I am unwell about the corpseflies. This setting has sapient telepathic insects that are capable of easily distinguishing between humans, communicating with (select?) humans, and even forming binding agreements with humans. They might be a hivemind, or they might be extremely social in a way that's (so far) indistinguishable from a hivemind to the listener. They retain surprisingly accurate memories across generations, and hate it when dead flesh starts moving again of its own volition, but will happily puppet a corpse themselves if necessary.
The specific society-or-hivemind of flies we've met is called the Lucilian Chorus, in a setting where magic is done almost entirely through song. Can the corpseflies perform yearningsong? What do corpseflies yearn for? Are any of the swarm dead and resumed? Would resuming a single fly even be meaningful, or would it be akin to resurrecting a clipped toenail?
And what makes this Chorus Lucilian? In the real world this would indicate some relation to the Roman poet/satirist/cavalryman Lucilius, but his works are so fragmentary that it's hard to say what this could mean if it's a reference - it could even be unrelated to the man and his work, and rather an attempt to anchor our idea of what a pest knight is like in the Roman equites instead of in the more popular medieval knight archetype. But of course presumably Lucilius never existed on the Big Man, so, what would the name "Lucilian Chorus" imply from an in-universe perspective? Was there a person named Lucilius - presumably from ~two thousand years ago in pseudo-Rome - who had some formative impact upon the Chorus that bears his name?
Also - pest knights, the willing hosts and intermediaries for corpsefly swarms, are portrayed as an old-fashioned order, apparently long-preceding the Conquest of the Dead. They're treated as an oddity and a joke, but their long existence implies an equally-long history of relations between humans and sapient corpseflies. What on the Man has that been like? Did humans ever attempt to establish rule over corpseflies, or vice versa? Have they gone to war?
Might they in the future?
Because of course, Cyshane is now ruled by the resumed dead, and its technology runs on corpse labor. Dead flesh used in technology must be significantly slower to rot than meat is in real life, and unpalatable to corpseflies, elsewise it would rot away much too quickly. Caul was sentenced to 17 years of postmortem labor, implying it's reasonable to expect a dimbox to last 17 years - and if corpseflies could nest in them, they would not last that long. So if anyone should have reason to hate and work against the necromantic turn of society it should be the corpseflies.
And yet our pest knight is working in service of the Crown. Is that normal for pest knights; or is it just what Naemic was doing as a career before she pledged herself to the Lucilian Chorus; or is it part of a scheme to lead to a sapient corpsefly uprising?
