Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 118 (Patreon)

Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 6

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)

-

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 barely knew them.”  Malpa is sitting in my workshop, his form only just starting to bounce back after a period of panicked starvation before meeting me, but still a heavy presence.  He has occupied a seemingly random spot on the floor, and leans against the wall as he speaks his thoughts.

I can’t tell if he is speaking to me, or simply voicing his grief to the world.  I suspect it might be both, but I know that at least the people closest to me know that I have inkrat glimmerlings about this space, and they can listen and see for me.  I think I might be able to get them to speak for me as well, if only I could make better ones.

It’s low on my list of wanting right now.  Unfortunately for everyone I am no grand devil, and my miracles take a little more than a trio of blinks to resolve.  I have to work at my magic, which I would like to say is unfair, but every time I have that thought, I also feel a strange gnawing need to remind myself that it is a joke.  Just in case someone is listening.

I let Malpa speak, hand wrists resting on his knees with his fingers splayed out ahead of him.  “Vestment I knew.  He was a good kid.  Odd kid.  But it’s the end of the world, we’re all odd, aren’t we.”  It’s not really a question.  I agree though.

The cleric I once was made it a personal journey to aid those who were too odd to be considered worth it.  He never thought of it that way, but with the broader view of the world I have now, I can see it clearly.  Was Vestment odd?  I suppose they would have been, to these humans who barely ever saw even another demon in their lives, much less a species that had been dormant for their whole lifetimes.  To me, though, they all just look like they need help.  Maybe that’s the cleric’s influence on my thoughts.  Maybe I should offer that old memory a prayer of my own in thanks, though it may sound solipsistic to pray to my own soul.

”Tirka wasn’t odd.  Tirka was normal.”  Malpa is staring vacantly at the backs of his hands.  Normally they’d be covered in a layer of dirt from working in the farms, but not today.  They’re clean, and idle, and that means he has no distractions from his woe.  “And I hated him.  Not a bad hate.  He was an empirial, you know?  I would have wanted to be him when I was a boy.  And then I would quietly swear when his kind showed up to collect taxes.  And that was it.  And now he was… just too human.  Too stubborn.  He was a cur to my loves, and if Jahn hadn’t beaten me to it I would have cracked him one.”  Malpa is still staring at his hands as the distant wind coming through the balcony door rustles some papers, a reminder of the omnipresent far off howl of the galesun.  “But I didn’t want him dead.”

I know.  I write in the floor by his leg with a quick application of Shift Wood.  If I focused on how little I focused on the writing, I might feel shame.  But while I am trying to keep a part of my thoughts available to hear Malpa’s words, I am devoting most of my thinking to Congeal Mantra and Claim Construction, using my familiar trick to weave the former into the latter and empowering the different parts of the fort.

I should have done this a long time ago.  A long time.  Hah.  As if I have even had a long time to work.  It has been crisis upon wound upon battle since I have come alive again, and I am not even a single year old.

Still.  I knew that this magic had merit when Seraha told me about the classroom.  And then distractions mounted, mantra was needed elsewhere, and I never did set about turning our home into a place that could learn itself.  But now I have a little to spare, and as with all my spells, it is in everyone’s best interest to never rest on a full vial of flowing nothing.

“Seth was fine.”  Malpa says as I add a dozen mantra to a segment of wall.  “For a dem- ah, I guess it doesn’t matter.  He wasn’t a bad guy.”  I wonder what the walls will learn to do.  Be better walls I assume, but how they will do that is beyond me.  “I didn’t even know the others.  Cito?  Kito?”  It was Cito, who may yet be alive depending on how far and furious the winds threw him into the green.  I write the name for Malpa as I add mantra to the kitchens.  “Ci-to.  Right.  And Imwa.  Just… they just wanted to live.  They weren’t that different than the rest of us.”

I almost find it strange that Malpa is talking about other humans as not being so different from him.  But I do not, for two reasons.  For one, I know the flow of societies from a whole lifetime of reading the reports of a hundred civilizations.  And for another, I am pouring magic into adding mantra to the armory, and cannot focus too much on what I find strange or not.

”It’s not fair.”  Malpa whispers to himself as I seal walls and doors with magic and consider how to make an armory a better armory.  “Worst storming in a century, and it’s this one.  That’s not fair.”  He practically growls the words, voice rising as he glares at my floor.  I use up the last of Claim Construction on adding to the shared barracks room that the children use.  “Or maybe it’s the green turning on us.  No, it’d just eat the walls, wouldn’t it?”  I check the walls.  The mantra is in place and beginning to do whatever it is that it does.  They are not being eaten.  “It’s just… random.”

