Three Laws of Alchemy

Alchemy is about change. Not decay, not erosion: the art of transmutation wroughts new order from components sacrificed. At its core, alchemy is change for the better‍ ‍‍—‍ the fuel of transmutation, then, is hope.

Whenever an organism burns with dreams, wishes, ambitions, a little mote of alchemical essence is created. This bundle persists in the body for a time, absorbing energy from the world, before its eventual dissolution, whereupon it releases more energy than was spent to fuel it.

(The old adage claiming a person cannot survive a second without hope isn’t true, but this observably‍ ‍‍—‍ if subtly‍ ‍‍—‍ factors into metabolism.)

Each mote of essence interacts with an alchemical field; with great density and excitation of this field, the body’s liminal aura can organize itself into a complex, coherent structure.

Ignition of the alchemical flame requires essence far in excess of what a human naturally produces. For this, alchemists imbibe ambrosia. Divines take the form of creeping vines, bearing leaves, flowers, fruit. The leaves boil into tea and tincture; the flowers bear nectar for bees to spit into a fine honey; the fruit, squeezed, ferments into a fine wine.

An alchemical flame can be brought into resonance with an object‍ ‍‍—‍ most often by drawing symbols in chalk which focus and shape the flame‍ ‍‍—‍ what results is a spark, lightning leaping from the alchemist to the target of their work, consuming it.

Matter destroyed this way becomes limina, an intermediate form of potential matter‍ ‍‍—‍ divine clay. Limina is unstable and slowly collapses back into a dissolved form of whatever substance was consumed.

However, a focused alchemist can send forth a second spark which will shape the limina into a form dictated by the structure of the alchemical field. (With experience, both can be married into a single spark of creative destruction.) When well‍-​shaped limina becomes corporeal, the ritual of transmutation is complete.

The alchemical field is closely related to the transmutation field. Mathematics unifies them as the mutamyr. They share a force carrier, and information and energy can be transmitted at distance through them, but the alchemical and transmutation fields cannot coexist in the same place.

This is easily expressed in mathematical form; at a point in space, excitation of the mutation field multiplied by excitation of the alchemical field must equal zero.

The initial outline of the cycle of genesis requires some reframing. Nature abhors alteration. And thus without intervention, the natural course is to minimize it. The intensity of mortal dreams is such that the genesis of essence is less chimerical‍ ‍‍—‍ this is one of the great mysteries‍ ‍‍—‍ but once it arrives, essence is mercurial.

Motion, such as the circulation of an alchemist’s soul meridians, endows essence with a measure of permanence or inertia, but at rest? It swiftly exhausts itself upon matter, a conjunction that produces a more stable form. Limina, by turn, is likewise unstable, albeit on a more sedate schedule than essence. But without the endow permenance of essence flux, limina will collapse into transmuted matter. And finally, transmutation itself bears the stain of alteration, but the cycle has finally arrived at a point where it can be shed, slowly washed from transmuted matter in vaporous breath.

Thus, in mathematical form, the first law is a system of relations‍ ‍‍—‍ asserting that in alteration dreams exceed essence exceeds limina exceeds transmutation exceeds matter‍ ‍‍—‍ coupled with the law that alternation tends toward zero.

The third law of alchemy characterizes what happens in that ultimate stage, the transition from transmutation back to matter most mundane. This process is called cancelation.

Transmutation, at its core, is a kinetic force; it draws matter into a certain configuration. Cancelation is a force in the opposite direction. Were this force to happen at all once, a transmuted object would burst into a spray of small particles. In fact, this “explosive cancelation” is exactly what happens when the transmutation field is aburptly removed‍ ‍‍—‍ such as by the passage of a more powerful myric field.

A key concern of the art of alchemy, then, is carefully managing the cancelation force. The equations have a certain slack in them: unlike the “equal and opposite” absolutism of kinetics, cancelation forces merely much be equivalent. Equal and opposite is the simpliest equivalent, but an oblique force of much greater magnitude is also equivalent. It need not be kinetic: a sufficient energy input can dampen this force entirely. But this cost may be prohibitative.

This, finally brings us to the three great laws of alchemy:

1. Dreams descends to essence, essence descends to limina, limina descends to transmutation.
2. The alchemical cannot be transmuted, and transmution cannot be alchemized.
3. Each working of transmutation requires an equivalent unworking.

Concisely, the law of cycles, the law of magisteria, and the law of cancelation.

On Vermincholie

All it takes is a drop of vermincholie. The substance is a deep, dark green, bearing rainbow‍-​sheened iridesence where the light dares touch it. Thick, slimey, the consistency of oil turned to sludge. It lies in wait with an ever‍-​present heat.

The touch of cold air prompts an immediate reaction akin to oxidation or combustion, a patina of grey insulation forming over the skin of the liquid. It is a yolk that grows its own leathery eggshell, a self‍-​incubating egg.

The touch of warm flesh, by contrast, cracks open this skin and out pours seething vermincholer like always hot oil. It sears flesh like acid and infects that wound with a viral payload. The affliction? Ovirexia. In its early stages, it overwhelms the immune system with a plague’s virulence. Fever and tremors, but one notices all fluid discharge soon begins to sting and sour.

If hale and hearty, one can resist it, just as with any disease. It might only take one drop, but further draughts are needed to render this fate inescapable.

The true teleology of ovirexia is a unique delirium. The head aches, dreaming nightmarish notions that writhe and enthrall. The soul itself is infected, a metabolic ritual to catalyze the production of emyra, glowing fruit of the mind and amply‍-​studied alchemical component. Production waxes to a peak each night, in eye‍-​fluttering dreams that leave the heart pounding with climatic intensity.

You can almost see the light that glimmers behind the eyes of one in the throes of ovirexia. Emyra is born, mote by mote, and drains like waste into the veins. This magical enrichment renders the it alluring, almost sweet to predators hungry for souls. The host now bleeds nectar.

