The Thirteen Arts of Vesperbanes
A vesperbane is a mantis who has undergone the pharmakon rites to host vespers within their body. In return they are granted magical abilities — but to use them, the vespers must grow bespoke organs, the physical means to implement that magic. Vesperbanes’ abilities fall under three broad categories, and within those categories are the thirteen schools of magical techniques.
Umbra
Enervate is a paraphysical substance that in ways resembles a form of matter or energy, but follows has its own unique physics and chemistry, and complex interactions with normal matter. The short of it is enervate attenuates energy and enshrouds matter, and the long of it is far too long to get into here. Enervate exists in the environment — as an atmospheric layer far above, or bound and seeking escape from the heat of the mantle, and at length produced by deposits of precious nerve crystals. It’s generally not found nor produced within organisms, being corrosive to structured matter. Thus, a vesperbane wishing to manipulate enervate must acquire and maintain a store of it.
Umbrachanneling - school of the black enchanter
The umbrachanneler harness the power of enervate through precise siphoning or discharge. Any umbrachanneler necessarily wields great destructive power; matter dissolves in contact with enervate, an effect even a wretch can exploit. Barriers can be broken down, flesh deliquesced, and the very air itself turned deadly. But their true power comes from their implements, tools made from amalgams, and designed to be imbued with enervate. An umbrachanneler with access to implements is limited only by the imaginations and manufacturing of engineers. But this is not the only way — an umbrachanneler whose body has been augmented may imbue their chitin itself, so their raptorials inflict wicked wounds, or deflect projectiles with charged energate (the famous Et-Oosen’s Phare). Others may seek alchemy over engineering, pursuing new effects through pure enervate, like the dynamists who master telekinetic control of matter.
Umbradivination - school of the black sensor
To innate senses, enervate is the absence of form and light, the absence of sound, and olfactory pain more harsh than capsaicin, more aversive than denatonium. But to a novice sensor, species and saturation can be discerned. To an adept, form becomes visible as energy gardients beating waves across the surface, the resonance cascades of enervate spells in action become stridently audible. The master begins to witness the mystifying geometries that the mind that warps to comprehend. Even the greatest stealth erodes under the eyes of a trained sensor, but the true profit of umbradivination is scouting for nerve crystal deposits, and gaining forewarning of umbral storms.
(This is a school of some controversy, for those tributes and conscripts with any facility with it begin to encroach upon the blood secret of the Nibrissa clan, the black whiskers — an unrivaled sensory organ, that the clan would do much to ensure it is never rivaled.)
Umbrasynthesis - school of the black alchemist
When the Telesterion opened the epsilon gates, umbracraft changed irrevocably. Even as the low hanging fruit in other fields has been plucked, umbrasynthesis still seems ripe with new possibilities. Through the three routes of fission, fusion, and reaction, the marriage of enervate and matter begets endless forms most bewildering. This school is unique in that the parachemistry of enervate is accessible to the vesperless, provided the right tools and perhaps a laboratory. But the combat umbrasynth can — and must — mold enervate within her own body.
Umbraconjuration - school of the black summoner
If umbrachanneling is the mastery of matter, than umbraconjuration is the mastery of pure enervate. An umbraconjurer produces semistable constructs of enervate — a feat that’s been compared to conceiving, engineering and constructing a machine with nothing but the reckoning of your mind. A wretch conjurer can manage little more than the nerve missile technique, while a fiend might aspire to the tau-nrv whip or the rho-nrv devastator. And of course, no blackbane fails to respect the capstone: umbra dragon invocation, called the last word in umbraconjuration. But the most reliable of the conjurer’s techniques is the simple orb, for it’s the most stable form enervate can take while still allowing embellishments for utility.
(Of note is the Asetari clan, a clan descended from a wingless tribe, whose blood secret was the Astral Body: an autonomous conjuration one could mistake for a living creatures, and a family of mind projection technique that gave them fine control of these wraiths.)
Umbraprojection - school of the black witch
Enervate parachemistry has many parallels to matter, and one is the class of umbral neurotransmitters — some of which are naturally occuring. The theory is that sufficiently fine control of enervate would then give you direct influence over a organism’s brain. The reality is that not only is that level of fine control essentially impossible, neural connectomes are sufficiently unique that “illusions”, “telepathy”, or “geas” effects through means of umbraprojection are outright fiction or embellished legends. What umbraprojection is capable of is quite underwhelming. It excels at, beyond anything else, causing causing confusion, mental fog, and headaches. For the wretch projectionist, that often is the goal, but it requires a deft touch to do anything else. One of the most common midlevel abilities is stimulating regions whose function is highly conserved, for instance triggering a fear response.
Umbramodulation - school of the black wizard
Umbramodulation is two things: an untested theory of theorectical umbral physics, and what actually exists, a grab bag of strange tricks and impractical techniques mainly cared for by researchers. There are anomalous properties of certain low entropy amalgam crystals — there are well-known deviations in cohesion coefficients and the mystery of the phase index. Modulation theory holds that enervate species aren’t black boxes of inherent properties, but all properties of the myriad enervate species are determined by the vibration of the bonds of the fundamental constituents of enervate. And moreover, that those properties can be altered without fission, fusion, or reaction, through the theorized mechanism of modulation.
