Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 149 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 12

The ants are odd.

Oh, yes, they are larger than a cow and their limbs have been modified to function more like a leaping spider and they bristle with shaggy red fur and they breathe fire.  Of course those things.  But they are also odd in a way that actually matters.

I cannot touch them with Bind Insect.  I do not think they even notice that I am attempting.

They are clearly insects, or at least, the machinery in my mind believes they are enough so that Bind Insect can make the attempt.  But attempt is all it manages.  There is a slipperiness to the magic here that I have never felt before.  It slides and wends away from its own function not like it is being blocked but more as if it is trying to fill a seat that is already taken.

In a way, I am worried.  These creatures might very well be under Bind Insect’s shadow already, simply not my version of it.  Another apparatus, lurking behind the eyes of the creatures that are currently using oversized mandibles to pick at and sample the crops of the growing acreage they have been left in.

And yet.  And yet.  They are docile.  More than docile, they are almost friendly.  More like strangely shaped dogs instead of anything else.  There is a flickering ember of intelligence in their behaviors, and a recognition from them of the different people that they clearly like more than others.

Dipan, to my great amusement, is one of those people.  If they were angry, if they raged and hissed and snapped, then I would worry that they were picking targets.  But instead they eagerly move to follow the man when he leaves the fort to try to forage for more of the mushrooms that Kina has sent him on an oakstaff’s walk for.  And that, I will allow, is very funny.  It is funnier because he is absolutely trying to escape, and it is not working.

Is this a ploy to lure me into dropping my guard?  I don’t know.  But I know multiple reasons an apparatus might have bonds and not be active, I’ve lived them myself after all.  I also know that nothing else except myself and Lutra have made our bonds into anything that can be playful, and so…

Well, if it is a ploy, it is one designed to work on me specifically.

All of this I consider and work through as a side project while I am doing more important things.  Sweeping the Green with Distant Vision, watching over the returning crowd of refugees through my bees, feeding Drain Health and Drain Endurance to the limits of the spells until the reserves of nothingness run dry and I am left to force myself to rest and recover, deploying scores of resin glimmerlings as scouts.  It is all important.  It is all irreplaceable, in its own way.

I cannot truly rest.  I have more to do.

Repairing myself took some of the points of power that I accumulated yesterday, but not so much that I have not made a small profit.  And with that fully done, I can once again make contact with the caravan.

I require help from the sappers and frontline engineers for the math of Distant Trajectory.  The one thing none of my past lives, even the merchant, were ever really good at, and it always felt so mundanely academic, until the moment when I needed to know how to align an arcane targeting solution to hit a moving apparatus more than a thousand lengths away.  But, with only one miss and a rapid need to disconnect Form Party from a stray fox that my inaccuracy connected with, I make contact with Lutra’s mind and voice.

“You’re alive!”  The other apparatus sings into my thoughts through the connection.

With my Spirituality sitting at the seventh step of whatever reinforcement is being done to the soul, I know the spell has a good amount of time in use.  But binding two of our kind is tiring to it, and in our time speaking, we have grown used to not dawdling, which is novel to me.

”Hello little sister.” I greet Lutra with a smile to my words.  “You already knew that.”

“We-I-myself am not in the habit of assuming.”  Lutra fires back like her own haughty rifle shot, voice wavering between an aloof adult and a dejected child that is doing their best impression of an aloof adult.  

Well.  Perhaps a little dawdling is in order.

But not too much.  “Is there anything that has happened on your journey?”  I ask directly.

They answer.  And for just a moment, Lutra is a young kid on their first adventure.  “I have talked to everyone!  And I help the iciytych cross the water!  And I met birds and made a deal with them and we are making them bigger!  Muelly and Karrl and I are friends now!  And I am pulling so much toward points, and I am going to strengthen Empathy so I can be like you and keep everyone safe!”  The words spill across the bond, a flow of information paired with them through Form Party as Lutra deftly and perhaps unintentionally manipulates the connection to share pieces of her current self with me.

I can see that she has used near through the supply of several of the spells we exchanged with Small Trade, which I suppose I cannot fault her for.  But also I can see four new ledger entries to her traded Bind Willing Avian, as well as being able to tell that she must be running herself near to exhaustion keeping her own Congeal Mantra, Feel Love, and Hear Intent all at under a claw of their potential.

