Black Nerve

Follow-up to: The Duality of Mantes

Diamantes don’t have a concept of friendship.

To some, this is a ridiculous thing to assert — mantes are a social species. How could they function without this fundamental stitch in the interpersonal fabric? Indeed, at a coarse level, the skepticism is vindicated. If a “friend” is simply some bug you like, whose company you seek out and enjoy, who helps and supports you, then of course mantes have friends.

Therids are spiders. Setae-furry, with colorful tufts to distinguish individuals, and big ol’ abdomens larger than their heads. They’ve got claws on their paws, and chelicerae-fangs with enough venom to kill just about anything their own size — or larger.

Their leg-span’s about a meter and a half, and they slump instead of standing, rising about half a meter. Most bugs look down on them, and the sprawly gait means they move pretty slowly.

To be blindfolded in a world of baleful, enchanting illusions is simply survival. To wear that handicap proudly can be excused as excess. But when your world contracts to that dark, claustrophobic interiority, where do the monsters dwell?

Mantes could once hear another’s thoughts as keenly as voices. They still hear voices; they just don’t listen.

The moths of the heartlands bear eyes of constant, darkling sorrow. Once prized for beautiful silk, now beauty consumes them. Stare into the light, and pray it burns your eyes.

What is red ichor? Weevils tell stories, the oldest stories, of bats before they bled wrong. But what changed? Why regenerating direbeasts, why magical bloodletting, why these hungry plagues of relentless mutation?

Lie on the altar bleed revelation.

The story of Clan Wormthew née Gildenighter is a tale of conniving desperation, pride’s own survival instincts, and blood that betrays its veins.

The story of the City of Eels is awakening from one nightmare to another. You can only watch.

The first vesperbane stronghold was lead by a series of five — some would argue four — military dictators before its collapse. Every single one had popularity and legitimacy no more than tenuous. Yet it endured three trials conducted as war before its collapse. This is that history.

Heartlands bugs farm many animals, from mealworms to hogs. All flesh is mutable under the ministration of red ichor. What arises from generations of beasts selected to be good hosts for mutant blood, and blood in turn selected to make its hosts tasty and fat?

And what arises when that same hunger is turned back on the genus Insect?

Think about it like this. Say you’re a vesperbane, and your enemy is trying to nudge your thoughts against your best interest, poison your senses and imagination with false images, and so on. All that tricky illustionist shit. You, obviously, don’t want this to happen, so how do you manage that?

Why not just say fuck it and go with the flow?

They say, “Every mantis has fluff on her antennae and spikes on her arms. You don’t know her until you’ve seen both.”

A diamantis has two personas, known classically as their fluff and their spikes. Or, as arthropods with a long history of relations with mantidkind would put it, the mask and the monster.

Most vesperbanes have an affinity for one of the four earthly elements. Wrapped up in that word ‘affinity’ is a complex, poorly understood phenomena, a consequence both of a soul’s enervate composition and the physiology of their umbral system, as well as subtle thing like diet or health. There is a long-lasting nature vs nurture debate on the matter of affinity; while most vesperbanes seem to have an innate affinity, it has in some cases mutated with training — but is that a true change, or the revelation of what was always there, or incipient, like a nymph turning imago?

A diamantis perches upon a flower-throne, tarsi clutching spokes. Trellises shield her, leaves enclosing like curtains — but those vines compete with flowers picked and placed.

Azalea and carnations adorn creeping fig; a pallete pink and orange, in a three-step gradient, and the note of contrast is a sharp violet appearing in only four places. Three lie on her body.

In a land of drought and scarcity, death is certain. Wise bugs weight the scales — who to favor, who to value? One day, Makuja will decide who lives and dies. Until then, she enjoys the world’s favor. But what wisdom comes to a girl with every privilege?

Anna of Three Lakes hatched on the grimy city streets, sooth-black and infested with slug and mites, an orphan with nothing and no one.

She was one of the first kids to get sucked up into an inculcatorium, in the days when Immolata the Second Overscourge first introduced them.

(Perhaps she’d been caught in some crime born of desperation, only for it to be decided she had some potential as a vesperbane. Or perhaps this was just a possible sentence for a deliquent youth.)

Author’s Note: A Chimerical Hope is, in a theoretical sense, loosely outlined as part one of a three part series (which I tentatively call The Dream of Tyrants and Traitors). Despite this, I feel the second and third parts — titled A Beatific Cage and A Tenebrous Dawn — will never be written, given the pace at which ‘chimhop’ (isn’t) proceeding. There’s a lot of very interesting plot and worldbuilding that would be introduced in these vaporous installments, and I’m be loath to never show it to the world.

After the lecture, Myla climbs down from her place among a row of perches. She wades pass a crowd of mantids in silver headbands, the blue light of Ngini’s mix glinting off them as the doors open to a sweltering evening.

In her bag, there’s a flakey book with a cord of mycelia looped around a certain page. She’s memorized the contents, but having a backup never hurts.

