Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 146 (Patreon)

Nominally I'm still on break.

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Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 9

Spirituality : 7

>Congeal Mantra (1, Command)<

>>Form Party (3, Civic)<<

Distant Trajectory (6, Arcane)

The bee rustles her wings under the fall sunlight, delighting in the quick motions despite her size, and languishing in the warmth of the afternoon.  She could have fallen into the pile of other bees, lancers and companions and a thousand smaller brethren besides, that are making use of their thicker fur to nap around the hive placed within the main courtyard.  But instead, she climbs one of the walls, scaling it with feet that cling to the stone I’ve reshaped and claimed like she still weighs less than a hundredth of a unit.  Perching on the edge of a parapet, staring up at the vastness of the sky and the distant line of the ruinsun’s new mountain, the bee lets my thoughts linger with her like I am fully contained in her chitin and fur shell, instead of in my own mind.

It is comforting.

The moment lingers for us both.  I enjoy the shimmering dust falling from the almost-writing marks left by Congeal Mantra.  I enjoy the way the body knows it can fly, even if natural law says it should not be possible.  I enjoy the bee’s own thoughts that slowly spin and catch on something between an instinctive curiosity at the field of revitalizing flowers and an earnest desire to roam.

I also savor what the bee is snacking on.  It has a strange crunch to it, and I didn’t realize that the grown insects were really capable of eating in this way.  When I realize that she is eating a glimmer, presumably one of the ones my Stone Pylons have been producing at a steady rate, my own curious perplexity overwhelms the angst I have been spinning in my own mind.

”Now what in the vast made you think this was edible?”  I ask the bee more directly through Bind Insect.

She doesn’t speak a language yet, not beyond the complexly simple motions of her ancestral dances.  But my words carry an intent as well as a vocabulary, and so I still get a reply, in the form of a shared sensation.

Congeal Glimmer, apparently, tastes like fruit juice.  Tart and cool, with a sweetness underneath that pulls flavors the bee has never tasted.  Not that her palate is well developed; fruit has been rather limited in supply for the majority of her waking life as my lancer.  She has opinions on Seraha’s festival cakes, and on the chewy texture of yams, and that is the extent of it.  But I can taste the depth of the glimmer’s flavors.

Fruits that I’ve seen, but never tried.  Fruits I once sampled, but never found again.  Fruits I didn’t even know about, but now realize passed me by without ever intersecting my lives.

The magic of Congeal Glimmer, as I have tried to understand it, is that it takes things that would have happened, and contrives to make them not do so.  As this grates against the way we think the world should turn, it is… convenient… to understand it in terms of what is happening.  Someone should fall, but does not, which means the glimmer is actually helping them keep their balance.  Someone should be struck, but they are not, which means the glimmer is allowing them to transpose themself elsewhere.  Someone should not be able to fly, but they do, which means the glimmer is lightening them and strengthening their wings.

My glimmer are small things, usually.  They cannot stop larger things from occurring.  And they do not play with each other; a glimmer failing to make something safe will not itself find salvation in another glimmer’s twist of the world.  But even so, unlike mantra with their more rigid magic of knowledge and effort, glimmer feel like the ultimate tool of a soldier.

One moment of luck when you need it most.

And, strangely, they taste like things that could have happened, but never did.  If those things were fruit.

I savor it with the bee while we sit atop the wall, wondering if it hurts her teeth.  Or if she has teeth.  What kind of strange creatures my magic is creating.

The flavor brings with it, though, memories.

It is a strange thing, to feel overwhelmed at this point.  I had thought that my growing skill with performing multiple tasks, even having multiple conversations, might translate to having a similar amount of perspective when it came to emotional aptitude.  Yet, instead, all it took was one single comment to bring the careful performance crashing back to the dirt.

Si’La’s making of my lives into archeology is not… wrong.  It all must have happened so long ago.  So long that it is, maybe, perhaps, unconnected entirely now.  No tether to who I ever was.  Nothing left of those lives but thin jumbled memories sometimes shaken loose by a new spell and ruins that no one can agree on the providence of.

Why does it feel so heavy then?  Like I am being crushed by the enormity of it?  I remember the scholar - I was the scholar, even if the name I once held still eludes me - doing the same thing.  The singer knew songs from civilizations that didn’t exist anymore, the farmer used techniques refined over thousands of years, we all were always in the shadow of the untold legions that marched on ahead.

So why do I feel like I have lost something special, hearing that the thing that defined multiple lives is nothing more than a historical curiosity?