And I am not sure what to make of Lutra’s potential choice of where to put her power.  But… I am also not sure if it is my place to interfere.  The most I would ever do, I think, would be to ask that we collaborate; if one of each of our souls is of a kind, and we can exchange magic like coin, then we could make worse mistakes than covering as many cards as possible together.

In many ways I am thinking of Lutra as young, though I believe that one of her old selves was an elf of some standing.  Still, her mind now is only just beginning to cohere into the person she wants to be, instead of a wounded animal.  and if there is one singular thing that I have learned, in any of my distant lifetimes, about the care of children?  It is that telling them they are bound to a career or lifestyle is a mistake.  The farmer nearly lost a son that way.  The singer attempted regicide over it.  Twice.  Perhaps slightly different ends of the experience and the scale of catastrophe, but I understand all the same.

 “And you are only just outside of the Green.”  I reply to Lutra with affection.  “How are the rest of the caravan?”

She falters slightly.  “Mela found the new people.”  Lutra says.  “I don’t like them.  They are… are…” the other apparatus seems to spin her thoughts around our long range connection, before settling into her more confident voice.  “They are not evil, but they are hurt.  And my magic cannot predict them.  Feel Love hears almost nothing from them.  I hope we can help them but I am afraid of them.”  She says before refocusing on the question.  “Oh.  Mela and Muelly are mad at each other about a silly thing I do not understand but they have done this before and they will be friends soon.  Daurthy wants me to tell you that if you want to kill her instead that she would be okay with that now.  Food for everyone is holding and easier now that they know what is edible and fall fruits are growing and my birds can help.  Fared and Doretta are still being quiet but Luet is happier when we move and I think her nightmares are better but I cannot tell.  And I have run out of Shift Wood entirely…”

It is such a tonal shift when Lutra admits that she has overexpended the magic I traded to her that for a small moment I wonder if I have somehow walked off a short cliff even without legs.

But no, it is simply a child’s coiled shame and not any geographical relocation on my part.  Lutra’s thrill at beginning to find her own footing undercut by both her reliance on myself, and on her own fear that she has done something wrong.  I, in turn, do what I can to undercut that feeling back.  “The magic is meant to be used.”  I tell her firmly and kindly.  “Our Small Trade made it yours, not with conditions or caveats.  However I agree that you will need much more, if you are so talkative.”

It is one thing that I had not expected.  Maybe I was too focused on my own experience; communication with the others has become almost natural for me, but it costs very little, and now that it is an option, I spend quite a lot of time quiet.  Lutra, though, has broken out of her shell of darkness and isolation and clearly has no will to return to it.

”I have nothing to give!”  She tells me with dismay.  “Small Trade demands balance!  I have been learning; a gain or loss I can make, but a gift is against its witchwood rules.  And my magic is not as deep as yours to exchange.”

“The twin masks of Have and Want dictate all commerce.”  The words from the merchant slip unbidden through my thoughts.  “More Bind Fish is needed, to maintain your charges under my care.  More Form Sphere, too, to stockpile my… more militant options.  But it is true that what you need outweighs that.  Unless…”

Lutra pulses with an affirmative.  “A point of power.”  She states, voice prim and proper.  “Perhaps it is a treasure that goes beyond a Small Trade, but…”

”I do wonder, as we grow, does what is small to us grow as well?”  I muse as we begin to shape our logistics disguised as a deal.  “A matter for the future, then, little one.  For now, we know that a point can be exchanged, as I believe you have done so before?”

”…I am sorry…” Lutra says with faltering embarrassment of the reminder of one of our earliest meetings.  “Though yes, you are correct.  Shall we offer terms?”

In the end, it is a Small Trade that is sent across the link of Form Party, but a productive one.  Or rather, a series of uses of the spell, draining to Lutra but needed to fit everything across.  The one thing I cannot have supplied the expedition in stockpile, I rely on this tenuous connection for.  It is why I am so hesitant to attempt to touch the Green’s mind again; Lutra needs my support.  And I do not feel like spending another six points on patching holes in my magic.

Form Sphere and Bind Fish for myself, to build a supply and to feed the eels respectively.  A single point of power as well, bringing my total to twelve, and hopefully not taking too much of Lutra’s adventure with it.  But for her?

