Honey Shroom's Arc

Chapter 6 of 11

By late afternoon the hum changed pitch. Honey Shroom climbed down from the platform and saw it at once — the last hives were drifting. The wooden boxes rocked on their stands, nudged by the bees inside, scraping a slow inch toward the tree line. He stepped closer and felt a fresh tremor crawl up through his boots. The bees had decided. If those hives reached the trees, they would not come back. He ran for the meadow's edge, where pink blossoms hung over the grass in a long bright row. He grabbed boards and stones from his work pile and dragged them into a line. Fast hands, slow mind. He stacked the boxes he had moved earlier into a tight tower, two high, and braced the base with rocks. A wall. A stop. If the hives could not pass, they could not flee. The drifting boxes scraped closer. Honey Shroom set his shoulder against the last carved hive and pushed it sideways into the stack. The bees roared inside. He shoved the next one in beside it, then the next, until all of them stood pressed together against his wooden tower, blocked from the trees. The tremor rolled through the ground again. The boxes shook, but they did not move. They could not move. He had caught them. Honey Shroom stepped back, breathing hard. The hives were still his — for now. But the humming was wrong, frantic, and the ground under the meadow still pulsed. He had stopped the flight, not the cause. Whatever was down there was still climbing. And his bees, packed against his wall, had nowhere left to run.