let’s talk about the sun cutter
alright, kinda wanna talk about this one guy.
and i mean that in a way that’s kinda literal.
he is the one, the indivisible, the lord of all batkind — the sun-cutter king.
his signature technique was the All-Conquering Division.
in later retellings of his myths thousands of years later, it tends to get simplified as him having a “tongue sharp enough to cut anything”
(not a metaphor; his endowment grew a whip sword in his mouth and he was known to behead people with its lash)
but that’s not really enough to explain what his technique was
it’s worth noting that some of the most common technique archetypes the vespers naturally produce are breath weapons and enhanced claw attacks — things that come intuitively to the bats.
so it’s a bit more accurate to say that the one king had slashing as a breath weapon
his preferred style of cut is a compond slash that divides the target into eight pieces by lines that seems to radiate out from a single point, like the rays of a sun — the eponymous sun-cut
how this is cast is of some interest. he draws one line with either of his foreclaws, and another with his tongue. you’ll note that this is only three lines, and you need at least four to divide something into eight pieces
how does this work? his power level is so high he could add three ones and get four
but no, it segues nicely into what makes this technique truly powerful. he does part of the work, and the technique completes itself
because let’s be honest, cutting things real good is powerful, but it’s not “strongest in the verse” powerful
we can imagine, perhaps, he’s honed an enervate affinity that’s profoundly optimized for cutting, but again, it’s just cutting
and importantly, part of the premise of black nerve is that philosophically, the magic system is technology — techniques from thousands of years ago fundamentally aren’t as advanced, refined, or powerful as what modern vespers are capable of.
now, some of this depends somewhat on how it’s implemented
there is a simple and compelling way to implement universal cutting with enervate mechanics: imagine creating a sheet of enervate that blocks interactions between atoms on either side of it. if you can manifest that sheet for a moment then blow it up, the different parts would fall away as if they were different objects. (fittingly, this really isn’t cutting, it’s dividing)
still, it’s unclear how this could be generalized to cut amalgams or enervate constructs, and being able to cut through any technique is what would make the sun-cutter truly worth reckoning with
but i digress
the base mechanics of his ability aren’t actually important, because at the limit, what matters is the narrative around his abilities. you see, “All-Conquering Division” extends to at least two conceptual levels.
first, there’s a important title i left out of the my initial glaze.
he is also the author of arete. in a meaningful sense, he created the vesper’s magic system, dividing power itself into fungible units that could be accounted and transacted.
the vespers know this, and they associate it with him so profoundly that they considered arete, endowments, techniques, a valid axis on which to divide.
now, it would oversimplifying to say he can cut you off from your vespers, but
what you’re noticing here is that the operative agent here isn’t any of the corporeal mechanics of what the sun-cutter physically can do, but the conceptual narrative of what vespers expect him to do.
thus, the true power of the All-Conquering Division is that it’s a technique that cuts anything, and this isn’t a statement of fact, it’s a command.
the sun-cutter makes three cuts, and the fourth is made for him. he draws the lines, and if the target isn’t cut, the vespers task themselves with divising a way to cut it anyway.
it’s an offense that adapts to anything.
in the sun-cutter’s era, there was no notion of ‘prophecy in the flesh’, but it’s not altogether incorrect to think of All-Conquering Division as creating a prophecy of destruction for anything it initially fails to cut.
(upon the sun-cutter’s head sat a crown of myriad fractal bone-blades growing out from his flesh. it’s said that every time he conquered a new foe, he grew a new blade there)
you may wonder: who is the sun-cutter, actually? where and why did he learn to do any of this?
back in in dialogue with plages, one of the proposed explanations for the origin of vespers was that king of bats created them to tame the virulent blood plagues.
but let’s go back further. remember, weevil priestess can become immortal, eventually learning the art of transmigrating their minds into young bodies, reincarnating themselves. this is the culmination of weevil wizardry.
when there were dragonriders, the dragonrider pact was considered to exclusive with learning most arts of wizardry, including transmigration. a weevil’s soul can only have one mate.
Hraal, the greatest dragonrider, so adored for her deeds and adventures, was allowed to be the exception. and what an exception she was; her genius was said to be sufficient that she simplified the process of transmigration. immortality went from something achieved perhaps once a century by the greatest wizard of a generation, to something any weevil could learn if they devoted decades to the task.
but you know how this story ends; Hraal learned wizardry, and so did her dragon, who tried to save a her miscarried litter through lunar divination, and weevils claim this was the origin of ichor.
the sorrow and the blasphemy was so great, that as Hraal and so many others entered the cycle of reincarnation, the elders no longer allowed weevils to take bats as mounts. all of them remember the first attempts to teach a bat wizardry leading to catastrophe, and an immortal loving a mortal creature was deemed too painful to allow — even immoral to.
