Black Nerve

so let’s sketch up astere navara

poor mom got rizzed up by some rich dude, relationship gets dicey after she’s already gravid, so she runs away. falls in love with a roach, lays her ootheca, then gets sick and dies.

thus, navara hatches in a slum populated entirely by roaches. for all the formative years of their life, they never meet another mantis. at this time, they dont even learn to stridulate, the only language they pick up is roach cant.

this is not great; the roaches are kind to him, but mantids have unique social needs that mean an ever‍-​present friction

Then, after a few instars, there’s another problem. navara is still a nymph, but mantids are bigger than roaches. significantly bigger‍ ‍—‍ at this point, navara needs to eat as a much as an adult roach and this is a slum, remember

so basically navara kind of needs to start fending for themself, get their own meals

with enough tenacity, a nymph on the street can make a little money doing odd jobs or begging, but it’s not easy given yknow, not speaking the dominant language. one tactic navara employs most is busking‍ ‍—‍ since roach cant is spoken with the throats instead of the palps, they’ve honed a pretty respectable singing voice, and a mantis singing like a roach is novelty

but despite all this, it probably goes without saying that navara remains pretty starving.

now, the town they live is big enough vesperbanes are a regular sight. the thing navara notices about vesperbanes is how much they eat ‍-​ in a single meal they might down more than navara got to eat on a good day

they wanted that.

…and they get it. there’s probably a story to tell about how hard they tried, how they finally pulled through, but you know what this is‍ ‍—‍ of course this kid manages to become a vesperbane in the end.

now, it’s here where a few traits of navara become prominent

first, navara feels stupid. to the roaches, he’s stupid because he physically cannot speak as articulately as a roach, and psychologically struggles to follow the social and linguistic quirks of roach communication. to mantids, he’s stupid for essentially the same reason, only instead of nature it’s nurture

this puts navara in the interesting spot of being a gregarious loner. they’re used to being misunderstood, used to having no one around. (mantids need alone time, and growing up around roaches only exacerbated this). so they keep to themselves, keep quiet.

but at the same time, they’re used to relying on people, and used to being nice and helpful so that people are willing to help them in turn. if navara’ll never have anyone’s respect, better to be seen as a kind fool than a troublesome one.

thing is, they aren’t stupid. they pick up language quick, become a competent rookie vesperbane quick. they don’t stand out, nobody’s hailing them as a genius, and given where they started, in the end they’re barely adequate.

but a barely adequate vesperbane gets fed and gets paid

and since that was their only motivation… pretty much all their income goes into helping out their roach family

navara has no ambition. they dont want to become a big name vesperbane, they train enough to keep their skill sharp, take simple low level missions, then clock out to play with the kids. people talk about career fiends, but navara would have been happy being a career wretch.

thing is… navara gets along with everyone. they listen to what people say, and they remember it. orders, advice, personal stuff. they aren’t trying to be the best, but it’s easy to see them improving.

is it any surprise when navara gets promoted to leadership roles?

(meanwhile at home, navara is bigger than the adult roaches, and providing for everyone. they may seem a fool, but it’s hard not to see them increasingly as a sort of dependable parental figure)

navara doesnt want to be a leader, doesnt think they’re fit for it, but when the people in charge insist, navara doesn’t get stubborn about it.

and like, navara does enjoy being a leader‍ ‍—‍ protecting people, making sure their needs are met and watching them flourish as a result. of course, the stress, the anxiety, is crushing. but when navara became a vesperbane, they had nothing but a desire not to starve, and they’d do anything else if the odds of eating were better (for want of a nail, they’d be a criminal destined to self‍-​destruct and die young and forgotten)

now, though? they had a purpose.

and with this new perspective, it’s not hard for them to look up for examples to follow, and see the fourth overscourge, Alemar, the most powerful vesperbane who keeps everyone in westhold safe. Alemar, who’s loved and decried for progressive policies that help people at the expense of military might or tradition

navara doesn’t think anything like “i wanna be overscourge one day”

but, they do think, every day i’m not overscourge, that i’m not literally responsible for keeping everyone i know safe, there’s more that i can do. so they’ll try a little harder

so they get more serious about refining their vesperbane techniques. they start learning fiend rank standards, like discovering their elemental affinity: wind.

