Mother Carmun

“People babble about Wights ‘ascending’ all the time. It’s nonsense. Not because they can’t—oh, they absolutely can—but because the instant a Wight tries to climb the ladder, every Sentient above them stomps their fingers. The only reason Carmun’s still alive is that nobody thinks she matters.”

— Soki Noles

The Preenwight Behind the Mirror

Mother Carmun is no mere cave-haunting parasite. She is M’Thrixuss, a Preenwight born of the Vice-resonance of Pride—one of the most ambitious and treacherous strains of Tertia known. Where most Preenwights are content to manipulate, humiliate, and dominate from the shadows, Carmun has always hungered for more. Her goal is nothing less than apotheosis: to ascend past the ranks of Secundus and claw her way toward Primus status, joining the ranks of the Supersentients who dwarf entire Courts.

Such ambition is unheard of among her kind… and for good reason. A Tertia attempting upward evolution attracts predators like blood in the water. Yet Carmun persists, fueled by centuries of careful plotting and the belief—perhaps justified, perhaps delusional—that she stands on the threshold.

Dubhan’s Shadow: The First Master

In the age before the Reformed Solar Commonwealth found stable subspace navigation, Carmun bound herself to Sephiran Dubhan, one of history’s most brilliant and dangerous kthonikers. With Dubhan, she glimpsed the architecture of ascension:

the mathematics of Vice-layer resonance,

the siphoning of multi-Vice harmonics,

the carving of subspace cysts,

and the first hints of Primii behavior.

Dubhan never trusted her, and Carmun never forgave him for being right to do so. Their partnership was a duel disguised as research. Dubhan sought to understand her. Carmun sought to use him. And each learned more than the other intended.

When Dubhan vanished from history, Carmun’s ascent stalled. Worse: she had made enemies. Sentients who sensed her trajectory closed in, eager to break or bind her. She had to hide, abandoning schemes centuries in the making.

She found refuge in the Cave of Narcissus, one of Dubhan’s many laboratories—in a place where Pride-radiance pulsed like a heartbeat and the veil thinned like old paper.

It was here she slept and watched.
And waited for her next opportunity.

The Three Offerings

Centuries later, three archaeology interns stumbled into the cave: hungry, frightened, and slowly marinating in the Vice Carmun needed most. She watched them as their desperation turned inward, selfishness blooming like mold in their shared confinement. Their vanity ripened them.

That was when she stepped forward—taking the name “Mother Carmun,” borrowed from an obscure Old Earth figure Dubhan once compared her to. Whether the Sisters understood the implications or merely liked the sound of it no longer matters.

Carmun exploited their pride.
Then fed it back to them.
Then bound them to her.

She molded them into a triune coven, a single entity with three mouths and three hands. They believe themselves ascendant scholars, self-made witches, pioneers of forbidden knowledge. They do not see the leash. They do not feel the hook.

But Carmun does.
And each ritual, sacrifice, and stolen secret they offer her is another rung on her ladder toward ascension.

The Hunger for the Rat-Thing

Carmun knows the truth that her “daughters” do not: the crystal skull’s cypher was only one of many. Sephiran Dubhan scattered his knowledge across a network of encrypted artifacts and recursive archives, each requiring different keys, different skulls, different tones, different combinations of sensory inputs.

But there is one place where all his cyphers converge.

His Rat-Thing Familiar.

A perfect, horrid archive.
The sum of decades of occult experimentation.
A brain full of keys.
A body full of secrets.
And a consciousness loyal to no one but Dubhan himself.

If Carmun gains the Rat-Thing, she believes she can:

reconstruct Dubhan’s full ladder to ascension,

graft additional Vice-resonances into herself,

and begin the dangerous metamorphosis toward Secundus status.

She is likely wrong about how easy it would be.
She is certainly right about the danger.

And the Sisters, blinded by their collective Pride, are mere means to her end.

A Tertia on the Edge of Evolution

What makes Mother Carmun uniquely terrifying is not her current power—it is her potential. She is a creature designed to dominate Pride, but she has learned to Mimic the tastes of:

Indulgence, through manipulation of her Sisters’ desires,

Covetousness, via accumulation of Dubhan’s lore,

Truculence, when cornered, and

even the anti-life stillness of Despair, in the long centuries she spent silent and alone in the cave.

This is how Sentients arise: by expanding their Vice-spectrum until identity crystallizes into something larger. Carmun has taken several steps on that path—steps dangerous enough that if the Sentients ever realized it, they’d tear her apart atom by atom.

But hidden beneath Ariel, buffered by layers of crystal and secrecy, she believes she is safe.
She is not.
But she is dangerous enough for it not to matter—yet.

Relationship to the Sisterhood

To the Sisters, Carmun is:

teacher and mother,

muse and mentor,

oracle and patron.

To Carmun, the Sisters are:

batteries,

tools,

conduits of Vice,

and disposable bridges toward greatness.

Their triune will is strong, but Carmun manipulates them effortlessly. Their collective Vanity blinds them to the fact that she is already shaping them for her own metamorphosis.

The Sisterhood thinks they use her.
Carmun knows she uses them.