When the hive could no longer bear the weight of her; her need, her hunger, the thick, cloying insistence of her presence it did not collapse, as you might expect, but hummed at a pitch so intense, it vibrated and ultimately divided. The queen, swollen with her own ego, did not believe herself to be cast out. This was her will, she had chosen it. To leave now was by her own fruition. 

Perhaps that is how it must always feel, at the core of such a creature. The world rearranges itself for you, even as it quietly prepares your replacement. She carried with her, restless followers, those still bound to her heat, her promise, her danger. Their loyalty was sticky as honey and just as suffocating, frenetic attempts made to feed her ego and keep her alive. They believed this was how love looked. Those who were bound to her, bonded by trauma of the hives own creation, remained.

Behind them, in the dimming chambers, something new stirred, softer perhaps, or merely different, a body not yet hardened into rule. The hive held its breath. There was a sense not of peace, never that, but of shifting, a dangerous becoming. For what is a family, if not an organism that will sooner or later, rupture its own skin to survive? And what is a queen, new or old, but the blood that pours from the heart of that wound?

In this hive the queen did not simply rule she pressed herself upon it, a pulse that would not be denied. She is queen not because she must be but because all things bend, unwillingly, toward the force of her wanting. She is a woman, undeniably so but it is not her womanhood that holds them; it is the dark, devouring centre of her need. The hive drinks her in. The narrow passages throb with her presence, and the others, half-formed in themselves orbit her, momentarily drawn close, repelled by the sight of her sting, drawn close again, feeding her with small obediences and with the endless offering up of themselves.

Unlike in nature some move wearily in this atmosphere, burdened with a loyalty they did not choose, their submission edged always with resentment. They know although they do not have a voice, that love inside the hive is a currency to be spent carefully. To withhold it is to risk being cast out into the cold, where no humming warmth or selfish need will take them back.

And the honey is sweetness, thick and golden but it lies strangely on the tongue, as though something sharp had passed through it. It leaves behind a taste of iron, a bitter coating of sharp hurt. Beneath the low, soft, ceaseless murmur of the hive, there runs another current, darker, unspoken. Tension gathers. It is as if the life of the place itself knows that such a centre cannot hold forever. One day the queen, driven by her own will and all consuming ego, might turn away; and the hive, emptied of her will be left to discover what it is without the force that once consumed it. You will hate it here.