striving for promotion, they participate in the prinwretch games, and fail miserably. someone points out how navara fought in a bullishly headstrong way, easily predicted, and they take that to heart. next time they play in the prinwretch game, they make a mildly impressive showing of throwing their voice with a wind technique, filling the arena with a disorienting singing. they win, and get promoted.

in the fiend trials, navara uses wind techniques to summon a big sandstorm and buffet some opponents. the other team cries foul, accuses them of shadowcalling, but they get investigated and it really was just a wind technique of somewhat impressive power (for a bane not yet fiend level)

promoted again, but the rise hits a snag about then

alemar dies. navara’s heartbroken, gets swept up in the political radicals who (correctly) attribute it to conspiracy, and they’re a pretty fervent backer of hela haze, initially. they get a bit spooked when the heaven slayers start doing the political assassinations‍ ‍—‍ navara isn’t that radical. but hela haze wasn’t the heaven slayers, even if they never disavowed.

instability boils over in the beginning of the third grand trial, and it’s no surprise who navara finds themself fighting for

but there’s something missing from this story. you see, navara fought monsters, saved people, acted as a body guard, ran messages and delivery‍ ‍—‍ despite all their years as a vesperbane, navara never really became a killer, almost consciously.

but there’s no avoiding that in a war.

and war is probably the biggest strain of navara’s character. how do you lead people, protect people, make them flourish, on a battlefield against their own sisters, one fought in their own strongholds?

so navara kills bugs and watches their comrades die.

there had never been war under alemar (or rather, navara had been blissfully unaware)

so navara loses faith in hela haze, starts to question this point of all this bloodshed

(and then it turns out hela haze had in fact lead the heaven slayers all along, in secret)

for want of a nail, navara would have defected. but they had people to protect. so long as they weren’t the overscourge, they could do more.

it’s not until they’re fighting to their life in the war that their powers are pushed to the limits, but the seeds had already been sown

maybe it’s because of how roach cant requires parsing and assembling several “voice lines” at once

maybe they picked up the random combination of random concepts from listening to other vesperbanes, implementing their advice

maybe it’s just because they’re that smart

it’s not rare‍ ‍—‍ in fact, it’s almost expected‍ ‍—‍ for wind form users to specialize as sensors

it’s also not rare for a particularly skilled wind sensor’s ability to amount to full‍-​blown echolocation

but navara was uniquely skilled at listening, and noticed a particular hum to enervate‍-​imbued air.

for years, it was just a weird observation of no particular relevance. no doubt hundreds of wind form users before him had noticed something similar.

navara just liked the sound of it. they always liked music, and liked singing.

so they played with the hum of enervated air in their spare time, to amuse themselves.

at some point, noticing how the hum interacted with other kinds of enervate, navara gained a sensory edge

another thing that must be mentioned is that the third grand trial is distinguished by being the first war fought with seals. though edu remained studiously apolitical, several banes had followed in his wake and some even survived.

years into the war, there were dangerous and devious seals‍ ‍—‍ and navara fought against the side using the worst of them.

it’s around then that navara discovers that the ‘hum’ he plays with could interact with seals.

and this is that changes the tide of several battles, why this made them a judge of the third grand trial, briefly renown as astere ‘seal‍-​silencer’ navara

but the title that sticks comes after a climatic battle against atrona, the flame reborn, who wielded the mightest of the thimithi clan’s secret flame technique. navara sung, and their gales extinguished the flames and extinguished every technique.

thus the title that stuck: navara, of the wind of the void.

when the trial ends, and hela haze is imprisoned and westhold is dissolved, navara gives a speech. it’s not a great speech‍ ‍—‍ navara has come a long way from the shy slum nymph who can’t speak, but not that far‍ ‍—‍ but they speak from the heart, and between their achievements and the historical moment, it hits hard. they speak of how even in empty desolation, the wind still blows, and on those winds destiny is bourne.

it inspires, and navara realizes this is an opportunity.