There is a stranger thought buried in there, too.  Multiple lives.  But not every life.  And while not every memory is clear and the monument to my own history still needs to be uncovered and dusted off and have the markings translated, I do have distant recollections of the scholar living in one city, studying in another, and stepping between a dozen other places besides for expeditions.  While simultaneously, the merchant knew that the political games surrounding the transport web, if it were ever expanded beyond a mere two cities, would either destroy her life or make her richer than some spires, depending on how fast she could move.

The farmer took occasional trips when he could afford it.  The cleric traveled freely but did an awful lot of walking regardless.  The soldier never knew the word ‘teleport’ in the context of moving people.

Bit by bit, I put my lives into an order.

And this is what had overwhelmed me.  That my lives, all those selves, all of them me now, would have each seen their world fall into the shadows of time before the next in the order was even extant.  And to further complicate things, scattered among those memories are hints of knowledge of a history that jumbles.  A single conversation half-overheard while dozing off seems to point at the web being rebuilt once.  Which means I cannot even trust the order of things simply by knowing if it was working; because for some time it wasn’t.  Another memory of a crisply written ledger, stolen from a mayor’s manse, hints at a secret lesser web used by those with darker intent and deeper pockets.  Was that always there, built along the first?  Or salvaged from it, after?  Or neither of those things at all?

So many lives, even before I attempt to turn my attention to the newer ones I have drawn into myself, and I cannot even line them up.

If I had lungs I would struggle to breathe.  If I had arms or a tail of some sort I could curl in on myself.  If I had a voice that was for myself and not just those I was bound to, I might scream.

But I don’t.

I just have a bee that is happily letting me ‘follow’ along with her, and a body that I may as well bury and forget.  I have seasons and seasons and moons and moons and years and years of life.  Of lives.  And I don’t even know when they came from.

It is not simply that I am so far from what was once home.  That has happened before; sometimes home goes away, or you go away from home, and there is no turning back.  Only the way forward.  But every time that happens there is still the chance from time to time to see a map and point to some spot and say here.  To sit around a tavern hall and talk about where you’ve been, with other people who might be just as vagrant as you.

Even that small little comfort is denied to me now.  There is no map of time, there is no familiarity, there is no recognition.  It has been so long - might have been so long between lives - that no one recognizes even the greatest wonders of the world.

Kalip hadn’t even known we’d lived on Auor, once.

“Hoy.”  A woman’s voice, filtered through the bee’s senses to me.  A little flatter, maybe, though I suppose I shouldn’t say ‘different than normal’ as I’ve been doing most of my hearing through moving resin lumps and the Green’s most prying beetles so I have no room to complain.  “You in there, you sparkly idiot?”

I brush thoughts lightly against Amalgamate Human.  Just enough to communicate, trying to lean as much as I can on the changes that are still taking shape that lock away my ability to accidentally command.  “I am.  But you did not need to follow, I can speak anywhere.”

”You can, you tarball.  But you weren’t answering anybody.”  Yuea grunts as she slings herself over the parapets and drops to sit on the crenelation one over from where the bee is basking in the sunlight.  “It’s scaring people.”

The words are so neutral that, coming from Yuea, I know something is wrong near instantly.  There is no flare of anger, no sarcasm, just caution that she does not use with me.

Everyone else has, at some point or another.  But never Yuea.  And I find it hurts more than I was expecting, as I had stopped expecting it at all.

”I just needed… to be alone.”  I tell her.  “Well.  No.  I need to weep, or scream, or to go home, but I cannot do those things, and…” the words come faster as I speak with the commander.  “Did you know I was married?”  I ask her suddenly, not sure why I am doing so.  “Or the merchant was.  I still don’t know if she and I are the same me.  I may never know.   It was arranged, and political, and I think she… I… loved him anyway, and he has likely been gone for longer than your empire has existed.  The farmer had a place in a townbond, and at least one child that he outlived.  The singer had a life mate.  The cleric…” the memories turn fuzzy as I overstretch and swipe them away like fog.  “…the cleric was fond of dalliances and passionate affairs of the moment, but he loved them all anyway.  And they’re gone.  All of them.  All the places they were.  All the moments they shared.  All the stories.  All the faces.  All the… all the…”

I lose my grip on the spell.  The bond holds, because it is made of steadier stuff than my thoughts are, but I do not know the moment when Yuea stops hearing my voice and when my words begin spilling into the air like a leaking flute.

