1.4) How it is Made: The Standard-Issue Bioarcanic Pistol
If you’ve lived in Bharncair, you’ve seen a bioarcanic pistol. The pistol itself looks normal enough, and its internal chanism is identical to a normal pistol, but there is one major difference. The bullet, the casing, and the propellant are all made out of the sa material: crystallized glandular muscles extracted from a particular Nightspawn known as a ‘Giant Exploding Ant’.
According to Nightspawn researchers, it has been observed and docunted that exploding ants can blow themselves up by rupturing their glandular muscles. How they do this is by making a glyph in their hearts, which sends essence rippling through their bloodstream and into those muscles, making them explode really violently—so we can order the muscles to do the sa with glyphs. We are essentially tricking the essence in the muscles to explode by making it think it is still alive and that the glyph is being sent from their heart, but in truth, we’ve already killed the ant and harvested its parts, and we’re also the ones hunched over a workbench carving the glyph.
Now, how do we make this pistol work? To start, crystallized forms of these ‘exploding muscles’ are shaped into a bullet. This is easily doable, because when an exploding ant dies, their glandular muscles crystallize and beco extrely inert, so they're easy to harvest, shape, and handle. Then, a single glyph is carved at the end of the firing pin. The glyph may look like a swirly symbol of nonsense, but in the language of Nightspawns, it ans ‘explode’. So, when the pistol trigger is pulled and the firing pin strikes the end of the bullet, the glyph cos in contact with the bullet, and when the essence inside the bullet ‘sees’ the pattern, it receives the command. The muscles explode, propelling the entire bullet out of the barrel.
(Keep in mind that the bullet has a range of only about thirty to fifty tres. This is because the entire bullet is made of crystallized muscle, so it will continue to explode from the end to the tip even as it flies, and eventually, the explosions would reach the tip of the bullet, making it so the bullet burns itself out after about fifty ters. Longer and thicker bullets fired from standard-issue military rifles and advanced hunting rifles will obviously explode longer, letting them fly between a hundred to three hundred ters before the bullet burns out, but it still remains that bioarcanic bullets tend to have lower range than normal bullets)
You may ask why we go to the trouble of using bioarcanic bullets over normal bullets with normal gunpowder. Here is sothing interesting about Nightspawn biology: if you were to stab or slash or shoot a Nightspawn with a normal tal blade or bullet, chances are, no matter how strong you are, you won’t be able to easily cut through its flesh or damage its chitin. This is because the entire Nightspawn is being strengthened and hardened by the essence inside their bodies. Normal weapons wouldn’t be very effective against them. However, since the entire bullet is made out of crystallized muscle that’s still exploding mid-air, when it slams into the Nightspawn, the bullet infused with essence is capable of clashing with and heavily disrupting the Nightspawn’s own essence, which causes montary biological incompatibility. This ans the bioarcanic bullet will deal significantly more damage than if a normal bullet were to be used.
A normal tal bullet may not even be able to make a dent in the Nightspawn’s chitin, but the bioarcanic bullet can pierce the chitin, rip through its muscles, and kill the Nightspawn.
Three important things to note:
One), the command glyph can be drawn instead of carved, but usually, it is carved. The reason is simple: unless the glyph is covered or protected by sothing, drawn lines can be easily washed away by ti and rain, but carvings are much harder to destroy. There is use in both drawn and carved glyphs, so figure out which would serve your purpose best.
Two), the command glyph can be drawn or carved on any organic material, but the glyph will only activate if the whole pattern is in direct physical contact with the Nightspawn part you’re trying to send a command to. You can carve an entire glyph on a Nightspawn part, and the command will be sent. You can carve half a glyph on a Nightspawn part and press the other half carved on a wooden block onto the first half, and the command will be sent. You can carve an entire glyph on a wooden block and stamp it onto a Nightspawn part, and the command will be sent. This is because essence is a living, semi-intelligent magic source, and it is capable of reading and understanding glyphs even if they are not carved onto the Nightspawn part directly.
