Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 102 (Patreon)

Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 7

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)

I am not forming power.

My small moments of quiet have stretched into the night, and the next day.  Outside my hidden spot in the fort, the larger bees flit to and fro as they move with the children or seek out fruit in the surrounding Green. The adults work to harvest the bounty that Bind Crop produces, which will still not be enough to keep everyone fed forever.  The thirty survivors from the enemy apparatus slowly awaken, and need to be fed and helped with a number of things until their strength returns; something else we lack the hands for.

Some of them, here in the early hours when the sun is just starting to lick at the world like a golden flame, cry.  Oob and his beetle companions, listening in on the various rooms, report it to me almost awkwardly.  Finally waking up somewhere free from torture, with something as close as we can give them to a bed and a meal, I think it partly breaks some of them.

It has been… I don’t know how many days it has been since I first woke up and lived.  Fifty, sixty at most?  But I know I was not the first apparatus into the world.  How long, for some of these poor hearts?  How many days in darkness, the only interruption one of the silkspinners dragging in a new body or animal?  How many meals of roughly butchered raw meat and dank water?

And then dragged away.  It’s very, very hard to feel angry at these people for their sharp words, their whispers of ‘monster’ when they see Yuea or Kalip, or any other species they are unfamiliar with or have enmity toward.  In truth, I should have seen it earlier.  They probably assumed they were simply being moved to a new prison.

And now some of them softly weep as they eat small bites of cooked yam, and bury themselves in blankets that aren’t made of corpses.

Those ones, over anyone else, I decide I will do my utmost to protect.  I will try for all of them, but these people, they I think are the ones most likely to heal well into the ranks of whatever we are here.

I’ve remade two of my little glimmer scout creatures, but I mostly just have them ranging in a patrol around the fort.  I have not been experimenting.  I’ve been taking the smallest sips I can with Drain Health from the wildlife I can manage to find at the edges of my range; killing nothing, but slowly refilling my ability to heal.

All of this, from the gobs rushing around and guiding their new siblings, to Seraha surreptitiously crushing a chunk of vim in her hand as she moves about the kitchens like a woman half her age, to even the distant activity of the eels in the lake some distance from us beginning to stir as the dawn continues.  It all comes to me through the tiny windows of light and life that I have into the world.  And for a moment, I forget that my body will likely never move to my own command.

It doesn’t bother me much, though.  There would always have been a trade for a new life.

What does bother me is that all of these magics that I have are not working properly.  Or at the very least, they are not working as I expect them to.  Who is to say if my magic is proper or not?  After all, I have never before in any life heard of someone trading shining gems made out of bits of the world to the thing that gives magic written on the soul in return.  But what I have heard of is injuries, and I recognize what mine are doing to me.

Magics refill slower.  Some of them, the cracked souls, cannot be used without pain.  And that power which I trade for more magic, is not forming.

Scattered across my old lives are memories of broken bones, fevers, headaches, and simply days when the thought of opening another scroll was enough to spark the idea of arson.  All of that maps slightly sideways onto how I am feeling now.  Injured, yes, but I don’t feel it.  Instead, I feel the frustration of my raw capabilities being interrupted.  The only way I would truly feel pain would be to inflict it on myself; poking at the gap of a shattered tooth.

I’ve been meditating, as best I can without forgoing every outside distraction.  And each candle that passes, I try to press one of my points of power into the wound that is my broken soul of Spirituality.

Even the name itself stings to think.  Or perhaps I am going mad.  Fever from an infected wound for an apparatus might simply be trick pain and poor deductive reasoning.

Four points of power into my attempt at self healing, and I can see measurable progress.  Cracks close, opalescent crystal forms like scar tissue, and the pain of reaching for certain spells lessens.  But does not vanish.  And now I come back around to my new problem.

I am not making more power.

Three points left, and I somehow doubt it will be exactly what the medicine needed to salve my wounds.  And after that, what?  Fear begins to take hold as the question that I have been putting off for days erupts again into my thoughts.  What if, truly, I will never heal from this?  No more endless use of my most useful magics, no more use of whole sets of my abilities at all, no more growth as I expand souls and select spells, no more talking…

A sinking feeling of certainty takes hold.  This is what has happened to Lutra, isn’t it?  The poor apparatus, at least one part of them the memories of a confused child, is damaged like me.  Souls locked away, the power needed to heal no longer flowing in.

I try to shut everything else out, and look for the motes.  Those small bits of the world underneath the living one shaken loose by my magic, the source of my nature.  I took in so many of them from the last victory, that in comparison what exists now is so thin as to be almost imperceptible.

But they are there.  They move toward me slowly.  Almost subdued, like the soft flecks of untethered power are no longer interested in me.  Maybe they aren’t.  Maybe I have failed to amuse the magic, and this is what comes of it.

They are still there though, and still moving.  Amused or not, they drift toward me.  I trace back snaking lines of them to imperceptible points, using See Domain to try to follow where geography and geometry no longer allow, and I find them coming from Claim Construction.  The fort, lived in and used and mine, is still bringing me a steady dusting of the things.

