Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 116 (Patreon)

Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 3

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)

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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)

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Spirituality : 6

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

Congeal Mantra (1, Command)

Form Party (3, Civic)

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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)

Exhaustion sets in.  Which is, itself, a novel experience.  Almost poetic, to know that I am still capable of being tired; it feels very mortal.

Half my magics are empty, but still critical to survival.  Which means parts of my thoughts spend that powerfully useful liquid nothingness as soon as it coalesces in the non-places the spells store their stamina in.  I’ve always been able, as my souls were empowered, to spend the magic faster than I can recover it.  And now that means that every drop of Fortify Space feels like it surges away from me far too fast, and does far too little.

I don’t have hands anymore, but I remember from every single life the sensation of being unable to hold water for very long.

Still, my domain creeps out from the fort.  Slowly securing more and more ground.  I’ve added a pair of Stone Pylons to continue pushing out Fortify Space at the mouth of the valley several hundred lengths away.  But even that spell is down to nothing and used as soon as I feel like I can make an impact.

A day passes as I work, spinning every spell I can and trying to simply make up for lost time.  The loss of half of our crops is a problem, though one that won’t be felt for weeks.  The damage to one of the walls is fixable, though I cannot recreate the quality of the original fort.  The recovery of my souls to being capable of producing points of power is a needed thing, but it is not fast enough.

Yuea drew my attention back to it yesterday.  My power comes from inflicting change upon the world.  Good, bad, neither, both, the unknown source of my magic does not care.  I believe this explains the slow drifting of soft light motes that comes in from things like Claim Construction or large territories of Fortify Space, as well; I may not be actively changing things, but I am pushing back on the changes of the natural world.  Altering not the things themselves, but whole systems of being.

Academically, the scholar I was wants nothing more than to sit down, secure the doors, and last through storming with a thousand thousand experiments to ward off boredom.  Other remnant thoughts from the singer or soldier push a reserved curiosity as well.

But many of my lives lived through stormings before.  All of them, really.  It’s nice to know the seasons at least are constant across time.  But that does mean I know what’s coming.  And I know we aren’t supplied for it, nor are the enemy apparatus going to let us rest, and so I don’t have the luxury to merely relax while the wind and rain pulses.  I need to act, for everyone.

It’s just a shame that the world has a different idea of what will be happening.

My glimmerlings alert me to a problem when I am metaphorically elbow deep in a cast of Spawn Golem.  I’ve let the magic refill to its brim, so that I might spend every dram of it on something useful and adaptable.  Halfway through my expenditure, I’m already sacrificing the adaptability for cost, instead creating a system of arcane gears and joints that will allow for balance.  My original plan for a mobile harvesting platform that could survive the galesun has been abandoned in favor of a creature that is cart and oxen all in one, and I’m starting to feel deeply clever for making it respond to touches inside the heavy stone box that is it’s ‘body’ rather than speech.  Golems don’t hear anything unless I make them, and they don’t understand most words anyway.  But touches are simple, and teaching people what to poke is easier than teaching a golem to listen.

It’s going to be useful.  And I snap the spell off, my collected stone spilling into a real creation in an unmoving pile, because someone needs my help.

I just don’t know what to do about it.  The glimmerling, one of a dozen that was dispatched with the foraging party today, shows me a vision of chaos.  Wind whips loose dirt and mast up in a cyclone that paints the air itself in a dark shade.  Rocks and sticks fly through the air around it, the sounds of the shouts and screams of the living foragers rising in abrupt panic as the galesun opens up a source right on top of where they’re working.

I instruct the glimmerlings to close ranks, find anyone they can in the mess, and pull them together.  They move to obey my instinctive control, and then through one of them, I see a whole tree come collapsing down.  I aim a Collect Plant through the construct’s eye, but the party is both too far for most of my magic, and yet too close for me to locate with Distant Vision.

Then I am down a glimmerling, several hundred weights of tree flattening it with a pulping crunch that I feel a ghostly echo of through Congeal Glimmer.  And then another, gone, picked up by a gust of wind so heavy it feels more like a hammer strike, lifting the creation into the air and flinging it ten lengths to crash to its breaking on the side of a rocky overhang.

I need help. I carve the words into the wood at eye level for four individuals I can find through the senses of my bound bees.  My thoughts want to fragment and consider how I should maybe stop calling the insects that are the size of ponies and intelligence of a human child or demon kid ‘bees’.  They might be their own species now, though I wouldn’t dare to name them myself.  But I hold off on falling down that path of thinking and instead try to form a plan.

