Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 152 (Patreon)

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 18

If you asked most anyone what Form Wall does, I think that you could reasonably expect them to say that it formed, in some way, a wall.

If the cleric asked the question to an alleyway class of youngsters, I think he then would have followed up with a friendly smile and a few examples.  Drain Health doesn’t just drain away.  Imbue Mending can mend things that perhaps aren’t all just solid objects.  I have not tested if Amalgamate Human would work on a demon or a verdling, but I feel that it might, as though the spell is using a form of ‘human’ from an outdated language I never knew.

Then, the question would be presented again.  What do you think you could make Form Wall do, if you were trying to be a little rude not to the teacher, but to the spell?

Well!  What is a floor, if not a flat wall?  A roof secured against the stormsuns is simply several angled walls forming slanted and braced peaks.   A foundation is walls that run deep, and structural bracings are walls that are slimmed down and called ‘beams’.  If you wanted to be especially pedantic, you might even say that an arm shield is merely a wall that is portable.

Personally, I would draw my boundary at saying that clothing is a very flexible cloth wall.  But what harm would there be in trying, anyway?  What is the very worst thing a spell could say in reply?  No?  I already have the magic, there is no waste of power to be had here.  The only failure would be failure to use it fully, and that would include at some point an attempt to make a proper suit.

Not now though, as cloth is at a premium in this fort.  The coming winter will be a problem if we can’t come up with at least a few blankets.

Blankets, and also, shelter.  Of all the problems that one can solve with Form Wall, shelter seems to be the one ill that is most obviously curable.

I am no architect, but I know the basics.  A roof must be supported internally or it will sag.  A roof that sags will pool rain or detritus, especially in the Green, and collapse.  So a good roof must also be slanted.  Slanted, but stocky enough and reinforced from within to withstand the galesun next year.

Though… does it need that?  Do my buildings need that?  The galesun, the wholly understood reasons why cities must forever sprawl outward with layered curtain walls and district clusters, always outward, never upward, not even for a library or a palace… that galesun does not apply to me.  It hits me very suddenly.  Two of the three stormsuns I can do little about, but the one that is most likely to topple anything I make?  That one is predictable and blockable.

Oh, some cities have raised towers in the past; windwards and advanced materials are always options, if expensive ones, but I have never lived those places.  Only studied them, as curiosities.

And yet I wouldn’t even know where to begin to work without that constraint.  How would one even stack a building, if each layer is built atop a slant?  There would be too much wasted space.  Or… no, that’s not right either, is it?  You simply wouldn’t do that.  But then what supports each floor beyond the second?

I am not, I wish to make it abundantly clear, an architect.  My hands and paws were never strangers to hard work, even the merchant.  She loaded too many barrels and sacks into caravan barges to claim otherwise.  But the making of a true building and not a temporary shelter is a science I don’t grasp.

Yet.

All of this is an attempt to determine where to begin.  The farmer was fond of the idea that you begin by beginning, that if you don’t know where to start, you should start somewhere and work to fill in gaps when you notice them.  And that is a noble attitude to have when nothing you are making might fall on a child’s head if you do it wrong.  Unfortunate then, that I do not have quite the same luxury.

So I start somewhere foundational.  The foundation, that is.

The singer and killer alike have prowled through too many basements and cellars to leave me not knowing that a building needs a strong foundation.  That much I understand, at least.  And this loops me back to my original question; what is a wall, and how exactly can its forming be manipulated?

Collect Material sets my test site.  Volunteer bees show me their growing viewpoints through Bind Insect to allow me to target, while the work of gathering carves almost perfectly lined up furrows into the dirt of the small portion of the valley I have already cleared with Consume Ecology.  I cut down to the rock, and then smooth that rock down to the closest thing I can get to level before hewing thick uniform grooves into it.  I am rather certain I have done a good job, and I use expressions of Know Material to triangulate, making use of the relevant knowledge I do have.

I start small.  I must start small, if I overextend I won’t learn anything from the failure.  So no basement, not yet.  Just the support that the rest of the structure will need.

Form Wall fills the small corridors of space.  I have ample supplies of stone leftover from my ongoing attempts to circle our position with Stone Pylons, and I make use of that, letting Form Wall draw it out of wherever my magic warehouses things and growing it like coral to come together as a solid piece of thick, sturdy stone.  The ‘wall’, such as it is, fits into the cut groove until I meet an amount of resistance to the magic itself.  I cannot see the base anymore, hidden as it is from my bees, but the sensation is almost like pressure.  I ease back on the wall’s growth, and let Form Wall simply finish filling the space up to the leveled dirt ground.