Three), the glyphs don’t have to be a hundred percent accurate. I cannot stress this enough, but bioarcanic essence is genuinely living. It is intelligent enough that as long as the glyph is about ninety-nine percent correct, the essence can read the command. Furthermore, you can use a combination of drawn and carved lines to complete a glyph. The shape and the pattern in direct physical contact with the Nightspawn part is what is most important, not how the lines are made and where they are.
Thus, the definition of a bioarcanic construct is any trinket, equipnt, machine, or weapon that contains Nightspawn parts, and there is usually a chanism that completes the glyphs or presses the glyph to the Nightspawn part in order to activate its special biological ability.
1.5) Ending Note
Since this is only an introduction to bioarcanic engineering, not much more detail will be gone into regarding bioarcanic constructs. At the back of this book, you will find ten pages’ worth of very rudintary and basic glyphs labelled with their aning in Nightspawn language.
I hereby invite you to experint by yourself. Try out different glyph combinations and see if you can communicate with bioarcanic essence effectively. Rember: the effects of the bioarcanic construct can only activate if the effect is sothing the Nightspawn part can accomplish. If you carve an ‘explode’ glyph on an exploding ant muscle, the muscle will explode because that’s what the muscle does, but if you carve an ‘explode’ glyph on the leg chitin plates of a slow-moving stick bug instead, don’t be surprised if nothing happens. A good bioarcanic engineer must be equal parts knowledgeable about the Nightspawn parts they’re trying to make bioarcanic constructs out of, and they must also know which glyphs to use in what order so they can communicate most effectively with bioarcanic essence.
Skilled bioarcanic engineers only spend their entire lives mastering bioarcanic engineering, so I wish you good luck in your scientific endeavours. You can purchase the entire set volu of ‘An Introduction to Bioarcanic Engineering’ in your nearest bookstore—
Gael skipped the obligatory advertisent at the end of the introductory section and flipped right to the end of the book.
The glyphs were everywhere.
Swirled, jagged, coiled, and twisted. Alien patterns sprawled across the pages in dense black ink, running up and down the margins like so crawling, veiny sickness. He traced his fingers over a particularly nasty-looking one, a vicious spiral with thick barbs along its curves, labeled in plain, unassuming script: explode’.
Right. That made sense. The glyph looked like it ant ‘explode’.
He skimd through the pages. More glyphs, more words. ‘Expand’. ‘Grow’. ‘Charge’. ‘Harden’. ‘Shred’. About three hundred in total, all basic commands ant to coax movent from essence in Nightspawn parts that still believed they were alive.
And dammit, none of these look easy to carve. Even the single ‘explode’ glyph looks like it’d take half an hour to get right. And what if I fuck up the lines? What if they’re not swirly or curvy enough?
He exhaled slowly, letting his mind pick apart the implications as he flipped backwards, deeper into the book’s swollen middle.
Here ca the catalogues.
Page after page, Nightspawn after Nightspawn. All in total, there seed to be about three hundred pages, each one cataloguing a different class of Nightspawn and explaining which of its parts could be used to make sothing useful. The photocyote organ of a headlight beetle Nightspawn could be used to make perpetually glowing bioarcanic lanterns. The muscle fibers of a tortoise beetle Nightspawn could be used to weave clothes that could harden like iron. The book was more than just a reference. It was a butcher’s guide to all things related to Nightspawn, and—by extension—all things related to Myrmurs.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Thanksalot, Julius Tadius, Rhaenwald Odris.
I’ll be sure to take care of this book for the first few weeks and then lose it sowhere in the cracks and crevices of the clinic.
The roof sighed beneath him as he leaned back, tipping his chair onto two legs, bottle dangling from loose fingers.
Now then.
Two carcasses. Two dead Myrmurs. What could he possibly make with them?
