Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 77 (Patreon)

Next week is a posting break, so I do not crumble to dust.  Also, if anyone knows how to make Patreon put the opening stat block in a spoiler tag or something, let me know.  I can't figure it out, and it's kind of... there.  I know a lot of people use the epubs now, but dang is that thing getting lorge.

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Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 11

Authority : 6

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)

-

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 : 5

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

Pressure Trigger (2, War)

-

Animosity : -

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

Trepidation : -

Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

As it turns out, that might actually have been the only trick the enemy apparatus had.  Though as soon as I think the word ‘trick’, a number of memories surface to chastise my thinking.

A pit trap is a trick.  An ambush is a trick.  A stealth swarm of bees is a trick.  But put together, a series of tricks is called a strategy.  And if the strategy keeps working, you call it a doctrine.  This swarm of silkspinners wasn’t one single trick, it was a complex plan in action.

Putting together a force of that size shouldn’t have been easy, even for one of us.  The silkspinners are large, and also quite dangerous.  If I focused on a single bee, with my Authority as it is now, it would still take days to elevate it to that strength, and that was assuming I gave up on things like the bee’s comfort and lifespan.  More than just that, the pylons were harnessed to the monsters like they were carrier beasts.  But that was not the work of silkspinners, that took effort.  Magical or otherwise.  And while they didn’t have contact with their apparatus, as See Command gave me no information once I scattered them, they still had a plan before that.

I regret that I forgot to use See Command before Sever Command.  I could have gained valuable details that way.  I could justify my mistake by saying I didn’t know their capabilities and that I needed to act quickly, but in truth, it was simply an error.

These facts that I mull over as my swarm of bees crosses back and forth over the length-wide calcified path of the enemy.  It is slow going up the ‘road’, and while being thorough for now is valuable, I can already tell that this particular source of power is going to meet the same diminishing returns as any other.  At a certain point, there will be no more reason to spend time on this aside from chasing dustings of motes that I do not presently need.

Honeybees have a rather long range for daily travel, for their size, but without a hive they are vulnerable.  And outside of my reach, they need to feed themselves, which is a logistical problem.  This campaign will be short; my notion of following my foe to its lair and killing them seems overly optimistic, and with the immediate threat ended, each candle lessens my bloodlust somewhat.

I simply am… not angry.  I am not an angry person.  I don’t know if I ever decided that, or if I am simply learning it now, but anger slides from my mind perhaps too easily.

The puzzle this enemy presents does not, though.  How, then, did it get this many of its creatures this far?  They weren’t eating anything that I could see, and unless it had a way to extend the range of its command spell, it wouldn’t be able to feed them magic.  The only possibility I have as a potential answer is that the Bone Pylons - ah, there it is, that is the spell’s title - with Convert Environment operating were, in fact, converting the environment into something.  Not just paving a road, but feeding the troops as they went.

That would make this line unusable though, for reinforcements.  Except it had reinforced.  Maybe it was the reduced travel time of moving through the devastation.  With no trees or undergrowth to get in the way, and even the ground itself eroded down to a flat surface, it would be much easier to have a silkspinner simply run the distance to the front line, and begin taking in sustenance there.

My precious bees, both the honorable aerial soldiers and the newer ones that are simply slightly eager mundane insects, do not like the flat space that has been ‘converted’.  What is left of the trees is crumbling ash that can collapse at slight touches, there is no greenery or vegetation or life at all; it’s simply a chalky white waste.  I don’t blame them for not wanting to spend more time in it than it takes to cross back and forth to the lush areas around it.

Even still, they are tearing apart the domain.  And because they are my bound, that funnels the disturbed motes of power back to my body, lengths and lengths away.  I build another point of power, and wonder how I am supposed to fight anything that has come even close to the same level of growth as myself.

It occurs to me, as bit by bit of the enemy’s Fortify Space is torn up and fed back to me, that I actually can make a reasonable guess as to part of the puzzle just based on this.  Because this is, unmistakably, Fortify Space.  A spell that I also have, and have had access to since my second step along the soul of Authority.

My logic, I think, is solidly composed.  It would be absolute arrogance to think that the farmer was the only one to ever have a soul that would resonate with that identity, that title.  And, as I have already learned, other apparatus have their own souls.  It is hardly a stretch to think that this one in particular, with its use of spells I know, would too have a soul I know.

And if it has Authority, then I can know, perhaps, what other spells it might have.

Authority : 6

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

See Commands (5, Perceive)

Bind Crop (4, Command)

Available :

See Rank (1, Perceive)

Shift Dirt (1, Shape)

Drop Trigger (1, War)

Shift Metal (2, Shape)

Make Clothing (3, Shape)

Know Abstract (3, Perceive)

Know Weather (4, Perceive)

Mark Home (4, Domain)

Verdant Pylon (5, Shape)

Shape Metal (5, Shape)

Bind Relationship (6, Command)

Make Meal (6, Shape)

It could be even farther ahead in raw power.  But as I look at this list, diverting my attention from my Distant Vision vigil ever so slightly, I start to feel a gnawing anxiety.  It takes me several readings and a candle of introspection before the shape of it starts to reveal itself to me.  But when it does, it comes on all at once, and with a claustrophobic spike of fear, even though I believe that I may have passed the threshold of this problem.

