Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 147 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 9

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)

For most of my new life, the question of how to approach any given emergency has been one of which spell to frantically reach for.  What clever working to build out of seeming nothing, fusing points of power into my souls in a pattern that I can see in the way it is offered to me, but do not understand until it is done being built.

I am a creature that solves problems, using a variety of increasingly detailed and powerful tools.  And when I encounter a new problem, my habit has become to reach for a new tool to match it.

But as power builds slower and with more required effort, and the cost to add to any of my souls mounts higher and higher, I need to instead take a longer view of things.  Emergencies must be approached with the tools I have, and when I do happen to have within me a budget for something new, it is reasonable to look for something that can solve many hypothetical problems, not specifically the one crisis currently looming.

Not that there has ever only been one crisis looming.  That would be for another life, I think.  This life of mine is a strange sort of kindness from the world; what magic or mechanism brought my old lives back and gave the new me a chance at things is something I am honestly quite happy for.  But whatever it was that did this, it certainly chose a period to do it in.  And I do believe one day, this will be one of those stretches of times that compiled texts and studied scholars will refer to as ‘a tumultuous period of history’.

So, as a new day of the fall dawns and I complete another check-in with the expedition that is making steady progress out of the Green, I consider the issues that are currently stacked up.

First, there is an emergency.

Now, this is vague and useless information.  The thing beneath the fort, which seems to be as near as I can determine a piece of the Green itself, or perhaps even a mind of the Green, insists there is an emergency.  There’s just a few problems that come with that.  For one, anything that is an emergency to a magically connected forest that spans so much territory that it has its own biomes and has in the past eaten entire nations is an emergency that is beyond a scale I can work at.

My magic is potent, it often overrules the world itself, but only where I can reach.  We are a sliver of length into the Green, on the very edge of it, even after multiple tendays of travel.  And already most of my magic cannot reach the border without tricks.  If something is harming the Green deeper into its center?  It could take a year with Yuea sprinting, carrying my body under her arm, to get me close enough to even see.

For another problem, no less for being second in line, there is the fact that the Green might simply not consider the same things to be emergencies as us.  There is every chance that logging activities from bordering nations qualify.  Or that a natural forest fire somewhere a hundred thousand lengths away is causing the colossal plant mind irritation.

But then, there is also the possibility that the ground is about to collapse underneath us.  And I would rather prefer to know of that event before it occurs.  So the emergency is worth investigating - because who would I be if I did not poke every facet of my form into trouble? - but we cannot rush headlong into it.

Second, there is an expedition.

On this, I have very precise information.  Form Caravan tells me their progress, their health, even a little bit of their mindset.  I know where they are with their food and I can even see a shadow of Lutra’s own magical reserve.  Form Caravan is quickly becoming my favorite spell, if only because of its tendency to give me practical answers.  Bind Crop does not give practical answers, it gives headaches.  

Of course, my ability to help is limited.  While I have managed to deliver messages in roundabout ways by applications of Link Spellwork and Distant Vision, I have been finding more and more that as I grow stronger, Link Spellwork’s true use pushes me toward a lack of finesse that makes writing challenging.  Previously, I working around this by using Distant Trajectory and Form Party, along with an impressive amount of math from two of the military engineers that spend an equal amount of time helping me plot launches as they do bickering.  But with Form Party broken, I cannot easily trade away magic to Lutra to use, or communicate quite so clearly.

I would like to say that they will be safe without me.  But that would be a lie I would tell myself to rest easier.  They will be fine, up until the exact moment I look away.  Or rather, that is my eternal fear; old memories of parenthood in various forms echoing the sentiment across time inside my thoughts.  But it is also a fear, and not a truth.  The truth is, I think Mela is going to be tested soon, the young hero falling into a challenge, and that if I were the magic of heroism, I would wait until the distant benefactor was injured to strike.

Third, there are more people.

Distant Vision is perhaps the spell I have acquired the most skill in using past Shift Wood.  And at this point, I am near-constantly sweeping multiple points of view across the Green, as well as maintaining my watch on the expedition, monitoring the area around Wavewatch, keeping vigil on the fallen towns and farms, and, of course, hunting for other apparati.  It is eminently useful, and it is why I have found a great many small things.  Plants I remember that have medicinal or culinary uses, places in the frequent valleys and hills that make excellent choke points, and sometimes…

People.

Not everyone died instantly when the disaster that my kind represent began.  Many fled, and some of those who fled took the biggest gamble they could.  Into the Green.  Into the place that was practically made of childhood ghost stories and stern glares from parents.  Into the place that, even now, still houses the same nightmares they were running from.

But it also houses me.  And Lutra, too, until she clears the border, though the younger apparatus - if either of us can be said to be the elder, I think I shall claim the title - would be less well suited to the role of guardian.  For now, at least.

