Any discussion of necroentomology is, of course, incomplete without mentioning Megalara cylindraceus.

Though most well-known for its ecological impact in Archanea, Megalara cylindraceus is nearly ubiquitous, with its larval form found in any world with sufficient ambient divinity. Its growth and metamorphosis, however, are both dependent on several factors that human civilization tends to deny and most larvae never reach adulthood.

Different realms each have their own distinct morphs (in the zoological sense, not in the alchemical sense as discussed in Chapter Nineteen), but generally speaking, larval Megalara cylindraceus superficially resembles a cylindrical, hard-shelled beetle. This is an instance of convergent evolution, as it is actually directly descended from the Ichneumonoidea family of wasps and has no relation to Coleoptera.

Unlike other members of Ichneumonoidea, Megalara cylindraceus is both eusocial and specially adapted to utilizing corpses—specifically those of humans. When unimpeded, a colony will burrow beneath the skin and integrate with the host’s muscles, gaining control of the body so it can use it to seek out prey. These corpses, which appear to be reanimated but are simply being puppeteered (refer back to Chapter One), lack fine motor control and are approximately as competent at hunting as a Magvellian revenant (refer to Chapter Twenty). Their preferred prey tends to be humans, though they will not avoid feeding upon other living creatures should the need arise.

As the colony hunts and feeds, it will reproduce within the body (though uncommon, it is not unheard of for some species of insects to have a means of reproduction while immature). When the colony within a host reaches a critical mass, it will seek out areas with a high number of corpses, such as battlefields or graveyards. Once satisfied with a particular location, the colony will eat the current host from the inside out and divide into three to six smaller colonies, each of which will seek out their own suitable hosts. This forms the basic parasitic lifecycle of larval Megalara cylindraceus, and an individual specimen generally lives long enough under optimal conditions to repeat this cycle three or four times before it dies.

A colony of Megalara cylindraceus will, regardless of if it has found a host or not, typically rest during the day, be active during the night, and avoid densely populated areas. This behavior seems to exist to prevent early detection and elimination (as individuals that do not avoid detection would be regularly caught and purged), and its attempts at remaining out of sight are one of the main reasons why it has not yet been hunted to extinction in any world despite the threat it poses.

The other reason why it has not yet been hunted to extinction is because, quite frankly, Megalara cylindraceus larvae are not particularly good at what they do. Human cultures generally do not know about it specifically because it requires a very narrow set of circumstances to line up in order to thrive and it rarely ever finds itself in them.

One of the greatest obstacles Megalara cylindraceus faces is that, in all of its stages, it is notably averse to controlling any corpses which have been embalmed (though this aversion lessens as the chemicals degrade over the course of millennia). In his magnum opus, Thanatophages and their practical applications, the human alchemist Forneus observed that paraformaldehyde both inhibits the parasitic and eusocial behavior of Megalara cylindraceus and induces a type of ‘feeding frenzy’, where the disrupted colony will eat through a host instead of commandeering it. Independent research with other fixatives, preservatives, and embalming fluids has returned similar results.

Indeed, while Megalara cylindraceus is typically abundant in the worlds it is present in, widespread funerary practices generally prevent it from engaging in parasitism before it even has the chance to, rendering it little more than a peculiar scavenger unless the stars align.

Even if the stars do align, unlike most magical means of controlling the deceased, larval Megalara cylindraceus is only capable of limiting decomposition (through the secretion of pheromones that have a minor antibiotic effect) and completely lacks the ability to repair the body of the host. This places a particularly tight time limit on its lifecycle as a parasite, and given that most colonies are unable to find fresh corpses at both the beginning and end of their lifecycle, many end up eating their way through their host once it decays beyond usability.

As discussed in the previous chapter, insects have multiple stages of growth in their lifecycle. While there are plenty of insects with as-of-yet undiscovered adult forms, Megalara cylindraceus is not one of them. The circumstances for its maturation are, however, even harder to produce than the circumstances for any amount of relative success in its larval form.

To begin with, an individual larva of Megalara cylindraceus must first mature within a host, which requires it to complete its life cycle as a parasite at least once. As mentioned before, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence in nature, but as Thanatophages and their practical applications demonstrates, it is something that is relatively trivial to arrange in a controlled environment.

The mature larva then needs to ingest the blood of the divine, which it uses as both a signal to begin pupating and as a source of strength during metamorphosis. Forneus’ experiments involved the blood of an as-of-yet unidentified divine dragon, though experiments by later scholars have confirmed that blood sourced from any sufficiently powerful divine entity will also induce pupation.

