A chrylurk is a swarm within a swarm: each a metamorphized corpse of a mortal as possessed and puppeted by mosquitoes, spiders and slugs; each a thread in the ghostly web woven to ensnare the collective in this eusocial symphony.
It is nearly as infeasible to describe a chrylurk as to describe a tree. One could gesture vaguely — a trunk with branches with leaves — but the exact arrangement is never repeated, subject to the vagaries of life-history.
Each chrylurk is a motile colony for its swarmlings. One caste grows exceptionally large, rivaling human proportions, thus forming the silhouette-skeleton of a chrylurk. Its chitin grows riddled with holes for its swarm to crawl to nest in.
These body-caste bugs fuse together — often two that grant a centauric form, joined where one’s abdomen melds with the other’s head, an important structure called the chrysoma: the lurking core. The womb of one body-half becomes the breeding ground where the swarm renews its numbers.
The chrysoma is also the center of blood-nectar metabolism. True to their quasi-mosquito nature, every chrylurk preys vampiric on mortals, but for all the nutrition blood can boast, it is but a convenient medium for the chrylurk’s ravin.
Mortal brains burning with desire generates a soul, and its metaphysical essence diffuses through blood circulation. Chrylurks are soulless husks unable to generate essence on their own. Hence their hunger for ensouled mortal blood. But simply draining discharge from wounds offers but crumbs. No, chrylurks first prepare their meals.
By fang or stinger, chrylurks inject their prey with venom that induces ovirexia. The mind is wracked by a hallucinogens, the body afflicted by a virus, and the soul breaks down. Dreaming begets essence; so through this nightmare-hallucination, the character of the mortal soul is altered, mutated, transfigured. Prey begins to secrete essence tailored for chrylurk consumption.
Venom can have its dose-blend altered for sowing or reaping. To reap, a bite delivers enzymes: then the accrued subtle body of the soul dissolves into the blood, increasing the availability of essence in the blood.
But a dose to sow does more than corrupt the soul. It assaults the immune system day after day, subjecting the host to fever and tremors and all the malaise of a disease. If, when, the virus triumphs over the host, the very proteins cells are infected-instructed to grow are the same chrytoxins that sink the host into ovirexia’s nightmares.
The corruption turns self-sustaining. The body ripens itself for a reaping dose to let it all come gushing out. At this point, the victim has become the chrylurk’s thrall.
But thralldom means more than self-envenomation. Once the immmune system falls, the next target is the endocrine system. The emotional responses of the thrall betrays it for the chrylurk’s benefit. Stable neurochemistry becomes impossible without continual application of the venom-drug; the appetite skews to prefer the taste of gorge from a chrylurk’s social stomach.
Such are the internal changes, but long-kept thralls are obvious at a glance: the distribution of fat and the texture of the skin shift, heedless of sex; muscles and bones atrophy to impede resistance; the flesh becomes deeply flushed and delectably sweaty; the constant draining of blood and soul leaves the thrall pale and skeletal. Bloodshot eyes dilate from the throes of chrytoxin.
Ovirexia is a disease, a constellation of symptons and behavior anomalies induced by chrylurks. For all that they will sow with venom and reap with enzymes, the infectious virus is foremost, the particle from which all else can spring. Everything else, in fact.
When a thrall goes long without a chrylurk dosing and draining them (their beloved siphon), they experience an acute withdrawal, headaches and hypertension. (Some might call this a punishment for flighty thralls.) But at length, this passes, at least in thralls that have fully “turned.” They begin to produce low levels of the needed chrytoxins with an inefficient emergency metabolism; bloodletting through self-laceration relieves the hypertension.
Their psychology changes, akin to the inanition state known to starvation’s victims; they become restless and pursue any scent or sight of their siphon. This may sufficient to reunite thralls that have been taken from their siphon; and in cases where that chrylurk has died, this wandering may instead bring it into contact with another chrylurk fain to claim it.
The most likely outcome, for a thrall with no chrylurk to sustain it, is death or perhaps a partial reversion of some of the biological changes induced. (Once a thrall’s body begins to undergo physiological changes, even if the virus is purged, returning fully to an unaltered biology is impossible, and it will always be easy to slip back into a thrall state.)
But especially for the most fully transitioned thralls, another pathway of mutation unfolds. The truth of viral ovirexia is that it is no simple virus — it is the entiotic germ. A chrylurk is nothing less than the mature reproductive stage of an entiote.
Thrall endocrinology changes the distribution of fat, but when repeatedly drained of blood and scarcely fed, a thrall instead wastes to skeletal gauntness. Without a siphon, though? A thrall ripens, blood ever-rich in new essence without outlet. All this excess gets stored in fat, a distorted mirror of soul’s natural genesis. Like this, any untended thrall becopmes an ever more tempting meal — a hungry chrylurk would gladly rend their juicy flesh from their bones.
But this accumulation of essence-fat prompts a new mode of ovirexia, a pivot in the entiotic germ’s behavior. Rather than just synthesizing manipulatory molecules, it leverages chrylurk genes form a viable zygote.
This is an unreliable process; in theory, it ensures that chrylurks could return even from complete eradication of every hive and hiveling, but in practice, the species could never survive if this was the primary mechanism for generating fertile entiote eggs.
