May She Always Reign

They struck the death blow at dawn. Always dawn.

First, warning signs -- smaller attacks, traps, isolated kills. Scouts would return, shaken, with stories of intruders threatening our hunting ground. As summer wore on, fewer and fewer would return at all. Then, attacks at home -- the enemy would threaten the colony directly, once they found us. Their children would throw rocks at our walls, emboldened by their long-time military superiority. We tried desperately to defend our home, but attacking the young only brought our ruin faster and harsher. Eventually we gave up, fleeing even the smallest of them on sight. We knew we were no match for their warriors, and they always defended their young, no matter who made the first strike.

Our Queen has survived two Purges, though she understandably avoids discussing them. The second nearly killed her, and even now her offspring are fewer, weaker, according to the elders, than they ought to be for her age. She struck out again to found our current homestead, and she was careful in choosing a location. It wasn’t enough. They found us.

We’ve had our city decimated in enemy raids twice now and rebuilt, but it took our strongest workers many weeks to complete each renovation, and the toll could be felt in the food supply. All of us were weak, hungry, and more than a little desperate when the final catastrophe struck, and even at full strength the attack would have decimated our strongest warriors. We have little hope of survival in the best of circumstances. We only pray that our Queen will be spared to carry on our civilization, or that a new Queen shall rise from our ashes and give birth to a new colony that can learn from our demise and develop stronger defenses. May She Always Reign.

We’ve lost many good men in the last two weeks, and six of our warriors have returned to the city with startling damage we’ve never seen before. They were not crushed by hand-to-hand combat, which, though tragic, we’ve grown accustomed to. Their bodies seemed intact, from the outside, but they flew erratically and collapsed upon return to base. Elite teams of ten returned as two or three battered, sluggish veterans with the scent of death clinging to their backs. Solo scouts rarely returned, and if they did, their entire squadron was infected with the same strange behavior within hours. Our sharpest hunter returned completely disoriented and was dead within the hour. His team dwindled steadily from seventeen of our finest heroes to four incapacitated and two third-string scouts. They were not on the mission with him -- his condition spread and infected them when he returned to camp. Thank the Gods he didn’t have time to return to his family -- they are safe for now.

The final blow came four hours ago. Far too early, just minutes after the earliest patrol had embarked, our men began clamouring back to camp, weak, disoriented, and reeking of the same unknown substance that we’d caught whiffs of on warriors who’d returned with unseen, fatal and contagious wounds. Too late, we realized that we should have quarantined the unfortunate victims to save the colony. In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered. There was nothing we could have done.

The enemy knew our location and flooded the colony with the substance, a devastating nerve agent. We knew now that the warriors who died in the field were the lucky ones. The poor bastards who made it back to the colony suffered far longer and had to watch their comrades fall victim to the hell they brought home. We can’t blame them -- one, they could never have known. And two, it will do us no good to blame the dead when we are so close to joining them.

The nerve agent is devastatingly efficient. It seeps into the walls, sticks to every surface, clings to bodies and floors and spreads easier than gossip or doubt. Brush against the leg of an infected neighbor and you suffer slow incapacitation, first dizziness and disorientation, then muscle spasms and loss of balance, then uncontrollable muscle contractions that make it impossible to walk, eat, and eventually survive. The contracted muscles never release. If you’re lucky, your own muscles crush you to death before you starve.

A few of us take a perverted comfort in discovering the nerve agent’s stamp in our Queen’s lethargy and half-hearted defense of the colony and her offspring’s slow development and lack of physical prowess. We’ve never blamed her, of course, but the stories from the Elders tell of a strong, fierce, ambitious Queen that none of our generation recognize. It is oddly comforting to find that the stories are not myths, but reverent tales of a survivor, a hero, battered but not beaten by an unkillable enemy. We’ve always loved her, but our respect has grown deeper. We hope her new colony will not have to learn of her bravery as we did. And, Gods, we hope they have the chance to learn of it at all.

The walls are beginning to collapse, heavy with poison. The outer tunnels are impassable, and the entrance is treacherous, but no one is returning anymore, so no matter. I remember our first attack, when we were knocked to the ground. One side of the colony collapsed, crushing 48 workers and exposing the nursery. It had seemed so devastating, so hopeless. But I was young. The Elders were unfazed. We rebuilt. It cost us a few weeks in food supply, but our new city was stronger. My squadron was tasked with reinforcing the outer defenses, and I have been patrolling the immediate area for the last two weeks. It is a miracle I’ve made it this long without exposure to the nerve agent, but I’ve never worried for my own safety until now. My role is to defend the homeland, and my death is meaningless compared to the greater good. But what is the greater good now? Who is the greater good, now? Who will be left to defend?