By the time people burst into the room I use to oversee everything, I have not accomplished it, and have lost my last glimmerling as well.  I don’t even have a seed of an idea, nor do I have eyes on the site I need.  I’m so tired, and scared, and maybe that is hurting my ability to think at the right scale.  But it doesn’t stop Mela from stopping her run into my den against a desk, startling the inkrats on it, and demanding what the others behind her are about to ask themselves.  “What’s going on?”  She says with a youthful energy that I know Yuea and Kalip’s version would lack.

One of the rats points at the main wooden panel for me as I carve.  Foragers under the galesun.  The letters scrawl out as I try to mix legibility with speed.  I need to get closer.

“Tar.”  Yuea snaps out, coming on on Mela’s heels.  She’s already panting, her green tinted skin covered in sweat from her endless training.  Next to her, I see through our bond as Kalip tries to suppress the wolv’s sense of smell he’s partially inherited.  “How far?”

Here.  I mark on the map.  I think.  If I followed the glimmerling correctly.  I was distracted.

“Yeah, we saw the thing you were working on in the courtyard.”  Muelly follows in last, the thicker demoness panting as well, though from a different approach to exercise than Yuea herself.  “How does-“

Mela cuts off her friend’s curiosity.  “We don’t have time, do we?”  She half-asks.  “Yuea’s tired.  Kalip and I will take you.  Let’s go.”  She steps through the maze of furniture that has been piled here for my use, unneeded anywhere else in the fort, and looks under the desk where my body has been sitting for the last few days.

“Hold up, kid.”  Kalip’s voice, heard through multiple angles by my lurking beetles and inkrats, is exactly what I don’t need right now.  A distraction from moving to help.  “What are you even going to do?  Stab the wind?”

“She’ll do something.”  Mela says with utter confidence in me that I wish I shared.  “Are you coming?”  She asks him as she rises up with two objects in hand, slinging a leather strap over her shoulder and securing my form to her back.  As she moves me, my constantly active Know Material wobbles; the numbers several decimal places down spiking up and down wildly.  It’s not disconcerting anymore, since my expanded range makes that a common occurrence that I’ve needed to get used to, but it’s a good way to track my own relative speed.  Mela also has the presence of mind to set a hand on the desk and let one of my inkrats climb up her bare and scarred arm to cling to the damaged leather hauberk she’s wearing.  Eyes for when we move.

“…You’re faster.”  Kalip says.

“Hang the fuck on!”  Yuea tries to interject.  “You can’t just rush off to die when everyone is depending on oh you little brat!”  The last part is heard only by me, and the others still in the room, as Mela takes the easy way out through the rebuilt doors to the balcony, and then off the edge in a leap that lands her on the edge of the wall.  I sketch a rough arrow near her feet in the proper direction, and then she throws herself forward again, clearing several lengths in a single bound.  “Your student doesn’t listen.”  Yuea snarls at Kalip back in the room as I’m already headed out.  I don’t know if she knows or cares that I’m still present, and listening.

Kalip snorts.  “My student.”  He sarcastically bites off the word, making use of his new canines.  “I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s learning too fast.”

“Yeah, if only someone was around to explain that.”  Muelly pointedly stares at the collection of inkrats on the desk, the demoness picking at the cloth robe on her furred arms as she tries to either intimidate or shame me into revealing something.

Mela is a Hero.  I write, surprising them with a direct answer.  She’s taken her first step.  The second will come later, but until then, she will learn faster, grow faster, and generally be an exemplar to those around her.  While I am writing, I snap out with an awkwardly shaped Collect Material, adding two units of stone to my internal realm and leaving a small crater in the floor of the Green as I remove an obstacle coming up ahead of Mela.  The problem is, she’s around you two. I add the words in wavy script to the former magetouched soldiers back in my study, still barely in range of Shift Wood.

“She’s strong because they’re strong?”  Muelly asks curiously.  “Wait, what was the first step?”

“Ah.  I know.”  Kalip nods.  “Wait, do you mean she’s a hero like in the stories?  Am I going to get tragically stabbed because I’ve been teaching her how to use a sword?”  Despite the crisis, Kalip’s recently excavated sense of humor prompts him to make a joke.  One which I don’t answer, and only partly because I’m focusing on the floor of the Green ahead of us.  It’s hard, the inkrat is made for reading, not parsing the constant movement of branches and grasses in the ever present breeze of the galesun.  But I do what I can, and Mela picks up speed.  “Hey, Shiny!”  Kalip tries to get my attention.  “That was a joke, right?”

