Insects and Bees

Overview

Insects are everywhere people farm, store, bury, or write, and they matter to every people in small ways that add up to harvests and losses. The bees that set an orchard's fruit, the hum that fills a ripening field, the flies at a corpse, the larvae of the marsh fevers, and the small eaters of paper and grain are all part of ordinary life. Magic follows them closely: whole workings exist to call insects in, drive them off, or slow them down.

Appearance

Bees

Hive bees are small, furred, and banded in dull gold and brown, about the size of a fingertip, with smoky wings that blur as they work. A hive in full summer roars softly from a stride away and smells of warm wax and honey. Wild bees are larger and darker, single-living, and nest in banks and dead wood.

Field and Garden Insects

A field at harvest hums with them: green and brown hoppers springing from the stalks, beetles with backs like polished horn, small white moths in clouds over the grain at dusk, and butterflies over the field margins in every colour of the hedges. Their caterpillars, green, striped, or furred, strip leaves in a bad year.

Carrion Flies

Fat, blue-black, green-sheened flies find a corpse within the hour in warm weather, and their buzzing is the first sign of a death no one has reported. Their maggots follow.

Marsh Insects

Over warm, still water in summer rise clouds of biting gnats and thin, whining flies, thickest at dusk. Some carry the marsh fevers, whose larvae can lodge in the body and work their way towards the spine.

Paper and Store Pests

Silverfish, small boring beetles, and pale moths live in archives, chests, and granaries, eating paper, binding, cloth, and stored grain unseen until the damage shows.

Habitat and Range

Insects live wherever there is warmth and food: thickest in the farmed country of the Confluence Basins and the orchards of the far-side folds, and in the warm wetlands of the river margins; fewest in high, cold, and dry country. They vanish in winter and return with the warmth, and their year is the farmer's year.

Behaviour and Temperament

Bees work flowers from first warmth to dusk and defend the hive with their stings, dying of it. Most other insects go about their business without regard to people, which is why a swarm or cloud is so unsettling when it turns towards a body: it is not anger, only hunger, and hunger does not tire.

Life Cycle

Most insects pass through egg, larva, and a resting shell before emerging in their grown form, and the turn from caterpillar to moth or butterfly is the most familiar change in the world. A summer's insects mostly die with the first frosts; bees winter in the hive, clustered on their stores.

Uses and Dangers

Bees give honey and wax. Wax seals letters, chests, and jars, makes the best candles, and gives archives and scriptoria their smell of old paper and beeswax. Above all, bees set fruit: an orchard with too few bees bears little, and orchard keepers call them in with Pollinator's Friend to rescue a poor bloom season, by floral lure or by a hive-linked rite.

The costs are many and small. Caterpillars and hoppers strip fields; store pests eat grain and paper, and couriers guard treaties against them with Page Seal. Marsh fevers kill, and healers drive their larvae out with Parasite Expel before they reach the spine. Flies speed the rot of the dead, and a caravan carrying its dead to consecrated ground slows rot and insects alike under Pall of Stillness. A swarm can be broken and driven apart with Scatter Cloud, though done badly it only moves the cloud onto someone else.

Lore and Belief

Insects are read. Necromancers weave nearby death-scent, insects, and scavengers into Carrion Warning, so that the flies and the crows warn of fresh death. In the Basins the air around the Harvest-Mother hums with insects, and a loud field is a blessed one. The chrysalis splitting to free a butterfly is the sign of Imago Prime, whose saying that the shell must break for the insect to emerge is told to the young at every hard change. Where no insect sounds at all, as by the still pool of the Ageless Spring, people feel that something is wrong.

The insects of the other planes and zones are other beings: the moisture-drinking Bleed-Beetles of the Parched, the heat-drawn Cinder-Moths of the Cinder Fields, and the blood-spinning Blood-Spinners of the Blood River share a shape with ordinary insects and little else.

Where It Appears

• Magic:
• Gods and Primes: The Harvest-Mother; Imago Prime
• Cosmology: The Ageless Spring; The Verdant Expanse