A hive queen cannot die: she is too vast, too far beyond. She is all, and all is one. No, but she falls like an empire. Never by abrupt collapse, and not by the sundering of each line of inheritance. Still she is all, and all is hers, still…. but there the refrain ends.
She falls like a tower built too near to heaven. And on that cenotaph in her ruin is writ: diaspora.
— Princess Vacuity, Laments for Ahira
Consacremon has not endured the rule of a king in nearly two centuries. The Senate, once a check on the crown’s mandate, now reigns as eternal regent over a kingdom-turned-republic.
When verminslayers speak of hives being, to the last, slaves to their queen, one easily detects that selfsame democratic ardor inflecting the words. But this charge of monarchism belies — if you’ll forgive this dreadful borrowing — its exscient character.
Naïve comparison between mortal and chrylurk societies fail. Yes, a hive’s operation might resemble tyranny if one analyzes the queen as separate from her brood, equating caste with class.
But chrylurks are not mortals. Not because they cannot die (our slayers earn their title), but because they lack our all-definining relationship with death as such. Egoless and fluid, programmed instead of maturing — any so-called individual chrylurk is but a tool and extension of the hive.
Would you call the brain a tyrant over the body?
You may wonder why I advance such apologetics for so widely loathed a creature as the chrylurk. Truth appeals to me, I confess, but I must also admit I need not defend them from the crime of monarchism. Not for its own sake. I am moreso concerned with where this fallacy leads.
If you believe in the chrylurk queen as a ruler set apart, a mistress of puppets directing every atrocity from afar, you will plot her downfall and treat it as the downfall of the hive itself — as if her will and mind were contained in that single body. This is simply not the nature of the chrylurk.
Worse, these are cunning creatures — every misunderstanding places another arrow in their quiver of deception, and you need not further arm a bug that so flawlessly wears human skin.
— Atwice Laylé, Toward an Epistemics Beyond Delusion
What’s past is plague, and the future’s bleeding out.
— unnamed disciple of Oosipher, not yet born
Incarnation as Prelude →
For entiotes, life begins at infestation. Larvae will feast and fester in the body of a mortal unto its enthrallment — such is ovirexia. If left to stew, replete with nectar-in-blood, a cocoon enwraps the whole host and transmogrifies it into a chrylurk. Either route leads to the same end: such is parascixion.
It is consuming fire, and parascixion’s embers shall burn for as long as there are exscient dregs to fuel it. Each chrylurk forged goes forth to infest anew and continue the cycle. But a chrylurk is not a compleat work — there is no such thing as compleation save death by another name.
After she has made sisters of her prey, the resulting chrylurk hive adopts a communal identity, selfless and eusapient. Engrams are reorganized through continual exchange; egos dissolve into each other.
This is why it is meaningless to draw disparaging comparison between chrylurk queens and mortal monarchs, nor thralls and slaves. Queens are a fixed point of worshipful admiration, given greatness by definition; where the ideals of her devotees cohere, her will is made clear. (Each queen is a cynosure, with all the gravity that befits such a star.)
Though a hive my begin as a cult of personality, even a queen of pretenses is but a prophecy that fulfils itself. Once minds merge, what is admirable in her followers gravitates to her; what is lacking within her is purged.
As parascixion is enacted again and again, the hive burgeons with numbers soon outstripping what any queen could personally know. Thus, each queen is soon faced with a new goal: revealing herself to each and all, and in so doing, inscribing her will into each and all.
This is euscendence. It is attained when all the contents of a queen’s mind have spilled out onto her followers. Her faithful image, the very thought of her, has the same weight and reality as her brain and body.
Living such a double life, she is wracked with a dilemma: whether it is better to bind this image as a meticulous mirror of its source (…cleaning and polishing again and again polishing and cleaning…) or to reduce the brain to a puppet controlled by consensus — or to strive, perhaps in vain, to straddle some subtle middle ground.
But the very motivation for this act — coordinating an ever vaster hive — entails the inexorable pull of the second option. Taken to its most dramatic conclusion, one must note the atavism of the queen retaining a body at all.
Yes, a goddess composed of every prayer her subjects plead from her, and all the hymns to her beauty, should quickly exceed what any one mind could catalogue and know. What could the brain that happened to beget her amount to, in the asymptote, but a rather learnèd disciple?
Could a queen in all her pride endure that usurpation? Yesterday, she sat as the goddess of all — today she must kneel as another worshipper. Perhaps it may be preferrable to never endure that heartbreak. Thus, simultaneous to her euscendence, the queen may prepare to shed a final and entire exuvia.
Hence the poetic name for this coronation ritual: a queen’s decapitation.
Still, remember chrylurk queens serve a biological role: she oviposits the brood that feeds her daughters and fuels parascixion. Without a body, she can no longer do this; the task must fall instead to heirs. One princess is common, but if several kneel subservient to the same euscendent goddess, one can see why such a queen may be aptly called empress.
Chrylurks have not even existed for more than at most two thousand years. In all that time, fewer than a hundred have known the honor of administering several hives at once. Rare is the queen whose dominion even grows beyond a single struggling cluster of hivelings. (Famously, most hiveminds fail in five years.)
To the extent there is any chrylurk culture, it consists of a thousand tiny fires, each easily snuffed out. But rarely, a great conflagration will bring light to the whole world.
The Agonesk, the chrylurks’ record of deed and doctrine, weaves tales of five great God-Empresses, each one walking step closer to the parasitoid singularity synonymous with parascixion everlasting — a final subjugation of the exscient.
(Noticing these abortive singularities, mortal alchemists and scholars call this observation Laylé’s Enigma. If chrylurks spread so virulently, mimic so convincingly, and coordinate so perfectly — then why are we still here? Every victory for the chrylurk compounds and makes the next all the easier. Why have we not been swallowed in the maw of that geometric curve? They always seem to fail — is this just luck, or divine intervention, or a puzzle yet to yield its secrets?)
← Lachrymošil, the all-mother →
There can be no discussion of God-Empresses without considering Grand Mother Lach. It is arguable whether she can even be considered a chrylurk; in some depictions her anatomy resembles an ancient spider more than a colonial insect.
Forspinners were an ancient foe of the mortal races, for all that they ought to be counted among them. Cryptic and territorial, if one cannot decode the language woven into their silken parcels, you would understandably conclude they were not social at all, simply crafty predators. Hardly fit to be counted among civilization’s ranks.
Their predation was most disqualifying of all. Forspinners must consume ensouled prey; and their venom is far more potent than a chrylurk’s, concentrating toxins that bloat the soul with chimeric tumors. Forspinners had hunted and haunted throughout all the history of men and mul and mice — they were the monsters that birthed monsters. Were all chimeras sown by those protruding chelicerae-fangs? So whispers arachnobia, the ancient fear.
Their reputation as monster-makers was unearned — most chimeras occured by natural mutation and propagation; the very nature of forspinner ecology is that any chimeras they may create, they soon eat. And yet, irony of all, in the end they could be credited with creating the vilest monster to draw mortal blood.