There are no combat umbramodulators, and little application has been discovered. But there’s the hope that one day, there’ll be a breakthrough…
Ichor
Red ichor is the blood of the vesperbat, the creature whom vespers originally evolved to bond with. Vesperbat blood is hyperactive, able to grow and mutate at staggering rates. The bats have evolved natural mechanisms to corral their blood, but when it’s freed of the flesh, its mercurial nature is unleashed. But through skillful use of ichor, endless possibilities for the manipulation of biology open up — and indeed, everything any vesperbane has done required ichor to birth the vespers, grow their endowments. There is a name for when the use of ichor fails, and that word is myxogoth.
Haemoaugmentation - school of the red healer
It’s the natural inclination of anyone given facility with biology itself: heal the sick and broken, and uplift all to a new standard of health. And indeed, control of red ichor is a route to mending wound and revising the body, but the reality is far less glamorous. Per hayflick regulation, haemoaugmentation is no cure to ageing, and ichor-derived grafts require constant work to escape the necrotic, cancerous fate of all bat blood.
Haemodiagnosis - school of the red peeragist
By name, haemodiagnosis would almost seem a subfield of haemoaugmentation. After all, how could one heal without first diagnosing the malady? But this school concerned more than mere triaging — a haemodiagnostic’s aim is to understand biology on the deepest levels, down to the sequencing of gene tendencies and mapping metabolic pathways. A skilled haemodiagnostic could reconstruct someone’s appearance from a drop of their lymph. Any developmental weakpoint you have becomes visible to them. And moreover, vespers spoke with blood before ever arete existed, and echoes still remain. The forbidden techniques of haemodiagnostics allows understanding blood secrets as no one else can — and stealing them.
Haemofabrication - school of the red pharmacist
Organs and tissues derived from metaplasia of ichor have longevity problems, and a way to sidestep this is to make ichor the process, rather than the product. The most obvious application of haemofabrication is synthesizing chemicals, but haemofabricates, controversially, also use their skills to create anti-vesperbane weapons. Haemofabrication is subject to some definition issues — is a graft that amounts to an advanced bandage (that is, a temporary measure until the body heals on its own) an instance of haemofabrication? More controversially, ichor-derivatives, such as ichortallow, blur the line between fabrication, augmentation, and genesis, but have often been placed on this side of the divide.
Haemogenesis - school of the red breeder
No school of vesperbane arts has been subject to more sanctions than haemogenesis. In short, haemogenesis is the growth of organisms with red ichor. There are two broad approaches — one, the easiest, is to shape and possess an existing organism. Mammals are the most receptive host, and the result is termed a dire animal. The other is to mold the creature of raw ichor. A note is to be made of the creation of self-reproducing threats, an act that warrants immediate sanction. There are two means of accomplishing this — through a kind of budding, where blood is sloughed from one creature to form another, or through what amounts to sex re-derived from first principles. The latter carries the extreme risk of bypassing hayflick regulation, and is the act of a true renegade.
Vesper
The chimerae of twin hungers, the vesper live within the intensities of a vesperbane, stoking their hunger and surviving off an excess intake of food, relying on the vesperbanes for reproduction.
Aretecraft - school of the vile medium
Arete is the medium of communication, inheritance and exchange between vespers. When one grasps the arcane rules, one may take part in the interlocution. A student of aretecraft may inscribe techniques and endowments (for genomes can be quite lengthy) so that they may be easily granted to other vesperbanes. An adept may become fluent enough to forge binding vespertine oaths, or perhaps become an exhumer of ancient knowledge buried in the arete-record. By far the most common application of aretecraft is the eduction of chi-nrv — because for all the information it contains, arete is also a means of sealing energy.
Mycocraft - school of the vile artificer
The kingdoms of life diverged long, long ago, but the separation was much more recent for kingdom fungi and kingdom animalia, than either for kingdom plant. This reflects in how ichor often struggles to affect trees, while having much facility with mycelium. The school of mycocraft is the most pedestrian, as its primary end is inoculating substrate with a fungus that consumes it over the course of hours or days, before being specially treated to form unique materials, such as the cheap banestone of buildings, or the baneleather soldiers are guarded with. Mycocraft can also be used to manipulate the earth by directing a mycelia mass to growth within it. Combined with ichor-augmentation, a combat mycobane could gain advantageous control of the battlefield.
Dwimmercraft - school of the vile theurgist
Would it be more accurate to introduce dwimmercraft as a list of applications, or a list of crepuscular interdicts? It may be true that haemogenesis is the school most sanctioned by the stewartry, but by the vespers themselves, no school has seen more restrictions and penalties than this. The idea is simple. The nature of the vesper-bond is endowments granted — but why should endowments be only in the body? Dwimmercraft, then, is the creation of sustained endowment-type effects outside the body of a vesperbane. The easiest way to power an effect like that, of course, is ejecting a vesper to act as the ‘ghost in the machine’. More abstractly, dwimmercraft is the manipulation of vespers. There are some effects which fall under this school only by this refinement of the definition — the Broodseer’s Eye, for example, seems an ordinary bodily endowment to the uninitiated. The most iconic effects of dwimmercraft are the creation of golems, or those wards which protect us from the obliteration fields.