The Hollowlight Hive

On the night the combs began to die, Liora woke to a smell she had never learned to name. It rode the stairways of the stone quarter like a low warning: old wax gone sour, metal cooled by long rain, and something else—like wet paper and a memory folding itself inward. She dressed by touch, fingers tracing familiar notches in the wood; the faint scratch of her needle against the workbench sounded louder than the city outside.

Vaelash crouched beneath a cavern the size of a lost sea. Streets arced like rib bones and lanterns were not glass but living things—hives strapped to wrought-iron posts, combs that glowed from within and threw maps of people's lives onto the pavement. People moved through light that remembered them. A child's laugh could set a honey-lamp to silver. A woman could comb a lover's touch out of the wax and keep it for winter. Liora tended three such hives in the eastern apiarium: small, stubborn things with names stitched into their caps. She called them Ash, Small-Blue, and Root-Queen's Remnant.

Her hands smelled always of wax and smoke. She walked the rows with a smoker at her hip, a glass-of-amber jar slung from a leather strap. Inside she kept salvaged memories she was paid to bottle: a father's apology, the pattern of a wedding dress, a sister's lullaby. She learned to read them by way of taste and weight. Some hum like bees after rain. Some thud like stones.

When she opened Ash that morning, the first thing she noticed was silence—an absence that felt almost physical. The usual low bell-hum, the comb's heartbeat, had gone thin. The honey-silk glinted, but the light was fractured, as if someone had scored the face of the moon with a fingernail. A thread of amber separated and collapsed into itself. Liora pressed her ear to the frame and heard, not a memory, but a child's sob from the market three streets over. The sound had no shape she could pick at. She could only feel its cold bite along the inside of her ribs.

She wrapped Ash in old linen, avoiding the way the light tried to gather in her hair. From the window she could see the Archivists' tower, a needle of iron and bone where men in silver came and went like seasons. They kept the city's ledger of what could be kept and what must be given up. She had seen them inspect hives before—sharp-nosed, polite, like men who trimmed live things for the good of the city's health. This morning, a pall followed them that even the honey-lamps could not hide.