Regina had started experimenting with new templates for Swarm Drones and had established a few new such templates she tended to return to, since she got her new Abilities and her most recent Tier increase. As the description for Hive's Paths promised, she was able to direct the growth of her Swarm more directly and even almost automate it to a degree. It had led her to developing a few combinations of things from Classes and other stuff that she found useful for certain tasks. One of the major projects she had started much earlier and continued was to train Swarm Drones to better relay her own mind, presence and orders, effectively acting like a double for her, even though Regina now used Classes and such modifications rather than just trying to brute-force it.

The drone she had sent to the excavation site was the pinnacle of what she had achieved in this effort recently. It actually had wings that resembled her own in form. Not so much because it needed to fly, as to increase the 'resonance' between her own body and the drone's. It was also roughly her size and shape, bigger than many flying drones. Its voice box and vocal cords were shaped to allow for speech much more easily than typical Swarm Drones. And it was gaining in levels, but she wasn't worrying about what would happen when it reached sapience.

Currently, Regina was focused on her surroundings. Using the drone's body, she walked down the tunnel in solemn silence. As she came to the next larger cavern, several drones lined it, standing still as honor guards and marking the ceremonial atmosphere. She brushed briefly against their minds and continued.

The doorway was interesting, but Regina passed it by, instead continuing into the main cavern of the deeper section behind it. Janis waited for her, with several others present and watching quietly as well.

Finally, she came to a stop in front of the dead Hive Queen and her drones. Regina looked at them in silence. Janis shuffled a little closer, reaching out with her mind to subtly project support. Since Regina's actual body was farther away, it seemed muffled to her, but she appreciated it, still.

She felt like she should say something, but she was drawing a blank.

"Rest in peace," Regina finally murmured.

They didn't look very peaceful. She could all too easily imagine her own drones in the place of those killed here, looking at them. They were astoundingly well-preserved, due to the lack of airflow or maybe a side effect from whatever had turned their queen to stone.

On an impulse, she added, "You are not alone now. Your death was a horrible atrocity but you did not die for nothing. I will make sure of that, sister. Your memory will not be forgotten."

They stayed silent for a long minute. "There is a good chance she actually was your sister," Janis finally said.

Regina glanced at her, almost glad for the excuse to stop looking at the dead Hive Queen who did, in fact, look a lot like she herself had in the early weeks. "Are you only saying that because she looks like she could be?" she asked, tilting her head. "I mean, Leian did say that as far as she knew, all Hive Queens going to Haven were related within a few generations. So I suppose she could be my sister or my second cousin. And that's obviously just regarding biological relation, not counting our souls."

Which wasn't supposed to dismiss it; the biological part did matter.

"Mostly yes," Janis admitted. "But there's also something we found in the back rooms. Come on, I think you want to see that anyway. It's pretty impressive. We're very lucky that everything here survived the centuries so well."

Regina nodded, throwing a last look at the dead drones in the middle of the room before she followed Janis. Several of the other people in the room, who had kept back and stayed pretty quiet so far, followed them.

They found Tia quickly, in one of the adjacent rooms. There were several of those, and they also seemed to be connected to each other. These rooms were much smaller. One of them had a raised floor made from a different material, tiled in some kind of organic-looking material she didn't recognize, although it might have been a variant of Production Drones' secretions. She could immediately tell that it had been a bedroom-slash-nest. Tia was in the one beside it, but Regina still found her eyes drawn to it.

There were decorations in all of the rooms. Some were pictures or other handcrafted things hung on the walls, but more often the walls were painted directly. It must have been done by the drones living here. They varied a bit, although there was a standard style Regina vaguely recognized. It looked a little like the kind of eastern animation you might find in her old life, which should have seemed incongruous with this old Hivekind burrow, and yet didn't. It gave an impression like kids painting their bedroom. Maybe she was a hobby artist, Regina reflected. The walls of the bedroom were almost fully covered, with climbing and twisting vines framing other objects hidden in their branches and scenes positioned in the gaps between them. It was impressive.