“Stop fucking teaching her.”  Yuea tells her lieutenant, clapping a weighted hand on his shoulder hard enough to stagger the archer.

It’s all a distraction.  I pull back from my bonds in the room; Oob is there, and the beetle will be absolutely sure to fill me in on the most tantalizing bits of conversation when I have the time.  Right now, people are in peril, and I must focus.

I cannot feel the wind, but I can place tight rings of Know Material untethered from my form ahead of our path.  And through them, I can see increasingly frantic variations in the number of units of wood and dirt and soil.  As my own sense overlaps the ones Mela is running us through, I watch as the farther spots experience momentary bursts of chitin, meat, hide, or blood.  Bugs or small creatures dying in the increasingly hostile winds, and whisked away.

Mela flings herself forward anyway, my inkrat digging liquid claws into the material of her armor and staining the holes dark black.  I wish she had taken the time to find more armor; the girl fights almost as exposed as Yuea does, and I do not wish to see her inflicted with splinters across her stomach and legs no matter how durable her Heroism makes her.

“There!”  She sees something I do not, a trail perhaps.  I don’t recognize the area, but despite the wind, she espies our path forward.  Her training with Kalip, a man who couldn’t forage a berry to save his life but knows a thousand ways to hunt a person, paying its due.  Or maybe she’s just following some instinct.  It’s certainly not from her childhood learning how to spearfish.

We plunge into the heart of the storm.  Winds that buffet trees around us and send up enough debris that my inkrat is having even trouble seeing the ground ahead don’t deter Mela at all.  For the first time since finding my different lives once again part of the world of the living, I am grateful that I cannot feel anything as a tangled mass of a bramble bush flies past, thorns the length of fingers threatening to scrap lines in my crystal shell.

Mela screams something, her voice eaten by the galesun’s wind.  I can barely see her hand pointing ahead; the ground is being scourged up by the storm, dirt blackening the air.  But when she closes in on a pair of trees with roots straining to hold to the receding dirt, I see the trio of figures huddled against it.  The demons and human don’t even look up as Mela reaches them and starts searching for the others.  They’re too busy being alternately slammed into the floor of the Green, or threatened with being grabbed off it and thrown into the sky.

And now I have what I need; a location to work with.  I still have no plan, but I set to work regardless.  I throw Collect Material out like a net, lines of it pulling like fry noodles before I spread the magic out.  I don’t bother aiming for anything in particular, simply casting it over and over and over in a thin dome around the foragers.  Quickly, the air clears, the dirt and wood pulled into my nowhere places as quickly as it is flung up.  The wind doesn’t stop, but it makes it easier to see and stops the stinging for the people stuck here, and once I get the rhythm down, I can split my focus.  Congeal Glimmer makes a small stone, and then feeds into it as I begin to try to shape another of my resin glimmerings to stand watch.  But the shape isn’t right, the glimmer is the wrong color, the wrong flavor, and I barely hold back long enough for it to be swept away by the wind before it detonates with a bang.

That is a problem, but I have been honing a good memory since I have found myself in this form.  So I simply set to work with Form Wall and Imbue Mending, using what little I have stored of my valuable workings to create a low barrier against the wind.  Claim Construction and See Domain let me know whether or not it is holding up, and where to focus on shoring up the construct, as well as when bodies press against it as people move to the more secure cover.

I cannot make the wall too tall, or the wind will snap it in half.  Or rather, I could, if I had more magic; with enough of the spell, and enough time, I could make it thicker than any cityhome’s fortification, and even built of the blended stone that doesn’t hold up as well as it should out of my storage, it would hold against the galesun.  But I don’t have time or stamina.  So I cheat instead, and make a barrier that is instead just a low shield, with handholds worked in.  Collect Material and Nudge Material dig a furrow underneath it, and Form Wall fills it in, sinking a foundation down for stability.

Mela returns and leaps the wall, depositing two more figures on the ground before the wind throws her backward and even with her strength she is thrown a length at speed to crash against the increasingly hard ground.  I know this wind cannot last forever, and I also know that we cannot lead these people out through the even stronger gusts that we had to fight to get here.

So I shore up my wall, Collect Plant a still-living flying bramble to keep it from hurting anyone, and begin to feed my stockpile of physical determination back to the people here with a reversed Drain Endurance.

Grips tighten on my handholds as they help each other find places to secure themselves.  Even with the wind as strong as it is, a wall like this with a sunken and hooked foundation is not something that can easily be uprooted.  My stone is not perfect, but it is still solid and heavy, and I have quite a lot of it.

