Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 121 (Patreon)

Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 11

Authority : 7

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

See Commands (5, Perceive)

Bind Crop (4, Command)

-

Nobility : 6

Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)

See Domain (1, Perceive)

Claim Construction (2, Domain)

Stone Pylon (2, Shape)

Drain Health (4, War)

Spawn Golem (5, Command)

Empathy : 5

Shift Water (1, Shape)

Imbue Mending (3, Civic)

Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)

Move Water (4, Shape)

-

Spirituality : 6

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

Congeal Mantra (1, Command)

Form Party (3, Civic)

-

Ingenuity : 5

Know Material (1, Perceive)

Form Wall (2, Shape)

Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)

Sever Command (4, War)

Collect Material (1, Shape)

Tenacity : 6

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

Pressure Trigger (2, War)

Blinding Trap (5, War)

-

Animosity : - -

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

Congeal Burn (2, Command)

Trepidation : -

Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

How are they doing?  The words write themselves onto the table that Muelly sits at, a wooden mug of a wildbrew sitting in front of her as the fort’s children pretend to play through the room.

”Bad.”  The demoness whispers to the beetle sitting with her and listening for anything secret woes the children have that need to be shared.  Not the small secrets; they deserve the fun of those.  But there are strangers and worries in our fort, and while I will not tell Muelly or Seraha or Talquin that Iyko and Ahalan have snuck away some of the vim-baked soldier crackers so that they can play at being heroes, I would have a reaction to hearing anyone had attempted to hurt or subvert one of our vulnerable younglings.

Our.  They are our children now.  Every one of them an orphan, and yet, every one of them made to feel like they can belong with us regardless.  Or so is my hope.  I’ve lived through my own orphaning five times; most who live long enough do in truth.  The bitterest sorrow is that the one who wanted that freedom never felt it.  But the singer is part of me now, and maybe it will comfort that part of my soul that we have no apparent parent.

Talquin, one of the two verdlings down in the cellar where the children wait to hide in the event any skirmish does spill over to the fort, leans her neck around Muelly to read my message.  I can tell the demoness doesn’t like it by how she twists away and huffs, but it is the casual and personal dislike of someone whose acquainted is invading her personal space, and not a revulsion at the verdling in particular.

I had worried, so much, that the verdlings would be rejected.  But the human and demon populations had already made the struggle to accept each other, and compared to that, a new species was nothing.  I hadn’t asked, but there are other races and species through the world, and both polities have dealings with them, or even populations of them.  The animosity between human and demon is due to a long cultural history of violence and blood, and that simply doesn’t exist for the verdlings that no one has met but me.

”They will be strong.”  Talquin says in her poetic voice as I write the same words again under the first line in her language.  “They see us, and envy our calm, so they will play at it until it becomes the truth.”

”Or they’ll just cry when we’re not around.”  Muelly grumbles.  She would know, I suppose.  Though I say it without malice; I would cry when no one was around, if I had the choice.  And really the children will never cry alone.  They trust the bees that I use to keep them safe, past the point where I truly believe the first time any of them encounter a hive in the wild without my binding, the will be rather painfully surprised at how bees normally are.  “How are things going?  You have the dusk excuse to be here, so it can’t be all bad.”

You are safe.  I scratch out in two languages at the same time, moving the carvings into the table apart so Talquin can pull back from Muelly.  The verdling settles back, folding all four legs beneath her as she lets her form drop to the thin makeshift cushion.  The enemy is gone for now.  Annihilated at all three points, with the deception hiding our true location.

“Is it… is it the same one that Mela’s been fighting?”  Muelly asks quietly.  “With the mud things.”

I don’t… know.  I mark a spiral sigh into the table, taking catharsis where I can find it.  The mud things are very much glimmerlings though.  We’ve pulled enough of the stones from their bodies.  If this is the same one, it would have already known where we are I suspect.  It would perhaps follow that this is a use of Sp-

I stop myself from carving Spawn Viscera into the table so deeply even I couldn’t smooth it out.  I can make new tables; in fact, wooden furniture is the one thing we will never have in short supply.  But I would rather not give myself more chores when there are tactical nightmares.

”Make gore.”  Muelly tells Talquin, keeping her voice low enough that the children don’t suspect there is an adult conversation going on for them to spy on.  On the table, Oob shuffles out of the way of my writing, orienting himself to face the pack of kids that are stacking the wooden shapes I have formed for them to play with.  They are creating something architecturally impressive given how subdued they are, hiding in a cellar while the world ends and the galesun adds to the chaos.  “It’s one of the… the persistence soul ones?”  Muelly knows my options as well as I do, almost.  I find that I trust her feeling on my choices for magic, in the same way I trust Kalip and Yuea’s tactical analysis, or Seraha’s opinions on usage.

