Chapter Thirty-Three: Ten Thousand Eggs
Through the weeks, a few things had changed.
The first and most visible was the bees. They had fully settled into the secret realm now, and with a whole world to spread into and no reason left to hold them back, Elias had stopped limiting the size of their colonies. The results were impressive. Freed of all restraint, the hives had grown enormous—towering structures larger than Elias himself, rising from the flower fields like golden cathedrals, humming with the industry of a colony finally allowed to flourish to its heart’s content.
With that growth came new queens. Ten more Lifebloom Bee Queens had been born into the expanding hives, swelling their number, each a Lord-potential sovereign in her own right. And Elias already had ten more Amberwing Bees stuck contentedly to his arms and shoulders, carefully chosen and waiting their turn to evolve.
The newcomers needed settling in, and that fell, naturally, to Holly, Honey, and Hope.
The three of them had long since cemented their place at the head of the colony, and they took to welcoming the new queens with the brisk authority of senior ministers receiving fresh recruits. Holly handled the practicalities, laying out the order of things with crisp, no-nonsense efficiency—which hives answered to whom, how the foraging territories were divided, the proper way of doing things in a colony this size. The new queens, young and uncertain, mostly had the sense to listen, though one or two bristled at being organized so thoroughly before Holly’s sheer unflappable competence wore them down.
Honey smoothed the introductions, drifting among the newcomers with her easy warmth, easing the inevitable friction of so many proud sovereigns suddenly sharing one home. A territorial dispute here, a wounded bit of pride there—Honey soothed them all, coaxing the growing court of queens into something like harmony with the patient diplomacy that had earned her place to begin with. Where Holly organized, Honey reconciled.
And Hope simply befriended them. She had no patience for hierarchies or protocols; she just swept the new queens up into her endless games and harebrained schemes, and by sheer relentless enthusiasm made them feel welcome faster than any amount of structure could. More than one nervous young queen found herself, within a day of being born, looping through the flower fields after Hope and delighting—in the wordless way of bees—as though she’d lived there all her life.
Between the three of them, the new queens were folded into the colony with remarkable smoothness. Elias watched it happen and marveled, not for the first time, at how well his three little ministers ran the kingdom he’d accidentally founded.
He decided he would stop there, though. Fifty was enough. Fifty Lifebloom Queens was already a dynasty beyond anything the world had ever seen, a population of a species that had not existed less than a year ago. There was such a thing as too much of a good thing, and an endlessly multiplying horde of Lord-potential queens was, he suspected, well past that line. Fifty would do nicely.
The second change was a happier sort of chaos.
Holly, Honey, and Hope were up to their usual antics—but now Briar had joined the mix. Or rather, Briar’s clones had. The main body stayed close to Elias as always, draped about his shoulders or trailing at his side, but the countless clones spread across the whole of the realm were another matter entirely. They played.
All across the world, Briar’s clones tangled cheerfully with the bees—offering up their biggest, sweetest flowers for the workers to forage, growing little archways and tunnels for the bees to weave through, swaying their vines in what could only be described as games. The clones interacted with Holly, Honey, and Hope most of all, the three queens having apparently adopted the whole sprawling vine-network as an extension of their domain. Holly issued directives to the clones as readily as to her bees, and the clones, good-natured, generally went along with it. Honey held court among the blossoms. And Hope had discovered that certain clones, if she pestered them enough, would grow her a flower swing to loop through, which she considered the single greatest innovation in the history of the hive.
It made the realm feel alive in a way that warmed Elias every time he watched it—his bees and his vine, his whole strange found family of creatures, simply enjoying the world he’d built for them.
And the third change sat waiting in his laboratory: ten thousand Crystal Butterfly eggs.
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It was, admittedly, a staggering number to look at all at once, rack upon rack of them gleaming faintly under the lab’s lights. But it was less excessive than it seemed. Crystal Butterfly eggs hatched at an average rate of only around eighty percent to begin with, and of those that did hatch, not all would successfully break free of their cocoons later in life. Attrition was simply part of the process. And the butterflies themselves were small—he’d confirmed, carefully, that their size wouldn’t change much through the evolution either—so he was confident his world could comfortably house every one that survived. Ten thousand small butterflies was a great deal less daunting than ten thousand of almost anything else.
