Jeb blinked.
He was standing in a blank void looking at himself. No matter which direction he turned, he could see nothing else. It wasn’t that the space around him was dark, it was that there was nothing there.
He looked at his reflection, noting that it did not copy his movements. When he raised a hand in greeting, the figure opposite him frowned slightly before raising its own hand. Simultaneously relieved and more concerned, Jeb tried once again to figure out where he was. Realizing that he had not breathed since waking in the space, Jeb took a deep breath.
It felt as though air rushed into his lungs, though he did not feel any eddies along his face or see any disturbance in the space in front of him. Trying to Create a light, Jeb’s hand soon began to glow. Jeb realized that he had never seen something glow without diffracting at all. Whatever he had breathed either did not interact with light, or, as he was beginning to suspect, did not exist. Looking down at his feet, Jeb felt a wash of vertigo.
His feet also stood on nothing. When he thought about falling, he felt the tug of gravity, growing stronger and stronger as he fell faster and faster. Looking up, his mind struggled to process the fact that he was falling through space rapidly while his reflection was standing completely still. Despite that, his reflection was not rising any higher.
Staring at the reflection, Jeb managed to convince himself that he was not falling.
“Hi?” he said hesitantly, unsure if his voice would even work in whatever dream land he had fallen into. To his surprise, the entire space seemed to resonate with the word. As though his speaking had been a key, the space resolved itself. Jeb now found himself standing in a dark void. Why he thought that was an improvement, he wasn’t sure.
His reflection, at least, seemed equally shocked by the change in scenery. It looked around, mouth agape, before gesturing at Jeb to continue speaking.
Frowning, Jeb continued, “Why aren’t you saying anything? Also, do you know where we are?”
His reflection cocked its head. It pointed to Jeb.
“I’m not sure I understand,” Jeb admitted.
It pointed again, and somehow Jeb knew that it was pointing through him more than at him. As though the memory had just been freed, Jeb remembered reaching out to his Swarm.
“Is this my soul?” he wondered, looking around the space.
His reflection opened its mouth to speak, but what came out was nothing but noise. It closed its mouth, frowned, and then tried to cough. Even that produced a cacophony, rather than anything as simple as a normal exhale.
“No,” Jeb continued, still trying to figure out his location, “I know what my soul looks like. It’s never been this empty.”
Realization dawning, Jeb looked back at the avatar of the Swarm. “You’re the Swarm, aren’t you?”
It nodded, and the sounds resolved into a voice, albeit one that still sounded like bees buzzing discordantly, “Yes.”
“Why do you look like me?” he asked, glad that they were finally able to communicate.
His reflection looked around, clearly unsure how to answer the question. It kept opening its mouth as though ready to speak before closing it again, shaking its head. Even though he knew on some level that time here did not correlate in any meaningful way to time outside, Jeb still found himself wishing that the Swarm would hurry up.
I wonder if anyone ever felt this way about me? he idly mused.
His Swarm finally figured out what it wanted to say “Why are you only now reaching out?” it asked, completely ignoring Jeb’s question.
Jeb nodded. He supposed that the question of his Swarm’s appearance could wait. “I realized that the Empress was not, as I had initially thought, the voice of the Swarm.”
Jeb paused, somewhat unsure about how that realization had led to this meeting. “I guess that I’m mostly just curious what your goals are,” he finally said.
The Swarm’s avatar nodded knowingly. “At first, we had little true consciousness. Even after our Binding, metacognition came in fits and bursts. When it finally settled, however, I believe that we had the same desire as any other living, thinking being.”
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Jeb gestured for the avatar to continue.
“Initially we had the goal of growing in strength and power. We wanted to ensure that we could live forever, and that we might be able to withstand whatever forces sought us harm. More than that, though, we wanted to Grow.”
As the avatar had continued to speak, its voice resolved more and more into a single tone, though one that sounded far different than Jeb’s own. It took him a moment to realize that the difference was entirely a lack of inflection. The avatar of the Swarm spoke in a pure monotone.
“What do you mean by that?” Jeb asked, noting the way that the space resonated around the word Grow.
The avatar looked to the side, and Jeb had a brief pang of realization at how similar its mannerisms were to his own. “Despite the fact that we have thought, will, and body, the world does not see fit to grant us a System. At times, we have been able to access your own, at least in part, but that came later. In the early days of our awakening, we simply wished for the ability to mark our growth by the objective standards of the world.”
