Chapter 37: The Queen

For the next block they walked in silence beneath a silvery sheet of rain, stray drops leaking through the veil of fabric the beast held over Violet’s head. Any other time she might have been eager to get away from the weather, but now she could hardly bring herself to worry. A grayness had expanded within her, and she felt just as blurry and vague as the clouds overhead. There may have been the sky beyond them, and endless stars beyond that, but what she could not see did not bear consequence.

It kept swirling through her mind, what she had done in the shop by fighting back. Violet supposed it should have felt enormous and consequential, her putting flame to a corner of the influence, yet all she could feel was dread. Dread and then a paralyzing blankness beyond that.

The influence’s response had not been any different, it had simply reached out once again, just as vast and all consuming as during her first encounter. For all the significance that existed on paper, Violet could not help but feel that her actions held no more relevance than if she’d lit a single match and held it forth into the teeth of a hurricane.

All that had been illuminated was her own smallness before an unknowable force. Even now there were traces of it swirling behind the air, barely perceptible. Were she to peel back the curtain of light and matter that gave form to all things, what would she see staring back out at her?

Violet turned her gaze to the rain speckled grass and tried to blot it all out. She could feel a rising faigue, an emotional exhaustion that told her beyond any doubt that she was sick of the world and its rules and dangers and bizarre contradictory fluctuations in logic and presentation.

It wasn’t that some new and awful thing had risen to shatter all she knew…no, the established order of the world still held firm. It was simply that none of it seemed to matter anymore, for if the influence could so easily run roughshod over all the old vestiges of humanity and nature then what use could anything that existed counter to its whims possibly be?

Almost instinctively she lifted her eyes to the north and could see azure pooling there against the bottoms of the clouds, glittering sheets of light passing like silk through drifting shrouds of rain. There was still the Glow, powerful and present…but oh so terribly distant.

She still could not raise it. Though its light throbbed overhead, it was a detached presence, a cool observer of earthly things.

At the head of the next block the cat suddenly sprang out in front of her and the beast. Violet halted, a shivery trickle of rainwater going down the back of her neck.

They were passing the sagging spire of an old stone church, ancient even amongst the ruins. Its front windows had long since been knocked out but for shards of stained glass around the upper edges, and the space was now choked with thickets of rose vines and lavender hedges, the two plants curling inexorably together into swirls of red and white and purple. Clusters of hybrid blossoms glittered in the storm’s pale light, their petals iridescent and strangely luminous.

“I know today has mostly just been…showing you things,” the cat said. “Would you allow one more stop?”

Violet shrugged listlessly and watched as her companion traced a gentle arc around and to her left, placing itself atop the crumbling set of mossy granite steps that led to the entranceway of the church building. There, a pair of great double doors sagged slightly open, just barely keeping hold of their hinges. The wood had swollen or even disintegrated in places and bluebells crept in and out of the gaps, slender vines wound tight around the decay like little green rivers girding a world on the brink of atomizing altogether.

A distinct hum hung at the edge of the air and Violet caught a shimmer of movement around the vine choked front windows, where a sheet of golden bumblebees had gathered beneath the eaves in order to wait out the rain. Gathered so closely together, clinging to vines and stone, they looked rather comfortable, content to observe and rest and take in the sights.

For a half second Violet hesitated at the doorway, but the cat had slipped in ahead of her without even a flicker of unease, so she stepped over the threshold and left the rain behind.

The church’s interior was not dark, but Violet still had to pause in order to let her eyes adjust. It was all one large room, illuminated by streamers of a pale half light that illuminated rows and rows of neat wooden pews, then a raised alter at the far side of the room, perhaps twenty meters ahead. Silvery trickles of rainwater dripped here and there, but rather than rot or mold or decay, the church had a distinct heat to it, intense enough that it had acquired scent.

There were yet more bees within the building itself, the pervasive hum of beating wings pervasive enough that Violet could feel it vibrating in the very center of her. Indeed, the air ahead had acquired a noticeable shimmer, insects reorganizing themselves as they settled in to wait out the storm.

They were gathered most thickly around the raised eminence of the alter, where the back wall melted into a stained glass window that had long since faded behind a sheen of grime. A dark haired woman was depicted there, her expression serene, a halo bright as liquid platinum hovering above her head. She seemed to be bent in labor, or perhaps holding something precious, but whatever it was had been hidden by the rippling sprawl of an enormous beehive. Violet could not see the exact limits of where it extended, for beyond the window the back of the church fell into proper darkness.

