Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 110 (Patreon)

Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 0

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)

There’s something refreshingly simple about not being rewarded for my murders.

Oh, the deaths of the conspirators let loose bursts of soft motes, but I made no attempt to grab at them.  My body is still too broken to form those miniature stars, and while I do not know the extent of how our magic works in duet, perhaps Lutra can make use of what remains of the settling dustfall.  And that change in how things are, that simple little difference of whether or not there is an extrinsic reason to kill, makes me feel… comforted.

I am complicit in death once more.  But at least I know that it is because I chose to be, and not because I am following the gentle reins of chasing an increasing amount of power.

“One more.  Where are they?”  Kalip asks my bees as he darts from branch to brach, making impossible jumps across the dark forest canopy with nothing more than his own skill, and the flickering sparks along my bond with a dozen small glimmers that are fixing his balance.

The glimmer are interesting.  I think they might be like mantra, in their own odd way.  Only where the mantra improve or enhance what they are trained with, the glimmer instead look at conditions and say “Actually, no, we would prefer not.”  Kalip’s foot is a handspan too far forward, about to miss a branch, and a glimmer shines in my mind, and he lands perfectly.

I don’t have time to be interested in that though.  I am searching for an answer to Kalip’s question.

The fort’s barracks spaces are currently full of people who are sleeping, pretending to sleep, or talking quietly enough that they hope they are not disturbing other people who are trying to sleep.  While the people I came here with have their own rooms, converted from various offices or storerooms or the one barracks I carved up with Form Wall and a pile of surplus wood, the newcomers are living rather more pushed together.

They tried to divide themselves into human and demon rooms, but that was never really going to be a passable action.  So instead, they have been getting used to each other in tense and close quarters while I try to determine how to solve that problem permanently.  Likely after my own healing is complete, and my magic is restored to its full power.

Until then, I am under no illusion that I owe these people privacy.  Not that I would share their small secrets or emotional pains with anyone regardless.  But having Oob and Oop each leading their growing beetle scions in stealthily gathering intelligence and gossip was how this particular conspiracy was cut down so easily in the first place, and I see no reason to not lean on them further.

Oob reports back with his delegated minions that the demon we are looking for, Daurthy, has not said anything for some time.  And, also, she is not in the barracks.  The beetle sends me an impulse over Bind Insect that comes across as a mix of embarrassment and irritation, to which I politely ask him to save his personal woes until Bind Insect doesn’t need every bit of stamina that I can muster just to let me cast the spell as I absolutely need to.

About a third of the people who we rescued were not soldiers.  Daurthy is one of them, as far as I know.  We haven’t exactly had the time to make a catalog of every arrival and their ranks and professions.  But she doesn’t associate with the soldiers.  She’s also missing half an arm, a wound I could not patch with Drain Health.  At least, not yet.  Maybe not ever, if she’s part of an attempt to kill us all in a one sided suicide pact.

One of the bees lands on Kalip and starts tapping.  It’s a rough system.  The standard one for no, two for yes, three for uncertainty.  Presses for turning left or right.  It’s an awkward way of guiding someone and it allows me to convey almost nothing that Kalip doesn’t think to ask.  But he pauses to tilt his head in confusion before kicking off the last tree at breakneck speed and landing at a run to cross the open field around the fort.

“Where do we start looking?”  He murmurs to the bee that has clung to his shoulder.

I’m already looking.  The main halls and courtyards have the massive honeybee sentinels crawling down them with their loping waddles, wings held back as they search for me.  Smaller bees fly in a systematic pattern that I assign to them, rapidly checking off empty rooms and passageways that she cannot be in.  And from there, a check of the underground portions of the fort; the cellars and armories.  We disturb the pair of verdlings, but they don’t seem to be too put out by it.

And I find nothing.  The fort isn’t empty; Seraha is up late with a pair of gobs doing something in the kitchen, and they watch the bees tear through with worried looks.  A small group of demons are sitting together in the rear courtyard and telling mourning stories for their dead; they watch with significantly more fear, but when Muelly sees them pass she rises rapidly and apologizes before hurrying after.  The children that were pretending to be asleep in their own shared barracks room try to hide small laughs and gasps as the bees swarm the space looking for any interlopers.

But nothing of the conspirators’ scout.  She’s not in the fort, I can say that with certainty after only a candleclaw of searching.  My bee taps Kalip, who pauses before expending the energy to vault the walls.  “Okay, where then?”  He asks.  More taps.  “That’s not helpful.”  The soldier mutters with a biter note in his voice.  “Where’s Yuea?”  The honeybee taps for ‘yes’ and Kalip twitches his head in my direction.  “Standing guard?”  ‘Yes’ again.  “Not there then.”

