Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 145 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 11

Spirituality : 7

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

>Congeal Mantra (1, Command)<

>>Form Party (3, Civic)<<

>Distant Trajectory (6, Arcane)<

Form Caravan (5, Civic)

The thing that frustrates me the most is, surprisingly, unrelated to the strange thing underground.

Nor is it needing to explain what has happened in a way that makes an amount of sense.  I will likely need to take time to express certain language differences, but it isn’t a foreign concept that some people simply speak differently.  Parox and Talquin speak the others’ tongue as a second language, after all.  And the people in the fort have experience with enough strangeness now that this shouldn’t be the challenge it might have been at the start of summer.

There isn’t any irritation in the mystery either.  An emergency, in very loud cascading echos, is occurring.  I believe the voice, or believe that it believes that.  I even trust that it has correctly located the emergency as being within the Green.  But having this singular clue as a starting point is a boon, not a curse.  There is no hint as to the scale or time frame of this lurking disaster, and what I spoke to is, undeniably, very very old.  The chance that the emergency began centuries ago and will never effect me is equally undeniable.  And, also, admittedly, I relish the chance to simply investigate something without the threat of violence.

My annoyance isn’t even the damage I’ve taken, though I believe it will take no more than another point of power and a candlemark of careful focus to at least piece Distant Trajectory back together.  There was a clear failure of Form Party to safely sever itself, and while I am not sure if I even can work on that, it is… simply another thing for the growing list.  All those questions - questions which have mostly stopped arriving with Mela and Muelly out on their adventure - questions of how far I can stretch a magic, how much I can change parameters, and of course, how Link Spellwork can create more complex messes, they all sit waiting for me.  When I have time, I lie to myself, I will see what I can learn of my capabilities.  But even that is something to look forward to, not simply busywork.

No, my annoyance is with Form Caravan.

Now, if I wanted to find somewhere to lay the blame for why I am annoyed, it wouldn’t be entirely unfair to place it several lengths down a hewn stone staircase.  The damage to Distant Trajectory means that our one Formed Caravan is currently out of reach.  And while my magical binding of their group persists, the information it provides is one way.

I know how their food supplies are doing.  I know that one of the golems has a damaged leg array, but that the replacement procedure worked as intended.  I know that Muelly, Fisher, and Matan have all sustained small injuries of varying sorts and how much that is slowing the expedition by (almost not at all).  I even know things that the merchant in me would have killed to have access to; information that is either being tallied by the spellwork itself or else pulled from somewhere else.  The estimated time of their arrival, their exact distance traveled, the odds of unforeseen obstacles.

And the more of Form Caravan’s strength that I feed into the singular tether, the clearer the focus becomes.  The better I can see, the more detailed the ledger.  The drain from the tether is outpaced by the recovery from the merchant’s soul of Spirituality, but it still refills slowly enough that I cannot always flex the magic to its limits.  Even with that boundary, it is a tool beyond my wildest dreams.

Except that I cannot talk to them.

If we had thought to arrange signals, they could talk to me.  Rearranging cargo in code.  Though the same thoughts from the merchant’s memories that have me feeling like shattering an economy as a hobby also have me internally wincing at the thought of directing travelers to constantly unpack and repack trade goods, just to report in.  The merchant wasn’t the only person I was who travelled extensively, but she and the soldier are the two who most understand that if a superior is given the option to be kept constantly informed, they will too often decree that option without waiting to hear that it will ruin several other things.

It is not that there are no options, however.  Link Spellwork exists.  Combing rather anything at all with Distant Vision is an alternative for Distant Trajectory.  However… as I have begun learning at a rapid pace, it is not a complete or even very efficient solution.  Link Spellwork does not want, as much as any of my spells want anything, for me to use it merely to extend my reach or target things I might not otherwise be able to.  It is a glowing piece of a shining puzzle that has been forced to stretch, like so much of my magic has, into a bent and distorted shape.

That is the cause of its excessive cost to use.  And it wasn’t until I had a tiny amount of breathing room that I could understand what I was doing wrong.