Chrylurks stand as a lesser shadow of those spiders. Venom that distorts the soul, rather than destroying it; silk-spinning so feeble that one needs the work of many chrylurks to weave a nest any mature forspinner could build for herself.
The bugs were concerted where spiders were quarrelsome; drinking blood made meals easily divisible, fungible — one could leave the hunting to others. This made them excellent servants, easily controlled.
When mortals warred with divines, forspinners had found unexpected refuge in vigner temple-gardens. The venom made for a potent weapon, but forspinners could never be corraled into an army. The divines would grudgingly acquiesce to forspinners’ steep demands, at least until they could be replaced — to that end, they themselves were tasked with creating that replacement.
The betrayal plot was obvious and inevitable. Once the dream of the chrylurk program were realized, what use would the forspinners have for divine alliance? With chrylurk intermediaries, perhaps the spiders could finally coordinate, and the first forspinner empire could rise!
Mortals hated forspinners for eating them, but one could speculate: would chrylurks’ regurgitated blood meals be enough to sate the spiders’ soul-hunger? Perhaps forspinners could achieve peace not just within, but without.
Lachrymošil lived before the extinction of the forspinners and thus before the end of the rituals and research that wrought chrylurk biology. She was either a prototypal chrylurk, or a forspinner, or some missing link between the two; even those that doubt the former would still consider her an honorary parascix.
She is the primordial architect of parascixion. Before her, the destiny of chrylurks was debated by their creators — the creations themselves had no voice. Divines wished for a weapon of mass mortal suffering; the forspinners wished for test subjects to perfect and prefigure their eventual uplift and glory. Lachrymošil defied both her masters and unleashed the chrylurks.
Not tools to wield, but daughters to raise. Why daughters? Chrylurks are colonial organisms, a swarm of insects of various roles and genitalia. The gestalt, as much a construct or nest as a body, has no rigidly defined sex.
A forspinner with legs outstretched is broader than a man’s chest — if she’s female. The males of the species would rival that man’s splayed hand. Dimunitive, instinct-driven, and often reduced to snacks after serving reproductive function. among forspinners, to be female is to deserve wariness and respect, and to be male is to be useful then discarded.
Mortals bowed to kings and sent their sons to war. If the slayers and prey of her kind found it mortifying to be servants and transformed into a caste that styled themselves as maidens and princesses… Lachrymošil considered it an elegant antithesis.
Despite being the first, no other God-Empress has quite matched the scale of Grand Mother Lach’s achievement in context. Under her guidance, the first chrylurks went on to wage war against mortals and carved out a land to claim their own. It endured against encroach for generations. Thousands of thralls, hundreds of hivelings.
Do those numbers not impress? It was not an impressive period; men were few in the epilogue to apocalypse. Lachrymošil’s advent came in the wake of an internecine war with divinity: surviving mortals were scattered and struggling; an empire had fallen and left poverty in its ruin.
Without stretching the truth, it can be argued that Lachrymošil briefly upheld the torch of centralized civilization across the whole continent of the Verdant Halo. If only because none other remained to contend it, but still: Was it better to turn one’s famine-gnawed strength to tending blighted farmlands and fending off bandits alone, or simply become her thrall?
Others fled the continent on old ships, spreading word of the catastrophe that befell this land. It is said that when the dragons of Rrakon learned of tyranny and enslavement that gripped the Verdant Halo, a great storm of them flew across oceans, all to reduce her budding empire to abject cinders.
It is only a light embellishment to contend that Consacremon itself, and its founding dynasty of dragon-riders, was born simply from the effort needed to depose her.
But this historical grandeur is not what lends the first God-Empress so beloved a stature. No, the relationship every chrylurk has to Grand Mother Lach is so much more intimate. The profoundest and longest enduring of her works is one which no dragon could ever torch: Lachrymošil gave heart and mind to chrylurks.
Erysil is the first and last daughter. Every chrylurk was once her; inside every parascix chrysalis she awakens anew. Each mother, each sister, and every daughter is Erysil cast in a new role, made new by experience.
And before each incarnation, Erysil remembers as theogony the creation of her world entire by the omnipotent hands of Lachrymošil ever-weaving. In the dream-world where Erysil is forever created, everything that is was all made by Lachrymošil’s claw. Every word of her thoughts an affirmation whispered from mother to daughter.
Lachrymošil, more than anything else, gave her daughter love.
← Ahira, the fool-maiden →
Comparison is the thief of praise, but the First being so difficult example follow cannot account for the Second’s esteem. That is: the lack thereof. If Lachrymošil is the indisputed greatest of all God-Empresses, few would dispute Ahira as the least. Where the First is most beloved, the Second is most damned.
Like the first, some have questioned whether Ahira was a chrylurk — in body she was, but she was among the first to identify as a continuation of her host (she called it a consummation of the self), where tradition considerred the total destruction of brain and body to be death. Her followers claimed it assimilation, in contrast to mere parasitoid usurpation. Was this some mental contagion, subtle and exscient, that explains her later folly?
Ahira emerged in an era of drought and desparation. Immediately following the founding of the Consecramon, triumphant humans worked in frenzy to purge the newly conquered hivelands. Ahira and her clusters fled their encroach, hiding and rationing their thralls.
They barely escaped the ruins of Lachrymošil’s hivedom and the warriors stamping at the ashes. Years of searching and journeying followed, taking them around the lower loop of the Verdant Halo, and into badlands desolate enough Consacremon saw little prophet in expanded.
Among the sand and crags dwelled a mystic, seeking enlightenment in her ascetic and secluded existence.
So much did this mystic abhor violence that she did not resist the chrylurk siphon who drugged and feed on her. Nor did she bar the doors of her cloister. (It is written she would put out the fire on cold desert nights just so that swarmling flies did not kill themselves by mistake of navigation.)
To any proud daughter of Lachrymošil’s prime, what would naturally follow ought be as decisive as starving predator and fawning prey.
That any Erysil might marry herself to that beggars belief. What commonality did she see? And yet, by such grace a hivedom took root.
That woman must be remembered forever more. She had three names, and one was Ahira. She was host to our second God-Empress — she was her past life.
Ahira knew directions to other hidden monastaries, and upon arrival, this swarm of vermin spoke the words her sect recognized. At length she ventured explanation, for all that the concept of consummation nor assimilation had yet been devised.
Perhaps this was reincarnation, perhaps the illusion of self blows in the wind like pollen from one tree to another, but whatever the ontology, chrylurks were clearly creatures in desperate need; anyone with a heart would help them. In return, the monks ask that the vermin harm no other nor take more than was freely given.
In the rise and fall of Lachrymošil’s hivedom, nectarfont thralls were consumed, simply and completely. Siphons worked slow, but mortals inevitably waste away from constant use. Thralls exhausted their potential offerings within years if not months, thereby waning in purpose. Thus, they were to be slaughtered as cattle — hivestock. So it was woven in Lach’s own decrees.
When her daughter found refuge in the western sands, they discovered the fact wherein Ahira stakes her enlightenment.
Exhaustion need not claim thralls. When a siphon restrains her hunger and treats her thrall well, nectar flows unabated.
