Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 148 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 9

Spirituality : 7

>Congeal Mantra (1, Command)<

>Form Party (3, Civic)<

I have become more and more comfortable being able to see the world from as many angles as I do.

Bind Insect gives me a thousand eyes, some of them even good as the bees grow and have glimmer and mantra incorporated into themselves.  Similarly, it gives me sharp ears from my gossipmonger beetles, Oob and Oop having five more brothers now who are unfortunately inheriting their personality.  I would add sharper eyes and ears from Bind Willing Avian, except that Lutra has all of that spell from myself at the moment, just as I have traded for Bind Fish and am rationing the magic of it to caretake her eels.  Even Congeal Glimmer lets me make my little glimmerlings that I can observe through and puppet almost like my own limbs, though I have yet to make similar tools from my other similar spells.

Distant Vision lets me literally see the world, though only see, and while the Singer knew how to read several kinds of lips in two languages, I find myself a little lagging in that skill.  See Domain and Form Caravan and Know Material give me strangely precise lists, detailed breakdowns of aspects of the world that my intellect lets me pair to real physical places or people.  Those spells, along with Know Weather and See Commands, could be said to blossom through the world like ink in water.  The more drops I add, and the more things are stirred, the more the original skeleton of branches becomes a pervasive cloud.  A picture painted that grows fuller and richer as I finish each layer.

And yet.

It is the one that I feared most, the one that initially and will even still on occasion disgust me, that I find I appreciate most.  Amalgamate Human.  Stolen from something that used it to force monstrous forms onto the people who were posted in this very fort, and only used as a last ditch effort when Yuea’s magetouched countermeasure was really about to kill her and there wasn’t much of another option.  I feel like I should hate it.  Should reject it as much as possible.

But I don’t.  I am trying my level best to be in this life someone that I think the world would like to have in it.  But I cannot lie to myself if I am to keep that up, and I am being selfish in my love of this magic.

The bees and beetles and eels and even the brief moments when I had crows under my sway, all of them feel.  They see and hear and experience the world.

But it takes only a drop of the magic’s store of empty liquid to feel what Yuea feels, and in all of my lives once lived, my body was not a bee, nor a bird or fish or beetle or anything of that note.  I was a human, a demon, a… different kind of demon… a gob, a lamia, and possibly something else besides if my memories from Animosity truly become mine.  I was people with skin and fur and scales, people with arms to stretch and tails to coil, people who felt the world quite a lot sharper than any of the creatures I am bound to.

Except Yuea, and Kalip.

Yes, the hide shaded like the stranglevines I layered for Yuea feels different than any human skin.  Yes, the wolv fur slowly taking over Kalip’s limbs does not comb like a demon’s proper coat.  Yes, their bodies are more explosively powerful than anything I have ever experienced, even the soldier dosed with the war trio of alchemical works.

But they feel.  They feel so alive, and I have, almost shamefully, been stealing small moments of that for myself.  An invasion of privacy so complete that I don’t know if I could ever actually admit to it, though I know I am going to at some point when we are not racing toward yet another battle.

To speak further on that, instead of facing my own inner guilt, Yuea is currently racing toward battle.

My maps contain rough estimates of where multiple other apparati are, both in the Green and out past the western boundary where our caravan is headed.  We know that there is the thinnest of evidence there is something just outside our valley, near where Lutra’s lake lays, because of the modified creature found on its shores just before storming.  We know there is the thing that was modifying ants into length-tall firebreathing beasts, somewhere near that western border.  And we know there is an apparatus of rather worrying tactical skill, possibly the same one that harried our escape deeper into the Green, that has at different intervals, seemed to lay claim to territory scattered around our little home.

And it is that last one that we have likely encountered again.  Though life is uncertain, and the truth that my kind draw from the same offered lists of magic means that this could simply be someone else who has made similar choices.

At the moment, I am watching most of Yuea’s group through my bees.  They are headed toward one final cluster of people, and the largest group of survivors as well.  It is hard for me, with my biases, to guess at how many people would live in one of the grouped arrangements of buildings that I have seen destroyed on the edge of the Green.  But I would say that quite a few of them would have hundreds, perhaps one or two thousand if one were to count the extensive web of farms radiating out from each village.  Which is why it is disheartening to understand that the sixty or so people fleeing with their lives on their backs, making a frantic pace that just causes more injuries and damage, is what is left of one of those villages.