An apparatus gains power from the use of their magics.  And other things, too, yes: the killing of things and the breaking of domains.  But predominantly, power comes from using magic, especially in novel ways.

My first spells were ones that were always going to have a use.  Well, almost.  If I had taken Nudge Material while entombed in stone, perhaps I never would have managed to shake loose a single mote of power with that magic.  But that was not the case, and both that and Know Material have been serving me well this entire time, even if the harvest of new power from them has tapered off somewhat.  Know Material can now tell me everything within a half length of my body, but despite that reach, if it were my only spell, it might take a year at this point for it to coalesce a new point of power on its own.

But what… what if I had selected See Rank?  Or perhaps Drop Trigger?  The latter, perhaps, I could have paired with Nudge Material somehow to affect a particularly strange and embarrassing form of Malvor’s Device trap.  But what use is See Rank when there are no hierarchies nearby?  The bees?  The bees don’t have ranks, no matter how people refer to the ‘queens’.

It wouldn’t matter if another apparatus was a year ahead of me, a decade ahead of me, if they picked magic that couldn’t fuel their growth.

Oh, tar, what if they were?  What if all this violence is the result of madness from being unable to touch the world for an unknown amount of time?  Trapped in the dark of their own minds, waiting for nothing, until it eventually spilled over enough to give them another tiny amount of power, and then they learn that this time they can make sure it never happens again, but only if they kill.  Would any reasonable person go back into the dark, with a choice like that?  Would I?  I want to think I’m compassionate, but I only lived like that for days before I frantically found a way to begin to cut my way out of it.

I was born, I think, in the branches of a tree.  And my first act was to bury myself slightly in the dirt.  What if I’d been born under the dirt?  Under the stone?  Encased below the ground and unable to ever truly free myself?  Would I have tried to build a home anyway, not really needing my body above ground to be free, or would I have made a small mistake in my choices, and slowly gone mad as I failed to have anything to do at all?  Just sitting in the ground, waiting for the Turnip Witch to find me.

How many apparatus are there, right now, trapped and screaming?

On a dark whim, I try Follow Prey, wondering if my conjecture can be easily proven by hunting one of them down.  But the spell is both too weak and too exhausted from use, and also, seems to require that the prey in question be a thing that I have at some point encountered directly.  So at least my nightmare remains in the realm of the hypothetical for now.

I try to put that thought aside and return to strategy.

The other apparatus does not have Verdant Pylon.  I make this decision quickly.  If it did, it would have used it.  It clearly knows what Bone Pylon is and does, and made use of them here, and if it had the option for another and it has any kind of intelligence it would have leapt for it.  This is an assumption, but I think a safe one.  From this, I extrapolate that it’s Authority is below five, or has only just reached it.  If it, like me, has multiple souls, then it is focusing on others.

I know it has Fortify Space.  Does it also have Bind Insect?  Is that all the silkspinners are?  Singular insects grown to massive size and weaponized with no regard for them as anything but weapons?  It seems likely.  Things I need to watch out for, Shift Dirt and Shift Metal.  My bees are not at risk of pit traps, but if they are caught unawares, they could be buried alive.  Metal is less an issue, but I should not discount sharper armaments near the enemy.

Drop Trigger worries me most, as I do not know what it does.  Pressure Trigger on my own side allows me to give my pylons more specific commands, but I am aware that there is more to it that I have not explored yet.  I will need to delve into that when I am not focused on war.  Until then, I will simply have to be on the lookout for any kind of trap.  Perhaps use the less developed bees to trigger…

No.  I want my enemy destroyed.  I do not want my own soul and self to go with it.  I know they are only bees, I am not a fool.  But for the duration of their time with me, they are my responsibility.  Not expendable tools.

But they are still fighters, and in a way, farmers.  Harvesting the lives and domain of my foe.  And while they go about their work, I keep watch on them.  Which is why I see it when my opponent makes a mistake.

Distant Vision, split into eight parts along the road, can’t see much except the edges of the blank space.  It’s still fortified, mostly.  But I can see when a half dozen silkspinners come skittering in toward the open space at an odd angle.  Two of them have blood on their spike legs; they must have been out hunting, and been called to reinforce the army approaching me.  Their forms vanish into the secured ‘road’, but if it was meant to be a surprise, it’s spoiled now.

I have no idea if the enemy intends to adapt its tactics to the fact that my soldiers are either too high or too small for its monsters to fight.  But I don’t intend to sit idly by.

We’re twenty lengths into reclaiming the road, pushing back toward my birthplace, toward the river that I am honestly curious to see what has happened to.  And it seems like this is the perfect spot to set up another ambush.

Let’s see how many Stone Pylons I can make at distance with only a half day to recover, and how fast these new soldiers can move when they know I am here and waiting.