In Dialogue With Plagues

The blood of vesperbats is restless. The order Chiroptera is known for resilient immune systems, but vesperbats are a cut above, having striven and lost in evolutionary arms races against parasites and pestilences of supernatural virulence. Tempered in that forge, the blood of vesperbats poses almost as much a danger to it as it is to what would harm its host. Almost. Vesperbats surpass every creature in regeneration --- wounds torn open will visibly stitch themselves shut, while sundered limbs can be reattached mid-battle, or if left severed, will fruit wriggling stumps within an hour. But the attack it cannot heal, that which can make a vesperbat bleed without reprieve, should stir real fear... but not in the bat. Vesperbat blood is restless, and it finds no rest when shed from the body --- no, being outside flesh unchains it. It is blood that bears regeneration. Pools of the bats' blood grow larger even when left untouched, and gore upon the blade reaches out for its wielder. And should the blood engulf and entrap something living? There is a reason batslayers do not go for the jugular. The blood of vesperbats is hungry; it will consume. Among the bats, it is law: wounds should be cauterized, and spilt blood should be burnt. (And it will turn to hot, hot flame; this oily blood burns with all the restless energy that stoked growth.) This cleansing flame is an imperative. But if one fails this imperative? Most of the time, nothing happens... But the blood is hungry, always hungry, and if it finds something to eat, it can grow and persist. It's a blind, deaf, mute thing. But it can smell, better than anything else alive. And it is as effective as any slime mold. A blood mass like this is evolution let unleashed. Every cell must do its part, fight for its own survival, or be replaced by one that does it better. A blood mass has stem cells, and all the genes of a vesperbat. Given enough time, it will remember how to construct bone, flesh, muscle, fat, nerve... gamete... Even a bat centuries old fears a myxogoth. There is but a single mercy. The vespers do not live in the blood, and their endowments aren't shed when they bleed. But it is known, the secret of every profane vesperbane, that all it takes to nurse a vesper is bat blood upon a vespermalum... Gods, if gods can hear, let an envespered myxogoth never appear. Introduction What is ichor? The blood of vesperbats, yes, the crimson flow that crawls from the wounds of direbeasts, of course. But pray tell, what is the blood of bats? Why is the touch of ichor sufficient to turn a maned wolf into a voracious direhound? Why can a vesperbane eat their weight in meals without bloating a pound? Why, really why, does the word "myxogoth" strike utmost terror in the heart? Even these powers are less perplexing than its limitations. If the blood of bats is so endlessly mutable, why does it recoil from the brain specifically? Why is it impotent to alter the trees of weevils? Why, after millennia ichorblooded, do bats and beasts cling steadfastly to their natural forms, if anything is possible? Because every mother bat loses her child, a sacrifice-gift remembered with each pulse. Because a bat has betrayed its brother before he even draws breath. Because the hunger of red ichor is a pale imitation of the attenuation of black nerve. The lore of bats is old, older than any reliable history recorded in the heartlands or the lands beyond. The only kind who can tell the story are the ambrosia weevils, remembering millennia in the roots of the world. Weevils don't often speak of the matter, and never in any detail. But before deathless ovitheions ruled the temperate broadleafs, before foolish empires of termites destroyed the dry tropics, before grassland mantes first cried tears of sapience, the weevils rode upon bats and loved them. i. Hanging from the boughs of ambrosia galleries, feasting on treats cooked by the weevils and their attendent gestalte bees, devouring any bugs that intruded upon their nest, the ancestors of bats had flourished with ascent of insect civilization. Though each viewed the other as a helpful pet, neither could claim mastery. The wicked teeth and claws of a bat could rend the shells of any insect, while the ever more clever tools of weevils and bee gestaltes, wielded by swarm, had put many bats from the sky into the ground. Weevils cloistered themselves in galleries of cultivated tree and funga. While trade with bees, ants, or roaches offered luxury and efficiency, the fruits of rotten trees alone could sustain a weevil colony. But every colony would one day wane, and every foundress dreamed of her daughters spreading far and wide. The queens of ants and bees could fly, but weevils, thrice their size, had lost flight. Travel by land was perilous --- legions of reaver ants marched forever on campaign; euvespids hunted in vicious packs; and therids lay cunning web-traps. To say nothing of the bats of the wild, or