so begins the Windborne Stronghold.

navara is strong, but not that strong. windborne stronghold survives not because of them, but because of how many banes have their back. still, with the resources of a overscourge, navara has access to remarkable resources. so he keeps learning and improving

a lot of things flow out of who navara is. he puts a lot of funding towards inculcatoria like the one he became a vesperbane in. windborne stronghold in general is controversially pro‍-​education. navara creates institutes of higher learning where techniques can be shared. an entire division of the wardens‍ ‍—‍ the Windsong Corps‍ ‍—‍ consist of student he’s trying to teach the voidwind technique to.

it mostly amounts to a division of advance wind form users. scholars are still trying to divise mathematics to describe what voidwind does, and almost no one is able conceptualize the shape rotations navara is doing, and no one can push it as far as they can.

(they still think of themselves as a fool, so watching the brightest minds fail is confusing.)

So there’s a bounty on his head, and plenty of mercenary come to kill him, dying to his power.

Then a bane in a vulture mask comes. They fight, and she withstands him in a way few foolish assassins could. Then, he recognizes her: it’s mewla, aka the dualist, one of the heavenslayer knights.

Navara is confused why a heavenslayer would kill him. Have they fallen so far?

Mewla isn’t very chatty, but navara insists. “If you’re gonna kill me, at least tell me what I’m dying for.”

“Money. It’s as simple as that.”

“Just money? You were there for the Third Grand Trial. You watched cities die. And you want to bury more dead, for money?”

“You watched bugs die. I killed them. I was the sacrifice, the blade in the dark, the one who betrayed everything because I made the calculation that it’d save more lives. And what did I get for it? Your precious Windhold saw everything I did for it, and threw me away in horror. My own family sealed me. I saved the world, and I’m the monster. You failed, and everyone bends down to lick your ass. ‘Just money?’ You can do math with money. There’s no place in this world for those who do math with lives.”

// mewla almost kills him, but he figures out inner void?

how far can they push it? even as a fiend, navara made extensive use of vortex shield techniques, which protects the user in melee by surrounding oneself with a continous swirl of air. navara soon got good enough to shield other things, and of course learned vortex bullet techniques

but with voidwind, the air can flow in higher dimensions, creating arbitrary shapes through intersection and overlap with the material hyperplane. they can sheath themselves or others in impentrable skin of wind.

(windscourge navara is thought to be impossible to assassinate; even a projectile that catches them by surprise will be deflected by an ever present vortex, and simply made to orbit)

but how are they able to maintain this effect continually? it’s due to a deeper technique even they won’t reveal.

the Inner Void Technique essentially allows navara to carry around a pocket dimension, a pseudospace empty save an ever howling wind. pocket spaces are a trick a lot of highest level vesperbanes pick up, allowing them to store tons of enervate. the challenge is in how you deal with all of the extra mass.

to most, the only hint of navara’s inner void is how it’s well known they can sing for hours without ever drawing a single breath. indeed, it’s rumored that navara doesn’t breathe.

with techniques like this, navara has worked with sealmasters and vesper‍-​enchanters to create the core of the windborne stronghold‍ ‍—‍ a fortress that floats in the sky borne by an everlasting voidwind technique.

being able to hold an entire fortress in the air, navara is effortlessly capable of much more trivial feats of effective‍-​telekinesis‍-​via‍-​precise winds.

including, of course, flight

(also, they wear a blindfold because their echolocation is better than sight)

![https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org/artwork/2023‍-​12‍-​15.png]

so like

this guy is pretty legit

local omniscience, total aerokinesis with an extremely wide range, power negation bullshit, effectively infinite chakra enervate reserves, he can fly…

you gotta wonder why this guy hasn’t just solved the setting already

the funny answer is “this is what the setting looks like when there’s a superman ass mf running around solving whatever shit he can”

and maybe the superman comparison is relevant‍ ‍—‍ after all, this is the guy who almost deserted bc the heaven slayers were too radical. they want good things but probably aren’t “instant revolution right now”, and probably lean toward status quo from a variety of biases, and maybe even feel weird about throwing around power and becoming a total dictator

and naturally being overscourge means administraion and intelligence shit eats up a ton of their time

also social shit (they still takes care of roach fam, even now), so they don’t end up going scion on the world

and it might be interesting if i say Inner Void has obnoxious maintainance requirements‍ ‍—‍ hours of meditation daily to keep it functioning or it tears them apart from within?

and they’re probably also scared of the natural fear for everyone else at their power tier‍ ‍—‍ that they’ll push it too far, and go crepuscular.

