Pramati'or
The Pramati'or are the bulk of every hive and everything the world thinks a Pramata is: thin, four-armed, hovering, plated under the skin, thirty years. They tend the bees, work the comb, carry the honey to market and come home ashamed of it.
They are not a splice. The Pramata code is locked, and the four kin are castes of the one genome made in the comb by what the egg is fed. A Pramati'or is an egg given flower-jelly for its first days and honey after, and most eggs are.
Body
Three feet and thirty to forty pounds, hovering two feet up at rest, with two athletic hind legs, two sharp thick wings and four arms plated beneath a natural bug shelling. The upper arms are the finest in the tier and a Pramati'or can lift a single grub without waking it; the lower pair is short and heavy and does the carrying.
The soft shell sword is folded in the sheath under the tri-tarsus grip of every worker alive, and almost none of them can draw it. Drawing takes the deliberate clench of one muscle at the base of the grip, the clench is not instinct, and no hive teaches it. The organ is in the hand and the instruction is in perhaps forty Pramata in the world.
Life
The stages are the Lay, the Sealed, the Unsealing, the Damp in which a worker is named while still soft and wet-winged, and the Lift a week later, which is the first day it is counted as present in the hive. A Pramata is grown at eight. The last stage most workers have is the Bath, the one immersion in royal jelly granted at thirty, which is why so many thirty-year-old workers are alive at forty and no older.
Age frays the wings first, and an old Pramati'or walks, which in a hovering people is the visible beginning of the end. The old sit on the comb, do close work and are fed. The dead are rendered and their wax pressed into the hive walls, and the wings, hard at the instant of death, are kept or sold.
Society
The suicide the makers set down is theirs above all, since the worker was built for the air war and given the hive instead. A body with a suppressed war instinct and no queen within scent has an instinct with nowhere to discharge, and the hives have a hundred euphemisms and one custom: the body is rendered like any other and the wax goes into the wall without comment.
Every jar of royal jelly sold is a worker who will not reach forty, and the workers carry the jars to market themselves. The strays who leave are called traitors by the hives they left and call the hives the same, and jelly-hunger takes the ones who never had a Bath from twenty-five, dead at twenty-eight, knowing the price of a jar and how far short of it they are.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which market towns take hive honey and which take only stray honey
- What a worker is told about the Bath before it is given
- How a homestead marks a worker who has taken its own life
- Whether any worker has ever relearned the clench that draws the sword