6: A Destiny Forged

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For several seconds, nobody moves.

“Oh, come on!” Tyk ducks around her mother and heads for the egg. “She’s not going to hurt you. She’s just a baby. See?” She marches right up to Smon before her mother can grab her and sticks her head between Smon’s mandibles to make her point. Smon, of course, does not try to eat her.

That seems to be enough for the hive as a whole, who surge forward, chattering.

“That egg is huge!”

“Has this happened before? Does anybody know if this has happened before? Is a lorekeeper here yet? Somebody find a lorekeeper!”

“Forget lorekeepers, somebody find a doctor! Half her body is missing!”

“Would any doctor even know how to treat a star?”

“Well we have to do something! We can’t have a baby god die here!”

“She’s still covered in birth silk. If we get that off, we can get a better look at the injuries.” This last speaker is one of the senior men, and in response, four men fly over to start carefully cutting the strange-looking silks off Smon.

Smon does not take to this very well. Ignoring their soothing, calming wingsong, she squawks in alarm at the sudden approach, leaping up onto her feet, and when they start cutting at the silks, she squawks again and starts pushing them off. Normally, a group of men would have no problem with a single larva, but Smon has a size advantage – she smacks Keyarna, one of the senior tower constructors, away over the crowd and he hits the ground hard, rolling.

If this keeps up, somebody is going to get hurt. Tyk raises mandibles, claws and tail in the most aggressive gesture she can manage. “Back off!”

Instantly, the men do. Whether because of Tyk’s warning, Smon’s reaction, or both, they back away enough for Tyk to get between them and Smon, and Smon to flee back into her egg.

“I knew she was dangerous!” Kesan hovers over Keyarna, who’s already being checked over by various friends and family.

“I’m fine,” Keyarna grumbles, getting to his feet and flying up to his truesister’s horns. Everyone relaxes slightly at this evidence that he can still indeed fly.

“That’s not the point! She attacked you!”

“No, she didn’t!” Tyk snaps. “You all attacked her!”

“We were just helping with – ”

“How was she supposed to know that? She doesn’t know you, and she doesn’t have a mama here to calm her down! How would you like it if a bunch of strangers took their teeth to your body?”

“The silks have to come off.”

“Do they? Why? They’ll fall off on their own, won’t they? Smon is smart, for a larva. She can do all kinds of things herself. She has the unfathomable wisdom of stars. We can’t just assume that we know what’s best for her and blame her when she disagrees.”

Tyk expects pushback. She’s just a child, one with no particular expertise or standing within the hive, or even within her own peer group. She’d publicly debating her own father (disrespectful) after threatening a group of men (highly dishonourable; men are fragile and easily injured with even a simple warning bite, so if you have a problem with a man, you take it up with his truesister), spouting what even she recognises is mostly nonsense. She knows that once the anger wears off, she’ll be incredibly embarrassed by this very childish display, and she expects people to admonish her and tell her to stand down.

They don’t.

Everyone present watches her, silently. Her mother looks worried; the members of the hiveheart who are present look interested. Everyone, Tyk realises, is running the same calculation in their heads, and reaching the same conclusion.

A daughter of the hive is unexpectedly claimed by a wandering star at birth. A star egg falls from the sky, something that has never happened in all of known history, and the wanderer’s child finds it, witnesses it hatch alone, bonds with the baby god inside. Said child immediately has a more positive relationship with the baby than any of the rest of the hive. Nobody knows how to get this baby home, but she can’t stay here. It’s obvious that she’s going to need to be taken somewhere.

With dread curdling in her stomach, Tyk sees her future laid out before her, and the plan of the gods that they wove her destiny into suddenly make stark and horrible sense.

A heavily jewelled mass near the front of the crowd shifts, immediately getting everyone’s attention. Hetta, one of the most decorated members of the hive and undisputed head of resource organisation within it, steps forward, sunlight glinting off gems so thickly decorating her carapace that they’re almost a second shell. “Tyk,” she says.

Tyk, without even meaning to, shrinks back. The mere fact that someone like Hetta knows her name makes her feel, somehow, like she’s in trouble.

But all Hetta says is, “This larva. How can we help her, right now? Food, perhaps?”

“Um. I… I tried giving her food, but I don’t think she eats our food? She has her own food; star food. Inside the egg.”

People murmur in confusion at this, but Hetta ignores them. “Very well. Then we will head back to the hive. The hiveheart must have an urgent meeting. Tyk, you will join us.” She skims the crowd. “San, Kesan. You will remain and – ”

“We will stay with our daughter,” San says firmly.

“Ah, yes. Of course. Yat, Keyat.” Hetta picks out another of the largest hive members and her truebrother. “You will keep an eye on this baby, keep her safe. If anything should happen, send word to the hive immediately.” She turns and walks away from the egg with such certain steps that a good half of the hive present follow her immediately. Many linger, but it’s clear that this is no time to crowd the egg, and they’re soon cajoled or badgered away by friends, the movement of the crowd or, in particularly stubborn cases, high-ranking hive members directly enforcing Hetta’s will. Tyk wants to stay, of course (what if Keyat tries to cut Smon’s silks off again and causes another incident?), but her father is at her horns, badgering her, and she feels that it’s best to obey him before her mother loses patience and physically carries her away.

