Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 136 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 12

Day by day, I build yet another point of power.  It comes slower now, the motes from my actions dulling and dimming and requiring more work for less return with each repetition.  By this point, I believe I understand how apparatus magic and my new form works; which I take as a feat itself, because despite the strange structure of each working, and the innate knowledge of what my possibilities are, there was never a nest tutor for any of this.

I grow when I inflict changes on the world.  The land, the people, the ecosystem itself.  It does not matter.  Neither does consent, which is both boon and bane.  Change brings growth, it is that simple.

Every glimmer I dispense from Stone Pylon feeds back the soft motes of change in ones and twos as they alter what could have been for their bearers.  Every jaunt through the Green with my own Distant Vision gives a small splash of that same material as I change myself, my own knowledge, my own path.

Teaching can generate motes.  Killing can generate motes.  Building can generate motes.

Every aspect of a life that is lived shakes loose and attracts that substance which is, I have deduced, uncondensed power.  The only thing that would see me fail to grow would be stagnation.  Even simple peace I do not believe would stop the influx, as what could be a greater change to the world than forcing the ancient and everheard songs of strife to silence?

It is five days before when the farmer’s memories help me gauge to be the end of storming, that the ruinsun rises.  And I wonder, as I send out the alert through hurried bees and wooden words, if perhaps the stormsuns are like me.

I can only hope they are not.  Because this year’s rare style of rotation with the ruinsun at its strongest, I think that it might be about to harvest a staggering amount of the power of change to itself.

There is no lull between suns for the third arrival.  Instead, the rain intensifies, the wind becomes an endless gale, and the ruinsun… well, if we are lucky, it will never look in our direction.

But even this event is something that is part of life.  And for some people, it is worth gathering to observe.  On the valley-facing wall of the fort, over the repeatedly damaged and repaired gate that does less to keep us safe and more to hold a depth of water sealed within our courtyard, a cluster of the fort’s residents stand and stare upward at the night sky where the dark outline of the stormsuns is visible where they blot out the stars.  Specks of Auor’s debris close enough to this world to form drifting black dots across their impossible silvery ethereal surfaces.

It’s mostly demons, I notice, as my own resin glimmerlings take plodding steps to affix themselves in points on the wall, ready to catch anyone who slips or is caught and whipped away by high winds.  I can stop the galesun - and what a phrase, the sheer elating power of that statement emboldens me to ever further heights - but I can only stop it from forming its beginnings near us.  With the gale at its world-cloaking pace, the wind still carries through my shield to slap raindrops at speed into the faces of my glimmerlings and friends alike.

And yet despite the inclement weather, the demons gather.  Looking upward in a vigil for the final sun.

It has the feel of tradition.  But I don’t… remember this.

When did this begin?  I ask Muelly.  She is standing next to Mela, one of the few non-furred figures on the elevated walkway.  Only the most curious of gobs were interested enough to get cold and soaked again.  Historically.  I add before she can speak to the glimmerling ahead of her.  This feels like a ceremony.

”It is.”  She tells me as one of her hooves taps into the wooden walkway braced against the fortified wall.  “As long as I’ve lived.  When I was a kid, we’d go to one of the circle yards every year, with everyone else, to dwell on the last stormsun.”

”You’re still a kid.”  Mela says from her side.  She’s also tapping her wrapped toes into the wood, adding to the growing beat of the demons lightly stomping.

”You are too.”  Muelly bleats back, without any malice in it.  Instead, she’s just staring up at where the ruinsun is sliding fully into view in the sky, spaced evenly with the others.

Daurthy, standing behind the two much younger girls, adds her own stomps to the chorus with military dedication.  The other soldiers are the same; they’re more marching than performing a ritual, or maybe, my own soldier’s memories tell me, the march is a ritual all its own.  “The point is unspoken contemplation.”  She tells them.  “Not whatever this is.”

”We’re on the edge of the map, and our little dream has seen half the towns I could name in ashes.”  Muelly doesn’t look down from her gaze up into the night sky.  “We can have new traditions.  I say it’s okay.”

Daurthy goes quiet, as if she might actually believe that Muelly has that power.

But Muelly and Mela stop their young light bickering, and watch the stormsun rise.  Around them, the demons of the fort do the same, hooves stomping in a slow rhythm that steadies and evens out over time.  I had wondered if perhaps Malpa would be with Jahn up here as well, but Jahn seems like the one demon that hasn’t joined the ceremony; perhaps he is preemptively taking Muelly’s words about new traditions to heart, and abandoning one he holds no fondness for.