Interrupting this write up to add some thoughts from later

on one hand, i think it rocks that navara’s aesthetic is being this colorful wizard character

on the other hand, i’m completely failing to daydream intense dramatic fights where the true depths of characters are revealed when it’s between navara and any of the brooding scoundrels that make up the rest of the bn cast

not to be topical or anything, but same vibe as those kingdom hearts screenshots where it’s these final fantasy anime characters standing beside mickey mouse and goofy

would it be cliche if i make it so that navara doing this is partly out of honor for a dead friend or something

e.g. one of their teammates straight up had a clown aesthetic

maybe even having genjutsu that induced/required/empowered based on laughter :brehehe:

i’m not making a comedian expy, i’m not, but

and maybe their teacher had a more somber wizardly aesthetic

so their garb incorporates elements of both

also i think i’m more sold on navara keepin it silly if it’s like, explicitly a fuck you to the setting?

because it’s already established that navara is super in tension with the clans

he’s civilian born, and he created not!universities instead of hoarding knowledge like the clans prefer

and to top it all he completely irreverent to the traditions and gravitas vesperbanes are supposed to uphold

yeah i think i’m starting to vibe with this

…it occurs to me

given that navara can effortlessly create vacuums, and they do some dimensional stuff

they might be one of the few banes capable of teleportation?

being able to literally travel as the wind and then appear in a pop of displaced air is pretty big dick

but i might not go for this

because there’s a gag where despite having this hypercomplex 4d airflow technique that nobody can understand or replicate, navara got a chance to look at the notes of alemar (dimensional popularizer) and was just like “i don’t get it”

a full write up should probably talk about their relationships‍ ‍—‍ they should have a buddy or two, and i was thinking about giving them a nemesis (some body horror mf who goes full worm that walks?) it’s actually interesting to note that body horror is his weakness. he can negate enervate spells but he can’t negate biology.

but anyway

he’s a gojo expy, right. so simultaneous to canon maybe he runs into some kid (not!itadori) who winds up as an archonhost and vaguely oversees those adventures.

anyway, that nemesis

arionna oorath was born to a minor merchant. she suffered a terrible sickness in second instar, leaving her bedridden for months. the prognosis was dire; she was a laybug, and it was an ichorplague. she wasn’t getting better, and death was a ‘when’. but the oorath family were empyreanist; they had a third cousin living in a distant monastery, and made arrangements for arionna to learn noucirculation, an ancient art of bodily mastery performed without vespertine aid.

arionna took to the instruction readily, desperate to live and see her parents smile again. even as arionna learned the arts, her parents went into debt buying any remedy, the finest physicians. perhaps, months ago, becoming a vesperbane could have saved her, but now her body was too weak, sure to fail their judgment

despite all odds, arionna mastered noucirculation enough to beat back the affliction and survive. scarred and sickly, but alive. yet debt sunk the parents’ business, and arionna, barely fourth instar, sought a way to help her parents.

perhaps it was arrogance from having achieved her feats of noucirculation; perhaps she had a child’s belief in their heroism and power; perhaps, when she looks in the mirror and sees a pustule‍-​scarred body, she longs to have a control of her body even noucirculation doesn’t offer.

whatever her motivation, she enrolls to become a vesperbane in secret. if she failed pharmakon, her parents would be paid handsomely per heroic exchange. if she didn’t, she could take missions and support her family. either way, it’d solve their problems.