If infected for long enough, emyra builds up throughout their biology‍ ‍‍—‍ in the fat, in the muscles, in each and every tissue. They become a treat at once irresistible and empowering.

Ovirexia is a virus, but it is a disease with a certain pluripotence. Not just a matter of mutation and adaptation (how else could it so relentlessly overwhelm the immune system?) but the genetics prefigures a kind of evolution or ontogenic recapitulation. It does not stop at constructing mere capsids; when the virus is dense as with the conquest of the host, they swell and burgeon and specialize, metamorphosing into cell walls replete with organelles.

One may speak the words spontaneous generation, but far from it; this is a slow process. So many would‍-​be cells promptly commit apoptosis, having suffered too many mutations or simply lacking the epigenetic mandate of heaven. The genetics will be retranscribed again and again, generations crafted then discarded, before a suitable egg cell emerges.

This can take weeks, months. Not quite an inevitability‍ ‍‍—‍ a host may not remain infected for long enough to complete this process, or their infection may not advance to an intense enough stage. Vermincholie is more than a fomite for viruses. It contains the foundation and fuel for this ovigenesis.

It is easy to interpret vermincholie as a mere liquid egg‍ ‍‍—‍ it is moreso the seed that makes a womb of its host.

On Exoderm

A chrylurk molts with utilitarian persistency. The shell is far more complicated than the integument even of iatrogos, let alone lesser insects. Naked‍ ‍‍—‍ which is not the natural simplification it may seem‍ ‍‍—‍ three layers of sclerite exist.

The deepest are hardened structural supports‍ ‍‍—‍ hollow tubes analogous to the trachae of their ancestors. It misleads you little to simply consider these to be bones.

Between those breathbones and the shell proper lies all of the flesh and fluid that pulses to effectuate life. Protecting that is the the hard clasp of the exoskeleton. It clads the bug stiffly, though its hardness and even the extent to which it properly encloses the soft internals is subject to variation.

Factors like nutrition and stress hold sway as well as the phermonal command of the queen or her court, but a chrylurk’s biology responds flexibly to deliberate or subliminal desire. A chrylurk may chose to grow a thin shell molted with ease a month later or a thick shell that will exact a week’s preperation and recovery to part with in half a year’s time.

But a chrylurk with exoskeleton bare suggests a gaunt, flayed austerity. Across most of the exoskeleton, setae stand stiffly in rows. Only with exceptions, such as the tresses of the head or the mane above the chest, do they sit so close together as to merit being called fur.

The sparse setae are capable of flexing and pointing in an extreme analogue of the mammalian pilimotor response. Across the limbs and body, they can ripple and pinch in complex patterns. But it is impossible to discuss this physiology without finally broaching the outward appearance of chrylurks.

Beneath their abdomen, special glands secrete a glaze, the waxy precursor to exoderm. Fresh exoderm is still semi‍-​liquid, fit to be molded. Mixing venom and saliva adjusts its resulting properities, rendering it softer or textured. Hives often stock shelves of lotions for finer control of exoderm.

It may dry to something soft like leather or hard like scales at manifold preference. Exposure to air and heat is what sets the exoderm, blunting its chemical responses. Thus, for accelerated and consistent results hives often have sauna rooms.

Another custom is the weaving of lines of hivesilk throughout this false flesh. Hivesilk extends the chrylurk nervous system, and thus when inserted with care, the bug can feel deformations of the exoderm as if it were flesh.

The hivesilk sensorium dulls over time, and the exoderm itself suffers the wear and grime of the world. Thus, far more often than a chrylurk undergoes a proper ecdysis, they will shed their exoderm‍ ‍‍—‍ an exfoliation.

Exoderm can be washed and reused even after exfoliation. Often, it will be chewed and regurgitated as nesting material for the hive. (To save time, some hives may opt to have drones eat the exoderm right off the body.)

It may take a full day for a chrylurk to regenerate a full coat of exoderm, devouring extra rations to compensate, but the secretion of glaze only truly halts when the exoskeleton feels the weight of false flesh. Especially if the hive lacks the spare labor or resources for the luxuries of bespoke skin, a coat of old exoderm can be set in place. This halts the secretion.

Naturally, the craft of mixing and shaping exoderm is an art, the pride of a hive. In some hives, flayed bugs bathe in clay and licked with tongues of flame, granting them a ceramic chassis. In others, instead the ruber seepage of trees is used to render bugs shining black. Others weave in so much silk a better analogue is fine lacy clothing.

But these are the stylings of decadent ancient hives, now more memory than practice. Modernly, the most successful have had little opportunity to explore the far depths of expression possible when every walking body is an obligate canvas.

No, the careful mixing of exoderm‍-​lotions for softness and texture, the pilimotor flexing of setae, it all has been tuned to excel at one purpose above all else: the imitation of human flesh.

On Serivane

Chrylurk anatomy is by nature mercurial and contingently adapted, but among its constants are the silk glands. In addition to the customary half a dozen distict blends of silk which spiders are fain to produce, chrylurks introduce a special new category: serivane. Behold gossamer of the most phantasmal elevation. It vanishes in air; it vanishes in solid matter.

Serivane is a thread that can pass through any material. It makes for an excellent trap: invisible to the unscrying eye, and yet when twisted just so, tensing in a hidden dimension, its ghostly remove falters and it may catch whatever has passed through it with phantom force. If not to trap, then it also serves to track, leaving a conspicuous lead to follow. Or, given a gentler twist, instead the passage of material leaves it faintly rippling.

Chrylurks boast an acute keenness for the vibration of these invisible threads. Specialized setae line their chitin, and thus should a thread of serivane dangle freely, it will be drawn like iron to a magnet‍-​head. These setae are sensitive to the most minute flexures of the thread while conducting fine movements of their own.

