{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/black-nerve/apocrypha/crepuscules",
  "path": "/posts/black-nerve/apocrypha/crepuscules",
  "publishedAt": "2023-06-01T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "tags": [
    "ramble"
  ],
  "textContent": "The crepuscular process is understood as the vespers' judgment made\nmanifest. After all, a \"crepuscule\" is just a vesperbane whose vespers\nno longer abide by the pact which binds vesper to bane.\n\nThere's four chief ways for this to happen.\n\nAffliction\n: Essentially, this is vespertine cancer.  Sometimes your vespers just\nget sick, profoundly sick, and shit goes badly wrong\n\nContradiction\n: You break too many oaths (or the fundamental oath, [the\nseptagrammaton][sept]), and are punished.\n\nThis one is usually pretty boring; mostly the vespers just eat you, or\nsometimes they eat your noucardium and turn you\ninto a mindless animal, perhaps influenced by their will\n\n[sept]: index.html#septagrammaton\n\nMalediction\n: Haruspices can achieve this various certain high level curses. Nasty\nstuff, but pretty similar to the above\n\nTransgression\n: This is what we're really concerned with.   A transgression is when you\ndo something that's not technically against any oaths (well, some\ntranslations of the septagrammaton are pretty broad...), and so the\nvespers hotfix a judgment.\n\nVespers are not bugs, and they refuse to make themselves clear to bugs\n(deliberately so, many think --- they've been exploited by bugs, and\nif their workings were clear, they'd be more exploited), but there's a\nfew categories of thing that get the vespers to raise their hackles.\n\nWorld-ending threats\n\n: This is believed to be the reason for the crepuscule of Dlann, the\narchtitan, which resides in the Obliteration Fields EZ.\n\nVesper tampering\n\n: New means of breeding vespers are often excluded, as are attempts to\nmeddle in the fundamental nature of vespers. (Famously, this is the\ntheory that explains the Bogs of Eden EZ, as well as lesser known\ninstances like the easily-confused pair of Meta-Vesper Interdict and\nMega-Vesper Interdict.)\n\nIchor virulence\n\n: This is a difficult theory to rigorously formulate, because one must\nexplain why plagues and myxogoths aren't excluded.  But there's a\ncertain compelling similarity between the Black Pudding EZ (infamous\nfailed myxogoth breeding experiment), the Hemotechtonic EZ (the titan\nTzic'zahd's attempt to pump magma through her veins), and the\n\nNouetic influence\n\n: this explains the smiting of God-empress Oosifea (though theorized,\nthe National Henosis EZ has never been discovered), the Whalesong EZ,\nand the abominable City of Eels.\n\nUnchecked growth\n\n: // FIXME: I don't have examples offhand, but I can imagine some\ncrazy fungus growth would go here.\n\nA question one might ask is: why crepuscules? If vespers don't like a\ntechnique, why not stamp it out entirely? Why set aside a few square\nmiles where it can run free?\n\nAfter decades of theorizing and debate, one of the most compelling\nexplanations is compromise. Sure, vespers \"want\" to punish the bane\nwho transgressed against their vision, but every bane is host to\nnumber of vespers.  Those vespers have what we might call \"rights\".\n\nCrepuscules are rarely sudden things.  To the vespers, endowments are\nbeautiful things, and the tools that culminated in some transgressive\ntechnique might've been the work of years, their entire life's work.\nHow would a vesper feel, if their magnum opus, the endowment that was\nsupposed to go down in the arete records as its shining\naccomplishment, turned out to be a tool of transgression?  And not\nthrough any of fault of its own (to the extent vespers have faults),\nbut due to malign manipulations from its hosts?\n\nCrepusules are allowed to exist as a mercy to the vespers who\nunwittingly brought it about.\n\n(What judgment undergirds what gets crepuscularized and what doesn't?\nSome theorize vespertine 'arbiters' that make such judgment, many\ncounting them seven in number, matching a suggestive patterns (seven\nnymphs of the dream; seven laws in the septagrammaton). No conclusive\nevidence of arbiters has yet arisen. Some believed the archons,\nfigureheads of a bat cult in the waning days of the myriad kingdoms,\nhad the power to bring about crepuscules at will. Only myths of\narchons survive, their very existence is debated, and their feats are\nconsidered alongside those of other messianic figures.)\n\n- - -\n\nThe other question to ask, though, is how.\n\nIn this sense, there are three types of crepuscular confinements\n\nUnconfined Crepuscules\n\n: The chief example is the hemotectonic. The hemotectonic is an EZ\nbecause that's where Tzic'zahd was, and she can no longer move, and\nall its phenomena are originate in her. In general, there are a number\nof zones that are simply focalized to some source that could move, but\nsimply doesn't. The crepuscule has no ability to actually enforce the\nconfinement; it happens naturally.\n\nSoft confinement\n\n: Consider the Dwimmermeal EZ. What actually makes\nit an EZ? If you try to create a dwimmermeal, it triggers the taboo\nand your vespers delete the instruction.  If you take a grubsucker\nform the zone, it dies and decomposes. Overall, these effects can be\nmodestly replicated: taboos require nothing but coordination among\nvespers. Grubsuckers are made by vespers, so of course the vespers can\nsimply design them to self-destruct past certain compass cordinates.\nWhat's important here is there's nothing metaphysical about this zone;\nin a certain sense, it's a \"fake\" exclusion.^[The text also describes\nthe Dwimmermeal crepuscule as somehow causing darkling beetle\ncordyceps to just not work anywhere outside the zone. For that, I've\ngot nothing; no idea how they actually manage that. Will prolly retcon\nthis.]\n\nHard confinement\n\n: The omicron EZ is the foremost example of this. You cannot derive\nomicron-nrv anywhere; the reactions don't seem to work. If you create\nomnicron-nrv in the zone, attempt to bring the mass pass the zone\nboundary results in force applied on the mass, dragging it backwards.\n\nHard confinement is rare, and seems to exclusively confine things that\nare, well, easy to confine. There are plenty of zones where enervate\nspecies are confined. There's a zone where a certain radioative\nisotope is confined. There's even a zone where a protein is confined.\nAttempted to synthesize it outside the zone will see it dissolve,\nalbeit with some delay.\n\nwhat unifies these effects is that every target of hard confinement is\nsomething with a particular oscillation mode that can be targeted.\n\nThe source of hard confinement is difficult to understand, partially\nbecause the most promsing theories hinge on planar physics, those\nenervate fields which permeate the whole planet. a notoriously\ndifficult thing to get research clearance for, because the elemental\nplanes are forbidden topics.\n\nIndeed, hard confinement is believed by many to be a phenomena almost\nunrelated to the vespers --- at best, they are believed to be able to\noccasionally call upon it, but certain confinements seem to predate\nthe development of agriculture itself, and several have seemingly no\nrelation to aretology.\n\nWhat is the force behind hard confinement? Certainly no arthropological\npower.",
  "title": "Notes on Crepuscules"
}