First thing’s first: he had to figure out what classes they were. He had their carcasses, but not their nas, and if he didn’t know their nas, he wouldn’t know what parts to extract from them.
But before he could stew on it further, a sound caught his ear.
A crack.
Soft. Barely there. He might’ve missed it if he hadn’t been waiting for sothing to break.
He flicked his gaze forward.
Maeve, still curled up in her chair with her book in one hand, was gnawing her nails on the other hand absentmindedly. Her nails were already whittled down, but that didn’t seem to stop her. Nor did she seem to notice. She bit again, the faintest splintering sound following as another edge cracked between her teeth.
Gael couldn’t resist a grin.
"What part you at, Exorcist?"
Maeve jolted like he’d stabbed her, and while he let out a bark of laughter, she exhaled sharply, scowling as she pressed a hand against her chest.
“Why do you want to know, Doctor?”
He grinned, tipping back his bottle. "First of all, ain’t my fault you’re getting spooked by words on a page—”
“ —I’m not scared. I’m not. It’s a good stor—”
"What part you at?"
She grumbled sothing under her breath, slouching lower into the chair.
"... A really good one,” she murmured.
Gael snorted, watching her. She was deep in the story, jaw tight, pupils drawn to pinpricks. That kind of imrsion wasn’t normal—not for a book that’d been out for years. He tilted his head, studying her.
“You really haven’t read it before?”
She hesitated, just a beat too long. “No. I haven’t.”
“It’s one of the big ones, you know. ‘A Catalogue of Forgotten Atrocities and Monstrosities’ is the most popular horror chronicle, all supposedly first-hand accounts. How could you never have read it?”
Her eyes flickered, sothing thoughtful passing over her face as she remained staring at her book. “I was always an Exorcist.”
And that was the end of the conversation.
He could feel it.
Except she shifted, staring at nothing in particular, and then, quietly—
“No,” she mumbled. “That’s not quite right. I wasn’t always an Exorcist.”
Gael stayed quiet as Maeve took a slow breath.
“When I was younger, I lived with my mother and father. Just the three of us in a cheap little apartnt in the lower part of Vharnveil, close to the edge of the city, because they couldn’t afford anything better with all the money they were spending on trying to treat my Crimson Weep ailnt,” She paused, sothing fragile pressing against her voice. “But one day, they got sick as well.”
Gael stayed quiet.
“A curse,” she murmured. “It was a bad one. My father searched everywhere for a competent healer, a doctor, a curse maester, an alchemist—anyone who could help—but it is called a ‘curse’ because nobody understands it, and nobody knew how to get rid of theirs.”
Another pause.
“Then, one day, a Plagueplain Doctor knocked on our door.”
Gael leaned back and tilted his head up while Maeve’s fingers curled around her book’s spine, knuckles whitening.
“He said he could help,” she whispered, but there was a hint of anger—hate and sorrow bled into one. “He promised… he’d fix them. He promised he’d cure them. What do you think a Plagueplain Doctor’s ‘promise’ is worth?”
Gael didn’t answer. He hadn’t told her, and he would probably never tell her, but he still rembered that dream from a week ago when they’d first woken up together: the bits and pieces of her mories, scattered like shattered glass.
He didn’t know why he saw a fragnt of her mories, but if he had to guess, it was a side effect of them being chained together, her blood draining into his. Blood, after all, was how the Blood Barons stayed eternally young. He could co up with a reasonable biological explanation for how transferring mories via blood transfusions could work.
But he didn’t need to imagine what the Plagueplain Doctor did.
“People do say in the eyes of the raven mask, a patient is not a person,” he murmured. “A patient is a question—the answer is always written in blood.”
“... He turned my father and mother into crystals,” Maeve said, voice thin. “And not just them. Our neighbours. The whole block. The Mortifera Enforcers and the Church of Severin covered the entire incident quickly enough—it was a Plagueplain Doctor running another vile experint for the sake of bettering the City of Splendors, after all—but they did a perfect enough job covering everything up that a sole survivor managed to slip through the gaps, forgotten and unnoticed in a nearby clinic.”
