{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/black-nerve/eifre-quest/04",
  "path": "/posts/black-nerve/eifre-quest/04",
  "publishedAt": "2020-03-24T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "What?  It's not a visceral surprise, the way the scream was, or the\nmysterious sounds from the woods were. It's a more cerebral shock,\nwhich takes a moment for your mind to realize.\n\nThe instinct is to clench tighter with your raptorials, in a grip that\nwould certainly crush the avian. But you easily wrestle down the urge,\nand release the bird.\n\nIt's just --- you have no idea what's going on. You err with caution.\n\nThe bird flutters down to the ground, and doesn't flee. You flare wide\nyour raptorials, revealing the menacing eyespots at their center. In\nfull threat display, you stare down the bird.\n\nYou wonder what some magnanimous story-scroll hero would do. Pointing\nyour antennae at the bird, you say, \"Taste mercy, knave! I have spared\nyou for now, pledge to serve me and it shall continue!\" You're glad no\none is around to hear this.\n\nExcept the bird. But can it even understand you? It's just a bird,\nsurely.\n\nIn response, you swear the insolent thing shakes its head! The\ntemptation exists to swipe deftly with your raptorial and take off it's\nhead --- but you always had excellent composure. Think. You almost\nrecognize the species of bird --- some manner of crow? You once read a\nstory with a crow trained to repeat vapid phrases. If this is such a\ncrow, then someone trained it. And if you're to turn the situation to\nyour advantage, as a clever, cunning heroine would, you ought to spare\nthe crow even after this insolence. Whoever owns the crow will\nappreciate it, and you'll thus have their good will.\n\nWhile you muse, the bird has turned away from you, and hopped further\ndown the path. It croaks \"Help!\" again and it lifts a wing and --- is it\npointing?\n\nThe bird slowly ambles up the path. If you were to make a wild, dramatic\nguess, the bird wants you to follow, as ridiculous as that sounds. You\nhave no choice but to follow, honestly. You're here to see who screamed\nand why, and that entails following the path anyway. You could\nbushwack your way through the wild of the woods... but there's courting\ndanger, and then there's begging for it.\n\nAlready the woods are more dynamic than the plains. Back toward the\nvillage, hills are slow, polite things that take a few hundred strides\nto gather any height. But even as you walk the wooden path, the ground\nbeside it rises up sharply to act almost as a wall enclosing half the\npath. Looking farther out, there are little mounds and prominences\neverywhere, as well as depressions and gullies like the beds of\nforgotten rills.\n\nYou see a damselfly flit the air, and a dirt hole tended by lesser\nbeetles digs into the path-wall farther down.\n\nStill the crow struts on, and you follow, feeling increasingly absurd\nand bemused. The both of you reach a fork in the road. A path sharply\nleft leading to an area lousy with fallen, crumbling trees and dead\nfoilage. A path center, slightly rightward, which inclines upward, and\nsees the trees thin.\n\nBut the crow chooses (chooses, you repeat in disbelief) the rightmost\npath, deeper into the ambrosia woods.\n\nYou've almost eased off your guard, your mind relishing the chance to\npuzzle at the mystery of the talking crow instead of contending with and\nworrying about the gross danger you're in.\n\nBut a sudden motion punishes that slack! You see in the corner of your\nvision (which is almost exactly behind you, with your wide compound\neyes) a deeper shadow by the path-wall, darker than even the occluded\nblackness under the fallen logs --- inappropriately dark. This compels\nyou to turn and take it in --- and as you give more thought to it, you\nremember its limp formlessness, as if it were cast by a puddle in the\nbranches above. The image makes no sense.\n\nAnd maybe it was just your imagining, because there's nothing when you\nturn around. With your fovea regarding it, you can see now, at the edge\nof where the black puddle was, there is a thin crack in the hard dirt.\n\nThe bird stands strides ahead of you now, and you turn to dash after it.\nBut the thing has stopped suddenly, so much that you almost step on it!\nYou catch yourself, and, antennae writhing, a harsh growl on your\nspiracles, you see the bird has turned to look at the path-wall.\n\nThere's a mantis slumped there, in a concave bit of wall you hadn't\nseen. She's covered in black robes, and in the darkness, it's almost\nenough for you to miss the green hemolymph stains. But the odor gives it\nall away: coppery, putrid, almost smelling of pain. There's wounds under\nher robes, nasty, deep wounds. But she's awake, barely stirring as you\narrive.\n\nYou meet her dark blue face, and her maxillae twitch.\n\nBelow, from her abdomen, through coughs, she speaks: \"Hey... hey kid.\"\n\n::: afterword\nApocrypha Given {#ap04}\n\n> Is there more than once species of empersoned mantis? Is there more\n> than one species of mantis, at all? are there any creatures which are\n> to them like chimps are to us?