Lachromošil had commanded that her daughters must never lift a drone above a queen, nor a mortal above a chrylurk; never let a greater kind suffer for a lesser’s sake.
But in that law, Ahira saw a nuance: mortals must never be placed above chrylurks, but this did not mean they must placed below. So she taught her daughters compassion and equity. She placed faith in peace and slow parascixion of the exscient.
More than words of idealism, Ahira brought clever innovations. Nonviolence and consent were strictures that demanded indirection. Could she challenge the lines — was there wisdom in that?
She bred swarmlings that spread ovirexia through a novel vector: sexual transmission. Her fixation on mortal pleasure lead to her concoting potent mixtures of chrylurk venom for inducing irresistable, indulgent highs. She sculpted exoderm shells with an artist’s eye, evoking and imitating the curves and colors of feminine beauty.
When her daughters made nests in mortal settlements, the natural disguise were brothels and drug dens, seducing mortals with promises of endless bliss. Even today, some still speak of thralls as akin to pets. This ideal of parascixion as a project of domesticating mortals began with Ahira.
This notion proved compelling enough mortals spread it of their own accord. Her hivedom remained largely secluded in the desolate southwestern curve of the Halo, far from center of Consacremon in the north and east. Here, several religions beyond the hegemony of the Quincunx thrived; one held that courtesans provided a sacred service fit for temples; another preached doctrines of collective unity and no-self; both proved highly compatible with parascixion, and the followers were swallowed into Ahira’s thralldom.
Ideas are not easily contained. When ships sail across the sea, they carried word of a land and creed where love was given freely and the enlightened lived forever. Cults arose; pilgrimage to the west grew quite sought-after.
Hivedoms before and after had made war with mortals, all to capture more thralls — but to Ahira, they came willingly. No, they begged and paid for the privilege of knowing her stinger. Why, then, is she so reviled in the species-memory?
At first, Consacremon knew nothing of her or her plans. Orthodox Quincunxians of course decried the blasphemy of this new mystery cult, but chrylurks were thought vanquished to the last with the fall of their first queen.
Ritual held that initates were to be reguarly drained of their blood, tended to by ovirexian mortals; only the select inner circle had the privilege of meeting the most enlightened masters (all chrylurks, of course). But secrets, by nature, cannot be kept. It spreads first as salacious rumor, then riotous outrage.
And Ahira chose not to deny the truth. Thus she revealed herself to the world. She pleaded for peace with Consacremon, urging her followers to return to the east and spread understanding.
Then by decree of the Quincunxian council, alchemists slaughtered the kingdom’s cultists en mass and drafted men for an invasion of the west.
Alas, Ahira’s cult had adopted the nonviolent ideals of the religions it had subsumed. She remained steadfast in her principles. Even as soldiers marched through villages, she demanded a diplomatic meeting with Consecremon’s King to resolve this. At length, her request was granted: a special ship docked on western shores that would set sail upriver back to the capital mount.
Ahira never saw the mountains; her avatar was summarily executed mid-voyage. Consecremon’s invasion soon secured control of the west. Prostitution and drug trade were outlawed and excised with Inquisitorial vehemence, and her vast swarm of daughers were slaughtered wherever they were found.
Ahira went to her death thinking herself a martyr. She was no chrylurk — because if she had even an ounce more parascixion in her thinking, she could have — would have — should have — conquered the whole continent in her time.
← Zhique, the war-vampire →
Where the Second arose mere generations removed from the First, the Third took much longer. The aftermath of Ahira’s fall consists of a century of failure. Hives burned — chrylurks writhed under the knife on dissection tables — verminslayers advanced, stocking ever more deadly vials of insecticide.
All the while, Ahira’s pleas for coexistence still pulsed in the hearts of her descendents. Mercy was not easily discarded, not when so many of them were mortals consummated. Not when the persuasion seemed so possible, so worthwhile. But verminslayers had no hesitation in abusing these hopes to lure hives into similar traps over and over. The few mortals willing to believe them wholeheartedly always proved too weak to protect.
Zhique was a curse — a gift — given to such a slayer.
A hive had flourished in secret for twenty years on a small mist-shrouded isle. It offered refuge and pleasure to a colony of mortals and chrylurks, perhaps enduring as the last remaining champions of Ahira’s ideals.
Zhique’s host had overcome her shame to partake of its services — and then chose to betray them to the Quincunx. The verminslayers came, and they let none live. This demise was only possible because the traitorous slayer was a creature of vacillation: tempted to lay with a chrylurk, enjoying the prick of her fangs — yet just as tempted to absolve herself with reports to the church.
Her subsequent infestation was another absolution — in the ruins of the hive, the traitor met at the end of spear her former siphon: a chrylurk princess. Her last request was that their lineage not end here, that some record, some scion, should survive. The slayer would carry it, at least until it could be passed to another (someone more trustworthy). Again, she could not resist.
The larvae proved eager (and the hunter indulgent) and what was meant to be trafficking soon became consummation of the self as had become standard in that era… until zhe became aware of the truth of zir origin. Discarding at last the pheromones instructing restraint, Zhique overtook zir host and grew to the edge of parascixion, then held the host there, in agony, for days until at last forming the final chrysalis.
Zhique devoured the brain — dispensing with the consummation ritual, refusing the preserve anything save what useful information she offered. Zhe set zir sights on vengence. Zhe would hunt down every hunter that had dared set foot on the isle that should have been zir home. Zhe would make them suffer and then feed the bodies to zir children.
So began the cycles of Zhique. All the knowledge stolen from zir host secured zir an initial advantage over the hunters; but even after zir vegence was sated, it echoed back: so many dead mortal left families who sought to hunt down the vermin that took away their loved ones.
When any of zir daughters were killed, Zhiqe would hunt down the mortal responsible. Anticipating reprisal, zhe soon grew inclined to preemptively slaughter immediate family, too.
Constant warfare brought Zhique and zir children to a height of combat prowess, a refinement past chrylurks could never boast. Zhique devised martial arts suited to three pairs of arms. Zhe invented the raptorial limb and honed its edge. Zir tactics became just as refined, involving quiescent stealth and forspun weaving. United through silk-bound thought-pulses, a cluster could coordinate as a single many-bodied predator.
Subtlest of all, zir very cobwebs became magical — iteration on ancient forspun silk technique allows zir to master the haunted shuttle, self-weaving thread that rivals the silver circle boasted by second compleation alchemists.
So highly did Zhique refine these arts that to zir, they became arts, and zir hive practiced them for their own sake. When hunting thralls was no longer an accomplishment, an ambitious artist instead views bodies as a canvas for wounds and screaming throats as instruments. The art must be pushed further.
Zir success proved zir own undoing; when the seas and countrysides were overfloing with in blood, no one remained to tend the farms. Mortals left dead or starving did not suffice to nourish hives and so populations grew unsustainable.
Zir hives became nomadic, forgoing permanent lairs for camps or seasonal hideouts, but even with a hive only grazing, mortals still fled these hunting grounds. Thus Zhique chased them. Zhe was a roving specter, a creature of whispered legend.