Now, a floor.  Collect Material again fills my thankfully contained inner world with dirt, as I slough away the top layer within the marked off square of foundational walls.  And then Form Wall again.

I rapidly learn from this attempt.

First, I learn that the material I have gathered with Collect Plant, especially the trees, is not… what I would call ‘material’ in the sense of it being workable goods.  What my spell dredges back into the world is green untreated wood, often with layers of bark still attached.  I cannot tell how it is exactly carved up to be used, but my imagination supplies the thought of a tree being rotated on a roasting spit, the spell carving off the outer layers like a street food vendor.  This alone would be enough to cause serious problems for the long term viability of this plan, but it is only the beginning.

More importantly, I feel Form Wall stretch, the formations and twisting rings of it in my mind going taut as I attempt to push it to Form Floor.  And that, exactly that, right there, is what should have tipped my worries.  If there is a Form Floor, then it implies a lack of capability on the part of Form Wall.

When the spellwork breaks, I am not surprised.  I am mildly alarmed with the vigor it shows in breaking, the amount of ‘floor’ I have managed cracking and popping like a particularly solid soup set to simmer.  But aside from that… there is no damage.  To the foundation or to the bees helping me, I mean.  The floor is unsalvageable.  This method would only work if I were creating ‘walls’ of particularly thin strips and layering them together.  Perhaps one of those herringbone patterns the singer saw in so many private noble rooms.

Well.  Form Wall is certainly prepared enough to try.  And trying things is rather the point of all this.

I get four layers into the patterning before I come to two conclusions.  One is that my mind is drastically different than any of my past living selves, because I don’t think any of them would ever get this far in a task this tedious without friction.  As I’ve been noticing more and more, each spell I fold into my souls seems to have, for lack of a better term for it, its own helpful addition to my thinking.  A little extra focus, just for itself, and immune to boredom and tedium.  I quite appreciate it.  It also means that my clearer and more observant thoughts are free to notice that my plan to use ‘flat walls’ is not going to work either.

They just are not interlocking properly.  There’s something wrong with how they fit together, the wood I am using for this experiment sliding against the other pieces even when they should be holding each other in place with braced angles.  So what is going wrong?

The bees give me a closer look, their eyesight sharper than the glimmerlings I have on station.  And close up, it becomes more clear what has happened.

Form Wall has created walls.  Obvious, I am sure.  I resolve in the moment to not tell Yuea this, she would laugh at me.  But what I see at a smaller scale is that the flattened strips of ‘wall’ that I have made are, indeed, walls.  Complete with the kind of spacing that would be required if I were putting structures adjacent to each other.

Could this be overcome?  Possibly.

Just to see if it can be done, I call forth a wall that is as smooth and flat as I can make it, and then use an application of Collect Material and the force of my glimmerlings to push it over.  The wall does indeed end up as a flat pane, though a second attempt to test a few different things shows me something annoying.  It is Claim Construction that breaks when the wall falls, as well as anything modifying the wall through that or Form Wall itself using Link Spellwork.

So I can engineer a situation where a floor occurs.  I simply… cannot make a floor.  Not that includes the magic that would make it a viable long term solution.  Also this plan - and I use the term in a way that I would never tolerate from a student - would never survive use for anything but a ground level floor.  Not to mention the fact that a toppled wall is unlikely to properly fit into any notched grooves within the foundation that I have built, meaning I am losing out on the entire benefit of doing so.

I do wonder, though, as I try to determine what my next step is.  If I had Form Floor, would it compensate for that?  The magic automatically fitting itself into the space meant for it, the matter of leveling and stability and foundation taken care of?

The thought bounces across something in my mind, and I wonder something new.  Form Wall cannot easily make flooring because even in small scale, the walls push back and create space around themselves.  What else do they do, as walls?

Many of my magics have modes of use that require a heftier allocation of the empty liquid that pools within them.  More force applied to achieve a qualitatively improved result.  Would Form Wall be similar?  What could it do, if I gave it everything?

I poke and prod and feel against the edge of the spell as the reservoir refills slowly.  There are tools there, spaces where things are meant to fit, whether they are materials or shadows or ideas or other spells entirely.  I’ve seen this before, many of my magics have these.  But it never set upon me that several of these may be undeveloped.  I can only tell here because there is one that is almost usable, but isn’t quite.  The spell simply isn’t big enough.

Or rather, the flow of liquified nothing through it isn’t enough.  The wheel needs to turn faster.

I had already known I would need it, but even still.  It feels tense to spend my blazing points of power, even if elevating Ingenuity is the correct thing to do in the moment.  I need stronger walls, more walls, places for the incoming and homes for the valley.  Seraha needs a village, the children need a place to grow up, Muelly needs a home to come back to, Yuea and Mela need a place to protect, Kalip needs a place to shed his soldier’s cloak.  They need me to build something.