No one is allowed near the nursery pods. The Elders in their wisdom made the unenviable choice to take the risk of the children starving, to try to save them from exposure to the nerve agent that now coats every one of us incurably. Some wings have been recently fed - they are our best hope. The next in line, the hungriest, will likely perish, but we must keep as many as possible uncontaminated. One wing was lost this morning to well-meaning ignorance when a squadron of workers tried to repair a collapsed nursery wall, but their saliva was already compromised. The offspring of that wing will now surely be born with irreparable damage, if they survive to emerge at all. We pray for the merciful end for them. In case they are unlucky, we have stationed a young soldier who we believe to be unaffected at the wing entrance with two honorable and horrifying missions -- to help keep the youth alive who may be saveable, and to inform the Queen of their contamination, so that they are not welcomed into the new colony -- or worse, used to begin it. The nest they will build will surely be unsound, and none but the Queen will have memory of this plight. They will be the death of her. Through no fault of their own, they must be removed. They deserve a chance to survive, but our Queen must continue forever. May She Always Reign.

The poison has touched my legs now. I pass dead brethren slowly, trying not to touch them, but it is a mostly futile effort. The wings of the dead stick out further than a typical corpse, and at odd angles, due to the muscle contractions caused by the nerve agent. Our tunnels are narrow to begin with as they are designed for wings at ease, and most of the hallways by now are at least partially collapsed. Every passing minute more bodies block more hallways, but we are workers by nature and not accustomed to standing still. There is little to do, but that does not stop us. The motion is therapeutic. We walk the halls to distract ourselves from the inevitable -- our home is dying and so are we.

The temperature is dropping. Very few of us are left. The Queen, I am told, is alive, but they would tell me that whether or not it were true. I roam the halls on instinct now, with little conscious thought available and most of that laced with fear. I am a Worker. I am a Warrior. I will Move to protect the Hive until I Die. That is all I know.

* * * * *

The Enemy has returned. I hear them outside. By the feeling of the earth, it is nearly Dawn again. I can feel the stirrings of 6, 7, maybe 9 of my brethren, plus the Queen, but her energy may be wishful thinking. I am unable to trust my instinct anymore. I have been unable to move my wings or legs for hours. My breath is shallow and contaminated. My shell is coated in poison. I am not dead, but I may as well be. I can only pray the Queen will rise, that her offspring have been insulated and she may start anew. We have served her well. May She Always Reign.

The Enemy has torn open our home. In happier times, I would have relished her brilliant garb before realizing its deception. Now, I can only enjoy the colors with the accompanying bitterness of near, certain death. She will surely crush our nest. We pray she will spare the nursery out of ignorance -- the enemy has proven that mercy is foreign to them.

The Queen lies deep in the center. Escape would have killed her -- to exit the depths of the nest would have exposed her to tenfold the poison needed to kill her. She will wait, biding her time, allowing the rain to both break apart the nest and create new, safer escape routes, and to wash the poison away. I allow this thought to comfort me as I feel my muscles seize more each second.

The Enemy is above me. She is clothed in a bold pattern of red and orange flowers -- a taunt, I imagine, for our demise. A final insult as we perish. They know we survive on the nectar of the flowers, and they wear mockeries of flowers in our season of growth. She even has dangling from her throat a piece of reflective metal, mimicking the sun, of all insults -- the Sun! How dare they! The giants with their poison and their nectarless flowers, their sprays and their hoses and their decorative, imaginary pheromones that mimic flowers too. And then they feel insulted when we approach their fake food sources and swat, and spray, and smack our houses and poison our heroes.

We were here before them. We lived in harmony with their forefathers, I am told, the men who sustained their lives from the same flowers and fruits that sustained us. But the balance shifted. They learned to create imaginary flowers, both for sustenance and for decoration. The sustenance means they do not need us. The decoration means they do not fear us. We annoy them, sure, but we cannot hurt them as a species. They will defend their young, their homes, their convenience and their picnics and their leisure and their pets, to the death. To our death, not theirs, never theirs. A weapon in her hand crushes what is left of our home. Her throat is her weakest point, we have learned, but getting that close is nearly impossible. And they know they are invincible. They decorate their vulnerable points, you see, draw attention to them rather than conceal. This one wears a gold locket, dangling in front of her heartbeat and supported from her throat. They know. They no longer need to worry.