Through this medium, chrylurks may call and communicate among themselves at quite a high bandwidth, dozens if not hundreds of threads vibrating independently.

Before we discuss communications, it’s worth reiterating that, much like conventional silk, serivane has its own varieties. The serivane used for traps and pulley tricks is especially stiff, a ‘force’ blend, while the serivane used for tracking is quite stretchy and flexible. The serivane used for communication balances both qualities. It is also known as hivesilk.

Hivesilk may stretch to several times its unstressed length, and readily adjoins to itself, leading to a curious flexibility of networks. One chrylurk may bind silk to another and remain connected even should they walk apart. If the thread grows too thin, then more hivesilk can be woven to extend the thread.

Now suppose the second chrylurk binds herself to a third‍ ‍‍—‍ then suppose the first would now like to bind to the third. Physically, the first remains distant from the other two, but she need not approach: the second can simply bind her two connections together, exending each other.

Done as described, this would sacrifice her own connection with the first (though the operation is easily reversed; they could trade back and forth). But what if the three wished to form a triangular topology? This requires a more involved operation.

Conventionally when binding to each other, chrylurks will exchange at least two threads. If there are two threads, then should the need arise, both chrylurks can move the two threads to a spinneret.

More silk can be drawn and woven into each thread, and like this they form a loop. Each chrylurk pulls one thread while weaving to extend the other. Like this, the loop rotates, and after one cycle, the threads have been doubled.

A doubled thread is easily split‍ ‍‍—‍ thus, two threads easily multiply into any number threads, and given any number of threads, you can easily render webs transitive. A binds to B and B binds to C implies that A could bind to C‍ ‍‍—‍ even should all three be separated by great distance!

The setae which bind to hivesilk cluster together, often behind the head, at a “hivenet port”. This direct connection is complimented by a horn‍-​like structure that often adorns the heads of powerful chrylurks. The spiral of the horns serve as the basis for a web to be woven within, a tapestry of threads vibrating sympathically with distant serivane excitation‍ ‍‍—‍ a wireless receiver.

Contra Sanguine

It would incorrect‍ ‍‍—‍ laughably ignorant‍ ‍‍—‍ to say chrylurks drink blood. The needles and siphons that surround our mouth serve to exsanguinate our prey, and there is undeniable beauty in seeing the flesh part and dew a deep red. But the mundane soup of hemoglobin and plasma is an unimpressive meal of little interest to my children.

Indeed, the most skilled of my collectors drain such a volume from thralls that it would be fatal were it not for apheresis; sifting the blood and returning the that vital dross which does not feed our true hunger.

No, when prey is infected with our desire, infested with our young, a change overtakes them. Their essence is catalyzed and extracted, secreted into the veins, bestowing a taste finer than the thrill of fear: a bittersweet tang overwhelming the coppery flavors of blood. Our alchemy transmutes their blood into nectar‍ ‍‍—‍ that is what we sup upon!

For I So Adore Emergence

Emergence is my favorite part of the process, I think. Every entiote begins their life as a small worm out of place, a thing that doesn’t belong, invader to a host. Cunning and desperate they cling and root and infest, spreading and mutating until they are an inevitability.

I’ve watched my children overtake so many thralls. To watch your own egg corrupt wimpering meat… yes, this is a mother’s pride.

But the analogy extends‍ ‍‍—‍ are these hives we build, nested in dank basements and abandoned tunnels, not parasites upon the flesh of this civilization?

I do so loathe this suffocating need to hide what we are. I dream still of a day when our spires can pierce the land from below, when a chrylurk queen can sit upon a throne for all to see.

Until that day… our infestation continues.

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 ‍‍—‍ the bugs tasked with such grim work. But what work specifically? 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. Those 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.

Parascixion (n.)

Parascixion (n. verb: parascize; adj: parascise)

1. perfection
2. parasitic fusion; paroxysmal abscision; paradoxical precision
3. the resolution and subsumption of contradictory desires or components into a zealous whole; adversarial evolution
4. maturation or metamorphosis, especially as part of the chrylurk lifecycle

The antonym is exscient: Nascent existence, nescient exclusion, noxious excreta.

The note of exclusion deserves particular emphasis. Chrylurks have a particular disgust for the isolation and ignorance innate to mortal existence, I’ve found.

When you think about it, isn’t just plain rude to not invite parasites into your body?

Appearance of a Chrylurk

Chrylurks have five pairs of eyes. Two are highly derived compound eyes, inverted into a concave pit filled with transparent jelly. These eyes have overlapping scales that form an aperture to let in light. Above them sit complex, unblinking ocelli that function akin to spider eyes.

Thin antennae sit even higher above, often extensively adorned with silk, and on either side of the head, horns curve downward, webs stretching between the arches.

But it is the mouthparts of chrylurks which are at once fiendishly complex and instantly distinctive.

Highest is their proboscis, a long trunk‍-​like organ about three handspans long if fully stretched. It is flexible, with setae for fine tactile and gustatory sensing. It ends in a wided pad capable of holding tools, tipped with a claw‍-​tooth. Along its length, it can evert several fine needles to pierce and suck.

The proboscis may hang down in a relaxed position, membraneous flaps at its base covering the mouth. Whenever it would get in the way, it can curl up spiral‍-​like, falling snugly into a slot below it; the compact form juts form the face like nose, but forms a seal with other mouthparts, and like this it becomes the middle of the upper “lip.”

On either side of the proboscis are the mandibles, which extend downwards to sharp, hollow fang‍-​tips, dripping wet and ready to inject venom. The mandibles lock together along a groove lined with dentation‍ ‍‍—‍ thus when the proboscis is curled up, this vertically toothed grin is exposed.

