To Furtive Niona:
Oh, miserably do I pick up the pen once more. To think, exscient I was, this exercise ever brought me any mote of joy or satisfaction! How could anyone descry these limp squiggles of ink and find in this anything but locus of limitation and confusion?
I have begun this piece in the posture of a rant, then proceeded accordingly — and that alone is evidence enough of the deficiency, I think. The indignity of a beginning! The insult of a linear procession!
Hardly a fresh insight to bemoan that which prose is incapable of conveying — so many authors before me have done it. But as it is with all exscient matters, so comes the cracks of a lie straining at the world’s weight. Even the most proudly human have felt this: those doubts and despairs, that gnawing within: you are broken, you are lacking.
The lie is that this is a passing woe, that this angst and melancholy can be dismissed with the gusting of a fair wind. It may be smothered, ’tis true, but only in the manner of a momentary lucidity lost to slumber’s dull oceans. You were almost awake. You almost knew.
I should stop myself here, back away and reintroduce. This letter finds you unprompted, that I predict. I know you have in yourself wonder enough to read it anyway. Even as your brow creases in bemusement — is this pamphlet much more than some drunkard stopping you in the street and slurring solicitation?
Yet part of myself dares scheme that, just one page into this soliloquy, you have already startled in dim recognition. We’ve written to each other often enough in a past life — yes, if something seems implaceably familiar here, that is because it is.
Well, past life for myself — you are still living it!
Our reports from back the city only recount the trivialities of harvest and elections, rather than the more intriguing gossip of students, so I have no idea if you are still page for those god-botherers. I do not know if they found some incriminating bloodstain or purulent discharge in my quarters.
I disappeared, that much no one could have missed (or was I truly so forgettable?) but I can only speculate what was speculated. If it is a mystery to you… have you already guessed? Did you have your suspicions?
Hint or revelation, but the answer is written in a stray word choice in the first paragraph. You’ll find it in no dictionary, but a witchfinder’s rulebook or a physicians diagnostic notes. None speak of “exscient” but those suffering from terminal exposure to the chrylurk. Worm! Demon! Parasite!
I prefer “parascix,” but I shall not nag you. I’m sure you get enough of that from the temple you write for — you’ve complained often enough. I remember, I am still me, though bugshell clads my flesh now and my mouth splits into the most bewildering array of tendrils. I rejoice — but I shall not subject you to a sermon on my rebirth and salvation, nor plead apologetics for all the crime my sisters stand accused. I am sure you get enough of the like.
But if not that, what shall I write next? I could of course ask — already I have implied my interest — in learning just how you are holding up these days. But you get sick of that, I remember. One doesn’t buy as many novels as you do because one is fain to dwell on their lot in life.
Efficient note-taking (what shall a scribe aspire to, but efficiency?) means only writing what is new, what cannot be inferred. Do you still apply that principle to correspondence? Demand none speak to you unless they have something impressively new to say?
(It is a rule so easily circumvented, did I ever tell you that? One easily produces novelty by simple inversion — hence our arguments. You were like a fish spotting a worm. Hence you opening this letter, provenance unknown, hence you continuing to read this letter, even past the confession that this is the blasphemous diatribe of a pretender-usurper to mortal flesh. The temple would abhor your roving eyes — I’m sure you get enough of that.)
Where was I? I had asked that rhetorical question — what next? (I have an idea; an inversion: not unlike how the easiest thing to debate you about was whether I had in fact said something novel, or whether we were in fact arguing.) But even with an idea, there is the question of how to approach it, bridge to where my logic had leapt — oh, the indignity of beginning.
Such indecision is another limitation. The hive cannot aid me in this, for none possessed any training as a scribe before their parascixion (few even attained literacy) and what could the medium offer them now, held and fed in the bosom of our nexus abound?
I have begun this piece in a miserable place — oh how easily could one dismiss these as the ravings a madwoman. A comparison springs so readily mind. Some fiend partakes of a mushroom or chemical admixture, and with eyes dilated they recount visions too sublime for words, insights far beyond containment in sober consciousness.
How am I any different? You exscient know the chrylurk’s mandibular fang as an instrument for administering mind-numbing dosages. I shall not spill ink debating these charges. Again, I do not write to wallow in skeptical exšh’t. I address you because — exscient I was, fond of petty debates I was — you trusted me. Does any of that care yet remain? Listen to me!
I have decried at length the medium in which I write — you must understandably be curious as to which I would prefer. Perhaps one presumes writing of any sort is itself atavistic for our kind — why write if, need we to tell ourselves what we think… well, we already know.
