Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 51 (Patreon)

Just a reminder that I'll be taking a little breaky next week, for both this and The Daily Grind, to recover a bit.  Regular posts will resume afterward.

Followup note: Patreon isn't letting me upload pdfs right now?  No one seems to have an answer as to why, so there's just an epub for this one.  Sorry for anyone that relied on the pdfs, hopefully that'll get fixed soon.

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Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 5

Authority : 5

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

-

Nobility : 4

Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)

See Domain (1, Perceive)

Claim Construction (2, Domain)

-

Empathy : 4

Shift Water (1, Shape)

Imbue Mending (3, Civic)

Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)

Move Water (4, Shape)

Spirituality : 5

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

Congeal Mantra (1, Command)

Form Party (3, Civic)

Ingenuity : 4

Know Material (1, Perceive)

Form Wall (2, Shape)

Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)

Sever Command (4, War)

Tenacity : 3

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

I learn several things over the next few days of travel.

For one thing, bees do not have the lifespan that I would have expected.  I am used to, from a farmer’s perspective, thinking of beehives as an entity unto themselves.  Rising and falling like they are living creatures all on their own.  In the abstract, I know that it is the queen and her similar offspring that are the heart of the hive, but hives themselves are more like their own thing.  And yet, now, I have a clear picture every time a bee dies, as Bind Insect catches the motes that come from their deaths.  Along with something else, that I cannot quite place.  Small shadows that sit alongside the spell, along with the ones it has previously collected from the bees that fell in battle.  I never would have noticed them without the steady flow of natural death.

I had thought that my magic would sustain the bees, and it does seem to.  At least, for the larger ones, the older ones.  The ones infused with glimmer and mantra seem especially healthy and spry.  But I am stretched far thinner than I was before, and I am not giving the bulk of my magic to only a handful of insects.  Instead, I have hundreds of them, and each of them is allocated only the tiniest drop of the magic.  Not enough to change or grow or live beyond their natural lifespans.

The hive is fine.  New larva hatch, new bees emerge.  I watch through the eyes of my bound as the hive welcomes them, both my bees and those still truly free.  Companionable touches of antenna and limb, cleaning the new arrivals off, smoothing out gossamer wings.  The hive would survive even without me, which is good.

The hive is also learning.  The bees that are under my command are doing a very good job of teaching the others.  Even the bees that live without my influence and orders are… I would not say ‘well behaved’.  The soldier’s memories would call them undisciplined.  The merchant would say ‘a flying assault upon the nerves’.  But they politely avoid the humans and demons of the camp, and sting no one as they go about their business.

It is because of this that I do not add more bees to my roster.  Instead, I let the spell recover just that little bit more of its total.  Letting the extra spill over to the remaining bound, and leaving the hive to its own devices for now.

Though I do learn, through the prodding of some of the more intelligent bees under my command, that I should continue to feed mantra and glimmer into their companions.  There seems to be a specific request to apply my magics to the queen, and, when we have a rest at the end of a simple day of slow hiking, I do so.

I choose glimmer for the queen, and mantra for a few of the drone bees with her.  The queen’s form, already larger than the smaller sisters of the hive, elongates further, growing to several times her previous size, though still staying small enough to fit within the hive.  Parts of her chitin smooth and whorl, an extra set of wings grows from her back as her other wings are strengthened.  And by the time the process is done, she looks like a cloudy night sky, with the occasional sparkle of something within her chitin shimmering to look at.

The drones fare much the same as the others that had mantra applied to them.  Black shapeless runes drawing themselves across their lengthening wings, and an increase in size.  Though instead of more angular bodies, theirs smooth out and become softer, as they cluster around the queen and the others of the center of the hive.

It is fascinating to watch how the bees barely change their behavior to match their new forms.  All of them continue their lives, as if no interruption has happened.  Maybe it is simply because they are still small insects, and cannot conceive of how to abuse their power, but none of them even try.  They just return to their faithful service to each other.

I count myself lucky, I think, that it was a bee that I first saw through in this life.

Another thing I learn, unrelated to my bees, is that Yuea is almost compulsively unwilling to complain about things.  Even when pushed to the point of collapse.

We are still moving, because we cannot take the risk of staying near the river and the potential enemy apparatus there.  But both Yuea and Dipan are on the mend; recovering from an infection for her, and letting a leg heal for him.  One of the kids also has a sprained ankle, a problem that would have been trivial in many of my prior lives and is a nightmare to let heal now.  So we are moving slowly.

And even that is too fast for Yuea.  Who says nothing, up until the moment she pauses for breath against a rock, and slumps into unconsciousness.

This teaches us two things, as a group.  One is that it is entirely possible to hold back what someone shares through Form Party.  Yuea was hiding her own health and exhaustion from the others, pushing herself onward without a single thought of if she even could ask for a rest.  And second, it teaches us something about what it means to lose her status as magetouched.

Kalip opens up to me about it, patrolling within the hundred length tall trees that we’re moving through while the others make camp for the night.  He talks to Oop, the younger beetle patiently resting on his shoulder, a one sided conversation that’s the most the bowman has ever said in one go to anyone I’ve seen.