Beside the mandibles, at the corner of the mouth, the curling fingers of the maxillary palps lend their assistance, obviating any need for utensils. Setae tufts spike outward, leaving the maxillaries as much as a cosmetic display as a appendage.

Lastly the labial palps and hypopharynx form a soft, flexible tongue perfectly suited for slurping the jelly meals derived from regurgitated blood nectar.

Seven Hivemind Ideologies

Ancestral chrylurks form secret hives far from human settlements and spend most of their time asleep, many falling into a deeper hibernation state. Tripwires warn them of intruders near the hive, and while no alarm is triggered, they mainly awaken to drain nectar from the blood of their thralls, kept in a drugged coma along with their masters. a few of the hives’ chrylurks will inspect the hive, hunt and gather resources before returning to sleep. The hive that only snatches a few humans a year and rations carefully minimizing its risk of detection.

Lucky hives can wind up with an excess of humans. If they can grab every member of a travelling group. The more thralls they keep, they more time they can spend awake. More time to hunt farther afield and build the hive stronger.

As a hive expand, it naturally adopts a certain philosophy to govern its operation.

The Dominance approach addresses the major constraint on hive logistics: keeping thralls long‍-​term allows for a more consistent sources of nectar, but unlikely chrylurks, mortals metabolism is more consistent, less able to simply hibernate to ration resources.

These hives recognize the ability of thralls to learn, and therefore use a balance of venom rewards and punishments to condition them to assist the hive’s operations.

The drawback to this approach is trained thralls must remain isolated from feral populations to minimize the risk of escape or hostile attention.

An alternative, then, is the Manipulation approach. These hives use pheromones to restrain the growth of larva within their thralls, allowing hosts to not even recognize their infection, and carry on their life oblivious to their service to the hive.

The chrylurks have adapted exceptional stealth or disguises, allowing them to access their thralls and drain them while they sleep.

But the consequence of exceptional modeling and mimicry of prey is that the chrylurks necessarily attain comparable intelligence. Communication with prey becomes possible. This begins as more manipulation through subtler means, but at one point does luring in prey with promises of pleasure and protection stop being a lie?

This is the Alliance approach. These hives communicate intelligibly with their thralls, invest resources simply to benefit and incentivize their hosts. Necessarily the hive still pursues stealth‍ ‍‍—‍ one of the first demands of the thralls is secrecy‍ ‍‍—‍ but with an ambition to one day do away with it.

Key to this dynamic is that the hive holds power over the thralls, and pleasing them is seen as conducive the hives’ aims rather than the end itself. If a hive fails to maintain this standard, one might say they have been infected by mortals, rather than the other way around.

In a hive pursuing the Integration approach, they serve mortals and their ideals; in some cases “chrylurks” may not even exist, entiote imagos instead existing as organs in mortal body, extensions of their will

But the ultimate result of blurring the lines between host and parasite is that loyalty to either side becomes meaningless. Chrylurks achieved all of this cunning and triumph through imitation and exploitation of mortals. To reduce either side to total enslavement to other would eradicate that creativity.

The insight of the Transformation approach is surrender to this evolution, to embrace the war of mortal against chrylurk as a catalyst to bring about a parasitic apotheosis.

Of course, there’s a subtle caveat to this. If the virtue you prize highest is parasitic fusomorphosis, the trial by fire of evolution unchained, then you necessarily become a champion of parasitism above all else. Few mortals wish to be infested, while every parasite wishes to do it, whatever the philosophy governing them.

And if your advocacy of parasitism is specifically by the logic that suffering builds character, then it is little surprise that you may come to enjoying inflicting that suffering. To wreak terror upon the mortals and dare their reprisal.

The Savage approach is just that: dispensing with all stealthy and subtlety, and instead relishing in all out war. Cruelty is the point.

What fruit arises from the war? Imagine a hive torturing its thralls simply for the joy of it‍ ‍‍—‍ but any joy grows stale with repetition. So begins the variation and vicious creativity‍ ‍‍—‍ and at a certain point, this is pursuit of novelty more than brutality.

And any war requires innovation of tactics, new tools of destruction. The point of waging war was to force evolution, and so you research and develop new strategies.

The Inquiry approach is define by the amoral probing, pushing the limits of chrylurk biology and hive technology. Could entiotes dispense with thralls entirely? How radically could we redefine their usage?

Of course, the ideal test subjects, the theorectically optimal thrall, is a productive slave. And here we have the loop; a cycle that leads back around to the Dominance approach. This is the spectrum of hive philosophy.

Where do you sit?

Cultivation of An Alchemist

An alchemist’s growth progresses through four known phases. Really, it’s more properly counted as eight; each is split in half.

The black phases are Impurity Cleansing and Vessel Carving.

• First you slowly, carefully expel bits of random transmuted matter from your body to cleanse your soul. This takes a lot time because those transmuted bits are your body, so if you do it all at once you shred a bunch of tissues and die. Also, you’ll constantly lose progress from eating food that contains trace transmuted molecules or your metabolism will inadvertantly pollute you wih more transmutation.
• Once you’re pure, your liminal body begins to grow. You focus on circulating essence through the pathways that become the meridians of your soul, this also takes a long time because it’s essentially drawing a new circulatory system by hand using a whole new sense. Pretty much impossible unless you have book full of diagrams telling you what goes where. You want to following it perfectly, because any fuckups will compound and kneecap your progress later on.

The white phases are Canal Expansion and Essence Rotation.

• Once your meridians are complete and stable, you then start pour more and more essence into them to stretch and level up their capacity and throughput. You also start to use your completed control to refine and evolve the limina that forms the ‘mass’ of your soul.
• Once your meridian are sufficiently wide, you focus on increasing the speed at which essence circulates, like a dynamo, greatly expanding the ‘aura’ that surrounds you, giving you the ability to sense alchemical phenomena at a distance.

The yellow phases are Aura Projection and World Separation.

