Eusocial crows. Theyâre fascist. The Intur came out pretty, but Iâll make sure that their destruction looks far and away more beautiful than letting them be. Seven castes and two superstructures are represented here: minors, medians, and majors of the child-masked and crow-masked Intur, which swarm into the javelin-throwing platform marked âBurial at Homeâ as well as a seventh caste which is a bit more esoteric, each bearing single eyes which can be assembled into a fully functional compound eye. This eye forms a single extreme-resolution image, and eclipses out the sun. Weâve already met one of these in the comic but the protags wonât know what she is for a very long time. All Intur pool their minds into a metacognitive entity known as the Black Sun. Sheâs a colossal emergent intelligence and the main antagonist of the story. A member of a similar, now dead hive guesses at their motivations under the cut.
âHave you ever thought about how small we are? The universe we exist in can hardly be said to know weâre even here. There is nothing after we die. Beneath each of our faiths, we knew that. Our doubts broadcast loud and clear each time our thoughts were consumed late at night by the thought of nothing. We set to thinking, what if, instead of faith in life after death, we instead were offended the promise that we could never die? We were so small. But, at last, in our swarming nakedness, we had the chance to create something impossible. A vast living thing. In defiance of everything that makes life on earth what it is. Nothing mortal can promise that you will never die, of course. The royal alchemist never drinks his own immortality potions. So we made something that could. And we shared ourselves with it, piece by piece, offering it everything we were in exchange for filling our minds with its vastness. We could feel it, every waking moment, that the vast living thing that was us could never die, and all the pieces of ourselves we offered to it would stay with it forever. All it was capable of forgetting were the things about ourselves we hated. And the thing about ourselves we hated more than anything else was our mortality and every reminder of such a thing. The sight of people just like us who were not vast. It became too much to bear. We wanted to save them. And when we could not do that, we no longer wished to see them. We thought we had done the impossible, creating a vast living thing. But it is either truly impossible for a living thing to be anything but infinitesimally small in the universe, or it was never truly life, not as we know it. Either way, the thing no longer exists, and I do.â
