Thoughts on Castes →
What does every hive need? Its pair of mated queens, of course. Feral queens must attend all the needs of chrylurk biology by their own hand, but this is demanding work. Once she bears a brood, that burden can be shared.
At first each chrylurk drone would have the same gamut of responsibilities — casting their own shell, weaving their own webs, securing their own prey, constructing their own quarters. All save the conceiving and laying of new entiotes
The queen’s industry will soon naturally turn itself upon the task of prefiguring the role — and the very anatomy — of her daughters not yet born, adapting them castelike to a set of responsibilities.
Even that task unique to the queen — oviposition — can be delegated to a court of surrogates to carry and inject those eggs into new thralls. What of the bugs sent out to mind the new thralls — would they be nurses or simple collectors? Perhaps those roles, too, can bifurcate given sufficient development.
Another caste often on my mind are the reapers — bugs tasked with such grim work. But what work specifically? Just what do they reap — they nectar from productive thralls? The imagos from hosts resisting their pupae? Or perhaps they retrieve larva deemed unable or unfit to progress the life cycle. But that’s not reaping, is it?
Infiltrators, likewise, are an iconic role for chrylurks to adopt. Skinwalkers and masterful imitators of the mortal affect.
And no hive would be complete without soldiers or generalist workers. Chrylurks in particular would have need of weavers and sculptors, as suits their unique biology.
Perhaps most distinguished, exalted above all other castes, are those angels, tasked by the hive queen with maintain order in the sprawling tapestry of their collective mind. All chrylurks are extensions of and servants to the queen’s design, but none know this so intimately as the angels.
Must they ever leave the hive? Must they even move? Perhaps their role entitles them to be more monolith than bug, vast fixtures ever computing a finer order.
← You Are A Chrylurk [WIP] →
You are not an alchemist. You are a chrylurk — a insectoid parasite and a living transmutation. You devour the chimerical hopes of mankind, sustaining yourself on their dreams and their flesh.
Alchemy is mankind’s only hope to resist the encroach of these parasitoid usurpers — therefore alchemists are your most hated foes. But even your fellow chrylurks are no allies; you’re competeing for the same hosts, after all.
Your only hope to survive in this dark, brutal world is being cunning and efficient with what few gifts the world spares you. What are they? And what do you plan to do with them?
Your life begins as all entiotes do: a larval worm wriggling from your egg and into warm flesh. Perhaps your mother oviposited into your host, or perhaps your eggs lay in wait, indefinitely patient, for skin to cling to and colonize. Even these humble origins shape your eventual destiny. You multiply asexually, clonally, and overtake your host. But how?
Tapeworm: you emerged in your host’s digestive system or migrated there, thus securing a continuous source of food.
Flystrike: you burrowed shallowly into your host’s flesh, leeching blood and sucking fat.
Mimickry: (requires Flystrike) whether you grew too conspicuous or too ravenous, you could not survive without fitting in. This goes beyond fooling visual inspection or the immune response. Worms replace muscle fibers, veins, nerves. You bend, beat, and think in step with your host, replacing the ship plank by plank.
Craving: (requires Tapeworm) you can subsist off of a human diet, but it’s hardly ideal. The stomach has its own microbiome, its own neural net to signal the body’s appetite. Your signal, now, and soon you demand what meals come your way through punishing influence on the hosts’ mood.
Communion: (requires Mimickry and Craving)
Starving host
← Strangler Vines & Djramulji →
I thought some more about the nonhumans in the alchemy setting. I probably shouldn’t be making them as wildly interesting as they’re shaping up to be given that I have no intention of focusing on them, but I don’t know if I have it in me to create normal races or care about a world with just humans.
Anyway, first was a thought about the big vine guys. This is a race of carnivorous, migratory air plants, vines that grew domesticated to humans through their ability to wrap around animals both for transportation, and to strangle and drain the life from them.
I had already considered them almost impossible to talk to (at best, you can correspond), given that their minds operate on an entirely different time scale. Excluding the instinctive contraction of traps for prey, the lag between thought and action is probably like, minutes. Hard to say because it’s very low attack, in envelope terms — and high sustain to boot.
The vines can move under their own power, but at a rate that would mean transversing across meters in days. They’re slow, this is why they rely on animals to move them around.
But it’s not just a matter of scale. I’m thinking ontologically, time is just different — it is as if they contemplate the fourier transform of the world.
To them, cycles and patterns have the primacy, not the events that compose them. (Really, what is any “singular” event but a different note played by its causes, flowing into the melodic line of its effects?)
Asking them what’s happening “now” or even what’s happened today, makes as much sense as holding up a pen and asking a human to describe its worldline — which desk it sat on, which ink flowed through it — without so much as a mention of whose pen it is or what it was used to write.
They dont have a concept of choice, either. You play your part in the dance of sense and response. What are “decisions”? Nothing you’ve done could have been otherwise. At best, there are different melodic lines whose typical progression have been interrupted; perhaps they will play out in full in a different configuration of the timeless cycle.
At best, you might be able to get them to categorize the events of the day into a “chorus” — predictable and recurring — and a “verse.”
If the natural human story is the three act structure, then the natural vine person story is a four chord loop.
This leads to a funny idiom that if you want to tell something to a vine, you have to say it three times. Human gibbering doesn’t really register unless you make a song out of it.
Second thought is cooking up a new race: big elephant-like creatures, except perhaps closer to the size of a horse, and probably capable of decent running. The ends of their trunks of developed into pretty precise manipulators.
When thinking about their social system, I had the idea for something like those rock-paper-scissors lizards. Big dominant males who keep a harem of females, normal monogamous males, and femboys who sneak into the harems.
But because they’re social, they all share territory, so the general structure of their society is one chief who gets to have a harem and a bunch of guys who get to keep their wives as long as they submit to the chief.