Bind Insect to let her work with the lancers in the expedition, and more Bind Willing Avian for herself and her new birds.  Shift Wood in quantity, almost so much it doesn’t fit through the merchant magic; for me with my Spirituality at seven, it is a candlemark worth of rest, but it is a tenday worth of writing for Lutra if she rations it.  Which means it is three days worth of writing for Lutra.  And then bits and bobs on top of all that as well.  See Domain, Imbue Mending, Follow Prey, perhaps one or two real uses of each, but the point is not for them to be sustainable.  The point is that they are tools that my sister can deploy should she need them.  

Form Party wears thin.  Using Small Trade across its tether is not without cost, though I am strong enough now to maintain it for some time.  Lutra and I fill the remaining moments with simple talk of what has been happening around the fort, the new arrivals, my thoughts on my magic, the Green.  I try to update her as best I can, without worrying her.

The expedition to Wavewatch is not a sojourn for the sake of pleasure, but… all the same, I hope that it and the growth it brings Lutra will give her a span of happiness.  I hope that for many of the people there, especially Muelly and Mela.  Though I suspect that some of those that went along already plan to remain at the city no matter what; but then, I hope that is the right choice for them as well.

For all that being an outsider to this era is a weight on my thoughts, it is also in many ways truly liberating.  I have no responsibilities beyond what I have picked up myself.  Any grudges I once had in my pasts are so far gone that they are at best history and at worst survive as folk myths told to children around the hearth to warn them about misbehaving.  

I worry for the day that I hear Seraha tell the fort’s children a story I recognize, wrapped up in the fog of archeology.  Or maybe I can prepare myself enough to be amused by it.

Dwelling on the older demon seems to summon her attention.  As my Form Party reserve runs dry and the connection to Lutra slips and frays, I enjoy the temporary sensation of quiet before answering the conversation Seraha has started with one of the beetles.

I have actually been maintaining two other conversations at the same time, though I am even now unused to it.  But there is a strange willingness in the magic to let me split my thoughts like an irrigation ditch, so long as I am splitting the spells themselves.  Bind Insect and Form Party both listen, and so I can listen through them at the same time without seeming to miss anything from either Lutra, or the tired and scarred people in the fort who whisper their worries to the bees that I have asked to support them.  In the same way that Form Caravan means I always know the status of the expedition’s cargo and route, even if I am not quite focusing, I always have at least an outline in my head of what is being said ‘to me’.

Which is why I know Seraha is speaking about the future, as I truly turn to listen and reply to her with my full mind.  “Well.  What are you going to build, now that you know you need it?”  She is asking me.

Seraha’s recovery has been nothing short of a grand devil’s play.  The woman’s fur even looks less faded now.  My use of Drain Health is certainly responsible for much of it, but… I don’t think it would go as far as it had, if she hadn’t met me halfway.

And most important clue to her doing so isn’t that she’s up and walking, or that she is back to trying to teach a mismatched group of youngsters their letters.  No, it is that she is interested in the future.  In a tomorrow that she has, without really saying it, included herself in the planning of.

I like that. I would miss Seraha quite a lot.  And there is something about both of us having killed for each other in the short mess of a time that we have been together that makes me feel like she should be around.

I don’t know what she is asking though.

I am already building.  I write to her where she sits by herself in the sun-touched courtyard.  Her charges, and my bees watching them, run in shrilly screaming circles under Seraha’s care.  But she has begun trusting the companion bees more and more to alert her to any real trouble, so she is mostly there to let them know she is there, and to fetch anyone that tries to run out past the marked out plots of our tiny farms.  I have rebuilt the palisade walls, and repaired the interior structures besides.  I am not personally responsible for it, but the farms are also being built and my magic will be growing us food to stockpile.  It is not much yet, but I admit my focus has been elsewhere.

Seraha turns the heavy wooden ‘page’ of the text I have given her.  Bound with metal loops, my first work of authorship in this life is perhaps slightly too focused on my interest in the communal behavior of the hive of honeybees to be of interest to most people.  But Seraha is reading it anyway.  Perhaps she has run out of other books in the fort and grown bored.  “Oh.  You rebuild, little dream.  But you are slow to realize things sometimes.”

I have noticed.  I write to her without playing into her teasing.  It took me several days to realize that Yuea is quite mad.

”Well you are young.”  Seraha’s wrinkled lips pull back in a smile.  When she continues, her voice doesn’t change, but the weight of her words does.  “Shine.  You will need to build something.  A crowded barracks and an armory are not a village.”

