Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 120 (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)

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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)

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Animosity : - -

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

Congeal Burn (2, Command)

Trepidation : -

Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

I keep an eye on Mela as she lurks in a tree. Her balance on the thick bark of the branch is unsteady in the resurgent wind, but still she digs her feet in and holds tight to the trunk as she watches for the things she is planning to try to speak to.

And I watch the area with See Commands.  The spell has so far told me nothing of what the lingering corpses were told to do, aside from to follow.  That follow order seems aimed specifically at the strange oily mass that the central one carries, like it’s dragging them forward in its wake. But I want to see if that changes when Mela says hello.

The swirling eddies in the wind drag branches to and fro.  I saw the galesun whipping up a true cyclone two thousand lengths outside the boundary of the Green, so perhaps that monstrous engine of devastation will require it to keep the winds here at this steady level.  We can but hope.

I can see through my bees, but Mela is outside the range of my control of the glimmerlings.  I worry about her, but only as much as the part of my mind that is watching.  The rest of me is watching Kalip move into position, watching Yuea move the fort to a military defense, and watching my own target pack for if things go wrong.

The ones Mela is meant to speak to are on a trajectory that would take them far past us.  It’s the lowest risk; if she has to run, she won’t lead them to our home.  But it’s still a risk.  I watch her even as my own preparations come together.  Weapons and traps forming up under my magic as I make ready for the inevitable realization that the thing that sent us packs of walking corpses is equal parts enemy and insane.

My attention splits.  Through the eyes of several lancer bees, Mela raises herself on the swaying bough and calls out to the group approaching.  Through the eyes of my resin walkers, another group shambles through winding bramble ropes that survive the galesun without complaint and won’t be bothered by the limbs pulling at them.  Through the eyes of Kalip, I watch over the edge of a bow leveled with an arrow nocked but not drawn from a rocky vantage point.  Through eyes that I wish I could pay more attention to, scared children hold tight to the bees that have been growing up with them; tiny protectors warding away another day of nightmares.

Mela calls a greeting.

The corpse of a… well it’s not a demon, is it?  It looks more like one of the savanna dogs the scholar had passing reason to learn about.  I think I’ve seen one of these before, but I don’t know their name.  Either way, the mangy and decayed furred snout raises to look at her.  And then the corpse howls.

The pack surges forward, the oily stone dropped in the dirt as they sprint for the tree Mela is in with a terrifying surge of speed and coordination.  All of them are screaming now, mouths open exposing sharpened teeth and shredded flesh, arms outstretched as they sprint.  Mela was prepared to fight if she needed to, but I do not believe she was prepared for this.  The nascent hero falters, taking a stumbling step backward that nearly sees her toppling out of the tree.

My bees react with the light touch of my instruction.  Thin metal blades shaped around pockets of water rise around them as they borrow my magic, and launch into the air.  Make Low Blade makes bad weapons, but the impurities can be directed, I’ve found.  These were made dull.

But sharpened by the hands of the veterans of the fort, experts in keeping weapons going under the worst conditions.

Mela remembers the plan as the bees move, their weapons ripping into arms and bodies and tattered clothing as they keep altitude over the enemy.  She shakes herself to attention, her hand gripping the tree trunk so white knuckled I think it might threaten to rip the bark away.  But she doesn’t join the fight even as the corpses slam into the base of her post; instead, she crouches, looks in the way that she was taught for stable ground, and launches herself away to another tree.  If she’s truly been paying attention, her path through the treetops will lead them farther away before putting them down one by one.

The two other points have no such luxury.

Amalgamate Human has a tiny range compared to many of my other magics, and Kalip is far outside it already.  But he’s not far enough from me that the glimmerlings can’t assist him.  Or at least, communicate to him.

One of the resins with him taps his leg, then through my orders, sketches three lines in the dirt atop the rocky hill he’s chosen to watch from.  An arrow, pointed their way.  A simple symbol, but one that means something we decided on for this situation long ago.

Kill, I order the soldier.

