Char stopped beside a number of other Druids, all of whom had honey bees circling around them. Each seemed to own at least a few of the hives that were arranged in neat rank and file almost as far as Jeb could see. Given how little of the Druidic Enclave had been so regimented, Jeb was more than slightly surprised that the Circle of Swarms would have their hives ordered so well. Thinking about it a little further, though, he supposed that it did make some amount of sense. Bees, after all, were themselves generally very fond of order. And, when he looked towards the edges of the bees’ space, Jeb also noticed that the order broke down further from the center.
Realizing that he had missed the introductions Char was making, Jeb tuned back into the conversation.
“Brian, I do not know for certain if I will be the best mentor for you at this point. Each of these Druids, however,” she gestured to the small group assembled in front of them, “has developed their Swarm into a specialized purpose. I leave you in their capable hands.”
Flames finally broke out on her skin, and Jeb watched as she burned away to nothing. When no one else reacted, however, he decided not to comment.
“First of all,” one of the Druids said, pointing at Brian, “can you bring your bees here? Although you are not, strictly speaking, required to have them live here, it makes everyone’s lives much easier. Your bees will be safer, have an easier time finding food, and will be closer to you for whatever modifications you wish to enact.”
“Should I summon mine too?” Jeb asked.
“How many bees are in your Swarm?”
Jeb repeated the question to his bees. Unlike the last time he had asked them a numerical question, his bees were far more able to give him a quantitative answer. The number surprised even him, however.
“Apparently I have approximately three hundred hives, each of which is home to a nominal thirty thousand bees, though of course the specific number of bees in any given hive fluctuates as they teleport wherever they need to go.”
“No, you should not summon millions of bees,” the Druid replied in a slow tone. Jeb nodded happily.
“Um,” Brian cut in, “I don’t know how to summon my bees.”
Jeb and the Druid he had been speaking to both turned to the young bear before looking at each other. Silently, they tried to determine which of the two of them should tell Brian what to do. In the end, the Druid blinked first, and he turned to Brian.
“Your bees are in a hive.”
Brian nodded.
“You know where the hive is.”
Brian nodded again. The Druid paused, clearly waiting for Brian to understand the next steps. When Brian continued to stare blankly, however, he continued, “your hive is small enough that you can carry it.”
Once again, Brian did not pick up on the implied direction.
Sighing, the Druid continued, “you can and should bring your bees here by physically transporting their hive.”
When Brian left, the group of Druids turned and addressed Jeb.
“Char mentioned that your bees have already created a symbiotic pair. Would you be willing to show it to us?”
Jeb nudged the bee that was still sleeping on his shoulder. It started to buzz, a deep booming sound that caused a few nearby birds to flee.
“Fascinating. I see that the larger bee Attunes the Mana that it takes in, though only the smallest amount. The bee on top of it, by contrast, gathers Mana incredibly efficiently. Together, it seems as though they just consistently make the Mana around them marginally more Attuned to a single Element.”
“Huh,” Jeb replied, impressed with his Swarm.
“I only wish that you had taken notes on the process,” another Druid chimed in. “It is incredibly rare that a Swarm comes to the idea of having two bees work to produce a single effect.”
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“Sorry,” Jeb replied.
The woman waved him off, “there are many things that I would wish. We cannot, however, turn back the clock.”
At someone’s cough, she rolled her eyes and amended, “we cannot turn back the clock on our own, and we should not turn back the clock on something so minor.” Glaring at the Druid who had coughed, she asked, “is that better?”
He nodded before speaking to Jeb himself.
“Right now I would say that there are a few paths you could lead these two subspecies down. Most obviously, you could work to increase the Attunement efficiency that the larger bee has. Although I am sure that there is a reason that it had been bred to change so slowly, that reason may no longer be relevant to you. Regardless of that, however, you could also consider increasing the throughput on either of the bees. Increasing the total amount of Mana that either bee can hold would also be somewhat beneficial.”
“What about filtering?” the woman who he had corrected chimed in.
The Druid harumphed. “I do suppose that one could do so, Brianna.”