And building needs me to convert my power into a different form.

Shine - Apparatus Of Change

Soul of Unity

Available Power : 13

Ingenuity : 6

Know Material (1, Perceive)

Form Wall (2, Shape)

Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)

Sever Command (4, War)

Collect Material (1, Shape)

-

Just like that, it is done.  And I am more.  Closer to being whole, or more whole than I was previously even if I was already entirely myself.  Already, Form Wall is refilling faster, with more pressure on the unseen valve.  I know I will be able to do more with this.  But first, a quick check of one important thing.

Ingenuity : 6

Available :

See Spellwork (6, Perceive)

Convert Material (6, Shape)

Two options this time, added to the chaos.  And of those options, I would bend the world for either.  My own eyes, in another form?  I want it so badly it stings, even if I know it could easily be another cold ledger like See Domain.  And what does it mean to Convert Material?  Could stone become rich soil?  Abundant dirt turned into soft cloth or unyielding metal for my work?  I do not know, but the potential value of it almost makes me grab it and pull it into my soul on the spot.

But I refrain.  Instead, Shift Wood adds it to the list in the mess hall, to be seen and argued by those with me.  Another decision point that will last until I have the temerity to spend my power in full.

And from there, I restart my testing.  This time, pouring everything into the simple square wall that marks out where I have demarcated a spot for things to go wrong.

Immediately I feel the difference.  Things the spell can do now that were out of reach before, like the first time I learned to split Distant Vision, or the increasingly potent control I have over Shift Wood.  I can tell there are options, discrete options, choices built into the magic that weren’t visible before.  And I force myself to not toy with them.

I give the magic a broad direction, and all the rock it needs to work, and let it pour out.

The wall grows like a curtain being pulled.  The bees might not be the most intellectually developed of their hive, but they are aware that things are not meant to pour into the world looking like liquid but standing like the sturdiest of tree trunks, and so their hasty buzzing retreat breaks some of my sightlines.  But not all, and they return soon enough to watch as the wall pools and pours itself together.

The differences are apparent even to my untrained eye.  For one thing, the wall is hollow.  Not hollow as a point of failure, but hollow as if it is waiting for something.  I find the hook within the working, and nudge options toward it until it seems to most readily accept a large quantity of the dried fieldgrass I have acquired through Collect Plant applications during my long attempts to understand where it puts things.  The stuff begins to cohere in the world within the paired stone forms, layered and laced together, and I believe even drier than when I gathered it.  I only need to see it for a moment to understand.

Insulation.  Form Wall is creating not just a flat pane of stone, but a wall.  A true wall, the kind of thing meant for a building in operation.  And once I see it, I see everything else.  All the little details that I saw in various lives, but never comprehended as part of a whole.  The molding near the dirt ‘floor’, the points near the top where I know Form Wall will be usable in the future like budding branches to connect and brace a ceiling, the window that comes together almost on a whim of the magic.  That last one a stern reminder that a building is more than a lightless crate.  If shelter from the elements was all that mattered, it would cost less for me to simply excavate caves for everyone to sleep in.

But that isn’t what a building is supposed to be.  And Form Wall can tell I am not asking it to fabricate the outer layer of a fort, or the sealed bulwark of a warehouse.

Yet now that I see it in action, now that I see where the choices to be made are, I think I could more easily build either of those things.  I could do so much, now.  Not a floor; in fact I think flooring might be even farther away.  But the expansion of the soul that governs this spell has opened doors to future uses just as surely as it is building a door in the outline of my little box.

My windowed, braced, secured, insulated box.

It is a monster more than any glimmerling I have ever made.  If I showed this to any of my past lives, they would raise eyebrows and curl lips.  The singer might try to say something nice about the attempt, the cleric might encourage me to keep trying.  But the farmer would ask what happened to the roof, and even the soldier would wonder if there was perhaps a different ruin of higher standing somewhere nearby to camp in.

But I did make it.

Start at the beginning.  Figure things out from there.

My terrible work needs things to be truly complete.  Coverings for the door and window, a roof, a real floor or at least some way to replace the dirt.  Complete is a word that does quite a lot of undeserved work here.  The building needs more things to even be considered a building.  And as the wall finishes coming together, I find that Form Wall is drained down to a tenth of its supply.  Not exhausted, but close enough that this is not something I can do more than four times a day.  For a simple one-room structure that might, if we are being generous, fit two people.  Four, uncomfortably.

So.  The work continues.

A roof first.  That is the important part.  And it is, I am comfortable saying, the most frustrating experience I have had with my magic so far.  Including trying to build a bridge through a moving river.