• As your aura grows stronger, you gain the ability to distort and concentrate it, and now instead of gently sensing the liminal world, the rotations of your soul can push back against it. With mastery, you gain the ability to perform workings at a distance.
• This next one is a bit involved. Basically, sufficiently fine aura control lets you focus it into a cone, and then a beam, and then finally an inverted cone‍ ‍‍—‍ which creates a critical point where the rays must all pass through. Except they cannot, the density of essence excitation is a mathematical singularity. The rules of alchemy unravel‍ ‍‍—‍ but i’ll get it into the details in an appendix.

The red phases are Soul Individuation and Blood Fruition.

• Almost no one reaches this point because while the two skills connect, there’s a big gap between what yellow phases achieve and what red phases require. It’s also really vague because again, no one gets this far. But basically, here the soul takes primacy, becoming the first mover that the body follows rather than the other way around. Regeneration becomes trivial, and you’re kinda immortal. You’re individuated, removed from the world of material phenomena.
• The capstone is basically transubstantiating part of your body into holy fruit that can empower others when consumed or can even function as autonomous mini‍-​souls. This is not super effective or clear in purpose because this stage hasn’t been functionally figured out. This might also be a straight up dead end, since the ancient idea here is if done right these fruits could be a “philosopher’s stones” that completes the transmutation of dreams, creating new source of essence. But modern equations have proven this is impossible, and maybe soul individuation straight up cuts you offer from generating new essence the normal way, making all of this ultimately a big ol’ bike‍-​sticking.

Reaching the peak of a particular phase is called compleation. Alchemists with a well‍-​formed soul are called compleat. Ascending white phase is second completion, and ascending yellow is third compleation. (No fourth compleation alchemists reside outside of myth.)

Anyway, now for the appendix. Transmutation requires a boundary (generally a sphere, it’s mathematically simplest) inside which the working takes place. This is why alchemists draw transmutation circles: it doesn’t matter how your circulate your essence, your soul alone can’t form a complete boundary unless you like, put the target in your mouth or something.

So, once you start generating aura it becomes feasible to rawdog it, creating bubbles of essence just by wiggling your soul‍ ‍‍—‍ this is known as the “Silver Circle”‍ ‍‍—‍ but it’s tricky and risky.

The other rule is that you can’t stand inside your own transmutation circle. Partly because essence is exclusive with transmutation, so you’d destroy your owl soul, but even if the pattern on the boundary avoids targeting you, the feedback from you soul circulating a pattern that manipulates a volume including the soul creates a feedback cycle that would fry your meridians.

Now, peak yellow phase is where you get to break these rules. You get domain expansions. The aura singularity is probably chaotic on its own, blowing stuff up and annihilating souls, but modern alchemists can create golden spheres, which are special crystal lattices that reflect the aura in a unique way. Imagine shining a light through a crystal to create a circular pattern on the paper below it. Now imagine it’s a 4D crystal that creates a spherical pattern.

Still, there’s no special trick that gets around either the “if you transmute yourself, you destroy your soul” or the “if you create a positive feedback cycle, you fry your meridians” mechanics.

No, peak yellow alchemists have control fine enough that their answer is “just don’t lol.”

Within your golden sphere’s radius, you can perform transmutations anywhere without needing to draw a circle, because everything is already in your circle.

However, shining the aura singularity upon it destroys the gold sphere, and the structure of a soul can only support a single gold sphere; creating a second will tear you apart.

Eight Industries

Note: proper names TBD.

• The Honeybee Clan prizes nectar. The hive only thrives when all bugs are well‍-​fed, so an ample food store and the skills to prepare it is the ultimate concern. The greatest hive cookest the finest meals.

• The Ichneumon Clan prizes their larva. The brood is the hive’s past and future. Through larva, thralls, and through thralls, nectar, labor, and insight. The greatest hive muliplies most abudantly.

• The Scorpion Clan prizes their venom. It subdues and transforms prey. Of course, venom requires delivery, so it is equally important to bear proud fangs and honed claws. The greatest hive is most potent.

• The Dragonfly Clan prizes their bodies. The hive is defined by its members, so each should strive to be beautiful, powerful, and keen. Their shells are iridescent rainbows; their wings grant them flight; their eyes peer piercingly. The greatest hive has the greatest vessels.

• The Locust Swarm Clan prizes their swarms. The virtue of chrylurks is that they are not one, but many; hives and hivelings alike are multitudinous. Swarmlings allow chrylurks to be utterly flexible and efficient. The greatest hive bears awareness at every size.

• The Orb‍-​weaver Clan prizes silk. It binds the hive to the collective will; it is the foundation of transcixion; it is a strong, flexible fabric. The greatest hive trains the keenest weavers.

• the Leaf‍-​cutter Clan prizes their fungus. Chrylurks were made to contain and master antiblight, and thus hives ought to pursue their unique advantage, and dig the catacombs where gods rot. The greatest hive makes the greatest sacrifice.

• The Termite Clan prizes their nest. No hive could exist without walls around it, and thus its architecture and material is of chief concern. The greatest hive bears the most elegant designs.

• The Honeybees make natural allies with the Ichneumon, who excel at sourcing nectar from their thralls.

• The Ichneumon make natural allies with the Scorpion, whose venom is perfect subduing prey.

• The Scorpion make natural allies with the Dragonfly, whose share a drive to refining physical form.

• The Dragonfly make natural allies with the Locust Swarm, who likewise cultivate diversity of form and ingenuity of function.

• The Locust Swarm make natural allies with the Orb‍-​weavers, who specialize in the silk‍-​spinning swarm.

• The Orb‍-​weavers make natural allies with the Leaf‍-​cutters, who also devote themselves to the alchemy of transcixision.

• The Leaf‍-​cutters make natural allies with the Termites, who architecture relies on mycelium.