and so there was a kind of species-wide divorce as the weevils retreated into their newly widespread immortality, and bats, once domesticated and uplifted, were left to go feral, stories of their old masters still echoing in their throats as plagues claimed them.
and then one bat rediscovered lunar divination. perhaps he pieced it together from the stories, perhaps secrets were revealed to him by a foolish weevil.
theogony is the ritual by which a weevil foundress first connects with the fungal core of a new gallery, connecting her to the roots of the world and revealing to her her role in the cycles and machinations of ambrosia.
lunar theogony is a dangerous, forbidden ritual of divination in which a weevil opens their mind just as intimately to the adumbrations of the black moon. it’s a path that leads only to madness and atrocity.
when that one bat performed lunar theogony, they witness memories. they remembered dying in the womb. and before that, they remembered being hraal’s dragonmate, living a life of adventure denoued by tragedy, and dying on a soft bed, the claw of their withered wing held by a bug in a young new body.
this, be it a vision or hallucination, lead the bat to conclude they were now the reincarnated mind of hraal’s dragon and her stillborn child
the weevil elders dismissed it as impossible derangement, and did not even allow them to meet the current incarnation of hraal.
(would it be incorrect to say vespers are the product of this bat’s attempt to create a “dragonrider pact at home”? interesting to think about how profound an inversion it is — because for all the assertions of equivalence, it’s not wrong to note that the dragonrider pact was created by, and therefore is designed to benefit, bugs first of all.
and what might a pact designed by bats, for bats, look like?)
the vespers saved bats from the ichorplagues and gave them mastery over the bugs that hunted them. and the sun-cutter had mastery and profound influence over the vespers. equipped with the all-conquering division, he leads the bats through uncontested strength. he promises the vespers unending growth, and he promises the bats an everlasting kingdom. and people believed him; he seemed unstoppable. after all, the world itself would bend so that he always won.
now, the weevils don’t like this. they dont like it on a number of levels, but the biggest definitely the slavery issue. the millions of mantids kept like livestock is an atrocity that needs to be stopped immediately.
the problem is, you don’t win if you just kill the sun-cutter (even if they had a way to kill the sun-cutter). that would only create more chaos; vespers exist, and even if every brick of the sun-cutter’s kingdom was destroyed, bats would still be able to use vespers to enthrall mantids. short of exterminating bats or vespers, what solution was there?
enter the instrumental transcendence plan.
what if we grew a really, really big tree, a mountain of wood, a veritable world-tree, and then feed it to ambrosia and used the resulting megafungus to cast a spell big enough to affect the whole heartlands?
what spell? how about a gigatic nouprojection to connect and unify all kinds into a peaceful hivemind? weevils and bats and mantids would finally see eye to eye. everything could know the sublimation of the dragonrider pact.
||(this isn’t the first time the weevils tried something like this. one of the many apocalypses that befell the termites was their subjugated weevils rising up and subsuming termite workers with a cultivar of ambrosia/cordyceps. for a brief moment, it cogitated as a world-wide awareness, just long enough to calculate that, despite its size, it did not have enough resources for the Solution. so it self-cannibalized and let pieces break off to eternal lie until one day it could rise anew, vaster and poised to win. these persistent fragments of that being are called the rotting things or the eld rot.)
instrumental trascendence is, of course, above all the puppet strings, a rotting things plot.||
the broad strokes of the plan go like this. over the course of several decades, hundreds of weevils would work together to grow the great tree, at such a scale that it becomes an engineering problem. then, they would gather up representative of every race of bug so that the spell knows how to interface with their brains. then they start seeding the tree with fungus. finally, on a day where the black moon eclipses the sun, a weevil will hang from the highest boughs in a ritual of theogony, and sun-accelerated flow of black nerve from the moon into the atmosphere will amplify the spell, in addition to the auspicious divination component.
there is a free variable here: who should be the weevil who makes allies among all the bugs of the heartlands? who should be the weevil who receives the ultimate theogony?
there’s a narratively fitting answer here: Hraal.
but there’s a problem. Hraal is an old spirit. very old. not only has her connectome abstracted and generalized past the point of no longer being a specific identity, a sense of detachment, borne from the modern world being so different from the time she hatched in, and having lived through so many different bodies (the medium is the message; you can transmigrate into a new body, but the original brain factors into who you effectively become).
and it certainly doesn’t help that a bat claiming to be the reincarnation of her beloved dragon is instituting mass slavery and genocide.
but Hraal is the only one they trust for this plan. so they pick a kid to be the chosen one, and groom them so they’re primed to become the new host of Hraal in what might the first case of forcible reincarnation.