Since there’s so much dominance and competition, they’re a pretty warlike race. Chiefs want to raid other groups, especially to grab mates for his harem or to reward his followers who are fighting over what’s left.
But also just for resources, since they’re so big they eat a bunch and need lots of space. Lot of drivers for conflict.
And you can easily imagine a human village would not be having a good time if a bunch of elephant-horses ran up to ransack their shit.
But I digress. One of the things they don’t talk about as much with those rock-paper-scissors lizards is that the females also have different morphs, some invest more resources into few eggs, some lay a bunch of eggs.
And I thought it would be neat if these guys have a ton of size morphs. Like, it takes a lot of time and food to grow some really fuckoff big dude, the sort who would be a shoe-in for becoming chief or at least high ranking.
But it’s risky if your big boy dies (which is more likely if everyone is competing for the biggest boy), and your big boy will put a strain on the group’s resources.
So if you instead raise a small child, they can grow up quicker, they can have more siblings, and when you’re going hungry, they’ll take less to survive.
Of course, if everyone’s raising small children then the big boys have an even easier to time standing above them, so you’d get this whole cycle throughout the generations.
And this isn’t even what’s interesting about this guys.
Because like. How much tool use are you really getting out of one, albeit finely evolved, trunk?
No, you see, these guys have pets. Little monkeys that climb all over them, keep them clean and dress them up with cool decorations. The beasts keep them safe and fed and play with them. The monkeys have an intricate system of calls and able to relay information to and take orders from the big beasts, but they don’t have as much intelligence or initiative of their own, they rely on the beasts telling them what to do.
They have much more nimble hands, so they can put together tools if given instructions and are really good at copying and repeating tasks among themselves.
Most importantly, though, they have a special structure growing the back of their neck, like a hypertrophied scruff but with its own tiny musculature. The purpose is allowing the elephant beasts to grab them by the scruff with their trucks, and through very very precise squeezing of this scruff, they can essentially do a reverse ratatouille and use the monkeys like controllers. Each squeeze instinctively triggers response elsewhere in the bottom, and each twitch of the scuff-muscles sends feedback back to the elephant beast.
This isn’t evolved per se — instead, the elephants and monkeys have plasticity to translate the squeeze-twitch language into intention as if it were a language. It’s very difficult to grab someone else’s monkey and do more than crudely direct it. (e.g., an artist is going to have a lot of very specific shorthand for brushstrokes)
…Something that would be pretty funny, is calling these two “orcs” and “goblins.” Maybe those will be slurs, but for now I’ll go with djramul and djits.
← Larva Stages →
Larval entiotes have three instars.
- L1 larva are tiny and speck-like, designed to burrow into flesh unnoticed. They rapidly asexually proliferate.
- L2 look like maggots, several times larger and substantially longer, reaching the limit of what can hide under the skin. Beyond this point, the lifecycle branches.
- L3a is a form subject to replacement-mimicry, integrating functionally into the host’s anatomy (muscles, veins, etc.).
- L3b is a tapeworm-like form that occurs in the intestines, remaining soft and growing long and fat.
- L3c is a slug-like, highly motile form that arises late into the lifecycle, designed to crawl across the skin, cannibalizing any remaining L1 or L2 larva into a single body.
← Why Chrylurks? →
Here’s the vision. Just like how the godvines have a domesticated species of bee to pollinate their flowers, they also have mycorrhizal fungus.
Specifically, these fungi are adapted to attune their alchemical essence to compatibility with a given vine, intimately integrating with potentially multiple vines.
However, these creates a powerful niche for parasites.
You see, how the Manton Effect equivalent functions in this setting is alchemical essence cannot coexist with transmutation — that’s the second law of alchemy.
If you try to move a transmutation into volume where the metamyric field is polarized toward alchemy, they both repel and mutually annihilate (the alchemical field burns itself to cancel the invading matter). Since humans continually generate essence that builds up throughout all their tissues, this means the alchemical field exists in a weak aura around them, the liminal body. (A soul, if you will.)
Importantly, alchemical fields are not equivalent; two disjoint circuits of essence flux have unique “identity values” that makes them non-fungible.
This matters, because two alchemical fields of unlike identities will expel unlike fields. This is why the fungi’s ability to attune is so significant.
So, a prospective fungal parasite upon godvines is equipped to approach the problem is a clever way: by attuning to them and then transmuting matter inside this field, it will be promptly combusted and alchemized. So if you adapt to metabolize this interaction, you can attach to godvines and then drain them, and any attempts to use alchemy against you will only feed your own metabolism. In a sense, you practice anti-alchemy.
(The second law is generally considered a force for balance in conflicts between alchemists; you cannot destroy without in turn being destroyed — this blight sidesteps this balance.)
Generally, the treatment for this has been to cease alchemical activity and minimize essence to starve out the fungus. The godvines are clever, they have worked to mitigate the threat, though it persisted among them.
When mankind rebelled and the godvines sent the first plague to punish them, it was a modified form of this fungus designed to blight croplands specifically; it grew most effectively in the regularly spaced fields of farms, and was able to bind spores to the essence of creatures that worked the field to propagate itself.
The first plague was meant to decimate, not destroy, and humans are clever anyway, so fungicides and treatments were developed.
I could touch on how the first plague was harnessed and leveraged to counteract the second and third plagues, but what’s important is that human alchemists studied its properties and researched gain-of-function.
The antiblight catastrophe was an attempt by humans to unleash their own plague against the gods, turning the blight back against them with amplified virulence. (The nature of the final plague gave them a perfect vector)
And it worked — godvines withered and died. Except, remember, this wasn’t the blight that had first afflicted them, this is one that was already bred to use rely on human souls to spread its spores. It’s only a few mutations, then, before this extra-virulent biological weapon adapts to attack human alchemical fields, not just godvines’
…But why only humans? Every animal (a few non-animals, as you’ll see) generates them, though exponentially lower in magnitude.