My work is done for now, until my spells can rest and be ready to work once more.  So I listen back over to Malpa’s bitter words, and try to think of how to speak to him.

And I realize I don’t have a good answer.

It is.  I scratch into the floor by where he has dropped his hand, letters carved in simple script by his fingertips.  Do you… I stop writing, unsure of how much to say.  With the full focus of my mind, I also have the full focus of feeling, and I find my emotions to be tumultuous.  Malpa’s condition of needing dirty hands to distract from grim thoughts is not by any means unique.

”Do I?”  He asks me, looking around to try to find where the inkrats I am listening through are lurking.  He won’t find them; I have made fifty of the glimmerling creations, and they are all masterful at ending up in surprising places unseen, with minimal prompting from me beyond the command.  “Do I what?”

Do you know how old I am?  It feels odd to ask.  I’ve shown Mela the truth of what I am, and I’ve spoken to Yuea and Kalip.  Lutra knows by virtue of being like me, but Lutra is also… not well.  All my old lives had their own tricks for healing of the body, but none of them knew how to heal a mind.

”You showed up with the others.”  Malpa says.  “But that’s not what you mean, is it?”  The man might be a frontier villager who thinks libraries are as much magic as glimmerlings, but he didn’t survive this far by being a fool.

I make the small mark that shows amusement.  There are six souls that make up who I am.  I write to him, watching him slowly read the words, lips moving silently as he does.  Each of them a whole life.  Do you know what I learned from that much living?

Malpa frowns as he works to answer.  “You know what plants out here are edible.  How to make the elixirs that handle the dust cough.  That’s why you know other languages?”

it is.

”So you’re an old rock then.”  He concludes.  “So what?”

So it’s all random.  Six different lives, six different views of the world, six different sets of friends and lovers and rivals and enemies, six different deaths I don’t remember.  But six copies of how loss comes about.  Death like this is never fair.  It is under no obligation to be just or patient.  It isn’t even something we should talk about like a person; it just happens.  Because it does.

Malpa drags rough fingernails across the ridges I’ve put in the wooden slats of the floor as he scowls, his poorly kept black hair tossed side to side as he looks around the room for some aspect of me to scowl at.  “And that’s suppose to be okay?!”  The man shouts.

Of course not.  I write the words on the panel propped up next to the map, the repeatedly smoothed wood starting to thin but perfect to make a large statement on.  You should be angry.  The world is cruel and unjust and it has taken from you something precious. So what are you going to do about it?

”I’m supposed to do something about it?”  Malpa gives a bitter laugh, the kind I’ve heard from men and women in a dozen cities.  The kind that someone uses when they don’t feel like they’re allowed to openly weep.  Or when they simply plan on giving up.  “Like what? Stab the wind?  What, do you think I’m Yuea?”

Well, gallows humor was always a favorite of the soldier and the singer alike, and it works on myself as well.  I laugh inside my inner world at his words, even as I keep writing to him.  No, no, that’s my job.  Yuea would try to swing at the ephemeral, but she would always mist.

Malpa stares at the pane of wood for a long time before the silence turns to barks of almost manic laughter.  He buries his face in his clean hands as his shoulders shake, leaning forward as he pulls his knees up.  “A kid is dead, and we’re here making jokes.”  He bites off the words.

Sometimes that is all we can do.

”Sometimes can ash.  I hate this.  Thought we were done losing.”

We’re never done losing.  If I’ve learned anything useless it’s that.

”So what am I really supposed to do?  Can you make me strong?  Turn me into something like Kalip or Mela?”  Malpa’s demand is sharp and desperate and above all else wrong.

I don’t have the capacity for another like Yuea or Kalip, you’d end up killing yourself if I remade you.  And nothing in my power can make you like Mela.

”Not really an answer.”  He mutters as he finishes reading.  “What now?  What do I do next?”

When did you last sleep?

”I don’t remember.”

Eat?

”Yesterday.”

Then you do those things.

”That doesn’t fix the problem.”

It fixes one problem.  And by the time you wake up, I’ll have something for you to do.  It would seem you are like me, and keeping busy is the best way for you to proceed.

