Through gnarled branches, snaring roots and cloying mud that gripped her with an almost vengeful quality, Hilda continued to follow Suki. For almost an hour, they had struggled through the mire that desperately clawed and raked against the encroaching light. The death throes of a power that once thought itself supreme. A power that had fallen victim to its own asinine logic. As the warlock extricated herself from hanging vines with a flaming grip, Suki quieted her with a hand held out.
Before them, rising from the muck and earth as a great hollow eye socket, sat a hovel. Its entrance had been haphazardly covered over with discarded bark and mud, glued together with some biological substance of hive make. The entrance, such as it was, yawned open before the two human guardians. Within its oval extrusion, a hive ghost floated lazily. Upon seeing them, it chittered, swirled its tines and floated into the hovel itself.
Suki instructed her charge to hold a grenade in her hand. Far too used to strangeness, Hilda complied with a sceptical look that could be felt through the monocular eye of her helmet.
After complying with her own command, she poked her head into the hovel and began to descend some rough-hewn wooden stairs. The warlock followed suit, admiring how homey the interior of the hovel had been made despite looking like Baba Yaga’s holiday home. Several shelves had been constructed and hung from the earthen walls, glowing jars of hive design hanging from them. The rest of the home had a bubbling, churning pot of stew and stone stove with nests strewn about the remainder. Hilda noticed their host seated in one, facing away from them.
She was hive, that much was certain. Though she radiated an almost unsettling tranquillity. Her ghost hovered by her side her expression hidden behind a voluminous cloak. As they entered, she lifted one of her three clawed fingers and tapped the jars behind her with a clack of carapace on glass. Suki indicated with her head, placing a pulsating orb of purple void light into the jar. Hilda, doubting her own comfort with strangeness, placed her pocket sun into the jar before sealing it. Their host then turned, fixating her three eyes on the jars.
“The light is pure. It burns and consumes. Good.” She celebrated her treasures, inspecting them closely before placing them on the shelf. Hilda noticed many conquests and offerings alike, tilting her head as she noticed several jars inscribed with differing hive symbols. Some of the jars even held an undulating, slithering ball of glowing green twine.
“I take it you’re a fellow scholar?” Hilda commented with trepidation, her voice coming out with perhaps more bass than she would have liked. The hive, with all their strangeness, did not seem to notice as she rose from her nest.
“Scholar of necessity, not by nature.” The hive wagged one of her fingers, aping the body language of her apish guests. “Long I have rested here. Long have humans refused old Nina.” She continued, rummaging through her stew with a wood-carved ladle before sampling it with her skull-like mouth. Recoiling, she scoffed derisively before turning to her compatriots with her fingers interlaced. “Nabenki and others cling to disparate dreams of hive future. But Nina sees. She sees with clarity.” The hunter tapped what Hilda assumed was her nose. It wasn’t hard to follow the implication.
“Pretty keen to wear that traitor badge, aren’t you?” Suki observed facetiously before rising from her resting place on the stairs. She gave a wink to Nina’s ghost, who levelled their single-eyed gaze to Urchin. Her response was a silent seething contempt. “We didn’t come to taxi you to the city. You have to give us tribute in kind, first.” The titan bargained with a suspiciously knowing stare. A stare under which Nina cowed herself with a mocking bow.
“But of course. Nina has received many gifts from the guardians. A name, a home and now a task. Nina wonders whether she shall survive their generosity.” The hive acquiesced with a sarcastic bite.
“My friend here has a problem. You’re kinda the expert on hokey hive magic. So, we were wondering whether you had a solution.” Suki explained with a nonchalance that Hilda frankly found alarming. “See she wants to change the way her ghost resurrects her. And I know you slippery crayfish can pop right back up without your worm. Especially after some of you carved them out yourselves.” She said the last sentence with such gravity that Hilda found herself pondering the context. Was carving out your worm, whatever that meant, shameful to hive?
The requests had their desired effect. Nina practically staggered back against her soup grumbling some very badly translated hive expletives. Something like ‘may your helium be ionized’. The two humans waited for her to calm down before she began pacing, her ghost attempting to reason with his partner. Nina snapped back, though apologized swiftly. Opal, for that was his name, seemed to expect it. But he was grateful in words, at least.
“Such knowledge is forbidden among the Lucent Brood. We are not the playthings of Oryx.” Nina declared emphatically to Suki’s unmoved face. Though as the silence began to grow heavy, the titan seemed to realise the implication. The denial left her lips, only to be caught by her hive companion. “Yes. Ghosts born of pure light cannot accomplish this task. Your friend must remain as they are.”
The revelation hit Hilda in the chest, pulling a shuddering breath from within her helmet like a frozen snag line. The dream that had empowered her was foundering. She sank to her knees in one of the nests, Suki scrunching her eyes tight as she tried to think of a solution.
“You’d refuse me out of some…religious edict?” Hilda breathed, aghast at her misfortune. Nina fixed her with all three eyes, narrowing them with a contemptuous stare. “We paid you for this knowledge. I will not be denied. Teach me, damn you!” The warlock demanded, voice rising as despair gave way to anger. An anger that sent sparks flickering along her fingers.
“Nina will not teach you because it cannot be taught.” The hive replied with irritation, knotting her fingers together. She shifted uncomfortably before seeming to gather herself. “If you are to do as I did, you must grasp temptation. You must reach for the Dark.”