"Mother," Tia greeted her, tilting her head a bit, her attention clearly still partway on what she was looking at. "Do you think they knew what would happen?"

Regina hesitated as she stopped in the room the farthest back of the entire complex. It was small, but housed several podiums. All but one of them seemed to be hollow, actually — maybe they had been covered by something that had rotted away? Tia and a few other drones were very carefully, mostly with magic or the aid of protective gloves, extracting things from them. Then her gaze came to rest on the wall behind her and Regina bit down on another comment.

"Possibly," she said softly, instead.

They had painted more of a tree this time instead of climbing vines, although the tree was made of colored streaks of light in a more abstract fashion. In regular spacing along the tree, other pictures were placed. They contained a variety of shapes, but the main pictures were clearly portraits.

"This is you," Janis said quietly, nodding at one point on the wall.

Regina had to make the drone she rode with crouch and lean to the side to see. It was the furthest painting down and to the left. There was a small cluster of shapes, pictures vaguely arranged on egg-shaped dark backgrounds. Three of these shapes held only one picture each; they didn't use a photorealistic style, but they were clearly of human women. The one furthest to the side did look like the photo she'd seen.

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Regina looked at the others, then at the one other person who was sort of in the same sequence, who'd been placed a bit removed from the rest. Like most of the other people in this roster (clearly arranged in the form of a family tree but also in other groups given the placement), there were two pictures. One was of a young Hive Queen; the one she had seen petrified. The picture beside it was of a young woman, perhaps twenty or so, with sandy hair but darker skin and a bright smile.

She took a step back. There were about a dozen women in total displayed here. The painter, or painters, had chosen subtly different background shades and contours, with the ones farther above ringed in a dark green and the others in a dark blue. The style was also slightly different. And the older ones, well, looked older.

"I wish they'd added names," Regina commented quietly. It felt ungrateful when she'd already gotten more information from this than she'd ever thought she would, but the words still slipped out.

"They must have had a reason not to," Janis said. "Maybe a few of them had family that was still alive?"

Regina hummed in response, quietly watching the wall, before she made herself turn to focus on the rest of the room.

"These were obviously built quickly, you can see imperfections and signs they were roughly shaped," Tia said after a moment, nodding at the pedestals, or containers. Looking at them more closely, Regina saw she was right; the edges weren't always smooth, and the dimensions didn't seem to be entirely regular.

"What did they leave behind for us?" she asked.

She could faintly sense several of their minds darkening at her phrasing, but no one was surprised or contradicted her. It was obvious to everyone here that these people had not prepared all of this just for their own Hive. They'd probably at least suspected what was coming; maybe they'd done this while shut up here, their last gate under assault.

"Unfortunately, not as much as we might have hoped," Tia said. "Most of it seems to have decayed. It seems they didn't anticipate this having to last for a thousand years." She shrugged. "Incidentally, it seems they used some kind of Production Drone substance to cover these compartments as well as the murals; I've found traces of it on them. Probably something that was intended to decay at some point within a given timeframe."

Regina grimaced. That made some sense and answered the question of why it hadn't all been destroyed. She stepped closer, looking at what Tia pointed out.

The murals were obviously faded, but their depictions were still clearly visible. That didn't surprise her so much; there'd been plenty of medieval murals older than this that'd survived back then (though they were probably gone now. Like so much of Earth's history). Unfortunately, the collection Tia showed her now had generally suffered more. Some metal parts were still intact, though often a bit rusted judging by the coloration. But there must have also been organic parts, which were decayed.

"There are some parchments, I think," Tia explained, carefully showing her a few sheets. "I'm not sure what they were made of, probably not sheepskin. I think we can carefully reconstruct at least some of their contents, but it will take delicate work."