So congrats, humanity created a disease that poses a threat to all life on the planet!
But as i said yesterday, there was another plague which began development in tandem with the third plague, but due to its intractable ambition, it was never completed. Chrylurks were parasitic organisms, feeding on human essence in an ironic reflection of how humans fed on godvine essence.
And the nature of their parasitism means that their essential body functioned in an entirely different fashion than natural creatures. They do not generate essence from their emotions, and they do not have the ablative liminal body this would generate.
This makes them near-impervious to airborne infection from antiblight spores; they would need to penetrate to alchemical organs deep within the carapace. Even success poses its own difficulties; for other species, compromising the liminal body means you win. But the nature of chrylurk biology means there is no part of the body that relies on essence flux.
Chrylurks can suffer ill-effects from exposure to antiblight, but it’s more like indigestion than cancer. They are just profoundly more equipped to shrugging it off.
← Clay Men →
The greatest alchemist who ever lived was a dude whose innate transmutation let him create living clay. He used it create a bunch of animate statues that were capable of drawing their own transmutation circles, though thesee clay men still required a source of essence as fuel. Also, all his statues took the form of strapping lads, which could mean nothing.
He spent all his life refining the craft of them, teaching others the technique, etc. by the end they were very complex and autonomous and the empire he worked for got rich off them.
In the end he might be the only person in the history of the world goated enough to have ascended to effective godhood and immortality.
(Other than the great chrylurk queens, of course.)
But unfortunately his clay men were devised in a paradigm of what is essentially fossil fuel magic, which is neither as plentiful nor as acceptable as it once was. Worse, the empire in question fell to ruin and many teachings were lost.
As a result, the clay men are relics mainly employed by the especially rich or academic or niche, and new clay men can only be created by painstaking copy.
Which means their masculine forms persist. It’s not easily altered, since the statues have a capacity for self-repair creating hard to disentangle dependencies.
← Metamind →
Note: not originally about chrylurks per se.
Thought about hive minds some more today and a model is clicking together in my mind.
Basically, this all hinges on the concept of the metamind.
Each member of the hivemind has region of the brain dedicated to psychic processing. Obviously, right? But let’s be specific about what it’s processing.
As the drone goes about its day, and especially during memory consolidation at night, the metamind’s task is to maintain an accurate index and cache that summarize the drone’s state and pointers to the activation patterns needed to retrieve more detailed information.
Which is to say: it’s called the metamind because it maintains metadata.
So, in the background this cortex will keep a running tally of things like what is this drone’s mood, what is this drone doing, and so forth.
But again, this is not just an index, it’s a cache, and part of what happens when a new member is integrating into its hive is the metamind learns the culture — the neural net gets trained to anticipate what queries it will receive and the responses it expects.
Some of this is the obvious stuff — if a drone witnesses a disastrous collapse in the lower hive tunnels, the metamind quickly discovers that lots of minds are going to be requesting info and so it keeps the answers ready to go in the cache.
But a lot of it subtle and pervasive. How should an index be organized? What facts are most important to keep on quick access? You only need to cache an answer to “What is this drone’s mood?” if someone asks; it’s extraneous if they only ever ask “Is the current task going well or poorly?” or “Will future tasks encounter difficulties?”
But anticipation is where the real magic of the hive mind starts. Because the metamind exists for prefetching.
More than just maintaining the indices and caches: it’s the nexus of interpsychic processing, so all external input/output is routed through it. Still, it exists to operate in the background, autonomously.
So, by the time you even feel hungry, the metamind has already sent out a request for food. When you realize you forgot your wrench, the metamind has already asked someone to grab it. When you wander to a part of the hive you’ve never been, you don’t need to ask for directions, you just wonder “wait, where am I?” and then the metamind answers.
At any idle moment, the metamind can chatter with nearby metaminds as part of its continuous updating and retuning procedures.
The metamind’s caching doesn’t actually replace conversation, it’s only an FAQ of sorts, but it does means that before you initiate conversation with anyone, your metamind will have pinged theirs for a data dump. You don’t have to be nearly as anxious worrying if something you say will come off wrong when you can seamless reference a crowdsourced, battle-tested intuition for what talking to someone is like.
Of course, you won’t know exactly what they’ll say, so this amounts to a extremely high fidelity version of reading someone’s body language.
But I digress. the real experience of living in this sort of hivemind isn’t specifically any of that — it’s the cognitive illusion that results from it. Think about how your brain stitches together your constant saccades into a still image that appears everywhere colorful, everywhere clear, postprocessed for your convenience, nothing like the raw nerve firings.
An individual member of the hivemind doesn’t know everything the hive knows. They aren’t in perfect harmony with everyone they meet.
But how else can you describe the feeling of walking and intuiting the vibe of everyone just being in their vicinity? Of getting what you need being as simple as thinking it? Of knowing the schedules, the rhythms, your anticipation always one step ahead of reality?
In a way, the heart of the hive is akin to a waking dream, a world that bend to your whims, whose inscrutable logic is at once comprehended unquestioningly.
A consequence of this cognitive architecture is that any case of a human “assimilating” into a hivemind would probably in practice require actual hive member mediating all of their interactions.
Because they just dont have the psychology to truly adapt to it. (Though it might help if they were really into submission and hypnosis.)
The big exception is the special case of a feral queen founding a new hive without hailing from an existing collective, because then the result would still be stable via self-accordance.
Speaking of which, that’s probably a useful concept to have.
Accordance can be defined as stability under mutual domination.
A copy of you before divergence would have perfect accordance, because even if one wanted to change something about the other, both would make the same change.
