Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 151 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 17

“Imbue Motion, you dumb dervish of a rock.”  Yuea offers her opinion to me through Amalgamate Human, the woman finally taking more than the time required to offer a militant report back to me.  Her flock of lost and scared survivors is heading toward a somewhat defensible field in the shadow of a hillside, my bees having found it for us both and helping to guide them.  There is no way they will make it back to the fort today, so a place to camp where I can at least create clean lines of Fortify Space is worth a lot.

Yuea has been busy browbeating the different species in her caravan into understanding that if they try anything stupid, she will rip their arms off.  It’s fascinating, because these people should by all rights be terrified of what I am, and what I create and shape around myself.  I’ve seen it before; my bees, especially the lancer rank with their pony-sized bulk and mantra drilled combat skills, should seem like monsters.  But instead, Yuea is here.  And so my bees have become almost like lucky charms that ward off her worse irritation.  And Jahn and Parox have been painted as the reasonable and levelheaded counterweights, with the verdling in particular made confused as to why so many humans keep asking him questions.

It took me longer than I care to admit that Yuea is doing this on purpose.  Not even as a form of militarized anger on her part, but a more surgical social pressure that has everyone dancing to a tune she decided to hum out long before the group was brought together.  I notice it when I realize that Sharpen and Anv are left mostly alone.  The gob not distrusted or shunned, but simply given an amount of space from the crowd with an almost unconscious intent.  By the time the newest people feel safe enough to start asking what is going on, they are already part of a social web Yuea has created for them.

It’s impressive.  The singer has seen things like this before, the merchant has done things like it, and she would have been applauding Yuea’s skill.  I, personally, am impressed because it is… well… Yuea.  It is the woman who is even now speaking to me across my bond to tell me to pick a magic to improvise a gun for her.

I will not be doing that.  Imbue Motion is not on my short list.  Though, I am fulfilling my Small Promise to listen to my friend’s input.  But listening is as far as I go here.

I am busy playing with magic.

Oh, I could dress it up in a beautiful plumage and say I am experimenting, or preparing for the labor ahead, or any number of other things that are all technically true.  But the truth of it is that no matter what functions are served by my workings, what I am doing is playing with magic.

Specifically I am trying to understand Congeal Burn.  The spell from the fragment of the soul of Animosity that came paired with a vivid memory of being a woman that had killed a lot of things in her life, and was desperately trying to put it all behind herself.  The killer is an interesting life bound into my own soul of Unity.  Not quite a whole person, just bits and pieces, but held together by the bonding web I have made of myself.  And it is from there that I find guidance for Congeal Burn, surprisingly.

The killer was capable of shocking skill in violence.  A ruthlessness that extended to how she treated herself, even.  And I find that, when I focus on that, it is easy to make a burn that comes out hotter.  Meaner.  Congeal Burn creates small spherical porous red and black stones that flicker with heat and phantom firelight, but there is a flexibility to them that glimmer only seems to get from the environment, and not from my intent.

I try a few, draining some of the reserve, and remembering not just the killer’s old anger but also the anger of the cleric, and the singer, and the acid sensation of abandonment and hopelessness they lived.  And I find that it takes a surprisingly small amount of effort to cast out a Congeal Burn that erratically flickers and flares up, igniting anything within a claw’s width of itself.

And then I listen to the other side of her memories.  Because that ruthless violence is not only just a small part of a whole person, it was the part that the killer was trying to escape.  For more of her life than she actually lived it, she was running from it.  She wanted to be an artist.  Maybe she was an artist.  I can’t… tell.  I can’t see beyond the impression of canvas and paint, I can’t feel the skill and creativity the way I can feel the old recipes the farmer has stockpiled or the medical knowledge the scholar memorized.

It’s strange to be able to look back on a life I feel that I lived, even if it is only a small part, and be able to understand it from a broader perspective.  The killer’s community… they trusted her.  She didn’t know, she couldn’t see it.  Too close to the situation, perhaps.  But when there was trouble, she was the one they ran to, because they knew she would fight for them.  There was a bond there I wish she could have felt herself.  And I hope that I can carry on that part of her soul into something she would have wanted to feel herself.

