Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 139 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 13

I had never really considered how loud this dense woodland expanse could be.

Oh, during Storming, there was an endless howl of wind, and endless cascading drum of rain, and even the infrequent rumble of the ruinsun’s quakes.  The world then was nothing but noise, and it came at just when I had started to truly have the ability to hear again.

My bees are precious to me, but this particular species might not have the best hearing.  But now, with the bees growing on a steady diet of my own magic, they open up a wide expanse of sensation that they share with me.  Mixed in amongst glimmerlings and beetles and also Yuea and Kalip, it means that I can, among other things, hear.

Really hear.  Not just closely eavesdrop on gossip, not just tactically observe the sounds of pitched battle.  This isn’t just another strategic tool to use to expand my map of the observable world.  No, this is personal, and experiential, and I am perhaps reveling in it more than is needed.  But there is a special kind of magic to having reached a form of threshold, where the blur of so many sources of sound and vibration does not feel like needing to parse through a hundred sent letters for the names I need, but instead, simply feels like I am listening.

And the Green, glorious and wild around us, is, it turns out, quite noisy.

The natural breezes that come after Storming paint the sky with the trees as brushes.  The surviving wildlife, all those astounding creatures that outlast the stormsuns through burrows or staying on the move or even simply weathering through, are once again out in force.  Cries from birds and beasts signal territory, or predation, or mating, or in the case of some of the birds perhaps simply basic unruly conversation.  The insects have taken no time at all to breach their own hives or spawning pools, and the soft omnipresent buzzing is joined by the squeaking drone of the second-summer cicada population.

It is a beautiful day.  And maybe my senses aren’t fully my own, even through the little glimmerlings that I more fully clasp than any of my bound, but there is something healing about the glittering sunlight filtering through the Green in rays like golden swords.  Something primally mystic about the vibrancy of life, as creatures who have survived the yearly cycle of the end of the world crawl out of burrows to forage and hunt and mate and announce all of it to the trees.  And certainly something relaxing about seeing the absolute deluge of color that had emerged in the wake of storming.

I have never heard of the Green before this new life, but now that I am here, I feel compelled to study it.  The same way I felt drawn to my bees at first, and this fort afterward.  Maybe the influence of my old lives is still alive and well inside of me, everyone’s interests and curiosities coming together to share that most vital part of life with me now.  But whatever the cause, the Green is fascinating.

Botanically, it seems to be almost purposefully thriving off of the double summer that storming brings in this part of the world.  Yes, fall is normally a colder season, the setting of the stormsuns coming along with a lengthening of days from our truesun and the weather becoming more passively harsh.  The farmer would have been spending this time pickling everything in sight, and I wonder idly what it would take for me to acquire a large amount of vinegar out here.  I cannot taste, but our kitchen would welcome some help in feeding the thirty-odd people here that are quickly going to run out of interest in yams.  Surely there is a spell for it.  Summon Vinegar?  Spawn Vinegar?  No, of course not.  Conjure Vinegar?  Pickle Crop?  Generate Brine?

Well.  That is…

I do not know what that is.  I will muse on that later.

The Green is what I am musing on now.  It is pleasant, to be able to perch on walls or ridges or hills within my range, and simply stare.  My bees I would never ask this of, and my Amalgamated Humans would never say yes unless I made it an order, but my glimmerlings are perfect for sightseeing.  And through their eyes, I can watch this late season second flowering take place.

A riotous carpet of purple flowers covers a certain kind of vine that grows into the bark of trees in large patches.  Groundcover like dandelions and something that seems like a strain of marshmote coat the floor in yellows and reds.  Soften blues and reds mix into environment from where fruits and berries have emerged from stocky bushes that I almost recognize, but which are clearly varients that have either changed over time to better survive storming, or have changed more rapidly to accommodate the Green.

My mind flits between the panoramas that my glimmerlings provide, as I simply let myself sink into the mood of being someone who has done their hard work.  I have survived one of the trials every year brings, and while winter approaches, I believe it will be mild here.  Milder than even the outsiders to the Green are used to, though I’m not sure how, as despite their long travel to arrive here, there simply isn’t enough distance between the edge of the Green and where the fort lies to make a difference.  And yet.