Fomalhaut’s essay Death and Divinity posits that this is the reason Megalara cylindraceus is absent in worlds without blessing (as they would never be able to mature), though, like most of Fomalhaut’s theories, it is speculative at best and unable to be confirmed. He does, however, also suggest the uncharacteristically sensible conclusion that Megalara cylindraceus’ corpse-seeking behavior at the end of its parasitic life cycle might be the colony attempting to seek out a dead god in order to fulfill the conditions it needs to mature, though the odds of this occurring naturally are, while not quite outside of the realm of imagination, effectively zero.

Pupation is, unsurprisingly, also parasitic. Forneus’ sole successful experiment is our primary point of reference for this stage (the aforementioned experiments with the blood of non-dragon gods were all terminated over safety and ethical concerns that will become immediately apparent), and his exceptionally thorough notes paint a particularly gruesome picture.

Beginning roughly six weeks after administering the divine dragon blood, Forneus expressed what he described as an abnormally deep dissatisfaction with the progress his sample was making, and he believed these feelings to be strange as he was accustomed to experiments with lengthy incubation periods and had previously noted that he expected to see results in around half a year. Although his ability to self-assess his own mental state at the time is dubious given everything known about him, the benefits of both hindsight and our status as outside observers to his madness make it obvious that these incongruent feelings were likely felt due to the influence of the now divinely-empowered pupa (refer to Chapter Seven of The Malleability of Consciousness and Cognition for further information on how divine beings innately and often unintentionally distort the minds of those around them).

It took Forneus another six weeks to act on these urges, when on the eightieth day of the experiment he fed the pupa his own blood. There was an immediate shift in the tone of his research notes following this, where he expressed extreme elation and attachment towards the now rapidly growing creature, and numerous scholars have suggested based off of future events that the sample had inadvertently pushed him into forming a blood pact. As time passed, he began to feel the desire to remove parts of his own flesh and feed it to the Megalara cylindraceus sample, and he initially had no problems complying with these urges. The pain of severing his nondominant arm, however, appeared to grant him enough lucidity to briefly question the thoughts in his head and record his doubts, though the sample’s influence inevitably won him over and he voluntarily allowed the pupa to fuse with his body to feed upon him more directly.

The research sample continued to grow within the sealed ruins of Thabes for several millennia, maturing until it reached what we now understand to be its adult form. Spectraltemporal scrying has revealed that it bore a striking similarity to the (still unidentified) divine dragon whose blood it fed upon, though samples retrieved from the depths of Thabes have shown that the ‘scales’ of the ‘dragon’ were a chitinous exoskeleton and it was, in fact, still an insect. Due to the aforementioned lack of additional experiments it is unclear if it directly mimics the form of the blood donor or if the similarity here is purely coincidental.

Upon reaching adulthood, the sample began to reproduce again. The resulting larvae flooded the sealed ruins, searching for any corpses they could find. Due to the environment maintained by the seal on Forneus’ workshop, most of the cadavers found were in particularly good condition despite lacking any chemical preservation, making them the perfect hosts. The larvae had notably inherited minor divinity from their parent, and gained the ability to repair the bodies they inhabited as a result (the corpses now truly reanimated). The resulting ‘death masks’ (as they were later called by nearby settlements) were particularly robust and the adult Megalara cylindraceus was able to direct their behavior and aggression much like the dominant members of other eusocial insect species, though in the empty, sealed workshop this ability had yet to have any practical application.

The workshop was eventually unsealed and Forneus’ sample was slain shortly thereafter. The group of adventurers that felled this specific mature Megalara cylindraceus had previous experience in slaying the divine, the sample had practically no combat experience, and it had spent the several millennia prior to its defeat in a state of starvation, so it is currently believed that this exchange did not display the full extent of the abilities of a first-generation adult.

Believed to be either infernal or demonic, the Megalara cylindraceus corpse was left where it was and the workshop was sealed again. Astute readers will by now know that this was, of course, a mistake.

There were still plenty of colonies wandering around inside ready to mature, and there was an ample supply of divine blood for them to feed upon. If you have yet to read Ryugu’s masterpiece Hoshidan kodoku and similar malices, it details the exact mechanics that cause divinity to amplify when sealed within a confined area and we can see a similar phenomenon occur here: this population of Megalara cylindraceus was trapped in a feedback loop where, as they fed upon each other, only the strongest larva survived long enough to reproduce, and only the strongest of their offspring survived long enough to reproduce, and so on. During this period, none were able to mature fully (while it is suspected that some began to pupate, a lack of living humans to fuse with would have prevented any from progressing to adulthood), but the overall strength of their divinity rose and rose and rose until the ruins were unsealed again a millennium later.