And with that in mind, I cast the spell.  This time, Congeal Burn comes out warm.  Not blazing, not burning, just warm.  An orange glow from it illuminating my office and the scorch marks on my hastily assembled testing bench.  It isn’t some powerful secret magic, it isn’t a great weapon or a tool that solves all my problems.  It is simply… warm.

My office, seen through the eyes of my inkrats and resinlings and the one exceptionally curious lancer bee who is helping me today, feels more inviting.  Softer.  Nothing has changed, all the fear and trepidation about what is to come is still there.  And I do not actually know what Congeal Burn does, aside from make hot rocks.  But something is different anyway.

If nothing else, I have found one very important secret to my magic.  Something I should have realized a long time ago, I suppose.  It is, unlike the collector method or the school of the sorceress or even the modern magi practices, a magic that comes from my souls.  And so, of course it would be influenced by my own knowledge and perspective of those souls.

I wonder.  Did my magic truly get stronger when I simply poured more points of power into a given soul?  Or did it get stronger when I lived one of my memories firsthand?  When I connected to the people I was, that are now the source of my true strength?

It doesn’t really matter now, I suppose.  But I’m grateful to all those lives all the same.  Even if they are now closer to me than ever.  It seems a little silly to offer a silent ‘thank you’ to people who are, in a very direct way, me.  A little egotistical, perhaps.

So I set that aside and start trying to understand what Congeal Burn is actually good for.  Glimmer and mantra I know enough of, so what, then, is the special property of this new form of solid magic?

It is a candlemark later when Kalip nudges at me through the bond of Amalgamate Human.

”Is something attacking the fort?”  He asks me bluntly.  “I heard a shot.”

”How could you possibly?”  I try to sound curious rather than indignant.  “Which is to say, if there was a sound, you should be far too distant to have heard it.”

”Oop heard something and is poking me.  Also you gave me wolf ears, I can hear a lot more than you think.”  Kalip retorts flatly.

”Wolv.”

”I feel as if you don’t understand that no one here has seen a wolv in our lives.  No one has ever heard of a wolv.  Talquin and Parox, who lived so deep in the Green that we didn’t know there was a civilization there, have never seen or heard of a wolv.”

Kalip seems very fixated on this, and I do not understand why it is my fault.  I didn’t make wolvs real, after all.  “If I tell you that everything is fine, will you believe me?”

”No.”

”Loosing your magetouched bonds has made you far too eager to countermand people.”  I grumble.  But, well, part of our bond is emotional, and I have never once considered clamping down on the part that shares how I feel with Kalip.  So I know, without fear, that he already knows I am not harmed.  “Everything is fine, though.  My experiments with Congeal Burn have led me to discover a new way to cause an explosion, that is all.”

I feel more than hear Kalip’s disbelieving snort.  ”I’m not even in the valley and I heard that.”

”Well, the explosion happened over the treeline.  I wasn’t going to simply let it pool in my office.”

”Oh.  Did you learn Imbue Motion like I suggested?”  Kalip asks with what I can tell is feigned innocence.  He’s been hiding from everyone else how funny he finds everything now, how the slightest little things bring up a wellspring of laughter from a part of him that he’s never really been in touch with.  But he can’t hide it from me, and I see through his stoic exterior every time he says something like this.

So I simply threaten him back.  “I am going to Form Party you and Yuea with all the lancers and the group of you can discuss the merits of Imbue Motion together while I make real progress if the both of you keep bringing this up.”  Kalip doesn’t reply with words, but I get a pulse of something that feels for all the world like a compressed and almost physically solid yes ma’am sorry ma’am through the bond.  A buried reflex triggered from him, even if his soldier’s training is aimed at a different person now.

I return to my experiments.  Partly.  Part of me is using Shift Wood to repair the hole in the roof of the fort.  For all that this place was built to withstand the stormsuns, as any good building is, it was less prepared for the malicious comet of sound and heat that the burn I attempted to coax to life let out.  In my office while I fix my ceiling, my loyal lancer toys with the friendlier burn, a much more protective trailing ball of flame orbiting around her like a moon as she watches the rest of my desk with insectile suspicion.  I don’t know how she managed that so quickly, when it took me using my magic directly to prompt a reaction, but that seems to be the way of a lot of my congeal style spells.

