So Prim strode south along the coast road, finding it easy going compared to the mountain passes of Calla. She was wrapped in a blanket that was pulled up over her head like a cloak, and carrying a bag slung over her back that contained a few days’ simple food, a purse with a few coins in it, and a writing kit: quills, a penknife, and the oddments needed to make ink.

The road followed the coastline, which was not straight. Every so often she, and the other travelers strung out along the road near her, would come round a point and see the city. The place had been protected very early by a seawall—or, in those days, a riverwall—put up to prevent inundations such as the one that had destroyed the first Eltown. Newer buildings, mostly of burnt mud, had later gone up around the outside of the walls and now blurred its lower reaches with a confusion of various rooflines and drifting smoke. But easily discerned was the wall top, running straight from one tower to the next.

The towers were five in number and arranged so as to command interlocking vistas of the First Shiver and, opposite, Campside. Impressive as those might have been, they were dwarfed by what loomed above them. The slopes of the mountain behind the city were grown with trees that, since the death of Adam, had become quite ancient. The trace of a road-cut could be discerned zigzagging up the slope. But at its top, the skyline was a froth of white stuff, like the foamy crest of a wave poised to break over the city. Accustomed to the mountains of Calla, Prim would have pegged it as the thick lip of a glacier had she not known what it really was: Hive. A complex of cells inhabited by souls that were unimaginably different from the sort who walked around on two legs and talked to one another with words, songs, looks, and gestures.

Little could really be known of the Hive save that it surrounded the base of the Pinnacle in the middle of the Land, and spread out from there along the Hive-Way, thin tendrils running east to the Teemings and west to the ridge above Secondel. There, over time, the Hive had filled in the gaps between the great stone temples and basilicas that Beedles had piled up to the glory of El, forming a seamless complex running for a mile along the ridgetop. Few of the souls who dwelled below in the walled city of Secondel ever set foot in the Temple. If they toiled up the switchbacks to the top of the ridge, they might pass through an aperture in the middle that marked the beginning of the great road east. But entry to the Temple itself was an honor conferred only on a few.