It is surprising that Seraha has come out, for everyone else.  For myself, I know that Drain Health has done the work that I have convinced her to accept, and that she will be hale for at least another storming, unless some new disaster strikes.  She stands amid a quickly tiring pack of children of many shapes, explaining the ruinsun to those who are just now old enough to understand.

There is not much time between the sun beginning to slide into place in the sky, and the first rumble.  The ruinsun is not fully present yet, but somewhere, underground and far away, it has already begun to make potentially deadly movements.  The stomping picks up, not in pace but in intensity, every demon and visitor on the wall now hammering down with their legs as eyes track the final stormsun just at the moment it fully becomes real to us.  My glimmerlings join them, too; thick resin columns adding to the vibrations in the fort that I feel through my creations as much as I hear.

The first full action of the ruinsun that we know about splits the air itself, its own stomping rumble of sound that swallows everything else.  A roar of grinding rock and shifting dirt so mighty that the wind and rain are almost silent in the wake of.

I find it with Distant Vision, the aftereffects actually within the Green and dangerously close.  But I didn’t need to.

It’s visible from the wall.

Eighteen hundred lengths distant from us, almost a straight line away from where the sloped mouth of the valley let us into this safer space after our long trek from the Green’s border, the horizon line has been reshaped.

From my perspective, I can tell that it is a six length wide and nine length tall ridge of exposed earth.  The ruinquake that has split the ground pushing the far side down into a new ravine, and raising this side up as if one of the bones of the world has just broken along a fault.  Buried nests of insects and small animals scramble where they are suddenly bisected by the shift; for many of them one of the walls of their home has just become a basking window, and for others, they have been separated from their burrowmates or sometimes parts of their own bodies.  The ruinsun has cracked the world, and in the soft settlement afterward, drawn up a line of terrain that could have served as a fortress all on its own.

From everyone else’s view?  Well.  They cannot see the details.  Cannot truly see the scope.  But they can see that there is a new mountain forming a barrier over the tops of distant trees.  The light of Auor giving just enough of a shimmering glow that the outline of the new reshaping of the land stands out as a silhouette against the dim sky and bright stars.

There is one last solid stomp, a declaration of noise perhaps to act in sympathy with the ruinsun.  Maybe that is how the tradition started; a way to signal to the distant stormsun, we are like you, already touched by you, turn away and do not look.  There is cheering and laughter from those on the wall; a celebration that we have gone untouched.  One of the soldiers holds a child up, Zhoy allowed up to the top of the parapets - and not one claw farther if my glimmerlings have anything to say about it - to see the change to the landscape.  And then the air hangs still.

For a moment, at least.  The galesun has something to say about the quiet, and makes its protests known with a resurgence of wind, carrying with it ropes of water from the rainsun that twist like eels and refuse to fall like rain.

“How did we ever survive anything?”  Mela asks quietly.

”What do you mean?”  Muelly questions, her grey hands holding tight to the stonework of the fort’s parapets as she stares into the distance with the others who are staying, and not immediately running for the shelter inside.  “We survived because we got lucky.”

Mela shakes her head as she extends a hand to point toward the new cut across the Green.  “That.”  She says, voice shaking.  “And not us us.  I mean everyone before it.  The old humans and demons and… and everyone else too.  Verdlings and whatever lamias are and everyone else.  How did we ever last a single storming?”

”…luck, too, I think.”  Muelly says.

Daurthy, still standing behind them, leans between the two.  The older demon isn’t quite elder enough to match their combined age, but she’s definitely the adult in the conversation, and I’m not surprised she’s still here, bracing her remaining arm on one of my glimmerlings as she turns to huff a heavy breath at Mela.  She’s been following one or both of the girls for the last tenday; I think she thinks she’s their adjutant after everything that has happened and everything to come.

”They didn’t.”  She tells the human hero.

”What?  But we’re still here.”  Mela gives her a confused stare, tearing her gaze away from the far off wall.  “I grew up in a village that never got ripped up.  Muelly was supposed to move to a city!  How did people, any people, last long enough to build cities if the ruinsun can do that?!”

Daurthy shakes her head.  “No, kid.”  She says.  “Mul’s right.  Some got lucky, and they lasted long enough to dig in, or set the wards, or just keep getting lucky.  But most people?  They just died.”