There was a particular reason he’d bought so many of them now, all at once, rather than working with a careful few as he’d first intended. He’d learned that only the very first step of the evolution actually required the egg stage. Every step after it could be done later, at leisure—because once they hatched, the larvae could remain caterpillars for half a year, longer still if their development was deliberately prolonged. That was time enough, he judged, to work out the rest of the evolution without any pressure at all. So there was no harm in starting the whole batch through the egg-stage step together, and every advantage to it. Whatever he eventually figured out, he’d have ten thousand candidates ready and waiting to receive it.
If he was honest with himself—and he tried to be—it would have been the more sensible course to simply figure out every last step first, on paper, with his questions alone, before laying out a single coin or a single egg. That had been the plan. That was the rational, patient, responsible way to go about it, and he knew it perfectly well.
But, darn it, he was a researcher.
Ever since that first long stretch of work with the bees, he’d found that whenever he wasn’t in the thick of some hands-on research, his hands would start to itch—a restless, nagging need to be doing something, mixing something, watching some experiment unfold before his eyes rather than only in his head. Pure planning, however wise, simply didn’t scratch it. And after weeks of nothing but questions and notes, the itch had grown unbearable.
So he’d relented. He’d let his researcher’s heart win the argument, the way it usually did, and he’d gone and bought the whole ten thousand and gotten his hands dirty. Not the most rational decision he’d ever made. But an immensely satisfying one.
The first step, he’d already worked out. It required a skill and the materials to teach it—and the skill, fittingly for a creature he meant to bond to himself, was related to blood.
The eggs had to be sprayed with blood during their egg stage, and from that exposure they would gain their first skill before ever hatching. So that was precisely what he did, with the help of a special piece of equipment built for exactly this sort of fine, even application—a fine misting system, its water reservoir replaced with a careful mixture of his own devising: water blended with Lifebloom honey, his own blood, and a measure of common- and elite-rank blood besides.
His own blood came, as ever, by the courtesy of his healer father, drawn safely and replenished by the next day—a small ongoing sacrifice he’d come to think nothing of. Thank you for that, Dad, he thought wryly, every time he loaded the reservoir.
He’d included his own blood for a specific reason. His questions had confirmed what he’d only guessed at before: that using his own blood continuously, woven through the whole process, would help form a bond and a closeness between himself and the butterflies, the way his care had bonded Briar and his trust in the bees. If a little of his own blood in the mix meant ten thousand butterflies that knew and trusted him from the egg onward—well. Why not. It cost him nothing he couldn’t spare.
It went along smoothly. The misting system worked beautifully, coating the racks of eggs in an even, gentle haze of the honey-and-blood mixture, and Elias settled into the patient rhythm of it, recording every detail as he always did—absorption rates, timing, the faint changes in each batch.
And then he noticed something.
One particular egg was drinking in far more of the moisture than any of the others. Markedly more—enough that it was beginning to draw from the supply meant for the eggs nearest it, leaving its neighbors a touch drier than they should have been. A single greedy egg, taking more than its share.
Elias went very still, looking at it.
Because he’d felt this before. The sense of it washed over him with the unmistakable weight of déjà vu—a single specimen, set apart from all its identical siblings, hungering for more than the rest, taking more than seemed natural. He knew this feeling. He’d lived it once already, with a frail, starving little vine that had turned out to be the most special thing in all his meadow.
He separated the egg out at once and gave it his full attention, feeding it extra blood and honey mixture, all it could drink and more. Whether this was lightning striking twice—another hidden treasure, another stroke of impossible luck—or simply a hungry egg that meant nothing at all, he couldn’t yet say.
But he’d learned, long ago, never to ignore the one that didn’t fit.
“Let’s see what you are,” he murmured to the greedy little egg, and made a careful note. Time, as always, would tell.