Hive Queen by Sinclair, Grayson (ereader iphone .TXT) 📗

left me with little to occupy my time. Gil and Makenna chatted happily to one another, and Adam and Evelyn were engrossed in some form of hushed conversation, but that left me with no one to talk to.

I suppose I could have woken up Tegen and Cheira, who had fallen asleep about half an hour after we'd left, but that would have been selfish of me. Both of them were sleeping comfortably, and I refused to ruin that just for the sake of alleviating my boredom.

The others were oblivious to my agitation, and I couldn't even be mad at them. They weren't excluding me on purpose, so I just kept riding along as the green landscape slowly died to make way to wet and muggy scrubland. The ground squelched underfoot, and water pooled in the tracks we left. The air became stifling and heavy with each passing step we took. The stench of salt grew more pronounced.

My already dwindling happiness was soundly ruined as we got closer to the salt ridden marshes.

I loved nature, every living aspect of it, and after a thousand years of the pitch-black void, I had reveled in nature once more, but this wasn't natural. The poisoned earth sickened me to my very core. To destroy the environment for the sake of money is abhorrent. The greed of humans disgusts me. Life was more important than wealth or power.

This lesson, I learned the hard way.

The entomancer race paid the highest price for our greed. If humans aren't careful, they'll have to pay for their sins someday. The last of the greenery fell away to gray, and so sunk my spirits.

With nothing else to do, I resorted to opening up my Hive Mind. I kept one hand on Lacuna's reins while I let the other rest on her flank, allowing a trickle of magic dribble out of my fingers to drift to the muddy road.

I plunged myself into the small amount of life that lingered here—pockets of resistance to humanity's intrusions. There were very few spiders or ants anywhere near. They clung to the last remaining trees; scorpions and cockroaches seemed to be the majority of the holdouts. However, the scorpions were unhappy at the salt-rich land, and yet, they still survived in the heavy moisture that sunk through the ground. The cockroaches were indifferent to everything and carried on unhindered by the salt. I poured a trickle of my consciousness into them all.

All my little ones, going about their lives. They, too, acknowledged my presence and rejoiced for their queen. I poured as much love as I could into our connection and spent a little time with them while we rode. Having used this particular spell more than the others, it drained my mana the slowest.

I still had to be careful of my mana usage, but I could handle using it better now. The more creatures I touched with the Hive Mind, the more mana it cost me, but as we went deeper into the Mire, fewer and fewer could stay with me. I bid them farewell and was about to sever the connection when I noticed a strange bird on one of the trees.

One of my little spiders watched it from its home in the deadwood. It was afraid of the bird, and though it looked right at my spider, it made no attempt to eat it.

All birds were the enemy of my little ones. My goddess loves to pit her creatures against each other. So why isn't it eating the spider? I pooled more of my power into the little spider, trying to get a better look at the bird.

It was clearly a bird, but it wasn't like any I had ever seen before. It was large, black, and menacing. Its beak was a striking blood red. As it looked at the spider, it shifted. Its whole body flickered for a second, like a mirage. The singular bird leaked shadows, bleeding ink out into the world, before it faded for a second.

It was there, then it was gone, replaced by three identical copies.

Each of them looked not at each other, but out in the distance, where we happened to be riding by. The three birds shifted themselves, creating more and more of them as I watched. Dozens of them appeared before one flickered on top of the spider I was controlling and crushed it underfoot.

With the death of the spider, my mind flooded back to my body in a rush and left me with a pounding migraine. I gasped as I came back to myself, jerking in the saddle and managing to wake up both of the children. I looked up from them to find the others looking at me with mixed emotions, from concern and confusion to bored curiosity.

Gil spoke up first. "What's wrong, Eris?"

I didn't know how to explain what had happened. It was confusing to me, and I knew I would just muddle things if I tried to explain what I saw, but I tried my best anyway.

I paused over my words before I spoke. "Um, I'm not entirely sure myself." I shifted in my saddle to point at the tree a few hundred feet away, where even now the birds kept shifting and multiplying. "But there are some strange birds in the trees over there."

Gil and Makenna laughed off my explanation, I guess thinking I was enamored over the wildlife, but Evelyn frowned, drawing a firm line with her pale lips.

"What did they look like?"

I tried to recount their appearance. "Large and black, with really red beaks…and odd. They kept shifting, like an illusion."

Both Gil and Makenna stopped chuckling, and they turned to face me with anxiety on their faces.

"How many were there?" Makenna asked.

I told her. "Just one at first, then they multiplied."

"Oh, shit," Adam cursed.

The others reacted in a similar manner,