”Doesn’t let me help next time.”  He stares in the direction that my body is sat, slowly twirling away underneath a table made of wood from a distant forest, hammered into shape in a foreign polity, here to be my shade only by a long string of coincidences.  “Doesn’t make me useful.”

It is language I’ve heard across every life, in some way or another.  Tragedy, despair, loss, they bring out this feeling in so many people; many of those people myself.  The guilt at not having been able to do more, the need to never see it happen again, the gnawing dread that creeps in when it becomes clear just how tilted against you the world is.

I still don’t have an answer.  As I told Malpa, no number of lifetimes under my crystal shell has taught me any real secrets about life and its endings.  Or about how to soothe a pained heart.

I also cannot make him strong.  Or rather, I could, but not in a way that would change any of it.  It doesn’t matter how well armed you are, you cannot fight the storming itself.  You cannot fight the oh so unjust loss that plagues all the living.

The only thing I can do is listen.  The thing we have always been able to do for each other since the first sunset touched this world.  Sit, and listen, and let him bleed out the venom in his heart.

And also slowly Drain Endurance him, so softly he does not notice when his eyes droop shut and his resting spot against my chamber wall becomes more like a bed than a seat.

My inkrats keep an eye on him as I resume finding ways to secure our home.

I’ve tried to make a game of it with Lutra to ‘lob’ packages back and forth between us with the childlike apparatus’ Small Trade, which I believe has helped keep them focused on the task.  And while Form Party is still tiring to use to converse with them directly, a few flickers of contact to arrange the timing and the contents of today’s food delivery.  Collect Plant is emptied to nothing from the scouring I have done of the far parts of the green, and I admit that there is a satisfaction - and a wave of amusement from Lutra - in the surprised honk the verdling in the kitchen makes when Lutra deposits to them several completely intact para root plants.

The name is a misnomer, it is not a root.  It is actually a bush, which has roots, but the roots are inedible.  The bees seem to like the material though, and the freedom I’ve been allowing them to prowl the fort on their own until they are needed means that they have the freedom to steal away the discarded pieces for the ‘hive’ that the larger ones insist upon.

For all that the edible material I’ve found appears hearty, I know it won’t last.  We have many mouths to feed, and while Lutra’s help has allowed us to keep everyone on fresh food for a pair of days now, I believe their Small Trade will require rests.  Getting information from the smaller apparatus is a bit like deciphering temple ink, though, so I can’t be sure how often they can maintain.

And all the while, a splinter of my thoughts is laying traps.

I would call them defenses, but the soldier’s memories have balking at the term.  Defenses is a word for walls and overguns, mobile troop formations and emplaced keeps.  I am not creating those.

On the inner edge of my Distant Vision, I am slowly blanketing the green in Stone Pylons and Pressure Triggers.  I’m attempting to create a semicircle facing outward first, as we have had very little in the way of threats from deeper into the green.  And while I know they are there, I know the enemies farther out are more inclined toward armies that will need thinning.

Each Stone Pylon is set to Drain Health, slowly accumulating what it will need to kill several things.  The triggers are so they don’t kill every passing piece of game or expend themselves wiping out ants; the green tolerates us for some reason, but I doubt it would look kindly on that level of destruction.  The radius they can reach is small, however, and concealing them is a feat all its own.  I also must add Claim Construction or else risk having them stolen away, though with that spell already drained, I simply mark each untethered obelisk on my map to bring into my domain later.

With each pylon able to reach a few armspans, that means that completing the arc that will act as a single line of violent defense will take only eight thousand uses of Stone Pylon.

I have completed a hundred and six.

While I wouldn’t brag about it to anyone out loud, I am proud of how fluid my casting has become.  Nudge Material and Collect Material are making it possible for me to source the stone I need.  It’s easier when there’s plenty of exposed rock as the galesun performs its annual loosening and stripping of the soil anywhere that isn’t held down with root cover.  But it is still an expenditure of time that I find myself in increasingly short supply of.  Beyond that, though, I am learning to be better at Stone Pylon itself.

My magic is, in many ways, a cryptic Malvor’s Device.  I push the supply that the spells themselves generate through the complex patterns of thought and mystic action, and the machinery turns in my mind and something occurs in the world.  But that isn’t really true, even if it is correct.  There is subtlety and nuance to all of it, and every time I push a spell to be something specific, I can feel how it slowly leans in the direction I want.

