The Life-Cycle of the Common Vermite
By Sage Aphras I
Too often I hear the lamentations of new slavemasters on the ill-condition of their rat-slaves. If they had the talent a new one could be purchased, but oftentimes a Vermite rebellion is too dangerous for the wellbeing of their owner. After all, fair children see a child-like visage in those black eyes and assume a thinking pet. I argue, with thought and care, you can raise your Vermite slave with the utmost obedience.
The Grassland Vermite, known as the Common Vermite, is endemic to the Ardalian plains. Imported from the eastern dunes of West Authalia, the Common Vermite rarely grows beyond its fifth year. A fully-grown adult would reach no more the height of a prepubescent child. We can ascertain their age by their fur: over time, it hardens from a soft down to a sharp coat of armor-like spines. It is important that as Vermites age, we temper the prickling quill-coats with good pruning.
In this chapter, I will address the basic nature of the Vermite, as well as respond to two contemporaries and their critiques of the Vermite slave trade.
There are good reasons for keeping a Vermite slave, not the least because of their long lifespans: a well-fed slave can live thrice the years of a normal man, and I've heard rumors of Vermites having lived hundreds of years at a time. Thus, an immediate acquisition can last generations of families. I've heard many stories of nobles having kept their Vermite servants. At their deaths, the Vermites would handed off to progeny, as valuable as any house sigil. With natural magical affinity, many employ Vermites as both thralls and pets. This is not dissimilar to the Salah use of hounds and stags to guard their castles.
Though they bear striking similarities to rats, Vermites are not, emphatically so, rats. In the wild, farmers will find Vermites in the company of rat nests. In fact, a glance into any field of red-tailed prairie rats will show the telltale glint of brown Vermite eggs nearby, for they are brood parasites. When a Vermite female is fat with clutch, she deposits her eggs near a rat's nest. At hatch, the younglings crawl to the shelter and overtake the nest, leaving them to wean on the rat mother's milk. Then, when Vermites reach of age, they outgrow the nest and consume their siblings.
It is in this stage many slavemasters capture Vermites, adulthood, where it has already bonded with its prairie rat mother. They assume wrongly that the Vermite is malleable, and with whip, water, and shackle will they turn pliant. The adult, however, is a clever beast, and at the moment of its freedom, it will immediately seek revenge against its captor. Only through reasoning will the Vermite befriend in later stages. Yet that does not a pet or slave an adult Vermite make. There is nothing in the Vermite disposition to make it more pliable than any other thinking beast.
From my experiences as the head Sage of the Ardals, I believe Vermites develop strong and strict social bonds only during the period of brood development. Though Vermites will consume their siblings (both Vermite and rat) in the nest, they never harm their mother: childhood development of the Vermite is essential. Thus, to capture and control the ratman is to capture and control the eggs. The successful slaver is thus tasked with seeking out eggs, not finding grown ratmen in the bushes.
A Vermite can be weaned on any milk, and given their hardy nature, will scarce fall ill to many of the diseases that could plague us. Vermites are not beholden to pox or miasma as we do, for I assume their coat filters the bad air around them. When they reach the age upon which they consume their siblings, the remaining Vermite will be as loyal a slave as any other, moreso than any fool's dream of owning a Salah!
Because of their upbringing, they develop considerable uncertainty about their own wellbeing. Difficulties with pronouncing the Owmsech make Vermite especially susceptible to problems with language, and thus they internalize their own inadequacies. For a good slave, you must groom your Vermite so that they become comfortable to speak man-languages. 'M's, 'P's, and 'B's, I find, are particularly challenging for Vermites. In fact, you can tell the maturity of a Vermite's age based on their speech and the words they employ.
Often, Vermites feel a call for home, as their lands are far off in the western mountains past the Salah waters deep in the caves. You must prevent, at all costs, on your slave's return, for you will surely lose them. Vermite societies, of which we know very little, are particularly brutal. Because of their magical and physical prowess, and their tendency to kill and eat their own kin, loose Vermites form harsh pantocracies not unlike the eastern Dwarf-hives.
In fact, the rat-principalities, as we know of the Vermite kingdoms in the mountains, have already driven out both the mountain elves and dwarf-hives. Much of what we know of the Vermite principalities comes from our limited experiences with the Urven, but even then it is quite limited.
As I speak, I would like to address a growing concern with regards to the possible immorality expressed by the ownership of Vermites. Many (though not all) Sages have discussed the seeming paradox with which merit-based Ardal might enslave these animals with such glee.