Distant Vision shows me a place.  It conforms to a circle, and I never really push it to other shapes because doing so makes it more costly for little reason.  Form Party connects people together, tying them with mindful tethers that share words and personal knowledge.

Link Spellwork sees me pair these two, and, I think, its version of the standard circle is to wish for everything I see with Distant Vision to be inducted with Form Party.  And when I push against that, without even understanding, it drags out more and more and more of the quiet black lake that fuels my spellworking.

And it is getting worse, the farther they get.

Now, this is not the end of all things in a convenient package.  ‘Worse’ is still ‘functional’, for now.  And I will have Distant Trajectory repaired before it is an issue.  But it still means I am limited, and so I am annoyed.

I want… I want… what do I want?

I want my magic to solve all the problems in a clean way that keeps my family alive.

The answer comes to me simply, bubbling up from the messy interlacing that is all of my souls.  I even feel the new fragment of Avarice react to the oath in miniature; whomever that once was, they understood.  When it comes to wishing for the perfect tomorrow, there is no sense dreaming small.

As for that family, well.

”We always thought the Green was artificial.”  Jeorge says, running thick fingers through the spearpoint of a beard he’s recently trimmed since I figured out how to make better edges with Shape Metal.  “It was too inconvenient.  The southern shore of the Coneer, entirely this place that we cannot build upon or supply from?  Our largest trade port forced into a worse position, unable to expand too far in one direction?  It felt like something deliberate.”

Kalip stops twirling the arrow he has been fiddling with between his fingers.  Pointing it lazily at the demon.  “Are you implying that the Green was a human weapon?”

”Weapon?  No.  Problem, however…?”

Yuea’s snort echos through the meal hall, and I see some of the newer faces smirk at the noise.  “The ‘Emerald Peninsula’ almost perfectly cuts off what could have been the most tactically significant roads from the capital.  The Green itself eats far more land on our side of the border.  And besides, you know damn well it’s been there longer than we’ve been alive.  Who the fuck would deploy a forest as an imperial deterrent, anyway?”

”Id’s Nub cuts off your army’s marching path, and it wasn’t on your side of the border until you took it.”  Jeorge retorts hotly.  The man is winding up to say something else, when Seraha gently intercedes.

”That is unfair to Yuea.”  The pink furred demon says with a small smile and a soft voice that carries to the room regardless.  “Even I wasn’t yet born when that particular phase of the war was long over.  But Yuea, we have had this conversation.  Who would create something, even something wild and beautiful like the Green, to be a tool, or a weapon?  For fifty tho across the border, in the strangest places, there are still scattered droppers left behind by your people, waiting to kill children.  This is not an accusation to you, or anyone here, but this is a fact.  Our kingdom and your empire have made many, many terrible things over our time at each other’s throats.  You, of all people, should know; you were one of them.”

Yuea goes quiet at the older woman’s words.  And for a moment, I can feel through Amalgamate Human a kind of anger from her like sandpaper scraped over an open wound.  Thoughts leak through to me that I refuse to pry open; all the things Yuea holds back, all the things she does not share, all the parts of her life that I try my utmost to trust her with.  There is something there that I cannot do anything to help her with, if I were to simply open up her mind and sift through it.

So instead I whisper to her.  Not through any of the usual spells, but the first one she ever heard me through.  A Small Promise.  When you are ready, I will be here for you.

She goes still, the radiating violence around her put on hold for a moment.  Then Yuea sighs, and looks away from everyone.  Even my bees.  Finding a spot to fix her eyes where there is absolutely nothing to look back.  No further acknowledgement, no comment, just a thick silence from her as, without moving, she removes herself from the conversation.

”Our kin have never found the Green strange.”  Talquin offers, the verdling sitting with her legs folded under her tall form at the end of one of the wooden tables.  I haven’t yet made any of their kind’s traditional seating, mostly because I lack many of the proper materials.  “Though our perspective on permanence may shift our view.”

”Nomads?”  Dipan asks casually, the man raising eyebrows over his scarred face.  “Never really asked.  We should talk more.”

