by Pirateaba
Klbkch stared at Lyonette for a second and then turned to walk away with the Drake. Lyonette stood in the doorway, staring at the two [Guardsmen]’s backs. They waited until they were a few paces away from the inn to start speaking, but the wind blew their voices up the hill towards her.
“Looks like Erin’s not back yet.”
“Indeed.”
“But who was that Human? I’ve never seen her before, have you?”
“I believe it was the thief that Erin Solstice employed.”
“Who?”
“The one who burned down Miss Krshia’s shop, I believe. The one exiled from the city.”
“Who?”
“The Human girl.”
“There are a lot of—”
“The one who called you ‘scaley oaf’.”
“Oh! Her. Hey, can I go back inside and beat her up a bit?”
Lyonette shrank back in the doorway, but the other voice stopped the first.
“That would not be wise. If Erin Solstice comes back and finds you have attacked her staff, she will most likely ban you for life.”
“Damn. Are you sure?”
“Very. You will have to give her your apology gift later. Although, you will first have to buy her a gift.”
“Hrgh. I know, I know. But what do Human females like, anyways? Should I get her some meat? Jewels? I don’t have that much money on me, you know.”
“I recommend we ask about. There are Humans in the city. Let us ask them.”
“Sure, I guess. If we have to. Hey, where should we eat tonight…?”
The voices trailed off as the wind changed directions. Lyonette shivered as she stood in the open doorway a moment longer, staring out into the dark snow. Then she closed the door. She felt…bad, even though she didn’t know why. But the inn was full of light, especially when she opened the windows and added more fuel to the fire. It was warm and bright and it almost felt like before, even if dinner had been bland. But it wasn’t the same.
It really wasn’t.
—-
Someone else came by that night. Lyonette was in the kitchen, trying to work out what would make the pasta taste better when she heard the door open. She hurried into the common room and saw a man wearing a worn, serviceable dark cloak shaking snow off of it as he looked around. A dagger at his side was his only weapon, but he walked as if he only needed his piercing glare to kill anything that might accost him.
Lyon recognized him as well. The man looked as annoyed as ever, and perhaps even more so today. His expression was grim, and he reminded Lyon of the oldest and grumpiest of the kingdom’s soldiers. She knew who he was—a Gold-rank adventurer. That made her defer to him slightly, even though she was royalty. It was certainly not because she was afraid of him. Well, maybe a little.
“W-welcome sir! Miss Solstice isn’t back yet, but if you’d like to stay, I could make you some pasta—”
Halrac’s piercing gaze froze Lyon in place. He looked at her, and then around the inn. He shook his head and grunted irritably.
“Hmph.”
He turned and left without another word. Lyonette watched him leave through one of the windows as the adventurer stomped back towards the city through the snow. She didn’t know what to think about that, but she imagined how much money a Gold-rank adventurer might have spent and felt even worse.
All in all, it was almost a relief when Olesm dropped by. The Drake was still irritable, but he came by for dinner by himself. He grew much more cheerful when Lyonette served him pasta and told him he wouldn’t have to pay for it; his expression immediately changed when he bit into the over-salted batch she’d made this time. He ate four bites and then pushed his plate away and didn’t touch it for the remainder of the time he spent in the inn.
Not that he took that long anyways. Olesm only stayed long enough to tell Lyonette about the Goblin army’s sacking of Esthelm, the news that Erin was alive in Celum, and that she wasn’t coming back any time soon. She badgered him with questions, but the Drake had no answers.
“I don’t know when she can come back, okay?”
He snapped at her as he drank some of the hot water she’d boiled and grimaced at the taste. It was the same water she’d used for the noodles, and he pushed that back on the table as well after another sip.
“But—when will she return? Can she?”
Lyonette wrung her hands. Olesm just shrugged, looking unhappy.
“It’s dangerous on the roads, and frankly, it might be safer where she is. After everyone’s [Dangersense] got triggered in the city, Zevara’s put the entrance to the dungeon on permanent watch with every spare [Guardsman] she can muster.”