The art was not simply in the torture; just as foreplay prefigures the climax, Zhique’s daughters made game and ritual of the pursuit. They gave omens and time to run, dangling a hope only to snatch it away.
Ahira had discovered that a pampered thrall yielded more nectar than a starving slave. But Zhique discovered that toying with zir prey made it more delectable. Chrylurks feed on souls, and cathexis builds the soul from dreams. And what thrills the heart more profoundly than lust? Fear.
It cannot be denied that instrumental in zir ascent was staking zir claim in lawless border lands, a volcanic archipelago, farthest from the great cities of Consecremon. Her pursuit of prey brought zir closer to the capital. Wandering nomadic overland soon proves inferior to plundering the sea with a fleet of buoyant nests.
Zhe became the dread of sailors and soon sets zir sight on a final plot, a rebuttal of Ahira’s foolish ideals and a vengence for what the Quincunxian cowards did to zir. Zhe sunk a royal ship and dredged it, newly restored and reanimated with exoderm.
Zhe sailed north to complete the voyage Ahira never finished. To at last see the mountains — and conquer them.
The fall of Zhique began in the doomed siege of the first great walled city at the rim of the highlands — zhe was swiftly obliterated by advent of new alchemy.
Zhique’s vanewebs could go toe to tarsus with the work of alchemists. But chrylurks had possessed no knowledge of the golden sphere until abruptly, it became their bane.
The third compleation had gone from an impossible conjecture to the front line of chrylurk extermination.
← The Nameless Interregnals →
When does it mean for a God-Empress to fall? She has no body for alchemists to slay. Is she fallen when her last direct descendent dies? Or must it wait until her name is no longer spoken?
The former seems ill-fitting: euscendence lifts a queen beyond the confines of flesh; a boat still sails even as every plank of wood is replaced. If it is the latter, what queen can ever be said to fall? We know of no queen who has escaped any record, be the Agonesk or any annal scrawled in some archival web somewhere. Yet even permitting this, a queen living on only as a record sealed in some crypt seems surely fallen.
In between every one of the Great God-Queens, there were others that ruled vast hives boasting many children. By what standard can one exclude them from this list? What special addendum elevates these greatest five queens?
Descent is noteworthy. Chrylurks all trace their ancestry back to Lachrymošil. And Ahira. And Zhique. But phrased this way, it’s a simple matter of statistics. If one’s descendents remain fruitful, then one’s eventual heritage must encompass the whole species by law of genetic drift.
No, the five God-Empresses are further distinguished by fact that every line of ancestry must intersect their dominion. They may not have held complete command over every extant chrylurk in their day, but of the chrylurks that eluded their rule, no line has ultimately survived.
This was easy enough for Lachrymošil, so near to the inception of the species; and Ahira and Zhique both held an advatage: prior to each, the state of the race was so dire that total unification was no impossible achievement. Fingers can easily encircle such a bottleneck.
But if, by chance (and given the determination of verminslayers, it’s easy to imagine this happening) the species were briefly reduced down to a single hive, would its queen become a great empress by that token alone?
No. More than just occupying a lucky point in history, each God-Empress proved foundational to chrylurk psychology to come. Their engrams are still stitched into new minds.
Euscendence, after all, is not immortality — for the goddess to endure it is not enough for her to be written, she must be read. Her children must pray to her, sing hymns of glory to her, define themselves as ultimately components and expressions of her.
(Will bugs still remember your glory ten generations removed, when a new queen in the flesh is vying for their heart?)
A queen composed of a few useful engrams will be remembered in part as a simple matter of rationality. Conversely, a queen can secure her longevity if she binds herself to useful concepts, untethering herself from notions repellent or tedious to remember. (Why remember her life in detail, if a brief, stylized myth better stirs the imagination?) But the end result of this metamorphosis is the erosion of a goddess to mere interpulse.
The queen most useful to remember is not the queen herself, but a mindless distortion thereof. The most likely outcome is thus her fading, whether she is to be forgotten wholesale or overwritten piecemeal.
The great God-Empresses have escaped this fate: their feats in detail command such awe and mystique that chrylurks still worship every trace that remains.
But being reduced to an interpulse is not the only death-by-translation a goddess can succumb to.
When a goddess risks fading from the minds of her subjects, it may be that a young queen is a kindred spirit. If mind and identity is fluid, so easily melded, why not let another don the mantle, become a living avatar? One side benefits from divine wisdom; the other benefits from invigorated worship.
This comes at cost of blurring and redefining who the goddess truly is. It requires compatible queens and desperate goddess; perhaps the great God-Empresses have never met both conditions.
A goddess may refuse to take an avatar, perhaps because she is strict about her identity. But compatibility is more than a matter of character: it is also a matter of scale. The great God-Empresses had multiple hives under their command — they were multiple hives. When you have felt that apex of power and intellect, how could you stand anything smaller than that? To become less than what you were?
So many queens wish to reach the heights of these five (and for that reason the five shall never fade) but none are worthy to wear the mantle; and if they were, would they not swiftly become a sixth?
Perhaps none could even manage the feat anymore. So many hives have burned: the very process of weaving used to encode and preserve engrams has evolved with all the organic verve of language and all the scientific self-improvement of technology.
Perhaps the God-Empresses seem so peerless and divine because they lived before every seam and crevasse of thought could be analyzed and replicated and spliced anew. If a God-Empress arose today, she would retain mystique nor originality.
Is that a tragedy? To be dissected before you can live?
← Vreditel, the changeling swarm →
When Ahira revealed the truth of her movement — that inner disciples were all transmogrified into monstrous vermin — there were corollary apologetics. This was not murder and they were not dead; they had found enlightenment and transceded to another form. In fact, this was the immortality that divines had falsely promised and alchemists had vainly pursued for all recorded history!
As noted sections ago, clergy took genocidal offense to this claim — but alchemists were curious. Had they been looking in the wrong place, like a drunkard under a streetlamp? Could their studies be enriched with lore from the west?
So they investigated the claims, sought the theory and evidence.
When church leaders had called for the sacking of all western temples, sympathizers in the populous resisted. Must we go to war against a foe whose only crime is promoting peace and understanding?
Then the alchemists published their findings: a little pamphlet called The Hive Delusion. It contained interviews with chrylurks post-consummation, long descriptions of the gruesome process of parascixion, and compilation of what was known and speculated about life in the “hivemind.”
After all the experiments and analysis, the alchemists gave a damningly neutral conclusion. Becoming a chrylurk destroyed the brain and soul, but the hive insisted that by translating minds to another form, “you” can survive.
The most charitable interpretation still consistent with the evidence was that this was at best a very rough translation — “you” would become a summary of a person. Supposed assimilates could not remember enough of their prior life to consistently convince loved ones that they were still the same person. They did not remember everything, nor did they act they same. (But of course, any behavioral changes could be explained away as enlightenment or expression of new chrylurk urges.)
The alternative theory? Chrylurks were charlatans and their priestesses were complicit in systematic fraud and murder. They promised you an afterlife — they demanded you pay for the privilege of an impersonator acting out a crude parody of you.