I lose track of where I am.  In truth, I lost it some time ago.  I’m aiming through the myopic vision of the inkrat and the pressure on the claimed wall.  Wherever Mela has carried me, I hope she isn’t doing something foolish.

Time becomes blurry as well.  How long the winds howl and the survivors cling to a fragment of hope is uncertain.  Moments are divided between the galesun’s assault, and everything else.

Wind howls.

A tiny line on the map away, Muelly stares out of my study and whispers good luck to her friend, hands clenching the stone in a shaking grip.

Wind howls.

In the fort’s kitchens, Seraha keeps the children busy by making them help her form shredded yam cakes, and I bless each of them with Bolster Nourishment in a defensive action against hunger.

Wind howls.

Mela returns to us at some point.  I only notice because the glimmer and mantra she carries are suddenly clustered with the others from the foraging party, their digging knives and clipping blades made with Make Low Blade and Congeal Mantra a hope for the future where there is time to learn and teach so many things about the bounty of the Green.

Wind howls.

The wall cracks.  I repair it.  The wall shifts.  I sink the foundation deeper.  Someone threatens to let go, their grip slackening.  I feed them stamina, and a Small Promise that if they hold on, then so will their shelter.

Wind howls.

And then, it doesn’t.

The galesun moves on.  The focal point of the maelstrom closes, and another opens somewhere else on the surface of the world.  The scholar didn’t know this, but the farmer did; the almanacs had long since figured out that the number was consistent, and keeping an eye on them was important.

There is silence around where Mela crouches in the middle of the tiny ring of a wall, everyone else clinging on with hands that they cannot pry open now.  Only the endless softer breeze that will last until the final sun sets for the year, and the creaking of a tree nearby that is deciding if it is going to topple over.

I make the choice for it and Collect Plant the thing before it can hurt anyone.

Hoarse voices, no longer needing to scream over the wind, rise now in pain and fear and sobs of relief.  Everything they had collected during the hard day’s work is gone, scattered into the sky save for a few handfuls of smashed berries.  Their clothes are more ripped than before, some of them have lost their charmed blades, and others are injured.  But they are alive.

I try again to form a glimmerling, Congeal Glimmer this time working properly and producing the proper earthy brown stone with shots of green through it that I have come to know.  I make two, then six, then fifteen of the creatures, spilling them out on practiced reflexes to help the survivors up, to carry them and what they have left back to the fort.

Two people do not rise.  Two of the forms Mela brought back and tossed into my defense, held down by their companions, were dead when she found them.  There is a guilt in me that I do not recognize the human, and a worse guilt that eats away at my souls that I do recognize Vestment.

The gob wasn’t even a single turn of the world old.  They had no chance to learn who they wanted to be, no opportunity to actualize themself after their spawn, they had… they…

I cannot cry.  I am a piece of unfeeling crystal, and I cannot cry.  Which is perhaps a grim blessing in the moment, as what is needed is not more weeping, but for me to act.  Not that my actions mean much in the face of the weather itself.

Since the dawn of thinking life on this world, we have all sought to tell the weather that it is unneeded.  And it, in turn, has worked tirelessly to remind us that we are tiny insects on the back of a very large beast indeed.

I expend the last dregs of a spell to make two more glimmerlings to transport the bodies across the rough circle of blasted landscape and back into the still living part of the forest, toward home, where they can be buried properly.

Two dead.  Three more simply gone, taken away as the force became strong enough to uproot trees and fling boulders.  If they are lucky, they will live and find their way back.  If they are very lucky, I will find them first.  But luck seems in short supply today.

A single point of power is marked as income.  Motes stacked up from so many things finally pushing over the edge.  The merchant’s analytical memories provide me with information almost unbidden, letting me know that each new point is costing more and more of the motes.  That I will need to do more, to get less.

But I already knew that.  Just as I already knew that I need to act.  I shove away the merchant’s patterns in disgust as they try to reassure me that with five fewer people, our food supply will last another three days.

Mela carries my form home, but my mind is already there.  Trying to carve ideas on how to use my magic out of thin air.  Trying to make sure every last drop is used, because to do any less would be to abandon my true oath.

Another day is over.  One more turn of the world, one step closer to the next sun, one length nearer to the brink.  I can’t even ask my bees to help me watch Auor pass overhead, the winds tonight are too dangerous to brave the ramparts and roofs, even if Fortify Space keeps them from appearing on top of us.

Exhaustion sets in.