Violet glanced quickly over to the cat, which had settled itself atop one of the nearer, more intact pews. There was an exhausted bee slumped atop the point of its left ear, but her companion hardly seemed to notice.

“Might do to say hello.” The cat suggested, eyes turning to Violet.

Violet flinched as a tickly patter of legs and stripy fluff bumped into the left side of her neck. The bees were beginning to investigate her now, clearly growing curious.

“Me?” She asked.

“You.” The cat confirmed with a gentle nod, careful not to dislodge its drowsing visitor.

“I don’t….” Violet had to give her head a sharp shake, dissuading a bee from landing on her lower lip. An itchy buzz had begun to leak into the backs of her ears, a few stray insects latching onto her hair. Already she could feel hints of a greater routine becoming apparent as the bees gathered fully back into their patterns.

“You’ve listened to them before,” the cat said reassuringly. “You know what to expect now.”

This was true in the most technical sense, but still Violet couldn’t keep a shiver of worry from rolling along her length, making the bees on her blouse stir and spin.

“I still don’t know how to talk to them,” she protested, and realized that her voice had dropped to a low, strained whisper, as though this might hide her fear. “What if I scare them? They’d sting me to pieces.”

The cat shrugged. If it had any concerns then it was doing a fine job of hiding them.

“You won’t scare them.”

“Why can’t I just practice talking with you?” Violet asked. She distinctly remembered her companion making promises of that very nature while laying out its plans for the rest of the day.

The cat gave her a very much exaggerated look of surprise.

“Because we are guests now,” it said, as though this should have been apparent. “And I am much too rude to make introductions myself.”

Violet sighed and very carefully slumped her shoulders. It wasn’t that she was trapped, the doors were right behind her and it wouldn’t be difficult to simply turn and beat a hasty retreat…but she knew she’d be leaving something unfinished. That the cat clearly thought her capable of speaking to the bees, even in the state she was in, made it even more difficult to think about turning away.

She took a deep breath and stepped forward between the rows of pews, careful not to move too quickly. There were rumbling flights of fat orangey bees settling into an orbit around her now, uncommonly large and fluffy. The wind of their frantically beating wings tickled the edges of her ears. Though the air around her was filled with the curious attentions of thousands of bees, they represented only a minuscule fraction of the hive’s occupants, their routine one amidst countless interlocking thousands. An easy precision permeated the overall function of the hive and Violet found that she could pick up on it without trying.

The pews themselves had attained a new prominence through this view, for there were flowers sprouting off of solid wood, alongside stems and leaves that curled into petals as stiff and sharp as little green needles. They flowered forth into crowns and spikes like the antlers of deer. There was a scent to them but Violet could no longer tell if this was what her nose was picking up on or if she was perceiving what the bees themselves were smelling.

An uneasiness flared within her at the sight of these unusual blooms and Violet managed to look away, turning her attention to the hive instead, as she had the first time she’d listened to the bees. Back then the cat had requested she consider the nature of a hive. It was so much more than simply the outer skin, just as all things were. To look at an animal or a person or even a building was to see only a very small portion of the outer structure, that which housed an unknown interior. And within the hive she could sense tunnels and cells and places where the young were kept in rows and lines and neatly organized clusters. There were intelligences at work beyond that of the centrally guiding queen, small and singular in focus. Bees that knew how to care for young and bees that knew how to clean the tunnels and dispose of the dead; bees that understood the architecture of their home and bees that existed solely to mate and then die.

Yet the queen remained distant somehow, there was a part of things being held deliberately back, and Violet did not push forward to try and see what it was, for the bees had to be acting for their own sake. Just as she peered in on them, were they doing the same to her?

The hum of wings and tiny insectile hearts was almost everything now, though only a fragile sort of everything. The world beyond the bees still existed, Violet knew, and then felt strange for having had that thought in the first place. Of course the bees weren’t seeking to consume every alternative to themselves. If there were not animals and flowers and seeds, if there were not the entire world then they themselves would die in darkness and cold.

It was so completely unlike the pressing push of the influence that Violet felt tears start at the corners of her eyes, though whether it was relief or joy or something else entirely she could not tell.

