Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 99 (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)

One of my lights has gone out.  I’ve lost a point of power.

I didn’t even know that could happen.  And it’s not as though I don’t hold onto them for a while, but they do get spent.  I didn’t think any of them were at rust of… what, spoiling?  At least it’s faded to nothing and not still sitting around rotting inside my magic.  A thought which would make me shiver if I had the body for it.

Maybe it’s a result of the wounds on my form.  My magics still aren’t recovering as fast as they should, and after the strange sensation the last time I purchased a new spell, I am loathe to try to fix that by bolstering a soul.

In the end, I don’t truly have a way to combat the change.  I could spend the rest of my power now, easily.  The calculus isn’t even hard.  I just worry as to the outcome, and when the sun sets, I value what is left of my health more than I value the potential worth of risky self improvement.

And also, I am having trouble caring.  Because we have made it home.

It took significantly more time than I would have liked.  Even with my creation of two new golems to help the refugees along.  But we have done it.  Down the blasted road the enemy made, and from the end of that calcified scar, across hillside paths and into the valley where our fort resides.

Jahn, Vestment, Dipan, and Malpa all met us at the ‘border’.  With the others helping, even some of the older children, they’d set up a small camp by the time we arrived.  It wasn’t much, but a meal that wasn’t foraged uncooked fruit, and a bedroll instead of dirt, was enough to bolster the spirits of a lot of the people with us.

Not that getting here was easy.  Four more people tried to kill me on the way, and one human who was bad at planning took a shot at Fisher too.   Yuea actually managed to disarm and talk down most of my own assassins.  Mela, I think, stopped at least twice as many attempts before they happened by doing her talking early.  But they didn’t peacefully resolve all of them.  And along with the one soldier who refused to listen, Fisher’s own attacker also got caught by surprise by the gob’s mantra-granted ability to already be firing a pistol while an attack was in the air toward them.

Gobs, it turned out, resonated particularly well with mantra.  I cannot see the state of the ones that Fisher holds with my soul cracked, but they seem to have collected a multitude of them, and the gob’s natural desire to practice things has lead to those mantra forming patterns far quicker than anyone else.  Fisher, naturally, has already started sharing them out and replacing them with the still-blank mantra the others carry.  The maturing and changing gob was already spending time sketching out ideas for how to streamline the process, and didn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that they’d put a hole through someone’s heart a day earlier.

In addition to the fact that the people we were trying to save were partially trying to kill some of us, there were other problems.  Food was a constant issue; my bees were mostly healed from their encounter, but Bind Insect was working on droplets most of the time, and they needed to eat as well as the thirty other survivors.  Bolster Nourishment helped everyone, but the more time that was spent foraging, the slower we had to go.

At one point, Kalip found us, somehow.  The man’s woodcraft hasn’t improved even though he literally has a wolv’s senses now.  We got a fresh round of screams and accusations of monstrous intent when he showed up, louder this time as the people had some time and some more of the positive side of Drain Health to recover.  Those shouts ended when Kalip unloaded the bushel of silkspinner meat he’d brought.

Apparently they taste like something called a ‘crab’, which leaves me entirely in the dark about the flavor, but it was close enough to a fish that the demons will eat them too.  And everyone, no matter how scared or angry, has at least a little appreciation for someone who slaughtered the things that hunted and captured them.

I actually wonder why no one looks at Yuea the same way.  Maybe they didn’t think she had anything to do with the pile of bodies back at the site of the battle.  I wish we’d known that the silkspinners were edible then, though.  Trust a soldier like Kalip to try eating anything.

Our other problem on the way has been being discovered.  Well, one of the other problems.  But we’ll get to the big one after this.

The dirt claw creatures were the first to make contact, and did so with predictable hostility.  Fortunately, they have an equal amount of tactical sense, and See Commands kept me appraised to the unchanging nature of their limited orders as the bees ambushed and cut them down.  The dirt apparatus must already be moving in behind us, and while I am terrified to think of it growing into the abandoned territory and gaining strength from it, we don’t have much of a choice at the moment.  The thing’s footsoldiers found us a few times, but I think they were all patrols sent out with unclear instructions, because none of them just followed the line in the ground that pointed right to us, and no followup force came to eliminate our group.

They weren’t the last though.  The Green itself started taking back the scar in its surface on the second day, and I finally got to see through my bees why the people who had lived on its edge for their whole lives called it aggressive.  It wasn’t violent, really, but a tree’s version of aggression still involved shattering the ground with roots that grew at a visible rate.  The ride got bumpy for some of the passengers, but the golems didn’t have an option to go slower or avoid the new obstacles.

The apparatus that had sent the strange fire breathing bug things to assault us early on in my life hadn’t been around much lately.  I’d seen evidence of its soldiers throughout the Green, but while I earnestly believe it could have harvested an ocean of power by burning the whole forest down, they never did so.  Now, Kalip and the bees reported things that looked similar to its old creations, but watched from a distance with intelligent eyes, and refused to strike first or assemble in numbers.

The walking skeletons that found us had no such qualm.  See Commands showed them to have a strange layered set of orders that seemed to be half unthinking instinct and half direction.  Like they were a caravan cart being steered and not actual living things.  Which, well.  Skeletons.