But those motes, once they meet my geological skin, slip across the surface.  Half of them slide into the cracks that I cannot quite feel, and vanish.  The others, especially the ones that touch on the surfaces opposite the larger cracks, eventually are pulled into me, and I can feel them slowly filling the vials and basins of my magics.  And almost none of them, even when I prod at them with my thoughts, work to coalesce into another point.

So what is happening to the ones that fall into the cracks?  My fear is forgotten briefly as my curiosity, honed across lifetimes and perfected in my new free rebirth, takes over.

I try to follow one specific mote.  I know I can, when they are pulled into me, I’ve done it before.  It takes effort and strains the odd sense I am using similarly to trying to force eyes to read another merchant’s files from across the room and upside down.  But I can do it.  Only, when I follow one into a crack, there is no more following to do.

It would be less infuriating if I didn’t lack the proprioception to even know if the motes touching the holes in my body are doing anything.  Are they healing me, slowly?  Is this why I was not wounded after I awoke from my rest following the first two kills of opposing apparatus?

And then another fear, though this one somewhat distant and behind me.  An abstract worry. What if, actually, I had not had things like Claim Construction and Small Promise, or even more practical magics such as Congeal Glimmer and Make Low Blade?  What if I had slain an enemy, and gone into the darkness, and there had been no source of new motes for me?

How many apparatuses will commit fratricide, and then simply never wake up?

This is one of those odd quirks of our combined magical and physical species that makes me deeply curious what force designed us.  Designed me.  Many of my lives were not particularly faithful to anything, especially not the cleric, but somehow I cannot help but wonder if some enormous power is responsible for me now.

Perhaps a little self-aggrandizing.  To think that I am so strange as to be required to be unnatural.  This, in a world that has the Green.  And, in other parts of itself, further wonders.  The Statue of Hoya, the Umu Archipelago and its floating caravans, the mere existence of something as strange as a goat, the whisper of the old flames in our ears.  Design feels too steady of a thing for a world as chaotic and messy as the one we live in.

Though I do still wonder what it is that takes the power I accumulate, and tells me the names of my spells.

This musing on the past is secondary now to the worry about my future.  About whether or not I will ever heal.  I strain my natural perception as hard as I can, to the point that my view of the motes in the darkness starts to blur and fuzz around the edges.  Motes stretching out to thin membranes and twisting noodles as I overfocus on them.

I can see the outline of my damage this way; the places where the world’s change touches my body and then vanishes.  And it is there that I strain yet further to look. To peer for any sign that each mote is a tiny spur of crystal regrowing, to surveil for change, for growth, for healing, any hint at all that things will be okay if I simply let them be.

There is nothing.

Letting go of the sense is an abrupt relief, and an admission of failure.

The worst part of this, I think as I try to focus on making a plan and not simply experiencing a mental breakdown, is that I cannot form a plan.  I don’t know which cracks are which; my souls, I always thought, were bounded to the points of my body and not the surfaces.  But the corners are not a physical thing, just an abstraction, and cracks cannot damage them nearly so neatly as they can the rest of my form.  Because of this, I don’t know which crack has hurt which soul.  I cannot check which soul is the least damaged, which one I might have the best chance to repair.

What if I only need one of them fixed, to begin gathering power again?  What if I pick the wrong one?   Or, even if that doesn’t work, what if I could heal one soul, and I need to choose what the rest of my life will be filled with?

Well.  That is little challenge.  It is Spirituality.  It is my channel for communication, and my method of creating tools, and of everything I cannot give up, I can lose it the least.

But I find it hard to focus on smoothing the next point of power into the soul.  I find it hard to commit, at all.  An ongoing theme in my life, I am aware, but no less true now that my entire future hinges on it than it was when I was simply choosing between moving dirt and talking to bees.

I need to talk to someone.  Or rather, I wish to talk to someone.  I yearn for the connection to one of my friends and companions.  The bees… they don’t understand.  I watch the inside of the hive of the mundane honeybees for a while, simply to calm down.

It works.  The social dynamics and strangely intricate dances of these small creatures is soothing.

But then, so soothed, I am reminded that I cannot watch forever or I will run out of the magic that keeps the larger bees alive.  And some of the fun of it all is soured.

My own panic, and possibly my injuries, are making my thoughts both too frantic and too slow.  Yes.  An outside perspective is what I need.  Somehow.  I will need to find a way to teach a bee enough patience to write a message for me.  I need to ask for help.

I send out Bind Insect to find who is not too busy.  Fear might be truly starting to creep in, but hope is never far away, when one has a friend.  The paraphrased old human saying comes to me unbidden as the memories of the scholar dredge it up and present it.  And I cling to those words as I make contact with a honeybee the size of a large dog and with a nature to match, and send them off to see if Kalip and Yuea are awake yet from their ordeal.

Hope is pleasant, but no matter how much hope I amass, I doubt now that sitting and waiting will fix my problem.