• The Termites make natural allies with the Honeybees, who appreciate the beauty and use of architecture, especially larders.

• The Termites are in tension with the Dragonflies, believing hives should be solitary and fortified, rather than free to roam and defended by personal power.

• The Honeybees are in tension with the Locust Swarm, believing hives should flourish with art and dance, rather than minize themselves in alien efficiency.

• The Ichneumon are in tension with the Orb‍-​weavers, believing hives should focus on hunting and breeding thralls, rather than the silken arts only the minority of chrylurks can master.

• The Scorpion are in tension with the Leaf‍-​cutters, believing hives should pursue worldly power and dominion rather than serving a inscruable elder agenda.

• Builders (cutter, termite)

• Farmers (honeybee, ichneumon

• Warriors (scorp, dragonfly)

• Binders (swarm, weaver)

Fragments

• Little can bring a chrylurk as much comfort as the embrace of a wet cocoon.

• 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.

Notes & Exposition

You Are A Chrylurk

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: (reuqires 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.

The Cruel Mathetics

Chrylurks need to consume essence to survive. We can invent a measure of essential mass, motes, defined such that the average person has ~100 motes of essence. In ordinary humans, essence dissipates and regenerates in equillibrium.

Chrylurks requires roughly ~10 motes a day, and more to use their special abilities, like serivane manipulation, transcision, or venom catalysis.

Chrylurks can eat a person to gain ~40% of their essence.

Infecting prey with a symbiotic virus (ovirexia) alters the targets’ metabolism to produce the chrylurk’s essential nutrients. Still, it takes days for the virus to take full effect. Immune response may rebuff or recover from the effect. But while the virus proliferates, the essence equillibrium is disrupted, leading to oversaturation. Subsequent chrylurk essence extraction is roughly doubled.

A chrylurk can drink prey blood to extract a small portion of their essence. This is most effective if the prey is first injected with a venom mix that draws essence into the blood. Thereafter, feeding can be ‘gentle’, ‘eager’, ‘intense’ or ‘greedy’.

Humans can only survive gentle feeding (~15% blood drawn) without issue. Eager feeding (~35%) is survivable if given immediate medical attention. Intense and greedy feedings are fatal. However, adept chrylurks can develop means to perform apheresis, returning blood once essence has been extracted.

After being fed upon, prey will experience distinct psychological symptoms; malaise and nightmares. Duration of these symptoms depends on depth of feeding. Further exposure to chrylurk venom ameliorates these symptoms and accelerates recovery time to the next class down.

Advanced hives are capable of growing special extraction pods designed to keep prey in a ever‍-​dreaming coma, regularly injecting them with chrylurk venom and extracting essence autonomously, resulting in an efficient output. These pods can likewise be run at a varity of intensities; a gentle pod can extract a slight flow of essence for the prey’s entire natural lifespan, while greedier pods will burn through hosts, overtapping their essence production until they are husks of no use to the hive.

Gravid chrylurk gynes can infest prey with eggs. As the eggs develop and hatch, the host is infected with ovirexia and the larva continually drain essence. essence drain is generally tuned to match the rate at which the host generates essence, and this bottlenecks the growth of the larva.

Pheromones can quicken or slow the larvae growth rate. A fast growth rate will quickly deplete host essence (often too quickly, and with too little essence extracted, to properly mature), but a slow growth rate can allow for an oversaturation of essence, to be extracted by an allied chrylurk.

The chrylurk lifecycle is highly adaptive to environmental conditions; given the right pheromone input from the vector, a entiote may never develop a cocoon or imago stage, instead allowing their host to serve as a larder of essence for a nurse‍-​lurk to drain, either intermittenly or upon host death.

Using these numbers, we conclude a chrylurk can survive from eating three people a month, or performing two eager feeding each night. A hive needs over ten pods per member; less if they hunt.

However, these calculations assume the chryrlurk remain active each day. To avoid exhausting their prey, chrylurks are adapted to enter a dormant state, a sleep to halts their steep essence consumption.

An entire hive may sleep for years, waking only if silken tripwires raise an alarm, but this is of course not viable if nurselurks must attend to thralls and extraction pods.

Larva Stages

See also.

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

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.

Narratives

Should I Begin By Disclaiming?

Should I begin by disclaiming how deeply miserable I am to be retreading these roads? I’ve always found something innately pathetic about explaining myself. The concillatory gesture, prostrate before the judgment of another.

Victory, after all, is self‍-​evident. If my story was one ending triumphant, why would I stand here preparing my case as if awaiting a capital trial? Yet if my story truly met a dire end, would I even persist to speak it?

So much is prefigured even in the manner in which I speak, the subtext that dwells and wriggles like so many parasitic worms, an infestation of meaning. And this text is not even the primary host. What was I, but a vector?

To whom shall I address this? The knights who drag my body back for a trial before the president and king? My children who’ll bear my curse and praise me like a goddess? The friends I’ve lost and discarded, all those wondering where it went wrong, what could have saved me? The historians eager for a primary source? Myself, always the fairest critic?

I contemplate the tedium of recounting my life from childhood on, and I fear this endeavor will find its end on this very first page. Must I recall every detail, set the scene and tighten the pace to keep you entertainted? Must I hone my rhetoric to some particular end, convince you of my innocent or divinity? I’d prefer the rack.

But I suppose there is one exception. I’ve felt this angst before‍ ‍‍—‍ a pressing need to say anything coupled with the utter inability to articulate that anything to some impressive standard. And yet, there was someone who listened‍ ‍‍—‍ patient through the rambling, attentive through the confusion, always poised to ask the right question that proved she was listening.

I could say anything to her, and she always seemed blessed to hear it.

Ever Seen A Chrylurk?

“Ever seen a chrylurk?”