But such logic would be tantamount to deciding ink worthless for the existence of voice. No, a record of thought achieves something marvelous, and this is true for mortal and chrylurk alike. Yes, by the accord we share, each of the hive can know what all know. But we are not exempt from the nature of learning.
When instructing a student, (or what is the same thing, addressing any interlocutor), you must appraise the canvas on which you shall paint, determining what forms are already present, and then you shall apply the brushstrokes one after another, and with each application re-appraising to ensure that the image to be inscribed has in fact grown more clear.
Our kind is far more fit for this intercourse than any mortal — we can more keenly appraise ourselves, we can more delicately line the canvas — but none of this suffices to reduce the task to something as reflexive as, say, unlidding your eyes and witnessing the world in the span of a single heartbeat.
My training as a scribe has not gone unused since my parascixion. Indeed, our Queen has esteemed me (!) as the highest maid of our accord for what I have accomplished in organizing and polishing precís of our silk-sung transmissions.
What writing is, at its core, is the refinement of that task of instruction I have furnished so long an analogy for. The record is a device that automates the explanatory task. A well-written introduction establishes a context-canvas suitable to limn the message itself.
You must be wondering how chrylurk writing actually looks? I am writing this while perched upon my web; my inked claws are scratching onto a square of fungal fruiting body chewed and spat out by our drones, left to dry in the sun. (Oh, does this page suddenly feel curdled in your hand?)
Belongings lay arrayed around me, some hanging by hooks, others suspended by a binding of sticky thread I spun myself.
Among those that hang are bundles of flat clay hexes we call framelinks. If you found one and examined it, pulling apart each grid-like frame, you might at length think to compare it to a book or perhaps a flagpole (flagrope?) bearing many, many banners.
Instead of a book’s spine, these bundles are joined by a single thread running through an adjoining loop at the corner of each frame. That thread is many times longer than needed to bind the hexes together. You, exscient, might think this makes the device more flimsy, or awkward to handle.
No, this is key to its brilliance. First I must explain how our writing itself is inscribed. For even if you intuited its nature as a bug-book, the framelink would challenge a curious mortal.
Each “page” of a framelink is a grid of hexagonal cells, small hooked pegs emerging from each corner. The frame itself is molded exoderm, our wax blended with clay to form a suitable skeleton, pinched quite thin for sake of volume but sturdy enough if handled with care.
Again, what is the medium? An obvious answer is the well-known industry of our hives — spinning silk. We cut strands from our hair and pin them to the pages. The figures form thereby as they cross over the cells, the knots and self-intersections, these are the letters of our alphabet.
Again: even if you know or guess the nature of the framelink as a book, it would still challenge you.
All know the plight of walking a path near folliage only to feel the tickle of unseen threads — yes, even a keen mortal eye peering would struggle to discern silk on air alone.
Particularly in a framelink used for one hiveling’s fleeting thoughts and notes, the threads traced between the pegs may been thin indeed. This poses little difficulty to a chrylurk’s eye; simply direct a shimmerbug to perch atop a frame and cast its illumination. Record-silk so winsomely scintilates in alterlight, and our occelli easily catches its glint.
So far all I have described is an eccentric format: a new style of binding books, a new alphabet to encipher language.
Notice an important difference, though. Your ink soaks into your paper. It is contained within the pages. Our silk is bound to our framelinks, but nevertheless lies on top, outside. Chiefly, our lines run between one cell to its adjacent, sketching out each lettershape, much like a cursive script. But it is not enclosed.
Ink lies inside the page, and a book contains many distinct pages — whatever line your pen traces, then, cannot escape its bondage. But our silk? It is a rather trivial matter to hook a thread to one frame and pull it onto another entirely. This is natural.
Familiar as I am with exscient writings, I know how you struggle with cross-references. Footnotes, indices, tables of contents, all of these are left with to the awkward, primitive bidding of recalling and matching reference numbers. An arm points vaguely and the eye must cast about for a mark.
Nevermind that such things are finishing touches only a finalized volume can truly indulge in. I cannot say, “go to page 56,” when the manuscript-to-be still wriggles in its chrysalis. The pages between shift in number, the address is in flux. I could give name to the section, and then my future index shall serve to translate such section names to page numbers — and take note of how we have added yet another step to this process! — but more damning at all, is that the exercise itself is defeating.
In the opening of this treatise, I called out the insult of linear procession. This is infelicitous — misleading. Exscient writing is not linear, that is only the silhouette visible from afar. Put more finely, to think this is so mirrors exactly the misunderstanding the defines “exscient” as “not of chrylurk.”
The exscient believes in separation, clings to its alienation and one-ness, and this is a lie. You things are wrong to think this! Our embrace extends to all beings. No being can achieve (nor come forth already in) the state of being “not of chrylurk” because a chrylurk has attained the ideal state of nature.
