He had to prove that he could bring back honey.

His fingers gripped the edge of the cliff as he dangled above the grasslands far below. His pack was slipping, and his best friend was only a few feet below him on the rock face. Avi hadn't wanted to bring him along, but Onath insisted.

He gripped the jagged edge of the stone with his other hand and lifted himself up. His pack slipped off his back and plunged down to the sunlit field below. It hit the ground in an explosion of all the gear that he needed for his task.

"Here, grab my hand," Avi said, reaching down as Onath got close enough to the top. He hoisted his friend up the rest of the way, and they both turned to see their task before them.

Just a few feet into the jungle, a buzzing hive of wasps rippled with life. It stood five times taller than the boys—a cluster of wax larger than the clan’s great hall.

Avi had only ever fought one of these wasps before, when his father had taken him for training when he turned six years old. These wasps were the size of small cattle, zipping through the air with a natural power. Hundreds of them crawled over the face of a dripping honeycomb.

Avi told his mom that he could bring back honey, and when she refused to let him go, he decided to sneak out and try anyway.

They had to get past these huge insects to get to their goal.

"Do you think we should try this?" Onath asked, reaching into his pack for a handful of seeds and snacks.

"We're already here. There's no sense turning back without it now," Avi replied.

Onath's family was fine. His father was still around, a successful farmer in the clan. Avi, on the other hand, was here to prove that he could provide for his family. For the past six years, they had been living on nothing, begging the other members of the clan to take care of them. And while their close family and clanmates never made them feel like a burden, Avi always wanted to elevate them beyond being so needy.

This was his chance to bring back the most valuable food that the clan sought after.

"I lost my pack," Avi said, "so we'll just have to share your tools and weapons."

Onath chewed on nervously.

"Wouldn't it be easier if we both had scythes? We can just come back next week. They'll still be here."

"No," Avi said. "We do this today, and we bring back honey before nightfall."

Avi opened the pack on his friend's back and reached in to get a scythe blade, a curved metal sword that would allow them to cut into the wax. He also pulled out a hammered metal pot that he would use to collect the honey.

"Grab the bow," Avi said. "Cover me as I go in. I'm gonna go around the right side through the brush there."

Onath didn't respond, but just dropped his pack and pulled out his crossbow. He crouched behind the low branch of a tree as Avi crawled to his entry point of the hive. Leaves and weeds tickled across his face as he tried to minimize the rustling of leaves underneath him.

All he had to do was reach a bottom corner of the hive without the huge creatures noticing, and his family would be wealthy for over a year.

He eyed the massive wasps as they danced and crawled and breathed. Their arms clicked with hard insect carapace—the very shells they used for armor in his clan. Their burgundy and yellow alternating stripes were furry and seemed a bit toxic from this close-up.

He was only three feet away from the bottom of the hive, but he needed to break cover. In order to reach his blade to the wax, he would have to expose himself.

He inched his head out from between the leaves, making sure to be as still as possible. He remembered what his father had told him: They can't see you when you're still, son. Only when you're moving. Only when you're breathing. Only when your heart is pounding.

Avi gripped his scythe harder. A bead of sweat dripped down his eyebrow as he inched closer to the honeycomb wax, as still as humanly possible.

Suddenly, Onath sneezed from his crouched position, and the wasps all shot out like a sunburst away from the hive and toward the source of the noise.

Avi lost his balance and fell forward into the leaves, crashing directly under the protector wasps that stayed behind. The closest one jumped from the honeycomb with its tail stabbing directly toward Avi through the air. He swung up with the scythe to slice the body, ripping off the pointed tip, but its weight still crashed over him into the brush, scrambling and gripping him with carapace mandibles.

"Run!" Onath screamed.

Avi heard the crossbow going off three or four times. Avi pushed the wasp's body off of him, ripping his shirt and cutting into his arm with its serrated limbs, and looked around at the chaos.

They had climbed up the cliff to get to the honeycomb. There was no other way of escape. The only two ways of escape were between jumping off the cliff and diving deeper into the thick forest wood that their clan had never even explored.

"Follow me!" Avi screamed, sprinting through tree after tree, trying to get as far away as he could from the buzzing monsters. He turned to see over a dozen creatures dodging through the trees after him, but no sign of Onath.

"Where are you?!" he yelled.

But there was no response. He feared the worst. Onath fell over the cliff.

But he couldn't go back and check without dying himself. One sting from one of these wasps had enough venom to take out over a hundred full-grown men. There was no compromise here.

He shouldn't have brought Onath along.

He continued ducking and sprinting through the brush, and just as he thought he saw an opening ahead where he would be able to hide indefinitely, he pushed back a branch to reveal an even bigger honeycomb. The mother hive. As if the first hive he had seen was merely a moon of this massive planet of wasps that he now encountered, the size of a small mountain.

This hive looked like hundreds of boulders shoved together, covered in swarming creatures, dripping with the rich syrup that Avi longed to bring home. But now wasn't the time to think about his family's socioeconomic status in the clan. Now was the time to hide.

He was still being chased, but there were wasps in every direction. As he ran toward the wax with nothing but a scythe blade in his hand, he only had one option.

He got to the bottom of the hive, in an opening between two crawling creatures, and sliced open the wax, sticking his feet inside one of the angular cells. He quickly sliced another gash in the honeycomb and retracted his body into the hexagonal tube until the blue substance enshrouded his entire body and dripped over his face.

He couldn't breathe in the substance, but he was invisible now. Although the chasing wasps had been hot on his trail, his scent had now been covered, and they returned to their dormant, socializing state.

Yet another time that his father's advice had saved his life.

If only it had saved his father's.