Talquin politely curls the flexible pseudo-arms around her neck.  “We should.”  She acknowledges the human.  “And yes, we wandered.  There are places within the Green that are safe to shelter, storming does not ignore us after all.  We travel between them, intermingling with other groups, sharing support where we can.  It is…” she trails off.  “If it is the life you can live, it is a good enough version of it.”

”We should talk.”  Dipan says with a casual shrug, the man who pretends to be aloof and apart from the world showing a bit of his secret colors as just as much an incurable gossip as Oob is.

Jahn runs a finger along one of the surviving plates that have long since had the warm bread placed on them for this meeting reduced to crumbs.  “I never really thought much about the Green.  It was just always there.  But being here all storming, it’s felt…” he cleared his throat suddenly, looking away from one of the demons that’s watching him to focus on Kalip.  “It’s felt like its own stormsun.”

That is not an unreasonable comparison.  I join the conversation with Shift Wood.  A flex of my capacity for multiple workings and multiple thoughts at once helping me to put the words upon several surfaces so my voice ‘carries’.  There have been several myths of various ‘extra’ stormsuns over the history of our world.  Of course, the one that brings fire I think exists only as a pun in some languages, and makes little sense.  My own favorite is the old elven myth of the Builder’s Star.  A stormsun that brought construction wherever its focus touched.

”That sounds… not horrible.”  Sharpen says cautiously.  The gob, so new to the world, has already had the trauma of losing one of their siblings to a stormsun.  I know from experience, that kind of thing can shape a mind for a lifetime.  “What is wrong with it?” They ask pointedly.

Supposedly it would build endless walls and little else.  Within those walls, laws and codes would exist as almost living things.  Lengths and lengths of nothing but the world remade into mazes and alleyways that demanded strange behaviors.  They said it was the reason their own grand empire fell, long ago, but I never particularly trusted that.  It’s too neat and tidy, and no trace of the thing remains.

Jahn stands, hands placed on the table’s wood that I’ve done my best to render into something less splintered.  ”Fine.  Right.  Are any of us going to mention just how much our little dream looks like a stormsun in miniature?”

A few of the survivors, soldiers and civilians alike, chorus out affirmatives.  Malpa chuckles, one hand unabashedly patting Jahn on his back, fingers running through fur.  ”I’d thought it but, what of it?  Maybe he’s what happens when a stormsun can think.”

I doubt I am of the same material.  I tell them.  Our magic has an intersection, but it does not…  I search for the proper word, and come up short.  It does not fit the shape of what I can do.  Much like the magetouched and their connection to the Timeless Sea; it is magic, yes, in the same way that a gun is physics.  But I can no more replicate it than I can replicate a powder blast with the force of my rotation.

”…And yet you stopped the galesun.”  Talquin says with a tone that I have never heard on a verdling, and do not know how to decypher.  “Your magic cut the winds.  If it is not of a kind, then what is it?”

”Convenient, is what it is.”  Kalip answers for me, and I feel the emotion of a smile trace through my mind.

”Convenience does not turn the sky away.”  Talquin insists firmly, her pseudoarms straightening out and draping around her upper body, the chevron lines of her eyes almost glaring at Kalip.  Then she abruptly softens.  “But it does not make the difference, does it?”  Her richly accented voice admits.  “If Shine can stop a galesun, or bandage a magetouched, or even… well.  If the power can reach that far, what is one more thing, in reaching the Green itself?”

Jeorge starts to nod, his horns shifting under the orange light of the Congeal Burn that has replaced the torch and lamplight in here, but then grimaces.  “It does bring us back to the problem.”  The man’s taciturn voice says, as if he is at a perfectly ordinary logistical reporting session.  “The Green is neither natural, nor our fault, but it is something.”

”Diplomatic.”  Yuea mutters.

”Would you prefer I use more profanity?”  Jeorge asks with the kind of bland tone that tells me he has begun to assimilate rapidly into the group I know more closely.  “I’ll need a moment to sort through the words I know that are just slurs for flatfaces.”

