Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 150 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 16

How does one begin?

That has been a problem for me across a total of nine prior lives now, even if I am not quite as wrapped in the memories of a few of them.  This life, the tenth, has so far offered me an answer to the question that I think every older one of my selves knew in some way or another.

Disaster is an excellent motivator.

There is a truth that comes with facing a disaster.  The sudden and cleanly defined choice, to either get up and act, or to let yourself be consumed by the oncoming waves.  And no matter what someone thinks of themself, the parallel truth is that no one, ever, truly knows whether they will pick action or despair when the time comes.

But for those who find that an imminent crisis is just what is needed to spur on action, there is nothing quite like it.  None of those old lives ever found anything that came in a bottle or mug that could replicate the feeling of sudden base need of knowing that someone was going to be in trouble if you didn’t pull yourself together and get to it.

I wonder if that’s part of why I am the way I am.  When I first awoke, new and glittering under summer light coming through the Green that I could not see, I made a promise.  Not a magical one, just a very personal determination of intent.  That I would be myself.  That I would not forget the lives that forged the foundation for my mixed souls.  But that I would live my own life, not a shadow of theirs.  And yet, every time I have room to think, I find myself meandering.  How long, really, did I spend just watching bees at the start of my life?  How much energy and effort did I put into roaming with Distant Vision during storming while we all hid within the maybe-safe walls?  And of course, when the battles lulled and there was time to breathe, how quickly did I set about wandering the fort in a kind of explorative play with my growing lancer?

When there is an upheaval, I catch the pieces in the air.  When violence comes to my friends, I am there to intercept it.  When there is something that must be done now, already I am doing.

And when there is nothing pressing, I… may have a tendency to get distracted.

The irony of it all is, I do feel like my own person. And yet I am also echoing everyone I was.  The words in that space of turning lines and arcana rings within my mind, the ones that read Soul Of Unity, hint to me that I have united.  I have brought us all together, experiences and lives intertwining more than just when I was reading old memories like a dusty book.  But was it the unifying that made me like this, or was I capable of bringing so many disparate lives together because we were all like this, the whole time?

A philosophical question that I am musing on, instead of moving forward.

This would be funny if my inaction wasn’t going to cause one of those emergencies soon enough.

Forty eight new people with Yuea’s group, set to be here by sundown tomorrow.  Casualties even I could not fix having taken a few of their number, but there were no more deaths after the first day.  Another sixteen are returning with Jeorge’s rescue squad, mostly demons in contrast to Yuea’s human village worth of people.  I am keeping an eye on them now with Form Caravan; the realization that I need not limit my use of the spell giving me two additional threads of information from the incoming batches of people, though neither as strong as the expedition that I poured the whole spell and slightly more into.

And beyond that, survivors that have a clear route to us, who I have given invitations and directions to via Small Promise.

The interaction with Distant Vision and Link Spellwork has not gotten much worse, but it is noticeable the more I understand it, and I do not believe it will ever get better.  But a Small Promise to everyone who can hear within the bubble of Distant Vision is convenient enough.  It is, as always, limited in the scope of the promise, but it is not impossible for me to offer something both useful and hopeful.

Two day’s travel in this direction and you will find a valley, and within that valley you will find us, and with us, you will find a warm meal waiting to be shared.

I have found I cannot say much more.  I cannot tell them I will protect them with my magic and constructs and walls and friends.  I cannot tell them we will work together to understand what has happened to the world and how to survive it, and even live after it.  I cannot tell them that I have, through my recent conversations with Seraha and Si’La and Jeorge and Lutra and yes, even Yuea, found a hope for things to come.  That they will be better.  That we will be better.

But if I can lure them in with hot food, I can have all the time I need to tell them the rest.

At the end of it though, between the people on their way, and the people already here, that is a number that is quickly growing well beyond the original batch of perhaps a dozen wayward humans I was struggling to keep alive.

