7: The Hiveheart

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Different hives construct their hiveheart differently, but the Redstone River Hive’s heart is fairly average, so far as Tyk is aware. It’s made up of fourteen people, which is a little on the low side for its size but not markedly so, and the membership are a mix of those who gained their rank via mastery in some hive-critical duty that the hiveheart needs to consider regularly, and those who gained their rank by support of the people. Hetta is the former, a member by virtue of her unquestioned leadership in matters of hive resource and population management, but she has the presence of one who could have gained her place through popular support, had she chose. All of the hiveheart do; an aura of confidence and duty almost overwhelms Tyk as she and her parents take their places on the ledge reserved for invited consultants.

They are not the last ones to arrive; only thirteen of the fourteen places for the hiveheart are occupied when they enter. The seven women rest comfortably on their ledges, but one set of gripping bars is empty. There’s an awkward wait before Kesyn, the master singer of the hive, flutters in and takes his place.

“Apologies,” he hums. “There’s a lot happening in the wingsong right now.”

“Then we’ll make this as quick as we can, so that you can get back to work,” Hetta says. “We seem to have a baby star on our hands.”

“More than one,” Kesyn says. “Only this one seems to be close enough to be our responsibility, but there are reports of falling eggs across half of the continent. Maybe further; distant reports haven’t come in yet.”

“How many?”

“We have reports of twenty six objects sighted falling from the sky so far. Of those, eleven are within range of a nest to have been inspected. Eight of those have been star eggs, six have hatched living larvae. Some have hatched multiple larvae, for a total of fourteen live hatchlings.”

Tyk runs the numbers. If three stars to an egg is standard, then it looks like most of the other babies, if not all, aren’t alone like Smon. Poor Smon.

“Do those numbers include the two falling objects inspected by our hive?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lot of things falling out of hive range,” remarks one of the men, somebody whose name Tyk doesn’t know.

Kesyn hesitates a moment before answering, humming a ‘bad news’ prepatory note. “Most of the eggs,” he says, “fell over the sleeplands.”

Nobody is happy to hear this. Sleeplands exist in patches all over the continent; or it might be more accurate to say that living lands exist in patches on a sleepland continent, since the sleeplands take up about half of the continent’s area. Vast areas of earth hollowed of edible sweetroot and fungus, the sleeplands aren’t unsurviveable, with preparation, but they’re certainly unliveable long-term. They are areas where the ground is ‘sleeping’, where roots and fungi and bugs are busy growing into the old tunnel networks of depleted hives and turning the waste of generations of people back into usable food and materials. When the Redstone River Hive is fully depleted, its members will have to scout out such areas for somewhere fully recovered and set up a new hive, allowing the old hive territory to sleep; that is the cycle of the land. But until such areas are recovered, the sleeplands are largely uninhabited aside from traders and travellers and particularly daring messengers, or small bands of the vicious and unpredictable Hiveless who have been driven from their own homes for crimes too unforgiveable to give them a place in any hive. Sleeplands are places that take preparation, resources, experience and luck to travel through. Lone larvae out there are as good as dead.

Tyk wonders just how much food the larvae have in their strange eggs. Just how much time they can buy themselves, waiting to see if they happened to land on a popular enough trade route to be found by a kind trading party.

“Has anything like this happened before?” Hetta asks Kepat, the master lorekeeper.

With an awkward beat of his wings, tattering and dulling with age, Kepat gives the response that everyone expects. “No. Not in all of recorded history. Either the life cycles of the stars are long enough that the last hatching predates civilisation itself, or this isn’t supposed to happen at all.”

“That’s a possibility.” Hetta rubs her mandibles together thoughtfully. “It may be that some batch of wandering stars, straying too close, accidentally dropped their eggs. The stargazers should analyse the skies, and see if they can find such wanderers and trace their path.”

“Um,” Tyk says, timidly. She feels her parents stiffen beside her, possibly shocked or affronted at her audacity in addressing the hiveheart like this, or possibly braced to defend her against repercussions, she doesn’t know. But she has no choice but to speak; she has information, and she doesn’t know the proper way to bring it up in a place like this.

The hiveheart, for their part, do not look affronted. They look to her and wait for her to speak. Somehow, that makes things worse.

Tyk bites down her nervousness and forces the words out. “I-I don’t think this was a mistake,” she says. “This is what the eggs a-are supposed to do, I think.”

“Why do you think that?” one of the men asks. Tyk doesn’t know him, but he speaks with such confidence and authority that he must be a major presence up in the tower. She hears her father’s stance subtly change on her mother’s horns beside her.