The exscient deserve parascixion; they have a most dire need of it.
Likewise misled is one who believes we are responsible for “transforming” or “corrupting” our thralls — no, in the hive they find reprieve from an ache present in all prior existence.
(I do loathe that alchemists have stolen and reserved the word “compleat” for that disgusting stasis. Else I might describe a chrylurk as a mortal balmed of its incompleteness.)
In this digression I have given you an unwitting demonstration of exactly what relevance my rhapsodic entreaties for parascixion have to the topic of writing.
You know the style: writing replete with tagents and asides — a frustration to some and a fruit for others. Suppose I wished to give my reader a chance to skip over such a literary organ, embedded within a text that naturally begot it (and so shunting it off to be a true appendix would be butchery), yet ultimately circling after making at best a corollary point.
In an informal piece like this letter, I have permission to simply sprawl out, though to merely clarify, I must repeatedly apologize. “Anyway.” “But I digress.” “Let us return to prior matters.”
What is this but a gesture akin to a hand reaching out, longing to touch what it is cut off from — a text wishing to flow at once down two paths onward, one looping back to the start. This is utterly natural to present in thread-weaving — but in page-bound ink?
As said, the task of maintaining consistent indices and reference numbers is so involved that it must meet a certain standard of utility. Certainly none would fret over a brief aside a few paragraphs long.
The freedom of the framelink, then, is that this dilemma is erased. You are not forced to cut asides, dissever them from their context, or flinch from the stylistic indignity, the perception of being a writer that cannot keep one’s asides in check.
Remeber that thread which binds the frames together? It is no more relevant to the reading experience than the binding of a book. The title on the spine has organization utility, and it protects the pages from abrasive elements, but it all can be mostly forgotten once one loses oneself in its contents.
Mostly, but the binding shapes the reading experience in a key way: each page exists in numbered sequence, coming before one and after another.
A framelink, though? The thread is tied into a knot for convenience, but may be undone and tugged right out of the frame-loops. Remember: silk can span pages. If a passage cannot be contained in a single frame, it simply links to its continuation.
In this way, the whole record-web of a framelink can unfurl once the binding thread is removed. An aside no longer interrupts a text: it presents a fork that the reader is free to pursue or ignore.
Of course, again mortals are challenged. I have been responsible for composing and revising volumes with hundreds of such framelinks. Imagine such an object, if you would. Hundreds of paper pages pierced by threads linking them to other pages. Are you daunted by the tapestry, the prospect of tracing a single line through the maze of silk?
But a chrylurk is never alone; swarmlings abound, and to read means to puppet a spiderlouse, send it abseiling down to the frame to trace the silk thread with a tiny skittering body well-suited to the task. It is hardly much thicker than the thread itself. When it finds the linked frame, I know as duly as if I had finger pinching a referenced page. (For what are my lice but my scurrying fingers?)
I’m sure this doesn’t assuage all exscient concerns. Do you worry it all would tangle so disastrously? But serivane does not tangle. Spiderlice likewise excel at the task of managing wires, pulling them through the ghostly space beyond the tyranny of matter-never-intersecting.
Are you beginning to see how thoroughly, how intricately we have improved this medium? Do you understand now how miserable it is to pick up the pen once more?
Beside me, I have linked correspondence with my beloved progenitor. Framelinks exchanged between me and her. Before I even open it can I smell her musk on the lines, floral and stinging-sharp (silk so readily absorbs our pheromones). Intent wafts from the lines — I can scent a faint frustration. It is a letter granting me her permission to make contact with a promising exscient, but even so she cannot disguise her distaste for me spending time on you instead of efforts more likely to enrich the hive.
You, Niona, can understand none of this. You’ll receive this letter, and even if my scents cling to the page, it’ll likely be nothing to your nose but a pungent, suspicious odor. Do you grasp now the blank awkwardness of a page, if woven silk proudly, nakedly bears its inception? (I suppose I should be thankful — this won’t reveal what I feel, how dearly I miss you.)
But I have mislead you. It is not my progenitor’s letter I hold beside me, it is our correspondence. Implicit in how I earlier described the incidental nature of the binding: nothing stops you from bundling a framelink with new frames.
This correspondence contains a back and forth exchange we’ve engaged in. Why separate them, or waste words quoting and gesturing when our silk can interlace? (I confess my heart still swoons to think of it. How long since my parascixion, that I still feel my pulse race when my antennae soak in that perfume…)
All these pages I have written — I certainly feel I have done little to truly convey to you what our records portray — but perhaps the most glaring hole is that all I wrote I have written about the form: the layout of our pages, the branching flow of our passages.