On the way back to the hive, Tyk tells her parents about Smon’s strange behaviour, answering all their questions as best as she can remember. They seem as puzzled by the star as she is. She’d expected them to have had some insight, since they’d raised two daughters in the past, but all they can say is that Smon is indeed very different to normal larvae. Whether that’s an individual thing or a star thing is impossible to know.

“It would be a mistake,” San says, “to assume that the stars are any more like us than they are like the bugs or the fish or the echo flies. All over the planet are beings who do things differently. If a baby crab is different to a baby person, would you be surprised? Nor should we be surprised by differences in Smon.”

“Crabs are beasts,” Tyk points out. “Smon is smart, like a person.”

“The opposite may be true. No larva can count as soon as they’re hatched; stars might be so smart that to them, we are as beasts. To Smon, your behaviour might be as a crab is to you.”

Tyk thinks about this. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t think that’s right. Stars might be smarter or might be stupider than us; I don’t know about that. But if we’re like beasts to them, Smon doesn’t know it.” She remembers Smon excitedly collecting her words, imitating her gestures, trying to share some sort of information about numbers that Tyk didn’t have the context to understand, recognising Tyk’s concern about her lack of appetite and getting some of her own food to eat in front of Tyk so that Tyk would not worry. Smon had been excited about everything, but the way she inspected the bamboo and the grass had been fundamentally different to the way she had related to Tyk.

“Well,” San says. “I suppose we can only wait and see what stars are like. I imagine that the lorekeepers are very busy right now, combing every fragment of history for any sign that this has ever happened before in all of sung history.”

“The world is a lot older than sung history,” Kesan says. “It could be lost completely.”

“I hope not.”

But he’s almost certainly right. Unpredictable wanderers come in and out of the sky sometimes, but among the stable stars, those whose presence could be relied upon, appearance or disappearance are extremely rare. Perhaps new stars are very occasionally born or die, or perhaps they merely come or leave occasionally, and no birth or death has been witnessed in history at all; either way, the life cycle of a star must be very, very long. Tyk doesn’t know whether there has been any consensus among lorekeepers on whether stars even have a life cycle. In the stories (which are of course fiction, but give a good idea of what the general consensus of facts are in the assumptions they make), stars are sometimes depicted as having relatives or being capable of death, and sometimes as being eternal beings, neither born nor killed. If this situation, a star being born upon the planet, is recorded anywhere in history, it won’t be in some random scrap that needs to be tracked down. Something like that would be well known among lorekeepers already.

And everything about Smon’s behaviour, her knowledge, her supplies within her egg, suggests that landing aground is normal and expected for her kind. So star births must be very, very rare, having not occurred since before recorded history.

The hive is visible from some distance away, a subtle mound dwarfed by a huge tower atop it. Most of the actual hive is of course the tunnels belowground, invisible from the surface, but the tower is a dead giveaway as to its location, a cone of struts and mortar reaching all the way up into the wingsong stream high, high above, where the singers collect and distribute messages between hives. The stargazers work up there too, meaning that by default, most of the important men’s jobs end up being done up there since that’s where most of the important men already happen to be. The tower is the opposite of the deep tunnels; a men’s place, not because women are necessarily forbidden, but because it’s physically too dangerous and too much effort for them to get up there in anything other than a dire emergency. Tyk is happy to see that the tower looks to be mostly intact, with only a few peripheral struts and sections shaken loose. It’s built to withstand wind and rain, so perhaps the shaking of the ground presented no problem.

The trio move closer, until the large squares of half-woven fabric are visible on the scaffolding, then the green and red haze of the silkvines sheltering the moth farms high above, and then the bright flashes of weavers and singers and various other workers flitting about, and then, under the tower, the entrance to the hive proper below. The positioning of the Redstone River Hive is such that the tower can be built directly over the entrance, meaning that entrance guards aren’t necessary; the entrance is a wide tunnel of fired mortar decorated by gemstones and intricate carvings as far in as the sunlight can reach, and then even further. The decoration continues past the upper storerooms, where goods for use on the surface or near the entrance are sheltered, past the small guard chambers unused for generations except for the rare occasions when somebody needs to keep an eye out for vermin, and into the main chamber.

It is a testament to the prosperity of the hive that the upper levels can be kept well lit with glow pools almost all the time. Tyk knows the layout of her home blind, of course, but even if she’d been a stranger, the pools of fluid glowing a faint yellow would illuminate the patterns of jewels in the ceiling, the entrances to the different tunnel networks for living and working and mining. The dome is vast, and the gems high, high up looked almost like very pale stars, reflecting the light from pools up on the walkways and tunnel entrances high in the dome. Currently the pools are uncharacteristically dim; perhaps the impacts caused them to overflow and they’ve been recently refilled. Keeping the pools bright involves harvesting a particular fungus to feed to the water; Tyk wonders whether the same fungus would feed Smon, and help her glow.

The entrance to the hiveheart chamber isn’t special. It’s one tunnel among many, with no particular mark or decoration to distinguish it from the others; one of the many tunnels that Tyk is aware of, but has no particular reason to visit most of the time. Parents by her side and dread in her belly, she goes to meet with the hiveheart.

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