That is close to correct.  I wish linguistic drift hadn’t left me feeling like I was writing words half forgotten.  It is the only thing I have seen that could have done something like this.  With… with the use of the dead.  But for now at least, we are… safe.

I hate using the word.  I hate lying.  But it is so close to true.  Safety, perched just outside the ends of the tips of our claws, taunting.  With every problem solved or managed, two more present.  And so many of those new problems are things coming to kill us.

Muelly and Talquin though, will take what offer of safety they can get.  The women sag in relief and sigh in their own ways loudly enough that the children notice.  Muelly calls them over, human, demon, and gob leaving off their growing castle to hear that they won’t be dying today, and they’ll get to head back up to the surface soon.

I leave them to tend to the young ones.  Gobs included; it is so achingly familiar how a gob can go from a competent and willing utility in any formation, to a child, in the pulse of a heart.  They would fight if they were ordered.  They have fought for us, and for themselves.  But that does not change that they are so, so young.  And children that fight wars tend to be children that die in wars.  The end of the world hasn’t changed that.

No, hidden away, behind layers of defense and our motley militia, that is where they belong.  Not safe.  I cannot make them safe.  But at least with the hope of being more than just soldiers.

Outside, Yuea stands down her little army.  They were prepared to defend our fort, posting on the walls with my golemic siege weaponry and the last of our ammunition in those absurd oversized magetouched rifles.  Along with postings from my bees who cling to the walls against the growing winds, waiting in case they are needed for… well, anything.

The larger bees, the ones suffused with both glimmer and mantra, the ones I call lancers, they are strong.  For bees.  They are large, for bees.  And they are certainly intelligent, for bees.  But two things keep them from being an army; they are still less effective at ripping apart a human body than a gun is, and they are not expendable.

Still, they are there to help.  Even without my orders, they followed Yuea and the others to defend the place they see as their hive.  And I love them for it.

Despite no fighting reaching them, this has been a good exercise for the soldiers of two hostile empires that are now forced to work together; survivors of an upheaval that has left their worlds broken.  And now I ask for them to change again, to meet my own arbitrary requirements.  Maybe it isn’t right or fair of me.  Maybe forcing them to act differently simply because I have the power to do so is wrong.  I don’t particularly care.  They will make peace with each other and survive this storming.  And already, they begin to share the soldier’s true love; griping about drills that do not end with them dead.

Did anything happen while we dealt with the enemy?  I write to Yuea as she remains perched on one of the angled points of the wall.  I have only so much focus to give, sadly, and I cannot be everywhere.

”Nothing.”  She says simply. Only she says it across Amalgamate Human.  “Anything far out there?”

I push my focus back to Distant Vision.  I maintain four spots of it at a time now, a tiny fragment of my attention watching for motion in them.  But it costs little for me to sweep them across the edges of the Green and the outer half of the aggressive woods that are still within my minimum range.  I can’t see everywhere, but it feels grounding to see myself moving among trees and ground cover, even as the galesun kicks up torrents of wind that fling mast and dirt everywhere.  For many of these plants, being uprooted every storming is simply the next step in their life cycle.  But it does still make sorting through the noise difficult.

Nothing that I can… no, I lie.  There are people.

There are people out there.  I have only caught the edge of the group, but I swing my sight around to locate them and begin to triangulate where I would make a map.  Five humans, one of those furred forms that isn’t a demon.  They are all injured and look like they are starving, and they are so, so far from us.  And not just them.  Another point of my quick sweep catches sight of a pair of gobs, one with a rifle longer than they are over a shoulder, the other… missing anything like a tool.  Missing an arm, too, orange blood dripping where duller orange scales end.

I spot more movement as well.  Not much in the way of wildlife; the Green has been worryingly empty of larger land animals for some time, though I do see a bosu ignoring the high winds and taking advantage of the exposed rockgrass.  No, most of the smaller and more clever creatures are sheltered somewhere by now.  Instead, what I see are distorted fuzzy red insectile shapes that spit liquid fire, turning strategic targets among the vegetation to ash and cinder as they wander.  I see a pack of thick mud form glimmerlings hunkering down where winds strong enough to rip fur out and abate skin swirl.

“Well?”  Yuea asks me.