The arrow leaves his bow toward the manshu without hesitation, the mantra inside his bones changing it on a level I can’t understand.  Motes of soft change flourishing from his body and moving toward me on the wind as he uses the form I’ve given him.

The second arrow is in the air before the first hits.  The third and fourth come as the first strikes the lead corpse.  The moving body doesn’t even react to the impact against its torso; not Kalip’s finest shot really, not even close to where a human’s heart is.  But when the arrowhead detonates and the upper half of the corpse is transformed into several gory chunks of meat spraying across the Green, and that gets a reaction.

After the pack has its vanguard reduced to viscera, Kalip’s next volley explodes among their numbers.  Fire and force from the detonations ripping into multiple enemies at a time, not enough to kill, but enough to disable them.  He’s breathing heavily already, and while I can’t see him through Amalgamate Human, I believe he has drained away some vital force that he doesn't have nearly enough of.

But the corpses never make it to his hill.  Once they’re downed, my glimmerlings swarm from around and behind, out of sight.  Resin legs from the larger ones smashing skulls to flattened pulp with precision strikes.  My glimmerlings collect the oily stone, too, and begin taking it to the furthest reaches of my control range.  I want to know what it does, and if I could turn it to my own benefit.  But I cannot risk something like that coming back to the fort.

Kalip’s fight takes almost no time.  Since he begins and finishes, my bees have downed one corpse; the things are particularly resistant to anything that isn’t being pulverized or rent asunder.  And Mela has made a clean escape, still being trailed by the howling cluster that no longer has their guiding stone.

Which leaves only my own battle.

The trick to most of my magic is twofold.  Partly, it is inflexible.  It does exactly what it does, and any changes that I make to it are less changes and simply discoveries that I follow to the exclusion of other uses.  Saving Shift Wood for writing, for example; I have made that small mark upon my souls accomplish what I need of it, but that means I am rarely using it for the older purpose of creating art or armor.  The second trick is that the vast majority of my arcane influences on the world stop at the boundary of a person.

I cannot drown someone with Move Water.  I cannot Make Low Blade buried inside a chest.  I cannot Collet Material flesh or bone that is in use.

There are exceptions, many of them horrifying in the implication of what the other apparatuses active on this world are doing.  But for the most part, any damage I wish to do, I must do through traps and agents.

It is a pleasant surprise then, to realize that I have those.  And in fact, the majority of what I have now is both.

Before I was last interrupted, I learned something very important about Spawn Golem.  I was using it… not wrong, but poorly.  The soldier would have called it recruit behavior, the scholar would have called it fumbling.  I think the cleric would have had a much ruder word for it.  The point is that I was taking my first learning steps without a guide, and hoping to stumble into the proper channels.  And in a way, my failure during the interruption did exactly that.

Building a golem to do everything I need it to is foolishness.  That is what people are for.  Living minds are flexible, and living hands and wings are much more capable of adapting.  Golems are situational tools, and better still, unlike my bound, they are even less alive than the glimmerlings.  They do not even have silent minds waiting for commands; they have no thoughts but what I issue them like a stingy quartermaster.

I never needed Spawn Golem to be fully replenished to create masterpieces.  I needed the dregs of it to make terrors.

One of my glimmerlings dashes across the trail of the oncoming third pack of stumbling corpses, and I watch through the other scout creations in the area as they stop, mouths hanging open as every head turns in unison to follow the motion.  I send another glimmerling past, and the first of the dead begins to shriek.

It would have been easier if they had moved in a straight line, but apparently not even death and a reanimating force can make a crowd of people step too far off of an established game trail.  So I need them redirected.  And redirecting creatures that howl and pursue anything moving is easy when you have expendable walking resin creations to work with.  Though I do need one of my glimmerlings to block a fox burrow briefly to make sure the occupants do not flee.  I am terribly sorry to the poor furred beasts, but I cannot let them lead the dead on a chase that is not my own.

