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Hornet does not cross the village above the Kingdom often.
Usually there is more risk within the crypt's bowels than there ever is above it, and after the first few times she had deemed it a fairly fruitless venture. Better to watch the cliffs howling above and the Wastes beyond for those that would seek glory and death than a meager village that serves as a waypoint and little else.
But her duty is to the Kingdom eternal and this means the Kingdom in its entirety. So inevitably, eventually, her silk will lead her thus. That the little ghost has made it a frequent travel stop only serves to mark it a place of importance, now. Better to watch them in their idle moments.
It is livelier than she has ever known it to be. Houses are lit by lanterns and the warmth of other bugs, few that there are, and the scent of hemolyph and life underneath chitin rings in her mandibles. Uninfected. Few linger outside in the dust of the cavern, cold as it is.
Few. Not all.
The Elder that lingers is par for course. A fixture, Hornet recalls his time here nearly as eternal as that of the Kingdom itself, quiet and internal, an unwillingness to change. He had never acknowledged her, if he had ever seen her at all.
The second is a beetle of unknown kind that Hornet does not recall, sitting on the lone bench in the village square. This one's gaze she feels keen on her back, and when she turns to look their eyes avert quickly, hemolyph a flush on their face. They say nothing.
The ghost is not here. Hornet knows this for fact. She'd not have exposed herself so blatantly otherwise.
"Ho there, traveller! Well met once again. Some time it's been, and yet still you're untouched by that ruin below. It gladdens me to see it so."
Hornet stares. The life here is, perhaps, infectious in its own way, she thinks - he is more apt to words than ever he had been before. Greets her when she makes herself known. He had never done such before.
Hornet's silence, for what could she have to say, seems not to faze him. His tone is warm. "I had worried for you, in truth, that you might've succumbed to those ills like all the others. It is good to see you haven't!" And, when she still garners no response, for crypts do not good social company make, "Not much for words? It's quite alright. I myself prefer quiet company."
His gaze is level, without hostility. He is thinking, Hornet thinks. "Mm. You know, you remind me of another little wanderer I've seen out and about. Something about the shell, perhaps... Tell me, have you seen someone of such like down there of recent? Smaller by half, but no less fierce. It has been an age, and an old bug does worry..."
He needn't have. The ghost was a monster of their own make, when they willed themself to be.
Finally, does Hornet's mouth open, for questions are simple to beget answers. "They are well." She says, in lieu of much else. They are well. What constitutes such, to a being like them? She knows not. But they are healthy, and they are not dead, and so they are well enough, she supposes.
"Ah, I am glad to hear it. They have always been silent company, you see, but this village has certainly livened up since their arrival, and I admit I've grown fond of them..."
Hornet tunes him out, for she senses something else on her periphery. Instincts honed to a fine edge needle her to another, to the other, dismissed but not forgotten. The beetle, lingering on their bench, is squeezing their claws tightly, and where before they had leaned away, Hornet sees now that they lean with vested interest, antennae canted forward.
She turns her head just so. Enough to cause notice, enough to warn them. A spider with prey in sight, if they aren't careful. It comes naturally.
The beetle stiffens. Their blue flush is heavy on their face.
They say nothing.
"Speak."
And so Hornet bids them to. Little was ever gained for cowardly behavior, for words on the tongue yet said. The Kingdom has enough of those haunting its endless caverns.
The beetle jumps, then freezes, then shuffles, and this person would have been devoured the moment she set foot in the Nest. Their mouth opens, closes, a noise whining high in their throat. They stutter, and titter, and it is thanks only to Hornet's patience borne of time and instinct that she allows them the time to act so.
Finally, after a time indeterminate, they speak.
"...You. You know the..." Their - her, Hornet believes, although she may be wrong - voice dips, barely audible. "...The Knight?"
Hornet's eyes narrow imperceptibly.
She takes stock. Their eyes are averted, and Hornet knows this to be typical of nervous prey. They are flushing, and their claws cannot ever seem to keep still, and this too might be a fear trait, if it weren't for something else in the beetle's tone. Her tone of voice says something, but Hornet has not had the pleasure of conversation in an age and so cannot quite pin the inflection.
"Why."
"I--" The beetle cowers, clears her throat, titters and stutters and flushes yet more, and Hornet waits through its entirety. This beetle would have already run home, she thinks to herself, had she not been pinned by a predator's gaze.