Well.  There are people.  And more living weapons from our friends like myself.  Scattered between here and the border.  I… I want to help the survivors.  But even I have a difficult time thinking of how blind hope could help us reach them in time.

Yuea snorts inside my thoughts.  “Just talk to me you rock.”

Amalgamate Human takes more effort to speak through than it does to heal my bound, and far more than to simply write, but I try anyway as Yuea seems to be confrontational today.  I open with a sigh.  “I knew we would not be able to help everyone.  And yet.”

”You still sound so unlike what I expected.”  She replies.

“Focus, Yuea.”  I chastise, accidentally reinforcing it with a command that I hope she does not notice.  “How do we reach them, and recover them?”

”You just said-“

”I lied.  I lie constantly.  If I did not have Small Promise to reward me for truths I would never stop lying.  I would only ever speak to children and tell them the future will be made of wonders and peace.  Now help me devise a solution.”

Yuea jerks her head to the side, swatting at the air in front of her face.  “Don’t fucking do that.”  She snaps as I speak a spell name.  “Look, we’ve got a few days for you to recover.  Just carve paths for them and let them come to us.”

”And make a trail to our door that we know at least one enemy can sense.  Yes, I can see how you ended up a commander.”

”Fuck you.”  Yuea bites off the words even across the bond.  “You get stronger from winning.  How much did you get, just from today, eh?”  I don’t answer, and she fills in the silence.  “Right.  Send your furred friends out, cast through them, and pull up a trail.  You don’t even have to fortify it, just make it easier and guide them back to us.”

I check Distant Vision, ‘pulling’ the casts across the ground back toward me, before pushing them back out once they reach the inner edge of my range, using the tactic to measure lengths of distance and vector to the survivors.  “It’s too far.”  I say.

”So reach farther.”  Yuea tells me flatly.  “Make your souls bigger.”

”I need that power.”  I remind her, briefly distracted as Kalip and Mela make their way back to the fort, both of them too tired and drained to scale the walls and needed the gate to be opened for them.  I still need to repair that gate fully, it takes too long to open and it lists.  “there are so many things I need it for.  Subvert Low Glimmer as a weapon against our constant harasser.  Distant Trajectory simply to see how it improves my flexibility and real reach.  Create Low Metal, or my own Small Trade, to cover the deficiencies in what the merchant would call the bottom line of survival.  Or even simply adding to my Authority soul the unassuming Make Meal, as Seraha is still ill, and there are thirty stomachs that need filling.  I am needed for you first and foremost, I cannot… I cannot justify making your lives harder to try to save… a few others.”

Yuea growls at me.  Out loud and through our link.  ”If you do that again, I’m finding out what happens when a woman shatters an apparatus.”  She threatens me.

I let the hostility break against me, and remind myself to stay steady.  I cannot calm myself easily in this wretched unfeeling body, so I must force myself to stay as placid as possible, especially if I am to be a general commanding strike teams.  “I apologize. I will find other ways to communicate spells.”

”You fucking idiot.”  Yuea says, a sudden softness to her.  “You… no.  Not that.  Though yeah, stop doing that too.  But no.  Every one of us was dragging our heels to death’s storehouse.  You think you owe us priority?  You think we’re better than everyone else?  Fuck you, Shiny.”  The woman raises an emerald tinted arm and jutts her hand out to point into the sea of windstruck forest.  “Every time you pass your limit you come back stronger.  And every person you have here, you care more.  Tell me when I’m pointing the right direction, and I’ll take care of some of it, and you can get the others.”

”What… are you doing?”  Kalip asks his commander as he drags himself up the sluice stairs to the wall, watching as Yuea has a silent conversation with me, her arm extended in a fixed position.

”Arguing.”  Yuea says.

Kalip, the traitor, just nods.  “Let me know if you win, commander.”  He says with total faith in the woman, before saluting and delivering a rapid report.  “The enemy are using Hisii tactics.  Scouting in force with expendables.  I recognize the formations, even if it was dragged through tar and back.”

”Shit.”  Yuea responds bluntly.  “The bodies?”  She prompts.

With a shake of his head, Kalip delivers bad news to both of us simultaneously.  “No.  It would have to be the… the lord on the other end.”  He’s still shy about saying the word ‘apparatus’.  I suspect he might think of it as my own personal title.  “Which means military knowledge.”

Yuea grunts in irritation.  ”Which means” she says as a current of wind tugs at the wall hard enough to pull her hair back and send the bee with her scrambling to find purchase, “that in a tenday we’re going to see the next step, and a forward fort near where we dropped the scouts.”