And right now the Green holds at least eight different targets.  In frightened starving groups, as individuals staggering through on their own power, and in one case, a duo made up of a heavily wounded girl and the revabel that refuses to leave her side and has been dragging her toward a sheltered outcropping for the last candlemark.  Humans and demons coming from their sides of the border, gobs coming from the plentiful abandoned tools scattered everywhere in the wake of the wave of deaths, all of them with less than the barest scrap of hope.

I don’t know what I was made for.  When I say I was made to solve problems, I am… applying intent to what might be a bizarre and unknown natural process.  Perhaps what I am is simply the next iteration of the gob.  New, but not out of place.

But I know that I am tired of watching people die.

All things in consideration, I haven’t even seen that much death.  Not this time around, yet.  But it simply does not take very long for a person to lose the taste for it.

There are several issues that face me, and I already know that I have decided to leave the Green to solve its own emergency.  For now, at least.

“Yuea.”  My voice, still satisfyingly my own, echoes across Amalgamate Human.  “Kalip.  Are you available?”

I already know the answer.  Kalip is currently talking to Jahn in low tones over hot cups of some kind of herbal infusion that someone has been experimenting with in the kitchens when Seraha is not looking.  The two men are commiserating over the lack of better beverages, with Jahn further musing about what it would take to prepare a proper full demonic breakfast.  The baker has opinions on the quality of my grains, it seems.  I almost want to let the two of them stonewall each other over the hotly debated point of if a breakfast requires some form of cured meat - the human says yes, the demon no, for obvious reasons - if only so it means they won’t join forces to convince me that adding the production of a mill and bakery to my growing workload is prudent.

Yuea, in contrast, is pretending to be asleep.  I highly support Yuea’s present living decision  to let go of the personal tension that she has held herself in for what I assume must have been her whole life.  From what I understand of the process, to be a magetouched in the human empire’s army is to be arcanely reforged into a weapon; displaced partly into the Timeless Realm and stitched through with commands and suppressants.  Beyond that nightmare of existence lies the fact that Yuea did not have her own freedom before that happened either.  She has always, in some way, been living someone else’s responsibility.  Even fighting our way to this fort, and for some time after arriving, she has been tethered to the job, the task of keeping everyone alive, and nothing else.  So it is pleasant, in a way, to see her… lounging.  Doing nothing.

I ruin that by calling to her through her own thoughts.

Though Yuea does an excellent job of ignoring me.  And, if it were under any other circumstances, I would simply let her have this.  But her small victory of the self is somewhat undercut by the fact that there are those who need us.  And I cannot run through the Green and lead those I find home.  Well, perhaps my bees could.  But I worry someone would hurt them, thinking them enemies, and that they would not fight back if that happened.

So I muster people who are more approachable.

”I hate you.”  Is the first thing Yuea says as she falls onto the table next to Kalip, her subordinate awkwardly but determinedly reaching out to pat her on the shoulder as she lays on the wood I have done my best to de-splinter.

By the time she has arrived, I have managed to get a variety of other aid as well, and so for once Yuea’s spot at the table is not one that she holds alone by scaring off everyone else through her presence.  The others around her are mostly soldiers or bees, but not entirely, and they watch as she slumps onto the bench like she has spent the whole night at a festival and not in bed.

If anything is going to shatter Yuea’s illusion of being an alloyed nightmare, this is likely it.

Thank you for arriving promptly.  I write out on the wooden tablets everyone has in front of themselves.  I have news.

”The Green is melting?”  Dipan asks sardonically.

Oh, to have eyes again.  I have, for some time now, been wondering if there is a spell in my available repertoire that would give me a body.  Or even if not my magic, if there is a working or ritual that exists in the world that could replicate the effect.  And I would give every point of power I have right now to roll my eyes at Dipan.

Well, perhaps I should not make that bargain too loudly.  I need some of that power to continue healing my other magic.  But most of it I would part with.

The Green is not… I am not aware of the Green melting.  I wish I did not need to clarify.

”That is not reassuring.”  Jeorge says, and while the setting of warm morning drinks and the promise of a balmy day is calming and casual, I see that the man has the ear of the demons that look to him as their ranking officer.  “What is the emergency that the plant underground was receding to?”

“If the thing ‘is’ the Green, like Shine believes,” Kalip says slowly, “then the emergency is something we can’t do anything about.”

That is, unfortunately, my assessment as well.  I write out.  Though I am continuing to search for any sign of what it was talking about.  There are only two problems.  One, I cannot see things too close to myself-

Before I can write more, Yuea is already talking, having raised her head just enough to tilt the wood pane up to her eye level.  “When this idiot says ‘too close’, he means about two day’s hard march.”