I do not know, at this point, for example, if I could use Shift Wood to make armor in the same way I first did.  I could accomplish the task, but it would be significantly harder, now that I’ve spent so many tendays using it as a writing stylus.

But just as this limits me in some ways, it also allows me to learn and master myself and my spells.  Stone Pylon is getting an exceptional amount of practice repeatedly forming identical copies of the lowest tier of creation I can perform with it.  It is a city workshop made arcane; impersonal, standardized, a blunt tool for a blunt problem.  And that level of skill is exactly what I need.  I don’t need a single intricately glyph-etched piece of art that deploys my own spells stronger than I ever could.  I need eight thousand deadly surprises, as fast as possible.

My work at measuring and testing my own magic has faltered lately, as survival is prioritized over all else, but I do think that I am doing… not more with less.  That would imply something fundamentally incorrect about the Stone Pylons that I am making.  But I am doing less with even less.  A couple more each day.  Drawing out my capacity to the utmost.

I add a few more to the slowly filling net of harm, covering the easy game trails and switchback paths, before I run myself ragged once again.  And then I find myself uncertain of what to do.

There are people throughout the fort who I could speak with, but I don’t know most of them, and the new arrivals are still skittish around my bound insects.  Yuea, Kalip, and Mela are all absent at the moment, daring the galesun as they intercept something that was spotted by one of the bees.  There are only so many things I actually can do idly, as it turns out.  Once my magics are used and my tasks are done, I either need to find new tasks, or simply wait.

The reminder that I do not have a living body, that I cannot feel the cool warmth of the storming sun, cannot simply take a moment to breathe and enjoy the flow of air through lungs, cannot find a piece of quartz to gnaw or a long straw to chew, cannot even take a nap of my own volition, it is a sense of painful loss all its own.  I shove it away as violently as I can by casting out the widest net of Bind Willing Avian that I can, magically offering succor to the nesting birds that abound in the green as they shelter from the galesun for the storming.

None of them take my offer, but having something to do is at least a distraction that lasts long enough for the next distraction to line itself up.  That distraction comes in the form of a pair of children bursting into my study, in flagrant defiance of the large honeybee that is attempting to herd them away from the space.  The bee sends a sense of sheepish apology across our bond, with the implication that it didn’t really have any option aside from tackling the lead child, and that seemed like a terrible plan.  I agree, though Malpa might not as Marrko and Ruuet affix onto his sleeping form and alter the path of their playful charge.

I let the Drain Endurance slip, and then reverse, waking him just before he is accidentally headbutted by a demon boy who is still unfamiliar with the extra length that his growing horns give him.  Malpa’s eyes shoot open and he snatches Ruuet out of the air, rolling just slightly enough to let Marrko thump lightly into the wall behind him.  The man, for a noncombatant, is very adept at dodging children.

”And what are the two of you doing in here?”  He asks, his scratchy and tired voice stern.  The kids don’t actually find him intimidating at all, and give a laughing answer about waking him up.  “You’re supposed to be learning your words today.”  Malpa shakes his head, undeterred.  “I didn’t nap that long, are you two leaving your poor tutor all alone?”

The two say that Seraha wasn’t feeling well and that they could do whatever they wanted today.  Which, apparently, was to ‘sneak’ into different parts of the fort.  I check in with my bonds and quickly verify that the eldest demoness did say something about this to me, and I even replied that I would let anyone who asked know.  I pass it on to Malpa, but also ask him to go check on the poor woman.

I am under a year old and I often feel overwhelmed.  I cannot imagine that the woman who runs our kitchens and the start of a small school, while being old enough that her fur has begun to fade, would be less tired.  Her shared room is closed and I have no eyes there, so I send the growing glowing bee along with Malpa just in case she needs something from me.

And it makes me feel better, in a way.  It’s such a perfectly living thing to do.  A way I can stop seeing the world as a map and a war and a machine, and simply be at home comforting a part of my family.

Just for a candlemark though.  Because there are things moving in the green, and there are enemies on the march, and I would like a few more squadrons of glimmerlings before any real combat is called for.  The galesun hampers us all, but for those that see their armies as disposable parts, it costs perhaps very little to throw them our direction and see what happens.

So much to do.  I appreciate it, much as Malpa appreciates being suddenly tasked with entertaining a group of bored children.  Staying idle would be painful.  At least like this, the anxiety is in a more practical form, and I can fight it with spell and blade.

Would that all problems were so easy.