Or maybe I simply haven’t tried to use glimmer or mantra properly.  Actually… I don’t think I have ever tried to make use of glimmer or mantra… at all.  Have I?

It seems so painfully obvious once I have the thought.  And the ever-denied reflex I have to try to sigh, I think, is the perfect example of why I didn’t think I could.  I have no hands to hold things, I wear no clothing to keep any trinkets close, and I certainly don’t own skin to press the magic against.

But at least in part, I can fix some of that.  And so my next project begins on the side as I try to find a way to even begin to test some of this.

Shift Wood and Shape Metal and a collection of material acquired in various ways, and adding to that my own memories of how to fashion a tool, or patch a piece of armor, and I have the start of something.  This part, at least, is easy.  I have no need for some masterwork, I won’t even feel whatever I layer onto my true body.  Instead, I just need a simple frame with slots for glimmer and mantra, and I need it to be capable of basic rotation.

When it is done, it is short work to fill it with samples of my creations, and have it carried to where my form is hiding by a resin glimmerling, and placed on one of the spurs of my crystal body.

Now.  I feel slightly ingenious for one particular aspect of my testing armor.  Glimmer is protective, yes, and I am sure I will find something I will need that for, so that part is always in contact with me.  But mantra?  Mantra wants repetition.  Practice.  Training.  Mantra wants to be specialized to not just a career or a skill, but a single action.  That is why it has been so effective when I have added it to tools, or rooms that serve a narrow purpose.

So now, I have a dial of several blank mantra.  And I know exactly where to aim a Nudge Material to simply… push the correct one for what I am doing into place.  Or to cut them all off from my body, if I do not want to taint them with whatever new foolishness I am attempting.

I give it a try, and I am startled by just how many drifting white motes of change the simple use of Nudge Material shakes loose.  I take a small moment to be enthusiastic before reminding myself that a big change doesn’t specifically mean I have made something healthy, and that what might have changed is that I have found a quick way to shatter myself.  But I don’t think that is the case, not really.  I think I have built myself a tool, that I am going to need to practice with even as I begin to refine the design, and expand on the concept of.

But for now I click the mantra into the ‘distant’ position, and get back to trying things.

While part of my thoughts drift through the eyes and feelers of the companion bees, listening to the words and sharing the time of many of the fort’s residents, I am also listing out ways my magic might connect to itself. Link Spellwork is continuing to be a trouble for me; I don’t actually know why it has changed from convenient bridge that was nothing but a useful targeting aid, to what it is now, but it did.  And now I have to live with that.

But maybe it isn’t all bad.  I can still work with this, as long as I can understand it.

I start with something that is easy enough to test out.  Drain Endurance and Bolster Nourishment.  Perhaps it is not the least complicated mixture, as I need to reverse the drain, but the spells together create a pleasing little ritual of action as I work a boon into the vegetable char that is being prepared in the kitchens for the midday meal.  I try this a few times, adjusting slightly and getting a feel for the magic, and I learn two things.  One quickly, and one when someone tries the new food.

Quickest I learn that this method?  It doesn’t take any of the stored endurance.  Drain Endurance has always been a push and pull, taking from somewhere and putting it somewhere else.  There is, as the merchant knew, no free meal.  But now, I learn second, there is literally actually a free meal, as the mixed militia exhausted from their morning drills together bite into the offered food and find themselves energized as if they’d just licked a vim slice.  But without any of the crash afterward.  Food that can restore stamina and vigor, just by being food, as long as I have the magic to spend.

I repeat the trick with Drain Health and it works as well, exactly as I want.  Nothing is lost, only something is gained.  But this… this would be at its best if I had something to use it on that could last a little longer.  So I ask the person who everyone still looks to as in charge of our kitchens.

Seraha, would it be trouble to ask for march crackers?  I write to the woman who is resting with a mug of steeped herbs that I have given her the recipe for.  I don’t think she likes it much, judging by how little has been sipped, but the smell at least she seems to appreciate.  I believe I have found a way to bottle a medic’s attention, and it would be nice to be able to put it in a convenient edible form.

