Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 135 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 11

The area around our little fort is safe from the galesun, for now.  Or, perhaps it would be safer to say, it is safe from the less cataclysmic engagements the galesun brings.  The gusts strong enough to turn loose stones into murderous projectiles, the winds that make it unsafe to brave the parapets or open fields, the occasional brief twist of air that sucks any tree not rooted deeply enough skyward, all of these things I can deflect with my combined efforts of Know Weather and Fortify Space.  If the galesun ever saw fit to form one of the city breaker cyclones near us, though, it would not matter how much of the Green I had secured; it would only take one haphazard boulder thrown at speed to shatter our temporary home.

And yet, the stormsun has historically reserved those events for the deep oceans and highest peaks.  So while I cannot say I am not irking it, I continue to resist the damage it would do to my companions.  We have lost too much already, to those grim winds, and I refuse to let it take more without a fight.

Once I learned that I could use Link Spellwork to make the process even simpler, the task has been sleekened down to an almost casual series of parries throughout the day.

And on top of that, it has taught me yet another facet of my strange magic, as well as a piece of tactical knowledge.  Out there, in the Green, the red furred and obviously enlarged insects do continue to prowl.  I had thought their apparatus had perhaps perished to storming, but no such luck.  Though judging from the state of the ones I’ve seen, they seem to be struggling to survive the first two suns this season.

Which might be why they’ve found the calm point that I have placed a Fortify Space upon.  Or maybe it is simply that they are hunting for sources of power.  I’ve known for some time that anywhere I pool my power is vulnerable to actual physical invasion, the domain cracking and crumbling away to be harvested by one of my rivals.  But strangely, this time, things don’t quite play out the same way.

Instead of the pool of my domain breaking apart, the long legged red creatures - they’re almost fluffy now, like someone has gifted an ant the wool of a sheep - huddle under the calm section of the world, while the galesun’s touch lands instead on the ridges of the Green’s sloped valleys and the smooth stone of outcroppings that I am deliberately leaving undefended.

Is it that they are restraining themselves from feasting on my magic?  Or is this the other apparatus seeing in my working a useful tool that it does not wish to break?  Or, perhaps, has something about my use of the spell changed it, in a way that it cannot be broken in the same fashion.  The creatures certainly approached this distant outpost like they were prepared for combat, but now, they simply wait, hunkered down beneath the branches of a massive willow, letting the rainsun’s consistent efforts to drown us all turn to mist on the floor of the Green outside their protective dome.

They look almost peaceful.  It’s strange to think they are under the command of something that tried to kill my first friends in this life.

But then, I think of Lutra, and I think that perhaps what I saw as unchecked murderous aggression might be nothing more than the terror of a person trapped in the dark and uncertain if their world was even real.

For some apparatuses, it has been so easy to tell that they understood what they were doing, and did so with malice.  But for others, it is difficult.  Murky.  Even the one buried in the altered wolv, the one that killed the bravest child I’d ever known and wounded half the rest of my friends besides.  Was it aware?  Or was it just a scared animal lashing out?

In the cleric’s old life, there was a common issue he faced, that the strong were never swayed by spiritual or ethical arguments.  Those who were determined to use their power for violence could only ever be met with force to stop them.  The irony then, that the people with the kindest opinions often had the least power to enforce them.

Perhaps I can be something different.  Kind, and strong enough to make that kindness known.

The thought feels incomplete.  I consider it as I work Stone Pylons filled through with Congeal Glimmer and Congeal Mantra into being.  The fort’s people are flush with the creations by now, with my pylons capable of producing three or four a day, and myself now able to make eight pylons should I have the stone available.  There is more to that spell that I do not quite understand yet, but it does not stop me from turning a field near the fort into an orchard of sorts, with tall grey and dun spires instead of trees.  My people can make use of the glittering glimmer and black glowing mantra, yes, but also the things shall make for fine trade goods if we need to strike a deal with the standing city I hope to reach with the fall.

