Nous Inspira

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Back in the 16^th^ century, when the Third Dominion was in full swing and the slave from the north slew Thanata Thimithi, then-matriarch of her clan, it precipitated the clan's defection from the regime.

For much of the remainder of the Third Dominion's reign, they were determined to pull the Thimithi back into line. Their agents of choice were, more often than not, the Anthimati clan, whose cursed eyes of nouprojection could have... a certain persuasive effect.

Even after the dominion fell, the Anthimati clan never discarded their grudge. Though there were other plenty of other feuds between families, they mostly had their definite beginnings and swift endings, or otherwise waxed and waned with the years. In contrast, there was something unending about the procession of snake eyes burned by fire and ardent blood shed by rosen thorns --- all of this is to say, when one speaks of the "warring clans period", those clans might as well have been just the Thimithi and Anthimati.

Still, there's something asymmetrical about this conflict, isn't there? Sure, fire is hot, if you get hit and don't have protection, but the Anthimati will turn your very mind and senses against you.

It's understandable, then, why the Thimithi badly needed a counter if they were to remain free of subjugation.

What they ended up with is, of course, what we're here to discuss today: the technique known as nous inspira.

Let's change track, and explain why the nous inspira is weird, when it comes to nouprojection defenses.

Think about it like this. Say you're a vesperbane, and your enemy is trying to nudge your thoughts against your best interest, poison your senses and imagination with false images, and so on. All those nasty illusionist tricks.

You, obviously, don't want this to happen, so how do you manage that?

You might think it helps to focus, to train your mind to follow a line of thought without getting distracted. If the threat is your mind being maliciously changed, then tautalogically, you want your mind not to change, to maintain its intended signal unfalteringly.

And if this is what your answer is, it's the same as 90% of the scholarship on this topic. It's what the percipients study, it's what Unbrood operatives are trained to do, and it's how the "mind blank" spells normal vesperbanes use for this generally implement their defense.

Whatever you might think to do, it's probably not to lean in, to let your mind run wild with every impulse, to make it more malleable, more mercurial.

But that's exactly what nous inspira does, if we oversimplify and elide a lot of very specific instruction and guidance that's probably been all but lost at this point.

Intuitively, the principle here is that any attempt at "mind control" can't control your whole mind, so instead we maximize chaos. If you follow after every nudge, then more often than not it's going to be your natural intuition rather than foreign influence. And if you do succumb to an intruder-thought, it doesn't matter that much because you'll be jumping to another flight of thought soon enough. It won't stick.

And by being more spontaneous and chaotic, you foil projection in another way: fundamentally, every mind is different, and the art of projection is based on guesswork and common patterns. They figure out the rhythms and connections of your mind by watching it and replaying desired stimuli.

And how useful is that if your mind is ever-changing, if two nudges only slightly different might send it chaotically in very different directions?

One cannot predict what you're doing if you have no fucking clue yourself.

This isn't the whole technique, but it's the first form a student masters: the wildfire mind.

This is typically trained by dancing by the flickering light of a great big campfire, learning to move and think on impulse.

Now, you might imagine that random flailing is a pretty hefty drawback. This is true, and thus, wildfire thought is more of a state of being partially trained, or at best, a last resort.

To be truly useful, an initiate must master the second form: focused flame.

This is what you might expect: refining the wildfire mind into something more directed, yet still spontaneous.

The metaphor and the training exercise typically used for this is that of music. A inspirer learns dances and songs that are easy to predict if you're acquainted with them, but hard to follow if you don't, keeping projectors guessing.

When these songs become deeply engraved on the mind, they become a kind of error-correction tool --- foreign thoughts become obvious, because they won't fit with the practiced mental rhythm, and thus become easier to shrug off.

The skill ceiling here is very high, and for almost centuries, it's generally considered acceptable for a Thimithi to reach only this level of development to be considered combat ready, and once they do, there's plenty to more learn here --- more complex songs, improvisationally framing more complex thoughts and actions into the rhythm of a song --- without ever needing to master the higher forms.