I am aware of that.  It seems fitting, as this nameless fort is not a village at all.  The words are a little rougher than normal.  I am still letting Shift Wood rest a little after giving quite a lot of it to Lutra, and detail work is more costly.  This is temporary.  Especially if we know that Wavewatch stands; other towns and cities will as well.  There will be places out there for you to find safety and lives to live.

Seraha tips the wooden book down into her lap, folding her hands over themselves on its pages as she looks up at the sky, away from my words.  She sighs as if it is the last one she will ever get and she needs to make it count.  “Oh Shine, you foolish little thing.”  The old woman says with quiet sadness.

The beetle that she is sitting with shifts, wings unfolding as it curiously demands clarification for her words that I am personally too concerned to ask for.  One of the companion bees, so new to the role that it is barely larger than a particularly wide honeybee, alights on the book just above her hands and brushes against her fingers reassuringly.  And I, well, I try to write something that will explain what Seraha seems to already know I am saying.

This is not a home.  I carve into wood she is not looking at, and in fact, turns her head away from at the noise.  We have made it survivable.  I have tried to help make it comfortable, even.  But Seraha, surely you, out of all of them, can see that this is not a home.

Eventually, she breathes again.  Eventually after she fails to brush away the bee she lifts it up to crawl onto her shoulder and nestle in the fur there.  Eventually, she reads what I have left for her.  And eventually, she even answers.

”I won’t be leaving.”  Seraha says quietly to the beetle dancing on her knee.  She looks down and meets its eyes, and my own gaze through it.  “They had to carry me half the way here.  For all these kids, I’m sure they’ll be tougher for the adventure.  But me?  Shine my hooves hurt and my eyes are fogging and you aren’t the Turnip Witch sweeping me into living forever.  And I don’t want my sunset to be spent in a barracks, and an armory.”  

I could assemble a golem specifically to-

“Hush, child.”  Seraha sets her hand over the wood I am writing on like covering an unruly kid’s mouth.  “You say this isn’t a village.  That is a problem.  I would rather you start there than on building me a personal walking chair.”

A walking chair is actually a fantastic idea but I do not say that part out loud.  Though a sliver of my thoughts, buoyed by Spawn Golem, gets to work on drafting a concept for how many senses and obeyable commands I would need to budget for.  

I… do not know why I am hesitating.  I confide in her.  Yuea will return soon and there are more people with her than we have here now, and I don’t know what they will even want me to do for them.  The expedition is only a tenday away from their goal, they may soon know more, unless something goes wrong.  The Green itself thinks something is wrong but I cannot see what it is.  Everything is so… so messy.  And I could be throwing together walls and shelters, but I think part of me doesn’t want this to be a village, because…

Because why?  I have been so busy, so caught up in everything that needed doing, and so determined to avoid drowning in my own history, that I haven’t even put my mind toward the simple task of thinking of why I am thinking.

What am I so afraid of?

Seraha, looking in from the outside, and with far more time in her day to ponder the situation even if she is constantly tending to the younger survivors, already has an answer for me.  “You are thinking this is going to end.”  She says the words placidly, but they cut my thoughts all the same.  “But Shine.  What if this is simply how things are now?  You believe your kind are a passing glint of the knife, but you have studied more history than I ever could.  There are not always gobs, not always heroes, not always witches.  But when there are…?”  She leaves the question open to me.

And I know the answer already, too.  When there are, they are not the work of seasons.  They are parts of the world for years.  Decades.  There are whole civilizations from centuries past that were defined by the moment that gobs stopped emerging, did you know?

”How could I ever know that.”  Seraha says with her thin wrinkled smile.

It is easy to forget sometimes that you are not all knowing.  I think the scholar would have liked you quite a bit, Seraha.

The demoness bleats a laugh.  “The scholar that you say you have made a full part of yourself now?”  She asks impishly.  “So I suppose this is how I learn that I have your affection.”

Oh I would have assumed it was reshaping the world for you that would have done that.  I reply with equal teasing, the weight of everything feeling just so pushed back, for a moment.  So.  The question.  What am I to build next?

”We have a future coming here, you know.”  Seraha muses.  “These kids, they’re going to be here at the end of fall, one way or another.  We’re going to need to make it through winter, even if the first half of it feels like a chilly fall around here.  If you say this isn’t a village, you’re making a mistake, Shine.  So make it a village instead.  Build for that future.  And then build for the next future after that.”