There was a fuzzy coat of bees upon her now, but that realization came slow and distant and Violet felt no real worry at having so many tiny legs and wings and soft bits of yellow fluff upon her skin. Bees buzzed discordantly in her hair, where they’d become trapped, but no real panic soured their actions. Violet did not think it had occurred to the bees that they could ever be afraid for themselves. That would defeat the purpose of how they operated.

She could see a vision of herself now, or fragments at least, how the bees perceived her. It came in bits and disconnected flashes; the softness of her blouse and the salt on her skin, the winding tresses of her hair and those unknowable rumbles that echoed out from the very center of her. It took Violet a moment to realize that the bees were listening to the steady pulse of her heart.

They were talking in a fashion, gathering observances and pieces of information, sharing references and similarities from across the breadth of everything they knew. This was how bees truly spoke, through scent and recollection and the gathered properties of things that carried past the physical.

And through the bees’s view of her own self Violet could pick up on how they saw the world as well. There was color, a fusion of heat and light that portrayed hues entirely unknown to human perception. Through this vision she could see the flowers that speckled the pews, but there was no attention paid to their bizarre forms, instead the bees dived upon them for they were filled with a most intense glow of pollen and nectar.

Distantly, Violet thought that she could recall being shown imitative flowers that held no stamens or means of reproduction, but these new variants had clearly learned and become something else entirely. And the bees loved them for it.

She blinked, and when her eyes opened next Violet knew that she was up past the alter, so close to the hive that the thrum of its populace shivered her in place. It was time for her to speak but still she was not sure how. If she reached out to touch the bees, as was her first instinct, then that would not be correct. She had learned that already, on the hummingbird and then the cat.

She had a window through which to view the world as the hive did, and….

A window was enough.

She spoke without opening her mouth. Without directing her thoughts very differently, for she was only presenting an image and a sense for the bees to peruse.

The presences within the hive that directed every routine seemed to shimmer and the whole construction sang with renewed energy. From the central chambers that lay in darkness Violet could feel the queen’s attention focusing upon her, and when she spoke it was in all the forms of the world, a sphere of sight and sound and sensation falling over Violet like a veil of honey soaked cloth, occupying every one of her senses…for now the queen knew that she could understand.

Slowly, this filtered into something more akin to speech. Distantly, Violet knew that there were no words, not really, but all the same she was hearing them, her perception allowing only for a more familiar arrangement to be absorbed.

YOU HAVE APPROACHED SO QUIETLY ON ONLY TWO LEGS ---- The queen observed, and Violet caught another hint of her own self as viewed from beyond. This time the information had been collated, presented from the queen’s own perspective. As viewed singularly Violet could see herself only as a monument, plantlike yet somehow not. Unitary but capable of what the bees seemed to view as the perception of truth. A vagueness still existed, but when Violet tried to touch upon even the edges of what the queen truly experienced within the limits of her lightless chamber, viewing all that was possible in the great abroad, it put a vivid shiver of horror through her…just as she supposed the queen felt looking upon her.

But however terrible she must have seemed to the hive, the bees upon her did not become any less gentle and the flickers of their findings continued to sparkle at thought’s edge like the tails of distant comets. Images and recollections, sensations and feelings were being added to a greater lexicon, anything to know the world better.

Violet nearly spoke actual words but managed to catch herself. Still, she felt suddenly stuck, entirely unsure which parts of her mind the queen could see and which remained hidden. Again she managed to focus and project what she hoped was coherency, a message that she was only here to wait out the rain with her friends.

ARE THEY YOURS ? ---- The queen asked, or Violet thought she did, for the edges of the question were clipped away by an instinctive burst of horror. The queen had referred to her own drones in implicit comparison to the cat and the beast. Violet could not help but think of the false animals and then the fungus, and at this the hive seemed to shiver.

WE DO NOT CONVERT ---- Came a quick response, the edges jagged with disgust at the imagery shown. It was being rejected, Violet could tell, for the hive had some notion of what the influence was and did not like it. The fungus felt sour and any bee afflicted was to be left inert until such time as it stopped existing.

Thinking of death in such a way felt strange to Violet, as though all living things were simply cogs in a greater machine, worthy of no more consideration than what their use could bring on its own. It felt strangely similar to how the cat had described her neighbor back home, the one who kept bees.

The hive considered this image, a distant person having tamed a foreign hive, but did not seem to know what it represented. The bees on Violet’s blouse turned a circle in ragged unison, but their motions were slow and drowsy, aggression a far off suggestion.