In front of the crouching vesselblade, a transmutation circle splayed out. Blue‍-​white dust there on the ground‍ ‍‍—‍ dry stuff, yet it seemed to take cues from glue. The alchemy‍-​chalk had as much carved lines in the dirt as inscribed them. That had to weaken the effect, I thought.

Then two fingers snapped, summoned that spark, and lightning‍-​glow seared an afterimage on my eyes.

But I guess that’s just skill.

Argent, the vesselblade, was a Conjure‍-​class Shatter‍-​grained‍ ‍‍—‍ the rarest emyra type you could get without getting immediately marked for containment. I knew that, and I’d seen his inmut before. Yet, when the glow gave way to mist of frozen air, and linked chains of ice extruded like grasping fingers, I still gasped.

Each sickle‍-​curve had a crystalline brillance, briefly catching the sunlight before releasing sparkling distortion. Shattergrain. He had that in common with Grand‍-​sage Luca. With all the giants that had wrought modern alchemy. The blue‍-​white dust of our chalk was but tiny shards grounded from a crystalline transmutation just like this.

And me? Enchant‍-​class Clay‍-​grained. Only the most common emyra in the whole world. Seven times more of me than there were of him. Maybe I should feel resentful.

Then he glanced up from where he’s crouched, face pale between black locks, and he smiled gently at me and I smile back.

“You there, Emil? Or are you saving all your focus for tomorrow?”

Right, his question wasn’t idle. His transmutation wasn’t idle either, he would say. It was practice, training‍ ‍‍—‍ even if it was clear from the way he spun the sickle‍-​chain, letting it loop around his fingers, that he also just enjoyed the way his inmut felt.

“I’ve read the manuals,” I said. “Studied the diagrams, the methods. I know what we’re up against.”

He laughed once. “Can count on you to do the reading, I know.”

It’s more than reading, I don’t say. It’s taking notes, it’s practicing the remuts. You don’t learn anything if you just read about it.

It was just a word. Just a sentence, not worth clarifying. Wait, just one sentence? Did he say anything else?

He’s looking at me, an eyebrow quirked. It really looks like I’m not paying attention.

“Sorry, can you repeat that?”

No sigh, no cringe. He said, “It’s different, meeting a bug in the flesh.”

“I’ve met iatrogos,” I said. Then I heard what I sounded like. “Not what you meant, I’m sorry.” I’m not a bigot, I didn’t say, because that wouldn’t have helped.

“Not entirely irrelevant.” He swung his hand sharply upward, and the chain jumped back and forth. Pendulum. “Some react badly to both. Eyes, chitin, segments, freaks them out.”

“I like it,” I said. What did I mean by that? “Not the problem with chrylurks.”

He nodded. “The appearance is one thing. You can be prepared for that and still get caught bad by the speed, or the ambush tactics. It’s hard enough to win against a chrylurk in a fight, but the real danger is that you’re hers before you even have a chance to fight.”

I’d heard the phrase before. The lose condition against a chrylurk wasn’t that you’d fail, or that you’d die.

It was that you would become hers.

“Most chrylurks we catch early in the lifecycle, when there’s just one to deal with. We aren’t that lucky here. It’s a budding hive, but a small one.” Then he paused, as if catch himself. “But you know this. You read the summons.”

I did. “You’re going somewhere with this, I don’t mind.”

“Teams are selected for a reason. You were selected for a reason.”

The emphasis. There had to be a reason, because I’m not good enough to merit inclusion without question. He’d never say it, which is why I had to think it.

“I think I figured out why. Maybe the full brief will say it outright, but I would understand if they didn’t‍ ‍‍—‍ bad for morale. But it’s your inmut.”

My innate transmutation. I stiffened and looked down. My eyes fell to the sickle‍-​chain, the brilliant crystals. He had performed his innate transmutation with the gravitas of doodling on a page. Right now he was playing with it.

If I played with my innate transmutation, things would simply die.

“I don’t want to use it,” I said. I wasn’t practiced with it. I had the most boring, most statistically unremarkable emyra affinity‍ ‍‍—‍ so of course the unique thing about me is that my inmut is lethal to the point of uselessness. On paper, it might sound powerful. But how do you train anything like that?

I kicked some dirt, and the spray landed over the transmutation circle. His circle. It was practice, he’d say.

“Our mission is to neutralize the hive. Contain the spread of chrylurks by any means possible. With more than one of them‍ ‍‍—‍ with a hive, even if it’s a small one‍ ‍‍—‍ the possibility that we don’t make it back is so much higher.”

“They wouldn’t assign us a mission we couldn’t do,” I asserted. There was something in my tone, I could tell by how his face shifted. I crossed my arms.

Hand went up‍ ‍‍—‍ just one, since the other was occupied. “They wouldn’t,” he said. “But the strategists have to assess the risks and mitigate them. And if the risk is that we become hers?”

I won’t do it, I didn’t say.

He finished: “I think you’re meant to kill us.”

Gravid Wound

Parasitoid that runs her stinger‍-​ovipositor into your soft, fatty tissues, piercing you again and again up and down your paralyzed body. Making your flesh bulge with her eggs, pockmarked with holes leaking blood and slime. Wet pussies torn open, each with their own fertilized gore‍-​wombs. Each is sealed back up, sutured with silk, glazed with sticky secretions, in bandage‍-​chastity.

It makes you flush and swoon‍ ‍‍—‍ because you’re feverish, flesh pale and sweating, immune system failing in the face of the new gifts in your veins. But even that resistance serves her‍ ‍‍—‍ your body cooks itself to warm her eggs perfectly.

You’re weakening, but not from hunger; she chews up meat and spits it into your mouth, maxilae shoving it down your throat if you dont swallow, and her drooling maw is your hydration.

Time passes in a nightmarish haze, but you’re wide awaken when the eggs start wiggling inside you. She seems impatient for it, groping you with chitinous limbs, fingering your swollen gashes. The sharp tip of her ovipositor everts again, and once again wets itself with your blood.