Within a tenday, by the time our expedition reaches Wavewatch and has the opportunity to knock on their closed gates, this valley could have as many as a hundred, a hundred and fifty people in it.  Non-insect people, I should specify.  It is becoming clearer and clearer that the way I weave Bind Insect changes my bound in a way I never truly intended, but cannot shirk the responsibility of.  And if we count the thinking beetles and bees that call our larger hive their home, then the number grows farther.  That is not a camp, or an outpost.  That is the beginnings of a village.  And I have been… faltering.

So many people relying on me.  And I do not know how to build a home.

And beyond that, I do not have very many people to ask either.  Some of the humans and demons were sappers for their people’s respective armies, but the change in the era has seen a change in combat doctrine.  Their skills include terrain mapping, controlled demolition, trap clearing, and the digging of defensive trench lines when territory is known to be contested.  My own soldier’s time, when the construction of a forward fortress larger than the very one we shelter in was a requirement for any kind of warfare, is long past.  Earthworks that used to be assembled on site by war-witch cadres are now the work of days of mass labor and only for planned battlefields.  Actually, the most useful thing any of them know is from a human who was in training for the Imperial Mercantile Forces, who is capable of building a temporary but robust bridge.

I nearly killed several of my friends attempting to build a bridge once, so I respect the ability.  But I do not need to build a bridge at the moment.

So here is the problem, as I outline it to myself in my more physical work space.  What used to be a commander’s office with atlases and written logs and what I assume was a well stocked liquor cabinet reduced by a wave of violent transformation into a room full of splintered furniture and shredded paper and blood.  Until I took it in turn, and have made it a room with barely competent battle maps, and my own form of reports.

It is very useful for organizing my thoughts.  As well as sharing them with my friends and allies.

The start of the problem is, I refuse to turn anyone away.

If we are a hundred and fifty, we will not remain as such.  It is impossible, especially with Wavewatch as a standing city of tens of thousands nearby enough to be reached within a month of travel, even through this hard world.  More people will survive, or be rescued, and find us here.  So I cannot simply say this much is good enough.  I must plan for a larger future.

Some of those people will be problems.  Some of them may hate me.  Some may try to kill me, or disrupt the slowly strengthening unifying peace I have roped the residents into.  That is bad, but actually more manageable than the more grim spectre of logistics.  All of those people will need food.  And clothing, tools, shelter, comforts, clean water, education, purpose, the things that make a life not just survivable but more than a farm machine.

Food is… manageable.  The rest is not.  Even shelter, which is what I am closest to being able to achieve.

But there is a clawhold in there.  The chain of creation is material extraction, processing, refinement, shaping, and distribution.  And of those, each step is progressively more complicated and less labor intensive.  And I can accomplish the first step with such ease that all of my past selves would be seething with jealousy if they weren’t currently me, and capable of the same feat.  I may not have the knowledge or capability to do the rest, but I can offer a start.

And there is the key.  Magic, my magic, is only growing in scale as I grow each of my souls.  As I evoke more change from the world, and draw it into myself.  Already I can feel another star forming, more power to put to use.  But while that magic can’t do everything, what it can do is something I have learned quick the lesson of.

I amplify.

Yuea and Kalip were dangerous people, but with my spells at their backs and in their blood, they are on the way to becoming walking calamities.  Seraha has taught before, been a teacher for children many times in her life, but with nothing more than a room I have built mantra into, her efforts are turning kids raised to be fishers and dockhands into scholars years ahead of where they should be.  Jahn and his growing group of farmers are, by all accounts, bad at the task, and the farmer I was knows it well.  But with my magic working to aid the process, food flows through the fort regardless of their dim skill level.

I cannot do this alone.  And that doesn’t matter.  Because I won’t have to.

Though I also need to commit to something here.  If I am to make my magic a core of this place, then I need to be ready to remain here.  Or, I must plan to make myself obsolete at some point, which seems like the prudent choice.  Both because I do know myself well enough to realize I will eventually yearn for adventure, but also because the lifespan of an apparatus of change is obfuscated to me.  Will I be here in a year?  In ten?  In a hundred?  I cannot know, and so I cannot ask anyone to rely on me forever.  Merely to rely on me to start everything with a wave at their backs.

