Pramatak
The Pramatak is the soldier caste, and it is made rather than born to it. An egg fed on the dark jelly the queen makes from her own body when the hive is afraid comes up a Pramatak, so that a hive which has laid many soldiers is a hive that expects something.
The hornet the makers wove into the Pramata at the vat is expressed in this caste and in no one else. Hives lay them in fear and are afraid of them afterwards, since a soldier in a pacifist hive has nothing to do. They live twenty years and most do not want them.
Body
Longer, heavier and darker banded than a worker, with a jaw the worker lacks and a sting the worker lost. The sting is barbless and can be used many times. The dark jelly that made them also thickened the thorax box, and since Pramata flight is worked by the deformation of that sprung box and the box must be warm to work, a Pramatak warms in half the time and flies faster and further than anything else in the hive.
A Pramatak knows the soft shell sword without being taught. The blade lies folded under the tri-tarsus grip in every Pramata alive and is everted by a pulse of body fluid, coming out soft and hardening in the air within a breath; it cannot be retracted, and is broken off at the wrist and regrown over a week. The clench that draws it is not instinct in any other caste, and nobody teaches it.
Life
Twenty years, which is ten short of a worker and half an architect's span. They pass the same stages as the rest of the comb, the Lay, the Sealed, the Unsealing, the Damp in which they are named, and the Lift, and they are grown at eight like any other Pramata. The Bath belongs to the worker's thirtieth year and a Pramatak seldom reaches thirty.
The instinct the makers suppressed is loudest here. A Pramatak in a hive that will not fight has an instinct with nowhere to discharge, which is the same wound that kills the workers, in the caste built hardest for it. The ones who leave become the only Pramata anyone has ever hired to fight.
Regard
Nobody outside the homesteads remembers what the Pramata were built to do, and the Pramatak is the part of the answer that is still walking around. The people refuse to go to war and are not important enough for anyone to force it, so the soldier caste is the only point at which the old design meets the world.
Royal jelly is legal to sell because a living queen can consent to it. To take it from a hive by force is the one thing that has ever made a Pramatak remember what it is.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- What frightens a queen enough to lay a hive full of soldiers
- Who hires the Pramatak who leave, and for what work
- Whether a hive has ever put its own soldiers down
- When a Pramatak uses the sting and when the sword, and whether both at once