle Enigma
Erotyles, the pleasing fungus beetles, are not recognized as an intelligent kind. It strikes some as odd, on reflection. In this age, enlightened and sheltered from the depredations of world-scars, so many now know of erotyles from tales alone: stories of beetles draped in wisp and cordyceps, sagely beasts who would encounter a troupe of bugs and kill all of them where they stand, save for the one who was kind enough to bow.
Easily dismissed as superstition or legend, but this skepticism is as incorrect as it is reflexive; erotyles are uniquely distinguished as a prey that reacts to intent, not behavior. They do not startle unless you mean them harm; they do not fall for ploys meant to trap them.
When the skeptic is augmented with this knowledge, the next step of intuition is to suppose this a cunning beast; adept at reading body language, keen to think a theory of mind. But this is not so; outside the domain of reading sophonts, they demonstrate no problem-solving or perceptive ability greater than other wild beetles. Faced with a direbeast, or even other wild insects, and its understanding seems meager indeed. But in the most decisive experiment yet conducted, when faced with a puppet controlled remotely by a vesperbane, its sense of intent failed it utterly.
It’s clear, in the end, what must be happening here. The mind rebels at the possibility, but the evidence speaks: each of these beetles must be a connectique of definite, if middling at best, development. A beetle with percipient faculties that exceed even that of most mantids — yes, they lack the tearful eyes of sapience, any useof tools or language, but is their mental sensitivity not evidence enough?
When viewed through the eyes of a distinguished percipient, the truth is a bit weirder. Paradoxically, it’s the very simplicity of the erotyle mind that grants them their abilities. The training of a true connectique does serve to elevate, but rather compensates for their intelligence.
Imagine a crowded room, bustling with the activity of a party or ball, conversations piled on top of conversations and drowning the whole house in a dull drone of interlocution. Now suppose your task was to overhear a neighbor’s argument. Quite the hopeless task, no?
But imagine your house was instead empty, silent but for the breathes and the creaking of wood. Favor your odds in this scenario?
A sapient mind is a roiling flux of enervate reactions and perturbations. A connectique might quiet this morass, still themselves to catch momently the ephemeral gust of enervate forces arising from another mind. But this state of emptiness a connectique strives with difficulty to attain is the natural state for an erotyle.
It’s so easy for to recognize the presence of intelligent intent when you lack any of your own.
Signature techniques
So, you can colloquially speak of vesperbanes having signature techniques, which means exactly what you think, but there’s also a notion of true signature techniques, a form of technical property.
To become a true signatory for a technique, you perform a spellbranding ritual. Once the ritual has begun, your vespers broadcast your intent to become a signatory. This transmission is such that:
- All banes who know the same technique become aware of you and can become able to track you with a well-known spell.
- Any nearby bane who is inclined to learn the technique will gain a weaker awareness, especially if their vespers covet the technique. (The exact distance this takes affect is related to your power level, theirs, and their compatibility.)
- Any bane who directly appraises you will detect the ritual.
Any of these banes can then challenge your ritual, and duel you. If they win the duel, you fail the ritual, and they become the aspirant in your place.
At any time, the current aspirant can end the ritual. If it ends prematurely, the first aspirant is stripped of their ability to use the technique, and can never initiate the ritual again, even with a different technique.
After a year, the ritual ends. If the aspirant hasn’t completed a sufficient number of duels (always at least one; the exact count depends on the technique, the users, and how cool the fights were), then it is treated as a failure, same as if the ritual had ended prematurely.
If the ritual is successful, however, the user gains it as a true signature technique, which empowers and optimizes the technique. Once you have a true signature, you cannot gain another signature, and you cannot lose your signature by any means except by becoming dead, banefallow or a warlock. The technique can evolve, within reason, but it cannot be swapped wholesale.
Three Kinds of War
There are three kinds of war.
There is the warfare of armies meeting armies, towns under siege, a populace roused to a tribal fervor. This is war fought in full light of day.
Then there is what is fought in total darkness, on nights where even the stars are blotted out. The warfare of poisoned wells and towns scorched to ashes in the silent absence of screams. To destroy the enemy utterly and preemptively, to meet them in battle much the way a bug in amber continues its flight.
To fight in the light of the sun is to meet with attrition, exhaustion and devastation. To fight through darkness and defection is to roll dice blind, faces marked with knives and mutual destruction.
Vesperbanes fight in the shadows of the setting sun, through skirmish and subterfuge. The reign of sunlight warfare ended when vespers endowed banes with the might to waste entire legions, and conscription of rank and file granted nor benefit nor edge, not when the cost was their sure death. Like this, the heartlands saw a redefinition of war that to most, resembled peace. If this avoidance of sunlight war is an agreement to keep civilians out of the business of banes, then the avoidance of night war keeps banes away from civilians.
There would never be an army of vesperbanes, but so long as there are finite contracts to be struck with syndics and guilds, avarice and self-interest would let there be no true peace between banes.