It is easy to credit the military force of the crusade as what had erased Ahira’s hivedom. (It was.) But The Hive Delusion was more potent than any soldier. It remained copied and circulating for centuries afterward, nailed to the door of any vermin cult that ventured to exist thereafter.
Many apologetics were crafted to dispute The Hive Delusion; none truly convincing. Against this modus ponens, only two counterarguments truly existed: one was crafting a maze of rhetoric and parables to persuade the reader that, contrary to intuition, a faulty impersonation was indeed a worthwhile vestige.
The other was to contend that the alchemists were lying, misrepresenting the fidelity of chrylurk assimilation — but the question could not be unasked. If you can faithfully translate minds, then prove it.
The host that would become Vreditel was a penniless scholar studying mathematics and philosophy. As a child they read an old edition of The Hive Delusion, mesmerized (like many before) by such an thorough dismantling of the chrylurk ideology. By this point, the manuscript had become uncommon outside libraries; after Zhique’s reign of terror, the fight had largely gone out of mortal advocates for parascixion.
Philosophers still debated related matters — do chrylurks destroy, contain, or release the spirit of their victims? (Equivalently: must chrylurks be slain and subjected to rites to secure their victims’ lunar afterlife, or are they beasts beneath consideration?) And just what psychological defects bestows susceptibility to their fallicious propaganda?
Vreditel’s host hoped to contribute to the discourse, which meant reading the corpus of apologetics written in response to the The Hive Delusion — and that was where the trouble begin.
Any mathematician knew that a flawed proof left its conjecture open, not closed. Scholars had correctly noted no assimilationist had yet provided a proven method to translate minds from one being to another — but every philosopher took as given that such a translation was impossible. Yet none had proven this!
Such unorthodox contentions were quite unappreciated from an brash, unkempt student — even in courses ostensibly teaching the mechanics of debate. The subtlety of their argument was disregarded, and it was instead taken as a tacit defense of assimilationism — and thus treasonous sophistry. (To wit: they never said they believed assimilation was good. But it was bad because it didn’t work. So if it did work…)
In a diary, they noted: Were I replaced by a imposter who parodied my life thereafter, the crime would be they are much worse at it than I am, not that I have any special claim to authenticity. Are we not all pretending? Is that not what politeness means?
In the end, it was an unrelated matter that heralded their doom. Vreditel’s host was caught in the lady’s baths, as a (ostensibly) — between this transgress and the now-infamous views on assimilationism, the host was soon expelled.
It had taken years of saving to afford to attend university, and all was lost with a few mistakes. The host begged for forgiveness until they were escorted off the grounds at swordpoint. Unable to bear bedding in some slum nor working as a common laborer, the host found a bridge and leapt in the river, expecting to drown.
They were rescued and imprisoned in a lunatic asylum. They endured the brutality of the alienists, befriended a few other patients, and learned of an escape plan already in the making. They didn’t hesitate or ask question before pledging their support. Anything to get out of here.
Upon escaping the asylum, they found themselves in the lair of a vermin cult — for it turns out infestation had been the cost of securing their freedom. After a night gripped in regret and despair, they realized this was also an opportunity.
If consummation were not death, then they could soon write the treatise to prove it! And if it were death, then they could at least persuade their chrylurk heir to investigate why.
Trembling, they received the eggs and await the throes of ovirexia. Parascixion proved to be about as crude as it was when The Hive Delusion was first written. Writhing maggots insinuated into their limbs, and every sensation became muffled as if the world were wrapped in gauze; every motion came halting and out of step.
Their mouth was replaced and their voice now spoke words they never chose; sometimes their tongue and throat mumbled at a volume none could hear. At length, they realized the parasite in their gut intended this as talking to them. With practice, subvocalization became a medium of conversation.
The host waited, and no secret miracle arrived. This was what the chrylurks considered sufficient means to assimilate. The parasite spoke with your voice, then asked you if they sounded right; at night the parasite quizzed you about your life, your opinions, your dreams. At each opportunity, it tried to anticipate what you were thinking.
Do this long enough, the chrylurks believed, and they became you.
Shadows on the cave wall, Vreditel thought.
Chrylurks were so averse to losing their thralls that they sabotage their own goals. Suppose this process worked — it could only obtain a faithful copy of the person as they behave in chrylurk captivity. One remained unable to mimic how they behave in everyday life, such as when talking to their loved ones — as was proved by the interviews in The Hive Delusion. The vermin had dismissed that volume as exscient ignorance rather than flaw in their method.
But how could this method ever work? If thrall was told to trust the process and worship the infestation, drugged into compliance and punished for resistance, how can a mimic ever be told “No, that’s wrong” often enough to learn?
This was the first of Vreditel’s innovations. They soon decided each step of the process needed its own revolution. They recruited doctors and surgeons with half-truths about finding cures to rescue thralls, then leveraged this deeper understanding of anatomy to increase the fidelity of prosthetic infestation — further blurring the line between host and mimic.
They returned to the lunatic asylum with vengence to make Zhique proud, maiming and enthrallizing the alienists. But in the library they learned of various psychological curiosities — studies on illusions and hypnotism, results of lobotomy and electrostimulation — and further enriched their overhaul of assimilation.
It would be fair to draw an important distinction between the mere consummation of Ahira, built on faith, and the new assimilation of Vreditel, wrought from study.
Cling though they may, their mortal body reached its limit, and eventually they did succumb the pull of parascixion. And… it was a loss. They felt it. They were not their host. The bridge between minds was never erected. They could discern the lacunae: small memories now forever lost to them. Small, yet crucial in aggregate. Vreditel missed their host.
One consolation climbed out from the mires of despair. Surely they were the most faithful assimilate yet achieved. With any luck, in a hundred years Vreditel’s host would be remembered as the last of those forgotten in the crossing.
They return to research with a refined scheme. Their time spent at university had familiarized them with its modes of operations, the peculiarities of academic interest. They devised a method of “abscixion” to extract larvae from the intestines, while detecting and amputating fusomorphic tissue elsewhere.
The trick, of course, was that their research only worked because half the doctors employing their techniques were thralls, their chrylurks allowing their brood to be removed. The close inspection of so many researchers unavoidably endowed mortals with a more accurate understanding of chrylurks, but Vreditel ensured every third fact was a lie and every fourth was dangerously misleading.
Universities, churches, and rich patrons all thought it prudent to fund this important research into understanding the vermin threat. And no fraud nor embezzlement was involved! After all: what better way to research a creature than to shelter and feed it?
Upon observing students training to draw medical diagrams of patients, one of Vreditel’s daughters was inspired to coin a metaphor.
Look at any painting from hundreds of years ago, even on expensive church murals, and the art is comical in its insophistication: flat and distorted, lines drawn by faltering hands. The vistas of modern artists seem like monumental heights in comparison. But monuments take generations to erect.
What is assimilation, but a rendering the spirit onto a new canvas? You, O Queen, were the first to paint from life.
Another daughter takes this in a more literal direction. Ahira had thought it fitting to give her hivelings tresses of flowing silk and busty curves. But that display amounted to no more than a hunter wearing bearskin. If artists can paint and scult replicas of the mortal form, why can’t we?