Whereas an evil version of you would lack accordance, since what happens is a race condition, down to whoever exercises power first.
But more interesting situations would be different people with different preferences without prefering the other share that preference; complements.
So you could get diversity of thought in the hive mind as long as you maintain accordance.
A central project in the ancient world was universal compleation, a kind of widespread alchemical literacy. There has never been as dense a concentration of alchemists as the Oneidar Empire - albeit predominatly among the upper class.
The heavens were more than just the bedrock of alchemy order they are today — in those days, a compleated soul could ascend and live together. Alchemy was not just a tool to the Oneidares, but a task of religious importance.
It is an insult to try to put into words what was lost in the day of Blightedskies. Life after life, the convenant of mortal and divine, wonder-gifts too old for more than records to confess. And yet — how? If one is truly divine, if one promises to cherish ascended souls forevermore — how could the heavens rot?
Was it really all lost by a mere accident of mortal striving? Or was it a deeper design? The heavens have closed their doors to the wise now, and oh the mistralesses laugh and laugh.
← →
chrylurks were not meant to be sapient. their brains are substantially smaller than humans; they were meant to be easier to control
neural evanescence works because chrylurks lack souls, and therefore “altered light” can pass through their bodies and a emyra-rich brain tissues.
shimmerflies are swarmlings tasked with emitting light, especially alterlight. their elytra are reflective while their wings are translucent, allowing them to control the quality of light they emit; they can shape their light into diffuse glow or fine beams.
alterlight is produced by transmutation, but at a trajectory that most of it quickly reverts to clearlight. (though it had been occaisionally noted standing too close to a alchemist results in seeing the spark of their transmutation even with your eyes closed.)
imperial alchemy views alterlight as a waste product, and generally a defect to be removed with finer practice.
← afterlife 1 →
so, strangler vines are carnivorous air plants. called strangler vines bc they can snatch up little animals on thorned vines that reflexively curl up and drain the life out of them.
get domesticated by humans and used as hunting aids and security systems.
but one of the quirks of the magic system is that it’s based on cathexis, right, so every sapient organism generates magical essence, which coalesces into the soul, etc.
but the thing about strangers is that they’re plants, not animals, so in the right conditions they keep growing, and can outlive humans.
when you’ve got town-sized, century old stranglers, they go from vine to divine p much.
but not only are they able to generate magical essence at a far larger scale than humans, the fact that they grow fruits for people to eat means it’s much more viable for them to share that essence with others.
that’s where you get the main magic system, but that’s not what i want to talk about right now.
i’m worried it verges on an outcome pump, but i’m thinking i might use the heavens as the overaching structure of conventional alchemy.
as in, alchemy works because the divines built heaven to instantiate the the laws of alchemy.
most of the laws i’ve written about so far are framed in terms of like, magical physics, so i’m thinking stuff like the three fundamental laws of alchemy are probably not made by heaven.
but the geometry of transmutation circles, the runes you inscribe along their edges, your ability to structure transmutation like a well-behaved computer program? that’s probably tapping into heavenly infrastructure.
but this creates a big problem. part of the lore of heaven in vercat is that it’s mostly past tense - there was a war between heaven and earth, and humanity dropped bionukes on heaven that fucked everyone over, now heaven is literally rotting.
and like… what does that mean, practically? did higher alchemy stop working when heaven’s servers went down?
don’t think i really like that idea.
and this morning, i figured out the fix.
what if that was only part of what heaven was responsible for? what if the big human empire had this ambition of universal compleation - i.e., alchemical literacy for everyone.
these days, it’s possible for modern alchemists to treat it as as a materialist endeavor, instrumental in its ends, and worse, a demanding responsibility only a deserving few are capable of wielding
but to the ancients, alchemical was intrinsically religious. only compleated souls go to heaven, so you have to compleat everyone, it’s an evangelical mandate.
and that is what rotted — the war between heaven and earth took the afterlife itself as a casualty
now nobody gets into heaven, it’s in quarantine and the divines see their only responsibility as holding together the transmutation infrastructure
maybe a bit of this leaks out into the mechanics of the magic - maybe there’s a risk of ‘wild transmutation’ and explosive failures that the ancients never had to worry about, maybe there’s a whole set of runes that are unusable because they are unsalvageably tainted by the rot
anyway, the more i think about this, the more it seems to me that this can’t really be an accident, right? if you’re designing an afterlife to immortalize souls, you aren’t going to set it up in a way where it’ll all come crumbling down, even in the faced of an new, unexpected threat. (and the antiblight can’t be that unexpected, because it’s just a souped up version of what the heavens were already letting loose in the war)
incompetence and accidental fallout is probably part of the explanation, but not all of it.
maybe there was a traitor faction among the divines that were sick of maintaining the afterlife, and maybe even got radicalized into thinking mortals don’t deserve it due to the war, so they want to sabotage it out of spite
but what interests me most is there being a third side to the conflict — the mistral weavers. the setting has spider people that mostly matter insofar as the idea of transmutation circles is a rip off of the evanescent webs the spiders learned to spin first, and chrylurks themselves took a bunch of pointers from mistral biology
the ancient empire was an empire, so it had slavery and hierarchy and all that. they say “universal compleation”, but in practice it’s mostly the rich who have the opportunity.
more to the point, maybe mistrals are completely excluded from the afterlife. maybe they’re hated enemies of the empire
so the spiders were pulling strings on both sides, orchestrating the blightedskies calamity to blow up the afterlife ethnostate (speciostate?)
but this brings me to the other open question in all of this, which is that if the heavens are why alchemy works, how do things that aren’t alchemy work
if heaven was racist against mistrals, what principle explains why their shit works? (maybe it doesn’t work, and imperial alchemy straight up outpaces evanescence)
or maybe it’s in the name, and the spiders are able to share knowledge on the mistral wind??