“She’s been touched since she was fourteen.”  Kalip says softly, apropos of nothing.  And I cease trying to find a way to sort the growing collection of vegetation that Collect Plant has accrued for me, and listen.  “Don’t… don’t let on that I’m telling you this.  She might actually try to kill me.  And it’s try, now.”  He sighs, the sound coming through Oop’s hearing as a whoosh of air and a shifting under the beetle’s feet of the bowman’s shoulders.  “I don’t think she remembers what it’s like, to have limits.  I’ve only had it for a few years, and I barely do.  You might’ve kept her alive, but she’ll kill herself trying to do something stupid if we don’t keep an eye on her.”

I can’t exactly write to him while he’s walking a patrol path.  Though we stop and enjoy a quiet moment together as a horned bosu moves through the trees ahead of us.  The great grey beast’s head coming up from where it has paused in eating something to stare at Kalip.  Soft eyes belaying the threat of the curved spur of what the scholar calls false bone that extends from its snout.  Kalip waits patiently, not even bothering to raise his bow as the arrows would barely inconvenience the practically armored grey hide of the beast, and soon enough it moves on.

It’s a good sign.  We learn that this part of the woods is home to wildlife yet still, and that means that if there is another apparatus here, it isn’t killing everything yet.

When I have a chance, I scratch a message into a tree ahead of his patrol path.  I’ll try to keep an eye on her.  I tell Kalip.  But you might have noticed, she is somewhat stubborn.

“It’s come up a few times.”  He says with that dry sarcasm of his.  And then, leaning on the tree and sweeping his eyes over the dense woods around us, he asks something new.  “The dead guy, he said that you told him you’d lived a lot of lives before this.  None of them were ‘touched?”  He asks.

The mention of the man stings, but Kalip says it with a seeming apathy to his death that stings worse.

He had a name.  I write, wondering how to express hostility with text.  Maybe sharper letters.

“A lot of people had names.”  Kalip says, and I realize, abruptly, that his voice isn’t apathetic.  It’s tired.  “Empire’s been at war for a long time.  Hard to keep track of all the names, after a while.  This last season… hah.”  He exhales a thin laugh.  “It’s hardly new.”  And then, like the conversation didn’t even divert, he pivots back to his old question.  “So, how many of you were magi?”

Ah.  The soldier’s thoughts come forward, from the memories of her that I have lived, and not just what is stored in my mind.  This is not apathy, or callous disregard.  This is what happens when someone has seen too much death, that they cannot let themself care, or they would break.

I let Kalip change the subject.

None.  I write.  Some of them had small tricks, but nothing close to what I can do now.  The true arcanists were… I trail off, trying to reconcile contradictions between some of my shared memories.  An interesting picture begins to form, as I realize I might have multiple ways to finish this sentence.  …few and far between.  For some of them.  For one life, sorcerer-champions were a large cadre, but their wandering kept them from the public eye much of the time.

“I have no idea what some of these words mean.”  Kalip flatly states his own ignorance of my writing as he glances at the tree’s bark.  “Dunno where you lived, then, though.  Empire has more than enough magi.  Enough that they’re a political bloc, anyway.”  He shrugs, the movement unseen by me but felt by Oop as the beetle’s shoulder perch rolls underneath his small legs.

And so I learn something else.  Well, nothing I didn’t already know, I suppose, but it’s more fuel to the fire of knowledge.  I do not think I lived somewhere that far distant, any of me.  An empire spanning centuries, that has enough of what they call magi that it is casual to mention is?  That would not go unnoticed by the stateless caravans, or the humming cities, or any of the great libraries.  The scholar, at the very least, lived when the Cartographer’s Alliance had outlined the nature of the world, and there was nowhere quite like what they call their empire.

No, I am far from my old lives, it is true.  But the distance is one of time, not of distance.  Enough time that they have forgotten the gobs, that they have found a great many of their magi, that language has twisted so that many old words are meaningless.  But, importantly, not so far that the language has vanished entirely.

Languages can survive a very long time, so this does little to give me an accurate count of the years.  But it lets me know I am at least within the trail of recognition.

Other things I learn are smaller.  I learn how to instruct my bees to guide a pair of the children in stripping herbs and crushing the leaves properly to be used in making the poultice that Yuea still needs.  I learn that their mantra develop something like words after that, ‘pluck’ and ‘grind’ marking the discs of stone that sit within their bond with me.

I learn that my increased focus on See Domain with the improvement to that soul lets me see quite a lot that I could not before.  It drains rapidly when I do, but I have spotted what I believe are natural ‘domain’ spots around us as we travel.  I know not what they are, or what they mean, but I can see them listed within the spell’s internal ledger of the world.

I learn that the larger bees seem to quite enjoy the miniature hives within the walking sticks of the survivors.  They cluster in twos and threes, sleeping together when they are not needed inside the spaces atop the simple staves.  And I learn that some of them are starting to respond to simple commands from the children; coming out when their temporary nests are tapped and flying as an escort to the kids that have too much energy after a day of slow walking while they explore the new space the survivors have stopped to rest.