I think I am glad that this is the place I landed.  Not just for the wild screaming of foxes that amuses me with every note, or the banners of colors that signal it is time to send out our own foraging teams.  But because the Green is a place of true mystery, and I do not know if I could be satisfied with a life of violent survival without a mystery to pry into.

The thought turns at my own soul.  The soul of Unity, the one I have forged for myself, interlocking with all those fragments and pieces that make me up.  And as one, we turn gently toward a single personal truth.

It’s just kind of fun when there’s a mystery to solve.

But a good mystery requires a dedicated investigation, and for now, I am content to savor that there is something waiting ahead of me.  And also, to savor through my bound bees, the normal ones, as they investigate the various flowers.  There is another new sense to share; it’s not quite the same as a sense of smell from the old lives, certainly not as sharply refined as the merchant’s tongue.  But there is a satisfying tang to the taste of collected pollen.  And a warm feeling to every delivery back to the hive.

I understand that Dipan is making better hives for the bees, apparently working off of a comment Seraha made in passing about a style she’d only heard herself from a demon merchant years ago.  But the gesture is so… calmly kind.  The human man isolates from everyone else, is consistently abrasive and crass, and yet, he uses his limited time and tools to try to do something nice for bees.

Maybe he is simply drawn by the promise of easier access to honey.  If so, the bees do not mind, as making it even easier for them to overproduce will make the whole hive happier.  Maybe he is trying to get on my good side.  If so, it is working.  And I am surreptitiously using Shift Wood to assist his efforts. 

It’s not the only magical influence I am working into the world.  But, despite Yuea’s grumbling, I am actually going to spend at least one day resting.  As much as I can rest, I suppose.  My body, such as it is, doesn’t seem to tire.  Not that it ever does anything that would become tiresome.  I have been making a best effort to not observe my own form, but when I do catch glimpses of it, I can tell that all it does is gently float and slowly spin.  Meaninglessly.

Or maybe it is not meaningless.  Maybe the spin in some way acts as a draw to the soft motes of change my magic shakes loose from every aspect of the world.  Perhaps, just perhaps, it is a function like breathing.

If it is, I wish my circumstances allowed me a sigh.  But I am trying my utmost to not dwell too long on the things I cannot have, or on the darkness I am encased in.

For now, I continue attempting to not think about the body.  Instead, I think about other bodies.

The nameless little fort, which still needs some shoring up and expanding with Form Wall later, is alive with people.  There is something about the first days of fall that rarely fails to bring out optimism from even the most bloodied of individuals.  When you have survived another storming, especially one with a final ruinsun, it can feel like anything is possible.  Like the future is bright, and painted upon a clean canvas.

It isn’t, of course.  The world is the same mess it was when the suns rose one by one.  There are others like myself out there, though how many of them are ravenously bloodthirsty and how many might be like Lutra and capable of conversation, I do not know.  But past the far border of the Green, Distant Vision has brought me glimpses of villages demolished and caravans scorched, and those losses will not simply go away because a different yet more natural terror has failed to kill us.

That is the logic, of course.  The tactical and academic viewpoint.  The calmly rational analysis that we are still in great danger and that our population barely qualifies as staff of a travel manor, much less a settlement.  Mostly defenseless and at the mercy of the future.

No one moves like they’re being coldly rational, though.

Jahn has conscripted a dozen survivors and is preparing fields out in the valley.  The makeshift tools they’re using need upgrading, but I see what the demon is doing.  Planting ‘crops’ that are enough for my magic to bind to, samples of the forage of the Green transposed in rough and uneven rows that will soon be enough to be called farms.