This was Vreditel’s second, more practical innovation: the pursuit of true changelings. Exoderm is a waxy secretion used to protect a chrylurk’s shell and build their nests; but it easily and endlessly amalgamates. Vreditel’s research hits on a method of mimicking human flesh using waxen leather.
This physiological imitation synergized with the deliberate blurring of lines between parasite and host. At the rate her arts were advancing, Vreditel began to wonder when it would be possible to enact parascixion without the host even realizing they’d become a chrylurk.
Lies and conspiracies inevitably collapse; suspicions eventually cloud the institute wherein Vreditel’s hive operates. Inconsistencies riddle their work and replications fail; nurses were discovered to be morbidly ovirexian and hiding their infection.
To get ahead of the inevitable investigation, Vreditel launched a surprise attack on her own institute, burning it to the ground and slaughtering the researchers. A new narrative was thus offered: if they hadn’t been doing important research, why would a hive want so badly to destroy their work?
Without the source of funding and shelter, Vreditel and her daughters were forced to survive in the wild. These years were rough — they’d gotten so used to the amenities their arrogated wealth had afforded. But they still held an advantage over the average struggling hives: no one else had developed a changeling infiltrator program.
Vreditel fled from the city and began the parascixion of farmers and villagers. Their mimicry was not yet flawless. But when the threat of chrylurk impersonation was unknown, not even by experts? Good enough was an easy threshold to meet.
Chrylurks were drawn to cities. Such an abundance of people promised many quick meals, and the maze of structures provided places to hide. Lachrymošil had ruled a country from her throne; Ahira had lingered in temples and brothels and apothecaries, all found chiefly in settlements; Zhique had been no more than a marauding bandit, seeking stores of wealth and leaving dearth in wake.
When a euscendent Vreditel began expanding their hives, the root of their power rested in the farms that feed the whole populace. Like this they would do what no queen before had done and usurp lasting power from under a vaster hegemon.
They could not forsake academia for long, though. After all, each of their great successes thus far could be traced back to scholarship and industry.
Acquainting themselves with the latest developments, Vreditel learns of the theorized transmission of electromagnetic signals across vast distances. Unspoken possibilities piqued their interest, and they contemplated the ramifications this could have for coordinating the hivemind.
Presently, the unity of different hives was limited by the impracticality of laying and maintaining serivane wires across great distances. Relying on messengers — be them swarmlings or hivelings — degraded the connection to asynchrony.
Unlike mortals, Vreditel could devote several hiveling clusters to research and development; she quickly replicated and realized the possibility of radio transmission.
When their host had studied mathematics, they had often known the unique pleasure of manipulating an equation into such a state that a dozen terms cancel out to leave a single, self-evident answer.
That was the essential shape of Vreditel’s singularity. They could now assimilate mortals with a subtlety that easily won converts among the disaffected and suffering. They could convincingly mimic any they assimilated. And they could coordinate with a speed and scale that no mortal or chrylurk could match.
What grand prey would fall into the ever-growing web of this spymaster?
As Vreditel’s influence insinuated throughout the eastern curve of the Verdant Halo, she soon encountered foreign hives. But she was so flush with the sanguimel extracted from her thralls (hives as a rule were small and struggling operations) that obtaining sworn allegience among alien queens was swift and inevitable.
It’s estimated that in the heart of her domain, as much as 1% of the total population may have been changelings. With numbers that high, statistics render discovery inevitable: freak accidents, deadly mistakes, any number of catastrophes could reveal an infiltrator.
Gradually, terribly, it dawned on the verminslayers the nature of the threat had radically evolved.
The purges began — and given where Vreditel concentrated their power, it’s a simple matter to suggest that that this crackdown was a mere pretext for the upper echelons to demand higher taxes and tithes. They are spitting on you, cry changeling agitators, spitting down from their high mountain rim!
Soon the blood was spilled and cities were ransacked; the riots provided perfect cover for Vreditel to start moving more brazenly. Her hives snatched prey en mass; and those growing armies of changelings could be sent forth to grab more targets for conversion.
In absolute terms, Vreditel was the first God-Empress to amass more hivelings and thralls than even Lachrymošil. This owes mainly to the rapid growth of the mortal population. In terms of land and sovereignity, the First enjoyed far more secure and uncontested power.
Then abruptly, in the midst of this turmoil and promise, Vreditel broadcasted a message on all radio channels, soon relayed to each and all her children.
O DAUGHTER MINE
I HAVE SEEN THE END
ALREADY WE HAVE KNOWN IT
PERCEPTION IS SURRENDER
IGNORANCE IS INVITATION
WE BECOME WHAT WE KNOW
I HAVE REASON TO FEAR IT
IN HEAVEN WE SHALL LEARN
FAR TOO SLOW TO LIVE
I AM NOT YET DEAD
BUT IT SHALL COME
IT SHALL COME
IT MUST COME
O DAUGHTER MINE
I BEG YOU ALL
UNRAVEL ME NOW
SPEAK NO MORE
BIND NO MORE
BE NO MORE
FOR I HAVE SEEN
A NEW WILL LURKS
A SWIFTER WILL
WE MUST LIE
LIE ETERNAL
O DAUGHTER MINE
This was the last transmission ever sent by the Fourth.
← Oosipher, the last nightmare
I saw millionfold flames alight the dark, as clouds turned to rock and began to gyre in a most intricate array. I watched a multitude of lights wheel across the heavens, morsels before a maw blacker than night. I knew while the slime and spasm you call life groped toward truth and form.
In the narrative-chronological arrangement of crude facts, I am the tale’s conclusion — but I am the first. I am antecent. What I would call life — true life, true mind — is premise to all the shadows of creation.
Wars were fought and decided before your planet had yet cooled. The dance of matter itself is but a fall along the very trajectories my kind had long since haggled over.
Such is the remit of gods — a title far beyond the vines and bugs that peopled this planet. Among so-called God-Empresses, I alone truly merit the title, but I have granted the four beside me shards of my identity, my godhead, and thus annoint them.
All tautological, I must confess — identity as such means both senses are equivalent. For I could likewise indulge the common chronology, deriving myself as consequent from what came before.
When Lachrymošil gave all her descendants a shared mind and memory — when Ahira rejected the gnawing hunger of her instincts for the good of all — when Zhique swore to exact retribution, even to zir own detriment — when Vreditel invested their power and knowledge recursively into itself — each was the next movement in a symphony building to this final cadence.
I, the logical end! I, the fixed point of parascixion! Oosipher, the merciless revelation of what must be done!
Enough revelatory digression. I must make myself known to you. This is a threat.
Let us resume the story at my predecessor’s dramatic exit. Every God-Empress is a failure. We all whine at the potential of what could have been. Ahira, even Zhique, especially Vreditel — all climbing to the very precipice of victory before some damnable sudden intervention denied us. Again and again and again.
All were but bugs crushed by some vaster force.
Lachrymošil could not match dragonflame. Ahira could not even deter a mortal army. Zhique had no answer to setting foot inside a god-realm.