now this is to me a pretty neat setup for an adventure. chosen one who has to travel the land making friends with bees, ants, spiders, etc. all while trying not to get killed by the servants of the sun-cutter and grappling with the role that was forced upon her and the machanations she’s but a pawn in? compelling stuff
as you can imagine, this story ends at the world tree on the day of the eclipse; the tree comes to be known as Hraal’s Gallows, since she will hang to receive the ultimate wisdom and be reborn.
not-hraal gains one important ally on her journey — at some point, she makes contact with the queenhives of the western continent. in particular, she amuses a young ovitheon who agrees to come to the heartlands and defend the world-tree. which will be necessary, since obviously the sun-cutter is going to try to stop them, and at this point in the timeline there actually isn’t much that can stand up to a vesperbat, let alone the strongest vesperbat. an old world seal mistress is probably the only other thing in that tier, honestly.
which potentially leads to this funny moment where you’ve got the confrontation between a weevil wearing the mantle of hraal and the bat wearing the mantle of her dragon, and then there’s just this big wasp there.
“who the hell are you?”
“you heartlanders think the world revolves around you, don’t you? i am Zenikalita, thrice-hatched, third daughter of myself and queen of the Red-Flower-Needle Hive. you need to broaden your horizons, little bat.”
she goes tarsus-to-toe with the sun-cutter, and it’s probably the finest challenge he’s had in a while. euvespid sealcraft doesn’t care for vesper narratives, so her defenses strained All-Conquering Division in a way little else can.
now, the most powerful seal euvespids can wrought is Queensting, a pulse of enervate so concentrated it distorted space and splits motes and atoms, producing an enervating-smite effect not unlike welkinflame, albeit much more refined.
Zenikalita only had the resources to prepare one scroll of queensting, but it was enough to destroy the sun-cutters heart, opening up a wound he was powerless to close.
of course, by the time she had the opening to use this, ACD had adapted to her defenses, and could cut past them. her first layer of defenses, that is. ovitheons are immortal, and the most important part of immortality is not dying. she wouldn’t have done this if it risked her life. but her second layer of defenses was a seal that teleported her away from the battlefield, taking her out of a fight she wasn’t keen to return to.
even with the key battle being with a random bug from another continent, i think there’s an interesting thematic point here. weevils and ovitheons alike are immortal, and here they are standing against the sun-cutter, who just wanted what they had. he tried to climb up to heaven, and now he falls down from the world tree with a queenstinger through the heart
with king cut down and the moon rising, instrumental transcendence is beginning. but when the connection comes, the dying mind of the sun-cutter can feel it, and he screams out his dominance and supremacy across the connection
the bats who had fought beneath him feel it, and they respect it.
with all-conquering division still trying to adapt to his adversity, with the inspiration the queensting provides, and with the faith of his loyal bats bolstering him, he evolves his technique one step further, and it’s cast in concert with every vesper present. kingslash, eight arms spiraling out from a single point, and each cuts harder and deeper the further they turn. hraal is cut, and so is her gallows, and instrumental transcendence ends before it begins.
(the legends would go on to say that the sun-cutter cut down the weevil’s great tree with his tongue alone, but that’s not true)
as he loses too much blood and black nerve to support conscious thought, the last words he says are along the lines of
my empire will endure eternally, and the vespers will flourish forever. i am indivisible.
these aren’t empty words when he says: he swears them as an oath.
what happens next is ambiguous. the question of when a vesperbat dies, with their bodies being the platythings of ichor and vesper, is already difficult to determine, and that’s when the vesperbat isn’t the deific leader of a civilization. weevils and wasps will to say that Zenikalita’s sting killed him and he was dead before he hit the ground. but bats brought him back to his palace and say he dwelled privately in his throne room for years, weaving contracts with the vespers and birthing new techniques through ichor.
on examining the arete record, the sun-cutter’s vertinym signed no transaction after that last oath. he did, however, leave an inheritance. seven ‘archon’ accounts that have the right to a fraction of his power and his signature techniques. with the coordination of all seven accounts, the sun-cutter’s true vertinym can be used once more
vesper and bat alike interpretted this strange setup to mean that the sun-cutter had split himself into several fragments, each with a portion of himself, and when all of them could be united as one, the king would return and his promise of an eternal empire and flourishing forever would be fulfilled.
indeed, you can imagine that in that moment of transcendence, the sun-cutter’s mind connected to some place beyond himself, and his consciousness still resides there.
when another bat opens their mind like he did, they can become the king in the same way the king had become the mother of ichor.
the archons, if they ever existed, were slain alongside the bats with the advent of vesperbanes. even still, banes who delve too deeply in the aethershade do report feeling the brush of a resonance that quivers their blood. but it’s difficult to confirm and study; there are few means of doing this that aren’t forbidden techniques in the first place.
in a way, the persistent limbo of the sun-cutter king is the non-answer to the paradoxical question: if the king always wins, if the all-conquering division adapts to any foe, could he win a victory over himself?