"I just. I-- care about them, is all!" Averted eyes look down further, and the claws in her lap curl inwards. Her voice is a whisper. "They saved me so I..."
And then the beetle giggles. Soft, hastily stifled, and there is a smile on her face as she gazes downwards at something only she can see.
It looks soft.
It looks...
Hornet shies away from the word. A feeling crawls in her stomach, and it is through countless years of learning the art of divorcing herself from emotion for the sake of duty that she manages as well as she does.
She forces herself to think, for to not think is to act rashly, and she is not rash.
Hornet sizes her over.
The beetle is...young. Carapace smooth, shell untouched, unweathered by time or suffering or the elements. She is a cowardly creature, and likely has not been to the ruins beyond the once if her appearance says anything of her. Likely she, too, has been gripped by the stasis of the Kingdom Eternal, unaging, unchanging in mind or body or spirit.
She would not remember or have met many other bugs, would she. Not in this village. Not in this ruin, empty as it probably already was by the time of the Kingdom's sealing.
And the ghost is not overly small. The other one, the coward with the shellwood nail, he had been smaller still, and markedly similar in appearance.
The beetle can't know. Surely not.
(Others had. Others do. The Nailmasters, the Lords of the Mantis, they'd known from first sight. But they had been marked by age, wisdom, maturity. All things this one lacked in droves.)
(Anyone else, anyone else, would not have stopped to think, in this moment. Had they realized what Hornet does now.)
The beetle is looking at her. She is staring and has fallen silent, fallen still, and perhaps she feels the weight of Hornet's stare far more heavily as she digests what she has just understood.
Young, Hornet tells herself. Without the experience to tell one thing from another. Born in a dusty, empty village and only an old man for company. Hornet repeats this to herself again and again. Better to educate the ignorant so that it need not happen again, than to let it happen without doing anything at all.
"The ghost is a child."
Such words are factual. The Kingdom is dead, the infection rampant. These are truths. So too would this be. Hornet has seen the bodies of their - her - siblings, has killed them herself in the name of the Kingdom, and has seen the parentage from which they were born. A father and mother with shapely, narrowed features, matured by age. The one sibling allowed to grow to adulthood, the same features of their parents. Those which all others lack.
Bretta does not seem to understand, at first. Her expression is that of a dirtcarver dragged into the light of a horde of lumaflies, wide and disoriented.
Hornet amends. "The Knight. They are a child."
"I...?"
"Despite their appearance to some bugs, what similarities others might fight likened to their own, they are not the same." Hornet explains. "They are still a grub - not even through their first molt."
Eternally, until the ghost discovers otherwise.
Bretta is beginning to look more Wyrm ash white than the blue of hemolyph. Her antennae twitch, flutter, and claws wring themselves to the point of digging into chitin. Her back is straight, unbending in the breeze. Hornet, at least, is privately gladdened to find her theory of ignorance correct. "That...That can't-"
"I speak truth. You've no place denying it."
She brooks no argument. Regardless, she probably needn't have said; already the girl looks to be crumpling in on herself, all nerves and the posture of submission, fear, guilt probably, a siren call to carnivorous mandibles as she reevaluates herself. Hornet wonders if the beetle would have allowed herself to be eaten, right then.
"A child, traveller?"
Hornet turns her head to behold the Elder. His face is slackened and his tone is as lost as he seems. More ignorance, born of a sheltered life and old age, she figures, if nothing else.
"Yes."
"Why, they are larger than both the shopkeep and the one shellwood nail warrior who came by-- I never would have thought..."
"That is the trouble," She says, and allows a hint of bitter amusement to coat her tongue as she turns to retreat back into the well. She does not look at the beetle buried in her own disgust. "Bugs do not often contemplate the nature of others."
She thinks of Deepnest. Spiders, beasts, creatures who had seemed to the Kingdom as alien things, kept to the fringes and killed for the trouble. Thinks of nobility and the working classes, old memories coated in the fuzz of half-loss, the prejudice prevalent on all sides.
Children larger than some adults. Adults smaller than children.
Hornet leaves the village. There is nothing else here for her.
Inside her home, Bretta prepares to destroy everything she has of someone she thought had been her own age.
The diary entries go first.