#delve

materials used inner book paper - schleipen fly 05, 115gsm endpapers - Ingres Bütten (black) endbands - linnen thread wrapped with chiyogami paper

case boards - 1mm grey board spine stiffener - card stock cover material - Iris book cloth (black) paper onlay - chiyogami paper title - hot stamped with heat activated foil (white)

format: ~A5

APPEARANCE & HOME

Someone who's never seen a vespine before might be frightened and mistake them for a monster. They're insects: hard carapaces, jointed limbs, wiggling mandibles, and huge but inexpressive eyes. They stand at least a whole head taller than the average human, but not any wider, giving them a proportionally lanky appearance. And their segmented body plan and typical color schemes vividly resemble ants, or more frequently wasps or hornets. Oddly enough though, they still only have the same two arms and two legs you'll find anywhere else in the world. (It's anyone's guess as to why.)

An ordinary vespine is just as polite and agreeable as any human in person, of course. They speak the same language, albeit in their own dialect. And though they lack clear facial expressions to make themselves understood, they're just as instinctively expressive by their body language, which is dramatically active nearly all the time as a matter of course. But this tendency toward dance and pantomime can make mammalian folk mistake them as hysterical or even sarcastic sometimes. The way a vespine talks with their whole body will remind a sheltered human of masked figures on theater stages more than it does human conversation.

Vespines are seldom seen outside the hivelands in interior Altara: an exotic environment of salt marshes and fungal forests that outsiders find as alien as they find the vespines themselves, but locals call it cozy and pastoral.

Most vespines are drones, and gather in hives around a single queen, who is mother to every drone in the hive. The queen stands significantly taller than her drones, has four arms instead of two, and lives two or three times as long as a drone does. Some queens may have only a few dozen drones in their hive, while others can have hundreds! And so vespine villages and cities usually consist of more than one hive living side by side.

Life in a vespine town is friendly and communal, and resembles mammal life in many of its amenities and creature comforts... but it's also cramped. The drones live the way they're naturally comfortable: sleeping shoulder to shoulder, gathering and lining up body to body, and generally coexisting without a concept of personal space. This is the one thing almost any vespine has to learn to adjust to when traveling abroad: strangers will take offense if you sit down at their dinner table and gently crowd in until you're fully flush together with them.

THE QUEEN & THE DRONES

Vespine drones do not mindlessly obey every command of their queen day in and day out. They're free thinking individuals just like you, with their own desires and goals. But they are still naturally eusocial creatures. And just as a mammal mother can't help but love and protect her child, a typical drone can't help but love and adore his queen.

Queens can only reproduce by coupling with other queens, which usually leaves both partners pregnant, and queens tend to bond in flighty and mercurial relationships that can shift often, breaking up or making up or changing partners from month to month, in a romantic saga that drones gossip on avidly. Drones cannot reproduce at all, and make up a vast majority of the vespine population. It varies how interested a drone is in romantic relationships of his own, if at all.

This doesn't make for an easy translation from the human construct of gender. Drones nearly always go by he/him in language, and queens nearly always by she/her, but this is a mere grammatical distinction to them. As for actual manhood or womanhood, the vespine understanding of the concepts is academic, superficial, and very loose. If you try to explain to a hiveland vespine that it takes more than putting on a dress to "be a woman," or grooming a moustache to "be a man," they might suspect you're just trying to confuse them with your exotic and complicated mammal traditions.

This hive system also makes for much larger family units than you may be used to, so the notion of family is a little different for vespines. Drone siblings feel a kinship to one another that's more communal than domestic, and dote on their queen less personally, and more like the revered local royalty that her name implies. It's normal for drones to hang on news about their queen's life and interests, and to jump at the chance to have a few minutes of conversation with her or even hold her hand- something a typical queen usually greatly enjoys indulging, as she has her own fond affection for her drones as a whole.

You might compare this to the secondhand social adoration between a local musical celebrity and her fans. And this would be appropriate, since all queens are expected to be just that: musicians.

MUSIC & A VESPINE'S SOUND

Vespine culture and identity revolves heavily around music.

This is both an understatement and an oversimplification.

Music in all forms and genres is the driving mainstream artform in vespine society, and the center of many vespine holidays, festivals, and ceremonies. The integration of energetic magic into musical instruments is usually credited to vespines. They're usually the ones who invented, refined, and popularized various magically amplified and altered instruments as well as entire genres of music born by them. And the making of music is so common that any drone is expected to play at least one instrument recreationally, if not with professional skill then at least enough to play some staple songs of his own personal genre, otherwise called his "sound."

For a vespine, your sound is not merely your favorite genre or style of music. It's a way of playing and listening that resonates with you on a viscerally personal level. A kind of music that feels like it expresses something essential and impossible to articulate with words in your own heart, your own identity. In other words, sound is the vespine experience that's most often equated to the human experience of gender! A given sound comes with certain cultural and aesthetic expectations, certain normative ways of thinking and behaving, and while none of these associations are seen as hard rules in themselves, an individual vespine can't help but be defined by what ways they conform to or defy the identity of their sound.

Its normal for a vespine to enjoy and be a fan of many genres, or even play many genres. But traditionally a vespine drone is expected to have one and only one sound that's their own. Further, a drone's sound is expected to be one of his queen's sounds. Queens aren't like drones: a queen is expected to have multiple sounds, from just two to half a dozen, and she's expected to play music in each of these sounds at a high artistic level. A queen's performances at holidays and festivals is important! It's what inspires her drones, connects them to her, and guides them to know themselves as they know her.

These aren't ingrained biological imperatives, of course. Very few social norms are. There are cases of a drone claiming a sound outside his queen's repertoire, or claiming multiple sounds, or claiming none. And the response this gets can vary wildly from hive to hive. What's more, there are some particularly new genres of music that more traditionalist hives don't consider valid sounds at all. Only a few generations ago, the advent of amplified instruments sparked an explosion of new genres, new sounds, revolution, and controversy. As well as radical ideas that all sound is socially constructed and arbitrary, that the feelings are real but only form as a response to existing art and culture.

There is no consensus. Vespine society is not a monolith, and if you asked ten vespines to write a list of the valid sounds that exist they might all agree on most of it, but they'd never be able to settle on the final controversial edge cases.

HUSKS

Every breed of folk in the world has their own particular monsters and ghouls. Humans have moon-maddened werewolves. The rabbit-like kith have their antlered and red-eyed jacks. The aquatic mer have their louse-mouthed cutters. And vespines have husks.

A vespine is an insect, with a hard exoskeleton rather than interior bones. So as a vespine's insides rot away, the hollow shell can sometimes retain its lifelike appearance. The emptiness inside can be made into a vessel of necromantic magic, an animated void, and the resulting creature is a husk.

Husks are especially unsettling for how closely they resemble normal people- at least at a glance. From a distance it may look like an ordinary vespine. But as you get closer you'll see the unsteady whipping movements of its limbs like a floppy marionette. The whisper of air through its joints. And the dark gaping pits into its hollow head, where its eyes belong. Husks fall into the uncanny valley to any observer, but other vespines find them especially upsetting to behold. This probably isn't surprising: a badly taxidermied fox is creepy. A badly taxidermied human would probably make you want to leave the room.