Elach shrugged nonchalantly. “Trust is different from… um… trust, I guess? I can’t think of the other word right now, but it’s like, I get a feeling from you that you aren’t going to rip my head off the second I’m not useful to you anymore. But you aren’t giving me anything to back that feeling up, so I can’t make it anything more than a feeling. So I trust you, but I don’t trust you, if you get what I’m getting at.”

“I think I do.” Shar said with a slow nod. “You have confidence in me. That I will not betray you, and that I can fight alongside you, but because you know nothing about me, you can’t form an emotional bond. We have a professional arrangement, but you cannot extend that arrangement to a camaraderie.”

“Pretty much. You put it in words better than I could.” Elach confirmed. A professional arrangement was exactly what they had, and he was trying to make friends. “But now that I’ve heard it out loud, it doesn’t really matter if I can trust you, does it?”

He turned to look at Shar, expecting to see relief from his revelation, but finding discomfort. Caught off guard, he continued. “We’re going to break off the second we meet Prisoner anyway, so why would you bother sharing any of your secrets with me? They’re probably city secrets anyway, so knowing them would just put all of you in danger.”

“...You are certainly skilled at making me feel guilty.” Shar sighed quietly, shaking her head while looking down at her feet. “I’m one of Hoalt’s constants, Elach. Does that mean anything to you?”

Constant? Elach wrinkled his nose. An unchanging variable. With what he’d learned from Sentence and Prisoner, that couldn’t be a coincidence. “I think I get the meaning behind it.”

Shar looked up at Flow darting through the branches and gently nodded. “Hoalt said the same about Prisoner. That his interests would align with the Gilded Night’s. But the Emperor would never explain what those interests were. He simply let us fill our own minds with the worst, and possibly the best, consequences that could come from our namesakes.”

She tapped herself on the chest. “A constant is the highest rank the Emperor gives. Socially, it is synonymous with the Emperor himself. The Vault defends the treasures of the Gilded Night. The Creator supplies the city with marvelous life-bettering inventions. We are mostly unknown in true name and form, but as forces within the city, we effectively are the Gilded Night.” Shar gestured at herself and let out a self-deprecating chuckle. “And then there is The Assurance. The promise of swift retribution should anyone harm the city. A woman who was confined to the eleventh floor of the pillar the moment she attained the mantle of constant, a sealed blade to be drawn only in the most dire of times.”

“The Assurance.” Elach repeated. Shar looked to be gauging his reaction, but he really didn’t have one. If she really was as powerful as she claimed, and she hadn’t wiped him from existence yet, then what was she waiting for? “Sounds ominous. I wouldn’t want to be stuck alone with her in a dark forest full of person-sized Issi bugs.”

“Hush, you.” Shar laughed. “That was supposed to be a revelation, and you shrugged it off as if it was nothing.”

“I met something way scarier than you could ever be.” Elach replied sarcastically, ducking under a branch Shar held up for him with a nod of thanks. “Really, though, I think it’s because I still don’t know much of anything about this half of existence. Not counting the time I was dead in my headspace, I’ve only been here for a few weeks.”

“You make me feel like a cradle robber every time you bring that up. I am really sorry that I can’t tell you more about the Gilded Night and everything that’s going on, but they aren’t my secrets to tell. Anything that’s just about me, though, you can ask away.”

“If I think of anything, I’ll be sure to ask.” Elach said. Flow’s instructions for them to hurry up came in clear over Elach’s bond, stifling any questions he might have brought up as Flow shot through the forest at steadily increasing speeds. Which left him with plenty of time to parcel out those questions and file them away for a slightly less busy time.

The hive Elach had set out looking for wasn’t so much a hive as it was a small city. The shadowed hornets buzzed through a colony infested into a hillside, small pinpricks of light dancing around them in the early morning gloom. Elach noted a group of insect-people on a well-worn path to the nest, walking instead of using their wings, guided by a lantern filled with bright yellow buzzing lights.

“They must be some species of firefly.” He noted, taking in the massive field of flowers through which the path cut. “But they look exactly like the hornets’ eyes. Maybe it’s some kind of symbiotic relationship?”

Shar let out a low whistle. “Isn’t that an interesting thought. A colony made up of quite a few different species of insects. All mutated into monstrous facades of their previous forms, of course.”

Elach raised an eyebrow. “Mutated, not manifested?”

“Mutated, not manifested.” Shar confirmed with a nod. “They feel closer to you than they do to Y’talla, Flow, or myself. Beings that have taken in and have been rewritten by Issi, not born of it.”

The group of hornets reached a smaller protrusion of the nest material in which a single, larger insect rested. They too were completely shadowed and had yellow eyes, but from the eight legs and eyes it was obvious what this creature had mutated from. A quick gesture of the lantern from the group led to a low rumbling as rising ground spilled dirt everywhere, showing exactly how the entrance-less hive was broken into.

“Do you think the lantern is what lets them get in?” Elach asked. “Maybe we could find something to cover ourselves in shadows like the bugs, collect some fireflies, and get in that way.” He suggested.

Shar raised a hand to her chin, considering Elach’s proposal for a long moment before shaking her head. “Not yet. We need to see more than one group using that entry method before risking both of our lives on it. A sample of, say, two more groups would be enough for me to feel confident in your plan.”

It only took two hours for Shar to feel confident in his plan, yet watching the parade of shadowed insects was so enthralling they stayed for an extra three hours. A pair of mantis-like insects hissed at the spider gatekeeper for ten minutes straight before grudgingly producing a lantern with only six fireflies inside, eliciting a deep chuckle from the spider as they gestured sarcastically for the mantises to go ahead. The spider happily accepted an overflowing lantern from a veritable regiment of small beetle-like insect people, speaking words Elach couldn’t make out and bowing to them as the underground entrance shuddered open.

The small beetles were overjoyed as they entered the colony, hugging each other and clapping their spindly arms to their comrades until the entrance closed behind them and cut off their excited chittering.

After the beetles and the mantises, they watched a fairly steady stream of different insects come and go. The spider’s reaction didn’t change based on species, which was made obvious when a single mantis returned with a fairly full lantern and the spider gave them a nod of respect, but seemed to be based solely on how many fireflies were brought back. Anything less than five per insect person looked to be shameful, between five and ten elicited absolutely no reaction from the spider, and more than fifteen got a bow and a short speech Elach could swear he was starting to understand for some reason.

When a much larger firefly returned with a fairly full lantern, Elach found himself mumbling along to the spider’s speech. “The collective thanks you for your service, and hopes the rewards you find motivate you to further greatness.”

“You can understand the chittering?” Shar asked with great interest, shocking Elach out of the trance he’d found himself in. He turned to her, unsure what to say, and found only excitement written on her face. “Or was that only a guess?”

He paused, then shook his head. “I don’t know how, but I understood the meaning behind the chittering. Maybe those weren’t the exact words the spider used, but that’s what they meant.”

“So the fireflies are the important part. That gives us a plan of attack, so long as we can find something to obscure us like the rest of the insects. We’ll have to follow a group out wherever they gather the fireflies, as I hadn’t noticed anything like them while we were traveling here.” Shar bent down to rummage through her pack, pulling out a black slate and a golden stylus. She drew an X on the exact middle, then pulled on both sides until the X had shrunk to a tenth of the size it had been. “I’ve marked this place on my map, so we won’t have to rely on Flow to bring us back here. I think we should wait for a small group to leave, so in the case that they catch Flow following their scent we won’t have as dangerous a situation on our hands.”

“Mmhm.” Elach agreed. They’d already wasted a few hours just watching the bugs, so what was another one or two?