“The dungeon?”
Lyonette had no [Dangersense]; she hadn’t even realized the entrance to the dungeon had been uncovered. Olesm nodded as he exclaimed.
“None of the adventurers want to go in. Griffon Hunt hasn’t even gone through the entrance yet, and all the other groups are staying put. No one’s sure what will come out—if anything. Someone’s got to go in, but until one of the groups works up the nerve, it’s another threat along with those Goblins that the city has to be wary of.”
He sighed and stood up. Lyonette watched him anxiously. Olesm looked at the food and water and shook his head briefly before digging in his pocket.
“Here.”
He put a few bronze coins on the table and nodded to them.
“For the food. I’m not that hungry, I guess.”
“You’re going? Already?”
Lyonette was surprised at the tone of her own voice. Normally she would have welcomed silence, but Olesm was the first person to even enter the inn since Erin had left. The Drake nodded, looking tired.
“I’ve got to plan some stuff out with Zevara and—well, I’m busy. I’ll stop by tomorrow, though.”
“But why not stay here? For a little while longer, I mean?”
Olesm paused, looking awkward.
“I’ve really got to be going. I still need to ea—I mean, I’ve got a lot…”
He stopped and stared at something in the corner of the room. Lyonette’s eyes were drawn to the ghostly chessboard on one of the tables. None of the pieces had moved since Erin had left, but the Drake’s eyes fixed on them for a few seconds. He looked back at Lyonette.
“You wouldn’t happen to play chess, would you?”
Lyon shook her head reluctantly. She remembered it being the latest trend in court, but she’d never picked up the game. Olesm looked disappointed.
“Oh.”
He left soon after, despite Lyonette’s attempts to entice him to stay. Afterwards, Lyonette stared at the bad pasta and hurled it into the fire along with the plate. It made a horrible mess and stunk terribly as the fire consumed the pasta. Then Lyon just stood in the center of the room as the smell of burnt food filled the inn.
She was lost. For a few minutes Lyonette desperately tried to suppress her tears, but then they came forth and she just stood in the empty inn, letting them roll down her cheeks and drip onto the floor.
It was all over. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t cook, and no one liked her. Lyonette had known that—she’d even relished the knowledge before. But now, she knew it would be her death. No one would buy any food. She’d starve to death and Erin would find her bones in the inn when she came back.
She was a failure. That’s all she was and would ever be. The pitiful third daughter of a small kingdom dying alone in an inn that wasn’t hers. She was nothing.
The girl curled up on the floor as the embers of the fire glowed and faded. She stopped crying because even that was no use, and lay there, waiting to die. She grew still as she rolled herself up into a ball of misery. Then the door opened, and the Antinium walked in.
—-
Pawn didn’t know why he went to The Wandering Inn. It was just where his feet carried him. The Antinium had no idea what to do or where do go; he just knew that he might find the answers he sought if he could listen to a certain yo
ung woman for a while.
It had been a long time since he’d gone there. In fact, this morning he’d intended nothing of the kind. Pawn had woken up sitting in his small sleeping spot and believed today would be like all the rest. Empty and uncertain.
The Antinium do not lie down to sleep. It’s not that they can’t, but their backs do not curve like mammals. Pawn’s own back resembled a beetle’s in many ways, and he disliked the rocking that occurred when he tried to lie down. Thus, both Workers and Soldiers alike slept while sitting. It was the most economic use of space, and in the huge barrack-like sleeping area that held five hundred Workers, Pawn had had an adequate six hours of rest.
That was how Pawn’s day began. He would pull himself out of his small cubicle of dirt with his four arms and file into line with the other Workers as they left the room at the same time to receive their morning nutrition.
