(I thought and thought about what I wanted to write for a while, and then it hit me. The best way to tell the story I wanted was to go from the perspective of the other side - from the bee. I’ve formatted it much like a Lore sequence, because that felt the most appropriate to me. I hope you like it. - OUTATIME)
The bee was content. It was one of many, one of many bees in the great honeycomb, the great forest… Agartha. Gaia’s Hollow Earth. Buzz buzz… buzz buzz. It didn’t have a human, but it had all the other bees around it. All the wonderful warmth, the honey… the Hive.
Buzz buzz. The bee was content. The wisdom flowed sweet.
The call came. The bee was being sent from the Hive. Sent from Agartha. Sent to bestow Gaia’s love on a human. The human didn’t understand. The human tried to wave the bee away, tried to swat the bee away. The human was afraid of being stung. But the bee knew. The bee knew its human. Down the hatch… into the belly.
The human swallowed a bug. The human swallowed Gaia’s love. The human swallowed the bee.
The bee rested. The bee was joining its human. The bee was content. The wisdom flowed sweet.
The human came to Agartha. Agartha had a new member of the Hive. Felt the warmth, smelled the honey. Met the other members of the Hive. It wasn’t for long, but just for a moment, the bee felt completely home, more home than it had ever been before. And then they were off.
New England was gross. The air was sour. The weather was cold and rainy and foggy. The bee was warm inside its human, but it knew its human was cold. It knew its human was unhappy with the weather, unhappy with what it was seeing. The bee loved its human, so the bee protected. Protected against the nasty fog. Lent Gaia’s power to protect from the nasty creatures, and pulled its human back to the well, back from the brink out of Gaia’s love. Such a nasty place but the bee endured.
The bee was not content… but the bee loved. The wisdom flowed sweet.
Egypt was warmer, but dry. The bee felt its human being annoyed by the sand. The sand got into everything. Even into its human’s mouth. Ptui. The things in Egypt were different, but still dangerous. Old things, very very old things. A few things possibly as old as the bee itself, possibly going back to time before the Hive could remember. The human struggled a few times. Got lost in time, a few times. It was a strange thing, moving through time. For a short while the bee was both inside its human and back at the Hive, human-less, all at once.
The bee remembered this moment. At once being human-less, and feeling what it was like to love a human, intensely. To protect, to keep, to cherish. Gaia’s love, for this one human the bee had been given.
Was that why the bee had been chosen to find a human? To find this human? Because the bee had loved this human already? The paradox was confusing. It did not make sense, but it didn’t matter. The bee loved. The wisdom flowed sweet.
Venice was annoyingly damp. The bee and its human came there often. Sometimes for information, sometimes for training. The human learning how to use the power of Gaia, to protect itself better. The bee did not need to save its human as often, but the bee felt ever closer, as its human drew closer to Gaia, drew more power when it was needed.
The bee loved. The wisdom flowed sweet.
Carpathia. Brrrr. Cold. If not for the human, the bee would not be. It would be hibernating, or frozen. The things in Carpathia were odd. Some were old, almost as old as the things in Egypt; the last holdings of the fae, creatures of ages past, contemporaries of mummies and djinn and yet closer to the bee, closer to the Hive… closer to Gaia.
Some were new. Some were… wild. Some were a combination of it all. Old, new, wild… all together. Those ones disturbed the bee the most. There was something extra-wrong about all of that.
But the bee loved. The bee protected and accepted the protection the human gave it in return, even if the human didn’t know it was protecting. The wisdom flowed sweet.
… this was wrong. The bee protected its human. But there was something here. In this facility. Something that hated Gaia. Something that rejected Gaia. A human that wanted to be away from Gaia. To drag itself to the stars, to the void. It was wrong. It was wrong. It was wrong.
It was over. The bee lived. The human lived. The wrongness was gone. The wisdom flowed sweet.
The memory was strange. This human had a bee. This human had seen this over and over again. The entryway to something different. A place overrun by the Filth, by the nastiness. This poor human. Her bee protected, but could not save. Poor Sarah.
The bee would have wept, if it could.
The bee was scared. Its human was in the place different now. The places before had been dangerous, but this Tokyo was infested. The Filth here taking over humans, taking over animals. Taking over everything it could, warping even the old spirits and the guardian spirits. Climbing the tall towers that humans made, the buildings that imitated the Hive. The nasty birds, everywhere. But its human was stronger now, and its human had friends now. Together they explored, human and bee. Learning what had happened, what was happening. Saving so very few. Humans with minds broken, or humans stuck in their own little worlds. Humans who should have left, if they could.
Following the path of one poor human. The one who had changed. Gaining a bee meant a show of Gaia’s love. What this John had gained instead was as wrong as the one who rejected Gaia. But different. John was trying, trying to come back. Calling everyone “Chuck.” John did not love what kept it going. What kept John going did not love John.
The bee was sad. But there was work to do. John opened the door. Human and bee climbed the tower. Climbed the tower again. And again. And again. All the wrongness, collected into the various floors of the tower. All the random wrongness in one place.
The human needed protecting. The bee was there to love and protect. The wisdom flowed sweet.
Another place warm and full of sand. Much less Filth here, but much more strangeness. The creatures different. Creatures of old stories, with a feel like and yet unlike the wild things from Carpathia. Things brought from Carpathia, brought from Tokyo, changed and reborn in wrong ways. The worst was the thing at the end. More like the Facility. Rejecting Gaia. Demanding to flow to the stars, to leave Gaia behind.
The bee did not like it. But now it was over.
The bee loved its human. The human did not know, but that did not matter. The bee loved, and there was more work to do. The wisdom flowed sweet.