The stinger-ovipositor of the chrylurk queen-caste drips with vermincholie, a calorie-dense blend of venom laced with eggs and essence.
Entiote eggs and larvae require a rich diet of essence to fully develop. For this reason, chrylurk prey divides in two kinds (it would not be unreasonable to call them genders): nectar-thralls are the gaunt figures described above, but more important to chrylurk reproduction is the brood-thrall. (Derogatorily, one could summarize them as bloodbags and eggsacks.)
Brood-thralls carry the parasitic larvae, maggots crawling and feasting even as growth hormones encourage more fat reserves. The thrall grows thicker and curvier, though not all of the weight is their own — the larvae multiply rapidly and asexually. (Though it isn’t uncommon for a queen to lay multiple broods in a single host, accelerating development.)
A well-groomed and well-drugged thrall can generate essence faster than uninfected mortals; so much so that the resulting disturbances in the mutamyric field can unsettle or stupefy mortals that encounter thralls. The effect resembles the dread miasma of chimeric beasts.
Entiote pupation has phase polyphemism, akin to grasshoppers’ latent potential to beget locust swarm; at low density, as soon as an individual larva has sufficient essence, it forms a concoon and emerges as a small swarmling. Such swarmlings go on to mate and lay eggs in the flesh of in other mortals. Or, often, the same mortal, since the ovirexia-augmented essence production will make it a tempting host for future generations.
When a mortal is replete with infesting larvae, either from an abundance of free-living swarmlings or because a queen keep repeatedly laying in them, the parasitic larvae begin to aggregate.
In this aggregation phase, pupation is suppressed, and larvae allow essence to accumulate at a greater density. In the process, they manipulate the formation of the soul. (Wild larva often struggle with this, and the guidance of a queen leads to more efficient and effective results.)
Well-known to alchemists is the concept of completion, the great work which induces the nebulous and mercurial incompleat soul to undergo crystalization into a grand and potent form.
Chrylurks instead subject their thralls to parascixion — compleat desolation. The soul’s tumor-growth is pushed and pushed to a breaking point, swelling until it begins to strain under its mass. By the symmetry of soul and mind, cognitive distortion creeps in at this climax, antecedent to dissociation and derealization.
This, at last, is what the synchronized larva-aggregation trusts as the signal to begin pupation: a half-woven half-secreted cocoon subsumes the host, encompassing the whole body. And, at last reaping enzyme comes to catalyze the soul. (Any queen would relish conducting this envenomation-annointment.) Before, reaping was a slow, decimating erosion, always careful to preserve the whole.
This is a spark antecdent to a funeral pyre. Alchemical compleation had wrought for mortals a crystalline ascension. The inversion entails a katabasis—harrowing, hollowing. Chrylurks are soulless husks, so each pupa must discard this soul-tumor it had grown. At the heart of the lurking core, the chrysoma, is an insatiable hunger and eternal emptiness. This is what lurks at the core of a chrylurk: the kenoma.
A chrylurk is a ruin created by the collapse of a soul made parascix. In contrast to fire (combusting with an explosive release of heat) consider the gradual implosion of days spent in chrysalis, a metabolism scouring the soul yet trapping all the heat inside the pupal walls.
Such intensity is necessary to forge the lurking core. It is the shadow of mortaltiy: a soul sunk in profoundest negation. But it is not an object of lyric poetry or ponderous philosophy: no, entiotes are governed by biology, and the this process is vital and pragmatic.
How do chrylurks remain forever soulless, if they constantly drink blood laced with the shorn fragments of victims’ souls? Every alchemist knows increasing essence quantity must reduce essence quality (chimeras are a poison chalice) — so how do chrylurks survive consuming the tumourous, chimeric essence they inspire?
The chrysoma contains a social stomach: most chrylurks do not siphon thralls, instead relying on a specialized replete caste who regurgitate their meals for the hive’s benefit. Nectar from thralls enters the chrysoma and passes through the lurking core, which sieves essence through a crystal of unique topology. When it rises as gorge, the thick fluid that congeals into the archetypal meal of every chrylurk’s diet, sanguimel.
Any compleat soul that witnesses this process will behold a strange alchemy indeed. Essence-rich fluid enters the hollow husk of a chrylurk’s non-soul… and the syrupy fluid that comes out has no trace of that provenance. This is mundane matter — as if the nectar so carefully sown had simply vanished in a magician’s trick.
Essence decays quickly when outside of a ensouled body to sustain it, but sanguimel has no essence and thus keeps indefinitely. Hives store it in grand reserves, but of course, some of it is eaten daily.
And when this happens, the compleat will witness an inversion of that strange alchemy. The sanguimel enters the chrylurk’s body, and at once, essence winks into being from nowhere. The magician completes the performance, pulling life out a hat.
This is one of the great enigmas of chrylurks: the cipher-storage, as if matter were marked with a secret code, a password known only to bugs. Their cores allow them to store essence in a substance with no discernible presence in the mutamyric field; then, upon consuming this substance, essence is generated within them.
Not the waste essence spewed by chimeras and thralls, but a form of emyra to rival alchemists and divines.