Galvachren's History of the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb

“Like Galvachren’s History of the Pridolow Wandering Villages, this short essay is banned by the Wall Guard, and commonly attributed to an older Galvachren, not the one who worked with Landis Ourna. For obvious reasons, enforcement of this ban is performed much more aggressively than the other— nearly so fiercely as censorship against City of Bridges.”

-Open letter from The Wanderer, a minor Named of Anastis, to the scholars of the [Redacted].

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The closest the Wall ever came to being conquered was not by the Gidrans, nor by the Chapel of Rage, nor even by the Growth.

It was, instead, by a pantheon of bee gods.

Well, mostly bee gods.

Most foes the Wall confronts are not interested in conquering it, but in either destroying it, or putting up enough of a fight to guarantee more of their population spots atop the Wall. This is not least because the Wall is simply too large to conquer and hold.

The Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb, of course, didn’t rely on force of arms in their conquest— even though the Wall was small enough at that point to theoretically be conquered.

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As with so many of the threats the Wall has faced through its lifespan, the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb was a danger of the Wall's own making.

A century and a quarter after the Wall’s expansion began, a movement rose up among Cambrias’ priesthood to standardize the closes. There was significant internal opposition to this plan, of course— many were the city planners, cartography gods, and land surveyors who rightly pointed out the fact that the plains were far from truly flat, that soil and bedrock conditions were hardly conducive to standardized construction, that making the hydrology of the plains cooperate would be a nightmare, if possible at all.

But standardized closes would allow for easier urban planning, easier taxation. It was that oh-so-tempting drug all governments must fight an addiction to— the idea that the world can always be forced to be more legible, that there are no limits to that legibility.

And so, over the objections of wiser voices, the word came down from on high that henceforth, all closes would be hexagons of consistent size.

Which delighted the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever looked at a beehive.

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There were, obviously, six gods in the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb.

The first three were simple bee gods.

One that offered gifts for clearing beehives of mites, fungus, and other pests.

A second that offered gifts for dissuading bees from stinging and for manifesting oversized bee stingers for use as weapons.

A third that offered gifts for translating bee dances and for translating human speech into finger signs that bees could understand.

These first three were not particularly unusual, so far as bee gods went. Only the first was particularly noteworthy, for the sheer range of hive ailments it could treat.

It was the fourth and fifth gods that made the Pantheon particularly unusual— for they were both gods of mathematics.

The fourth god was a god of hive calculations, whose gifts allowed their wielders to use beehives as calculation engines, to perform mathematical calculations more swiftly and with larger quantities than any human without mathematical cognitive boons.

And the fifth god was not a bee god at all— no, it was a stranger, more esoteric thing, a deity of pure mathematics. It was a god of geometry, of defined territories and repeating patterns. It offered bizarre gifts whose workings were hard to define to layfolk, that often required page after page of equations to explain. This was not uncommon for mathematical gods, of course— but rare was it that these esoteric gifts meshed so well with a pantheon so concrete as one for bees. If one were to attempt to explain that mathematical god, well… there was one thing that could be said truly and simply of it.

It was a god of hexagonal grids.

And regardless of the arcane obscurity of the functioning of the hex god’s gifts, their effects were easier to summarize. They were gifts of defining territory, of knowledge of defined territory. And in combination with the fourth god… well, it allowed the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb shocking awareness of everything going on inside any hex grid they claimed.

And it was only a few short decades after construction of the Wall’s new hexagonal closes that the pantheon began claiming the new construction.

Oh, and we can’t forget the sixth god, of course, nor the pantheon godgift. The sixth god was a simple god of flowers, one whose gifts encouraged the growth of flowers, made them grow faster, larger, and produce more nectar for bees. It never spoke, communicating only in quiet, cheerful little hums and melodies— most likely incapable of speech. Quite a pleasant little god, really. And the pantheon godgift was a friction gift that allowed one to always get the last bit of honey out of a jar— not history changing, but one that must have saved folks a lot of frustration.

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There are two fronts any Ishvean war is fought on— the physical moon, and the Firmament.

The first needs little explanation. On most any world in the Known Multiverse (with a few noteworthy exceptions), war is fought to break the spirit of the opposing force through violence. It matters little whether the violence is against enemies, enemy food supplies, or even enemy sleep— it all serves to attempt to break the enemy spirit. This never changes in war.

Ishveos’ second front, the Firmament, is among those rare exceptions.

It is extremely rare that Ishvean gods can oppose one another through force, save a few noteworthy examples such as the High Goddess Lamitu. Thusly, war between gods is fought more indirectly— through physical means such as worshippers, but also through domain and portfolio contestation.

If one god can convince another that a chunk of land did not fit their domain, or that their host was not contained by their portfolio, they could drive the other away, often seizing their territory in the wake of the others’ retreat. This persuasion is not a simple conversational matter, but a far more violent magical action that few gods can adequately explain to material beings.

Cooperatively-inclined gods can easily share territory, of course, but cooperative gods have far fewer reasons to go to war.

