Alright, I kinda wanna talk about this one guy in Black Nerve —- and that’s almost 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 removed, it tends to get simplified as him having a “tongue sharp enough to cut anything.” (This is no metaphor; his vespers had endowed his mouth with a whip sword that was known to behead people with its lash.)
But that’s not really enough to explain what his technique truly was.
First, it’s worth noting that the most oldest, and still most common archetypes for the vespers’ design are breath weapons and enhanced claw attacks — two arts that come intuitively to the bats.
Thus, it’s a bit more accurate to say that the Sun-Cutter had raw slashing force as a breath weapon.
His preferred style of attack is a series of rapid cuts dividing the target into eight pieces, composed of lines that seem to radiate out from a single point, as if the rays of a bleeding sun — this is the eponymous sun-cut.
Now, how he performs this technique bears comment. He draws one line with either of his foreclaws, and another with his tongue. You will note that this is only three lines, and you need at least four to divide something into eight pieces.
How does this work? Simple: his power level is so high he could add three ones together and get four.
But no, this leads nicely into elaboration of what makes this technique truly powerful. See, the king only does part of the work, then the technique completes itself.
Because let’s be honest, cutting things really really good is powerful, but it’s not “strongest in the verse” powerful.
We can imagine, perhaps, the Sun-Cutter honed an enervate affinity profoundly optimized for cutting, but again, it’s still just cutting.
And importantly, part of the premise of Black Nerve is that philosophically, the magic system is mere technology — techniques from thousands of years ago fundamentally just aren’t as advanced, refined, or powerful as what modern vespers are capable of. This is the mystical stone age we’re talking about.
Of course, applying this reasoning depends somewhat on how the king’s technique actually functions — wheels from the stone age remain intrinsically effective.
One simple and compelling way to implement universal cutting exists through 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 single 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 division.)
Still, it’s not fully clear how this form of technique could be convincingly generalized to cut seminerves or enervate constructs; and it is being able to cut through any technique that makes the sun-cutter truly worth reckoning with.
But we digress.
Truth is, the base mechanics of the king’s ability aren’t actually important, because at the limit, what matters is the narrative around his abilities. You see, the effect of ⸢All-Conquering Division⸥ extends to at least two conceptual levels.
First, there’s a important epithet I left out of the my initial glaze.
He is also the Author of Arete. In a meaningful sense, he created the vespers’ magic system; it was he who first divided power itself into fungible units that could be accounted and transacted.
The vespers know this, and they associate this with him so profoundly that they consider arete, endowments, and techniques themselves, a valid axis on which his division can operate.
Now, it would oversimplifying this to say he can cut you off from your vespers, but…
What you’re noticing here is that the operative agent here is not any of the specific, concrete mechanics of what the Sun-Cutter is physically capable of, but the high level narrative of what vespers expect him to do.
Thus, the true power of the All-Conquering Division is that it is, by definition, a technique that cuts anything. That isn’t a statement of fact — that’s a command.
The sun-cutter only needs to make three cuts for the final cut to be made for him. He draws the lines, and if the target isn’t thereby cut, the vespers actively task themselves with divising a way to cut it anyway.
His is an offense that adapts to anything.
In the Sun-Cutter’s era, there was not yet any notion of ‘prophecy in the flesh’, but it isn’t 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 once sat a crown of myriad fractal bone-blades growing out from his flesh. These are the antlers every elder bat boasted. It is 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 be mutally 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 had profoundly simplified the process of transmigration. Immortality soon 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 would no longer allow weevils to take bats as mounts. All of them remembered how the first attempts to teach a bat wizardry lead to catastrophe, and an immortal loving a mortal creature was deemed too painful to allow — even immoral.
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, binding 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 witnessed 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 this as impossible derangement, and did not even allow them to meet the current incarnation of Hraal.
This brings us to the vespers.
The vespers saved bats from the ichorplagues and granted them mastery over the bugs that had hunted and slaughtered them. And the Sun-Cutter held mastery and profound influence over the vespers.
Equipped with the All-Conquering Division, he led the bats with uncontested strength. He promised the vespers unending growth, and he promised 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 at all. They dislike it on a number of levels, but the biggest definitely the matter of slavery. The thrallspell, and the millions of mantids it kept like livestock, was an atrocity that needed to be stopped immediately.
The problem is, you won’t win if you just kill the Sun-Cutter (had they even possessed 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?
This brings us to the instrumental transcendence plan.
The weevil elders wondered: what if they planted a seed and enchanted it to grow a really, really big — 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? One of the old stories the weevils tell in hushed whispers is the the age of termite queenminds, who pulled entire mounds into the embrace of one soul. So, 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 sublime mind-marriage of the dragonrider pact.
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, as well as having lived through so many different bodies.
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 machinations 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 library-hives of the western continent. In particular, she amuses a young ovitheon who agrees to come to the heartlands to aid the defense of the world-tree. This 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 power tier, honestly.
Which potentially leads to this funny moment where you see the confrontation between a weevil wearing the mantle of Hraal and the bat wearing the mantle of her first 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 such a way little else can.
Now, the most powerful seal wrought by any euvespids is Queensting, a pulse of enervate so concentrated it distorts 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-Cutter’s 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 now 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 bothered with any 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. The queen had been amused, and now takes her leave.
Even with this key battle being against 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, a beast who just wanted what they had. He tried to climb up to heaven, and now he falls down from the world tree with a Queensting-wound through the heart.
With the 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 adversary, and with the inspiration the queensting provides, and with the faith of his loyal bats bolstering him, the king evolves his technique one step further, and it is cast in concert with every vesper present.
The Kingslash, eight arms which spiral out from a single point, and each line cuts harder and deeper the further it turns. 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 quite it.)
At last he had lost too much red ichor and black nerve to support conscious thought — and the last words he says are something along the lines of:
My empire shall endure eternal, and the vespers shall flourish forever. For I am indivisible.
These aren’t empty words when he says: no, he swears them as an oath.
What happens next is ambiguous. The question of when a vesperbat truly dies, given their bodies are 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 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 had signed no transaction after that final oath. He did, however, leave an inheritance. There are 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 may 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.
And 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.
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?