Their speed is actually shocking.  They moved so fast that, in the long day it has taken Yuea’s group to collect two other fragmented patches of survivors from outside, the larger group has bypassed our valley entirely, gotten turned around, and is now headed back our direction.  I find it almost quaint that none of these people, even with their frontier lifestyles, have woodcraft experience, but I am realizing now that it is because they are on one very particular frontier.

The Green’s boundary line is like a scar on the map.  Where it ends, the forest stops.  And for hundreds of lengths past it, as far as I have seen, there are no other forests.  Trees, yes, but nothing approaching a grove or glade or copse.  It is like the Green has eaten the idea of the woodland for the whole region.

And since they never enter the Green, why would anyone know how to survive it?

The bitter irony is, if this group had simply been able to keep going, they would have almost run directly into our home, sometime in the next few days.  Or if they had aimed slightly differently, they would already be there, by pure accident.  But instead, they are traipsing directly through another apparatus’ realm, this opponent situated between the close range of my scouts and the inner boundary of Distant Vision.  Next door neighbors, practically, except instead of sweeping snow together, we once tried to kill each other and then one of us went into hiding.

”What’s going on?”  One of the demons that has already been added to the rescue party asks.  “Where’s she going?”  The man points after Yuea, who is currently racing away from them with barely a word to the others in my cadre, soft loam of the Green kicking up in sprays behind her footfalls.

”Fuck.”  Jahn utters, turning an angry eye to look at the ragged family of demons following in the middle of the pack, all of them suspiciously staying as far from everyone else as possible while still hiding behind my friends.  Jahn has already voiced displeasure to me, through his support bee, that he is going to need to put up with yet more casual bigotry from both his own kind and the new humans, and has asked that we rescue more verdlings next.  The conversation that started with Parox might have disappointed him even further.  But still, he doesn’t want these people dead, which is why he points at them now.  “Stay here.”  Jahn bleats, drawing his heavy bladed axe and racing after Yuea, with Sharpen and my two lancer bees close on their heels.

None of them are as fast as Yuea, even the bees.  But all of them are wearing the glimmer bracers I have made, and through the eyes of my bees I watch the Green part like a curtain for them.  Roots and mud patches that should trip simply do not, branches that should snap and snag fail to catch, and any greenery that is an obstacle, I personally Collect Plant away.  Their own guarding magic and my carving spells ripping a tunnel through the last ten lengths of distance to where Yuea has sensed a problem and is running ahead to get there first.

Through Yuea, I already know what the problem is.  The villagers they were about to run into are under assault.  An ambush, which itself is ironically helpful as the sudden noise gives us a beacon straight to the people we were searching for, but which will likely not be appreciated by those wounded or dead.

Yuea has a bracer on too, and her own motions catapult her forward through brambles and over fallen logs the speed of a charging predator.  There is a moment, as she runs, that I lose her.  Just for a heartbeat, but the feeling of losing all the sensation I am borrowing; the wind of her passing on her skin, the sharp sounds of screams, the glitter of the sunlight, all gone for an instant?  It rattles me.

When it happens next I am ready for it.  This must be the same apparatus, the last one did this too.  And when Yuea lowers her profile and races through a gap in the wall of trees ahead, emerging into a reed-covered riverbank crowded with figures, I know it is the same one.

Scores of humans are scattered around the open area.  Some of them on the ground, either injured or just too tired to fight back, staring at the creatures that are closing in, or already in their midst.  The beautiful fall sunlight dancing on the clear flowing water a sharp contrast to the bloodied grass and warped lines of sight from the patches of the world where our opponent has twisted things in a similar way to how I Fortify Space.

Those creatures are… refined.  Bodies of flowing mud, but larger now.  The size of a merchant’s cart, with six heavy frontal legs that drag them along and seem to be armored in hardened clay.  They should be slow, but they lunge and leap at their prey, their legs slashing and crushing far faster than I would expect.

Yuea takes it in without stopping, and I aid her in picking a target.  “That one.”  I order, already layering down a defensive line of Fortify Space behind Yuea and intercepting two farther attackers with Form Wall.

The enemy knows we are coming, it can’t not.  Not at this point.  So there is no point in holding back.  And Yuea flows with my order perfectly, her body levering back as she completes her run, plants her front foot a scant claw away from an older human’s head where he is sprawled on the ground, and strikes.

Yuea slips through the gap in the front armored legs, and her uppercut hits the mud glimmerling in its central body so hard that the wet form ripples like a pond with a stone thrown into it.  The resistance from the wet mud nearly dislocating her arm, and yet that is not nearly as bad as what happens to the glimmerling itself.  Whatever magic is holding it together, it is not well suited to surviving a single massive impact; the spray of mud from the opposite side of the towering attacker like blood splattered from a gunshot.

