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My daughter stalks me through amber chambers shaped from the secretions of our ancestors. Swollen with rhododendron and madness, her scent is dark golden and intoxicating.
No wonder my other children love her already.
I have never seen her, but I know that she is sleek, opalescent, her delicate pincers silver with the blood of her royal sisters. She does not hide her approach, for she is stronger, faster, younger, getting ever closer as I drag my swollen body, trailing fear-tinged scent, deeper and deeper into our home.
The rooms are dark, fossilized, musty. Tattered silks hang in corners, dried carcasses of long-dead enemies lurk in the shadows. I stumble, dip my head and the beads around my neck clatter against the floor. Faint light sets them shimmering, winking like momentary stars. From my own mother's body I took them; these beads that have been taken from one queen by another for generations. Suddenly, absurdly, I wonder what my murderess-daughter will think of the necklace. Will the gold drops remind her of the honey that fed her, the mirror-dark stones of the shimmering bodies of the sisters she has just killed?
Click-clack-click. Fast, impatient, angry. My scent must drive her mad, fed as she has been on a diet of aggression by my own subjects. My barren ones, my lesser children. They are diligent workers, but when they look at my beads they see only fossilized honey, pieces of shiny stone, balls of sticky pollen.
As I flee into tunnels abandoned and collapsing, I realize this:
I am no longer alone.
No longer the only one who can see stars in beads, or the sun in honey-flooded chambers, or moon mystery in pools of silver water that collect in the upper reaches after the rain.
She could see what I see, if she were not so bent on my destruction. If she had been let out into the open world beyond our home, instead of sent straight away to find me.
I grieve for her inexperience, and I grieve for my silence for I know of no way to tell my thoughts, my vast, roiling, mute thoughts, to her. I grieve for my mother and my mother's mother and her mother before, all of us locked into our lonely silences, our thoughts building up behind dams, with none to share them with save our ravenous murderous daughters.
Why run? Sooner or later, my dark daughter is bound to catch me. Soon we will fight, soon she will kill me. And if not her, then another royal daughter raised up to take my place. Almost I stop.
Almost.
I stagger into the chamber I've kept ready for a confrontation such as this, a chamber marked by own scent, light with age, but lingering, warning others to stay out. Dried grains crunch under my legs. In the middle of the room, I turn to face the gloom from which she will emerge.
Instinct drives her hard, ambition blinds her to all but her goal. Old queens fight, but do not lay traps. That is not our way.
But I have spent years thinking about skies and stars and how I do not wish to die.
Sticky webbing hangs from the ceiling, poised like a waiting bird, held by only a few strings, easily cut by pincers. To fall over her, entangling.
I have had many days, ages of days, to plan for this.
If I live through this, I promise, I will raise the would-be queen myself, finding ways to teach her my thoughts. A daughter who would rule by my side, who would wait for old age to claim me before taking the necklace.
Her spicy scent precedes her into the room. Wrapped in it, she is more beautiful than anything else that I have ever seen. Is this how all the old queens feel when confronted by their younger rivals? Struck down by youth and beauty, their hearts within them like melting wax, sapping their will to live?
And I know that I could never live in peace with one such as this.
I shudder and lower my belly, crouching. The thrice-looped necklace swings; stars sway in front of me. My useless wings flutter once, my head bows.
I dance.
She knows the dance. We are all born knowing it, the dance that tells us where to find flowers overflowing with nectar and warns us of collapses and predators, a rich and amazing language, yet inadequate for all my thoughts. How to express what I know in dance? Slowly, I move, dipping and bowing and hesitant. Slow, too slow, clumsy, uncertain.
Stars, I tell her, beads are stars. Flowers are the face of the sun. This is secret knowledge she will get from no one but me. And when she leaves for her maiden excursion, she will understand. Moonlight climbs our silken threads, sunshine pools in our honey...
She checks, distracted by my odd behavior. Ah, she is beautiful with her delicate neck and triangular head, light on her legs, her wings a-quiver. Her eyes are large and luminescent. She cocks her head at me, bemused, as I spin and step and heave my aching body. For a moment uncertainty tinges her scent, then it disappears it, leaving her resolve harder, darker.
I bow my head and let the necklace slip onto the floor, offering it up to her. Someday she will realize how I lured her into a trap, but didn't trigger it. Someday she will remember my dance, and wonder. And maybe she will have the courage I didn't to reach out to her own daughter in friendship.
She closes in, black and venomous, looming, ready to strike.
I cannot look at her.
The beads twinkle up at me one last time.
Faces like stars... honey the sun...
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