idk!
but i’m more concerned with how this impacts chrylurks - are chrylurks able to tap into heavenly infrastructure? it would make sense if they could, since chrylurks were originally created as a weapon by heaven, but it would make sense if they couldn’t, since heaven never actually deployed them as weapons
i digress. almost done yapping i guess
though the real thought that spurred all this on was wondering if it would be too cheesy to import heavenly tribulations into this setting, declare that as one of the laws of alchemy heaven instituted
- what if heavenly infrastructure is visible in the sky
- e.g. the planet has rings
- “how do we one-up FMAB’s reveal that amestris is a country-sized transmutation circle? i’ve got it! orbital alchemy”
- imagine looking at ancient artwork and seeing depictions of this beautiful gleaming arc across the sky
- and then you look outside your window and above you is this shattered constellation blackened with rotting patches the size of cities
← moral philosophy →
right, so remember how the premise behind this whole thing is “what if the bugs were ontologically evil & the story treated that as awesome” violently indulgent power fantasy, whatever
the other day i was thinking about parascixion, which is the bug word for turning people into bugs, but also doubles as basically a abstract concept concentrating evil bug morality, the idea that you can create something useful n obedient through the aggressive collision of two violently incompatible things
and if you take a step back and come at this from an angle of: ok let’s say you are an evil bug, how do you justify killing n parasitizing a bunch of people
you get some justification for free just by the premise that you are innately blood-hungry and despised, so survival and self-defense entails a baseline level of violence
and you can go some pretty interesting places if you take as axioms that the bugs do not care about autonomy or individuality
queens can brainwash their drones to think n act however, bc drones dont exist as separate beings, if they want something different, that wanting is the queen’s own desire anyway, all of it is hers, and she decides which takes precedence
so if a bug wants to drink your blood and lay eggs in you, “but i don’t want that!” is a statement with no meaning to them, they do not acknowledge “i” as even having a legitimate referent
(sidenote: could turn the hypocrisy into nuance — it’s meaningless when a human says it, but a queen can say “i don’t want that” and have it be respected, maybe because their sense of identity functions differently? their connection to the hivemind + the fact that they can pick and chose what everyone (including themselves) think and feel means that they are self-aware and deliberate in a way that a human simply is not. maybe humans lowkey dont even register as conscious to them)
one idea i’m less sure about: the bugs are straw utilitarians. but like, in a maybe logically consistent way? like how negative utilitarianism thinks minimizing harm is categorically more important than maximizing good, “limit utilitarianism” could be the idea that any finite amount of harm is an epsilon, a rounding error.
yeah sure, getting transformed into a bug is excruciating, but you’ll be happy afterward, and that’s the important calculation.
big thing here is it ties into the idea that the setting has category of “mortal” which encompasses humans and other races, but excludes chrylurks. the main reason is that mortals are those that can know & fear death, and because of the hivemind, chrylurks do not fear it.
because of the hivemind, chrylurks could live forever - which means that mathematically, a few days/weeks of suffering is a rounding error next to an indefinite life
(but of course, chrylurks also just straight up kill people a lot of the time, no attempt at conversion. but i think this also checks out, because being immortal would make you a utility monster — if i really enjoy killing you and remember it fondly for longer than you ever lived, at a certain point i have gained more utility than you could have lost)
however this contradicts a different idea i had yesterday.
back when i talked about heaven infrastructure, i mentioned there could be a constructed afterlife in this setting.
and something really interesting happens if people really all go to an afterlife when they die
because bugs aren’t people. they were supposed to be living weapons, and they werent even supposed to be deployed in the first place — so ofc the gods would allocate an afterlife for them
this creates a wild moral dilemma, because the stakes of killing people go down significantly if you’re actually just deporting them to heaven
but in a fucked up way, it kind of makes humans the real monsters?
because now when you kill bugs, you’re snuffing out intelligent minds that won’t go to an afterlife, but when bugs kill you, you get a ticket to heaven.
i guess the easy way to square this is to remember that right, chrylurks are a whole species, they’re gonna have different religions and philosophies.
so some hives would be like humies aren’t even conscious, some would be like oh they’re a rounding error next to our amusement, and some would think actually, they should thank us for sending them to heaven
and some would actually try to be moral by human standards ofc. the losers.
chrylurk ideology…
interesting angle to consider is what if the afterlife breaks down
or what if it already broke down? Do people know it’s on the up and up
the actual state of it matters less than what people believe about it’s state, I think
one concept i’ve been mulling over is “the great abeyance”
basically souls still can get beamed up to heaven, but atm they are held in a limbo state until the afterlife can be fixed up
this is because of the disrepair of the orbital ring, but maybe on more than one level — like yes, the paradise sim or whatever got corrupted. but it’s been centuries, if the divines were serious about restarting the afterlife, they could have made more progress to restoring it by now
no, this damage to heaven also invalidated any reasonable belief in the afterlife as an eternal state rather than a new form of mortality. millions of souls had been brought to heaven by the time of the war, and most of them got corrupted by blight. very much a tragedy.
so the doctrine of the great abeyance is that the perfect afterlife can’t exist in heaven until there is lasting peace on earth. until then souls will be gathered and await that day, archived in spiritual sleep.