“W-well, the eggs are designed for it. Or Smon’s is, anyway.”

“Smon?” someone else asks.

“The star larva,” Hetta explains. “Go on, Tyk.”

“The egg is very, very thick, and tough. You can see the burn marks on it from the fire. It’s big inside, and Smon didn’t break her way out of it; there’s a part that opens up and can close again, like an entrance stone. There’s a lot of space in there, and she uses it as a little burrow, so I think their eggs are designed so they don’t need care right after birth. A-also, she has some of her own food in there. I don’t know how much, but it’s clear that she’s expected to feed herself for a while after being born.”

“That suggests that they don’t expect parental care right after hatching,” a heavily bejewelled woman who Tyk recognises as Lian, the hive’s master architect, says. “That doesn’t mean that they’re supposed to hatch on the ground.”

“N-no, it doesn’t, but there’s other stuff that does,” Tyk says. “Like I said, the shell is very thick and hard and fire resistant. Also, inside were two more larvae who didn’t survive the fall, and I saw that they were webbed firmly into soft protrusions inside the egg, to hold them safely in place during the fall. I saw where Smon had cut herself free of the webbing, too. They were all protected in there, and there was silk attached to the outside of the shell, to help with the fall, I think.”

“Plenty of animals put some kind of protective silk on their eggs.”

“Yeah, but this wasn’t all over the egg. It was tied to the top. It dragged behind it as the egg fell. And I don’t think it got torn or burned off in the fall, because even though the egg itself had scorch marks on it, the big patch of silk tied to it wasn’t burned at all.”

“It wasn’t burned?” someone asks. “How is that possible?”

“It’s star silk, one would expect it to be fire resistant,” Hetta says. “I saw it, too, and Tyk’s right; the shell was scorched and the silk wasn’t, so it couldn’t have burned off the shell. It was a huge square of silk tied to the top.”

“Like a driftflower seed,” Kesyn says. The men hum in understanding; several of the women look confused, so he goes on to explain. “Every thirteen years, driftflowers bloom and release their seeds up into the sky. They grow very, very high, far higher than any plant I’ve ever seen; high enough that they can release their seeds into the wingsong stream. Their seeds have these little cups of plant silk on them that catch the wind and help them sail through the sky and stay aloft. They say that when they drop out of the stream to land on the ground to grow, after travelling farther than a person travels in their lifetime, they fall very, very slowly, trapping the air in their cups.”

“I saw the silk on the egg,” Kesan says, apparently emboldened by his daughter speaking up. “It did look like it could do the same thing.”

Tyk flicks her mandibles in assent. The egg had fallen strangely slowly, with that silk dragging behind it. That must be why. It was designed to slow the fall, meaning that the egg was designed to fall.

“We have no idea,” Hetta says, “what the ramifications of all of this are.”

Kesyn flicks his mandibles in a dismissive sort of gesture. “It really comes down to two options, doesn’t it? We can’t leave… Smon, is it?… to die. Either we raise her as an orphan in the hive or we take her to someone who can.”

And the attention, somehow, for some reason, is back on Tyk.

This feels like more of a dream than watching a god egg hatch. The hiveheart are interested in what she has to say. Why? She hasn’t spent all that much time with Smon. They could easily learn the things that she has learned themselves. There’s no reason for her to be considered an expert in this.

Except that they have clearly done the same calculations about her destiny that she has. Everyone knows what the conclusion of this meeting will be. Everyone knew before it started. They’re just having it because they need to have it.

The problem is that they’re right. Smon will need to be taken somewhere else.

“I don’t think that we can raise her here,” Tyk admits reluctantly. “I tried giving her food, and I don’t think she can eat it. She needs her own, special food, food that I don’t know how to find. She needs other stars, I think. They’re clearly born in groups of three; I don’t think it’s good for her to be raised without other stars. We probably could raise her here if we absolutely had to, but…”

“But other stars are down here,” Kepat concludes, “and it’s best for her to be with them. Besides, she will have to climb back into the sky eventually.” He speaks as if the conversation is a foregone conclusion, and Tyk realises that this has probably already been discussed on the wingsong, between the hives who found themselves suddenly saddled with larval gods. “In the stories, those who want to speak directly to the stars always go to Starspire to bargain with them. We don’t know how old these stars will be when they need to ascend, but they will need to do so eventually; that seems like the best location to gather them.”

It’s obvious when he says it. But still.