With the problem identified, I begin to shape the solution.

What magic, really, do I have that facilitates life?  Not just survival or resistance to death, but civic living.

Well, Form Wall is the obvious first choice.  Imbue Mending makes any craft operate well past when it should, and is an excellent choice for continual Stone Pylon application.  Stone Pylon itself, along with Pressure Trigger, allows for many of my spells to be almost mass-produced without the need for my own supervision, though again, their longevity is suspect.

Bind Crop is good for food supplies and Bolster Nourishment can work to take it that much farther, but they are not infrastructure.  I need to focus on what lets me build things that will persist without me.  Though… Bind Crop could.  It really could, if I were willing to experiment.  To take that risk of something going very wrong.  Poison at best, an eruption of miasma at worst.  Or maybe there is something even deeper in the abyss of what a ‘crop’ is capable of doing to people that I haven’t seen before!  That would be exciting, and possibly lethal!

What else, then?  Spawn Golem?  Yes.  I know they do not need me to function, and it takes so little to make simple tools that can automate repetitive tasks.  I do not know how far I would need to grow that particular soul before I could have the empty liquid stamina to Spawn Golem something that could, say, weave a bolt of cloth.  Ten?  Twelve?  More?  But I do know that right now, I can make easily controllable crawling carts, and I can make them rather quickly.  I know I can make something that can till a field, or work a pump.  And that I believe is where the true large power of my magic is.

Extracting resources.  Creating structures.  Removing labor.

Everything else is… smaller, I feel.  No less valuable; every single spell I have within my conglomerate soul is one that has saved a life.  There is a story to every single thread and ring and icon of spellwork, and I would trade them for nothing in the world.  But I am not planning to win a fight or scrambling to cross a river right now.  I am trying to determine what it would take to build something that will outlast me.

I have sixteen power.  And by the time I am done making my list, and begin consulting with the returning companions, I will have more.  So what then do I do with it?  Because if I am building a future, I cannot wait until the future arrives to pick up the tools.

Currently I have openings for spells from Empathy, Tenacity, and Trepidation.  Though that last would cost me five times as much for a spell that I do not think would be exceptionally impressive; the soul of Unity it seems only goes so far.  So I start with what is available there, sorting through the lists for things that stand out as potential boons to infrastructure.  I look for things that the cleric’s old friends and the singer’s old targets would have loved to have had, even just a little bit.

Empathy has an obvious and immediate standout.  Form Fortification, which, while I am no oakstaff, I have a prediction about the nature of regardless.  I am certain it would be useful, and filled to the brim of its reservoir with caveats and conditions.  Next to it in the list, also a fifth elevation spell, is Drain Warmth.  Something I would have dismissed if not for my experience with Drain Endurance and Drain Health.  Because those spells have taught me, this is not simply a theft, but a way to stockpile.

It might not be infrastructure, but even a mild winter can sting when there is no defense prepared.  So it goes on the list, because surviving now is what will let my people have that future Seraha wants me to shape.

Meanwhile Tenacity has things I would dream of playing with, spells I want to wend and wind through the world just to see what I can do with them. Make Brew?  Song Trap?  Share Abstract?  Even Subvert Low Glimmer calls to me with the thought that maybe the next time someone tries to slaughter a crowd with a collection of mud beasts, I could instead simply take their toys away and walk off with them.  But no, all of those little wonders I must set aside, because Separate Material is right there.  If for no other purpose than pulling raw ore from the ground, it would be worth it.

And even that is a shadow next to Learn Stability.  Because… well, if no one can teach me how to construct something, then I will need to learn myself.  And while I can throw together a structure in a day with no real effort, I need something to teach me what works and what does not.  Learn Stability offers a thing that the other magic does not quite match; not the power to remake the world or fight a war, but the ability to educate myself.  Which is, itself, an amplifier of tremendous power.

