Deathborn Prologue

If you keep an eye on the ground, you’ll find a myriad of little dramas playing out around you: of sparrows and mice, spiders and grasshoppers—and ants. But your eye must be sharp and your patience expansive, as mine are, to find these stories, more so to transcribe them.

This tale begins in the sprawling ant empire of Queendom Finch, deep in some nondescript, temperate forest of maples and oaks. Birds swoop through the canopy, deer graze, wildcats hunt, and mice scurry through leaf litter. Plants hum in wordless tongues, a thousand Voices mingling in the soil.

Lower your eyes further, down beneath the roots of an old tree, into the depths of a complex maze of tunnels and rooms.

Here, there lived millions of dark blue ants, whispering in a language of pheromones too alien to smell, vibrations in the earth too faint for human skin to discern, and sounds so tiny your ears could never hope to hear.

They toiled, as all ants do, within a massive country of hunters, foragers, and nursers, where none but the queen is female (or male), but for the sake of simplicity they will be referred to as such. They had a healthy territory of a mile or so and were rich in meat and edible fungus.

Among these nondescript ants was a very interesting specimen. Her body was adorned in spots the color of ivory, and she worked deep in the nursery, where the soil was warm even in the harshest winters.

This was Head Nurse Birch. She was about three and a half seasons old. This was very close to what a human would call a year, and what an ant would call the end of her life.

Birch had many afflictions and aches, ranging from joint pains to paranoia around cleaning, though none were enough to keep her from working most days. She was also lucky to be part of forgiving colony who favored acceptance even in the leaner years, so if she had wished, she could have retired to a library or dining hall with no consequence.

At present, however, she liked being a nurse too much.

As a nurse, Birch doubled as both a child-rearer and a doctor, though she was not often called to work on adult ants. She stood watch over the royal wing of the nearly empty nursery.

The cocoons’ discarded shells had been deconstructed for recycling and each cradle’s interior had been cleared out. Nurses hustled back and forth with damp bits of moss and grass blades to furnish each crib. Once they had a bed furnished, they’d return with a clawful of larvae or a cocoon and place them carefully inside.

Birch, meanwhile, kept vigil over a lone, unhatched cocoon. The ant inside should have awoken long ago. Now it was her job to determine whether something was wrong.

With no light in the colony tunnels, her ability to inspect it from the outside was limited. The best she could do was tap and turn it as she waited for a sign of movement. This monarch had developed normally from egg to larva to cocoon, so there was no reason it should be taking so long to so much as stir.

As Birch’s patience started to wane, she began to go through a list of possibilities.

Perhaps the cocoon was too hot or cold, or maybe it had developed poor jaw muscles, or maybe against all odds it had died?

With an irritated huff, she sat it upright and bit the tiniest of holes into the side, just large enough to stick her antenna through. With a few deft movements, the smell-and-touch silhouette of the royal revealed itself to her, and the problem became clear.

The ant was small, about the size of a male, but the abdomen was larger and longer than usual. A pair of withered wings could be faintly made out as well. A prince, she assumed. She tapped his head and eyes in hopes of waking him.

There was still no movement.

Birch waited a long, long while for any signs of life from the ant. She wasn’t keen on being the nurse to accidentally throw a live prince to the graveyard.

Then she went to get a second opinion from several other ants.

They all came to an agreement, the prince was dead.

Birch sighed.

Far too small for flight, far too small for queendom, and far too small for life, it seemed.

Disappointing, but not the end of the world; thousands more royals had been born this day. However, it would be safest to make sure there was no illness afoot.

Birch decided she would take it to Chop, firstly to have it inspected for possible disease, but secondly to talk to her friend for a bit.

She hefted the cocoon onto her back and left the chamber, carefully maneuvering through roiling waves of blue-shelled ants. She turned down innumerable halls and passed through chambers stocked with snacks, leaves, stones, and dozing ants before she finally arrived at a curious collection of rooms near the top of the colony.

Not many ants passed through here. The smell of dead ant was thick in the air. It was not like regular rot-smell (the sort that rises off an old carcass), although it was there, too; it was its own special chemical scent.

Birch sidestepped a train of ants carrying both dead sisters and unpleasant smelling bundles on their backs as she entered the largest room in the cluster. “Chop!” she said, “Chop, I have a dead cocoon for you.”

Chop, a surly ant who was missing two limbs (a foreleg and a midleg), stepped out of her shadowed corner. She was an ant who—in addition to preparing food when she had nothing else to do—cut apart other ants whose deaths seemed suspicious, connected to a disease or a poison. Occasionally she would be given the carcasses of prey or other non-ants as well, but she mostly stuck to her own kin.

Where her legs were missing, she was given sturdy pieces of wood, each carved and smoothed until they were roughly the shape of her missing limb. They worked okay, but her gait was awkward, and her stick-forelimb was not good for much but stabbing or writing.

While all ants could move about the colony as they pleased if there was no work to be done, Chop spent most of her time in her room. In fact, aside from the queens, her caretakers, and the nobles, she may have been the only other ant in this colony with her own designated chambers.

“Diseased, eh?” Chop asked, “Poor thing.”

“He may only be deformed, but I want to be safe. There could have been an outside factor to cause this, and I know we’ve been hunting for more edible plants riverside this season,” Birch said. She set the cocoon down on Chop’s table and continued to speak, “He hasn’t so much as twitched since hatching time began.”

“I understand. Let’s see what happened here, shall we?”

As Chop turned to gather her crude, wood bone-pry from the corner she’d been working in, Birch saw something.

The cocoon wiggled.

For a moment she thought it was her imagination. It paused, remained still for so long Birch was certain she had indeed dreamed it up. It must be anxiety, my anxious old brain, she thought, I checked, it’s not alive.

There was another, near-invisible jump from within the cocoon. And then another, and then another and another and another until it was shaking violently on the table.

It was a one in a million chance, an impossibility, a thing Birch’s logic-oriented ant brain could never have accounted for.

Why the cocoon had suddenly sprung to life was a mystery; maybe it had never been dead, but eerily still, or maybe setting it down had knocked the life into it. But really, how didn’t matter anymore.

Only the where mattered, and they were smack dab in the middle of a Chop’s death-soaked chambers.

This was no place for an ant to be born!

Birch panicked. She scanned the room—death scent all around! And was that fungus? Oh, she hoped not!

She jumped forwards, desperate to stop what was going to happen, but she would have never made it in time.

Right as Chop started to reach for the cocoon, a horrible, terrible thing happened.

It burst open.