Deathborn Prologue (Draft 2)

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This wasn't right. She'd raised him exactly as she was supposed to, so how was he dead?

Head Nurse Birch racked her mind for any error on her part but found none. She supposed this was just one of those unfortunate twists of fate. She tried to remind herself, Sometimes a prince, or a forager, or a hunter, will turn up dead and there’s nothing you can do.

I know! she replied to her own thoughts. Her days as a doctor to both grubs and adults taught her this much, but she still prickled all over.

She wasn’t just irritated at the circumstance, but at the busy-body, lower ranking nurses who had pushed past her to get a look at the prince’s cocoon.

“Oh, what happened?” one asked.

“Could be a disease,” another said.

“Did someone make a mista”—

Birch cut in. “No one made a mistake,” she snapped, “This is just an anomalous situation.”

It was pitch black in the colony, but she could feel their stares, their disapproval. She didn’t care. Truth be told she trusted about five of them (and there were hundreds of thousands under her watch) to do good by their colony and trusted only one ant to give the diagnosis on this unfortunate soul. That ant wasn’t a nurse.

“I’m taking this to Chop.”

The lower ranking nurses couldn’t have overturned her authority if they wanted to, and they didn’t try, because they knew that Chop knew more about diseases than any other ant in the colony. Before she could overhear whatever gossiping rituals they carried out when they thought she wasn’t listening, Birch dragged the cocoon from the royal nursery and plunged into a sea of ants.

The prince and his cocoon were small, as all princes and prince cocoons are, but Birch was smaller and it dragged against the ground despite her attempts to keep it aloft. It was heavier than herself, oval-shaped, and spun from off-white silk, but really it was more unwieldy in shape than weight.

Timekeepers ran by, shouting, “Dusktime! Dusk! The first night shift starts soon!” as she slowly made her way upward through the main halls. They were shouting “Dawntime! Dawn!” by the time she’d made it to the top of the colony. She hardly felt tired, though, for with her age came wisdom and clever tricks. She could take dozens of miniature naps over the course of a shift, sometimes only a few seconds long, but each amounting to a somewhat restful sleep. (Though nothing was better than a long, uninterrupted nap.)

At last, she entered a sparsely populated area of the queendom: The Butchers’ Hall.

The title started as a dark nickname from the days before the caste had an official name, and it’d stuck ever since. Really, the “butchers” were inspectors of dead ants. Only a few hundred insects dwelled in their halls at once, and unusually, they’d been given separate bedrooms away from the colony. The only other workers given the grace of their own designated sleeping quarters were nurses.

The Butchers’ Hall lay next to a colony entrance, conspicuously empty, and smelling of ant-death. A stray beam of moonlight pouring in deepened the shadows. The ants inside, wrapped in the acrid, chemical smell appeared wraith-like.

Birch hesitated before she entered. The death-scent was so overpowering that it obscured other scents within its range. Her instinct compelled her to drop the prince and flee. Worse, she was blind without her smell, unable to tell one ant from another despite the moonlight.

At last, she forced herself forwards. The wraiths politely moved out of her way as she hurried towards the large doorway at the very back of the cluster of rooms.

“Chop!” she said, “Chop, I have a dead prince for you.”

Chop, a surly ant who was missing two limbs (a foreleg and a midleg), stepped out of her shadowed corner. Where her legs were missing, she was given sturdy pieces of wood, each gnawed into roughly the shape of her missing limb. With them, her gait was awkward, and her stick-forelimb was not good for much but stabbing and writing.

Officially, she was a Head Butcher, but she governed her entire group. Her word was law, she may as well have been a noble. Birch wondered why she hadn’t been accepted into their ranks. She even had a room to herself! This was a high honor in ant society—even most nobles had to share living space.

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

“I’m not sure, but I want to be safe,” Birch said, “There could have been an outside factor to cause this. We’ve sent some swarms to explore the riverside this season, I believe, there could be something poisonous from there.”

“Ever the cautious one,” Chop said, “Excuse me, I have to clear off my workspace.” She swept an acrid smelling carcass about Birch’s size off the luxurious stone table and moved it to the far back of the room. “Come closer.”

Birch set the cocoon down on Chop’s table and spoke again, “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 some crude tool from the corner of the room, Birch saw something.

The cocoon wiggled.

She thought it was her imagination. It remained still for so long after that Birch was certain she had dreamed it. It must be anxiety, my anxious old brain, she thought, And it’s been so long since I was in any light, I’m just seeing things. I checked, it’s not alive.