“But?” Jeb asked.
“Yes, Joshua, what is wrong with breeding his bees to filter Mana?”
Joshua grumbled something.
“Could you repeat that?” Brianna asked with a sickly sweet tone.
“It is fundamentally inefficient to have Mana filters embedded in living objects.”
“How would you filter Mana, then?” Jeb asked, fascinated by the implications of the sentence.
He waved a hand. “Each hive that I have Attuned to a specific flavor of Mana is constructed to filter Mana.”
“Would you be willing to show me?”
The man grimaced before shaking his head. “Unfortunately, I cannot.”
He didn’t elaborate, so Jeb shrugged and let the matter drop.
“I don’t think that filtering Mana makes the most sense for my bees,” Jeb said, returning the conversation to where it had been. “Increasing their throughput, though, seems like something that I would absolutely love to do. If I had to guess, the reason that the efficiency is so low is because my bees were once all inside of a single Hive, so the different Mana Attunements needed to be at least somewhat harmonious with each other. Now that there are many, however, I think that it could be a good thing to increase the efficiency.”
Brian made it back as they finished planning Jeb’s next steps, and the Druids walked the two of them through the steps they would need to do in order to evolve their bees most efficiently. Unlike with mundane bees, there were ways to make the different workers and drones lay fertilized eggs. Jeb’s Swarm had just created a new Queen, however, so he decided to work in the traditional manner.
The days faded into months as Jeb kept tweaking the slightest parts of the large bees that the Queen began to specialize in birthing. Talking to the Swarm, Jeb was relieved to hear that they generally had a single Queen birth each of the different subspecies. How that worked with the fact that each Hive was also Elementally Attuned to a specific flavor of Mana, Jeb was not entirely sure, and the bees’ dancing did not clear up any questions. ‘ Jeb ended up missing his first Solstice in the Druidic Enclave, too engrossed in his work. He was surprised to learn that the Enclave did not truly experience winter. Or, at least, the hives around the Circle of Swarms never frosted over. Jeb thought that he might have seen faint glimpses of snow in the distance, but he ignored it.
Spending so much time working with the bees, Jeb started delving deeply into the place where they were Bound together. The prismatic light of his own Mana was still a unified whole. Even though the rainbows from the Swarm gave off the same light, Jeb was slowly able to realize that they were individualized, rather than completely joined together. That realization showed him how he was Bound to the bees.
Rather than a single connection to the Swarm as a whole, Jeb was individually connected to each bee, though obviously more strongly to the Queens. Since each bee was Attuned to at most a single Element, however, his own many colored Mana split apart into any number of sharp colors as it twined to the specific bees. Too interested in the connections, Jeb did not notice that he had been selecting the bees to cause them to have a new effect. Rather than simply taking in large amounts of Mana and returning it heavily shaded to a single Element, his bees had begun condensing the Mana around them, even if only very slightly.
Jeb tasted the first hints of an Essence Storm brewing around his hive and quickly sketched some Enchantments on the air to break apart the dense Magic. I wonder if this is something I should be concerned about for the different hives on their own, Jeb thought to himself.
Brian interrupted his musings before he could follow the train of thought too far.
“I did it!” he cried, holding up a bee that looked indistinguishable from any of the other bees that Jeb could see flying around the boy. Even as he looked more closely, Jeb could not figure out what was so different about the bee.
“What did you do?” he asked, breaking out of the trance he had been in for months.
“This bee can lose its stinger without dying!” Brian said happily.
“Great job!” Jeb replied. “Can it regrow the stinger?”
Brian froze.
“Sorry,” Jeb said, seeing the realization dawn on the Druid. Both of them quickly got back to work, and Jeb fell back into the trance of Magic. His Class started to assert itself, and Jeb gave into the feeling.
The man cloaked in midnight became far more effective at his work. The bees riding on the Mana Attuners took in orders of magnitude more Mana per day, and they started to color the ambient Mana around them with the prismatic flavor of his own Magic. The connection between the man and the Swarm bled together more and more, until the only way to distinguish the two was where many colors stopped bleeding into each other.