WHAT DO YOU WANT ? ---- The queen asked, and though there came a flurry of suggestions, Violet could not recognize them, for they were flooded with color and scent, hallmarks of bee communication that she was not yet able to fully understand. Distantly, at the back of her comprehension, Violet could feel the first sickly edges of her headache beginning to seep through. To concentrate on such intensely alien subject matter was taxing.

Her gaze drifted to the lower edges of the hive, where lobes of honeycomb hung like stalactites, dripping thin streamers of sugary amber fluid. It had begun to pool at the edges of the floor, dotted with dead ants and the desiccated remains of fallen bees.

The cat had told her that bees were willing to give up leaky portions of their hive, and so she focused upon the imperfections there. In the center of the hive the queen considered this, but she was not the only thing to move. Deeper still, curled into the warm spaces between tunnels, a distinctly alternate something began to stir, but quickly settled at a gesture from the queen. Still, Violet took a shuffling step back, made suddenly uneasy by the hint of fractured difference she had felt, a curl of emptiness coiled into the null spaces that lined the hive.

It was familiar somehow, in a sad, desolate sort of way. Upon her the bees stirred and Violet thought that she could feel a tiny pulse of agreement, images and memories falling upon her like grains of stardust from a disintegrated meteorite: pheromone trails suddenly broken off, flowers wilted and dying but for their last grains of pollen, the keening of lost animals at night.

It felt like sitting by the edge of a flat ocean at the beginning of a final decay, watching the last tremors of light and life begin to flicker and fail.

“A spirit.” She said aloud, and the words felt strange and foreign, for she was caught halfway between her own comprehension and that of the bees. From somewhere far away the queen agreed.

TO PROTECT ---- She said, then reluctantly agreed to give up a piece of honeycomb. With that the presence of the hive withdrew itself and suddenly Violet found herself on her knees, leaning hard against the mossy, half rotted alter, her head spinning as a more familiar reality came to assert itself. The bees departed only slowly, spinning away in skeins and buzzing clusters. A few had become trapped in her hair, but Violet felt too shaky to even attempt help. Her breathing had gone strange and there were fragments still spinning through her mind, unmoored from anything else.

A moment later the cat brushed against her side, then stood on its hind legs and began to gently comb the bees from her hair with the tips of its claws.

“You did very well.” Violet heard her companion say.

She managed to nod, but even that small motion only upset her headache. The flare of pain was beginning to fade but still felt worryingly intense, as though she’d twisted some vital cluster of synapses.

“It’s like a mirror of the influence, almost.”

“What’s like a mirror?” The cat asked, shaking a wayward bee from where it had attempted to perch on its nose.

“The queen, and the hive,” Violet gestured vaguely to the edifice they knelt at the base of. “It’s kinda the same, but the bees talk and share and…they wanted to know what I was thinking.”

She felt strangely upset saying this, a memory of the sheer ugly insistence of the influence’s actions boring into her once again. The cat stepped back from where it had been bracing itself against her left shoulder, claws slipping back into their sheaths. There was no more discomforted buzzing leaking from her hair, so it seemed that her companion had finished in its chores.

“You should go get that honeycomb before the queen changes her mind.” The cat advised, and Violet rose, feeling more than a little unsteady.

“There’s a spirit living in the hive.” She said.

“Not a bad deal….” The cat seemed unsurprised. “The spirit gets to live off of the warmth and energy of the hive as a whole, and the bees get a formidable protector.”

Violet dug into one pocket and found her penknife. Brushing a crumb of rust off the blade, she gingerly approached the hive and found that the portion she’d selected was rather conspicuously clear of insects, the queen having already written it off. A gentle warmth poured from the amber streaked wax.

“Do the spirits ever…talk?” Violet asked.

“I think the way the bees communicate is easier for them to understand, bundles of imagery and sense pouring back and forth. Easier for a broken thing to communicate by instinct and feeling.”

“Do you ever talk to spirits?” Violet asked.

The cat looked to the hive for a silent moment, eyes fastening upon the place where the spirit was resting, then shook its head.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it scares me,” the cat said, and its words had the air of a confession. “To think that I could end up like that, in place of simply being killed…that would be worse than anything.”

Violet said nothing, only took hold of her selected piece of honeycomb and began to carefully cut it away.