I curl my mind inside the bee’s form, and settle there like a fallen errkite.  I know I have let go of my other magics.  I know I am not responding to people, as I am not seeing people.  There is only one tiny window out of the dark that I am locked inside, and it is this bee, here, on this wall.

And still Yuea speaks regardless.  “The girl talking about ancient history?” She asks me, and I make a small humming back along a thin strand of our connection by way of answer.  “Guess you’re a bit of ancient history too, aren’t you?”  She says.

I think she’s trying to be friendly.  But I am finding it hard to want to listen.  Still, Yuea settling in is more a comfort than Yuea wondering if I have finally decided to lose control of any grim impulses I have.

”Look, Shiny…” she looks down at the bee, who is staring up at her sideways now with one of its big domed eyes.  I see Yuea’s face in smoothly overlapped facets; her green tinted skin and sharp eyes staring back with something hard, but not unkind.  “No, Shine.”  She corrects herself.  “That’s your actual name now, isn’t it?”

“In the absence of any other options.”  I murmur back to her.  And to the bee, as well; she should at least know both sides of this conversation.

“What do you need?”  Yuea asks me directly.

And I have no answer for her.  I wasn’t expecting to need to assess what was help I could receive, much less be offered it so bluntly.  And yet.  “It seems…” I say to those on the wall with me slowly, “that the problem is rather that I don’t need anything.”  Yuea makes a rude noise, which I appreciate, as I was worried for a moment that she had become someone entirely separate from who she once was.  “There is very little that anyone could do about this.  I am… I feel as if I am falling, Yuea.  I have spent most of this new life confused or lost or frantically reaching for answers, and that has become my normalcy, but I have never felt like I had already dropped from the bridge into the chasm.  How am I supposed to ask for help when the thing that I need that help for is to undo the death of civilizations?  Of the world - worlds - that I find myself longing for but that have been gone so long they’ve been built atop twice over?”

“You’re not gonna land.”  Yuea says, no longer looking at the bee.  Her face in profile stares out at the expanse of the valley the fort sits in; the land that looks perfect for a road, but where all paths are consumed, stretching out and up through trees and rocky elevation.  The farms made for my magic to latch onto extending like a thin sliver in the land around the walls.  “That falling?  You don’t land.”

”You just get used to the drop.”  I echo quietly, realizing I know what she is saying.  Words I’ve heard some of the soldiers say, words they’ve had to explain to those in the fort less familiar with the sensation of losing everything.  Interestingly, it is both human and demon alike that share the phrase.  Something that has lasted since their territories had no border, perhaps.

Yuea’s hand lands on the bee’s fur, and the creature I am settled inside shivers and preens as she is petted like a companion animal.  I feel it, but I do not feel the joy the bee does, which makes the shared sense a strange one indeed.  “Look, Shine.”  I can actually hear her cutting of the -y, that is a monumental effort for Yuea, and it does something strangely effective at dragging me back from my darkness.  “I’m the wrong woman for this.  I’m not a good friend.”

”I think you’re lying.”  I whisper-shout across our bond.

”And even though you replaced my blood with it, I’m not that sappy.  Not good at this talking shit out thing either.”  She continues.  “I’m not here to lie and tell you it gets better.  I’m just here to tell you we need you.” Yuea reclines like being balanced on perilous stonework is normal for her, flicking a finger over the bee’s antenna.  “For you?  That’s probably good enough, right?”

I experience my own brief flare of anger at being uncertain if she is mocking me.  All I have been doing, while I try to piece myself together into something new and confusing and apparently depthlessly drowning in my own history, has been helping them.  Helping Yuea, helping her tiny cluster of survivors, helping the similarly lost batch of demons, helping the new gobs, helping the trapped soldiers, helping the individuals that we drew in to our fort with Small Promises and frantic directions, helping Lutra as the poor other apparatus needed the time and space and power to learn to be more than someone flailing in the dark.  All I have done is be there for them.  All I have done is be needed.  It is practically how I define-

…

Ah.

I try to look at Yuea closer, and the lancer I am with shifts as if letting me borrow her body more directly.  The commander isn’t looking at us anymore, even out of the corner of her eye.  Instead, she’s staring away at one of the watch towers, her hand still idly atop the bee’s head.  An enforced lack of observation.

For a small moment I wonder I wonder if Yuea has felt some of me through Amalgamate Human.  If my ire at her, however temporary, might have bled into our conversation.