I’m sifting through the senses of the glimmerlings that I have scattered around the fort.  The limited reach of Congeal Glimmer means that they can’t range too far out, but in this case, that is something of a boon.  If the demon is beyond where I could catch them, they likely aren’t coming back regardless.  Dark shapes of trees and ferns touch on my thoughts as I flit from one scout to another, whether glimmerling, beetle, or bee.  Night vision is something we’re going to need to work on soon; none of my creatures are quite as sharp eyed as Kalip’s new form.

Which is why it is to my surprise when I spot someone.  Just a fleeting shape in the night, but enough that I can determine where they are headed.

Well, in a way.  The process is more mentally taxing than I would like.  With half my magics drained away, and another half broken, it is somewhat of a challenge to simply put a pin in a map and say ‘here’.  Instead, I work backward; I have been half-instinctively tracking my glimmerlings through a strange proprioception, but that doesn’t mean I know exactly where they are.  I do know the direction they moved in, though.  I reorient it, and check its position within See Domain, and when that doesn’t give me an accurate picture, I send another glimmerling from the fort itself to the location of the first one, targeting through Congeal Glimmer in a strange recursive loop of information that I resent being unable to simply ask for.

It works though.  And in the span of someone else’s heartbeats, I have a likely destination.

The lake.  Lutra’s little plot of territory, water and friendly eels.  Near enough that someone might risk making the trek there in the dead of night.  Especially if that person was paying attention to where the other residents of the fort headed when they set out during the day.  Perhaps if they were promoted by a distant explosion that happened to coincide with a meeting their co-conspirators were having.

She’s not trying to find me, I realize.  She’s making a suicide strike.

The bee on Kalip’s shoulder repositions to the back of his head, and I start guiding him in the right direction.  He catches on quickly, and kicks into a sprint in an instant, kicking up sprays of loose dirt from where he was waiting for instructions before his pace steadies out.  Once again the vegetation of the Green flies by the viewpoint of my bee, the nighttime sounds briefly pausing as they wait for the overwhelming predator to tear past.

Kalip can, when he wants to and doesn’t care much for anything he hits, move very fast.  I’m reminded of Yuea doing the same early on in our friendship; simply ignoring the thorns and branches that she had to crash through to get where she needed to be.  I’m also reminded that I don’t particularly want Kalip to shred his skin - reinforced as it may be - just to get somewhere faster.

I project out a small line of Collect Plant using the perched bee as a guide.  The bee’s eyes have trouble under the moonlight, but not so much that they can’t send me flickering impressions of incoming obstacles, which I target with rapid accuracy.  Taking a single branch off a tree is a surprisingly taxing use of the spell compared to simply ripping an entire bramblerunner from the ground wholesale, but this is one magic I have a surplus of at the moment, and I spend it freely.

And then, suddenly, our new game trail through the Green ends, and Kalip stops with an abrupt planting of his feet that hollows out a channel in the soil and send the bee tumbling from his shoulder, buzzing as it recovers to fly to a branch overhead and sending me a nascent impression of annoyance.

I’m proud of how the bees are growing.  Learning new things every day, even if those things are flavors of aggravation.

Kalip has stopped to scan the area, the moonlight from the broken orbital pouring down into the clearing and lighting things in a pale white.  The water of the small lake gently laps at the shore, the streams that feed into it fill the air with the constant background sound of flowing water, and under the moon as full as it can be in this era, the whole thing appears as an inky mirror.  The crushed stone spenders that stand around the lake cast strange long shadows onto the reeds and pebbles.  And every few seconds, one or two glittering silver forms show tiny hints of themselves on the surface around the center of the lake.

There is also someone approaching.  Short for a demon, her fur looking like blurred shadows under the effect of the pale moonlight, and absolutely panting and out of breath.  She stumbles forward, head whipping around at every tiny noise.  If this is a trained soldier, I’ll eat my own Empathy somehow.

Before Kalip moves, though, I direct the bee to stop him.  Because from my vantage point, I can see one thing he cannot.  And this time, I need to intervene.  “What, what?”  He gives the bee a confused look as the overgrown insect hovers in front of him, tapping at him awkwardly while in flight, pushing him back toward the treeline.  “Alright, fine!”  He raises a hand to deflect a foreleg aimed at his nose, but doesn’t strike back, just shuffles backward and kneels, drawing his bow and planting three arrows in the dirt in front of him.  “Got a reason you want to share?” His voice is kept to a low murmur, traveling no farther than exactly where he wants it to.

Of course I do, Kalip.  I can’t talk to you right now, and every time you say something like that, I get a cent of a length closer to screaming.

The demoness approaches the shore.  Our missing rogue, found.  But before she even gets in range of the potentially automated Drain Purpose effect, something happens.

“Hey there.”