That’s not quite correct.  I etch into the wood in front of them, and try to not be saddened as Daurthy flinches back from my words, fear lancing across her face.  But she isn’t all wrong either.  When I was a scholar, I saw many records and histories, sometimes from failed polities.  Storming has always brought death; even the most prepared are vulnerable to the whims of the suns.  But the worst ravagings are rare, and often fall in uninhabited places.  It was common enough for wanderers or tribes to find places of true devastation years after a particularly bad storming, with no one having seen it come down.

”We can’t read in the dark.”  Muelly grumbles at me as she notices me writing. The girl holds up a hand, the cut back tunic she is wearing sliding down her furred arm as she focuses, and I feel a questioning tug against one of my magics.  A moment later, a very short moment, as Muelly has been practicing, Congeal Burn spills out into the world of air and sound, and Muelly is holding a lightly flaring stone.

She uses my powerful and strange stolen magic as a lamp.  I am almost offended, but I am too much that old scholar I once was, and I would do the same if I needed to.

Well now you can.  I write in very small letters, my own version of a mutter to my friend.  To the point, Daurthy is correct.  Many people did not survive.  Many people still will not survive this year.  But disaster can be mitigated, and danger planned for.  Our own home here would have more lights in it, if we had simply been… better supplied.  If we had enough food.  Or even simply enough rope.

The reminder that we have already lost some people to the galesun is harsh.  But it is true; storming has been a constant hazard to everyone for longer than every bit of me has lived combined.

If ever I felt that I was growing too powerful too fast, memories such as that one squash that dark thought.  I will never be done growing.  Not until there is always enough food, always strong enough walls, always a safe shelter from storming.  I will not be done until I can shade the world from the everdirectional stormsuns, and not one life is spent bracing against the winds or working city pumps.

Someday, the ruinsun will not rebuild the land at its whims.

The ruinsun’s latest work is part of what I mean, however.  I write to the girls, not letting them in on my darker thoughts.  Should something of that scale have occured within, say, Wavewatch?  The city would be in turmoil.  Hundreds dead in a moment, more to follow.  A tragedy, yes?  But Wavewatch is small, compared to the Green.  Every city in both of your home polities would not cover the amount of ground the Green does.  And so if the ruinsun is truly capricious and random, these strikes are quite unlikely to land upon a city at all.

Daurthy nods as Muelly reads my words aloud, acting as a translator for the others.  I am fast running out of wood though, and will need to apply some effort to smooth this part of the inner walkway once again.  “There aren’t enough of us to be a target.  Yet.”  She says.

”Us?”  Muelly asks distantly.

”You know.  The living.”  Daurthy gives a one armed shrug as she steps back.  “Whatever we are, these new people the… the thing wants us to be.”

”Oh.  People.”  Muelly says, seeming to forcefully press away on the tension Daurthy brings to any conversation about my existence.

Mela doesn’t seem to even notice.  Or she’s better at being subtle than her friend, which is scarier.  ”Can I have one of those?”  Mela elbows Muelly, trying to snag the burn stone from her hand.

”Get your own!”  Muelly shoves her back, before a far away rumble of moving earth shocks them both into freezing.  “Tar, my fur is soaked, can we go inside now?”  She asks.

”It’s your ceremony!”  Mela reminds her.

”Our ceremony, now.”  Muelly bleats a laugh, before looking down the slick steps of the wall with wide eyed anxiety.  “I wish I could jump like you…” she whispers into the wind, words I only barely hear through my nearest protective glimmerling.

Mela’s eyes widen with a bright smile.  And the next thing Muelly is aware, she has been swept off her feet, picked up in a double armed carry by her friend who moves with a casual strength that she never would have had any other way than embracing her heroism.  Before Muelly can word a panicked denial, Mela has stepped off the edge of the wall, plummeting to the courtyard below.  Technically I suppose this is safer, as neither of them risk tripping on the rain-slicked stairs.  But I do not see them land; I only hear the wet smack as Mela crashes into the knee deep mud that has been made of our home by the rainsun’s constant work.  And then a wail of despair from Muelly; though it’s heathy, so I don’t worry enough to dispatch my bees into the unpleasant night.

Daurthy looks back at the glimmerlings, and I can see her trying not to shudder.  “I’m not throwing myself into that.”  She says, carefully moving for the stairs with a soldier’s deliberate steps.

I would never ask you to.  I write at head height as she passes by where a small handful of chipped burn stones have replaced a torch in a sconce.  Daurthy sees the words, and looks nervously back at the glimmerlings again.  That chaos is best left to Mela, and possibly Yuea.  I add as she walks down the stairs with a carefully awkward crossed grip, her missing arm making the trek hazardous.