Her hands were trembling. Just slightly.
“I stayed there on that bed, ignored by the nurses and the doctors for… a while. As best as they could ignore soone with the Crimson Weep, anyways,” she said. “I don’t know how long. Weeks. Maybe months. I didn’t talk to anyone. Didn’t do much of anything. Just sat there, ate when they told to, slept when I was tired, until…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “Until a Hunter ca looking for an orphan girl she could train. Soone to be her disciple."
Gael furrowed his brows. “She could just take a girl out of the clinic?”
“A girl without a house is not a girl with a na,” she said plainly. “Her last disciple died, and she needed a new one. Quickly. The decision wasn’t mine to make anyways, so training began imdiately in the temples of the Symbiote Exorcists,” she went on. “There were other kids from other Hunter-Host pairs—trainees who’d been there longer. They didn’t like at first. Thought I didn’t belong.”
“Because you were soft?”
“Because I was new.” She ignored his smirk. “It didn’t take long for to catch up to them, though. My new mama drilled Myrmur anatomy into until we could list half of every known species in our sleep. She taught how to fight, how to track, and how to use the system. I had to learn every weapon I got my hands on, and my mama trained in all of them herself.”
“A Hunter playing a single mother?”
“My papa was there too,” she said after a beat. “Her Host. He wasn’t really my papa, though. He was more like mama’s handler. He did what he was assigned to do, handled all of the paperwork after a Myrmur hunt, and nothing more. He never spoke to .”
“You had a solid career path, then,” he said.
“Three years ago was the trainees’ initiation test.” She nodded. “Six of us Hunters had twelve hours in the upper city catacombs. The higher-ups had received reports of a brood of Myrmurs nesting in the catacombs, parasitizing vagrants in the tunnels, so it was our job to clear them out.”
“No Host?”
“Trainee Hunters only get their half of the Symbiotic System on the day of the initiation test. We got our Standard Wasp Classes the hour before we set foot into the catacombs, and if we passed the test, we’d each be assigned a Host and made into full-fledged Symbiote Exorcists.”
How fun, he thought to himself. You only get your magic and mutations an hour before you fight your first real fight with a Myrmur.
“The minute before we stepped into the catacombs,” she murmured, “my mama was there to send off.”
She reached for the black briefcase resting beside her, lifting it and turning it over in her hand.
“She gave Mistrender,” she said. “It was her favourite bioarcanic weapon. There are tiny, hollow spikes on the handle that pull out my blood whenever I’m holding it, and while my blood is churning around inside the handle, building up speed and montum, I can concentrate bioarcanic essence into it—so I can fire my poisonous blood out as projectiles.”
Gael watched as she hugged her case.
“She gave it to because she wanted to take her place. She was retiring soon.” A breath. “I wanted to be her successor. I wanted to make her proud. She may not have been my real mother, but she took care of when nobody else would even look my way, and…”
Her voice trailed off. Her eyes went distant, as if sothing dark had crept into her thoughts, pulling her sowhere Gael couldn’t follow.
For his part, he didn’t say anything.
Either she’d tell him of her own volition, or she wouldn’t. It certainly seed like she was thinking about it. Her lips parted for just a second before she gritted her teeth, probably thinking ‘what the hell am I doing telling all this to a Plagueplain Doctor’, but she probably thought he didn’t care much either way.
So why should she care?
He was a Demonic Plagueplain Doctor, after all.
“... Down there, in those catacombs, I—”
A distant blast split the quiet, a plu of fire lighting up on the misty horizon.
Maeve flinched, snapping her head toward the fire.
“What was that?”
Gael, however, had already kicked off his chair, twirling his walking cane as he grinned from ear to ear.
“At least multiple patients with non-insignificant injuries,” he said. “Let’s go.”
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