through luck or skill, arionna became a vesperbane, and as she arrogantly expected, learns the vespertine arts as readily as she learned noucirculation. she’s hailed as a prodigy, and receives the honor of placement on a three bane team under an arch‍-​fiend teacher

then a c‍-​rank beast‍-​slaying mission goes wrong, her teammates die, and her arch‍-​fiend teacher is only able to save arionna. the monster was a pestilence‍-​type, and arionna’s in the hospital for months again. the arch‍-​fiend dissolves the team (arionna thinks she disappointed them; the teacher is just guilty).

the monster’s plague attack is stronger, much stronger, than what she endured as a laybug nymph, and her noucirculation is edge enough to survive where her teammates died, but it’s a dire prognosis again. only with the vespers mysterious assistance she she recover.

teamless and bearing mission record stained with a failed c‍-​rank and extended leave of absence, she falls into the disgrace of the wretched corps

there, she meets astere navara. they don’t get along‍ ‍—‍ arionna is a fallen prodigy, navara is a slumrat. arionna is arrogant, navara is simple and submissive. yet despite this, navara excels in the wretch corps and arionna only causes problems. they get assigned missions together often, higher ups hoping navara would be a good influence.

As a team, they are‍ ‍—‍ after all, both navara and arionna are in this to support their families. arionna lost sight of that, focused intently on training for her own power, but navara shows what it looks like when you train for others’ sake. arionna is humbled fraction by fraction.

they get another monster slaying missions, and arionna has trained to make this one turn out different. she’s study bloodletting intently‍ ‍—‍ between her intelligence and her noucirculation training, she manifests the wretched raptorials astoundingly quickly.

while navara’s wind techniques control the battlefiend, arionna wades into melee, her blood‍-​limbs tearing about the monster. they rend and cannibalize the beast’s blood, until her claws close around the monstrous heart

maybe it was instinct, maybe it was arrogance, maybe it was just a deathwish. but arionna does something forbidden for a vesperbane: she consumes the direbeast’s myxoma, its heart and core, the source of its blood

maybe it was the noucirculation, or maybe surviving the afflictions had granted a blood secret, or maybe arionna got lucky, but after eating the core, it settled in her system

it didn’t kill her.

there were, in fact, mantes who had survived with the hearts of bats in their abdomen‍ ‍—‍ the angels of oosifea, wielding scourge‍-​level power before there were scourges

suffice it to say, a vesperbane who could grow their own blood had big advantages.

it was also, remember, super duper forbidden

arionna & navara had grown close enough that navara wouldn’t report this, but navara pleads for her to get rid of it. arionna refused. (inwardly, it’s because she feels how powerful this makes her, and clings to that greedily) but the argument she marshals is that she can do this, it’s supposed to be impossible. she can’t just ignore that. if this power is unique to her, why shouldn’t she use it? navara’s like, this is probably forbidden for a reason, the higher ups know better than us. arionna is skeptical, and navara eventually relents, but insists that if arionna was going to keep the thing, she had to do a lot of good with it.

it isn’t long before arionna eclipses navara is power level hard. she disguises it as a special ability, attributes it to simply “unique ichor reserves”, calls it the crimson fountain technique. being able to produce and control her own ichor, arionna shapes it into weapons. her mastery of myxokora reaches the point where she can form blood tentacles from any part of her body.

she’s on a fast track to becoming an arch‍-​fiend or even scourge level force.

and the nuance? she’s holding back. this is only a fraction of her true power, and she can feel it. every time she slays a direbeast, she can feel its myxokora singing out for her to consume it. whenever her myxokora kill a bane, drain their blood, it feels good. sometimes she wonders if she shouldn’t just pulls the heart out of every bug and put their blood to better use.

but navara is her conscious, and he tells her not to consume any more myxokora. better to be cautious than to go too far.

the war was hard on navara, but it’s harder on arionna. it’s one thing to witness war for the first time, to be forced to take your first lives, to watch your comrades die because you weren’t strong enough to save them. it’s another thing to see all this suffering and death, and wonder how much of it you could have stoppped if you weren’t holding back.

navara, of the wind of the void, becomes a hero of the third grand trial, standing among the strongest banes. where once arionna exclipsed them, she’s now in their shadow, and who wouldn’t be a little resentful. navara is the strongest because they can go all out. if arionna went all out, she’d be a nightmare.