”You can’t build in the Green.”  I point out to Yuea.  A statement that I have learned from my companions; I never knew the Green when I was alive.  And even as I say it, I remember that I have a sinking suspicion the statement is more folklore than fact.  “Except for this fort due to an unknown influence.  And the grim little structure that one of our enemy apparatuses had-“

”Yeah, thanks.”  Yuea says out loud.  “Shut up.”

”Commander?”  Kalip says the word with mild curiosity, but the full force of all the trust he’s chosen to invest in Yuea.

”Talking to Sparkles.”  She taps her forehead.  “It’s getting easier, unfortunately.  I’ll teach you the trick later.”

Kalip nods once.  “Does she know Hisii tactics?”  He asks.

I do not.  It’s another unfamiliar name, something that drifted by while all six of my lives were busy being dead for more years than I will ever truly know.  The two of them work rapidly to explain, and I focus with the part of my mind that I use for military matters while I restart the habitual casting processes that will put my magic back to work building a defensive ring of Stone Pylons, while another part of me takes a very long moment to drain Bolster Nourishment into our food stockpiles.

Without living distractions like feeling the wind on my skin or experiencing thirst, I have much more of my thoughts open to learning cold military stratagems.

I think I am not doing well.  Over and over, each new crisis puts it off a bit longer.  But I have living memories of six minds, paired to this seventh new mind that is my true life now, and I do not think I am supposed to be trapped in my own body.  Bit by bit, it is becoming more of an itch that cannot be reached, and I worry at how bad it will become before the end.

But for now, I listen to Yuea and Kalip, and put off my own collapse.  I learn of the Hisii, of how the forces of their Empress went to total war with a people they could not tolerate - a familiar loop of a story for these people - and how they fought and died.  Kalip says that the idea of scouting in force isn’t uncommon among the litany of imperial enemies, but the Hisii did it differently.  The important part is that there is a doctrine of how they would follow up on fallen scout clusters.

First, a staging point will be established.  Pulled back from where the losses were suffered, but within a day’s travel.  And the Hisii were adept at war during storming, so that would be a day adjusted for the galesun.  Then, they would wait.  Wait, and reinforce.  Not simply sending more forces, but sending their most powerful available sorceresses and slayers, all while more scouts scoured the nearby area.  And then, when they located their target, they would wipe it away with their full force.

They lost the war because the strategy was grounded in hot emotion and not cool logic.  It was exploitable by an enemy.  But only at a large scale that we did not have.  What it meant here was…

”It’ll be coming itself.”  Kalip says.  “If it thinks it’s a Hisii.  Or remembers being one, maybe.  And that’s a problem.”

I think, I write out, relaxing the somewhat selfish taxing connection of Amalgamate Human so that it can instead expend itself restoring Kalip, that many of my kind are not well.

”In a way we can exploit?”  Yuea asks, crossing her arms on the wall and leaning defiantly into the wind.

”Are you doing okay?”  Muelly asks me, running fingers across the wall where I’ve written to her.

”I get that.”  Dipan says as he squints to carefully read the words over the kitchen’s sink as he prepares for the evening meal by himself.

”Concern.”  Oob and Oop send to me in concert, the two beetles not reading any words, but feeling my intent across Bind Insect.

Lutra was the first time I really considered it.  So many apparatuses are going to be born in the dark, and never leave it.  We are not immune to fear or restlessness.  And Lutra besides, cannot often tell if they are any of the people they once were.  I do not know how I escaped that fate.

”But are you okay.”  Muelly reiterates as Malpa sets a comforting hand on her shoulder, the scarred human looking with worried eyes at the bees that are my eyes and ears to the world.

”If they’re uncertain of what they are, like Lutra, we could disrupt their tactics once they’re in place.”  Kalip says.  Yuea hums thoughtfully, considering how they can break a personality that is in disarray.

”I can’t read half of that.”  Dipan tells me as he scrubs the hide off a series of yams.  It is yams for dinner again.  No one has started complaining yet, which is itself a small mercy.  “But if you need someone to save you, I can go find Mela.  If you need someone to complain to, I’ll just stick around.”

”Compassion.”  A chorus of honeybees that reach beyond their origins tell me.

What am I meant to do about all of this?  I ask everyone.  About what I am, and what I worry I might become?

”Keep scraping by.”  Dipan tells me with a shrug.  “Works for me anyway.”

”Whatever you do,” Muelly says softly, her partners nodding with her as they try to comfort me, “we’ll trust you.”

My glimmerlings say nothing.  If they did, it would only echo my own thoughts.