I have one tool that makes this possible.  Shift Wood.  Possibly Nudge Material as well, but it acts in service of Shift Wood, as that is what I am working with.  And I know, if I can simply get the roof close to the right position, Form Wall can pick up the slack and reinforce and brace it, should I be willing to pay the price.  But that is easier said than done.

For one thing, I need the wood to be present.  And unlike some of my other spells, Shift Wood does not draw from my personal storeroom.  There is a large amount of loose wood around the Green, for reasons that I hope are obvious; and it is actually a surprising source of motes of change to use my glimmerlings as a harvesting force to bring me fallen logs and broken branches.  And from there, the true work begins.

Work, in this case, is mostly the resistance of frustration.  The act of using Shift Wood to carve away bark and smooth out panes of wood is simple enough.  Nudge Material proves less useful, as my ‘fingers’ in the world are a role better played by the resinform glimmerlings I control, but I still find some uses for it.  Even assembling what I believe will be a working roof is easy enough.  Shift Wood does an exceptional job of letting me ease the edges of disparate pieces together, melding and shifting them in ways that I hope are not structural points of failure.

And then I need to put it in place.  And I realize my glimmerlings cannot fly, my bees cannot lift the weight, and Shift Wood can do a lot of things, but letting me project consistent and dedicated force to pull a heavy wooden object upward is not one of those things.  Move Wood would be welcome here, but I don’t even know if that spell is tethered to one of my own souls.  It is a strange life, to have so many very clear choices to make, but not to know what choices might come up later.

Well.  No.  That is every life, isn’t it?  My only advantage is that some of my choices have names.

This musing changes nothing.  The roof is not where it should be.  And even if I could find a way to make it be there, I would need to do it twice, at once, so that the heavy shingles I have tried to properly replicate like wooden scales can brace and hold each other up until Form Wall can finish the work of connection.

How did mortal hands ever do this on their own?  Well, with machinery and magic, I suppose.  The best time to begin construction on a collector was yesterday, as the saying goes, and I am well past the time where it would have been useful to start making even the simplest of those that I remember from the farmer’s life.  But I do know how pulleys and cranes work, even if I have never built one myself.  Wouldn’t that be a strange feat of irony; replicating a mechanical circumvention for the need to hire a sorceress with magic.  A playwright would love it.

What I should do is ask for help.  And I am, in fairness, in the process.  Small writings to those in the fort, a collection of volunteers who are healed and fed enough to try to assist.  But that will take time, and it will be part of the project once I have built the tools to build the tools.  The final draft of homes and workshops for a hundred or more weary lost souls steadily approaching us.

For now, I need to know if I can do this alone.

So the roof - my precious slanted roof piece, so much effort and focus put into you - is taken apart.  It pains me, but I do it anyway.  And then, with glimmerlings perched on poorly assembled ledges, I pass the pieces upward.

Shift Wood does not like holding things in place, but I force the issue, and the spell leaks all the faster for it.  Shift Wood does like being used in novel ways to manipulate its chosen material, however, and reassembling panes and shingles and a keystone beam of wood to hold it all together at the top is certainly a flexing of my limits.

The process comes together very suddenly, once I start.  Not in terms of time, but more that every step is one more thing I must pay attention to, or else it will all slip away.  One more drain on my patience and focus and magic alike.  And so it sneaks up on me, when it is done.  Or… not done, no.  But ready.

Form Wall is recovered just enough.  Or maybe not quite enough, but I hope that it will gain what it needs in the process.  Stone rises from where the building has taken shape, those nodes near the top of the wall’s structure now extending like spurs to bite into the formation I have balanced precariously atop them.  Over the open triangles of space on the two sides the roof does not cover, the rock wall grows upward to fill in to the edge of the reshaped wood.  More spurs grow, stone and wood linking together almost like I did this on purpose, even if I know that is a lie.  Shift Wood falters, and I replace it with a forceful and amateur push of Nudge Material, just holding on for a moment longer. 

And suddenly, I am exhausted.  The reserves of multiple spells running dry all at once.

But it doesn’t matter, because even as I sag back away from the structure, it does not collapse.  It is a structure; a poor one, an imitation of a professional’s work, but something that holds itself up without my intervention.

It feels silly, to be so proud.  It feels silly, to think this is some kind of important first step.

It feels less silly to see the amount of motes that burst out from the foundation in the moments after it has stood unassisted.

Now.  I simply need to learn to do this better, and then repeat the process a hundred times.

Just… as soon as I slip into unconsciousness for a moment.  A candlemark at most, I tell myself, as the dark edges close in around my thoughts.

A short, partially earned rest.