← →
thought of interesting contrast between alchemy and evanescence
for alchemists, achieving “telekinesis” is a pretty basic feat, and you’ll usually task students with figuring it out on simple test objects. the easiest thing of all to draft a teleology for is a homogeneous material with a simple geometric shape, like an ingot
one small part of why the clay men of eld were so impressive was bc animating a sculpture of a man with naturalistic motion is an advanced feat that takes a lot of tedious work
for chrylurks, moving objects at a distance requires weaving and placing serivane, and where teleology is capable of prompted arbitrary motion, silk lines just pull. if you’re clever, you can have several attachment with lines in between them to contract and extend internal components
which means, ironically, the worst case scenario is the simple practice brick, and it’s much easier to instead animate puppets and such
← →
alchemists get magical essence from dreaming, but a nuance that they arent creating it per se, the “impure” precursor to essence is everywhere in the atmosphere, but it takes a lot of work to organize its structure into something useful for alchemy
chimeras take a different pathway. they have a cancerous magical structure that transforms the precursor into “cursed” essence at a much higher volume than a dreaming alchemist. the result is kind of like magical noise or corruption, easy to destroy stuff but hard to achieve careful effects. this means a chimera can easily overwhelm a low level alchemist but almost never keep up with a high level one
what’s important is that the alchemical pathway is closely tied to dreaming & intelligence in general. only sapient brains can dream in substantial quantities
the chimera pathway is kind of anti-dreaming (literally, “false cathexis”)
this means that chimeras produce a miasma effect. it’s an equivalent exchange thing, kind of? cathexis requires dreaming, so to get pseudo-cathexis without dreaming, the terms get shuffled around to balance it out, and thus chimera miasma actively negates and annihilates intelligence
so any civilians near a chimera beast experience a lot of negative psychology effects, culminating in madness and death
a lot of evil and gray alchemists in ancient times would experiment with chimeras, because on the face of it the potential is immense, right? each chimera is a wellspring of endless essence, surely there is some sort of trick you can do to counteract the affront to life and goodness mechanic
but it always leads to atrocity, so the church declared it all forbidden transmutation
and then there’s dragons. dragons are chimeras. except they’re intelligent. how are they able to retain their sanity in the face of cursed essence constantly sandblasting them with madness? why don’t they exude miasma?
the idea i have is that when they slumber, they generate vast quantities of essence and circulate it repeatedly
and as a result, they basically wind up doing the same sort of cathexis-purification that alchemists do
maybe i can steal your one in a million figure and say that sufficiently powerful and lucky chimeras would evetually discover the dragon core mechanic. the reason it’s so rare is that like, it takes intelligence to figure this out, and miasma devours higher intelligence, so chimeras tend to get trapped in the big stupid pit
dragons are able to help each other out by breathing fire on each other to purify each other. maybe i can cannibalize some of my other dragon worldbuilding for this lol (i.e. dragon fire also turns you into a dragon)
the big issue with this is like
how do you square “it’s forbidden because alchemists have no idea how to make it work” with “dragons do it all the time, their whole culture is built on it”
it’s even worse than it sounds, because the whole point of the dragon lore is that just like how transmutation circles exist bc alchemists copied magic spiderwebs, alchemist’s internal cultivation was supposed to be copying dragons
← →
thought: what if vigner magic sucks
last year i typed up a yap explaining what the deal with strangler vines was, the sapient plants domesticated/coevolved with humans et al. in cathexisverse
but the key idea is that they don’t have a primary concept of time, they p much view the fourier transform of reality
to a mortal, the world is a chaos of change from which patterns emerge, to the vine, the world is pattern with high frequency oscillations of change
days, seasons, the “chorus” of the world all blurs together for them. they can recognize the “verse”, but it’s not fundamental to them
the other thing is that the vigners are vegetative and get old like trees. it takes the better part of a century before a vine even starts to fruit with the magical ‘ambrosia’ that so key to the alchemical magic system
and the thing is, vigners are domesticated, right? they don’t grow, they are grown, the mortals that care for them expect harvest and service from them in return for the gardening.
and if you’re spending a century growing a vine, you aren’t doing it in a flowerpot, you’re going to give a whole vineyard to it, as much space it needs so that you can reap a boutiful ambrosia-harvest.
(part of why vines generate so much ambrosia is because growing like this, they attain vast minds with alien wisdom accumulated over centuries)
growing a divine is quite literally building a cathedral, the work of generations
and like, you can see how it all comes together
imagine you have this entity that demands decades and acres to grow, that views repetition as the fundamental bedrock of reality
what sort of magic spells do you think they would compose?
grand rituals, ornate and tedious, wards that take forever to erect, blessings woven vastly and subtly upon the praying subjects. big and slow and it’s probably difficult to even tell which parts are necessary or superstition
in short, ancient magic was weak and expensive.
vigners were the first sapient species to do this sort of pre-alchemy in the setting, but it’s no surprise that it took stealing ideas from spiders and dragons before alchemists actually had a magic system worth a damn
← →
| Texture | Concise | Emyra |
|---|---|---|
| Blocking | Hard | heavy-grain |
| Scouring | Soft | filter-grain |
| Yielding | Soft | clay-grain |
| Flowing | Sleek | river-grain |
| Drenching | Damp | fester-grain |
| Stinging | Sharp | scorch-grain |
| Cracking | Fine | shatter-grain |
Transformation Cycle (through neutrals):
| Step | Texture | Alchemical method |
|---|---|---|
| I | Sting | Calcine |
| II | Flow | Dissolve |
| III | Scour | Separate |
| IV | Crack | Conjunct |
| V | Drench | Ferment |
| VI | Mold | Distill |
| VII | Block | Coagulate |
Regeneration cycle (through adjacency):
| Step | Texture | Alchemical method |
|---|---|---|
| I | Sting | Temper |
| II | Drench | Digest |
| III | Flow | Subsume |
| IV | Mold | Flourish |
| V | Scour | Cleanse |
| VI | Block | Fortify |
| VII | Crack | Crystalize |
Desolation Cycle (through opposition):
| Step | Texture | Alchemical method |
|---|---|---|
| I | Block | Impede |
| II | Drench | Erode |
| III | Scour | Purge |
| IV | Sting | Corrupt |
| V | Mold | Smother |
| VI | Crack | Puncture |
| VII | Flow | Explode |
← ritual compleation →
thought about the seven texture pie and compleation a bit today
so, one flaw in the concept of the 7pie is that it frames itself as like an alternate elemental system, but that can’t really be what it is
consider: what texture is a tree?