The demon raises a thick black-furred arm to Malpa as the human passes down what remains of the path into the valley.  The larger and quieter man is moving with another small group that includes Sharpen and one of the other new gobs, Hilt, who comes from a similar lineage and has a similar focused but eager outlook.  The newer humans and demons in the small group are unused to the gobs, but they’re all working together to gather up the second summer bounty of the Green, fruits and wild grains and seeds and some of the specialized herbs I’ve requested to teach them how to process into medicines.  And a shared goal erases discomfort faster than most things.

Much farther afield, Kalip is taking a break from his role as a backup teacher for the seven surviving children under my shield.  He and Yuea have refused rest, because they are who they are.  Idiots.  But even still, idiots I favor.

The two of them, along with the ranking survivor of the demon army that is here with us, a silver-horned man named Jeorge, are foraging in a different sense.  Scouring the battlefield where the last enemy apparatus was smashed, and picking it clean of the corpse trooper’s armor and weaponry.

There are so many bodies.  I haven’t looked there, since the fight.  Peeking through Yuea’s eyes, it is a field that to the old soldier I once was might only be a minor skirmish.  But to me, it is a charnel pit; half dried mud shaded by the thin trees of the Green in this particular area that has swallowed up corpses and chunks of desecrated flesh and bone.  Weapons and armor are slowly being stacked as the trio become more and more muddied, cloths covering their faces against the smell.  Nearby, the wagons full of bodies that were never turned to weapons lie with dead beasts at their head, whatever those things were having quickly begun to rot away once the apparatus was dead.  I will need to bury them.  I will need to do something.  I can’t just leave them there.  It, like so many things that have happened to the people of this age, isn’t right.

Back at the fort, the children attend daily classes under Seraha to continue their studies even without their villages.  Numbers and letters from the elder demoness, survival tricks from Kalip later, and despite being of mixed ages they all follow and learn quickly.  The classroom being laced with Congeal Mantra helps, certainly.

In the dining hall, Talquin and Parox have emerged from the cellar they have been using as a shared room.  The verdlings, green and white long bodies rising over the tables that aren’t sized for their species, are talking to each other about the future.  They didn’t expect to survive this long.  Certainly not once the world began to turn deadly.  And now they are trying to decide what comes next, though they are going to be interrupted soon as Seraha’s class lets out and a flood of hungry children and oversized companion bees spill into the room around them.  I wish them luck, and I believe I will speak with them privately later.  As with everyone in this fort, they are holding secrets, and while we are far from anything that could turn them against us, I think of everyone here, these two might benefit from airing their own.

In one of the fort’s elevated watchtowers, there are two soldiers performing maintenance on the spearthrower golem.  I notice them only because the magic itself fluctuates, the tether back to me shifting ever so minutely.  When some bees investigate, they find a human and demon arguing over which parts require cleaning and checking.  They notice the bees, but do not stop their argument, which allows me time to watch with amusement as they become increasingly crass at each other.  There is an abrasiveness between the two, but they are willing to put aside actual vitriol in favor of their interest in a new weapon.  For some people, weapons are a grim necessity, or a tool of the wild frontier.  For this pair?  I get the impression that they will overcome their fear of me to ask for Spawn Golem made gun standings within a tenday.

In the back courtyard of the fort, near where the well supplying the kitchen is in dire need of a cleaning after the hostility shown to it by storming, the vast majority of my bees come and go from their old hive.  So many of the tiny creatures, hundreds, thousands of them, each of them contributing, each of them capable of such growth alongside my magic.  Their habits are hypnotic to me.  Some kind of bias, as they were my first escape from the dark of this new life?  It could be.  But it is difficult to find that to be bad.

Instead, I wish to watch them, in the same way that I watch the sun and wind playing through the trees and the flowers coating the landscape.  Through smaller eyes, the landscape of their hive is no less beautiful and intricate.  I wonder if some of what makes it unique and strange will be lost if they migrate to Dipan’s current project; but then, I have become something of an eccentric witch queen myself, and there is likely nothing to stop me from maintaining the old hive as a summer home for any bees that wish to visit.

