Chapter Text
You are seven when your lusus leaves you. Her departure is premature for such a young Mother, but you have known your whole life this time would come. With a careful haste you pack up your favorite belongings and plenty of snacks, and set off after her. The feral trolls will scavenge your hive, leaving nothing worth coming back to.
She leads you across rivers and farms, war-ravaged and polluted land. You both come to the end of your pilgrimage dusty and worn, but unscathed. No one dares harm a mother grub, or her charge, after all.
Down in the caverns the overseer took your name, Porrim Maryam, and recorded your sigil before waving you off with the other young initiates as one brushes away a botherflea. You were handed a culling fork and thusly began living the legacy of your blood.
By nine sweeps you are at the head of your cohort. Not that it means much from where you are in the pecking order. But to you it is the grand accumulation of your smallest victories. You were the fastest to learn the lessons the Attendants teach, and the most willing to learn.
You tackle your new job with seriousness and maturity and never slack off from your duties. It's grueling messy work but the harder you work at it, the more likely you will be elevated to join the higher ranks of the attendants.
The future will come, but not for many sweeps. You have to focus now on your chores right now. You're following the tiny echoes of chitinous clattering through a narrow cave you. With your culling fork held awkwardly behind you, you can just barely squeeze through.
Just ahead you can see the grub, munching on fungus. Immediately you recognize that this grub isn't big enough for sauce. It's only in its sixth or seventh instar, judging from its size and development. But it's mottled carapace hasn't taken on any color, something it should have begun by its fifth instar.
You work yourself closer and another grub appears, a monstrous black worm that gives you shivers; drones give you awful fowlflesh. The two are working away at the same fungus patch. Odd. Drones aren't hostile like their colorful cousins, but competition for food is usually so intense, the larvae resort to cannibalism. Young though you are, altruism isn't anything you ever expected to encounter in these vicious creatures. The possibility wasn't even brought up in any of your lessons.
Oddities aside, your training dictates that grubs deviating from your ledger's guide of desirable physical traits must be acquainted with the prongs of your culling fork. You have a duty to your empire.
The drone munches on, unperturbed.
- - -
Mere nights away from your tenth wriggling day finds you on duty in the estuary. You're crawling around on cliff-like ledges, ripping handfuls of bioluminescent moss off the slimy walls. The attendants trade this stuff to the neighboring territories as a valuable luxury. The grubs that manage to crawl up the cliffs love to fill their nutrition bladders with the glittering mosses, too. But the bag on your hip is growing heavy despite the competition. Heavy enough that it's threatening to slip off the belt and fall down into the dark waters below you. If that happens, you're cullbait. For the loss of the bag as much as the valuable moss inside. All materials are precious.
You shove another fist full of the damp fluff into your sack, and pull your hand back immediately in shock. Your pricked finger goes into your mouth. You let the bag fwump onto the ledge, kneeling to investigate. Resentment spreads over your pan as a fan-tailed worm rolls out. The grub stares up at you with its deep purple eyes, it's minuscule headfins flicking with happiness. There is moss clenched in its mouthparts. With a sharp echoing cry, you desperately snatch the bag back and fumble around for the contents, but your once bountiful harvest has been reduced to measly scraps and crumbs.
You can't return empty clawed. The realization that you have to start over smashes your mood through the floor. All that work down the gaper, and you have to do it again! Your groan of frustration bounces around the cavern and fades off before you pick yourself up from the ground. You glare down on the grub who is feeling around the wet stone for more scraps to munch on. There is a twitch in your eye when you nudge the hefty creature off the cliff and a satisfied tweak to your lips when you hear the sploosh of it's landing. You're highly discouraged from culling the aquatic grubs, but that doesn't mean you have to be kind. You sort of hope something eats it.
Sighing in irritation, you clear away any grubs within six paces of your new harvest spot before you begin again.
Your bag is almost full when you notice a tugging at your sack. Fearful of a repeat event, you snatch the bag up against your body and come face to fin with a familiar grub.
It's clinging to the outside of the sack this time, but it gets brushed off all the same. You return to your harvesting, intent on finishing with no more disasters.
Soon enough the grub is back, trying to climb your leg. You tenderly remove it from your leg, their feet parts hurt quite a lot and you’ve learned the hard way to be gentle, and attach it to the wall instead. “Find your own meal, little one. This one’s spoken for,” you tell it, despite the earlier meal that should have left it asleep under the waves. Making sure to put some distance between yourself and the little menace, you set about filling the rest of the bag. The head attendant settles for nothing short of overflowing. She’ll sure as shells send you back with an empty sack and empty belly if it’s not done one-hundred percent.
Undissuaded by its relocation, the seagrub continues to make an annoyance of itself by making a beeline for you. You regard it cooly, but it doesn't try to get at your bag so you do your best to ignore it. Maybe it’ll go back to grazing once it realizes you’re no provider of easy meals. And it does, sort of.
As you peel the moss from the stone, the arm sized worm moves in to gobble on the loosened pieces still clinging delicately to the cavern wall. It's munching further loosens more patches for you to peel away. Your work goes faster than ever with your new helper, even if it eats as much as you harvest.
And just like that, mere nights away from your tenth wriggling day, you make your first mistake. You bond with a grub.
You begin to look forward to work in the estuary. You find yourself playing little games with the grub until the night you climb up to your favorite spot and instead of your friend, you’re met with a sticky pulsing purple cocoon.
- - -
Your mistake wasn't rectified with the grub’s pupation. For all you decorated the cocoon with clumps of glowing moss and talked to it when you were near, you felt a hole opening in your heart. You grew up alone with your lusus. You built your hive in a secluded grassland, and never had anyone you could call a neighbor. After your pilgrimage brought you here, you had noticed the other initiates clumping off into groups, but didn't feel strongly about joining them. You didn't need friends. You only needed something to keep you busy.
Grubs, as you're taught from the beginning of your life, are food. Food for other grubs, the mothers, the entire planet, but especially for you. They are not friends.
You’re not taught to regard them as living intelligent creatures, capable of thought and emotion. And yet the longer you spend getting to know them the more you find that they are.
- - -
As you grow more and more attached to your tiny charges, you make another mistake.
You begin to play favorites.
You defend cocoons and larvae alike, culling anything that dares harm your friends for sauce regardless of ripeness. The head attendants admonish you for the the declining quality of your work. You begin to smuggle grubs into your quarters, and though every single one of them has escaped, no one suspects you of bringing them in.
You mourn those you are unable save in the secluded safety of the caves, and learn the bloody ways of the Jade castes above. You learn how to bend them to your new ways. You refuse to cull for the good of the bloodline, so you make up and live by your own parameters. Grubs aren’t just food anymore.
And so you continue, sweeps of sneaking, defending, loving, and learning. You once approached another initiate with what you have learned ,aiming to discover if you were the only one to come to the conclusion that these so-thought mindless creatures could be capable of so much more. Only once though, for she must have gone to an attendant.
Your gastric sac just about falls through your waste chute when he enters the living cavern you’ve called home for eight sweeps. Silently, you’re glad you don’t have any “friends” here with you this time, but what he wants isn’t to punish you. You’re not in trouble in the least bit, in fact you’re to be honored. Elevated.
Your lusus is showing signs of maturity and has challenged the old Mother Grub, usurping her place as the mother of your species. Custom dictates you will be her Attendant.
The rest of your organs just about follow your gastric sac.