That had been the worst of it.  We didn’t realize how they were moving; a box of steadily walking soldiers, five by five, spread so far apart we couldn’t see the second one by the time the first had spotted us and charged into engagement.  By the time the fight was over, eight people were dead, to my utter sorrow.  Half my bees injured, some very badly.  It slows us down, in addition to the cost of their pain.  And also, everyone now knew, with polished crystal clarity, what Yuea was capable of.  Even with the injuries I knew she still had, and her lack of learned ability to move quickly without hurting herself, she had stormed through the walking bones like a force of nature.  You can, I think, only watch a woman turn a skull to splinters with her bare hands so many times before you realize she might not be joking when she tells you that she isn’t worried about your attempts to kill her.

And through it all, I help where I can.  Doing my best.  It’s not as much as I have become used to, it’s not enough to save everyone.  But it’s what I can do.

When we did finally reach that camp, and begin our trip back the remaining distance to the fort, I think many of the demon survivors were confused to see other demons waiting.  More confused still to see them working with the others.  Not that the humans weren’t in a similar place, but they’d seen Mela already, and it wasn’t difficult to assume that Yuea and Kalip were still technically human.

There were, always, more questions.  Where are we going, how much farther, what’s going to happen to us, what did happen to us, where is my family, my friends, my city, when do we get to go home, when is the Empress going to respond, where’s the rest of the army…

I tried to find answers to a few of those questions with Distant Vision.  My range at this point is very long.  Long enough to breach the upper edge of the Green, to look out into the frontier of the border region and even a little deeper down the roads toward more established settlements.

I stop trying rather quickly.  For one thing, I cannot tell anyone what I have found.  My bees are smarter every day, but the concept of ‘writing’ isn’t on their agenda yet, and I cannot use my magic for communication yet.  For another thing, I have a limited amount of Distant Vision to throw around, with the reduced recovery, and so using brief glimpses around us as close as I can to scout is a much more important place to put the magic.

And… well.

One human farming village has been turned into a lake; tips of the buildings poking over the water where they haven’t just been reduced to debris.  Things swim under the surface, while new rivers carve themselves out to weave like tendrils toward new targets.  A demon fishing village has been reshaped into some kind of bitter fortress, with what I assume are the old residents patrolling around it.  They look alive, but their eyes are manic, and something baleful is going on there.  At one point on the road, I find the remains of a column of soldiers, supply wagons turned to cinders along with their flesh; they fought to the end, but half the weapons and armor are missing.  I find those fifty lengths away, along with the bodies of the young gobs that emerged from the battlefield, coils of wire having torn them apart and growing like roses from dead flesh.  There is no wildlife.  There is barely any movement I can find.

I stop looking.

I don’t want to know.

I don’t have answers for them.

The last portion of the journey is almost the hardest, despite being back in what I think of as ‘our’ territory.  I never did get that layered defensive ring of Stone Pylons finished, but there are enough of them that I feel as though we have some security.  But the lack of the golems to help means that I will need to either form new bespoke creations, which would take days, or rely on the others to make the trip on their own.

Fortunately, many of the victims have recovered enough to walk.  Many of them have also recovered enough to complain about being sore from the ride on the makeshift sleds of woven branches, and while Yuea rolls her eyes at the complaints, I remember my first time riding anything, from every life.  I begrudge these people nothing.  Their complaints are valid.

And then… we’re home.  My home, at least.  And maybe theirs too, if they decide to stay.  The fort’s modified human architecture is both reassuringly normal and perhaps a little hostile to those among the group that aren’t human themselves.  But I can almost feel the relief of everyone as, one by one, the tired, injured, and lost, all filter past the fences of the farm plots, and through the open gates.

One of the human girls, Ruuet I think, waves shyly to the crowd from the wall as they pass under the gate.  Some of them wave back.

We are utterly unprepared to take them in.  Seraha and Dipan have, I’ve heard, been scrambling to clear debris out of unused rooms and lay down bedrolls or other scraps of soft bedding.  Our food situation is only going to hold for tendays and not a season.  The stormseason is approaching, I can almost feel it in my non-bones.

But we’re back.

“Hello again.”  Muelly’s own voice is one of utter relief as she envelops Mela in a hug, the demoness utterly unconcerned that the younger woman hasn’t bathed in half a tenday, or the stares of the people around them.  “You’re back!  Is the… is she available to talk?”  I am not, really, and Mela explains.  “Ah.  Well.”

I do not like that tone at all.

“What happened?”  Mela appears to be on the same line of thought as myself, as the bees near the two women listen to my small request and come closer to listen in suspiciously.

“The other one.  Lutra?  They… they aren’t doing well.  It started a few days ago, but… I was hoping she could talk to them.”  Muelly glances in the direction of the lake.  “Hopefully soon?”

Ah.  Of course.  The Form Party was lost when that soul cracked.  Lutra must be panicking, in their way.

And when an apparatus panics, the results could be disastrous.

Well, at least this situation I can solve with words.  I hope.

Resting, and letting my souls recover, will have to wait at least a bit.  For now, I set loose the larger bees, give the others under Bind Insect the general order to help where they can and be patient with the newcomers, and then call upon Oob to help me with my new task.  The beetle is irate that I am depriving him of this new source of fresh gossip, but I remind him that I, too, am being called away.  And also that he’ll be the first to know what’s happening with Lutra, which I think he appreciates more.

It is after that short conversation that I realize that my little beetle is rapidly developing the mind of a scholar, in his own way.  That the insect has the context to understand regret and also secrets.

I hadn’t thought of this before.  Hadn’t noticed, perhaps.

We’ll talk about it after we solve the newest problem.

Which is, really, the unofficial motto of our home.

It is good to be back once more.