Author’s Note: Wasp, Bettle & Scopion was a planned Black Nerve novella. I finished one chapter and made substantial progress on the second.

At this point, though, I find I am unlikely to continue work on this project. I had a few interesting ideas and I’m proud of what results, but it was too ambitious for a side project, and overall, I just didn’t not have enough outstanding long-term plans or this project or confidence in it.

In the fullness before yet there were any kingdoms nor lords to rule them, all was all and nothing else. Demise looked upon the blank, unchanging excess of all things, and she grew bored.

The thought arises, a chimaera of contingency and need. It precedes any notions of self or world, and its content is dumb confusion and wonder. Around it unfolds a constellation of rolling pattern and blossoming symmetries. Space is tiled with squares meeting twelve at a corner, and lit by lights that harmonize in octaves. All that is vibrates, as if in hymn to a hidden god.

Iecka feels an itch under her mask. Right in the middle of her labrum, where her maxillary palps can’t quite reach. She sighs, and lifts a dactyl — a thick one at the end of her raptorial foreleg — and slips it beneath the silk to scratch. It breaks protocol, yes — but she looks down at her patient, and she dares the unconscious, practically rotting form to report her. If he could, he would, she was sure; Iecka recalls the disgust on his withdrawn palps when he had first seen her yellow and black chitin.

If you need to make a team of mantes, the magic number was three.

More was better, but being a mantis meant itching to compete :– to win. More teammates meant more bugs to fight with. Moreover, with four mantes brought you to the perfect number to fracture. First one made enemies with another, then after that there would be one they disliked second most of all, which finally left their partner in strategy. (Some say a mantis kept two lists: their enemies and their not-yet-enemies — more interesting that way.)

They are called the long ones, or the legged folk, or the deepkin. They are sapient centipedes, and if they have an endonym, it is not one they’ve deigned to share with us.

A common trope when imagining deepkin is to believe them to be a race of trespassers and thieves. This not unlike the perception of mantes as monsters fain to hunt and kill mercilessly. Untrue? Yes, except many own the idea with pride.

Description

They told you that you were special—that you had potential. They told you that you could make the world better. They told you that dreams blaze bright.

That’s the treat waiting at the very end. Start running, and chase it for mile after aching mile. Don’t fall, or this’ll all be for nothing—they won’t even scrape your body off the ground.

kinda wanna talk about the euvespid birthright and the contradiction of paradise

but it’s the sort of big idea that would probably benefit from several hundred words of write up hyping up the gravitas to really hit

I’d be interested in hearing about it in either form

The wonder of the euvespids is the archive of souls.

Euvespids are wasps, and their sting is a neurotoxin — a nouetic neurotoxin. It erodes thought, and when prey isn’t dosed sufficient to die at once, the euvespid hunter retains a mental connection to metabolized venom. It adumbrates as it deliquesces flesh, granting them an enervate-trail to relentlessly track.

2024-07-12

Here’s a story idea. Premise is something like this:

It’s a mercenary world out there for vesperbanes. Elizi will do whatever it takes to put food on her plate — well, almost anything. She still has a heart. But if it takes a little finesse to get her fair share? Sometimes you gotta play a little dirty to stay in the game. Elizi does the best she can, and maybe one day, that’ll be enough. Till then, honor is a luxury.

Note: This is a transcript of a series of discord posts.

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”

note: this is a quick reply to someone on discord, i’ll edit it tomorrow

The crepuscular process is understood as the vespers’ judgment made manifest.

A “crepuscule”, after all, is just a vesperbane whose vespers no longer abide by the pact which binds vesper to bane. There’s four chief ways for this to happen.

vespers arent bugs, and they refuse to make themselves clear to bugs (deliberately so, many think — they’ve been exploited by bugs, and if their workings were clear, they’d be more exploited), but there’s a few categories of thing that get the vespers to raise their hackles

Enervate absorbs. But to fully grapple with the behavior of enervate, you need deeper theories. Enervate is five things and nothing else: two kinds of particles, which generate three forces. The rest is extrapolation.

This pages collects the various answers we’ve given to questions about the heartlands over the years. Largely from my discord: https://discord.gg/tqHjHK7

You can also email me questions to consider serpentsquiggle@proton.me.

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’.

What is an umbracog?

Put simply, an umbracog molds enervate in their brain. Its antumbra reacts with neurotransmitters and itself, augmenting cognition. Every sapient bug in the heartlands is an umbrcog of some development, because nouform cognition is what allows for intelligence.

Given that, why is an umbracog, in the colloquial sense, meant as something strange and rare? Why does every bug not boast their mental gifts, why are they not all masters of the psychic arts?

Expression: Vespertheca Prevalence: common to all members of Vesperis vulgaris Endowments:

Expression: Umbral Meridians Prevalence: all members of V. vulgaris Endowments:

Expression: Sanguine Vessels Prevalence: all modern members of V. vulgaris Endowments:

Expression: Wretched Raptorials Prevalence: common among most cultivated pedigrees of V. vulgaris Endowments:

The souleye, (sometimes called the fifth eye, the esoteric eye, or even the pineal eye for an analogy to vertebrates), regulates a diamantid’s nous, the seat of higher cognition and sapiance.