”Now that’s diplomacy.”  Malpa calls from the table he’s at, a laugh in the big man’s voice.  Jeorge seems initially a little confused by the human’s almost eager humor, but still gives the table the man is at a slow nod despite that.

Yuea’s voice cuts through everything when she decides to speak again.  “What do we do about it?”  The commander demands of the thirty-odd people in the hall.  She could demand it of more, but I don’t think she’d be asking the bees for advice.  “I want suggestions.”

Technically, Yuea is not in charge.  But we never really decided who was in charge, if anyone, and I do not honestly believe that anyone in the fort is prepared to argue with her.  Though I had assumed I’d already corrected the worries of everyone who had whispered concerns to their companion bees that Yuea spoke with my voice and carried my authority.

I like Yuea.  She reminds me of… so many people.  So many strange and unique places in my memory stirred up by her attitude and poise.  But I am not here to turn Yuea into a small dictator.  The cleric’s knowledge of various government structures may not be able to help me know the correct way to run even a small settlement like this, but he knew damn well that unlimited authority on a strong military figure was always something to avoid.

”You can’t kill it!”  Ahalan’s child voice is a little too loud as the young demon yells up to Yuea’s spot.  The kid is sitting with a few others of the older children, all of them at least a decade old.  The ones who understand enough of what is happening to know that this is not a normal life.  That this is a conversation about something dangerous.

”Kid.”  Kalip starts with a shake of his head back at the nail-thin young demon.  I watch as he watches Ahalan glare at him, wondering myself what Kalip thinks of the directive from the young orphan.  “Even if we could kill it, I don’t think we would.  Unless it was…”

”An emergency?”  Jeorge offers from next to him.  The soldier’s own look toward the younger demon is one of firm reproach.  I forget, sometimes, that Kalip and Yuea were never really soldiers so much as they were weapons.  The kind of rigid military discipline that is so common in army structures never really applied to them the same way.  Jeorge, though, much like many of the other humans and demons in the fort now, was a professional soldier.  A child speaking out of turn seems to be one of the things that rankles him.  “It is an emergency though.”

Seraha bleats out a laugh.  ”Shine has told us that, in the dozen words the plant has spoken, it has repeated that there is an emergency for several of them.  How very helpful of it.”  Her hourglass pupils fix on Yuea, the green tinted woman straightening up like she has some residual memory of being addressed by a tutor.  “What would you call a cry for help with no details?”  She asks.

”Oh.  A trap.”  Yuea seems more relieved to have a quick answer, than at the answer itself.  “Should have thought that myself.  Must be tired.”

”…If you say so.”  Kalip says with a concerned stare that burrows into the back of Yuea’s skill.  “But it might not be a trap.  Might just be damaged.”

”Explain to us?”  Parox asks in a reedy voice from the other side of the table Talquin, the second verdling in another folded pile of limbs over their elongated body.

Kalip nods and his glance flicks away from Yuea to the handful of humans, demons, and gobs that aren’t following his quick logic.  “She’s been saying that the thing is a plant.  But then every description she gives includes all the old machinery around the thing.  Follow?”

”No.” Parox says with amused frustration.  But then the horizontal lines of his eyes widen slightly.  “Yes.  The little dreamer also says things had decayed.  Rusted away, yes?”

”Right.”  The ex-magetouched actually makes a very good teacher himself when he wants.  “We’re all assuming that because the connection went to the Green, that Shine was talking to the plant.”

You believe that I was speaking to the machinery?  But it wasn’t… active.  Functional.  Or rather, there was no indication that it was.  My writing again is copied repeatedly to multiple tables.  I have been speaking less often as they talk among themselves because listening occupies less of my focus than making several identical iterations of the same spell work, and because I have use for all that focus.  Besides that, even if it were limited, it did speak to me.  No construct would do that.

”…Why do you say that?”  A lightly red skinned human asks.  She sits with the cluster of people that weren’t ever soldiers; despite my best efforts to destroy the boundaries of past tensions, one that I cannot overcome myself is the gap between anyone who has marched for long distances before, and those who lack a commanding officer.