Regina looked closer, absently tugging on her mandible in her own body. She could tell the pages themselves had stood the test of time relatively well. They'd been kept dry and in the dark. But the old Hivekind might not have chosen the best ink for them — and how would they have known? It was a rather niche skill — and it had clearly not worked as well; it was very faint on the page, sometimes blurred.

Still, she looked closer, instinctively trying to make the drone squint at it, trying to make out what the text said. She got a few words. It didn't seem to be a historical record, to her mild disappointment. But instead there was some discussion of … magic? Mana was mentioned several times, if she wasn't wrong. And … actually, that seemed like names of other worlds? And there were a few words written in what seemed like Aishan script, with transliterations in parentheses behind them, so they were clearly explaining some concepts. They seemed like technical terms anyway. Or maybe she was projecting.

Regina glanced at the others, and only just caught Janis and Jae exchanging a look. Janis seemed slightly disgusted but fascinated, Jae mostly calm but curious. She wasn't sure what that was about. By now, Iseis and Zephyr had also found their way here, looking at the mural and the pillars only in passing, and carrying on a murmured conversation. And where was Galatea, anyway? Regina really wished she could be here in person, it would be easier to sense everyone without having to look.

Up on the surface, apparently looking at some of their other, previous finds. As Regina focused on her, she could tell Galatea was leaving, probably heading back to join them.

"I believe we might have missed something here," Iseis said, cocking her head and frowning slightly as she glanced at the wall. "Let us see."

Curious, Regina followed her into the next room, after making sure the documents were secure. This room looked similar to those before. Iseis glanced around, before pointing them to a dark shadow in the corner.

It only took Regina a moment to realize what they were seeing. There was a small bolthole in the wall. They'd probably covered it with more of their camouflage material, but little of that was left. This wall was painted in sweeping colors, though, and this part was black and dark gray, so the black of the opening didn't stand out at first glance in the low light. It was also quite small, barely enough for a drone to squeeze through.

Tia crouched and looked through it. "A small space, bare and stony," she reported. "It's empty."

Regina gently pushed her aside and tried to squeeze through herself. It was a bit of a test of her control of the drone. She paused, glancing at the others. "Light, please." She hadn't experimented with it much, but trying to do magic from this distance wouldn't go well.

With Sparks from Janis and Iseis lighting her way, it was easier to push through until she ended up in a small crawlspace that looked like it was roughly hewn out of bare rock. She stretched her drone's arms out, touching the walls. There was only enough space for maybe two drones here.

Sighing, Regina got back out. It wasn't much to see.

"I guess now we know what happened and why the door was still closed," she said.

Janis nodded. "A few drones must have managed to hide out here and survived. Then they made sure everything was preserved, left, repaired the door if it was damaged and closed it."

Regina grimaced slightly. She wondered what had happened to the hypothetical drones, but had a feeling she knew. They wouldn't survive long on their own in a world trying to kill them. Most likely they died fighting a while later, possibly on purpose. She could picture her own drones deciding to go out taking as many enemies with them as possible, but she pushed that thought aside.

"I don't understand," Iseis said. "Why didn't they hide the Hive Queen here, if they had this hideaway? Surely it would have been the best chance."

"Isn't it obvious?" Regina didn't even have to consider it. She glanced at Tia. "Their enemies would have never stopped and would have turned everything over until they found her. They knew she was here. They would've all died. This way, at least a few of her children survived."

Folding her hands, she returned to the main room, not looking back.

She was already feeling a bit emotionally drained, but she still had work to do. At least they'd managed to salvage something from this. Regina still had to talk to the gnomes, deal with the Prince of Elakand, send someone to get the dark elves' maps of their tunnels, and make sure she knew what the psychics in the area were up to. And, of course, double-check that the monster activity in the region was at least starting to decrease. That had been why they'd decided to do this now, she'd almost forgotten.

And if she was focusing on work to try to avoid musing on what she had found and what this meant for her, well, she had her duties. She'd give herself a bit of time, and consider it with the care it deserved.

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