It was easier for Pawn to do this today than it had a few weeks ago. He had regrown all but a few digits on his hands, and his severed limbs had nearly fully regenerated thanks to the unique healing substances the Antinium used. As he stood behind a Worker, Pawn flexed his digits and marveled a bit at how the simplicity of that action alone made him feel so much better.
The Workers ahead and behind Pawn did not look at their hands, or even move except when they walked forwards. They were not like Pawn. They kept their gazes straight and did not talk. And they gave Pawn more room than strictly necessary.
He was the odd one out. Pawn knew that, but he tried not to take advantage of his position. When he stood in line the Worker gave him the same amount of brown-grey paste as the other Workers. Perhaps if he’d asked for more, he would have received it, but the calculated ration was enough to sustain him throughout the day. Besides, no one would ever ask for more of the Worker’s food than normal.
Pawn stood in the food consumption area and slowly ingested the muck he had been given. There were no seats for the Antinium to eat at; they simply collected their rations on earthenware bowls at ate as efficiently as possible before depositing the bowls to be used again by more Workers filing into the room.
Workers and Soldiers ate separately. This wasn’t because one group ate better quality food than the other—they all ate the same highly-caloric mush, but Soldiers just ate three times as much as Workers, and thus used different containers, necessitating a separate room to feed in. Pawn stared at the brown clump of mushed up…something…as he put it between his mandibles and chewed. The food went down easily, but the taste—
He had grown used to it. Even so, it was never what one would call easy. The Workers ate the food quickly, showing no signs of disgust, even though Pawn knew they had to be tasting exactly what he did. If they had gag reflexes—or an alternative food source, it might have been a different matter.
But food was food, and there were no alternatives. Except at Erin’s inn. Pawn could remember having delicious meals there, and he had to force himself to eat the rest of the mush. He crunched down on something on his last bite. Something hadn’t been fully processed? He swallowed it anyways. It was a nice interlude from the rest of the mush. Perhaps it had been a bone fragment.
Then, as soon as they had finished eating, the Workers moved as one out of the large cavern used for food preparation and into the tunnels to begin their daily duties. Pawn followed them, not pausing to duck even though the ceiling of the tunnel was barely a foot over his head.
That was another feature of the Antinium Hive in Liscor. While some of the cavernous rooms were indeed quite large, designed to hold large numbers of the Antinium, many parts of the Hive had been optimized for space. Thus, the tunnels used solely by Workers were barely large enough to accommodate them. They had only a foot of height as they marched through the cramped corridors built to accommodate exactly two Workers at a time. And such was the flow of Workers going to their daily duties—
Well, any creature with a hint of claustrophobia would have suffered greatly. Pawn didn’t mind; it was what he was used to. He walked with hundreds of other Workers as they walked through the tunnels and around each other in a perfect, synchronized flow of traffic that never halted or wasted time. Hundreds of Workers moved in every direction, going aboveground to work for the city, or below to dig or shore up collapsed tunnel walls, fulfill other tasks around the Hive, and so on.
This was only one of the shifts of Workers that worked throughout the day. Pawn was one of the Workers who slept from just before midnight to around dawn, so he considered himself close to a ‘normal’ sleeping habit. But there were other Workers who would sleep in the middle of the day. It didn’t matter; all time was the same in the Hive.
Pawn walked down the narrow Worker corridors until he came to a main intersection in the Hive. Here, traffic diverged and more bodies entered the ceaseless cascade of motion. Larger Soldiers marched in huge columns down the massive highway of bodies, going to reinforce weak spots in the Hive, to eat, or just to rest until they were called on again. Here the Workers joined other flows, moving deeper into the Hive, or up above.
Pawn walked forwards, following the Worker ahead of him until he came to the split in the traffic. There he paused, uncertain. The Worker behind him paused, and so did the Worker behind him, and behind him and so on. In an instant, thousands of bodies stopped for one crucial second until the Worker behind Pawn awkwardly walked around him. The Worker behind him followed the motion and so did the Worker behind him and behind him…
Instantly, the flow of traffic resumed. Unlike traffic in Erin’s world, the Workers did not hesitate. They moved in perfect synchronization, so that after the initial pause, traffic flow resumed without any pileups as it were. Even so, the incident had cost all the Workers following Pawn a precious second of inactivity. Pawn knew he should feel guilty, but he didn’t.
