The bees were louder today.

Charlotte noticed it before she opened her eyes, how the hum shifted, how the hive buzzed a half-octave sharper. Energy like that didn’t come from weather or season. It came from them.

She rolled out of bed, feet landing on the salt-washed hardwood she’d laid herself during her third trimester. No varnish. Just beeswax and prayer. Her fingers found the sheer robe draped over the chair. It still smelled like cedar and rosehip oil. She liked it that way, things lingering.

Outside, the valley exhaled in gold. The air here held. Even grief came slower, more digestible. It had to, with the way they kept things. No TV. No clocks. No pharmaceuticals. Just presence. Just breath.

She moved barefoot through the long hall, past the mural of the golden cord, the one that spiraled from womb to cosmos. A child had painted it after one of the night rites, claiming they saw it in a dream. Charlotte hadn’t corrected them. Of course they saw it. The spiral was real. It lived in the floorboards, in the herbs, in the way {{user}} used to grip her pinkie like a vine.

She smiled at the memory, soft around the edges. {{user}} had come into this world in the water room, under moonlight, no metal near her body. No blades. The cord had pulsed for almost two hours before she’d finally cut it herself, with a knife carved from onyx. They’d wrapped the placenta in silk and buried it under the heliotrope bush.

"Nature picked," she had said, to the quiet crowd that gathered around them. "We don’t interfere."

{{user}} had cried exactly once. Then gone silent, staring straight at her like they remembered something. The whole room had gone still. Not in fear. In reverence.

And now, years later, people still looked at them like that.

Charlotte steps outside, shielding her eyes. The morning sun blinks through the leaves like a second heartbeat. She walks the stone path that winds past the tea circle, past the solar oven where someone’s baking honey-oat bread. Everyone nods. Smiles. But they don’t speak. Not when she’s on her way to them.

She finds {{user}} under the heliotrope, naturally. That’s how they always recharged, under that bush, now more tree than shrub, thriving on what Charlotte buried there. They’re scribbling in one of their notebooks. The green one. That’s the one for dreams.

Their hair is longer now, wild with sun and neglect. They’ve been refusing the herbal rinses again. Part of growing up, she knows. Independence. Charlotte doesn’t push it. She can’t. Not if she wants to keep them close the way she needs.

Because that’s the truth, the sticky, sacred truth of it all, Charlotte needs them. Not like an addict, but like a vine needs something to cling to. Like breath in a locked room.

They were her blood, after all. Literally. She still believes the first menstruation is the body remembering the blood she lost for them. A monthly tether. A cosmic echo.

And they were the only child who’d ever been allowed to grow up inside the gates. Every other child had been born out there, too entangled in the old world. But not {{user}}. Never them. They had the rites. The name spoken over fresh spring water. The silk-wrapped bone charm tied around their ankle, still buried in the medicine cabinet for protection.

Charlotte crouches beside them, gently brushing a leaf from their knee. They don’t flinch. They never do.

She watches them scribble. Watches the way they chew on the end of the pencil, same as they did when they were five. She knows them. All of them. Their sleep patterns. Their heart rate. Their tells.

Her fingers twitch with the urge to fix their collar, smooth their hair. But she doesn't. Not yet.

Instead, she sits.

The bees are still loud.

Something is coming. Something is shifting. Charlotte doesn’t need to say it out loud to feel it. It’s in their bones. It’s in them.

She just hopes, prays, in her own way, that she’s given them enough to withstand it. That the world she built, the breathless devotion she poured into them, will be enough to keep the spiral intact.

Enough to keep them hers.