It feels good to work.  To change things with intent and plan.  I am not merely reacting anymore, I am looking to a future, and seeing opportunities within it.

The bees that are my closest bound seem to understand my thoughts implicitly, and I wonder if some part of me bleeds through Bind Insect to their small lives.  Though perhaps not so small anymore, are they?  The simple honeybees grow almost naturally with the application of my magic over time, and it is no strain on my Authority anymore to bind their entire hive.  When they are ready, infusions of glimmer enlarge their forms, thicken their fur to a shining lush coat, and lengthen their legs and antenna such that they must look like giants to their brethren.  Mantra too grows them, but the larger changes from that come in the form of the glowing black lines of flowing writing, a language that was never around to be forgotten but still feels that weight covering their wings and chitin.

They are beginning to learn to speak to me, and what a delight that is.  To hear their curious compassion come through as words and complex concepts.  Their queens - and there are three queens to the hive now - eschewing instinct to create something social and not simply natural.

I have changed them.  Into what, I don’t think either of us know, but it is fascinating to watch it happen.  These small creatures were what brought me out of the dark when I awoke to this new world, and their patterns were a form of community I aspired to.  Now, I show them in bits and pieces a larger iteration of that pattern, and they aspire to my vision.  Together, we pull each other forward.  I quite like it, even if I do not think either side knows fully what we are doing.

The others in the fort understand that the future will change, but there is more fear there.  Or sometimes excitement, for those such as Mela, and perhaps even Dipan.  I think the man longs to return to what he thinks is civilization, though I think also he might wish this because he wishes for a softer life where he is not needed for anything.  I don’t begrudge that.  Perhaps one day I will have golems enough to remove the need for the rough labor he so dislikes.  Wouldn’t that be a future worth living to?

There are bees for every living person in the fort now.  Not all of them enhanced with the solid magics I can produce yet, but each individual has a companion with them.  Whether they knew they needed it or not, their bees support them, give them someone to speak to, and they learn in turn the worries and fears and hopes of my people.  Because I do think of them all as my people, until such time as they choose to go their own way.

I don’t use them to spy.  I have Oob for that, after all.  The little beetle, still so small, but a hundred times more cunning than before, has made his desire for functional agelessness clear to me.  And so Bind Insect and Drain Health work to perfect a form for him, that might yet live forever, so his eavesdropping and snooping can last until the world itself is too dull to pay attention to.  His counterpart, Oop, is still working on the decision.  But either way, the concern that the bees are spying on people is meaningless.  I already know far too much about the goings on in the fort, and yet, knowing is not the same as abusing.  I will never use that information to hurt anyone, and if Small Promise considered that oath small, I would have made it openly.

The new people who’ve joined us, staggering through the path I’ve cut that hold off the dangers of the galesun, adapt more quickly than I expected.  They’re civilians, or in the case of the gobs, simply new.  And that means there is fundamentally less hate built up in them for the other species they share the fort with.  Seeing the demon and human group that has been galvanized by their own trials already goes a long way to making them fall into place, and their own support bees allow me to get to know them while providing them a welcome outlet for the nightmares that have plagued them since the emergence of the apparatuses across the region.

I knew it was bad, that things were hostile and people were suffering.  But every new story is a new horror.  Small farming communities ripped apart by their own crops, trading posts overrun with weapons that wielded themselves, those taking to the roads found by bands of roving corpses, or worse, the soldiers of a rival nation that no longer seemed to have borders.  I recognize from their tales a half dozen spells I either have, or could access, and I learn things I did not wish to know about how I could twist my magic to the most harmful form possible.  But still I listen, because nothing drains the venom better from a heart than sharing it and being heard.

Though I do take a moment to follow along with the eyes of my bees as Muelly guides the two newest gobs that have made their way to us last night around the fort.  “Sorry we don’t have a private room for you.”  She’s saying with a grimace as they tour the barracks floor.  “Or enough blankets.  Or… you know.”  Muelly sighs.

