Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 140 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 14

The bee I am with is the size of a foal, and as such, is a terrible fit for the environment of the wood and stone hallway of the fort.

The fort’s inner hallways are simple.  Military efficiency, though the more I am here, the more I wonder whose military.  The human empire claimed this fort, but I have seen human constructions on the border of the Green.  Even one ruined military outpost, though there was a substantial amount of ash there in place of standing structures.  This fort is usable by humans, but it does not look like that empire was the one to actually build the place.

I haven’t yet spotted a demon fort, but their own buildings have such a similar style to the human empire’s that I cannot help but wonder if there is a twisted history there.  This is where their territories meet, after all.  Land fought over and changing hands so often that the common people share the same knowledge and tools when it comes to putting up a house, simply for convenience.  Or perhaps whatever caused this racial division into separate nations in the past didn’t fully shatter the cultural bonds of style.

Whatever happened then, what I know now is that this fort might be something older.

The wood has been replaced many times over, I suspect.  The outer palisade wall too, and my own arrival marks another time it has been destroyed in part and put back together.  Twice, even.

The furnishings are obviously new as well.  Bunks and personal chests, the weapon racks in the armory, the tables and benches in the meal hall.  All of it looks not only new, but built on site.  The kind of rough design that a military carpenter would hammer together, and call good enough for now; the intent to replace and upgrade forever buried under more work.  It is not uncomfortable, especially now that I have had several tendays of free action with Shift Wood to hew away splinters and rough surfaces.  Though the foraging teams seem too focused on food at the moment to help me gather what is needed to produce a good quantity of wood stain to finish that secondary project.

I do love them for being willing to say no to me.  It makes me feel… alive.  I am alive, of course.  But being treated like a peer, or even simply an overeager captain, has a charm to it that tethers me into the social birdcatcher of the small community.  But also I would like to build them better chairs.  Even my inkrat glimmerlings can tell the chairs are not good.

That will need to wait until later though.  My attention is already split between keeping a close watch on two of the children having a small adventure around the would-be farms outside the walls, actually using Form Wall to continue undoing the stormsun’s work on the walls, and exploring with this bee.

They’re one of the older bees.  Not one of the first, but they’ve been bound to me since early in my new life.  Fused with both Congeal Glimmer and Congeal Mantra, their thick fur glows with blue-black light from markings that are almost language, and their powerful wings flutter like they’re trailing burning sawdust for just an instant.  This one in particular is perhaps the closest out of all the bees to needing a name, too.  The others are, no matter how much their intelligence grows, still tethered fully to their instinctive idea of community and shared lives.  But this bee is the closest that her people have gotten to having an isolationist among their ranks.

Which is to say, occasionally, this bee will wander off alone to explore the fort’s halls or rooftops or even the nearby upper branches of the trees or the walls of the valley.

For a species that turns growing intelligence toward the development of intricate community relationships, for one of my honeybees, even one of the lancers, to seek solitude for even a candle is strange.

But then, which of us isn’t, in these strange days?

This particular bee has my attention as I peer through their eyes and feel through their antenna, because they have asked for me to pay attention.  Not with words, not yet, though soon I think.  But Bind Insect as a spell has been molded with my constant use into a thread that can be pulled from both sides.

Earlier today, while prowling alone, the growing bee found something.  Something they wish to show me, somewhere in the center of the fort’s main structure.

The hallways of the fort are built with military precision.  And so it is to my slight surprise when I realize that the narrow corridor the bee has turned down is a dead end.  The fort should not even be large enough to have dead ends.  Through See Domain showing me Claim Construction, I have a knowledge of many things about this fort, and yet the floor plan is not among them.  But even still, the neat ordering of storerooms, barracks, armories, and passages and staircases, shouldn’t have a dead end of a hallway.  Especially not one that does not terminate in a door.