The bees are aware of my presence, because I let them know I am with them.  But they don’t mind; their thoughts are small here in this early stage.  Without the pressure of being needed by me to fulfill tasks, their growth will be slower.  Steadier.  It maybe tendays, or even whole seasons, before some of them are ready to be implanted with Congeal Mantra or Congeal Glimmer.  But that is acceptable, and their older siblings will be there to greet them when they are ready.  At first, as I watch, I try to look for those that would make good companions, or good lancers, but… that is not the way of bees.  None of them would make good anything, except for exceptional pollinators and honey producers.  They aren’t heroes in waiting, they really are just bees.

But from Bind Insect, change comes to them surely and steadily.  And while they keep those things that make them the best of themselves, there will come a day when they awaken to realize that they are more than a honeybee ever could be.  Even one native to a place as wild as the Green.

My observation, of both the larger and smaller worlds, consumes my thoughts for some time.  Through bees and glimmerlings alike, I simply allow myself to exist, and see.  Drifting from scene to scene, letting the day flow by.

At some point, there is a pile of metal dragged through the fort’s gate and deposited in my planning office.  Later still, a point of power coalesces inside of my crystal form as a steady supply of motes from my glimmer and promises and the claimed walls themselves all tip over the edge of what is needed to ignite.  Afterward, there is a commotion through the fort as one of the young boys leads his friends on an adventure that involves attempting to coax their companion bees to catch them from leaps off of high places; but the intervention of several adults and the lack of broken bones means that it is only a commotion, and not a tragedy.

As the sun begins to set, I allow myself an internal imagined stretch, as I return myself to alertness.  Reaching out with Distant Vision, I check the progress of the expedition, and find that I could have gained largely the same information simply from Form Caravan.  They have made excellent time, and Mela and Daurthy both somehow seem aware that I am poking my crystalline snout into their work.

The nascent hero waves at me, directing her smile into the sky as if Distant Vision has me looking down upon them, and not surrounding their travelling group with a single omnipresent eye.  I would wave back, but everything that would let me is a working that should be conserved, because a happy moment is only valuable if it does not come at the cost of a life later.

It is almost time for the fort’s supper when I am pulled back to a singular focus by two voices pointed directly at me, and a third that is conveniently nearby.  “Hey Shiny.”  Yuea’s tone is as it ever was, a refusal from the woman to be subdued by something as simple as a field of death.  Her words are accompanied by a rattling thud as the makeshift bundles that have been brought with them are dropped on the floor of the mostly empty barracks.  “Did your market run for you.”

”The familiarity you use with that… with them… I would call it human madness if I didn’t know my own people were just as fucking stupid.”  Jeorge comments from beside her, adding his own baggage to the pile.

”Your people call her ‘little dream’ all the time.”  Kalip supplies as his own neatly stacked bundle of swords and maces is added like stacked kindling to the pile.  “You should talk to her sometime.”

Jeorge narrows red eyes at the glimmerlings I have positioned to rearrange things for my own convenience.  “Can they hear me?”

Yes. I write on the pane of wood Kalip is carrying, the man helpfully supplying it to the demon… captain?  Their ranks are different than I remember any nation being, I will have to ask later.  I hear through my bound, and the glimmerlings count.  If you ever require privacy, please let me know, because I am becoming inconveniently omnipresent.

“Seems like a nice trick.”  He says without thinking.  And then flicks his eyes to the side like he’s afraid I might strike out for the simple joke.

It is helpful, I will admit.  I write with flourished text.  But unlike some people, I am not actually a voyeur.  And thank you for the help scavenging.

Kalip, reading over Jeorge’s shoulder, nods to a resin plated glimmerling.  “This isn’t all of it.”  He tells me out loud for the sake of keeping Jeorge in the conversation.  “Not even the start.  Three of us can’t carry it all.  Maybe if we had one of those golems.”  Kalip’s voice carries the hint of something beyond tactical analysis.  It takes me too long to place it from the normally stoic man; interest.

Ever since his magetouched suppression was broken, he’s been mostly emotionally consistent because we’ve had too many problems for him to be anything else.  A few jokes slipped by, but I know Kalip keeps his emotions closely hidden.  So it’s pleasant, now, to see him failing to hide the fact that he’s curious about my Spawn Golem designs that were given to the expedition.