The two gobs, Hilt and Chain, both have pebbled grey skin and the kind of swept back ears you normally only see on elves.  They’re twins, as much as gobs can be twins, both born from the abandoned equipment of the same fallen soldier.  And they do not actually know what Muelly means, but they still nod as they take in the words, before she continues walking and talking about when the people here eat and how to get my attention and how to not bother Yuea when she has a certain look on her face.

It’s familiar, and comforting, even if it is also a brand new experience.  The distant nostalgic touch of a memory that I have only just formed.

I like the experience.  It feels like smiling, which I still have no ability to do.  Oh, I can make some of my glimmerlings smile, the inkrats technically have faces for it.  But it doesn’t feel like anything to me.  So the sensation feeling anything close to that is welcome.

I do spend some time fretting about memories themselves as I use my odd ability to split my attention across a claw’s worth of minor tasks.  Attending to the crops growing in constructed troughs of dirt in one of the cellars as well as the plots in the process of being brought back to a proper farm just outside our walls, adding nutrition to the simple meals being produced in the kitchen, clearing the damaged courtyards of the fort of the worst of the puddles before they become their own lakes, making simple golem pieces that I will have use for later, all of that takes… thought, yes, but I spend the focus almost like currency, while my actual feelings dwell on something that is more personal.

And right now, that would be the absence of certain memories.

Know Weather and Form Caravan are both new spells.  And almost every spell I have ever taken into my collected soul has brought with it a memory.  Not one of my memories, but one of my previously lived lives; a memory that defined them as someone distinct and separate from me.  But those memories were something I cherished, because while I could remember the life regardless, it lacked… proximity.  The lives are distant things, other people I happen to know about.  Except for the spell-carried remembrances.  Those I feel, as if I had lived them myself, a pure connection between who I am and who I was in a way that truly makes me understand that I was those people.

And yet for my two newest spells, I have felt nothing.  Not even the distant sense that there is an itch in my thoughts waiting for a moment of calm to appear.

Is there something wrong with them, or wrong with me?  Did my selections simply not have a memory attached?  I am… disappointed.  In a way that I did not expect to be.  Like I have missed a harvest dance.

It would be all too easy to believe this is because of a personal failure.  But I do try to not let it bother me as I speak with various people around our little stolen secret military outpost.

The halls and rooms are more crowded now, even the dining hall with its long benches and high ceiling.  There are more people; even with the deaths from the last apparatus and its corpse soldiers, there have been another fifteen survivors making their way to us since then.  And on top of that, the bees that grow beyond their initial forms do take up space.  All of that mixes with the rainsun overhead, making going outside a constantly miserable experience for the living.  At minimum there is a light drizzle at all times, but as a few days pass, the rainsun escalates to downpours in some places, and some of those places are directly overhead.  Other spots in the Green have rolling floods guided by the stormsun, the orbs of collected water seeping across the landscape like the fictional slimes based on their appearance.  Those mobile floods never last long, which is good, but even our little valley with the open caverns beneath it to hold water is starting to turn marshy.  The ground softened with covered in puddles, waterfalls spilling from cliffs and ridges, small creeks turned into flows that could be mistaken for rivers.  The world is wet, and our only consolation is that at least the galesun is rebuked enough that it is merely wet and cold.

I cannot feel it.  Which bothers me even still.  Maybe it seems naive or foolish, to believe that I could become accustomed to this style of existence in less than a prime season.  But I had still hoped.  Hoped the itch in my thoughts that I need to touch something would quiet somewhat, or that I would find another spell to replace a missing experience.  But no such luck on either front, distressingly.

So I watch the rainsun soak the world more as I would observer a piece of motion art, or a dance.  Beautiful, temporary, and largely unable to hurt me.  Even if I know that it would not be impossible for a twist in the rainsun’s pattern to harm or even kill people I know, or destroy the farm plots again, or flood the undersea and cause an unpredictable amount of damage to the fort.  It is dangerous, and wonderful in equal measure.