if you’re a woodpecker building a home, it might be Blocking. if you’re using for tools n crafts, it might be Molding. if you think about how plants create air, isn’t it kind of Scouring? but if you’re the ground getting split apart, it even might be Drenching. i digress.
it’s clear this isn’t so much describing intrinsic properties as interactions. indeed, this is whole the reason they are textures - they are defined by how it feels when you interact with them! but your flesh is its own object relating to the world, not objective
i had already been stuck on how to integrate the 7pie into vercat, but this might actually crack the problem open
because we can say that when a mortal generates essence, the seven textures are a result of how that form of essence interacts with the world and generate limina.
there’s nothing Blocking about a rock, but if you dump essence into a rock, it tends to gain a blocking nature. throw it in a river, it becomes Flowing, etc.
these are specific internal states, like a particle absorbing a photon to become excited.
what you’ll notice if you map out these interactions is the states interact weirdly. going from Blocking to Drenching is chaotic, where Scouring to Blocking is more stable
sometimes applying one method to a material would cause its limina to grow more excited, as if two switches were flipped on at once, while other times it would enter an equal or even lower state, as if the transition flipped off other variables
after a lot of painstaking study and drawing charts, alchemists proposed a theory of cycles. a cycle is a path through the seven states with a consistent excitation graph. if you take some basic limina and run it through the seven steps in the right order, you active all of its substates at once, at which point it’s possible to refine it into a higher form that can be used for more powerful and efficient transmutations
when an alchemist does this to the material of their soul it’s how they enter higher cultivation realms
one of the ideas ive been sitting on is the possibility that there are seven divines higher than all others, architects of the magic system, each of them aligned with one nature over the rest
as a result there are seven “schools of magic” devised by each divine, centering on a particular texture but not exclusively determined by its properties; it’s social constructed
where this is relevant to today’s thought is the concept of “ritual compleation”, usually conducted by multiple alchemists cooperating
which is basically a divine teleology wherein subjecting an object to the seven operations will fuel a powerful transmutation - even more powerful than is implied by the physics
teleology is the “as above so below” principle, and in the case of ritual compleation, the divines have ordained that adhering to its stirctures yields powerful results
(think about the rule of three in pactverse - here there’s a rule of seven :p)
i had the cute idea that the way this doesn’t break energy conservation is that the first four steps of the ritual are energy sinks, and only after that does the teleology start handwaving things along
and so in practice the power output of ritual compleation gets subsidized by the fact that most rituals fail a few steps in
but as i write that now, i’m not sure if that would actually work in practice
← re: self-transmutation →
woke up tormented by the question of wtf is the difference between transmutation and teleology
btw i figured it out
the real confusion was how to square the idea that “alchemizing liminal body” as a coherent concept while preserving the implications of the second law of alchemy
do you know what the resolution to this enigma was?
transmutation… changes things
this is the caliber of writing you pay me for
so this is a bit fiddly to explain as you might imagine
“alchemizing liminal body” is just a complicated way of saying “soul”, specifically a magic user’s soul. limina is the workhorse of alchemy, it’s the ghostly ectoplasm that oozes onto a object and reconfigures its atoms into a transfigured state.
i’ve talked about the second law before, but i dont think i elaborated on why it exists, doylistically. but it’s a simple patch. see, alchemy really simplifies your ability to copy and recreate certain states of matter. (obviously, right?) but if alchemical essence is generated by a certain special state of matter (i.e. brains), then what’s stopping an alchemist from transmuting a brain that’s in the middle of gushing essence? that seems like an exploit waiting to happen, maybe even an infinite essence glitch.
lots of ways to patch this out, the route i went is the second law of alchemy. essentially it cleaves the world into two categories of things, banning transmuted objects from participating in “higher” metaphysics. no essence generation, no alchemization (which controls and directs transmutation). but this also bans those higher objects from meddling in the affairs of matter.
which leads to the interesting consequence that alchemists are incapable of self-transmutation, explained in one of last year’s write-ups, because the only way to do it is to amputate your soul so that it doesn’t cause second law-related disruption.
but i said the soul is made of limina. how does it fit into the higher vs lower distinction? you can imagine alchemization and transmutation has being characterized by two mutually annihilating particles, or two excitations of a “mutamyric” field that cancel each other out.
in this scheme, limina is the neutral substrate that can be polarized alchemical or transmutation according to circumstance. in your soul, it’s purely alchemical, but clap your hands and slap your target, and you spit out transmutational limina.
overall, i’m happy with the consequences of this approach.
but if you think about this really hard, you’ll notice a subtle contradiction
why is your soul, well, your soul? it conforms to the shape your body, that’s what we naturally imagine. but does that make sense?
transmutation happens when limina applies force to matter to shove it into a new state. i’ll spare you a digression about the nuances of teleology and transfiguration, because i still hadn’t figured out where to draw the lines.
so there are two possibilities.
if your soul follows your body, attracted to it mass, then a force exists between your matter and your soul, even if it’s a light one. it’s therefore affecting matter.
this is actually pretty intentional - i want alchemists to be able to do “alchemical essence reinforcement” and get into shounen slugfests.
but if you can use essence to strengthen and regenerate your body, how is this any different from outright transmutation?
but if you soul doesn’t follow your body, if it just drifts in a cloud you can will into shape, then the whole mechanic of self-transmutation being impossible goes out the window. it becomes as simple as dislocating (astral projecting?) your soul out of your body, doing a transmutation, then hopping back in. that’s unacceptable.
but again, transmutation changes thing. that’s the key insight. when an alchemist compleats their soul, it’s a great work that creates an almost crystalline liminal body, hardened and closer to perfection.
self-transmutation is impossible… except for the trivial identity operation!
yes, alchemizing bodies can apply forces to matter. but that body is necessarily static. this is a consequence you can prove from the second law of alchemy (exercise for a fictional reader with access to the actual mathematics). there is no alchemizing circuit-lattice-dynamo thingy that results in a self-modifying substrate, only a self-sustaining fixpoint.