A few glimmerlings respond to my need to see the space around us, and I exchange viewpoints with the bee, trying to explain to them through Bind Insect what I am doing.  I am not sure if they understand, but there is a comfort from them at being spoken to that I savor.  That comfort does not echo from me, though, as I realize that on the other side of this terminal corridor, there should be the powder room.  Kept central to the fort, as far as possible from anything that might ruin the gunsmith’s work.  Does the back of that room line up with this wall?  I can’t tell.

I regret not having Domain Map.  The Tenacity spell sits, taunting me, unselected, as I consider whether it is worth expending six of my points of power to add it, just to solve this tiny mystery.

No.  No, it is not.  Not the least because I find that every time I acquire a spell to fill a specific need, I quickly find that the magic is surprisingly helpful for many things that are not that need, and of sparing use for what I wanted.

The bee did not call me because there was a dead end, however.  I was called because there was a smell.  Something the bee found both alluring and repulsive, and in that dissonance, worthy of investigating.

My explanation, understood or not, has removed any trepidation about the growing insect padding softly in bursts of steps toward the end of the hall.  As we close in, I ask and receive looks to the walls, finding that they are not the flat wooden planks, but instead, stone.  And shaped stone, at that.  There are shelves here, intended in those walls at the end of the corridor.  Eight to a side, floor to ceiling.   

There is a draft coming from the end of the hallway.  Where the stone floor is ever so noticeably too smoothed, where the walls clearly are not the same as anything else in this place’s design.  The bee and I feel the breeze crackling against their antenna, smell the scent of something that is primally alive, and wonder in time with each other what it means.

Though the bee’s thoughts terminate at confusion and curiosity.  My thoughts continue slightly farther.  Because I believe I know what this is.

The fort was built here because this is a point where vim is harvested.  Or so Yuea had told us.  Now, I wonder on the history of it.  When was it really built, and for what purpose?  That matters less than the fact that the human empire’s army was here, and was harvesting vim.  That substance that can infuse a soldier with another fight’s worth of life and vigor, that can stave off death and exhaustion, and leave someone wishing for the former after the latter catches up.  We have used quite a lot of the fort’s stockpile of it.

And I believe my curious little lancer has just found where it comes from.

I could have simply asked Yuea or Kalip, I suppose.  But they are busy with their maps and tactical assessments and drills for the soldiers to keep them active.  Busy having hushed conversations that I am ignoring, as they do not wish for me to overhear.  Part and parcel with why my focus is so heavily upon this one bold bee, that is.

And also… it is fun.

It wouldn’t have been every one of my pieces that would have appreciated it, but I think that the experience of a mystery is fun.  I could ask the people who would know, I could Collect Material away the floor with decent precision aimed through See Domain, I could find any number of quick workarounds to this.

But why?  It is a warm fall day, our expedition back to the nearest standing demon city is making good time, our walls are safe, our little collective is fed, and there is nothing that needs to be struck by a falling explosive boulder within two hundred lengths of here.  I have time to entice my lancer bee compatriot to search for a secret passage.

And there is, most certainly, a secret passage here.  The ghosts of old memories flicker like candles in the dark as I realize just how many of my old lives have experience with the things.  A dead end, a strange part of a structure, something off about the walls, this could have shown up in the scholar’s texts as the perfect example of the concealing of a secret passage.

The bee is one of the smartest examples of its species to ever exist; if it can even be considered of the same species anymore.  But it still isn’t quite prepared to comprehend the idea of a concealed pressure plate.  It just knows this is a strange place with a strange smell, it doesn’t know how to feel by touch for a stone that can be indented in one of the shelves, or search for a carving that disguises a lever.

A setback, but not a large one.  I explain to the bee in patient thoughts as I call for a few of my inkrats.  They also lack the intelligence on their own, but that’s the thing about my glimmerlings; they’re just me.  There is no ‘their own’, not really.  And my own mind is more than enough to set about crawling over the shelves that normally hold recent vim harvests, looking for whatever opens this gate.

While I look, I spend time with this curious bee, who is now devoting some attention to trying to find a seam that the draft is coming through.  Communication is not one-way between us, and while they can’t yet speak exactly, they have things to say regardless.  Memories that are important to them, places they find comfortable, their impression of family from the other lancers their size as well as from their smaller brethren and even from the non-bees in the fort.