You think it’s torture at first, a thousand slow and hateful stabs to make you suffer, but she’s so careful, so precise. Each scarred, egg‍-​laden hole is carefully surrounded with a trypophilic halo of pits‍ ‍‍—‍ vents for her children to breathe, you realize.

You don’t sleep that night. How could you? The wiggling continues, at first tiny kicks, and then a sustained rhythm getting more strained and anticipatory. You feel your heart beat in every slit.

You’re waiting, and it doesn’t happen‍ ‍‍—‍ nothing tells you the transition from one agony to another is complete. Your whole body is crawling with the movement of something alien. Then you realize these can’t all be the twitches of eggs not yet hatched‍ ‍‍—‍ they have hatched, and your her children are already stirring.

Breaths turn sharp, and then into screams. It hurts. Dozens of worms writhing, widening their wombs, mouth finding the walls and ripping off muscle fibers or slurping into fat deposits‍ ‍‍—‍ devouring you from within.

And then you see her ovipositor is out again. Its narrow, leaking tip is lining up with one of your sealed gashes. With a thrust, the bandaged is torn through, scar‍-​chastity violated, and slime lubricated chitin is rubbing against your insides. Sawing back and forth until it finds something‍ ‍‍—‍ the grub who calls this lesion home.

She’s woundfucking you, while silencing your screams with mandibles clamping your tongue and maxillae exploring your mouth.

And then, with a shudder, you feel something cool against your feverish flesh, leaking in from her ovipositor. She pumps slime into your wounds. Maybe she knows your flesh can’t nourish and sustain her young entirely, or maybe it aids in your digestion, or maybe‍—

You were dreadfully sure you couldn’t endure her fucking every pussy she’d torn open. But now you can feel her slime numbing the pain of her thrusting and her gnawing young to a dull ache.

You gasp when her mandibles release your mouth‍ ‍‍—‍ only to immediately yelp as she bites down on your neck, and you can feel the buzz of venom delivered. Only this isn’t venom, is it? Not what paralyzed you. This feels…

You heart beats faster, and your muscles release. A breath you didn’t know you were feeling leaves you. You feel at peace‍ ‍‍—‍ you feel as one. The mother above you with antennae atremble and mouths drooling excitement, her hands unable to resist palming your sweaty, bloody, lively flesh. The grubs inside you are mindless but for their hunger to relish the nutrients you are utterly replete with.

It’s beautiful what you’re apart of, isn’t it? Life in its most lurid cycle.

You’re moaning when she rips open your next womb, pumping you with more trophic slime to feed and digest and numb you. You’re mouthing pleases and thank yous‍ ‍‍—‍ for the children, for the dripping loads, for the venom‍-​injection that cleared your mind.

You wish you had the strength and movement in your paralyzed limbs to service her, repay even slightly. Stroke that ovipositor and help it align and enter smoothly, grope that fat abdomen and its soft cuticle, to hump the strong legs that pin you down.

As she gets ready to woundfuck you again, you kind of want to feel that ovipositor in your mouth, stinger pricking your throat as she rams it in, her pleasure twitching up and down the length, and taste that slime, nourishing you like just like one of her children. Maybe if you’re good, she will…

Most of all, you can’t wait for the next injection.

Can you imagine enduring the high coming down, your limbs hollowed out flesh outweighted by those annelid grubs?

No.

You just have to be a good little eggsack.

From the Ovipositor’s Tip

That isn’t cum, dripping in thick, sticky lines from the swollen tip of her abdomen. You can tell by the smell: earthy and sharp like a musky flower luring you in close for a deeper whiff (choke on her pheromones), with a salty note that promises it would be so delicious if you just give it a lick.

This is vermincholie, and just one drop could be enough to turn you into her thrall. Infested, fattened, and bleeding for her. Just one drop‍ ‍‍—‍ but a hole pumped until it’s gaped and overflowing is how she makes sure it takes.

Where it falls on your skin‍ ‍‍—‍ where she glazes you‍ ‍‍—‍ it hardens to something membranous and stiff, like wax scales. Your flesh prickles, by turns numbed and radiating this throbbing, pleasant warmth. It takes after chrylurk venom in that way.

It numbs you (a soothing lie) because the accurate reading is excruciating. It takes after venom‍ ‍‍—‍ as a tranquilizing painkiller, yes, but also as a digestive enzyme‍-​stew. Her vermincholie sinks into you like burning acid.

Chrylurks do not cum; their reproduction has no need for the male sex. Her genes spread in a viral payload; her oozing discharge is infecting your cells.

Even the female sex is optional; her virus alone could make a womb of its host tissue, recapitulating evolution and as if by spontaneous generation, turning vermincholie into vermin proper‍ ‍‍—‍ now beget the wriggling worms of her larva.

The secret of chrylurk reproduction is that one drop is all it takes, so when she runs you through with her ovipositor and makes you bulge with eggs, this is largely an excess‍ ‍‍—‍ an indulgence, even. A chrylurk egg is just vermincholie held secure, the jelly‍-​like yolk serving to nourish vermin that could very well survive without it.

So tomorrow, when she bends you over again to pump you full and numb and hers, she’s simply spoiling the young you’re host to. Like a mother breastfeeding her babe, a chrylurk fucks their thrall.

Drabble

See Also.

Swaddled in silk, woven ropes cut into flesh. A hoarse throat whimpers. Things squirm between muscle‍-​fibers. Numbness fades like walls eroding. Bone‍-​gnawed agony.

Segmented fingers groping, squeezing, callously curious. Stridulations faintly‍-​familiar formants. “Shush. Enough.”

A fang punctures flesh already blood‍-​caked blood. More stone for the castle walls. Hoarse moans now.