I hope not.  I might be annoyed with her, but I have been raised several times over to never show anger to someone who is trying to help.  And she is trying to help.  She is just… exceptionally bad at it.

”Well.”  I speak to the imperial human.  “I can tell you, with the deepest heart truth in me, you are correct.”  I pause for a moment.  “You are shit at this.”

Yuea nearly falls off the wall, coughing a sound like a strangled laugh that she was certainly not expecting.  “Yeah, shiny.”  She says, rolling out of the crenelation to plant her back against the wall on the inside of the fort as she stares up at the bee that is watching her strange dance with a confused set of questions prompted at me through Bind Insect.  “That’s what I fucking need you for.  Everyone else needs the food and medical secrets from a thousand years ago and the monster slaying, but me and Kalip?  We need you to fucking translate.”

”You’d do well enough without me.”

”I’d strangle Mela inside a week.”

”Mela isn’t here.  Though I suppose that is partly my doing.  Also I do not believe you would like the backlash of that kind of antagonism to a hero.”

Yuea shuffles her way up, sighing as she snaps a small leaf off her upper arm and tosses it away, uncaring for the fact that I think she’s not supposed to just tear off that part of her body so casually.  “Some day you need to fucking list out what a hero is.”

”I do not.  I cannot.  It must be oblique.”  I tell her, and find that there is comfort in filtering old knowledge and historical record through the lens of a modern crisis.

It all still aches.  But talking is at least something that makes it the kind of ache that can wait for later.

Yuea doesn’t hear that part though, just the words that she thinks are a joke.  “Sure thing, shiny.”  She tells the bee, while looking down into the fort’s yard at the faces of people who are surreptitiously checking on if she has actually found me or not.  “You gonna be okay?”

It’s worth consideration.  The somewhat harsh truth is, nothing I am going through is materially very different than what everyone must go through at some point.  The numbers are simply a little larger.  And maybe the sensation of being overwhelmed comes now simply from the fact that I am remembering this despair from so many directions at the same time.  A waterfall of memories and old pains that weren’t really mine before, suddenly held up to the light.

Am I going to be okay?

Parts of me have answers, from old lives.  The farmer would say well, I have to be.  The soldier would say no, and so would the singer, but for different reasons and with different amounts of lie.  The cleric would say some day, it won’t hurt anymore, and I will wonder if I have failed for not feeling that hurt, but I am lying to myself to say that I do not look forward to that absence.

Amusingly, it is a new bit of myself that I had never taken the time to delve into that exhumes one last thought.  The thief, of the soul of Trepidation, lived a life I think the singer could have understood very well.  But unlike the singer, every one of her own disasters brought with it a persistent and stubborn hope.

What?  The thief would have asked with a smile on her muzzle.  Is it gonna get fucking worse?

Well.  Maybe it will.  But maybe it won’t.  But it certainly won’t get better if I don’t try.

It’s not quite the deep breath I crave, but I extend my thoughts back into the workings of my magic.  The rings and lines and inscriptions inside my thoughts spinning to life and reactivating as I place my metaphorical hands upon their surfaces again.  Extending myself back into the world.

”I will persevere."  I tell Yuea.  “Thank you.”

“Oh, don’t thank me yet, spinny.  I’m only asking because we still have a plant older than you are in the basement, and if you think I’m leaving it intact without a plan you’re out of your crystal skull.”  Yuea hops off the wall, landing below with ringing chimes from Amalgamate Human as I instinctively begin repairing the damage to her ankles, back to wishing I could sigh again.  “Come on.”  She orders either myself or everyone else within earshot.  “Let’s figure out if we need to harvest you a couple dozen of your dots to put into ‘torch problem’ or whatever else it’ll take to make you into a warmage.”

The bee watches her leave from her perch on the wall.  And I smile to myself, giving the curious lancer a mental pat through Bind Insect before extracting myself from the complex bundle of sensations and thoughts that is one massive and magically altered honeybee.  The strain on the spell that I hadn’t noticed eases immensely, as I resume using it the way I have been previously; spreading small eyes and ears in a net of impressions across the fort and some of the valley beyond.

And then I ‘follow’ Yuea back inside.  Because she is, in part, right.  I might not be needed the way she thinks, but I can be useful to people I rather like, and so I think I will.  I am already sketching out a small reassurance to Si’La that she is not responsible for my own despair, when I have a thought to check something that Yuea just said.

Perhaps fortunately, ‘torch problem’ is not a real spell.

I don’t think I would know what to do if it were.