Pram'votal
The Pram'votal is the architect caste, laid in a cell the architects have lined with river mud, and the cell makes the child. They are stocky for a Pramata, with broad forearms and a grip that can work river mud into stone-hard walls.
They build the homestead, line the queen's cells and speak for her to the comb. They live forty years, longer than any other caste, and are the only Pramata the strays' towns have ever asked to stay, since a Pram'votal can raise a granary that outlasts the town.
Body
The mud-lined cell they were raised in gives them a heavier plate and a slower wing, so they hover low and land often, where the rest of the hive works the air. The four arms are the same arrangement as a worker's, the upper pair thin and precise and the lower short and heavy, but the forearms are broad and the grip is built for material rather than for grubs.
A Pramata writing uses the upper arms and holds the page with the lower, and the towns that have hired Pram'votal as clerks have all remarked on the speed. Like every Pramata they read the polarisation of the sky and always know direction and the hour, which is why a hive's land claim is a set of bearings and angles from the comb, recorded by the architects and unusable by anyone else.
Society
They are the clergy of the hive. The queen rules by scent and the Pram'votal speak for her to the comb, and the speaking is only translation, which is why a hive has no politics worth the name. They also keep the count of combs, which is the whole of the record a homestead holds.
Outside, they are the caste other peoples want. Every barony and crown in reach of a homestead has hired Pramata to set boundary stones, and the stones are always right, and the disputes that follow are always about the wording. The towns that keep a Pram'votal keep it for what it can raise.
Country
The comb is theirs. It is a tower of mud-lined wax with the queen's cells at the warm centre, the grub comb around her, the stores outward of that and the hive's dead pressed into the walls themselves, so that a homestead is built out of everyone who has ever lived in it. Around it, out to a mile in every direction, the bee pasture and the beds of magical flora are laid out in bearings read off the sky, and from a hill they look like nothing at all.
Hollowhive still stands, which is a Pram'votal fact as much as a sad one: the hive died of its queen's silence and the building did not, and the strays walk into a structure made of the rendered dead of a hive that starved with full comb.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which towns have hired a Pram'votal, and what was built
- How much of a queen's word is actually the architects'
- Who tends Hollowhive now
- Whether an architect can be laid without a queen to seal the cell