Pramavohl
Once in a million layings the queen fills a hanging cell with her own royal jelly, feeds the egg on nothing else for the whole of its growth, and a Pramavohl comes out of it. After that the hive will have a new queen or a war, since a hive holds one.
She is twice the length of a worker, wingless in age, pale gold and soft where the others are plated, and is never seen outside the comb. Many of the queens alive now have lived since the splicing, in the Age of Alveria, and remember the flesh constructs coming for the jelly.
Body
The plating never hardens in her, since jelly from the first day keeps every tissue supple, and the softness that makes her immortal also makes her unable to stand her own weight; a queen past her first century is carried. She lays for centuries and remembers everything laid. Her hive is her body, and the workers say so.
Her scent is the government. It is made continually and carried through the comb by the fanning of wings, and it is the law of the hive felt on the skin of everyone in it, so that no Pramata in a hive has a private mood. Her fear is the hive's fear within a minute, and her death is felt before it is announced.
Life
She makes the castes with her own body. An egg on flower-jelly and then honey comes up a worker; an egg on the dark jelly she makes when the hive is afraid comes up a soldier; an egg sealed in a cell the architects have lined with river mud comes up an architect. The comb and the feed make the child, and the queen makes the comb and the feed.
When she dies the hive dies of the silence. The scent stops, the workers stop fanning within two days, stop feeding the grubs and stop eating themselves, and within a month there is wax and no one in it. Hollowhive is that, kept as it was found, and the strays make pilgrimage to it.
Faith
The hive faith is the queen herself. A Pramavohl who has lived since the vats is, to her comb, a goddess in residence, and the rites of the hive are her feeding, her bathing and her laying. Her name is not spoken outside the hive; the queens carry titles instead, the Mother of Nine Combs, the Unseen of the Waxen Reach.
Above her the Pramata put the First Flower, which is the flowering world and is not personified, and behind that the garden moon Zuella, the Far Comb, thanked for the seasons. The queens have lived long enough to have heard the mad ones who came back from the star gods' auction, and they have not told the comb.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- What a hive does when a second queen is laid and neither will go
- What the queen's own feed is made of, which the workers are not told
- Whether a queen has ever left a comb and lived
- What the queens were told by the ones who came back from the auction