every time arionna uses her abilities, it feels great, it’s such a pleasure, and she has to hold back, restrain her blood, deny herself. how long could you bare to starve, surrounded by food, smelling it every second?

when her parents die, the only one arionna has left is navara‍ ‍—‍ now saddled with the endless responsibilities of being the scourge of the largest stronghold. navara assigns arionna to be the chief slayer, and it’s years fighting the strongest beasts the heartlands has to offer, placing the most tempting morsels right in your mouth, so close the juice drips onto your tongue, and pulling them back out again.

somewhere, a mine digs too far, stumbles into dire mole rat tunnels. the rats devour the miners, and infest the mines and dig further. the town collapses, the mole rats feast. arionna goes in to save whom she can‍ ‍—‍ but it’s worse than anyone thought. not a direbeast, a myxogoth.

arionna breaks her rule; she starts eating myxoma. how else can she defeat a myxogoth?

and when it’s done, when the myxoma has fallen to her “crimson fountain”… why stop? she’d broken the rule, taken the forbidden fruit, and it taste delicious. she keeps going, eating more, finishing what the myxogoth started.

navara finds her like that, lost in instinct. other banes had went in to slay the myxogoth, and arionna had gleefully devoured them, but when navara goes (they’d hesitated, let others die, because ichor was always their weakness), they see what really happened

and navara is the only bane arionna hesitated to devour.

arionna stops, and cries.

navara acknowledges the truth‍ ‍—‍ arionna could kill them right now. there aren’t any banes navara would hesitate to fight, but with the size of arionna’s ichor reserves, and number of myxomata granting her regeneration, and the fact that she was a scourge level bane with plenty of other tricks up her sleeve…

arionna was the strongest; she’d once again taken the lead. navara laughs about that, arionna still cries.

arionna had come to her senses; navara continued survival proved that. but if they tried to take her back to windhold… neither of them could hide what arionna really was.

but again, navara couldn’t think of a way to kill arionna.

so arionna exercises her iron will, and attacks herself, rending her myxomata, emptying her crimson fountain.

navara brings her to Garua to be imprisoned with the worst criminals of the third grand trial. fitting, she thinks.

navara visits her every month, but most of the time, she can’t even bear to look at her old comrade.

the end of navara’s story is when Yufemia (masked as the antiherald called “Despair” aka not!pain) attacks the flying fortress as part of a villainous masterstroke to destroy the windborne stronghold.

it’d be this epic setpiece where yufemia casts a lost vesperbat technique called Wings of the Last King to turn the sky black in midday. and from the enervate‍-​dark sky, magic enervate strings descend as she summons an army of puppets

and maybe there’s some dire point where yufemia threatens everyone in the stronghold (to puppet them, maybe?)

and also she fucks with the technique that makes the fortress fly

so there’s this epic moment where the fortress is falling out of the sky, everyone inside is about to die, and navara just gojos it to save everyone at once and levitate the fortress by force of will

of course, it’s all set up for yufemia to hit him with a fuck you technique (it’d be cute if it’s the Sting seal) that kills them.

and then as they die, they listen harder than they ever have before‍ ‍—‍ hears their own brain echoing in the choir of the world, and they sing themself back to life

and they ascend as some air elemental type entity, essentially, and the fortress crashes to the ground but navara levitates everyone out because they are the air now

and then yufemia reveals that she can puppet archons, summons an tailed beast archonbeast

and everyone’s like ‘ah damn we’re screwed, gg’

Still, navara’s inspiring enough that they decided to stay and fight and for a while it’s navara + most of windborne levitating vs yufemia + her remaining puppets and the archonbeast

cue epic battle with the archonbeast that ends with navara sealing it inside the inner void. and when they finally pull through, they notice yufemia just booked it

because like… she won? the flying fortress is gone.

and when navara tries to leave‍ ‍—‍ they can’t. they went crepuscular; they got excluded.

they can still sing‍ ‍—‍ they are nothing but song now‍ ‍—‍ but it won’t carry outside the ruins of the fortress.

So they’re remembered as navara, the angel with ten thousand voices.