What follows in the history of Archanea is considered by some to be the results of man-made events and not ‘natural’ enough to warrant inclusion in discussion of Megalara cylindraceus’ ecology or discussion of its ‘natural’ behavior, but these fools have no idea what they are talking about. This is a strange fallacy that many ecologists have bought into of late, where humans are considered a ‘dominant’ species and thus unable to participate in the so-called ‘natural order’. Even ignoring how Megalara cylindraceus as a species is primarily defined by the ways it preys upon and parasitizes humans (and thus cannot be discussed without mentioning their deep relationship), humans are only ‘dominant’ under a very narrow set of criteria which mostly revolves around broad and undefinable degrees of ‘civilization’ (which has only ever defended itself against Megalara cylindraceus through coincidence and luck). Even if you look at raw, individual power, humans are beneath dragons, who are in turn beneath gods. Can we really call them dominant if their so-called dominance relies on ignoring every way in which they are not? Is there a compelling reason to believe that the way humans have been manipulated on a societal level by Megalara cylindraceus is irrelevant to our understanding of it as a species? Does anthropocentrism have any place in our academic discourse?

Once the workshop was unsealed a second time and hapless human adventurers wandered in to provide hosts for the larvae, several nearby humans were compelled, like Forneus had been before them, to aid the present larval population of Megalara cylindraceus in their growth cycle. A number of individuals began to pupate, and, over the course of the next few centuries, they grew.

Despite being free to seek out sustenance outside the ruins, the first pupa to fully mature consumed its helpless, still-developing siblings. It is currently unclear if this behavior is innate in all populations of Megalara cylindraceus, if it was ingrained in this particular population by the prior millennia of adelphophagy, or if it was a reaction to the divinity present within its siblings.

Then, instead of leaving the ruins to directly feed on the local human population, it sought out another blood pact with a nearby human. Unlike previous blood pacts made in the pupal sage, the human involved was not compelled into performing any directly self-destructive acts and was instead driven through a cognitive link stronger than the one with Forenus to manipulate the local human population into worshipping the adult Megalara cylindraceus, which allowed it to both passively bolster its divinity and no longer have to seek out meals on its own. This cognitive link was notably bidirectional and allowed the human pactbearer to influence the behavior of the adult Megalara cylindraceus slightly, aiding it in asserting itself as an apostle of what it and others believed to be a god.

Early scholars believed that Megalara cylindraceus had deliberately orchestrated the creation of this religion, but our current understanding of entomoneurology implies otherwise.

As discussed in Chapter Seven of The Malleability of Consciousness and Cognition, humans interpret divinely influenced sensations and urges by filling in whatever information is missing with whatever they can rationalize, much in the same way they interpret cravings as a desire to eat a specific food and interpret nerve misfires during REM sleep as dreams. While more intelligent divine beings are able to interact socially with the humans they influence to engineer a desired result, there is no evidence that suggests that any stage of Megalara cylindraceus is capable of understanding and communicating with humans, and there is no evidence that suggests that its cognitive abilities are significantly more complex than any other insect. As we know from the species discussed in the previous chapter, this does not mean that it is unable to act with intent, but there is a perceptive gap between insects and mammals that makes it difficult for any direct communication to occur, and Megalara cylindraceus is likely limited to communicating vague emotions or sensations (which its pactbearer would then interpret as it pleased).

The incident in which Forneus removed his own arm, for instance, almost certainly was not due to a direct command to self-mutilate, but rather Forneus detecting that the pupa was hungry and, as a byproduct of the devotion it induced in him, he convinced himself that it was his responsibility to feed it. If a human with a more stable psyche had been placed in the exact same scenario, it likely would have sought out the numerous corpses in the workshop before resorting to its own flesh (though the end result would have been the same if it could not resist the pupa totally and completely).

Likewise, it is currently believed that the religion that formed around this adult specimen was the result of a loop of positive reinforcement: the adult would feel mild euphoria when worshipped (as established in Rapture and Awe) and would pass these feelings along to the pactbearer, directly (though unintentionally) rewarding it for establishing and expanding a faith. The dogma of the faith may then have served a similar role to the social engineering divine dragons perform, ensuring that members interpret the divine either in the ‘correct’ ways or at the very least in ways that are consistent with other members to ensure the faith persists.