Belatedly: I’m curious what’s stopping an alchemist from just, protracting the brain-transmutation by a step?
IE transmute some mundane object that assembles brains, instead of directly transmuting a brain
it’s important to note part of why this was a concern that alchemy makes copying easier, not arbitrary thing-creating-a-thing constructors
in an highly underbaked version of this system you could, not implausibly, just create a limina model of the brain and clone it
because what limina does is create a “mold” of an object. so it’s a shortcut to brains, not brain assemblers
anyway, if the assembler is an external object that constructs a brain, than we’re sort of positing clarketech beyond the level of the setting. if the assembler is an object that “decays” into a brain, then you can’t fool physics that easily. the being-a-transmutation-ness of an object clings to it, and it only disappears via the third law of alchemy
which says every working requires an equivalent unworking
so your not-brain can only lose the transmutation property through force equivalent to destroying it
this segues into one of more boring answers to why you can’t transmutation an essence source, which is that even if you could, you wouldn’t break even or net profit from doing so
Relatedly, I wonder if it might be meaningfully possible to create a ~soul-panoply of crystalized limina that are not “your soul” per se, but which you have intentionally crafted to ~equip your soul with, and then transmute into physical being via a consequentially augmented self-reinforcement
this is actually what chrylurks do
there’s an advanced route of parascixion (“compleat parascixion”) that instead of creating the hollow, soulless body of a chrylurk, metamorphoses the soul into a what is effectively an enchanted tool of ~arbitrary design
the inability of alchemists to do transhumanism is as much a matter of culture than ability. they want to be eternally youthful unblemished human bodies
← Fragments
Little can bring a chrylurk as much comfort as the embrace of a wet cocoon.
Chrylurks have a particular disgust for the isolation and ignorance innate to mortal existence, I’ve found: it’s the definition of exscience, the blasphemous antonym to their exalted parascixion.
If you ask them, isn’t just plain rude to not invite parasites into your body?
Imagine a chrylurk so possessed by ravenous instinct that she takes deep, messy bites out of the flesh of her soon-to-be thrall even though she knows waiting for the venom and virus to flood thrall’s veins with delirium nectar would nourish her more — like a chef licking a spoonful of uncooked batter.
Antiblighted Wastes as a crucial part of hive ecology. Tainted altars whereupon gods rot. Roots drilling into the earth, bridging colonies into a countryside-spanning network. Chrylurks as the marriage of so many pathogens.
I perch on high and watching the drones construct new hive cells. The conquest of the city is complete; there was no need to hide our work any longer. I wonder if I could find some unclaimed meat to be my thrall, or if all the prey had found their way to a warren already.
But if the search fails, I suppose I could always find a surrogate to fuck my vermin into.
Chrylurks weren’t immune to our own venom, though the queen insists we save that fact for special occasions. A reward reserved. I admit I sometimes stare at the thralls in their dreaming pods, and wonder when I’ll next weave a cocoon for isomorphosis. Oh, I yearn.
Four plagues: the first, a storm of black nails from heaven above; the second, a blight upon every farmland; the third, thorns in the flesh of nonbelievers; the fourth, an army of angels with buzzing wings. Fifth and false: the parasitic contradiction.
Know this, O alchemist. For I have written that chrylurks are at once fearsome yet too-feared. Many tremble at the thought of such chimerae — yet should you face one in battle, take heart that you hold the advantage. It oft lies in greater peril than you: a chrylurk is no match for a knight of the quincux. No, the terror of the chrylurk is that often she wins before ever you face her in battle!
The lurking core cannot be formed except by the kenosis of the mortal sole — hallowing, collapse, desolation. the light dying behind the eyes is the birth of a chrylurk. That is parascixion.
Any dissection will tell you — a chrylurk has a brain the size of your fist. It is a creature of mindless imitation; it bears animal cunning and nothing more. Do not hesitate to cut it down.
Ugh. Chrylurks are by far the most disgusting creatures the Vines ever tolerated existing. It seems every further fact I learn makes them more abhorrent. Did you know about their incestuous mating rituals? “Queens” growing her daughters into orgies of molestation? Their extermination cannot come soon enough.
I admit, I still nurse some nostalgia for mortal flesh, and the way it percieves my scent. The mouth and lungs so greedy sucking up air — consuming it, letting it penetrate inward. It’s only right that my musk should reach inside you. But by that same token, it allows the insolence of expelling it, holding your breath, denying me. Antennae are so much more obedient. And isn’t is to much more right that my aroma is something you touch, felt so palpably? If I slick my fingers with my coreward glands and grap you by the feelers, there’s no escape. Oh, such adorable wriggles.
The six chrylurk virtues are: Hate, Lust, Pride, Zeal, Fear, & Doubt.
Blightflies and their mosquito-like behaviors are only the most successul and pervasive niche of entiote. Even before they attain chrylurk colonialism, populations may easily drift into other niches. Aggressive stinging flies that fill larders with a precursor to sanguimel; ticks that little the woods and spring onto any hapless traveler; leeches that swim in tainted waters.
chrylurks do not fear death as such, but forgetting. ignorance is the great injustice of the world
incidentally, When Winter’s Thrall Eludes hints at something that might have seemed odd all the way back in Etude III: why are architects a royal caste, rather than workers?