Of all the things I am… the soldier and merchant knew logistics, the farmer knew medicine and… well, farming, the scholar and cleric knew their letters and numbers and how to put them to work, and the singer knew spycraft.  Even the new souls in me, they know so many things that can keep you all alive, and keep our enemies frustrated or dead.  But of all the things I am, a builder is simply not one of them.

”You seem to be giving up before you even start.”  Seraha says, frustration and anger creeping in.

I am saying that I don’t know where to start.  I wish for not the first time that I could sigh.  A sigh seems like it would feel so good right now.  But you are, of course, correct.  And I am wasting time being hesitant.  A village, a town, a city… no, I do not think I could ever plan for those things.  But more than a barracks and an armory?  That I can muster.  For you deserve more than that regardless.  I simply… need to know more than the scholar’s tenuous historical understanding of what a foundation is.

”Well.”  Seraha says, looking up as one of the children’s high pitched bleats rises to a sharp pained cry, the woman standing on knees that don’t scream at her in quite so much pain as she rises and begins walking.  “We had best begin learning then, shall we?”

I suppose it is hard to dispute that.

So much of my new life has been learning, but it has always focused around my magic, or applying old knowledge to this new part of a world I don’t entirely recognize.  Maybe it would be a nice change to have to do things the old fashioned way for a change.  There are quite a few survivors living here now, and more yet coming.  Someone among them likely knows.  The soldiers have sappers and fortification engineers among their number, at the very least that knowledge is transferable to the process of constructing something less militant.  Or so I hope.

And, when all else fails, I do have magic.  To speed the work, to circumvent the tricky parts, even to learn what is needed in some cases.  I think it is only fair when it is my only way to touch upon the world, that I actually make use of it.  And after even just this half-day’s worth of activities, I find myself with enough points of power to actually make a meaningful choice.

I simply need to learn what choice to make.  But Seraha is right.  We can learn together.  Though we should learn fast, as we do not have long before another sixty humans and demons find themselves at our gate.  And my hesitation has bought me no favors.

But first, an application of Drain Health to soothe the pain from where Zhoy has twisted her leg trying to jump from midway up the wall’s stairs.  The kid is bold to the point of fearlessness, somehow, in the face of all of this.  But the little demon and her friends should perhaps learn that not being afraid of gravity does not give anyone special exemption from it.

I think, I write to Seraha after the crying and reassuring and firm explanation of why one should not fling themself off of tall places unless they are named Yuea has concluded, that I shall build you a small manor, as thanks for all that you do and have done.

”I think you should perhaps break off whichever piece of your gemstone skull is holding that thought.”  Seraha tells me with a bleat of amusement.

Perhaps not at first.  I concede.  But every village needs a good drop of silly extravagance in it.  Or at least, that is what the singer believed made a village more than a collection of angry dirt farmers.  And I can think of nothing that would be a more satisfying capstone once we have sorted out all the rest of the important pieces we will need to house and feed a hundred souls.

”I’ll give it to Dipan and live in a tree if you do.”  She threatens me.  I think on that.  Dipan would surely love the status and wealth of it, for perhaps a day before he would begin to feel trapped.  Seraha reaches her own conclusion in parallel to me.  “No, he’d think it was funny.  Yuea then.”

Oh yes, that is much more amusing.  Let us plan for that.  A village with a house for an unwilling princess.

Seraha snorts as she tries to read while also shepherding the children inside to arrange a midday meal.  ”Oh you noticed that, did you?”

I have noticed that Yuea is not what she says she is or seems.  I have pried no further, as we are thousands of lengths into the Green while the world crumbles outside and around us, and I can think of nothing I want less than to scare her away now.

“It frustrates, that you can be pragmatic like that, but not about building bunkhouses.”

Oh!  A bunkhouse!  I believe I could assemble that easily enough, yes.  An excellent starting place.  I do not know why I did not think of it myself.  Perhaps because I am, from multiple lives and viewpoints, stuck in the pattern of thinking as a city as an already-there thing, separate from its own pieces.

I have never built a place from nothing.  But what is a life, if not new experiences?  And with that tiny clawhold Seraha gives me, I turn my thoughts inward.  Giving her space and a comforting exchanged farewell, as I go to determine what magic will be needed next.

Not to survive the next disaster.  Not to struggle against the present now.  But to build something for the uncertain and clouded future.

A future, I promise myself, that I will make for one old demon’s sake even if for no one else.