The Bee Dungeon

The Fourth of the Seventh hovered as still as she could. She was flying in front of the window to the King’s own hive, the giant one made of entire trees. She had never dared to come so close...but apparently the First of the Fifth’s soldiers had been invited inside, and so had led her there. She remained outside but could not resist the temptation to come and see the King at work.

She also wanted to visit the Flower Meadow, but that trip was a bit too far for merely indulging her curiosity, so she left that to her workers. But, well, no bee could begrudge her a chance to see the King!

He was as majestic as always, a towering giant taller than an entire hive with a body she couldn’t have even imagined. He had but two legs, mighty pillars so strong he needed only a third the number to support his entire weight. He had two arms but each of these split into five more for an unparalleled ability to grip. His eyes were smooth and colorful, like the petals of a flower, and his hair was like an entire forest.

And what he was doing was no less fascinating. The King was building something out of the plants themselves, twisting them together into some long vine of some sort. And even more curiously, the First of the Fifth’s soldiers were helping with the task!

Then the Fourth of the Seventh began to buzz, for she noticed something.

The color and shape of the vine they were weaving...matched a part of the King’s torso. She noticed now that he was not covered in some sort of hair or fur, but rather that he wore some construction of plant stems over his body. It looked nothing like normal plant stems, so she would not have noticed had the soldiers not explained to her their current task, and if she had not then seen it in progress. She wondered why the King put such a thing on his body.

But the surprises weren’t over.

“There, how about that? Maybe if you both try at once?”

The King and the soldiers finished constructing their vine, and the King wrapped it around a large branch with a tip coated in wax. One of the King’s legendary fire sticks, with which he reportedly lay waste to any invaders that intruded upon his realm.

The two soldiers crawled to the ends of the vines on either side of the fire stick, where the vines made loops. They crossed their front legs together inside of the loops and then began to fly. The vines went taut...and then the fire stick began to rise into the air.

The King smiled.

“What do you think? Can you fly with this?”

The soldier bees tried to fly around the room. They were a bit unsteady and the fire stick wobbled this way and that, pulling one bee down and then the other. But ultimately, they managed to remain in the air.

The Fourth of the Seventh couldn’t tear her eyes away until her workers began to pull her back to the hive.

A bit later, a wave of workers returned, carrying an abundance of nectar. The Fourth of the Seventh drank deeply from her honey reserve, overflowing like it never had before. Her hive had been one of the smaller ones on the outskirts of the Apiary, so access to an entire patch of fast growing flowers had vastly increased her resources despite the far trip and the suboptimal flowers.

One of the workers came and danced before her and she raced over to the front of her hive. The First of the Fifth's soldiers were returning for the day, coming for their meal before they returned to the King’s abode. The Fourth of the Seventh danced rapidly before them, asking her questions without even pausing to hear the answers. The soldiers buzzed and danced as the workers brought them honey, telling their story from the beginning. They told the Fourth of the Seventh the entire process the King had showed them, how he had gathered the flowers themselves. How he had removed the flower and the seeds, how he had broken apart the stems and left them to partially rot, how he had processed them into the fibers she had seen him work with, and then how they and the King worked together to weave those strands into the constructs of his design.

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The Fourth of the Seventh hung on their every motion, trying to imagine what it would look like. She thanked them for the tales as they thanked her for the honey, and then raced back to her reserves once the soldiers flew back to the King. She drank as deeply from the honey as she could without cutting into the growth of her hive.

She was deeply curious about this process...and she had access to the very flowers the King used for it. But she and her workers were still tiny, too small to participate. She would need to grow if she wanted to get involved.

And so, for perhaps the first time in her life, the Fourth of the Seventh was determined to grow. Previously she had been content with her lot in life. Born too late, relegated to a corner of the Apiary where she would ever play a subservient role to the queens that came before her. And that was fine with her. She had her role, and she would carry it out. Any more than that could be decided by those above her.

But now....now she found herself too small to achieve what she wanted, her honey reserves too small to allow her to grow, and her worker force too small to expand those reserves. But, fortunately, the First of the Fifth had granted her access to a wealth of flowers like she never had in her little patch of the Apiary.

And so, the Fourth of the Seventh grew. Her workers flew far and brought back the riches she had been given, and she used those riches to lay more eggs than she ever had before. A new generation would arise, until one day they gathered enough honey for her to grow.

In fact, she made other plans as well. She had some of her workers begin preparing a second hive, much closer to the Flower Meadow. Once the construction had finished, she would move her entire hive closer and so cut down the length of her workers’ trips. Such a location was further away from the King’s hive and the flowers he had planted, no other queen wanted to live there and so no other queen objected to her efforts. The First of the Fifth even approved of the move.

For now, she had something she wanted to do. And she was going to do everything she could to achieve it.

The First of the Fifth tilted her head as she watched her worker report. The Fourth of the Seventh had taken to her duties with an enthusiasm that surprised even the First of the Fifth. She knew that the offer was a big deal for the Fourth of the Seventh, an offer of resources and opportunity no queen in her generation had ever received, but it was tempered by the need to support soldiers that weren’t her own. So, the First of the Fifth expected a good, but measured response. Yet, from all reports the Fourth of the Seventh was expanding more rapidly than she had ever done before. Not only that, but she apparently personally welcomed the soldiers in anytime they came by her hive.

All this was strange to the First of the Fifth. If anything, she might wonder if she had made a mistake, and given the Fourth of the Seventh too great an opportunity. Maybe the Fourth of the Seventh was making a play to rise among the Apiary queens, and perhaps attract the favor of the King upon herself? Perhaps treating the soldiers well to throw off the First of the Fifth as to her intentions?

Which is what the First of the Fifth would have assumed...were it not for the news that the Fourth of the Seventh was planning to move further away from the King. The First of the Fifth could understand it from an efficiency standpoint, given the Fourth of the Seventh’s main resources were now located in the Flower Meadow, but the move was still unthinkable to her. Every Apiary queen wished to dwell as close to the King as possible. In the early days, they had nearly fought over the locations of their hives, even. So, no Apiary queen would willingly move away.

The First of the Fifth thought and thought...and then gave up. She came to the conclusion that the Fourth of the Seventh was just happy to have a role now as more than a minor queen on the outskirts, and so was enthusiastically carrying out the task the First of the Fifth had given her. And well, the Fourth of the Seventh still had one of the smallest hives in the Apiary. If she understood her role and wasn’t making a play for the King’s favor, then what she did was of no particular concern to the First of the Fifth.

Or so she thought at the time...

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