They remember being small.  Which I didn’t think possible, but either I must revise my academic estimation of the potential of the mind of a honeybee, or my magic has been safeguarding their memories for them while they grow large enough to hold on to those thoughts themself.

They remember quite a few things, really.  Our ‘conversation’, as it is, winds through their impression of storming, past the sensation of being infused with glimmer and mantra, and eventually, to the feeling of being in battle.  The bee is, as all of their people, not a natural solider.  They remember what it was like to clearly see and understand the faces of the people counting on them for the first time.  They remember how it felt to be struck from the air, to be too close to an exploding bird, to have their fur burned away and to slowly heal from the dripping magic of Bind Insect.  And they remember the feeling of being given control of Move Water, and a liquid-filled needle.

I query a few of the other bees.  They, too, remember what it was like to fight with weaponry. But none of them attach the same sentiment that this one does.  The same… it is not desire, really… but maybe it could be called resonance.  The growing insect understands almost nothing about the bigger picture of the world yet, but she knows, in a way deeper than anything I could have explained myself, what it means to hold the monsters away from her hive.

I have most certainly been underestimating my bees.  But now that there is time, now that there is room to calmly expand and grow, that can be changed.  There is always time to change, but at least now it is time on my own terms.

I begin work on a project with a small piece of my attention, while the bee and I finish finding the latch to open the hidden passage.

Disappointingly, it is a latch, and not something more esoteric.  The mystery of the concealed wall is, it turns out, the simple fact that I do not believe this was ever meant to be a concealed passage at all.  There is simply a stone hook to be tugged up by a glimmerling that I only need to struggle with momentarially, and the wall pivots cleanly to expose a simple stone staircase leading down into the darkness.

Before I can ask for hesitation, my strange little lancer has begun crawling her way down the steps.  And so, I am following into the dark, watching the outline of the stairs light up under the glow of the bee’s wings.  My inkrats spill over the edges of the steps after the bee, but I struggle to keep pace with them.

The walls here are older stone, that almost looks damp in the strange light of our passing.  Torch brackets sit empty and rusting, clearly bolted on sometime after the original construction, but there are no other markings.  The stairs are narrow and have a low ceiling; my mental map of the fort leads me to believe that there is only a small amount of space between the wall and the powder room, which is taken up by the initial steps, before it has dropped down below the fort entirely.

I would call it clever architecture that these stairs do not intersect any of the storage cellars, but I realize now that the cellars must have also been later constructions, and so were positioned to not collapse these steps.

It doesn’t take a snoop or professional bloodseeker to understand that this is the fort’s passage down to where the vim it is planted over comes from.  But what I did not expect is just how far the stairs descend.  The bee moves with a kind of casual eagerness, unbothered by the dark or the heavy atmosphere; seeking after the strange smell that pushes and pulls at its instincts down below.  And so already we have descended well below the cellars, below even a second layer of construction if anyone had decided to keep digging.  And still the stairs continue.

Something nags at my mind.  The fort, whoever made it, was built with military efficiency.  What could possess the people who designed like that to allow for the single path to and from their strategic resource to be… this?  A set of pitch black damp stone stairs, that are starting to become touched by moss and I think some form of puffy white mushroom that the bee keeps scraping off every time its wobbling descent drags its carapace against the wall.

This valley sits over an undersea!  We cannot go too far down, or we will sink!  Unless these steps take us even farther below?  I am back to being enticed by the mystery of it all.  I had assumed the source for vim was some old artifact of a previous civilization.  We had those, after all, in the lives I lived previously.  Knowledge doesn’t follow a linear path, and there were times when a city or circle or college would develop a technique that never caught on widely.  Their dusty notes and a few strange objects would survive hundreds of years, only to be dug up by the scholar or pilfered from a vault by the cleric, and later it would become clear that this was a solution to a specific problem that didn’t exist anymore.  Or an old way of doing something we had since refined as a people.  Or, sometimes, a tool that no one had thought of or thought to develop before, which would then be a source of learning and adaptation.