The demoness screams, a noise halfway between a shriek and a bleat coming from her as she practically levitates herself over the surrounding canopy in shock.  She, much like Kalip, also couldn’t see Mela sitting in the tall wet grass on the lakeshore, and the young woman’s voice, even in a pleasant greeting, is somewhat startling.  Even Kalip twitches, though I would never tell him I noticed.  Not now, at least.  Maybe later.

Mela turns her head up slightly toward the encroaching demon who has fallen backward, crunching several beltails and the reeds around them into the ground as she struggles to stand again.  She doesn’t say anything, and from this distance it’s hard to tell, but I think I see the ghost of a sad smile on her face.

“What are you… why are you here?”  Daurthy, our missing demon, demands, her voice coming out shaky.  Even she knows her indignation isn’t going to get her anywhere, but she does it anyway.

“It’s a nice night, isn’t it?”  Mela shrugs, turning back to watch the lake.  “Isn’t that why you’re taking a walk?”

Daurthy, whose hand has been creeping around to the back of her belt, stops moving.  “…perhaps.”  She comments.  “Is this… a good spot?”  The woman asks.

“Sure.”  Mela says, her voice almost unnaturally calm.  “Not if you’re looking to kill anyone though.  So maybe not what you’re looking for.”  She says it so easily, and I remember being young in six lives and simply not having the time for clandestine games, even when doing actual espionage.

“I was-!”

“I get it, you know.”  Mela says softly, pushing her hands off of the damp ground and leaning forward, curling her knees up to rest her chin on them.  Making herself vulnerable.  “Why you think you have to try.  But I can’t let you.”  Daurthy stiffens at the words, and slinks backward.  Her hand pulls the stolen kitchen blade she has tucked under her tunic.  “Oh.  You know, Seraha was looking for that one?  We actually need it, until she can make more knives again.”

The demoness adopts what she must think is a fighting stance, and which the soldier in me scoffs at instantly.  “You are a child.”  Every word she speaks is like its own sentence, punctuated with spite.  “You understand nothing.  You have seen nothing of what these creatures will do, you know nothing of the pain they cause.  Even as a human, a being that should understand atrocity oh so well, this cannot be allowed!”  Her voice rises until she is practically yelling into the night.

On the water, the eels still, silver glinting on black as they come to a stop and observe the confrontation.  Daurthy levels her stolen knife, but Mela makes no move to stand.

In the air, unseen by everyone except for two apparatuses, something is moving.

“What is happening?”  Kalip whispers to no one.  He can feel it, if only a tiny bit.  Something is changing.  A magic that isn’t mine or Lutra’s or anyone’s really.  Something that the scholar knew as a natural part of the world, the same category of magic as the emergence of the gobs.

What is happening is that we are watching hero magic at play.  It is still real, and if the scholar were alive, he would be thrilled that we are about to actually witness a crucial moment.  A pivotal moment on which the world swings.

Mela looks upward at the moon.  “You know, she’s from before Auro got the grin?”  She asks, raising an arm to trace the line of destruction across the white surface overhead.

The demoness flinches.  “Stand up.”  She orders.

“Or what?  You want to stab me but only if I’m facing you?”  Mela doesn’t look over.  Kalip shakes his head with an aggregated expression on his face; annoyed at his student’s dismissal.  He probably wants her to stop talking and fight, but Mela isn’t even making a move to stand up.

“Stand up!”

“No.  Come sit with me if you want to stab me.”  Mela glances over at her conversation partner.  “Or just come sit with me, and talk, instead of whatever you’re doing.”

“What I am doing is what is needed.  Rather should I die or not, it doesn’t matter.  Someone needs to try, or else…” Daurthy trails off as she realizes that she’s let her knife drop.  “Why am I speaking to you?  You’re just another human, and worse, a puppet.”

Mela laughs lightly.  “Not really.”  She says.  “The puppet thing.  I don’t think she can make me into one without some problems, or I’d volunteer.”  The words put a disgusted sneer on Daurthy’s face, and a deep concern in my mind.  “And… just another human?  Come on.  We were just telling you all a couple nights ago that we want everyone to get past that.  You know I’m not.”

“I know you are full of lies.  You never change.”

“It took me a week to change!”  Mela snaps back.  “It took so little time… it…” she stumbles for the first time.  “My best friend is a demon.  My next best friend is something new that I guess is called a gob. My history teacher is a demon, my magic teacher is a rock, my combat instructor is… uh… whatever Kalip is.  Old, I guess?”

A five lengths away, hidden in the trees, Kalip scowls.

Mela continues.  “It was so easy to change.”  She says, lowering her voice again.  Finally, she looks at Daurthy and the vegetable knife pointed her direction, her face wide eyed with sympathy.  “Don’t say I’m just another human.”

“It… it doesn’t matter.”  The older demon says.  “Tell me where the thing is, and I won’t hurt you.”  She takes a halting step forward, then another.