And then Trepidation.  Which has… Measure Time, if I am being generous?  Shift Self actually sounds useful, and one day perhaps I will exchange the power needed for it.  But no, I do not, sadly, have time for an investment now.  I need if not immediate results, at least a tool that I can begin to put to work.

So what lets me build?  What is worth the hefty price of raising a soul farther?

Authority has Verdant Pylon, which, if it works at all like Stone Pylon, would act as a multiplier to how much of any of my convenient spells I could use, and makes sharing certain magics with a growing population quite easy.  Drain Disease is another survival tool, as I know sickness is going to be the true enemy at some point.  Interestingly, unlike the other drain spells I have seen, this one would be a boon to use normally, and a terrifying weapon if I were to reverse it.

Nobility offers Shape Stone and Improve Tool, both of which have the effect I am seeking after of persisting.  Masonry will not simply cease functioning if I do not focus on it, so as with Form Wall, I would be able to construct things of lasting value.  Though all the shape spells I have seen have been…

Well it is wrong to call them difficult.  But where Form Wall or even Make Low Blade are like sturdy and reliable beasts of burden, trained in their tasks and practically doing the work for me, Shape Metal is more like a cat that has been personally slighted.  Wonderful, yes, but upset with me at every turn and requiring quite a bit of coaxing to make what I actually want.  I would sooner take Form Fortification and feed it collected stone, than I would the more flexible Shape Stone, if only because I could be certain the the fortifications would be done correctly.

Shape Wood from Spirituality has the same problem.  But Make Low Metal doesn’t.  ‘Low’ is a modifier that many of my spells have, which makes me wonder how far an apparatus is meant to grow.  Already I am an army of myself, and I have yet to reach ten with a single soul.  But setting that aside, the ability to make the substance we need?  Even if it were of lower quality… what of it?  I am not creating overguns or timepieces, I would be making cookware and armor.  Additionally, Seek Resources sits on the same list, tantalizingly teasing the existence of other seek spells.

Oh, how I long for something that would guide me to answers to the Green.  Answers for the apparatuses.  Answers for what happened to this world.

Maybe someday.  For now, Spirituality is high on my list.

Ingenuity should be too.  Specifically because Refine Material seems like a puzzle piece that clicks into place next to Make Low Metal.  Or next to any construction attempt.  If I am going to do something, I should do it with the best I can conjure, after all.

And all of this, all this thought and planning and speculation, is subject to two horrifying conditions of its own.

One: over the next several days, my friends and confidants are going to one by one walk into this room, look at my notes, and ask me if I have gone mad for missing an obvious benefit to something I have overlooked.  And two: whatever I do pick, it will likely include the elevation of a soul.

And then I am going to have even more choices.

This plan, the entire thing, is like setting camp on swiftsand.  Because I may wake up in the morning to find that my firepit has been swept away on the current and my bedroll is sitting atop a new swell of a dune that I am going to have to climb down.

But what else can I do, except look for answers in myself?

Well.  That is perhaps not quite so hypothetical, now is it?

I have quite a lot of magic, and I have had no time to truly explore any of it.

What can I already do, I wonder?  While I start to draw lines in the valley’s whisper of a road that leads to the fort, marking out where I will be trying to form the outlines of homes and storehouses over the next few days, I also begin drawing invisible lines in my mind.

What spells could do more?  What can I put to new uses?  What idle fluffmote of an idea has floated through my thoughts a dozen times but not been tried yet?

It is a beautiful warm sunny fall day to ask these questions of myself.  And I think, perhaps, I would also like to ask them of some of my oldest companions.

I wonder what my bees think of all this?  And I wonder what their growing and maturing selves might have to offer in thoughts.

If I am quick, perhaps we can refine a plan for our strange communal hive before Yuea returns and demands me to take Make Meal so she will never be asked to help in the kitchens again.