There was another, near-invisible jump from within the cocoon. And then another, and another, and another until it was shaking violently on the table as the prince within clawed his way out.

Immediately, visions of the deathborn came back to her, of the lair, the ant skull and its throne of bones and roots, the desolate halls, the monsters that roamed them. It was as if she was back in that place again, its thoughts invading hers. Her stomach seized, her jaws ground together, her limbs froze. It was as if she’d come face to face with a spider.

How could this be? Had she not inspected the prince closely enough? Had he just been in a deep sleep? Maybe he had been dead and setting him down jolted him to ife?

Really, how didn’t matter anymore. Only the where mattered, and they were in the middle of Chop's death-soaked chambers.

This is no place for an ant to be born!

She leaped forward as if to pinch the cocoon shut in her jaws.

Right as Chop turned around to ask what was wrong, a horrible, terrible thing happened.

It burst open.

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“NO!” Birch’s cry was guttural, the sound an ant made as she was swept away by a predator, never to be seen again.

Chop nearly leapt out of her bones. Her tools flew from her claws and scattered across the floor. “Birch!” she shouted and ran to inspect her friend, expecting to see some predator or parasite had infiltrated the colony, only for Birch to dart forward and snatch the cocoon in her jaws.

By now, her workers had gathered at the entrance of her room. Their presence blotted out the moon, and the chamber fell into darkness.

“Birch?” Chop asked.

“This was a terrible mistake, I-I should have taken him to the graveyard!” Birch said.

“What?”

“This prince, he is… he’s…”

The onlooking workers murmured. A few of the surlier ones entered the room, gruffly announcing their intent to rescue the prince.

Birch began to panic. She whipped her head to the side to get a better look at who was approaching, and there was a ripping noise.

“Stop,” Chop told her helpers, fearing Birch would further tear the cocoon, “You’re going to tear the male apart before his bones get a chance to harden.”

“Good!”

Everyone gasped.

“You don’t mean that!” Chop snapped.

“I do!”

“We must be able to come to a solution on this. You don’t want to attract any attention from outside.”

It wasn’t even an order, yet some workers immediately moved to sequester the Butchers’ Halls from prying eyes.

“N-No, I would not.”

“Then tell me what you’re trying to accomplish here,” Chop said, “Please.”

There was a beat of silence.

Birch suddenly became winded. Every word was punctuated with a wheezing pant. “Chop, Chop you have to promise me you won’t let the worst come to pass!”

“Just calm down and tell me what you mean.”

Birch stepped back on wobbly legs and let go of the hatchling. From the hole she had torn in his cocoon, he began to peek his head out, but Birch shoved him back in and pinched the opening shut. A faint crack emanated from inside.

“Birch! You hurt him”—

“It doesn’t matter. We have to… we have to… we have to get rid of this. This was a mistake, I have to fix it.”

“Wait a second!” Chop snatched the cocoon from her friend’s reach, “What do you mean by fix it? There’s nothing to do now, he’s been born!”

“I’ll do what I have to, Chop! This thing”—

Chop felt as if she were speaking to another creature wearing an ant’s bones. That was Birch, wasn’t it? Surely, she couldn’t be suggesting what it sounded like she was suggesting. “That thing is a hatchling prince”—

“And it is deathborn!”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

There was a long silence. The cocoon started to wiggle again.

“Birch,” Chop started carefully, “I think you need to stop and breathe. Maybe you should calm down and…” She made the mistake of pausing for too long, and Birch finished for her.

“…and what? Let the colony be destroyed?”

 “He’s only a prince, he’ll live a week! What can he do? And think of your own safety! The nobles will be upset if they learn you’ve hurt the prince, they’ll have your head if you kill him.”

“Have my head? My health has had my head for seasons, they can take it if they want!”

Seeing Birch’s state of mind, the workers finally poured into the chamber in full. Though there were only a hundred or so of them, they had Birch surrounded and separated from the prince in moments. Though, being under Chop’s command, they knew of the two’s history and merely held the nurse in place. In any other wing of the colony, Birch’s head would be off her shoulders in an instant.

Chop pulled the prince’s cocoon close to her. “I can take care of whatever it is you need me to take care of, but you will have to explain yourself. Just go and take a few deep breaths”—

“Can I trust you?” Birch asked.

“Of course, you can! We’ve been friends since we hatched!”

“But can I really trust you?”

 Chop understood what Birch was getting at now. She supposed it had to be done. With a deep breath, she stood up tall and grit her jaws. “I’ll make an Oath on it, here and now. What do you need me to do?”