\n\nYour father taught you that there are two kinds of mantids in the\nworld; the ordinary folk like you or your friends, and the wingless\nmantids.  People don't talk very much about wingless mantids, even\nwhen a sunny nymph like yourself was the one asking.\n\nBut you had gotten answers at night, as your father lays you down in\nyour bed and comforts you with bedtime conversations, his mind tired\nand inattentive after a long day.  Bedtime conversations they were,\nbecause any attempt of his at bedtimes stories ran aground on your\nmountain of questions until the tenor was more philosophical than\nnarrative.\n\nThey say long ago wingless mantids involved themselves in a great\nevil.  Whether they perpetrated it, or were just complicit in it your\nfather couldn't say.  But the price for that evil was that their wings\nwere shorn off as a warning for the rest of us.\n\nThere are a few wingless mantids in Shatalek, and they tend the farms\nalong with the noble roaches --- one of them even cleans the tavern.\nThey don't speak much, although they flinch less when you walk by than\nfor any of the imagos.\n\nWhether there's more races of mantids in the world the normal and\nwingless, you aren't sure.  You know mantids come in a wide variety of\ncolors, from your reddish-yellow, to your friend Yikki's pastel pink,\nto the black of Hervanium Clan mantids.  Sometimes, you've wondered if\nVesperbane Clan mantids are races of their own.  You've twice seen\nthem pass as travelers through the tavern.  One had what could have\nbeen moss growing all over her chitin, and another had four limbs\ntoo many! (More often than that you've seen vesperbanes at a distance\n--- but imagos don't like to let you near them.)\n\nAnd there are creatures less than mantis.  Like the awful feral\nstickmen you've seen illustrations of --- smaller, inferior bugs who\nprey savagely in the forest.  You've heard some keep them as pets, but\nyou don't know who would want the things.\n\nAnd you know from your studies that knowledge-hunters have named the\npraying mantis Cephalomantis sapiens.  Once, at glance, you saw the\nterm Cephalomantis apteroid appear, in a scroll the scriptorium did\nnot let you borrow.\n\n> Is mantis society a dictatorship?\n\nYou've asked, and there's no one 'in charge' of Shatalek the way\nmother is in charge of the family. There's a syndicate of farmers, led\nby coordinators who handle trade with the world outside of Shatalek,\nand you've heard them mutter over half-empty glasses about taxes and\nrulings from the councils.  There's a syndic who represents Shatalek\nto the prefecture.  Sometimes stern-faced, fancy-robed mantids ride in\non cicindela-back and ask to speak to the coordinators, or the\nscriptorium master, or Tlista's guard.\n\nAll you know is they come from a place called Wentalel, or on some bad\nyears, a place called Greci.\n\n> are there any other sapients?\n\nIt took you a long time to figure out how to properly ask this\nquestion.  \"Are there any other kinds of people?\" didn't work ---\n'people' synonyms with 'mantis' for most, so asking this only yielded\nterse assertions about the wingless.\n\nWhen you learned to hunt, you also learned one of the big divides in\nthe world was between the edible and the inedible.  Mantids stand\nelevated from the vulgar creatures of the world, and all of them ---\nbeetles, ants, wolves, apes, bats --- can be eaten, though one may\nnot want to.  The one exception is mantids --- cannibalism is contrary\nto the ancestors' teachings, and any who would practice such is no\nmantid, but a beast. You asked if there were other exceptions, and\nthere were none.\n\nGreat. New facts (interesting ones, even), but you were no closer to\nanswering your question. One day, you explored out by the the farms\nwhere the chorus roaches toil. One roach, strolling between fields,\nnodded at you, and said a hello.\n\nIt startled and you ran all the way back home. But it revealed the\nproper approach to the question:\n\n\"Are there any other creatures that talk? Or communicate?\"\n\nAnd your mother (for that day she was there) replied there are many.\nThere are the chorus roaches, masters of agriculture and husbandry,\nwho we taught to speak, and who have accepted our protection for\nservices rendered.\n\nThe spinners ants and gestaltes bees alone are inept, and lack speech\nin their spiracles, but they conglomerate into autonomous hives whose\ncunning we learned to reckon.  They are thought (perhaps by\nconjecture, or interpretation) to serve some queen, of like we have\nnever been allowed to meet.  They have dispatched learnèd workers as\nliasons, and arrangements have been made by interpreting bodily\nmotions and pheromones, but they remain baffling servants.\n\nAnd then your mother's voice grew distant.  She's heard mention of\nvelvet hornet nests, or vast spider webs traded with.  Some\nadventurers, returning mad with terror, have told of termite-made\nthings that spoke with a voice from nightmares.\n\nThere are no vesperbats in the heartland.  But once there were, and\nonce they ruled. Only the ichorbats, a mindless shadow of their kind,\nremain.\n\nAnd of course, there are stranger, one-off creatures existing half in\n",
  "title": ""
}