When a mantis swears vows of pharmakon and nurses a pair of vespers within their intestines, they become a vesperbane. In exchange for feeding, serving, and propagating the chimera of twinned hungers, the host is infested by new power.

With these symbiotic xenografts, the host is able to not only withstand, but wield the power of black nerve (otherwise an energy‍-​draining, matter‍-​eroding corruption) and red ichor (the shed blood of ancient vesperbats, a race now reduced to virulent, mutant cancer‍-​parasitism), and begin to comprehend the arcane lore of arete (the anamnestic species‍-​record of the vespers).

How did you become a vesperbane?

1. Tribute: You had a life, before the inculcatorium. You might’ve had a future, even if your family wasn’t the richest. But you were taken as a heroic tribute, a tax paid with healthy children. Most don’t make it ‍— you did, but survival doesn’t stop there.
2. Recruit: Whether out of patriotism, avarice, or a desperate lack of options, you gambled on the vesperbane life, and won a chance to a strive a little farther. Maybe the your training was sponsored, or you paid for it yourself, but you had years to pick up the skills you’d need.
3. Foundling: Your earliest memories are wandering orphaned, but you were found by the stewardry, fed and sheltered and educated. Vesperbanes have been a fixture of your life ever since. The catch, of course, is that your future has already been decided. You will be a vesperbane; what else was there?
4. Heritor: Since birth you’ve been entwined with the vespers, dormant within your being. Whether by ritual or desperate necessitity, it has awakened and granted you your hatchright. Whether your parents still live, whether your inheritance endowed your fleshed with exclusive power, you were made for this.
5. Apprentice: You caught the eye of a skilled vesperbane, and promised to learn their secrets and signatures if you proved yourself worthy, and worthy you proved to be. Whether or not the stewardry condoned your initiation, the vespers approved it, and that’s all that matters.
6. Convict: The courts ruled you guilty ‍— of debts you couldn’t pay, crimes you inflicted, treason you endorsed. Rather then prison or servitude, the sentence was trial by vesper. Their judgment, so often harsh, spared you one last chance. You may redeem yourself ‍— if you can endure atonement’s weight.
7. Patient: Were you plague‍-​stricken, maimed to the edge of death, or gripped by lunatic madness? Life had few options were left for you ‍— the future looked like death or clinging on as an invalid. You sought rebirth through the vespers, and your hopes were granted… at a cost.
8. Sacrifice: Upon the altar in a cult’s dank catacomb; buried with a defector’s curse in your breast; traficked or traded like meat in the shadows of the heartlands; your ritual awakening occured without the stewartry’s countenance. No one intended you to live, certainly not to swear pharmakon ‍— perhaps this offered you escape, or simply pludged you further into bondage.
9. Arrogator: Among the charges of vesperbanes is a duty to protect the nascent young of the vespsers. Only irresponsibility could bring a vespermalum into the possession of a laybug like you were. Whether you stole it, found it unattended, or acquired it through a mundance exchange, you partook with no haruspex to guide you ‍— and incredibly, the vespers did not strike you down.
10. Miracle: A plague should devastate its hosts; a vesperbane should unravel their enemy; a crepscule should consume and perpetuate chaos. Maybe even you don’t know what happened, but you were granted vespers by no choice of your own nor of others. Now the power is none but yours to wield ‍— and the price is none but yours to pay.

Two vespers entwined yield dyarhiza, the foundation of vesperbane power. This tissue differentiates itself into the umbracelia that conduct black nerve; the hemohyphae that pulse with red ichor; and the vespercaps that shed pale spores.

• Nervecaster:

Nervecasting is a physical thing. It is not enough to simply will a spell, it must be done. The clear, simple and wrong answer to how a nervecaster does this is through the use of tarsigns. The dactyls of their tarsi are brought together, first into the sign of focus, and then contorted into several precise configurations, finally concluding in one of the signs of release. Then a spell is cast.

To give a more correct answer, we must first belabor an analogy. Imagine instead of casting spells, you are drawing patterns. To draw a pattern, you need ink and paper. You must know the pattern, and have the dexterity to render it. A simple hexagon requires six lines. The same hexagon writ larger would require more paper, while an octogon draw the same side length will instead require more ink.

In this analogy, the paper is enervate, and the lines are umbra coils. Knowledge of the pattern is knowledge of the spellform, and dexterity is skill at molding coils.

Tarsigns, in truth, don’t cast spells any more than guide draws a shape. A guide can be traced to make the drawing substantially easier and more precise, and when a bane blindly makes tarsigns, their umbra coils instinctively align themselves into corresponding configurations.

The years sacrifice thousands to the Kindling Dream. Burn on the pyre, bleed on the altar, or lie buried alive. The vespers will judge you. The crooked die with white fingers of death impaling their shells.

Yet you lived.

You are a vesperbane. What’s your specialty? What’s your hunger? What’s your hope?

Where are you? No matter where you are, there’s work for a vesperbane.

Hunger

The nature of a mantis is to be both hunter and morsel. A vesperbane has an apetite to devour the world, yet every creature has something soft which in turn entices the world. Hunger defines vesperbanes ‍— the hunger of, and the hunger for.

So tell: what drives you forward? What do you need? Food. Black nerve and red ichor. The favor of your vespers. Powerful techniques and missions and money. All these are the currency of any vesperbane.

But to truly understand hunger, you must know that it’s not about what you don’t have, or what might bait you forward. No, hunger is about what you already have – or, put plainly, what you’ll lose.