The Bee Dungeon

Belissar could have spent all day just watching the new bees. But there was plenty more to see so eventually the tour commenced. Tarwantrad led them down the hill to show them each area in more detail, starting with her own take on the flower meadow. It was arranged more like a garden or a farm, with pathways splitting out separate fields each with different flower types.

“What that?”

Frelis, however, was more interested in a line of identical flowers down the center of the path. Tarwantrad smiled.

“That’s the field alraune, she manages this field and encourages the flowers to stay put. You can say hello, these are friends.”

Frelis buzzed her wings as the flowers began to rise from the dirt. A vine-like root emerged which all the flowers were connected to and waved at the group. Belissar gingerly waved back as Tarwantrad continued.

“You can visit her flowers as well, though I’d hold off on planting any seeds from them. Alraunes take special care to raise…though…”

Tarwantrad looked over at Frelis.

“To be honest, your bees might be able to handle one sooner rather than later.”

Tarwantrad then showed them the rest of the flowers in the field, ranging from mundane to mystical examples like focusing sunflowers or twisting dandelions. She also pointed a few empty spots where Frelis and her fellow gardeners could plant suitable flowers from Belissar’s Tower. Still, they had a lot more room to go through, so Tarwantrad kept it as brief as she could for now.

The group was walking through a forest, with Tarwantrad pointing out the flowers in the trees and on various vines and bushes. Juosiutik suddenly rushed towards a vine wrapping around a tree and the flowers growing off of it. Tarwantrad started and quickly began waving her hands.

“Wait, don’t touch that! That’s poison ivy!”

Juosiutik barely managed to stop before she touched one of the flowers.

“It’s poisonous, huh?”

Tarwantrad shook her head.

“In a manner of speaking. It generally won’t kill you unless you have an extreme reaction, but it will give you an itchy rash that will last for a week. Fine for bees, but larger animals and humanoids should handle it with care. And…the mana imbued variants can be far worse…”

Juosiutik slowly and silently backed away from the vine.

“What that, what that?!”

The Fourth of the Seventh circled around a spread of flowers on the side of a mountain slope, zipping about with Frelis on her back while Belissar, Tarwantrad, and Juosiutik hiked their way up. Chief Rohsuak had elected to wait for them at the bottom as they scaled up the mountain in the room.

“Ah, be careful not to touch the pods! They explode!”

Tarwantrad called out as the Fourth of the Seventh approached the flowers. They were shrubs topped with pink flowers, but many had large, red, cylindrical seed pods hanging off of them. Belissar’s eyes widened.

“They…explode?”

Tarwantrad nodded with a serious expression.

“They’re called thundering balsam. Once pollinated, they grow those pods and fill them with volatile chemicals. When disturbed, they explode and launch the seeds far and away. They also have the habit of causing landslides. The flowers are fine, but you’ll need to be careful about where you plant them.”

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Belissar gulped. Juosiutik also gulped…while staring at the pods with an expression Belissar wasn’t sure he liked.

“What that, what that, what that?!”

Frelis zipped around a bright yellow flower despite the heat and the fumes from the lava flow nearby. The group had moved onto the volcano area, where one flower in particular was clearly drawing Frelis’s attention.

“Ah, be careful with that one. Combusting orchid, makes volatile compounds that can be processed into potent pheromones…but that also combust when they come into contact with water. Urubran helped me raise it, as you might have guessed, Belissar.”

Juosiutik’s eyes lit up.

“They sound amazing.”

Again, Belissar was not sure he liked the look in Juosiutik’s eyes. Or Tarwantrad’s for that matter, as the elf giggled.

“They are. They’re incredibly difficult to grow and handle, but they have all sorts of creative applications if you can manage it.”

As the two began to discuss just what sort of applications the flower had, Belissar began to wonder if it was a good idea to bring Juosiutik here.