I learn that a pair of the larger bees, my own form of magetouched, two of the ones with a mantra that reads ‘sting’ in shifting runes that I cannot understand, has become an especially proficient guardian.  When one of the children disturbs a wasps nest, I notice too late to do anything only because the bees with the small human have already carved their way through the angry wasps.

I learn that the deaths of wasps provides those small motes to me.  Not many, but some.  And they are funnels toward me, like water down a pitcher, by something within the spellwork of Bind Insect.  And from this, I infer why the areas we have left, where there were other apparatus operating, were short on good hunting, and had flocks of birds rapidly fleeing the area.

I am not idle as we travel, either.  Days pass without incident, and I take the opportunity to practice my magic.  To use Distant Vision to continue to search for our goal, and to make a personal memory catalogue of the plants and herbs around here.  Many I recognize, but many more are new to me, and the parts of my old lives that did truly care about the natural sciences and their exploration leave me with a residual excitement to continue that legacy.

Link Spellwork continues to show how strange it can make my spells.  It also interests me that the order in which I pair spells seems to sometimes matter.  Usually, what I am doing is mixing things with Distant Vision for the extra reach to my ability, so I had not noticed.  But as I test more things, I realize that it does actually matter.  Distant Vision first lets me cast the spell somewhere distant that I can see, meaning that Distant Vision must already be cast for me to work through, which I believe leads to the excess drain.  If it is second, however, it instead works to add a far ranging sight to what I pair it with.  For perception spells, like Know Material, it is far less draining, because it simply casts the spell far away.  But when I put it into a cast of Make Low Blade, I found that I could ‘see’ where the simple paring knife was, so long as it was far enough from me that it was outside the field upon which I could have made it.

As I said, Link Spellwork is strange.

And also it does not bother to explain itself.  I do not know what it means that Imbue Mending blurred so well into Congeal Glimmer.  Though I have Dipan carrying that particular stone, just in case it does help with his injured leg.  It also sometimes simply does not work; Collect Plant and Move Water did not care that I asked them to work together, they had nothing to share, no matter how much magic I applied.

Though I do find one trick.  I already knew that I could bestow my motion spells on my bound, and let them cast through me.  But I had not thought of one application that Yuea practically commands me to try.  Her exhaustion and recovery doing nothing to stop her from trying to optimize my contributions.

Make Low Blade, on its own, can make arrowheads.  And, using a half-shirt of chainmail that we had been carrying with us but is honestly probably okay to sacrifice, I do so.  But these arrowheads, I shape in a very specific way.  Sharp, yes, as sharp as the spell that makes poor quality goods can do, but hollow.

And into that hollow space, from a small stream we pass on the third day, they are filled with water.  Capped by Shift Wood expanded plugs that should hold for weeks as a perfect seal.

It takes some time to communicate to my larger bees what I want them to practice.  But once they do, especially the ones with mantra for stinging, they swoop in frantically dangerous arcs around the outside of the camp, occasionally leaving quickly dulling arrowheads embedded in the trunks of trees as they pass.

Well.  Trees, shrubbery, the ground.  The last of the porridge in the cook pot.  Someone’s backpack.

We stopped practicing near the camp.

Days of languid travel later, no longer pressured by anything chasing us, I find the fort when we’re about a day’s journey from it through Distant Vision.

The walls stand silent and unguarded.  The fort is dark and unlit.  The skeletal remains of two horses, an ouk, and three bipedal riders I suspect were once human sit on the dirt road leading out of the valley.

I move my spell inside, to the courtyard, to where more bones await.  Bones, and monsters.  Things with two digitigrade legs that hunch in the shadows.  Their heads are little more than rough furred balls with massive fangs and a writhing tongue where they split open down the middle, either venom or acid dripping out of them.  Some of them chew on bones, moving them up to their maws with their spindly claws.  Others lay curled on the stone, dormant or sleeping or something like it.  Still others prowl randomly, occasionally undulating like they are screaming.

I move my vision farther into the fort itself.  I pass over scenes of battle; the dead monsters have had their bones stripped down just as the dead defenders did.  Furniture ruined, tapestries shredded or burnt, doors smashed.

But doors smashed in a strange direction.

These things did not come from outside the fort.  The doors are all broken as if the invaders came from within.

I move my spell again and again, waiting for the moment I encounter a fortified domain that I cannot pierce.  But it does not happen.  Instead, in a locked cellar of the fort, blocked off in the corridor upstairs, surrounded by wine barrels that almost make want to laugh at how intact they are, there is… me.

Something that looks like me, I suppose.

A four pointed crystal.  Slowly turning.  Slowly making monsters.  One is weaving together, strands of empty light layering down into sinew and bone and tooth, just at the foot of it.

A dangerous enemy, yes.

Entirely out in the open.

It is time, I think to make another choice.  Not by myself, but all of us.  As a group of companions, and as the only people positioned to strike now, while there is still a chance.

I call up my spells, and I begin to write.