The woman, Si’La, is not from the Agien Archipelago as I had suspected of the last red human, but she might be able to trace her family to there.  It isn’t important, just another signal of how long has passed.  She is more important right now as someone who has travelled more than many of the others.  Though while she has spoken to her companion bee of her travels, she has never explained their reason.

”Can machines speak?”  The gob next to her asks.  Dull orange scales mean this is one of the newest ones, and fortunately everyone convinced them that Smith is a rather cursed name for a gob, so they go by Anv instead.  “I have not met a speaking machine.  Unless the golems count.”

”Oy!  You fucking rock, did you make a speaking golem!?”  Yuea’s energy surges back as she glares at the nearest beetle she can spot.

No, though I am curious what that means.

Anv gives an innocent look at Yuea, and by association all the bees I have between the two of them.  ”They do not use words, but they make noises that communicate stress or other conditions.”

Anv, that is not… I let my writing still, Shift Wood almost spilling over itself as I pause.  That is a very impressive level of attention to detail.  I will ask your assistance designing the next cargo walkers.  But that is not what Si’La meant I believe.

”R-right!”  The human looks back up at the room full of people watching her, heads turning her way in a sporadic wave as everyone finishes reading or heading what I have read at different speeds.  “I just meant that there are constructs that talk, that’s all.  Not the festival tricks, with the hidden voice tubes, either!  I mean there’s crafted mind tools that you can ask questions about the timeless realm, or a few really, really old things that are sort of like sir Shine’s golems hidden in academies that can sometimes talk.  Some people even think that the really old teleportation platforms used to have minds in them!”

They didn’t.  I tell her, and realize that I might have a strange value as a historian that I hadn’t really considered before, judging by how her face lights up.  At least not publicly.  Also I had understood that the transport web had been lost to time?

”W-web?”  Si’La stammers.  “N-no, no!  There’s only a couple partially intact platforms that have been studied.  How many… were there?”

More than a couple.  I find the answer hard to give.  My memories… are my memories now.  Not just the memories of others.  Those people have become me, and while I am something new, it means there is a heavy weight to the information that I hadn’t quite noticed before.

It wasn’t more than a couple, except in a technical sense.  It was hundreds.  Thousands.  Across the world, across Auor, at points in orbit for use in scientific study and stellar harvesting, buried in odd parts of the underground for tourism and collecting unique geographically tethered phenomena.  The web wasn’t easy or cheap, but it was so much of the world.  Or at least, that’s how part of me remembers it.  I also remember when it was just a couple platforms.  A pair of capital cities tied together.  Which was… apparently… the start of a new era for the entire world.

For once, I am glad I do not have limbs.  I think if I did, then right now, they would feel like leaden weights.

Si’La is saying something, chattering happily with the others about the amazing speaking statue that some southern academy has in its halls.  But I am finding listening difficult.  I drop the part of my focus that I have been spending in trying to push my ability with Congeal Mantra farther, my efforts to make some kind of glimmerling but for the alternate material so far having failed.  I also drop the part of myself that is listening to the conversation.

All of me asks my curious lancer for permission to borrow her senses, and I get a quick almost cheerful affirmative.  The bee, laying under one of the tables like a particularly chitinous war hound, rises and shakes her wings off, spreading a layer of glittering dust that does not stick around as she trots out of the hall.

Excuse me.  I write onto the tables with shakier letters than I have been managing so far.  I believe I need some air.

I drop my attention for my glimmerlings and other bees, for the beetles and the humans alike.  Mostly blind but for the viewpoint of one kind and massive honeybee, I focus on nothing but the movement as she trots out toward the fort’s courtyards.

Though I still catch a hint of Yuea’s voice behind us.  And even through the sudden press of time that I am beginning to feel, I understand that there is actual real concern in her tone.

”Keep yapping.”  She orders the rest of our people, none of whom seem to countermand her.  “Gonna go have a conversation.”

I ask the bee to move a little faster.  Though I don't think, perhaps thankfully, that it will be fast enough.