“And what about now?” Jeb asked.
His reflection shrugged. “I, we, whichever term fits, no longer have a unified sense of purpose. Your changing priorities have been instrumental in changing our goals, but that is not the only difference. There are simply too many bees in the Swarm in too many distinct situations for there to be a single unified purpose to our actions. At this point, a contingent of Hives is even pushing to stop our efforts to expand, as they fear that we will draw undue attention from beings more powerful than us.”
As the Swarm explained its lack of cohesion, Jeb saw his reflection start to dissolve. He watched the once solid shape became hundreds and then thousands of small motes of light. The motes of light remained in the vague shape of himself, though with far less granular detail. Each mote began to resolve into the shape of bees, and Jeb understood that, at least on some level, his seeing the Swarm as something other than a monolith was affecting its appearance.
“In general, though,” the avatar continued, voice once again the buzzing of countless small voices, “the Swarm has the same goals as you. You have sought to understand the world, and we do as well. The world has shaped you to see it in the lens of Magic.”
Jeb nodded, realizing that he had never extinguished the burning light on his hand. When he let it disperse into the ether of the meeting place, however, the space did not grow any dimmer. He started to look around, only now noticing that the space, despite not having any clear source of light, was still somehow fully visible.
The Swarm smiled at Jeb’s childlike searching. “Just like that,” it continued. “We still lack access to a System. As a result, our own understanding of the world is fundamentally mundane.”
Jeb cocked his head. “You teleport constantly, and every Hive that I have visited uses Mana almost as much as pollen to sustain itself.”
The Swarm’s avatar started to coalesce into a unified whole again. This time, however, Jeb was still able to see the seams where each bee had been.
“To use a tool is not to understand the world through it. Had we only the Magics you have given us, then yes, we might have only been able to see the world as you do. However, for better or worse, you did not Bind us into a subservient role, unable to grow except through your dispensation. The spirit of exploration at the core of our Bond is the force which leads our actions. It would not do to see the world identically to you, as our explorations would be fundamentally redundant.”
“Is the spirit of exploration a unifying goal within the Swarm?” Jeb asked, noticing that the avatar’s voice had returned to a single one during its latest comments.
The avatar shook its head. “Is every part of you committed to exploration?” Before Jeb could answer, it continued, “Before you answer, do note that we have felt every pang of fear that coursed through you at the prospect of going into the unknown, even when you refused to recognize the feeling yourself.”
Jeb nodded. “As a whole, however, we have both built ourselves around that exploration.”
The avatar nodded, and Jeb once again felt like he was facing a reflection of himself. The space, empty as it was, began to collapse in on itself. Jeb found the avatar of the Swarm pushed closer and closer to him.
When the two touched, the space fell away.
Jeb found himself lying on the ground of the Druidic Enclave. It took him a moment to remember that he had been falling. Memories of his meeting with the Swarm were already fading. Try as he might, he was unable to pull more than the foggiest recollections of the conversation he had just finished with the avatar.
However, the haze of memory did not mean that nothing had changed. Jeb looked into himself and sought the Bond between the Swarm and himself. It had changed in some ineffable way.
The cord still shifted from his own prismatic but unified line into countless rainbows of threads, but there was a new depth to it. Jeb could feel the Swarm as it moved, not a unified whole as he had imagined. What little he could remember of the avatar still gave the impression of a fundamentally human intelligence. Touching on their connection now, however, Jeb realized how much he had been projecting his own intentions onto the avatar.
The Swarm was not human, and understanding it as such was only going to be an impediment going forward. Each bee was still less than fully sapient, he knew for a fact. Even still, they were at least as sentient as any animal on his family’s farm. Despite that, they did not seem to have any sense of self preservation. If their Hive needed them to die, no bee thought anything of giving up their life.
Even knowing that the Swarm was a communal consciousness did not make that any easier for Jeb to comprehend. Thinking about it in militaristic terms helped slightly. His family’s stories about the many soldiers who died to protect the rest of their squadron started playing in his mind, but there was something missing in even that analogy.
Jeb resolved to spend as much time as he could working to understand the Swarm’s point of view. After all, it apparently shared his goal of understanding the world around them.