The geometry god of the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb, in combination with the hive calculator god, was able to persuade rival gods with shocking ease that they did not belong in one of their claimed hexagonal closes.

The pantheon’s Hive Warriors would have been deeply unimpressive with only that godgifts of the pantheon itself— but they were afforded the godgifts of many other gods nearly at cost, for any that failed to offer their boons cheaply to the Hive Warriors would be rejected from the closes. Despite the resulting strength of the Hive Warriors, however, they saw little battle during the conquest, for the vast majority of the war was accomplished within the Firmament, subverting or ejecting gods one after another, spreading from close to close— all driven by the new mandate to construct hexagonal closes.

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The Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb only failed in their conquest due to overreach.

If they had kept up their path, conquering the closes one by one, they would never have attracted the ire of the Wall Guard. The Guard, after all, was perfectly content absorbing the powerful into their ranks— their allegiance was more to their own existence as the ruling class than anything else. And adding another High God to the Wall aside from Cambrias has remained a preoccupation of the Wall Guard for its entire existence— and a High Pantheon would have served just as well.

But in their drive to expand, to gain power, the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb sought to upend the social and theological order of the city itself— not just adding themselves to the ruling class, but supplanting it entirely. They sought control over the mobility of groundlings between closes, and even began attempting to theologically redefine the Wall itself, as something more akin to the actual walls of a honeycomb.

Whether that would have interfered with Cambrias’ control, well… we’ll never know, because the Wall Guard went to war immediately.

At that point, the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb had spread throughout the vast majority of the new hexagonal closes, and were encompassing nearly a third of the total wall. The Wall Guard immediately stopped construction of new hex closes, and attempted a decapitation strike on the leadership of the Pantheon priesthood using the, at this point, freshly formed Strike Force organization.

The problem with that, of course, was that there was no leadership among the bee priests.

The Honeycomb priesthood had taken their organizational principles from bees— and most humans fundamentally misunderstand how governance in a beehive works, assuming that it’s a monarchy ruled by the Queen.

In reality, bee queens don’t rule anything. Their one and only job is to produce more larvae— they’re factories, not monarchs. (Well, in a small number of hive-dwelling bee species, queens can decide to move to another hive location on their own, and the workers will follow— but more often, the bees decide even that as well, and provoke the queen to move by putting her on a diet.)

The actual governance is done by the bee workers themselves. When a bee returns to the hive and begins dancing to talk of flowers, she engages in a process of democratic persuasion, of convincing other bees to go and investigate her discovered flower patch, while other scouts do the same for their discovered flower patches. Bees will fly in and out, investigating the various flower patches, and join one or another of the competing dances— until finally one wins out and gets the whole hive dancing, and the hive begins harvesting the chosen flower patch together. Other decisions are processed largely the same.

And, it turns out, this sort of decision-making process can sometimes work surprisingly well for humans and gods too. Well, the dancing part is optional.

Once the Wall Guard’s decapitation strike failed, they faced two options— a long, brutal, expensive war of attrition, one that would have to function without much direct support from reliquaries, possessor gods, or any other gods within the closes, save Living Gods and Avatars; or to come up with some clever theological solution.

They went with the clever theological solution, of course. They simply began strategically knocking out Wall segments within the honeycomb, transforming individual hex pairs into hourglass shapes with a single removed segment, utterly disrupting the control of the Pantheon. This was not, by any means, an easy or cheap task— every Wall segment was specifically built to be hard to demolish, held up as much by boons and blessings as stone. It would not be entirely inaccurate to call each Wall segment a relic on its own. And, on top of that, the Hive Warriors were hardly going to let the segments be destroyed without a fight.

But even facing those steep challenges, the Wall Guard eventually won after a brutal two year war that killed tens of thousands on both sides, transforming the honeycombs into the Hourglass District, these days a rather posh, quiet neighborhood. The gods of the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb were all starved to death in some Wall Guard vault in the depths of the moon somewhere— well, most of them. Their sixth member, the quiet, cheerful flower god, still lives within the Hourglass District, humming quietly to itself and growing the District’s famed flowers. It has still never spoken to this day. As for the Pantheon’s followers, well… the remnants of their state were crushed utterly, most of their records destroyed in fire.

This leaves, however, some interesting questions. The Wall Guard’s official histories all claim that the Pantheon of the Iterative Honeycomb were mere conquerers, intent to rule the city themselves— but that doesn’t really make full sense when taken in context with the decentralized governance of their priesthood.

Many idealists think that perhaps the Pantheon was rebelling against the injustices of the Wall itself, that they intended to supplant the Wall’s entire social system with a juster, kinder system, that they intended to free the groundlings, to remove all barriers to movement withing their vast hive.

We can never truly know, given how thoroughly the Wall Guard destroyed the primary documents. The fervor with which they censor material about the Pantheon of the Iterative Hive, however, is rather intriguing.

Those speculations aside, from an architectural and urban planning standpoint, the Pantheon’s destruction is probably for the best, in the end.

Not like the multiverse has any shortage of magical beehive cities. They’re a little cliche at this point, honestly.