But should they pursue them, the next step is the radiant spirit.

In the realignment war and then later as a part of the Pantheca proper, this technique was what made the Thimithi born leaders and commanders, and it became common pillar of their combat doctrine.

The nature of the radiant spirit is simple: all minds emit adumbrations that vibrate nearby enervate, but this effect is generally so subtle that only exceptionally sensitive receptors are capable of being affected.

To be radiant, then, an inspirer must learn to turn up the volume on their mind.

This has two chief effects: it weakens projection by the same principle talking over someone weakens arguments, and it acts as a projection of its own.

Thus, the benefit to the user is minor, but the benefit to her allies can be game-changing. Enemy projections become hampered, and with simple training, allies can learn to relax and synchronize with the rhythm of radiant inspirer's mind, directly amplifying their own resistance to nouprojection.

(Interestingly, one of the selling points of the Anthimati's ophisrhodon is that it grants the beholden resistance to other nouprojection. In a way, then, you can think of the nous inspira almost as the "good" counterpart to the "evil" ophisrhodon. This is definitely how the Thimithi presented it.)

Now, all of the steps so far have been things that, theoretically, anyone with a mind could achieve with some effort. But the radiant spirit is limited by physics: there is physically only so much enervate in a person brain, which limits how "loud" they can be.

Brains can gain more enervate through umbracog training, but that's something that the vespers' intervention (academics argue whether this is "well-intentioned" or not) generally prevent vesperbanes from acquiring. By nature they flush the additional enervate from their hosts' brains.

Thus, radiant spirit is generally explained to the world as a Thimithi bloodline ability. The truth of it is, (perhaps due to the special favor of the vespers?) the Thimthi have a peculiar innate affinity for nouprojection themselves, and this is how they use it.

After radiant spirit comes inner reflection. This is one of the most perilous forms, and something Thimithi elders forbid any but the wisest and most developed practitioners from attempting. This is because the inner reflection is the point where advanced technique and refinement double back around and risk running counter the fundamentals.

With the radiant spirit, you are metaphorically shining light out into the world. The inner reflection asks: why not accept that light back into yourself, and make an eye of the mind's flame?

The problem with this is, well...

You see, the nous inspira is supposed to protect you from nouprojection, right?

The inner reflection, put simply, is "what if we allowed projection to affect us anyway?"

Learned incorrectly, this completely negates the protection and makes the user more vulnerable to projection.

But learned correctly? An eye of enlightenment is opened, and it interfaces directly with the brain at the speed of enervate transmission.

It's the purest form of extrasensory perception. You can sense techniques even as they're being molded, feel your foe's mind as they plan their next move.

And it amplifies the radiant spirit's effect, too: if you can feel your ally's minds, you can subtly alter your song to more tightly synchronize with them.

What more is their to learn? Well, the apex of nous inspira development is termed the divine flame. This is the point at which the user's wild and freeform adaptability and their extrasensory connection to the world around them (combined with a style trained past the point of muscle memory) allows them to enter a total flow state wherein you might well describe them as being one with the world itself, acting in such perfect concert with what seems almost supernatural foreknowledge --- it's as if they are channeling a higher power.

There's a reason why worshiping Theiona Thimithi, the first overscourge, and the last master of divine flame, as if one of the exalted ancestor is considered fringe, but not ridiculous.

The above description gives one a general idea of the principles at play with the nous inspira, and the way it looks, but this would be insufficient to recreate it. Just as a great poem has meaning meanings achieved with clever, unexpected choice of worlds, a great technique achieves many effects with a clever, unexpected mechanisms.

A more mundane metaphor: we ask one to "say cheese" to get them to smile for a photo --- this odd trick works because of the details of how the mouth must shape itself to say cheese.

Similarly, there are specific techniques used to get a mind to "think inspira".

The way the Thimithi generally teach it, the nous inspira requires a sp