Daurthy does not like me.  Or more rightly, she does not like what I am, more than most even.  I think she understands that I am not an evil person, but she cannot help her fear.  But I understand her, and I know that she is trying her best.

Treating her better than her army ever did is a good way to foster that trust.  Though I wish I could provide a higher quality of food.  While we have been, between Bind Crop, a few kinds of harvest, and the fort’s own supplies, been able to keep everyone alive, we are not precisely flush with options for flavor.

If the caravan to the still-standing Wavewatch fails to secure us a spot within their walls, then I hope at least that they can negotiate a deal to bring back a stockpile of food.

I have a few days left to provide them with the wagon that they will need, for such an occurrence.

That process itself is an ongoing work, and one I think I am almost satisfied with.  While I’ve been making use of the majority of my magics while we weather the storming, the one that is being most exercised is certainly Spawn Golem.  As with every spell, when I do finally have the time to explore it, I find more closed doors than open horizons; and yet, I have been having a strange amount of fun in turning it to a productive use.

The problem of course is that golems are not endless in their motion.  I have not yet made anything that could not draw on my spell’s reservoir, or that truly needed to, but it is a limitation the caravan will need to contend with.  My spawned creations do recoup their strength over time, though, but I lack the Nobility required to even consider speeding that process during their creation.

So my work is strange in how I have made it economical.

Every civilization I have studied or been a part of has known the simple wheel to be the pinnacle of transportation solutions.  I cannot make a wheel that would stand up to even the simplest trails in the Green, so I fear I must diverge from the shouted memories of my past lives.  The farmer, especially, would detest my solution, I think.

My solution is legs.  I use Spawn Golem not to form a single useful semi-living contraption, but instead to mimic what I had tried with the spearthrowers.  A wooden platform, like its own little wagon bed, is set down, and through it, I weave a golem made of long rods and small grasping claws.  Those claws extend underneath the platform, and into them, the sets of legs I have modeled after those of my precious bees can be settled.  When they are grasped in the right way, they will move, smart enough to navigate anything short of a sheer cliff if I am right.  Different pressures can be applied by altering the ‘holding’ golem, and when the legs run short on strength, they can simply be swapped out.

The drawbacks are numerous and difficult.  The leg sets themselves are weighty, and will require their own wagon to carry, which then requires more legs be loaded, and I am already overtaxed on this specific spell.  It has to work, because I don’t have time to give them something better if they want to leave with the fall.  We also have no tarps for covering any cargo or passengers; there simply isn’t a scrap of cloth to spare in the fort, not when one of the things we are desperately short on is bedding and clothing.  And as for those passengers, well, they are going to have an experience something akin to being lightly assaulted by a floor.

I think many of you may choose to walk. I write to the caravan’s membership as they cluster around a single long table in the dining hall.  It may be less exhausting.

”Can’t be worse than riding a mule.”  Mela says, getting some nods from those among their number who have spent time among the unruly beasts.

”How bad are mules?”  Fisher asks, the gob having been helping me test some of my creations in the back fountain yard of the fort on days when the rainsun is less hateful.  Fisher knows all too well that Mela is wrong.

The question sparks a dozen voices of people who would have hated each other a season ago, all clamoring to tell the youngest of their number about a mutual dislike for their poor maligned beasts of burden.

I watch through my bees as they talk, eating together in a strange form of celebratory meal.  The ruinsun has a little over a day now to destroy us all, and the other two stormsuns have certainly not stopped.  This very well may be the last thing any of them eat; though as I told Mela on the wall, it is unlikely that the worst of the strikes will hit us specifically.  And yet it is always possible.

And so this is either a preemptive celebration of survival, or a festival of mortality before the end.  Which is which I supposed does not matter; as either way, Seraha and her kitchen assistants stolen from the military auxiliaries have prepared a meal that has something for everyone.

It also has the last of our cheese.

This celebration I find familiar.  The simple quiet satisfied resignation, that it is all out of your hands now.  And either the empty supply will never be noticed, or else, you will have a whole year to replenish it.

A day and a spare candle until fall.  And we send our friends on their way, to tell us if the outside world still stands.  To bring more change back, in ways that I find suddenly I am rather afraid of.

But that fear is for fall.  Tonight, I simply enjoy time with my bees, and my friends, and with the knowledge that we have made it through.