I’ll add that to my list for tomorrow.  I write.  I consider giving an abbreviated version of the list I have in my planning office, where my inkrat glimmerlings are scurrying about and helping me organize my thoughts manually, but even a short version would fill the thin wood pane.  And I only needed some of this metal to begin working.  The rest can be collected over time.

”Fabric and leather, too.”  Kailip says with a grim line on his mouth.  “Their clothes are mostly ruined, but we need the material.  Unless you can make some?”

That is on my other list.

Jeorge’s eyes move between the once-magetouched archer and my own writing, and the demon lets out a huff of a laugh.  “Starting to see why you sunsuckers like this thing.”

”Fuck me, haven’t been called that in a while.”  Yuea muses almost nostalgically.

Kalip smiles.  Tiny and coy, but still something I appreciate seeing.  ”Looks like our guardian’s insistence on cultural exchange is worth something after all.”

With a snort, Yuea shakes her head, prodding at a piece of ripped chainmail with her toe where it’s fallen onto the floor.  “Swearing and not dying together.”  She says quietly.  “Still getting used to it.”  She tells Jeorge directly.  “Tell me to fuck off if I you need to.”

“I am very sure that is an order I should not follow.”  The demon says, but he still nervously grins as he glances at the glimmerlings again.

”You’ll adjust to it.”  Kalip promises the man, folding his arms and leaning back against a wall.

Yuea offers similar, but worse, reassurance.  “Shiny’s way might be hopelessly naive, but if it works, it works.  So yeah.  Get comfortable, dumbass.  At least if you want to stick around.”

Now that, I have a protest to.  It is not naivete, Yuea.  I write the words, and then realize that the pane of wood will never be large enough for what I want to say.  So, I mirror the words onto the wall, in larger script, and then continue adding to them. 

I know things are going to get worse before we can carve them into a better shape.  I know that we are alone, and fractured, and facing odds we do not know.  So we must learn and scout.  We must find friends and allies and take in every soul we can.  And we must alloy ourselves into something that will not be broken again.  I am not an optimist because I am stupid, I am an optimist because so long as that is what defines me, I shall find myself fighting for the future I dream of.

Two people that might not qualify as human anymore and one demon read my words, eyes scanning the lines with the same efficiency they all once used to read scout reports and logistics documents.  But with minds and hearts that, I hope, I have a chance of changing.

This part of the world did not seem like it was doing well for any of them before I arrived.  And my presence was heralded by an unknown number of other apparatuses that have been wreaking havoc, which has left things even worse.  They deserve a better world.  But to make it, they are going to have to change.  More than just the physical changes Yuea and Kalip have experienced, and more than just Yuea’s decision to tie her loyalty to me.  She can’t just believe in me.  She needs to believe in something.

There is a long pause.  And then, a muttering.  ”Small dreams.”  Yuea says distantly as she reads the wall.

“I have not been a child in this life.”  I say with serenity, whispering to her personally, even as I also scratch the words into the barracks wall.  “There was no time to be tempered.  My dreams remain large, and so I must grow my power to dream them.”

Jeorge looks between the two humans, the demon seeming even more out of place now.  ”I think I see why you trust them a little.”  He offers jokingly, though the tension in his voice is hard to hide.  “Idealistic little firebrand, huh?”

”Well.”  Kalip says slowly.  “When you can level a mountain in an afternoon, you can afford some idealism.”  He shakes his head and pushes off the wall.  “What now?”

Now you go eat with the others.  I write.  While I fix this wall.  And make shovels.

”Is that on your list too?”  Yuea asks with a sarcastic smirk.

I don’t dignify her with a response.

But yes, it is.

And I still enjoy watching the three of them leave for the meal hall through the vision of my glimmerlings, while in another entirely different way of seeing the world, I watch a thin dusting of soft motes shake loose from them in time with their steps along the old fort’s floor.