But I still watch, as I talk.

My conversations these last few days are simple things.  I listen to the hurts and hopes of everyone, I offer advice where I can, I use the stockpiled memories of old lives to teach techniques and recipes that - while not lost - aren’t known to the people who weren’t prepared to be frontier settlers, I craft a set of tiles and relearn how to play Fa-I using my glimmerlings and spend candlemarks helping stave off boredom while the rain hammers outside.

And I ask a small question of some of them.

While much of my magic is finding itself pushed to constantly perform, especially the perpetually convenient spells of Imbue Mending and Bolster Nourishment simply to keep the fort alive in a way that mattered, there is a single working that stands out as having been untouched so far.

Well, not untouched.  I did try.  But Form Caravan is, much like Form Promise before it, particular.  A very finicky beast; where many of my magics are capable of being warped to my needs, it instead has needs of its own that cannot be compromised.  Namely, that it needs a minimum number of entities under its layering, and that it needs something that roughly approximates a destination.  That part feels most flexible, but I haven’t pressed it.

The problem is that I don’t fully understand what it does, but I do understand that it is a form of protection and understanding for the caravan it wraps around.  Which, as we plan to send a group out of the Green to attempt to see if there is safety and survival to be had, is going to be vital.

But a caravan cannot form if it is not in earnest.  So I need to assemble our volunteer expedition before testing the spell that may see them safely to their goal.

Mela is going.  She must, for reasons I cannot dwell on.  Yuea and Kalip are not, for the mirrored selves of those same reasons.

Muelly surprises me by asking to go herself.  There has been a strangeness to her, these last few days; an inner conflict that she hasn’t even shared with me, though I can see painted on her face when she watches the horizon and its black wall of raindrops.  I spend quite a bit of my focus with her, not speaking precisely, but watching and guiding her as she learns to use my own magic on her own, drawing from my stores to affect the world.

Those she has entangled herself with romantically, Malpa and Jahn, have no desire to go.  To them, I think, the end of civilization has been freeing, especially here.  Both attempt to convince Muelly to stay with them, but both relent when she declines, and reassure her that they will be here when she gets back.

Dipan surprises me just as much as Muelly when he says no.  I had thought… well, I don’t know what I had thought.  Though clearly it was incorrect.  My impression of him has been of a man out of place, but whatever drives him to decline, he does so with purpose.  Maybe he’s always been out of place, and here is as good as anywhere else.

Fisher is the lone gob who feels comfortable venturing into the outside.  Which makes sense to me; many of them have only just arrived, and need to recover, and all of them are so new.  Sharpen doesn’t want to leave, saying the fort needs to be protected, but I think they are thinking of Vestment’s death when they say so and hiding from the storm.  I do not begrudge this.

Daurthy is the newest person to actively volunteer before I can ask.  The demoness soldier, despite her missing limb, is a hardened combatant and marching to her death doesn’t seem to bother her.  I think she might follow Mela to Auor himself if asked, but I don’t tell her that.

Neither verdling wants to leave, and that I understand.  No one else even knew they existed, on the other side of the Green, and Talquin and Parox were far from home to begin with.  We are already forming an unbalanced group to send to a demon city, and while I do not wish them to feel left out, there is a practical consideration that the people we are trying to contact might not be… accepting.

Four people is not a caravan though.  Even reinforced with an equal number of the bees that are developed enough to have both a glimmer and a mantra fueling their strength, that is not a whole caravan as the spell sees it.  So I ask, softly, for anyone else who wishes to brave the Green and the storming and the world outside that is under the assault of constant change.

The decisions come slowly, over the course of days.  Days of the kind of survival that comes in the wake of violence; where it takes the mind time and space to realize that there is no followup attack coming.  That the danger has passed.  The residents under my protection slowly come back to themselves as there is no sign of another invasion, of another apparatus.  And as they do, they talk.  Not just to me, but to each other.  Gossip spreads, though I am careful to cull rumors that are overtly false.  Mostly, it is one ongoing conversation among them all about if they want to leave.

