Queen Apisalia's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

At dawn, Apisalia left her cottage with a question burning in her chest. To outlast every queen, she needed their numbers. She crossed the meadow toward the grand yellow hall where the hive kept its royal records. Inside the archive, she found a tall wooden pillar lined with metal plaques. Each plaque bore a queen's name and emblem. But the crowning dates had worn away. The brass was smooth where the numbers should have been. She pulled the flower-pressed registry book from its shelf and flipped through the pages. Names. Lineages. No dates. Someone had torn the date columns clean out, leaving ragged edges. Her hands trembled. Without dates, she could not measure her reign. Mellifer Ironsting stepped through the door, his staff tapping the floor. "I heard you came here," he said. He looked at the torn pages. "Someone wanted you blind to this." Apisalia closed the book. The milestone she chased had no marker now. She could not know if she had passed it, or how far she still had to climb. "Then we find who tore it," she said. The hunt had begun.