HOTHIVE
REGENT: VESPERIDAE, COLONY QUEEN
What was once the powerful, bustling industrious hive-city of Colony now seethes and thrums with fever under the name Hothive, a once-great industrial matriarchy now put to work for its parasitic masters.
The Colony queen who appears as the representative and leader of what is now called Hothive does not mentally seem to be the same individual who originally ascended to that seat, though she has not asked to be called anything else.
Hothive was the domain of the Colony dwellers for many centuries under the simplest rule of governance possible -- entry by outsiders was forbidden. The borders were defended. Those not identifiable as part of the Colony were destroyed.
Colony did not particularly entertain itself with the notion of individuals, instead existing in a kind of eusociety with a sisterhood of queens all in equal power over hundreds of smaller hives. Rather than a hierarchy, Colony thrived via specialization -- with each citizen born to fight, breed or lead. None were more specialized than the Colony border guards -- vicious killing machines with multispectral vision, who hunted outsiders with a singular focus, less individual murderers than the blades of a perfect threshing machine.
Perhaps this is why what finally felled the Colony was something so small it could not be seen, not be slain.
The parasite that made Hothive slipped in undetected and hungry, as small things like that always are. An invisible predator as efficient as the Colony itself, the parasite spread like wildfire. It wasn't long until multiple hives were infected and the dead-eyed drones, their bodies animated by the invisible hive-will of the parasite, brought the Colony down. Vesperidae was the last uninfected sister-queen, fighting against her hundred siblings, the parasite's hive mind puppeteering them as one. As the last to be conquered, she demonstrated the strength necessary to continue to rule -- under the parasite's designs.
The Colony had one mind to speak, one mind to desire and a million bodies to act upon it. Now it is the Hothive's mind who speaks and acts with the Colony's million obedient bodies.