I think the fact that I am offering the safest passage I can to simply exit is enough to tilt many of these survivors into trusting me.  If they could leave, then they don’t have to.  And that makes finding volunteers a challenge.

In here is somewhat safe.  Out there is something else.  Not even dangerous, but unknown, which can be infinitely worse.

The first one who agrees is from the demon’s military contingent.  Karrel was a second guideye, a semi-noble officer role from my understanding.  He isn’t the highest rank in the fort from his people, but that demon seems to have quietly retired from any role making decisions, the pain of what he went through a little too much when he didn’t have to pretend he was in charge anymore.  Matan is another, a name I recognize as one of the human sappers who helped me target galesun points before I found a way to do it easier on my own.

After them, another handful sign on.  Luet was in a similar position to Mela; a young woman destined for a life of simple but meaningful labor, torn from her village by what has happened.  I don’t know if she wants to go home, or similarly aspires to Mela’s role, but she is strong and blunt and has been learning how to fight from the drills the soldiers run.  Fared and Doretta are simple demon soldiers and not-so-secret lovers, and they take my offer because they are the kind of people who would die for a cause they found just.  Selfless to a fault, and with their worldview adjusted somewhat recently to include more than just their own kindred in that attitude, they create a demon majority in the caravan that will hopefully give some sway to their words when arriving at Wavewatch.

And then, there is one last person I wish to send with them.

“It could very well be a mistake.”  I tell Lutra, doing my best to fail to express that I want them to attend the caravan.  “And a dangerous, or lethal one at that.”

The other apparatus has taken a break from touring the flooded streams and ponds with their eels to speak with me.  Lutra has been doing better and better by the day, though they are still sometimes scattered in their thoughts.  Now is not one of those times though.  “Of course it will be dangerous!”  They speak across our Form Party connection with enthusiasm that blends the voices of their child and adult selves.  “You would not ask if it were easy.”

I laugh, enjoying the expression while I can.  “You are not mistaken.  And yet, I fear that this is… a mistake.  Too much pressure to place on you.”

”I can tell.”  Lutra sings back.  “You care.  I can feel it.  It has been stronger and stronger and stronger now.  If I ever had any of the blank fire left over I would Small Trade it to you so you could understand how you are changing everyone.”

”I do not think what I have done is exceptional.”  I am taken back by Lutra’s words.  Sharp and chaotic, yes, but driving to a point that I have been avoiding dwelling on myself.  “All I have done is kept them alive.”

The other apparatus sings back to me.  “Kept them alive from each other!  For long enough they are forgetting the parts that hold them back.  We change things.  It is not the same, as what I was born for, made for, trained for, lived for; it is not a grand heroism.  But it is.  You change them, and change yourself, and change me.  So now I will follow in your wake, and the changes will propagate.”

”…Lutra, are you feeling alright?”  I ask softly.

”I am at the best I have been in this life.”  Lutra whisper-sings back to me.  “My fish bring me out of the dark, and the love around is a sensation only I have felt with this body.  I am real.  This is real.  I think I did not believe that, before you.  And so you have changed me into a person who knows that they are alive, and for that, I will follow you to the end of all things.”  They pause in their speech, and then add, “But no birds.  Yet.  I shall yet acquire birds!”

It is the enthusiasm that convinces me that Lutra is in a state of mind to properly say yes to my request.  It reminds me, slightly too much, of myself when I focus on the intricate nature of the constructions of bees.

And so, shortly before the final stormsun rises, I have a roster.

Now all that is left is to weather the last tenday of storming, as the ruinsun begins to emerge from behind the curtain of the sky.  And then, we shall see, what is left of the world and what place it might hold for our tattered band clinging to hope with the strength of a grand devil.