anteaters, or bears. Cutting a path to a new gallery site required the finest weevil-warriors, and death still came as companion on every venture. When a new gallery was founded, the first eggs were layed, and the first spores inoculated the wood. The first fungal harvest always yielded an entheogen, and through it, the foundress witnessed revelation, her theogony. This ritual bound a foundress to her gallery, making her its owner, or slave, or partner in marriage. Her daughters might recapitulate it, binding themselves in miniature to become priestesses. This marriage of a mind to something greater redefined a weevil --- the word is untranslatable, but poets call it the metamorphosis of the soul. All of this was to say, bats were not steeds to weevils. To the bats, weevils were useful pets. They would never allow themselves to be reigned and directed by small bugs, a mere source of food. But among the foods offered by their pets were the myriad mixtures of ambrosia cultivated by weevils. A bat would never allow themselves to be ridden, but if they partook of the entheogen? If they underwent that metamophosis of the soul? They were no longer a bat, and the name for this was the etymology of the word dragon. In turn, the priestess, a partner in this marriage or submission or enslavement became a weevil dragonrider. Together, they were one being, with wing and weapon, speaking and stridulating, commanding both bat and bug. A dragonrider and her army could war with the perils of the land and survive. Their dominance was such that any skilled dragonrider soon had ambitions beyond simply scouting a nesting site. They toured the land, seeking glory and adventure, vanquishing threats, making allies and enemies. All to prove their worth. A rider sung her deeds at every gallery she visited, and once she impressed a foundress, the foundress may consent to grant the rider a pick of her sons and take one to a courtship chamber. Every story of the deeds and sufferings of dragonriders glows with the overbright sensibilities of myth. And there is reason to dismiss all of this as mere legend. Pyramids and megaliths and cave paintings persist in every continent of the heartlands, and every single one had been conceived after the supposed golden age of dragonriders. To believe they ever existed is to place one's faith in the profound durability of weevil records. They claim their records woven into the roots of the world. Indeed, ancient galleries separated by vast oceans do agree in cosmogony. But to accept this as fact? Foolishness. To admit the possibility? One must concede it reasonable. But granting any of this... whatever happened to dragonriders? These ancient bats bleed the blood of beasts, rather than ichor, the hypervital blood of endless growth and hunger. Weevils claimed the cursed blood of bats as their oldest mistake. But before we recount that story, bereft as it is of proper and believable rigor, let us discuss some facts won by modern knowledge-hunters Any animal that feasts on bugs is poised to inherit some dim reflection of its intelligence, and modern bats are the greatest insectivore of all, preying on every great arthropod. Noetic hormones are a catalyst for cognition, and bugs evolved them first. Not an easy adaptation, and not a cheap metabolism. So arises the niche of sapiovore. Bats, more than any other beast, needed to eat bugs. Flight burns more calories than any other mode of travel. Bats big enough to feast on noubugs, big enough for a weevil to ride, loomed vaster than any other bat or bird. Most sapiovores simply rely on their prey to synthesize their nouetics, but bats metabolize the nous into black fat: an exceptionally dense and efficient energy store. Where did the weevils come in, though? The weevils cultivated ambrosia, a fungus that synthesized nouetics. Between weevils being the first arthropod civilization (domesticating severals bugs the bats might feast on), and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their fungal gods, and the potency of ambrosia itself, ancestral bats would have eaten well. For fitness as steeds and war-mounts, weevils would breed them ever larger, rendering the black fat adaptation ever more refined. Weevil priestesses once practiced a whole repertoire of now-forbidden rituals they claim harnessed "wild magic". Prostrating themselves toward the black moon tenebra, they sought divination and wisdom and subtle power, calling down filaments from the aethershade. One of these rituals, now forbidden, is the dragonrider pact. Before she bled the first drop of cursed blood, before she became the mother of ichor, a young bat bonded to a priestess. Together, they fought hundreds of battles, with a tour that visited every weevil gallery in the known world. Their unbroken chain of victories is remembered with awe even millennia later. But every rider's adventure ends, in either death or birth. The rider chose birth, and retired to her own gallery, lay