“If she gets closer, I’m shooting her.”  Kalip hisses to me, an arrow in his fingers.

Down by the shore, Mela makes no move to stand.  “And then what?”  She asks.

“What?”

“If you do it.  If you don’t die trying.  After you kill my friend, then what?”  Mela asks.  “Am I supposed to thank you?  You want to call me ‘just another human’, and you’re standing there telling me I should get over you murdering my friend and think you’re special?”  There’s a heat to her words, an anger I haven’t heard very often from the young woman.

“For all the pain that has-!“

“My family is dead!”  Mela screams over Daurthy’s words, shocking the demoness into silence for a brief window as her anger spills over and erupts outward.  “One other person from my village survived, and he’s an asshole!  My parents are dead, my sister is dead, my betrothed is dead, my friends are all dead!  You don’t own pain!  It’s not yours to decide who feels it!”  Mela has pulled herself up before dropping to her knees, her hands covered in mud, her face streaked with tears that shine under the moonlight.

Daurthy stops, and wavers.  The knife in her hand dips as she slumps.  “It matters for nothing.”  She says in her rough accent.  “They are the same thing.  They are all the same.  Killers.”

“That’s what my parents would have said about you.”  Mela’s voice is almost a whisper, and the bee has to strain to hear her.  “That’s what your parents would have said about me.”

The demon’s hand wraps around the knife so tightly I am almost worried her knuckles are going to crack.  “What then if they were correct?”  She asks, voice cracking.

“Then none of this mattered.”  Mela says, as she pushes off the ground and stands up.  In the air around her, a hurricane of something unseen is forming.  Waiting for something, pressing against the soft skein of the world as we know it.  “Then I’m going to get stabbed on the shore of a lake, instead of enjoying the moon and going for a swim.  Then your entire reason for acting is stupid, because you’re telling me you’re somehow a better sort of killer than what you think you’re stopping.  I don’t know.  It doesn’t matter, because they were wrong.”  She tries to wipe her hands on her pants, and finds with a frown that they are just as muddy as her skin.

Daurthy’s shoulders slump, and I see her shaking with silent sobs.  “What now are you trying to do with me?”  She asks.

The strange phrasing catches Mela off, I think.  “I’m trying to make you give us a chance.”  She says.  “And I’m almost there, too!  I can see it!”  The young human steps forward and reaches out a hand, uncertain in the motion.

Her conversation partner shifts her grip on the knife.  “It doesn’t matter.  They know what I tried to do.  They’ll kill me anyway.  Your friends.  They I think already killed the others.”

“They won’t.”  Mela promises.  “Because nothing happened.  We just went out for a late night walk.”  She smiles and shrugs.  “I’m the impulsive and reckless young one anyway, I can get away with it.”

“You… you…” there’s an incredulity in the words that is almost overwhelming.  A fundamental disbelief in everything happening, blended with a lifetime of ingrained hate, a period of imprisonement and torture, and a complete panic for anything that might happen in the next candle.  “How can you… why would you do this for me?”

Mela steps closer, and Kalip hisses as she gets in the way of his shot.  “Because I want to be better.”  She answers, her hand still reaching out between them.  And the unseen hurricane around her strums at her words.  “Even if the world is ending.”

Under the light of the broken moon, the woman in front of her drops the knife she was holding to the dewed grass with a soundless thump.  Then Daurthy stumbles to her knees, crying now in earnest, a long and wailing sound that contains more pain than any one person should ever have to try to keep contained.  And Mela, without hesitation, kneels with her and wraps her arms around the sobbing woman, pulling her close, and whispering words that neither Kalip nor I should be able to hear.  “Everything is going to be alright.”  Mela says.

The storm surrounding her stills to nothing, an invisible and intangible something that can only be seen by the way it distorts my natural senses.  And then, a crystallization.  A response to the pivotal moment, to the choices made.  Everything gathered rushes inward, pouring into Mela in a way that gently pulls at the branches of trees and sways the reeds and elicits a gasp from Kalip and leaves me smelling burning salt and the remnants of thunder.

And then it’s just two women, one quite young and new to her adult life, one older and feeling like she is somehow broken, sitting together near the shore of a lake, under the broken moon.  No magic or hidden force, just two people, one comforting the other.

But something has changed, forever.  Because that is what happens when someone chooses the kind of hero they are going to be.

The honeybee taps on Kalip, and he nods as he silently retrieves his arrows and rises, fading back into the Green and returning to the fort without interfering.  A few of my glimmerlings stand watch from afar, but I don’t move in either.

“So.”  We hear Mela say from afar.  “I know this might sound dumb, but it’s a really hot night, and do you wanna meet some giant eels?”

Kalip has to bite down on his arm to stop the laugh that threatens him, emotions he is unfamiliar with making stealth something of a challenge.  I have no such restriction, and laugh inside my mental space with aplomb.