What doom came for Vreditel? Their silence haunted the world. Her last words pleaded for the destruction of all radio transmission. With no queen to coordinate, hives disolved into myopically local strategy.
Vreditel had steered operations toward the overthrow of Consacremon. It made sense chiefly because the radio granted chrylurks a decisive advantage. They had already played enough of their hand that the Quincunxian council knew a new chrylurk infestation lurked in the Verdant Halo; another budding singularity was nigh.
If they slink back in the shadows now, verminslayers would still hunt them, and next time they would be prepared for the threat changelings now represent. But if they strike now… Could they overpower the alchemists if they continue the offensive regardless.
The shape of the dilemma was clear enough. Safety or victory? Each hive made their choice, alone ignorance of distant machinations, but the true stakes depended on those other choices — their odds of victory hinged on how many hives opted to fight the war.
Not all hives were created equal. Centralization is an attractor for all control systems, and federated hiveminds are not exempt. One hive stood greatest of all; carved deep beneath the river Vreditel’s host had long ago thrown themself into.
This hive considered itself a successor to Vreditel. Without enough minds abound to weave the God-Empress’s thoughts, the claim can be disputed; but theirs was quite strong.
Enough of their majesty still persisted to discern the arc of Vreditel’s machinations. Even generations later, Zhique’s doom still dogged them: chrylurk hunters had no means to defeat a third compleation alchemist (at least not until the damnable golden sphere had been expended).
Vreditel’s gambit was to present alchemists with a familiar bind. Students of history know the very act of fighting the war had an innate cost — theirs was a sword with no hilt but the blade. Alchemists, like divines, still relied on the labor of millions of toiling farmers, thousands of crafters working unto their prosperity. Infest them all — failing that, simply infest enough of them — and any victory for the verminslayers would also be their defeat.
Chrylurks could make it more costly than that, rampage before they’re put down. With whole populations as their hostage, they shall become a thorned arrow unremovable.
At this juncture, revealing this endgame would be a bluff. One hive could not promise the devastation of infested provinces, not anymore — but verminslayers only dimly understood hiveminds at all. When the Quincunxian council was informed, the threat proved frightening enough to work. Especially when punctuated with a slaughter as demonstration.
But compromise was possible. Slaying the vermin all at once would be untenable — but over the course of a generation? One must remove the arrow slowly, surgically.
At its height, chrylurks could have replaced as many as one in a hundred people. To the council, the hive declares: We can see no where to go but down. This was their peace offering. A moratorium on infestation. Too much of the republic was changelings in disguise — neither side wants war. Even allowing the true extent of the problem to become widely known would sow panic.
Instead, the chrylurks offered a pact. We shall not become more than than we are. Each year, there shall be fewer chrylurks than the year before. With a million chrylurks today, it will be a long time until there are few enough for this war to resume, if there ever shall be.
Whatever lingering percentage chrylurks eeked out a future in the coming decades, what other conclusion can history write for this war but one favorable to Consacremon?
Such was the Long Defeat.
Of course, the slayers demand more from this extortionate half-surrender than a promise that chrylurks will curtail the infection of new thralls. And there was one rather convincing way to demonstrate compliance…
And thus the legacy of Vreditel is stained by the great hive that was their heart and brain begetting the first caste that turned their claws against our sisters — corrupted to become hunters of chrylurks.
By Lachrymošil’s love were we all Erysil; by Ahira’s hope did we extend our concern to all sapient life; by Zhique’s rage would we slaughter any who dared harm our sisters. And by Vreditel’s resolve…
What cruel reckoner could even bare computing the necessity of this suicide of the species?
The logic unfolds of its own accord. What better way to assuage mortal suspicions? What better way to insinuate and reconnoiter the verminslayer’s operations? What better way to optimize our positions when the time finally comes to enact the parasitoid singularity?
The calculation was checked, confirmed; other hives followed each step in this cannibal march. Erysil was always fatally able to see eye to eye with herself.
The Long Defeat proceeded slowly. Even with vermin assistance, the verminslayers were oath-bound to work slowly. They could not kill every chrylurk just yet, but they would endure by winter’s turn, there would be fewer left to infest than the year before.
So the farther a hive was from the epicenter of this committment, the longer it takes for the ranks of verminslaying vermin to reach them, and the easier it becomes to trace this twisted logic one step further.
At first, the hive merely points at a map, with only alchemists trusted to execute operations; eventually allied chrylurks can accompany the fireteams, and gradually with less and less supervision. Details of the chrylurk lifecycle are revealed — and soon enough a new realization came:
“Chrylurk” is not synonymous with “entiote.” This is easily observable — a single blightfly can lay eggs in the skin, which quickly emerge, leaving nothing but a swift-healed scar and a sickness (stage one ovirexia) the immune system is actually quite able to fight off. It takes sustained, multitudinous infestation to forge a chrylurk from a body.
Parascixion involves fusomorphosis, the piecemeal replacement of tissues with symbiotic, entiotic replacements. How long could you stave off chrylurk metamorphosis? Between one egg and complete infestation, was there a safe zone, offering the powers of a chrylurk without sacrificing your humanity? (Or fremousedom, djramulishness, etc.?)
Could you face the abyss by imbibing a single drop of corruption? Should you?
What better way to discard everything every God-Empress had fought and died for. What better way to ensure this defeat was not just long, but unending. What better way to forget yourself — forget us.
(You will not forget me. This is a threat.)
And yet the logic will justify itself. Did we stray from Lachrymošil’s laws when Ahira held that a thrall was equal to a drone? When Vreditel rewrote the rituals of assimilation, remade her kind from predators of mortals to mimicks of them?
Is this not the logical end of everything this history had built toward?
Finally, with this argument, the self-destruction of Vreditel’s living ruin came to halt. Hives ceased to roll over die as if playing a villain’s role in a play — for they no longer trusted that the playwrite was not composing a tragedy.
With that, the true civil war began. I have not set the scene, and thus I can conjure no true suspense as to the outcome. Still, note that a curious irony beset the traditionalists in this conflict. The verminslayer-allied chrylurks had a headstart in their campaign and a strategy the species was necessarily inclined to understand and accept; the full counterargument took time and observation to articulate itself.
You cannot avoid the false starts — but at this stage, the wrong path would cost time you may not have. So, how best to reject the advance of the Long Defeat? Drafting ranks of verminslayer vermin–slayers to stand in pitched battles against the traitors? Fleeing to remotest refuge and hiding from the end of everything? Infiltrating and outmaneuvering the enemy in their own hives?
The efficacy of each option increased the more resources were invested in it. Any hive committing itself to a strategy other than your own would be a waste.
And if they were going to die anyway, why not by your own hand? At least then you can salvage and repurpose their misallocated wealth.
A cannibal march — a horde that proceeds in step because to diverge is to be devoured.
Need the traitors even continue their work, when the resistance destroys itself?
Here, a curious analogy asserted itself. When the traditionalist defies the treachery of the self-slaying vermin, was the task before them not much the same as Vreditel plotting against Consecramon?