Then she hits it again, a sharp sideways jab that punches through the connecting mud that joins one of its hardened legs to the body.  Finding the process easy enough, Yuea begins ripping the rest of the legs off the glimmerling, only stopping when it collapses into a still pile of earth.

I hold onto the bond of Amalgamate Human like a passenger on an unruly ox, trying to manage feeding Yuea’s body the blank liquid of the spell in ways that will undo the damage she is causing herself as she flings her mud soaked form toward her next target like a bolt.  A challenge that is made more difficult for myself, as I am now doing several other things.

I cannot, unfortunately, see the whole battlefield.  I have one set of eyes, and that set of eyes is focused on destroying her own knuckles punching through magically sharpened clay.  But I did establish barriers during her mad rush, and Claim Construction puts those hastily assembled walls in my domain.  See Domain isn’t a perfect targeting vector, but it does allow me to start from somewhere, using the corners of Yuea’s vision to extend my Form Wall castings out, spilling the stone I’ve harvested with Collect Material out in arcs that I quickly link into a palisade on the riverbank, cutting off the incoming forces.

Then one of my walls is yanked away from me, and the stone is neatly sheared and flattened into what I believe are spined burrs, a tiny glimpse of the effect through my magic all I get before the force that has done so launches them in a scattered burst across the field.  Mostly I hear that in fresh screams, as I race to Fortify Space the surviving walls, and replace the shattered ones with less sturdy constructs of wood that comes from my steady use of Collect Plant.

When I ‘feel’ one of the bosu-sized glimmerlings begin to haul itself over the wall with its claws, trying to get to whoever it was I originally erected the fortification around, I am waiting for that too.  Move Water would never let me injure someone with its workings.  Not alone, at least.  But Pressure Trigger is, somehow, not me.  Perhaps it is similar to how my bees, or even my unbound friends, are capable of using my magic in ways I cannot.  Perhaps now is not the time to muse.

The Pressure Trigger built into my wall activates, and a large portion of my spell’s stockpiled stamina vanishes as a length of the contents of the riverbed is picked up and slammed down on the glimmerling that dared to try.  Mud ablated away, the whole thing surrounded and flooded with water that I have ordered to rotate like a gyre, stripping it down until the glimmer at its core is actually visible.  And then, not just visible, but ripped out and deposited in my Fortified Space.

Another one of the attackers slams into a wall, and another trap activates.  But this time, the water simply… stops.  As if there is something shoving it away.  My spell closes it in around the enemy, and some other spell repulses it, pressure and force building until suddenly Move Water fails first and a temporary rainstorm coats the clearing.  My own impersonation of a stormsun doing a rather poor job of protecting the people we are here to save.

The screams don’t stop, but they suddenly become… muddled.  The people I am trying to track seeming to pop like soap bubbles in my mind.  Not dead, but my ability to even think of where they were, to try to draw dots and lines on an imagined map - or a slightly less imagined map as I am rapidly using Shift Wood a hundred lengths away to draw up a local map of the terrain - disrupted.  But only here.  My drawn map has not changed, it is just this riverbank that has suddenly been muffled and blinded.  And even then, the effect has splashed off places I have affected with Fortify Space.

I want to push back, but, to my great annoyance, I cannot find the ground around here.  I am aware of the fight continuing, of things… existing… but even my clearly different mind is struggling to understand the relationship between people and where they are.  A deeply inconvenient effect, that slows me down when I am needed most.

The problem with this fight is, while I truly believe Yuea could kill any one of these foes, we are not looking at a singular batch of them.  Even as Jahn and the others rush through the treeline to assist, yet more of the heavy glimmerlings are emerging from farther up the river, racing down the muddy banks, leaping with tremor-inducing jumps over the rushing water that has long since recovered from my borrowing of its flow.  Ten, twenty, will there be more still behind them?  Likely.

I am already expending everything I can from my own Congeal Glimmer.  Whipping up resin flesh bodies that dance to my command and, while I still cannot properly see through them with whatever has been done to this battlefield, I can point them at the right targets at least.  But as quickly as I create my spare soldiers, I also watch several of them vanish from my spell’s window into the world.  The snap of clay claws ending the things I have been using as scouts and beasts of burden with simple motions, like they are nothing.