Along the Northeastern coast of the continent stretches a chain of mountains tall enough to block the wingsong stream, blocking all communication beyond that point. A chain of mountains that the oldest stories say were born of starfire themselves, pouring and pooling up into peaks and destroying all that lay in its path. And the tallest peak, jagged and steep and higher than even the strongest could hope to fly, rising to meet the stars themselves, was the Starspire. No living person has ever made it to the top of the spire and returned. The stories say that one could reach the sky from there, that legends long dead had done so and spoke to the stars, but who knows how reliable such stories are?

Having witnessed a star egg fall from the sky and hatch, Tyk is a lot more confident in such stories than she has ever been before.

“It’s a long journey,” her mother says, speaking up for the first time. “Long, and dangerous. Surely there are gathering areas that are closer.”

“The eggs are fairly spread out,” Kepat says. “No matter where we gather them, it’ll be a long journey for some.”

“But unless you’ve miraculously contacted previously unknown hives on the other side of the mountains, Starspire isn’t remotely central. It’s a long journey for everyone. Why not gather them at a nearby hive and move them when they’re older?”

“Because we don’t know how old they’ll need to be before they have to reach the sky,” Kesyn says, tolerating (Tyk thinks) San’s unnecessarily aggressive rudeness very well.

“It won’t be before their truebrothers are born, surely.”

“How can you know that? Our boys must be born in sunlight; how can you be so sure that theirs don’t need to be born in the sky? We don’t know how old the larvae are when they catch fire; perhaps they grow flames instead of a carapace, very early in childhood. Is it a good idea for any hive to be close to a hive of suddenly erupting stars? No; we cannot afford to make such assumptions. They must be taken to the Starspire as soon as possible.”

“Tyk,” Hetta says gently. “We must ask you – ”

San steps forward, physically putting herself between Tyk and the hiveheart, and this appears to be the threshold for audacity; they all shrink back or rear in shock as she says, firmly, “My daughter is staying here.”

“She is a wanderer,” Lian says. “What other purpose – ”

“She is a child,” San counters. “She is a child, and her place is at home with her hive and her parents. If she ventures as an adult, perhaps decides to become a trader or somesuch, then that will be her choice and I’ll have no grounds to contest it. But until Ketyk’s wings are coloured – and she’s young enough that Ketyk hasn’t even been born yet, let me remind you – she lives in my burrow and she stays with me. So unless you’re willing to raise Smon here for that long, you’ll have to find someone else to – ”

“I’ll do it,” Tyk says.

San stops, mandibles clicking together in surprise. She turns to face her daughter. “Tyk, you don’t have to do this. Don’t let them pressure you.”

“They’re not. I want to go. It’s my destiny, mother. Let me fulfil it.”

San sways her claws thoughtfully. Atop her horns, Tyk can hear the very faint hum of Kesyk’s wings as the pair have a brief discussion in the makeshift personal language that truepairs develop with each other over time, a discussion that would be gibberish to her even if she could hear it properly. She knows what calculations they’re running – technically, they have authority in this matter. This isn’t something that the hiveheart can force on anyone, and Tyk is too young to be under her own jurisdiction in such matters. But in practical terms, there’s a baby god who needs to be moved, and she’s already bonded quite publicly with Tyk, and everyone else in the hive will have reached the same conclusions about Tyk’s destiny as the hiveheart has. If Tyk going on this journey is the will of the hiveheart, and the will of the hive at large, and the will of the gods, and the will of Tyk herself… how much control can they realistically exert over the situation? In the face of such odds, is it a good idea to try?

“You don’t have to do this,” Kesan says, echoing San’s words a moment earlier.

“I know.” Tyk has been running her own calculations. Those marked by a wandering star often have uncertain destinies, as their wanderlust can seize them at different times and to different ends. Some become explorers; some lead the refugees from spent hives in travelling to establish a new one; a great many become traders. Some wander off into the sleeplands or the ocean or some similar inhospitable region and are never heard from again. And the wonderful thing about this particular destiny, about being chosen by a wanderer to lead Smon on this long and perilous journey, is that the journey has an ending. This is a destiny that Tyk can fulfil.

If Tyk does this, she can come home. Home to a hive that isn’t raising her with the sombre expectation that she’ll someday leave them. Home triumphant and unsaddled by destiny, having achieved the job she was marked by; home and able to fulfil any duty she wants, do anything she wants, with no expectations, no sense that she’s choosing wrong. Her parents are acting like she’s being sent away too young, but this? This is the one future in which her destiny doesn’t send her away.

She steps around her mother to face the hiveheart, and her mother lets her. “I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll take Smon to the Starspire.”

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