The elderly pink furred demon looks down at the pane of wood that her own companion bee is crawling on so that I can see what I am writing.  Then she sighs.  Deeply.  “You know, Shine,” she says, with a voice that stirs memories of four different grandmothers of mine, “if you made make-meal a part of yourself, this wouldn’t be a problem you would have to bring to my old hands.”

Make Meal is on my list, but you know as well as I do that I will need more ways to build things.  I write in reply, almost controlling the damage the thicker letters form in the wood.  If I swear an oath to consider it, would it entice you to help teach Malpa how to fold them properly?  I would ask Talquin, but she cannot fit in the kitchen.

”Something to consider for the future.”  Seraha groans as she rises to her hooves with creaking bones.  “You have until I hobble my way across the courtyard to write me a recipe for whatever thing a march cracker may be.”  She tells me.

The recipe, modified for use with the limited stock of grain and oil we have available out here where most of our food is still coming from forage parties in the Green, is carved into a wooden pane by the time Seraha reaches her destination.  The hardest part is not remembering the steps - the soldier had them burned into her memory and I don’t know if I can forget the process - but instead guiding the glimmerling to balance the pane where it is in plain sight.  They are not precise constructs, my little hands and eyes.

Now I am thinking about food.  Food I cannot eat myself.  Oh, I have grown fond of tasting vicariously through my bound, but it is not the same.  Every day I find a new regret about my body that no magic will solve.  Even the nostalgic flavor of glimmer that my curious lancer has apparently made a habit of snacking on doesn’t make up for the loss.

But loss aside, I am thinking about food.  And those thoughts wander to a spell I have hesitated on.

Consume Ecology was dangerous at first because the Green might have found it objectionable.  And it is a known fact, in this part of the world, that damaging the Green leads to the Green damaging you back.  Perhaps not personally, but on a scale that has swallowed whole towns before.  Muelly’s entire life before was apparently as an heir to the position of ‘person who is there to tell everyone to not poke the woods’, after all.

But now I hesitate for another reason.  Because I am, as far as the thing below us cares, classified as a ‘toolmind’.  I have permission to modify this place, and for those modifications to not be undone.

And I have seen what Consume Ecology does to this land.  The calcified scar fifty lengths wide as an enemy apparatus hewed a line through the world, reducing all life down to crumbling chalk and dusty bleached bones.

Clearly it did not have permission, because the Green has already swallowed up that nightmare.  But… what if I did the same thing?  What if it stuck?  I hold back on Consume Ecology because, even if I could make the damage small and focused, I don’t really want to scar the world like a new horrible form of stormsun.

But I have to know.

I use a ring of glimmerlings as spotters ten lengths from the fort, on the edge of my range for the Avarice spell.  The soul is not folded into me yet, so I cannot empower it, and the spell itself recovers slowly because of it.  But I make do.

I don’t know what to expect, or what I even want, so I start by simply letting Consum Ecology work as it wants to.  A small circle of soil and a small amount of grass my target.  And the effect is both instant, and neigh-euphoric.

The world opens up before my senses.  Everything contains energy, this has been a known scientific fact for as long as even the farmer was alive.  But it was academic, for most of my lives.  Even now, it should still be.  But suddenly, there is a sense of a pulsing, winding, glowing vigor infused deeply within even the dirt I am looking at.  Not simply ‘life energy’, such a thing has always been an oversimplification for stage plays, but it is something that is now visible to me through its outline, and accessible through the stirge of Consume Ecology.

With less hesitation, I bite down on that energy, and feel a rush of that vigor start to trickle through my souls as I feed.

It is challenging to keep my focus.  But I manage to see what is happening.  Unguided, the energy is simply processed by the turning and grinding wheels of the spell, and then unceremoniously fed back into nearby reservoirs.  Slowly, not especially impactfully, but… where before, Drain Health had been rather low from my testing, now it sees an increase in the dripping nothingness that refills it.  Enough to be noticed.  It is not the only spell either.

And this is from taking the life from a patch of mostly empty dirt.