He stared at the bodies walking around him. Here were Workers, going to their duties. Across from him, another stream of Soldiers was rapidly advancing down the hallway, nearly running. They might be off to fight monsters.
Part of Pawn wondered what would happen if he walked in front of them. Would the Soldiers just trample him? They did that to other Workers who accidentally got in their way. But would his status as an Individual mean they’d avoid him?
He decided not to test this theory. Instead, Pawn resumed walking, resulting in a micro-second of delay as he rejoined the flow of Workers. He walked upwards, up towards a special room built near the surface of the Hive.
A large room had been sectioned off and given a new purpose. Instead of acting as another feeding room, the low-ceilinged area had been filled with cushions, small rectangular wooden boards filled with pieces, and even the odd chair. Antinium, all Workers, sat around these boards, playing chess.
They all paused when Pawn entered the room. The Workers looked up at Pawn, and then resumed playing. He stared around the room, looking at all the seated Antinium playing chess.
In truth, the dirt ceiling was too low to really allow any Workers to sit on the chairs. They sat around the chess boards on the dirt instead, completely ignoring the cushions that had been piled neatly in one corner of the room and never been used.
There were around sixty Workers in the room at the moment, all engaged in a board game. None of them looked up from their games, and they moved at very regular intervals. The rhythmic click of wooden pieces gently tapping on the board soothed Pawn. But he did not sit down at an empty board as he usually did. If he had, he would have had an opponent in seconds. But Pawn didn’t want that today.
Instead, he sat with his back to one of the dirt walls. Pawn stared ahead, not really at the chess players. They were all new Individuals, the few that had survived and not become Aberrations like the rest. They had chosen names, and they were all learning to play chess, as per the recommendations Pawn had made to Klbkch.
But they were not…like him. Pawn knew that. These new Individuals were not like he was. Nor were they like the original Individuals, the original Workers that ha
d chosen names.
“Hah.”
Pawn chuckled out loud at the ridiculousness of that thought. Instantly, every Worker in the room paused in their chess playing and looked up at him as one. He froze in place, unsure of what to do. After a second the Workers returned to playing as if nothing had happened.
That was it. Pawn closed his mandibles and made sure not to make another sound as the sounds of chess resumed. These new Individuals had names, but they didn’t have what he and the others had. They still obeyed orders like any other Worker, and they didn’t express their opinions. They hadn’t developed personality like he, Bird, Belgrade, Anand, and Garry, the only surviving original Individuals had. It wasn’t these new Individuals’ fault, of course. They had been forced into the choice, they hadn’t made it themselves. They didn’t have…Erin.
Things had been simpler a few months ago. Back then, the Hive had made sense to Pawn. There were Workers and Soldiers, the Prognugator, and the Queen. That was how it had been. But now there were Workers and Soldiers yes, and the Queen, but they had a Revalantor who also acted as a Prognugator in the form of Klbkch. He had kicked the former Prognugator who was also the new Prognugator, Ksmvr, out of the Hive. And there was a new group of Antinium.
The Individuals. Over a hundred Workers who had chosen names and been tested for individuality without becoming Aberration. But in that group of Individuals, there were five…leaders.
No, not leaders. Five exceptions. Five of the original Individuals who had become so of their own volition, to save a Human named Erin Solstice. They had been the chess club, her chess club, the Workers who had played at her inn every few days. And they had given their lives, almost all of them, to protect her from the undead.
That was the real change in the Hive. Five Antinium had chosen and become Individual, taking classes and names and true personalities. They had begun to level up rapidly like any other species, and they had become…
Unique. And it had to be said, of the five, one in particular stood out.
