He took her down the cold dank stone stairs with an echo and a drip on each.
Drip drip drip
Thud thud thud
The moisture from the stone stairs gave way to a humid acridy once they entered the chamber at the bottom. He put his torch into an iron grate on the wall and stepped forward, showing her it was safe.
‘This is….this is disgusting,’ she spat. ‘I knew the royals were desperate for power but this…’
He nodded his head in agreement. All the chandeliers above were dripping wax, to keep the chamber lit. Wax made from the lipids of corpses whose bones decorated the chandelier.
‘The pelvis produces the most honey. After every queen dies, they bring her corpse down here. They begin the decaying process in the barrels, and when the tendons and cartilage detach from the bone they begin to mold and sculpt it.
She heard a faint buzzing and looked at the contraption in front of her. It was a pelvis, a human female pelvic bone, and it was honeycombed. Bees buzzed and crawled all over the femurs piled like table legs, holding up multiple pelvises, each honeycombed and dripping, each crawling with thousands of insects, beginning to wake up from their hive like sleep upon hearing the guests in their chambers.
‘Wha-….what do they do with the honey?!’ she gasped.
‘They feed it to their subjects. Mass market it. The neurotransmitters in the dead and decaying queens get passed through the honey into the subjects. It’s why they fight. For God and country.’
She wanted to vomit. He saw the pale look on her face, even paler than usual.
‘It helps to control their movement,’ he pressed on. ‘The court dances, the weird rituals, their mating cycles. All of it tied to this.’
‘To the hips of the queen,’ she spat.
‘They move through the colonies uninhibited. They don’t worry about being attacked. Security, all for show. They’ve engineered the populace down to the very last child. Everyone obeys the queen.’
‘Until she dies?’
‘Until she dies.’