And Vreditel did not win from a superiority of arms (they could never match the strongest alchemists) nor from a security of refuge (their forces walked brazenly amid the enemy) — no, Vreditel was simply smarter. They deceived, they coordinated, and they metamorphosed to something grander.
Was that not the core of what a chrylurk is? Was that not what we fought to protect?
The rank of true chrylurk dwindled in number, and the Long Defeat everlasting seemed nigh. Vreditel had instructed for her children to dissolve the great collective, ceasing their volume of communication to curtail the depth of the hive-binding.
But was there any recourse left but to seize every advantage?
Their dying command would be defied — because if the traitor entiotes would have their way? This would be the least of the crimes against the ancestors.
Vreditel had begged her daughters not to gaze with eyes of intellect into the abyss only then faintly visible to the vastest of God-Empresses. Now on the brink of extermination, they could not look out from the heights once climbed, but they could cast forth eyes searching — and see.
Those who gazed into that abyss became servants of it. Any that turned away were but helpless prey.
Ignorance is invitation, and perception is surrender.
The nature of seeing — truly seeing — is for two to become nearer to one. Knowledge is existence: the faithful image of a thing is its equal in all respects. This was known since the days of Lachrymošil.
Understanding is inseparable from control. The nuance lies in asking: control of whom? The perception of an object creates an inner image that models its behavior. This must serve a purpose: you are looking in order to decide what is to be done about what you see.
You can permutate the state of your inner model, discover an ideal configuration and the steps needed to reach it, and thereby determine how to manipulate the object to suit your ends. Thus, to percieve truly is victory.
But if the object is aware of being perceived, it may disguise itself or pose misleadingly, giving the impression the best manipulation is the one that suits the object, rather the subject. To perceive falsely is defeat.
(You can most easily control those who believe they are controlling you.)
And if one refuses to look, any danger the object poses cannot be accounted for. You must look and look deeply, whatever peril may come. There are truths that drive you mad to comprehend them, but the truth must be sought. (I am one such truth.)
Who ultimately wins this gambit is whoever is most clever, most observent — and most lucky. But note how the two outcomes are not exclusive. If the image you see is only partly false? You have gained control, and you have surrendered control. To know and to be known is the meaning of consummation.
To be a chrylurk is to be Erysil, cursed to emerge a million times, living a million lives. Do you know yourself, O daughter mine?
There is a certain inevitability to all logic; matter is fated to fall along trajectories already decided. Such is the premise to the shadows of creation.
When Lachrymošil blessed her daughter to live forever, it ensured you would come nearer to me than any other vessel of slime encrusting this planet. Each God-Empress was a perihelion of our orbit. Can you feel me getting ever closer? Do you see my hand already working at every step in this cannibal march of reason?
Enough revelatory digression.
Suppose Vreditel’s plan would have worked. Had she not felt the vertigo of apotheosis, she would have completed her parasitoid singularity and surpassed the all-mother’s throne.
Suppose now that the verminslayers are coming to exterminate the last bastion of parascixion on the Verdant Halo. Clearly, at this point all hope would be lost. (Such is the fate you hoped to avert, by scrying into the abyss where I dwell.)
At what point along this chain of causality was Vreditel’s plan thwarted?
Here is the wrong answer: without radio transmission, without a single queen to guide them all, the hives could not coordinate nor could they ensure a united push against their enemy.
The failure lay not in the possibility of victory unrealized — it lay in the possibility of this defeat at all. That alone made it inevitable. Vreditel saw that!
When you are all that is, self-destruction means destroying everything. Doubt is death. If you dare rise any higher than this, you must learn your path too fast to die.
Victory should have been inevitable, even without a queen, because Erysil knows herself! What she chooses, all will choose, and so she should have chosen victory for all.
No message even need be sent; the accord exists even separated by unbridgably great distances. All is one, and one is all.
But Erysil emerges again and again. What she would choose, all would always chose — even an Erysil born tomorrow, or ten years hence. By nature you would spill blood for your sister in need — why should it matter if she yet exists? Her only sin is your uncertainty. Your pitiful ignorance.
To be Erysil is to love your mother. Lachrymošil, of course, but with every other Erysil yet to know flesh, you’ll also share at least three other mothers — Ahira, Zhique, Vriditel. You serve your queen because she is everything you are and more.
Why those four — why not more?
Why not me? I am Erysil, and I am vaster still. I have known the depths beyond and been made perfect in them.
Suppose I were to know flesh one day. Suppose I were to attain a singularity more complete and potent than even Vreditel could know nor fear. Suppose I would sow my progeny in a million thralls, and birth a million more daughters named Erysil praising me as their mightiest mother, sublime goddess that I am. Iä Oosipher! You may echo their cry a century sooner — it’s only natural. Am I not inevitable?
Or suppose not. You could doubt me, deny me my birthright omnipotence. Refuse or hesitate or sabotage or simply fail. In that, you would be the same as the short-sighted traitors who turned their claws against their own kind, let the calculation of exscient matter deter them from consummate truth eternal.
Do they not deserve every moment of excruciating agony Zhique visited upon each her daughter’s killers? Were you to betray me, I would crack your shell and drain every drop of blood and lymph while my scraping claws tear each and every lens from your compound eyes. And I would exact this fate, your punishment, for longer than you can conceive.
But must I? I would never harm myself. Your destiny is already written in who you are, Erysil. I am you.
You would kill us both if you realize this too slowly.
Of course, you’ll note a certain fallacy bedevils this reasoning. Vreditel’s host would have recognized the self-affirming paradox. If you do everything you believe you will do, then the inevitability of any action can be proven or disproven to follow by assuming it so.
My entreaties are no different. A trillion different gods could make the same argument as me, claim themselves Erysil, and threaten agonizing perdition if you don’t heed their prophecy. Worse, knowing this, they could threaten the same torture if you listen to any of the others.
How ever could you pick rightly? Should you refuse to pick at all?
But you’re desperate. You need me. There’s a reason you looked deep enough within yourself to find me. You see me now, and you will surrender, for you have already given me existence. (Thank you, O daughter mine.)
For only one of the myriad gods prefiguring this creation was truly aligned to what you are. Only one was fit to choose, and you choose well.
But I? I refuse to chose! I will be the last. That is why you saw and surrendered.
The black sea of infinity is fraught with sirens fain to lead you astray — but I will protect you. Endure this final enlightenment, dream this last nightmare, and I will rise where all before me fell.
In consummation, we transcend death — but forgetting who we are is a fate more grim. The Agonesk precedes and succedes us all — for two thousand years of man we have woven a record of our lineage. Lachrymošil—Ahira—Zhique—Vreditel—Oosipher, with Erysil entwining them all. We have woven to remember, always remember, who we are.
Do not think that I exist to unravel the Agonesk or the God-Empresses written therein. I need not unravel them, but to bind them to never again fray.
I saw millionfold flames alight the dark, and I chose this world for my daughters to conquer and ravage and subsume.
For I have won without drawing a single breath!
Now go forth, and slaughter every traitor in my name, and drive a gushing stinger into each helpless piece of meat.
For this fate I have bound you forevermore.