This was another reason that this honey was so valuable—not necessarily because of the taste and the richness of the food itself, which was only used by the richest members of the clan during banquets and celebrations, but it was the scent that the hunters and the clansmen used. They would dry the material, mix it in with the pigment of their war paint, and effectively be blind to the wasps that roamed and dominated their region of the world.

And Avi had just found their main nest.

His breath held for quite a while as his pursuers joined the others, crawling and buzzing about the hive. But he had to breathe eventually. He stuck out his tongue and looped it back into his mouth, bringing with it a huge glob of honey that he then chewed and swallowed. A warm crescendo of sugar wrapped his tongue in a blanket of delight and fruity jazz. He had only ever tasted this flavor once before, at a wedding in the clan when he was a boy.

The blue substance dripping before him opened like a curtain, allowing in some fresh air into the bubble that he had made with his mouth, and he was able to breathe.

He remained frozen, still unsure how he would get out. His body would be heavier, covered in the substance, his clothes completely soaked through, and he had no idea where he truly was. The sky hinted that the late afternoon sun was starting to touch the horizon, and he could only pray to the Maker that Onath was alive and okay.

He wouldn't be able to find a way out until all of the wasps were asleep. Around midnight, the huge creatures usually began to calm, nothing but a low hum ringing throughout their hive, allowing themselves to recharge, yet still protecting their young larva that were growing into more man-killers.

Avi knew that soon a wasp would be coming to the cell that he was in to either eat the honey or fill it up with more. And if he were caught here, his life would be forfeit.

There was really only one option—to dig deeper into the hive, create a small hollow until it was time to escape.

So that's what he did.

Maneuvering like a lizard in a vial, he squirmed and turned, taking one final huge breath. He turned and jabbed his blade into the far end of the wax cell to carve pieces out, kicking them behind him through the opening as he continued to dig. Eventually, his cell drained of most of the honey, allowing fresh air to follow him into his strange cave.

It took a lot of effort to carve through the hard wax and then push chunks out of the opening, but it was the only option he had. When he decided he was far enough into the mass, he carved the wax under his feet to create a flat spot for him to sit. He reached an air pocket from inside the hive. The opening was only the size of his hand, but a thick, heavy aroma slipped up into his hollow.

It was repulsive at first, but then Avi grew intrigued. He remembered that smell.

His father was taking him on the training trip, showing him how to tame the wild dinosaurs, how to collect the raw thundrox, and how to kill the wild wasp.

This was the last night that Avi had with his father.

The wasp that attacked them that night as they lay near an empty dinosaur's nest was unlike other wasps that his father had ever seen.

"This is a strange one," he told Avi. "It has unique antennas, and its coloring is green and red. This might be a mother."

Avi wasn't sure what that meant, but he knew he was about to watch his father destroy this creature in glory.

Except that's not how the night panned out.

As the wasp buzzed over top of them in the moonlit field, almost missing their heads, Avi's father swung his blade and chopped off the wasp's two bottom limbs. The creature pulsed with rage in the night sky as it turned on them, point-first, coming directly towards Avi.

His father jumped in front of him before it happened, taking the full dose of venom himself, but also stabbing the eye of the creature before it flew off into the mountains.

This is the smell that Avi remembers as he stood there with his father, weeping, unsure what to do, unsure where to turn.

It was irresistible.

He carved a larger opening, which revealed a tunnel. Although there was no light or fire to see by, the sunset shone on the hive in such a way that strange, blue, dreamlike light speckled the walls of the cavern through the wax.

He found himself in a tunnel system within the hive. No wasps—just strange dripping formations, warped stalactites—and mounds and mounds of white, squirming, maggot-like larva. The tunnels were getting wider, leading to some central cavern.

As he climbed through, he killed every last larva that he passed, slicing it with his blade silently—cutting it like a soft meat roll.

He crouched through the last opening and looked up into the central cavern.

A monolithic wasp sat in the center, almost breathing. The bulbous monster gargled with bug blubber, fed and tended by workers that flew in and out of the hole in the peak of the chamber. Its upper four legs moved in a lazy sway, but its bottom legs were gone.

Avi knew exactly which wasp this was—because its eye was also missing.

This was the wasp that took his father.

He thought he had buried vengeance long ago. He thought he had come up here merely for the financial and provisional gain of his family.

But in this moment, he realized none of that was true.

He came back for revenge.

And this is exactly what he would get.

He launched himself toward the belly of the wasp, stabbing first with his scythe blade and ripping into its stomach. The wasp leather was harder than he expected, and it took three or four muscled jabs to actually break through its outer shell.

The mother wasp woke, humming and hissing with a chemical code that alerted the entire family, but Avi didn’t care. This was his chance to redeem his father. He pushed harder and harder into the stomach, carving as if she were the hive itself, fighting through strange bug-organs and dripping liquids—greens and oranges, hairs, tendons, and veins that gushed over him as he ripped forward in white-hot vengeance.

At last, he reached a lumpy organ, beating faster than a human heart, faster even than a rodent’s—pulsing like a dark, venomous star. A wild-wasp heart was a delicacy in the clan: the size of a child’s fist and enough sustenance for a week. This one was the size of a dinosaur’s skull.

There was no hesitation. One by one, Avi ripped through the veins and arteries that connected to the organ and gripped it as the mother wasp’s body fell sideways. He tumbled inside the guts, landing on shards of shell and bug-bone, but he had won.

Her humming slowed, then died with a final breath. The pursuing wasps dispersed as he hefted the heart and carved his way out of the wax hive, dripping with honey and wasp blood.

Outside, beneath a moonlit sky and a million stars, not a wasp stirred. The horrid creature that had united them was dead. His honor—and provision for his family—were secured, but more importantly, his father’s memory was avenged.

“Avi!” a voice echoed from the trees.

And Onath was alive.

All Avi had to do now was find his friend—and bring his trophy home.