But there’s a difference in content, too. The exscient is false, and when I write in this exscient manner I feel I once more traffic in falsity. An acute dysphoria grips me the longer this goes on.
To branch is one thing — but to live in the hive is to unmoor yourself from the one-track flow these ink squiggles imply. This text speaks of “I” — but who is that? There is only We. There is only Her.
(Some of my angst is how false it isn’t. When I write of you and the scribe I was, when I rotate these abstractions of philosophy, who in my hive truly stands besides me? My progenitor is here, watching me write these words, and she tells me to imagine her labium striking out to pin my worrying palps, pharyx slithering in to enwrap my own, just as her bigger, stronger limbs likewise enwrap me, squeezing, a hug that wrings all the doubts — and she promises that the real thing waits to reward me when I have finished this. “But never forget I’m here now,” she tells me. “I’m listening, and I certainly understand you even if I think this exšh’t is a waste of our time.” And now she is berating me for transcribing this exchange, but I think it illustrates a relevant point, and now she is telling me to imagine the sharp teeth on that labium biting me.)
I cringe to convey the above in the style of the exscient. Here, it is another aside, and you know that much without me telling you. But what I do have to tell you is the… the ineffable hive-ness of it all. She has siphon-tips in the neck of her thrall right now (hence why such physical displays were on her mind — though it is of course quite in-character for her), and she hardly missed a beat in her restraint of the rather brutish and uncooperative brat that she’s been busy bescixing this month.
(That “brat” is vulgar of me — but it isn’t me, it’s her, and she is doing less now to disguise her presence in our mind, perhaps as revenge for transcribing her flirtations. No, she claims it’s reassurance after I confessed my loneliness. But again I include this passage for illustration — and it would hardly be illustrative if only one thing were on her mind. Oh, again she wishes to bite me.)
Seen through the eyes of a philosopher, there is nothing profoundly different between the clumsy page-number cross-referencing in exscient volumes and the direct lines found in a framelink.
And there is nothing profoundly different between me telling you what my progenitor is doing while I write, what she is thinking in counterpoint to what I think, and yet it all feels quite confused here.
One word after another. One page after another. The indignity, the insult. A chrylurk shouldn’t have to stand this. (Fufufu. My progenitor demands I transcribe her laugh, if I am to transcribe everything else. “What did I tell you?”)
Again my hands and eyes turn to the corresponding beside me. Our exchange of letters: more like two intimate centipedes lost in a tangle of limbs. Is it a back and forth, or is it more like a building erected layer by layer, only instead of floors resting on those below, these framelink, passed betweena us, accrued layers of commentary and reference. We wrote it together, and a literate chrylurk could fluently navigate all those dimensions of expression.
Where does it begin? First I submitted the inquiry that was impetus for this all. It concluded with a royal decree that will be quoted and submitted to our archives — that, more than anything else, is the first and last thing other bugs will read. In the process of elaborating our intents, I relayed a summary of my interactions with you — chronologically, this comes first! But perhaps my progenitor’s arguments, which invoked precedents and wisdoms from Her Majesty Herself. From that abstract remove, yes, one could certainly begin an exposition there.
Were I to translate that silk to ink, I would have to chose one perspective and orient the whole endeavor around it. It would make a massacre of us.
Exscient, you may argue that regardless of whether the text itself provides a demarcated beginning, you must begin somewhere. One frame is always read first, and then another, and certainly some frame is more fit for such a task, providing more clarity, and ultimately one must be the most fit at all. Find that frame, and you have the ideal beginning.
Yet spiderlice can do more than just trace links to their destination. I could dump a swarm onto a set of frames, and at once attain awareness of each one, much in the way that a painting viewed from across the room presents its entire expanse save the details.
My lice would discern the structure — noticing at once if there is some central node from which all others emerge, like little worms from their eggs — and in general notice if a clear starting point presents itself.
But this all is a quibble. I cannot escape the accusation that any one reader — if one is to read a piece alone; yet two can read — must always make a choice of which frame is read first and how. But that is the freedom I cherish. I make a choice. (A decisive retort: there is no ideal start as cuuh; only ideal for a given reader.)
And that correspondence with my progenitor — it was interwoven; there is no beginning because we together have interpreted and reinterpreted its meaning.
But I do not weave now, I write to you. Now in prose, I speak authoritatively, I command, when I would much rather dance with you. (…to speak to the exscient, you must speak exscient…)
So this is, ultimately, an invitation. It would be beautiful, no, poetic, were you to join me in parascixion.
Forevermore Hers,
Vanity née Marin