Belissar stood staring out at the largest body of water he had ever seen, blue waves stretching out into the distance beyond. Juosiutik and even Chief Rohsuak joined him. Tarwantrad simply watched over the three with a warm smile for a while.

“This is the sea Nenavann was telling you about. Well, this is more of a lake, to be honest. It’s too small to be a sea, a real one is much larger.”

Belissar’s eyes went wide.

“This…is small?”

Tarwantrad nodded.

“When you can one day visit Nenavann’s dungeon, you’ll see what a real sea looks like. If you take a boat out, you can get to the point where you see nothing but water in every direction.”

Belissar took a deep breath at that. Nothing but water? He could scarcely even imagine it.

“What that?!”

The Fourth of the Seventh swooped down to ask, dancing towards a shallow area where the water turned green. Tarwantrad smiled.

“That’s a seagrass meadow. And yes, they have flowers.”

Belissar looked in the direction indicated and realized it wasn’t the water that was blue. There was indeed a field of grass underneath the water, swaying about as gentle waves meandered overhead. Tarwantrad’s smile grew.

“That’s why Nenavann was excited about your swimming bees. Well, they might need some adaptations first depending on if they can handle salt water or not.”

Belissar blinked.

“Wait, all of that water…is salty? How…where did that much salt even come from?”

Tarwantrad motioned out.

“The world was much bigger before, and full of all sorts of wonderful things. We in the Circle have tried to rebuild as much of it as we could.”

She looked him in the eyes.

“It’s why I was so happy to hear about your dungeon. You’ve already discovered so many bees we hadn’t known about, and I’m sure you’ll reveal many more. Just like I’m trying to do for flowers and Nenavann has done for the oceans.”

Belissar slowly nodded. So…this was why the gods had given them the Towers. He once again resolved to fill his with as many bees as he could, to create a place in the world where they could grow and thrive.

Eventually, Tarwantrad led them to a far corner of the room, where they found a large door. Her smile finally dropped as she looked at them all seriously.

“I made one more room connected to this one. I keep the truly dangerous ones in here.”

Belissar gaped at her. They had seen flowers toxic enough to kill a man with a single drop of nectar, flowers that absorbed and focused the power of the sun, flowers that could explode and knock down mountains, and flowers that burst into flames…and Tarwantrad apparently didn’t consider them dangerous compared to what was in here.

“What…what do you have in there?”

Tarwantrad chuckled with a dangerous expression.

“Monster flowers.”

“Ah.”

Belissar could only nod at that. After all, he had seen what monster bees could do. He may love them as his own children but there was no denying that a swarm of soldier bees or lancers or giant bumblebees or the new butcher bees could be incredibly dangerous. They had to be if they were to protect the Tower form the Hunger. It was only nature that Tarwantrad would have similarly dangerous monsters of her own.

“I wanted to share them with you, of course. I want to help your dungeon grow as safe as possible and you’ll need dangerous defenders for that. Just…be careful with anything in here, you and your bees both. The last thing I want is for any of you to get hurt from something I shared with you, and some of them are dangerous even to pollinators.”

She turned to Frelis.

“Please, when you begin foraging here, do not hesitate to ask for my assistance if any of the foragers feel uncomfortable or unsure. Many plant monsters are more instinctive than intelligent so there is only so much I could do to keep them safe for you, so it’s best to err on the side of caution.”

Frelis danced her confirmation. Tarwantrad turned to each one of them, including each of the bees, until she had gotten a nod or confirmation dance from everyone. Then, and only then, did she open the door.

The room inside was a repeat of the first with wildly different climates…but that’s where the similarities ended. Immediately, Belissar noted that the flowers here were, on average, much larger than in the first room. And generally had brighter colors. And more thorns. A lot more thorns.

And teeth, which he hadn’t been aware that flowers could have. He made a nervous chuckle as he glanced at Frelis. She was zipping about in tight circles, clearly struggling to stay put.

“Well, I think she’s going to like this room.”

Tarwantrad made a dangerous grin at that.

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