But usually not that last one.

Vim felt to me like one of those niche solutions.  A failed grand soldier project that was kept active or restarted simply for being cost effective even if it wasn’t particularly useful compared to modern techniques.  Now, I am not so sure.

Now, we have descended past what should have been the valley’s undersea.  The bee is surprisingly focused, almost too objective oriented for the creature I have been bonding with.  Their path down the narrow passage is unerring and rapid, and it is only now that it snaps to my attention that they are not acting normally.

To speak in my own defense, there is no expectation that anyone would know what a greater magicked honeybee would do, normally.  But if anyone should know, it is myself, so my defense crumbles in the face of reality.

My defense is also secondary to my attempt to resolve the issue.  I try to call them back, through Bind Insect, but while the bee pauses, they resume moving very shortly.  See Commands lights my vision as I target them through the former spell, and it is there that I find the problem.  Something has imposed an order on them.  A single simple directive, which is drowning out the soft touch I have through Bind Insect.

APPROACH

I do not approve.  Sever Command strikes it.  Once, twice, then when that does not work, at full strength.  The spell pushed to its admittedly simple limits, as I have minimal practice with it. Draining every drop of the blank liquid in its reserve into one strike that I point through See Commands at the offending impulse.  A pressure builds in my thoughts, the width of the spell not quite enough to accommodate my usage, until I press and press and the gap into the world is thrown wide to let my assaults through.

It cuts away the outside command.  For moments.  Already, I can see it returning.  But moments are enough time for the bee to understand that something is wrong, and to listen to me as I beg for her to flee, to fly up the steps as fast as possible.  The bee obeys with frantic motion, outpacing for now the settling blanket of the invasive magic that is powerful enough to overwhelm my own.

On impulse, the bee flees with my thoughts along as a passenger, I throw other magic behind us, simply to try to understand what is happening.  Know Material returns what is expected; stone, plant matter, water, some metals and crystal but only in small amounts.  Follow Prey returns nothing, because if anything, we are the prey in this situation.  Know Weather tells me nothing, which actually tells me something; the undersea should have currents, and I know those are under the working’s purview, which is cause for alarm.

And then, finally, See Domain.  Which I expect to say nothing.  And am disappointed to learn, does not say nothing.

Another domain lurks beneath the fort.  See Domain shows me this part of the world in a ledger, simple lines of designated things and what domains cover them.  Structures or people or territory, domains can stretch across multiple concepts and entities can be part of multiple domains.  It is, I have learned in my time here, something of a jumbled mess.  But a mess that I have learned to sort through, in my conflict with other apparatuses.

Now, I see in that ledger an additional depth.  A single entry, but one that glows with light and pulses with color.  And I do not understand what I am looking at, or how I have missed it literally beneath our floor.  But there it is.

Something owns the ancient construct that sits below the bedrock of the Green.

I shift my defense as the bee rushes out of that dark tunnel of steps and moss.  Fortify Space slams down behind us in layers, and around the bee in a shell.  The impulse slows, but does not stop, and nor does it shatter my own domain.  Instead it simply seems to ignore it.

Though not ignore it entirely.  And as I expend more and more of that magic, I buy my insectile partner in exploration time to make an escape.  Back above the undersea layer, back above where the cellars are dug, back through the not-very-secret door, exploding into the rough wood hallway of the fort and nearly demolishing both a wall and the poor new gob that is rounding the corner as the bee scampers at high speed for the outside air and open sky.

My inkrat slams shut the passageway, and the command eases.  Fades.  Vanishes.  So too does my ability to perceive; See Domain returns to showing me what it always has.  The fort, the people in it, my bees.  My promises and claimed walls.  The territory fortified.  Everything as it should be.  No sign of the thing below us.

But I know it is there.  Whatever it is.

I am terrified of what old buried monster might be down there, and, almost shamefully, I am at the same time absolutely delighted.

This is the kind of mystery that I can appreciate.