Kina and the gob sitting at their side both wince in unison.  “That’s a lot of ground.”  The human says with a grimace.

”We could do it.”  Kalip is frowning as he talks though.  “The party spell she has would let us sweep in wider lines.  And anything that’s an ‘emergency’ is going to be… well, noticeable.  Even to those of us without scout experience.”

Kalip isn’t wrong, though I believe none of you actually have scout experience beyond the last few months.  He offers an actual embarrassed smile toward one of my bees at the comment, which I find charming.  And also that spell is not available.

”What?”  Jeorge asks, voice cracking into a surprised bleat.  “What happened?”

The plant happened.  My attempt to bond with it, to get answers, inflicted damage to some of my magic that I am still repairing.  It will be some days before Form Party is ready.  Ah, I keep forgetting to not do that.  I am getting tired of filling in holes in the wood.  The second problem, of course, is that there is something I find more important in the moment.  And I would ask your attention to that instead.

Dipan leans back on his bench, the scarred man stretching out languidly.  “And here I was worried life would get boring out here in the falling.”  He muses, waving across the room at Jahn and Talquin as the late arrivals come in.

”Shut up.”  Yuea sighs.  “Shiny, what’s wrong now?”

I have, over the last few candlemarks of searching for the source of the Green’s discomfort, located eight different groups of survivors.

I am not done explaining before Yuea has risen with a groan, stretching out tightly muscled green tinted arms as she starts walking away from the table.  “I’m gonna go see if we have any guns left!”  She calls back.  “Let me know when you know what direction I need to run in!”

The others watch her go, before Kalip turns back to the table.  “We don’t have more powder, I don’t know what she’s talking about.”  He says, though I can see through Amalgamate Human that he is also tensed and ready to move at a moment’s notice.  “What’s… the best way to do this?”  He looks to Jeorge, which seems to surprise the demon.

I think that Jeorge has gotten the mistaken impression that because Yuea and Kalip were both here before him, and both altered by my magic for their own survival, that they are somehow equal in both disposition and rank.  But for all that he has been slowly cracking out of his imposed shell, Kalip is a man who does his best work when he has clear orders.

Jeorge, however, is not a man who enjoys giving orders.  His command was one focused on logistics, not combat or similar action.  Which is why he hesitates, looking around at the other survivors and even his own fighters with an expression that reads as someone who does not ever wish to be in charge.

Jahn, surprisingly, steps in.  Setting down the piece of wood I have been writing to him on, because I do not actually need everyone at the same table to talk to them, he does not sit as he looks at the assembled group.  “I wish…” he says slowly, before shaking his head and huffing.  “I wish I hadn’t needed to learn how to do this.”  He tells them, meeting Dipan’s eyes for just a moment and getting a surprisingly sad nod from the human that I don’t think anyone else sees.  “Jeorge, get everyone who can brave the Green together.  We will divide into teams after Shine shows us a map.  We will not need eight groups, but we will need them to be mixed of our people.  Dipan, please make sure everyone knows what is going on today, even those who will be staying here.  Especially the kids.  Shine, if any of these survivors are gobs, they are the most likely to be able to reach us on their own, if you reach out and promise them shelter, but if you can, do it to all of them.”  He takes a deep breath, the man having just said more words to an assembled dining hall in one sentence than I think I have heard him say to his actual lovers in the last month.  “Is there anything else?”

”If the apparatus can…” Kina clears their throat.  “Apologies, that was rude.  If Shine can make us more of the walking golems, it would let us carry back anyone injured easier?”

Talquin’s long neck bobs over the table as the verdling towers over them, not sitting, but taking her eyes away from Jahn.  ”Mmh.  And if our little dream has other tricks, perhaps, then we could find many trials eased, yes?”

”Tricks like this?”  Yuea returns, gunless, but dumping a pile of my projects onto the table.  “I found these in the armory.  What the fuck are they?”  She holds one up in the direction of one of the beetles that has been very patiently listening into the conversation for me.

It isn’t an especially reasonable question, I think my work speaks for itself.  I have taken the metal from the various chunks of damaged and ruined armor that the corpse puppeteer was using, and turned them into something more useful.  My ability with Shape Metal is still amateur at best; imagine working with clay, and knowing what you want the final shape to be, but finding that your fingers leave the wrong marks, that seams do not seal properly, that everything is somewhat awkward in its final form.  That is where I am with my magic.  Learning, but I have had less time and need to learn than I did with Shift Wood, and so while I can create, I do not exactly create masterpieces.

Yet.

The armor that Yuea is holding is one of those attempts.  It is a simple metal bracer, without the embellishments I like to put on things.  We don’t even have the extra leather or cloth to make proper bindings, so it instead is made in such a way that I can easily tighten it myself on anyone that wears it, with a point that I can easily tap with the same spell to remove it as well.  It is… likely very uncomfortable, and would offer minimal actual protection, but the protection is not the point.  The point is that it is an excellent container.