It occurs to me far too late, that while I have been expanding my skills and honing my magic toward the task of preserving life and building a home, my potential enemies may have been doing the same in the service of creating weapons.  That I am not the exclusive holder of the sigil of learning, and that unfortunately, it is very possible for one of my kind to learn to be more dangerous.

This is not a fight we can win.  Only one we can survive.  But fortunately, everyone already knew that.

“Everyone on your feet!”  Jahn’s bellowing voice cracks as he tries to catch his breath and his tenor slips, but the pointed arc of his axe blade in the beams of sunlight points a clear marker through the Green.  “That way!  Go!  Move until you see the verdling, we’re right behind you!”  The demon starts stalking forward, more cautiously than Yuea ever will be, carefully moving past humans that stare at him with open fear as he approaches one of the glimmerlings that stands over a dead body.  The mud creature searching for its next target finds it in Jahn, a leap flinging it toward the demon who suddenly isn’t where it expected him to be, the glimmer in his bracer leaving him somewhere else.

Jahn throws his axe, muscles straining to put force behind it, and it carves a hole in the glimmerling before one of the mantra he is carrying scribes something into the world, and the axe is back in his hand.  The dance repeats, Jahn unable to kill one of these things, but harassing it in a way that it cannot ignore to buy time for the others.

The bees fulfill a similar task, their specialized lances unfortunately failing utterly against whatever magic is keeping the water away from my grasp.  At first they strike openly, but it only takes a moment of one of them crossing the sky where the Pressure Trap was forestalled, and my enemy across the battlefield spots the effect.  After that, whatever spell is rejecting the water’s presence is affixed to the bees themselves, their water-filled needles quickly ending up buried in the mud or lost in the river.

It is Sharpen who provides the best chance for us to stage a retreat.  While I direct my bees to retrieve anyone who they can, helping people to their feet with shoves and headbutts, and Yuea continues to be a problem that is unignorable but limited, Sharpen goes mostly unnoticed.  The gob darts through the fight, using weapons that they are less familiar with than the pistols that the first batch of gobs to join us had been training on until we ran out of powder.  A brace of daggers, Make Low Blade having provided them with one small addition inside.  They aren’t good weapons, but they aren’t meant to be.  Instead, they are jammed into half the mud constructs, the crablike things not even noticing as Sharpen simply leaves them behind after the stabs do essentially nothing.

The fight stretches on.  I struggle to apply magic wherever I can to keep our people alive, to keep everyone alive really.  Drain Endurance reversed into the fleeing humans gives many of them the last bit of vitality they need to drag themselves and their neighbors and friends out through the treeline, following the corridor I have carved already through the lengths of the Green.  Drain Health lets me save at least a few from near death, though it feels grimly horrible to nearly empty my reserve of the spell to repair a woman’s spine, only to have her half her head shattered against the ground by a clay-bladed stomp.

Every second is a problem.  More glimmerlings are pouring in, the battle line is not a fortified trench that we can hold.  One by one, in small clusters, people are shoved through the Green’s trees to actually run, and I do have plenty left in Drain Endurance to provide them to manage their flight.  But it will take only one mistake for someone I care about to perish, and being unable to properly see what is happening is making it hard for me to do anything meaningful.

”Yuea.”  I speak into my commander’s thoughts as she rips a glimmer out of the center of a living mud ball large enough to encase her fully if it landed on her.  “Fall back.  Signal the others.”

”Everyone pull out!”  She yells, Jahn and Sharpen moving to head to the visible Fortify Space line around the trees with a few last stragglers.  And then, privately, just to me, “Still people here.”  She says in curt words, her body clearly aflame with pain as she overtaxes muscles that we haven’t had time to build up with my magic.  “Shit.  Two kids left.  I can’t tell where. They’re right there!”

She tries to point, but the direction, distance, and geometry is all wrong.  I see the human children through her eyes, though they are close to adults themselves, hiding with backs pressed against one of my riverbank walls.

Walls.  They are there.  That is manageable, in terms of giving directions.  “I will ask an apology for this later.”  I tell Yuea.  And then I seize control of her body.  I am an inexpert driver, but at least I can walk without ripping her kneecaps out, which is more than I can say for how well she did when I first used Amalgamate Human on her.  It is eight steps and one lunge to put her where she needs to be, across the field of trampled reeds and bloodied soil and guided toward the single beacon I can find that is one of my Fortify Space infused walls.

