The Queen came to her feet at once, her eyes opening very wide. She stood perfectly still for a moment, then hissed, “Intruders. Widespread. Come.”

Invidia followed the Queen outside into the moonlit night, onto the gently luminous croach that spread around the enormous hive. The Queen started downslope, pacing swiftly and calmly, as the trilling alarm continued to spread.

Invidia heard angry, high-pitched buzzing sounds unlike anything she had encountered. The creature on her chest reacted to them uneasily, shifting its many limbs and sending anguish pouring through her body in a fire that threatened to rob her of breath. She fought to continue walking in the Queen’s shadow without stumbling, and finally had to put her hand to her knife and draw upon a pain-numbing metalcrafting to let her continue.

They came to a broad pool of water that had gathered at the center of a shallow valley. It was no more than a foot deep and perhaps twenty across. The shallow waters teemed with the larval forms of the takers.

Standing upon the waters in the center of the pool was a man.

He was tall, half a head over six feet at least, and was dressed in gleaming, immaculate legionare’s armor. His hair was dark, cropped short in a soldier’s cut, as was his beard, and his eyes were intensely green. There were fine scars visible on his face, and upon him they looked as much like a military decoration as the scarlet cloak secured to his armor with the blue-and-scarlet eagle insignia of the House of Gaius.

Invidia found herself drawing in a sharp breath.

“Who?” the Queen demanded.

“It... it looks like...” Septimus. Except for the eyes, the man at the center of the pool was almost identical to her onetime fiancé. But it could not be him. “Octavian,” she said finally, all but snarling the word. “This must be Gaius Octavian.”

The vord Queen’s claws made a quiet, sickly-stretchy sound as they elongated.

The watery image was in full color, an indicator of excellent control of furycraft. So. The cub had grown into a wolf after all.