Two of my contemporaries come to mind. Sage Emeron of Sentinel and Sage Ormoc of Vendirsalam have both argued on the immorality of the Vermite slave trade. I find much of their concerns unfounded. In the second volume of Owmsech Lamentations, Emeron argues that the Vermite infestation is a product of human intervention:
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> "Vermites have graced forests and mountains. They've lived for millennia in crevices. Only when these spaces were removed did they slither into the nests of common rodents and become a problem. We seek their enslavement through the language of domestication, though we have neither truly enslaved nor domesticated their naturally free and wild hearts." (Emeron, 33.234)
Sage Ormoc makes a similar plea, of which I will also address:
> "To whom are Barmapats (for I will not use the disgusting word of Vermite) beholden? In Ardalian eyes, they would be the farmer who chances upon their kin and grooms them as pack mules, but these farmers have no chance nor thought to speak of life, love, and philosophy as these creatures do. The Barmapat does not seek chaos, murder, and misery: we heard too often stories of them skittering away into dust-dunes to wage their magick wars, but how many return? Is it not honorable, in a way, that when the dark recesses of your mind call you, you leave for a good death, without harm or trouble to your kin? These are the real thoughts of Barmapats, cleverer and kinder and gentler a creature than anything birthed from the hellfire wombs of mountain dragons that we call Owm." (Ormoc, 6.4.2)
Both Emeron and Ormoc speak to the Vermite nature as one hidden from human sight, animals which, by virtue of their primal call, reveal something grander. To Emeron, the Vermite is a free and wild beast at heart, waiting to roam like nature's knight-errants. The mage of a Vermite as a wandering good, like a quilled lady-of-the-woods, misinterprets the Vermite condition as a controlled entity.
To Emeron, the Vermite is a being worthy of its freedom, for we will never understand its noble and savage soul. Yet Emeron's great misstep is a belief rooted in the language of a wild-man, a Siralian westbound who sees the black forests as uncharted lands and not the sites of unseen dangers. Is it not a fact of Vermite nature that they eat and kill their own kin before they even step out of their nests? The brutish violence in which they mete out is a byproduct of their own brutality. To speak of a wild heart worth emancipation is to say the same of a mare, miloch, crow, or any other animal already under our control. The only difference is that the Vermite has the capacity to speak about their own nature, though such capacities are severely limited by their significant expressive deficiencies.
In comparison, Ormoc's argument is situated on the Vermite as a thinking being worthy of our own noninterference by virtue of their thinking capacity. Ormoc is drawing from his previous work on the Cogniladra, a discussion on the nature of Ardalian ethics. For the Sage who has not read the Cogniladra, I will briefly explain the position. Ormoc's argument is a mere extension of the positions he has outlined previously. Per chance a hound's owner strike his dog, and the dog whimpers in response. Is the owner, therefore, committing a vile act? The vileness of the act, Ormoc reasons, depends on an acknowledgment of the act as vile. After all, a man struck by lightning does not make lightning a murderer. This is crucial for the hound does not think of misery because he is attacked. Instead, it is responding to the act as unwanted.
The human, in comparison, responds to misery as misery, separate from the act. By Ormoc's own (purpled and laboriously expressed) reasoning, the Vermite extends beyond the limits of beasts because of its capacity to think beyond stimuli and understand misery.
Ormoc's position, however, is built on the fallacy of cognition as the primary indicator of soulfulness. The existence of cognitive self-evaluation is not a justifiable indicator of a beast's ability to reason. It is unsurprising that the Cogniladra, for all its pages on the distinction between men and mares, dogs, pigs, and any other animal of which we have domesticated, has spent little on dog-men and elves. Through Ormoc's own reasoning, to impute misery upon a thinking subject is an immoral act because we can generate such. Would then, by that reasoning, the actions of the Ardalians be considered the generating of ill-fate as we sling palepowder into Elven homes? Ormoc is suspiciously silent on the position of men and elves.
In fact, Ormoc's naive proposition ignores the nature of misery within thinking subjects already! Does crime and all manner of foul business not occur between humans? Should Siralians march upon Ardalsalam tomorrow, and we defend our borders, would both be engaged in a vicious cyclical generation of brutish misery? No, Ormoc seeks to wash away the baser nature of Vermites, like Emeron, and ignore their behaviour in favour of a revanchist imagination of a Vermite country, empire, or place somewhere, out there. There has been no such thing, and while there are exceptions of exceptional Vermite, the species, as a hole, has been doomed to fail.
To some, I may seem uncaring, but I would like to impress upon any readers that I am not seeking extermination or bondage because of a distaste for Vermites. Rather, I seek some sort of solution to a problem which has plagued men, rat or not. Just as how we tend to weeds, it is our responsibility to tend to the Vermite as best we can. Some readers may see my position as a nasty affair, seeking to legitimise violence upon these creatures, but my heart aches as much as any other at the site of their suffering. You would notice, as I have emphatically stated numerous times, that not once have I stressed their abuse. In fact, by sending them into the deep mountains where their warring and wayward people lay (in 'true' nature), would I not be sending them to more pain? A dog lost to nature simply becomes a wolf, and lives a life more brutish than any he'd live pampered as good hounds are.
I find it is, steadfastly, the goal of the proper human, if he is to be considered a proper human, to guide the Vermites under civilized and watchful gazes. We have, after all, been born under the watchful gazes of dragons ourselves, and we are hardly vicious and brutal beasts. We cannot let our sights be swayed by the mere chatter of Vermites who could speak, for their half-tongue is no more impressive than the mewing of a cat or the barking of a dog, the latter of which are languages we simply do not yet understand. We are so close to understanding the Vermite and their ways, why should we give up a history now, at this point?