While this second adult Megalara cylindraceus was briefly able to prosper (growing to roughly twenty times the size of Forneus’ sample), it was eventually slain by a subjugation force cobbled together by nearby human settlements. While through blind luck the subjugation force did not make the same mistake of resealing the workshop with the Megalara cylindraceus corpse inside, no Archaneans to date have been able to recognize the larvae for what they are, setting the stage for a third adult the size of a small country to emerge again a millennium later (where, in some worldlines, it was promptly slain by humans once again).

Within the Archanean population, there is a clear pattern of Megalara cylindraceus being slain upon reaching maturity only to come back stronger later. While some of this can be attributed to the abnormal kodoku-like environment that it was initially trapped in, Decarabia, the leading researcher of Megalara cylindraceus, has suggested that this is a natural or otherwise ‘intended’ part of its lifecycle.

As with most other species, it is unclear if our predecessors (who were far more prone to meddling than we are) had a hand in Megalara cylindraceus’ genesis (what those below refer to as ‘intelligent design’), but Decarabia has argued that intent would explain nearly all of the difficulties it faces in its developmental cycle. In her early work, Eschatological Parasitoids, she writes:

“Megalara cylindraceus is set up to fail. With larval hunting patterns that put it at direct odds with an apex predator it can’t live without, requirements for maturation that are nearly impossible to find without outside intervention, and an adult stage seemingly destined to meet a bloody, violent end, one wonders how it could possibly have evolved in this way. But what if it hadn’t evolved to be like that?

“The vast majority of Megalara cylindraceus will never know what it is like to be an adult, so why would the adult form even exist in the way it does? It’s exceptionally elaborate for something that, as far as we’re aware, has only ever existed thrice despite larval Megalara cylindraceus being present practically everywhere, but suppose this was intentional.

“At first glance, one may view the happenings of Archanea as selection events, where natural processes cull individuals with traits lacking fitness for their environment (in this case, becoming large enough to catch the attention of humans), but is it really? After each death of an adult, the next generation feeds on its corpse and grows exponentially larger and stronger, so this actually provides plenty of long-term benefits for Megalara cylindraceus as a species. What if, like how Acanthocephalus dirus and Leucochloridium paradoxum manipulate their hosts in ways that make them more visible to predators in order to progress through their own lifecycles, the adult stage also serves to signal to a predator it needs in order to grow? The only particularly unusual aspect of this from a parasitological perspective is that Megalara cylindraceus will continue to grow with each cycle, making its lifecycle less of a ‘loop’ and more of a ‘spiral’ that expands ever outwards. Its upper limit is only enforced by the environment’s ability to produce a predator capable of killing it, and if one does not exist, left unchecked, it will render the world it has found itself in inert.

“Suppose Megalara cylindraceus is meant to be like a bomb with a fuse that is difficult to accidentally light. Forneus may have stumbled his way into setting it off in the same way a hound may pick up a knife with its mouth and accidentally slash someone with it, but could we not view the difficulty in which Megalara cylindraceus takes to ‘activate’ as a safety mechanism to ensure it does not ‘go off’ prematurely? Would it not be the perfect weapon for ending a world, provided you aren’t in a rush? One which doesn’t activate unless told, and one which never ends until its purpose is achieved?”

Decarabia goes on to claim that Megalara cylindraceus may be a weapon created by our predecessors meant to cleanse insubordinate worlds, and while I am not entirely convinced on that aspect, intelligent design does seem to be the most plausible explanation for the many quirks of its maturation process.

She does bring up a particularly interesting point, though, by mentioning Acanthocephalus dirus and Leucochloridium paradoxum, which each use an intermediary host to attract and enter their primary hosts. While she asserts that the signal is to drive a cycle of growth that cannot occur without an adult dying first, what if the ‘signal’ being sent is not for the humans that kill it, but to catch the eye of something else? We ourselves only became aware of the adult form of Megalara cylindraceus once the third adult had destroyed several Archanean worldlines, and we know that divine dragons only learned of it after the second adult and only a small group of humans were ever aware of the first; who is to say that, as the generations continue, it will not catch the notice of some unknown entity that exists above us? This is what I believe may be the intended purpose of Megalara cylindraceus: attracting the attention of the inhabitants of higher realms out of a desire to prove that they exist.

A fourth adult is on pace to reach maturity in most extant Archanean worldlines within the next century, so perhaps we will get an answer soon.