The metal is wrapped neatly around thirty separate glimmer.  And this is what had taken most of my time.  They are firmly embedded, but open on the inside so they maintain contact with the wearer.  All of them are of the variety that manifest when Congeal Glimmer is used in the natural parts of the Green; the kind that make thorns slide off skin, or make mud fail to grip boots.  These are tools for those that wish to run through this wild place unfettered.

I explain this, though with fewer words, because while no one is in pressing danger, I would like us to begin to move more quickly and my inclination to speak with a flourish is not helpful for that.

”There’s twenty of these things.”  Yuea says unhelpfully as I am already reaching through Bind Insect to call upon the bees that are most capable of joining in the rescues and Congeal Glimmer to muster my glimmerlings in their own marching formations.

There was a surprising amount of metal to work with.  Many of the bodies thrown at us were wearing what I believe is standard half-plate for your empire’s army.  That is a substantial weight.  I explain to her.

”Shiny, when do you even find time to make this stuff?”  Yuea presses.

I do not sleep.  I remind her, wishing that I could take a nap.  And my thoughts no longer flow the same as yours do.  When using my different magics, it is as if I am focusing my full attention on several things at once.  I can sweep my eyes around us, talk to you, build a golem, and craft armor all at once.  Well.  I could if you were awake.  As mentioned, I do not sleep.

”I don’t sleep either, if you keep waking me up for this shit.”  Yuea grumbles as she slaps the bracer onto her arm, and I Shape Metal it shut to neatly conform to her skin.  “Where am I going?”  She asks me through Amalgamate Human, her voice echoing twice in my head, once out loud through the ears of my listeners and once directly to me.

“Yuea, you are not alone.”  I whisper to her softly.  “You can rest.  The others…”

”Sure.”  Yuea tells me, breaking away from the group that Jeorge is trying to assemble half like an army and half like a mob.  “Look.  Sooner we fix this, sooner you’re back to looking for the bigger problem that’s going to kill us all, okay?”

”You seem annoyed.”  I offer.

”I’m always annoyed Shiny.”  She tells me.  “I can’t stop being annoyed, unless I’m asleep.  I’m so fucking angry, all the time, and I’m holding it together because you’re nice enough to point me in a direction, okay?  So point.  And I’ll be a good cranehound for you.”

I pause just long enough for her to know I am pausing.  “That means something different from some of my eras.”

”Oh I doubt that very much.”  She retorts.  “Just don’t expect me to bark where anyone else can hear.”

Sometimes, I look at Yuea standing around the fort, silently watching over the walls or observing the other resident survivors here, and I see a woman who is carved out of steel in mind and body.  An unbreakable bulwark; even if she has broken before, it is hard to imagine it happening again.  Not now.

And sometimes I hear Yuea talk and I wonder if I have maybe given too much strength to someone who might be slightly insane.

But that is a conversation for when there are not people within my range.  ”You will be going with Sharpen, Anv, Parox, and Jahn.”  A cluster of familiar faces, and one new gob that is eager to prove themself.  More importantly, people who have all proven in some way that they  can fight the things apparati make.  “Your goal is out of the valley and farther east.  And before you say you work better alone, I am sending you because this is close to where one of my kind we have fought but never confronted was active.  And I would like very much for all of you to return alive.”

”Do we get bees?”  Yuea asks.

In response, I ask one of my support bees to land on her head.  This is not what she meant.  But I believe, right now, that if anyone needs emotional support from a furred creature that knows only how to love its hive, it is Yuea.

Also I have two of the heavier lancers assigned to them as well.  And through them, a good amount of my own magic.

To me, it feels as if events flow smoothly, but I can see the yawns and cracks and I know that this is a rather sharp awakening to many of these people.  But I feel a swelling pride that all of them have taken up to my call regardless.  Maybe it is, as Dipan said, simply a good way to not be bored, out in the frontier without a shard of civilization around to entertain a person.  Maybe it is, as Yuea alluded to, a duty that keeps them moving.  Or maybe it is just that they have been tested by the world, and found that they are, actually, all better people than they expected.

There is a moment, in the courtyard of a fort that isn’t supposed to be here, that seems to bring a cool morning breeze and a sharp-edged clarity of purpose.  And from everyone assembled, motes of change shudder free like dust from one of the lancer’s wings.

A point of power congeals almost instantly in me.

I spend it to patch some of the holes in Form Party before it can become quite so stuck in place as the other ones I hold.  And then I begin giving directions to move out to the people under my strange banner.

There is, after all, an emergency.  Though perhaps not the one I have been told about in very loud language.