Yuea arrives and wastes no time, her mud covered arms and fracture-filled hands grabbing each of the cowering and terrified young humans, one under each arm, before she kicks off my wall, cracking the stone as she builds speed to run from the glimmerling that slams down in her wake.  She ducks and weaves like she’s playing a sport and not fleeing for dear life, holding her cargo away from hard clay attacks and muddy slams.  And seconds later, when Yuea crosses the line back into the trees, she flings the two stunned humans into the trampled dirt and spins to cover everyone’s retreat.

She would need to, if the dozen remaining glimmerlings were going to make it.  And the opposing apparatus does direct them after us, but, one by one, they cross over the arc of ground that is mine.  And within Fortify Space, I can see.  I can track and target and, most importantly, I can follow my bonds.  The tethers from my spells to all sorts of things that feed back information and motes to my mind.  Sometimes, there is no information at all, but the bond still exists.  Like, for example, Congeal Glimmer.  I can barely tell if a glimmer is in use, even.

But I cannot see it when Camouflage Space or Hide Space or whatever is being used against me is in effect.  Which means I can tell exactly which glimmer is the one that has just reappeared as the first mud crab lunges toward the gap in the trees.

I detonate the dagger Sharpen left buried in its mud hide.  And the next, and the next.  Every time a glimmer goes from hidden to visible, I seize upon the bond and feed it so much power in such an unstable way that the stone bursts with a shockwave of force.  Is it enough to kill any of the pursuers?  Well, one or two.  Though ‘kill’ doesn’t mean much when talking about glimmerlings.  But more importantly, it is something unexpected and dangerous, and it makes my opponent hesitate.

My bees are the last people out, drawing a few of the enemy glimmerlings on a completely wild chase as if they are going to reconvene with everyone else, before taking a long loop back to the main group.  My own surviving glimmerlings fight to the end for us, swarming and shattering against their massively larger variants as they hammer away, bringing down two, before all thirty of my own remaining troops are hunted down and broken.

And between all of those stalling tactics, by the time the mud crabs of the opposing apparatus are actually freed up to chase us down, there isn’t anyone left alive within its range.  Or at least, its assumed range.  I make notes in my planning room, on two maps, of where we found the first flickers of Hide Space, of where its area of influence might begin and end, and of course, of how dangerous the glimmerlings have become.

Now, then, there is a fresh problem.  Wounded and tired, starving and scared, the humans have had their numbers reduced and not one of them has slipped through without losing something important.  And we - by which I mean Yuea’s rescue group - is going to be several days travel home with such a large group.  An uncomfortably soft target for that apparatus to strike at, though I do not know what motivates it yet, so I cannot say if it would.  Only that it might.

In another grim irony, I have experience with this, now, too.

I am already turning Spawn Golem to making more transport striders.  Bind Crop, while I have hesitated to truly experiment, is still giving us enough food that there is fresh fruit and travel crackers that can be boxed up and added to the golem’s cargo, sent out to help retrieve those who need a ride and feed the rest besides.  Drain Endurance and Drain Health I fling afield in the thinnest pulls I can manage, taking slivers from swaths of the Green with Link Spellwork and Distant Vision.  Link Spellwork continues to show sides to itself that make me certain I am misusing it, but in this case at least, I can apply it without consternation, and replenish the supplies I am going to need.  Even the simple touch of Imbue Mending on shoes and shirts gives a comfort and calm that is hard bought otherwise.  It feels like personal care - it is personal care, but it also feels as such - and that goes a long way to convincing fifty scared noncombatants that they are not simply being led to a different nightmare.

But oh, how I am concerned with what fifty more bodies will mean for us.  More than that, counting the other rescues, and the other group’s rescues.

In comparison, I am almost laughably relieved when Dipan and Kina return home with six gobs, and eight shaggy red furred fire breathing ants in tow.

I was busy.  I do not know what they did.  But I also am told to ‘not worry about it’, a thing I will not actually be doing, but I appreciate that Dipan is at least trying.  The human has been drawing too much amusement from my theoretical headaches, but at least he seems happier now.

Through all of it, I continue to draw in the soft motes of change.  Bits and pieces from the people we gather, from every mended garment and consumed ration.  Bursts from lives saved and survivors located.  A rush from the fight, dusty fountains of the things coming off every scrap of ground we fought over, and similarly contested by myself and the opposition.  And of course, my own dense clusters from a score of Small Promises fulfilled.

There are what the merchant would have called ‘diminishing returns’ on every action, or perhaps on every spell.  But while fighting for the lives of people who do not know who or what I am is no longer new to me… it is new to them.  To the people who will live, at least for now.  Who will have a chance because of us, and because of me.

And so I am less than shocked when the day ends with stars.

Available Power : 16