From its place recessed inside the brain, it synthesizes, stores and processes the umbraneurotransmitters required for higher cognition. Though poorly understood, its role in catalyzing, selectively distributing, and otherwise modulating nouetic activity hint at a role even more significant than a simple nerve gland or neural liver.

One day, I posted:

Prompting this response:

Okay, so I understand that mala being held by mantid groups in common can lead to enclosure by clans or other power-seekers who then use control of the vespermala to cement their advantage, but what are pharmacia, and what are nocturnal accounting and accumulation?

— Hasturtimesthree

So the important part about the disenthralled rebellion’s mala storage isn’t enclosure, it’s that collective access, coupled with mantid’s short lifespans, meant that there was a remarkable increase in the amount of cross-pollination and diversity in vesper crypts. For most of their natural history (albeit less so in the late myriad kingdoms, as the bats began to amble towards trade and vassalage), a vesper’s descendants were very likely to live in the same host or a small number of closely related hosts. Any idea or innovation might take many generations to have a chance of dispersing across the vesperbat population. Most did not.

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.

This post is four years old; the canonical list resembles this, but consider everything here subject to substantial revision.

Overscourge of the Windborne Stronghold: Astere Navera, whose breath is black winds. A neurochanneling genius — at first, she was only a stewartry student studying nitrogen-inducing amalgams. So-called aerochannelers are known to create simple semistable constructs such as vortex rings, but Navera pioneered techniques that discovered and then addressed the problem of phase-turbulence, and her mastery of aerochanneling now resembles neuroconjuring, and some of her feats have verged on shadowcalling.

Note: This section is likely outdated. Pending further review, I don’t think anything written herein is grossly inaccurate, but some terminology has been superseded.

Contrast with The Fourfold Divisions 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.

So, the first thing to get out of the way. This post concerns two stories:

Importantly, TSoH was conceived and started before most of black nerve as a setting really existed, meaning little of it will cohere with its canon, other the vaguest generalities like ‘mantids and evil bats and magic’.

Black Nerve: Silk & Ember was a revision of TSoH, reimagining its events within the more modern canon of black nerve.

I don’t quite recall the impetus behind this post — this may have been fluff for the Black Nerve RPG? It’s old stuff, but consider this a look at some philosophies and worldviews in the heartlands.

The world is a cage, and the greatest hope is freedom.

The Hope Doctrine is an opposition to slavery, imprisonment and coercion. The ideal world is one where every mantid pulses with the blood of freedom, and should never fear that it stop. The best one can do is to relish in what freedom you have, never restrict or encroach upon the freedom of others, and strive to dissolve chains.

Note: This is a mirror of an old exposition on enervate, ripped from the Black Nerve Omnibus and posted for ease of referencing. It’s not necessarily up to date; don’t treat it as strictly canon.

See also: The New Theory of Umbral Physics.

The sky is a dark ocean of fractal whorls, writhing tendrils, and black turbulence. Where there once were volcanoes, spires of iron and copper stab free of the ground and reach for heaven. In place of one moon, there is a dark orb emitting corrupt energy.

Greetings from the Vesperbane Stewartry.

You are receiving this letter in recognition of your outstanding performance on the highest level of the Syndic Civil Examination, and your particular responses on the psychological assessment. Estimates of your mental acuity score are over 50 (36 is average). This places you in the upper 1% of all mantids, (percipients and vesperbanes excluded).

Note: This is some of the oldest worldbuilding in black nerve, and as you can imagine, substantial information established here has been revised and contradicted in other sources. Consider this of principly historical interest.

Note that more polished and canonical articles covering similar subjects have been written:

Declassifier’s note: a distinction is to be drawn between interdicts and [exclusions].underline, as the two are frequently conflated in popular imagining. ‘Exclusion zone’ is a political designation, whereas an ‘interdiction zone’ are a magical phenomena, caused by crepuscules, the vespertine singularities which often result in unbreakable taboos. But not every exclusion mandate concerns vespers, and not every crepuscule, nor even every crepuscular interdict, is confined to a fixed area. But there is frequent overlap between the two.

Note: Prologue chapters are the same as There Lies Already the Shadow of Hope. Read those first.

But begin with a scream. The sound came as a harsh equal to the hissing moans that the roaches make for speech, and it was distant enough that it blent with the wind in the leaves of the forest, and the faint laughs of its guardian ambrosia beetles.

I ignored it, and puffed air through my spiracles. “Why doesn’t the shrine have any walls?” a younger Tlakida asked no one, cursing some fool builder. I drew my cloak tighter around my thorax, hoping to damp the noise. Of course it still leaked in, through the tattered, unwashed thing. The cloak hardly could cover my unfurled abdomen. I loved to wear it, though, even when it drew sneers.