I continue to experiment.  Observing the place I have affected, I have done far less damage than the other apparatus did.  But damage all the same.  I mark it off, and leave a glimmerling to observe, and move to another nearby patch for testing.  This time, I try to focus the energy into a single spell, and learn two things.  One, I can do that.  And two, sadly, Consume Ecology cannot replenish itself.

The next set of tests is of scale, and force.  How wide of an area can I affect?  Roughly a circle of a length in diameter.  How deeply can I drink?  Well, that one is a heady rush of powerful flavor, and this time the effect is far more pronounced than greying dirt and wilting plants.  This time… I begin to see how my enemy did so much damage.  Some of the energy I am stripping away brings with it the color of the world, the vibrancy and life, and also, the core force that holds it all together.  Inside the area I try to strip bare, even the breeze dies and sunlight dims, as the natural world itself is milled like grain.

It feels too good.  I don’t like it.  Especially as I don’t yet know if the Green will recover the damage I’ve inflicted here.  An experiment it might be, but harmless I can’t say it is.

And yet, I can see the use.  Oh, can I see uses.  A Stone Pylon with this applied might not become exactly a self-perpetuating siege weapon, but it wouldn’t be far from that.  And what if I could Link Spellwork it into a Spawn Golem?  The expedition, in their reports, already talks about losing travel time because the golems need to ‘rest’ far too often.  If there was a way to let them feed like beasts of burden… would they inherit my permission from the Green?  Or would they instead be capable of powering themselves off grass and mast that replenishes faster than it is eaten?

Even beyond that, the spell processes the fed upon energy so cleanly.  Could it be used to heal myself?  Or even to fill the stores of Drain Endurance?  I have already depleted Consume Ecology for the day, so finding that out will take a period of rest, but… I am becoming exceptional at precision with tools not meant to be precise.  If nothing else, I could weed a farm plot with the most outsized mystical hoe possible.

Whatever my end use becomes, these last few candlemarks have been of great use to me.  It is knowledge.  And knowledge for its own sake is always welcome, but in this case, each thing I learn and try brings me one step closer to… well… anything.  To knowing how to solve the next problem before it happens.  To being able to be a better apparatus, I suppose.

I take a moment of just floating, pulling back from the eyes and ears I have as windows into the world.  Letting the motes of change from Small Promises and Claimed Constructions and Stone Pylons working away at their tasks flow toward me.  Glimmer, mantra, and burn all providing small dustings of the stuff, while bound insects and borrowed fish and two changed humans provide a good deal more.  Clothing holding itself together with Imbue Mending and working knives made from Make Low Blade handing over their own tithe of two or three motes each day as they see practical use.  Parties and caravans shaking out pulses as the people in them adapt and overcome their own challenges.  Even a tiny, tiny amount of income from Know Material and Distant Vision and See Domain, sight-spells still hard at work showing me the world my way.  A new way.

There’s even tiny bits from one particular Small Promise.  A mote or two every time someone visiting the dining hall sees my written out list of spells, potential choices, and logic laid bare.  Every time one of them talks to the growing beetles who are standing around the dedicated table, telling them what they think is a good idea.  Each opinion I hear and consider fulfilling my oath that I will listen.  Everyone has ideas.  Even the soldiers that are still jumpy around me.  Even the survivors who are still hurting and worried for tomorrow.  There is something cathartic, I think, about seeing a set of solutions set out and presented as potential.

The change motes aren’t a storm or a flood.  It isn’t even really a flurry; the stuff is too distributed and diffuse to fully cloud my one personal sense of vision.  Even if a lot of that is from experimentation that bleeds motes into the world in bursts, it doesn’t distract me.  And it is steady, and it is, ironically, change that comes from trying to force the world into a stable shape.

For the people with me who deserve peace.

Another point of power solidifies.  Eighteen of the things.  And while the impact of any given source lessens over time, as is to be expected from a magic I have taken to calling change, I still predict that at this rate I will have another point within three days.  Less, if something happens.

And something is going to happen.  Because, with most of the more constructive magic I have given time to rest and recover, I think I would like to try my hand at assembling something before Yuea and Jahn and Kalip and Jeorge all return bearing more mouths needing food and heads needing beds.

Ingenuity is at the top of my speculative list.  I think, for some tentative reason, that Form Wall is going to need all the help it can get.