”Oh. Easy. “ Yuea says.  “If you’re worried about snapping or something, do the promise thing to not hurt the kids or something.  That way if you do go into a realm-fugue, you’ll get that backlash you talked about and it can at least slow you down.”  Her answer is tactica and calculated, and ignores that Small Promise is not Small Contract.  Which is, apparently, a spell.

It is also the answer that most helps pull me out of my spiraling thoughts.  It is simply too audaciously foolish for me to not gain some measure of perspective.

Thank you.  I write to Muelly, Jahn, and Malpa, all of whom are speaking softly to the bees.  Sharing some small personal story that might be meant for me, but all I hear is a comforting blanket of warm voices.

I can do that.  I write to Dipan, who grins with his little pointed smile at the wall before he sighs and gets back to work.  I also write a quick note to some of the others, the new people, asking for a little help on his behalf.

That is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.  I tell Yuea.  I will consider it.  Meanwhile, I have yet more work to do.  Do what you can to prepare to undermine the plan you think our enemy has.

”We could use more glimmer.”  Yuea tells me.  “Some for everyone who might fight.  Between that and vim, even this army could kill an apparatus.”

More than more glimmerlings?  I ask.

Kalip nods sharply, once.  “Absolutely.”  He says.  “They’re passable scouts.  But you need to direct them like you don’t for us.”  They are also very limited, in ways I have a difficult time expressing to the two.  Every one I make means the next comes slower, and there is less to my ability to make more glimmer itself.

You will need the others to vote.  I remind them.  An old, old Small Promise coming back around again.  Maybe I should have made my Little Oath to do what I thought was best for them, not what they decided on.

…Well isn’t that interesting.  Also how is Little Oath different than Small Promise?  That seems unlikely.

A thought for the future.  It doesn’t matter.  Now, I muster my focus, push aside my fears and yearnings, and return to scouting with Distant Vision.  Scouting, and something else.

If you can make it to us, we have a place to rest for you.  Small Promise speaks plainly and with open vulnerability to two different groups.  Link Spellwork allows me to Collect Plant in the pattern that Yuea suggested; opening up trails that point in a straight line to our home.

There is only so much I can do.  But I will do it.  And if Yuea of all people is reminding me to show compassion, then I believe I have forgotten what I swore to myself when I first found myself remade and alive.

The survivors will need to hurry, though.  Through the domed spaces of Distant Vision, I can see thin raindrops beginning to dust the tops of the trees as they bow in the endless wind.  We cannot see it over the horizon yet, but soon, the sliver of the rainsun will poke its way into the sky.  Tomorrow, storming reaches its midpoint.  Halfway through the worst of the world’s weather, and we aren’t dead.

They aren’t dead.

I have perhaps one in every ten parts of my magic remaining to me, and without real rest, that number will not change.  I am still oh so very tired, and I do not see that changing.  But I do not stagger.  The lack of a body of blood and heart means that I do not falter when exhaustion begins to creep in.  It means I can do my utmost, with unnerving and itchy clarity, when it is needed most desperately.

Though if Mela or Muelly could perhaps figure out how to borrow Distant Vision from me as they have with many other spells, it would be quite the relief.  I refuse to falter, but I will always accept help.  And I think that is why the survivors here might trust me so much.

My thoughts wander along with the sweep of my sight.  But just before I am preparing to set the spells to rest and let myself sink into darkness for a candlemark, I espy something approaching the Green from roughly fifteen hundred lengths outside.

The army of the dead are nothing but bones, weighed down by heavy armor nothing without muscle should be able to carry.  In fact, it looks as though extra weights have been attached to them to keep them from being thrown around by the galesun.  The soft drizzle of fresh rain makes the crude hammered metal that adorns them run slick as they march in a diamond formation through the scorched ruins of what used to be a village square.

Three more of the formations move around them.  Hundreds of the dead, whether corpses of bare skeletons, all of them preparing to enter the Green.  Three covered wagons and one carriage roll through the center of their little army, pulled by things that make me realize that whether or not Spawn Viscera is responsible for the creation of the moving corpses, the enemy apparatus does have the spell.  The beasts are bloody red and grey flesh, exposed muscle that drips in the moist air.  Every motion splits their sides and leaks gore, their forms more like a ball of arms that just happens to be harnessed to a cart.

I tell Yuea, fill the maps in my study as best I can, and then I let go.

They’ll get here when they get here.  But a candle worth of a nap in the darkness of my arcanely drained souls will be enough to win any battle.