Rotting flesh stumbles through underbrush, passing through thick tangles of branches and roots that are either hardy enough to survive the galesun’s yearly assault, or else have already regrown from the last time they were stripped away; the Green at its own defiant work.

A foot from the lead corpse lands with a thud in the dirt, the scene watched from the canopy by a pair of glimmerlings and giving me a view almost like I am a commander moving pieces around a war map.  Loose dirt shifts.  A few stray insects not fast enough to escape are crushed.  The branch of a tree is shoved aside.

And the golem I have created espys a target.

The eye is an eye in the same way that a fragment of charcoal is a diamond.  It isn’t, but it shares qualities.  The stone loop gripping tightly to the tree has a finger sized slit in it, within which there is a small bar of some form of observer.  I do not know what, exactly, the spell has created, only that it has made it and it works.  It works to do exactly one thing, at the most minimal cost to the nothingness that fuels the magic.

It spots corpses.

The remainder of the golem is two parts.  The strongest possible reactive joint that I could form, and a bar of unshaped stone, which then became shaped by Make Low Blade.  As with many of my weapons, it is dull and unwieldy.  But it has an edge, and it is heavy.

And as the corpse steps into the sensor’s range, the blade swings with the force of an executioner’s glaive.  A stone cleaver impacts flesh, sinks halfway through the human body with an ease that is viscerally disgusting to watch, and as the cutting stops it flings the target ten lengths to the side with the remainder of the force of the blow.

The golem pulls back, resting.  Its task fulfilled, it awaits the trigger condition again.

All of this happens in a blink.  And the remainder of the pack, twenty six ragged and screaming corpses chasing after a glimmerling that I am carefully keeping in their view, provide ample targets for the other golems.

Oh, yes.  The others.  It is not every tree, and I suspect the Green will not suffer them to lurk here for very long.  But Spawn Golem could have made something in the shape of a singular powerful bladewoman at the cost of two full day’s worth of rest.  Or, it could make thirty of these vicious traps.

The corpses pour forward like a wave.  And with every step into range, a heavy stone blade arcs around the trunk of a tree, the path cleared with Collect Plant so nothing obstructs the impacts into skin, fur, flesh, and bone.  Strike after strike carving ragged holes in my enemies, sending bodies sprawling with their insides draining into the soil, marking this part of the Green as a stained battlefield that will have bones in the dirt for a long time to come.

The pack reaches the center of my killing field, and I force their line of sight to the glimmerling to break.  I need them staying here until there are no survivors, and that means I want them wandering, or open to being drawn back.  Which is why I planted a half claw of Blinding Traps within the trees, two of which detonate now, sending sprays of light and fury that causes no harm but leaves even my own sight of the clearing blank through the glimmerlings watching

When it clears, the dead are aimless again.  See Commands lets me know that, in the absence of prey, they are reverting slowly to simply following the oily stone that one of them still clutches.  I Sever Command the group, and they simply… stand.  They wait, unmoving, until the motion of one of my glimmerlings catches the eye of one of the survivors, and they move again.

Twice more, they are guided through a gauntlet of swinging stone edges; things that they don’t even seem to realize are hurting them, as they make no effort to fight back or destroy the golems.  Blinding Trap stuns them into motionlessness when I need them to stop running, and glimerlings guide them back into the killing field. I am not quite so efficient as Kalip at putting them down, but I am just as ruthless.

These aren’t people.  Not anymore.  Or if they are, then death is a mercy for them.  I cannot see anyone wanting to be in this state.  Though as the thought occurs to me that they might yet live, I try to Drain Health into one of the still moving bodies.

It does… nothing, I think.  If normally the spell is like moving a liquid vigor in or out of a bowl, then this is like pouring it onto a flat stone.  It simply has nowhere to go, nothing to absorb into or fill.

They are dead.  Or so I tell myself, for the true purpose of soothing my own pained souls as I cut down the last of the cluster that was headed our direction.

Just as before, the glimmerlings collect the oily stone, and begin to take it to the edge of my command radius.  I’ll make a collection of the things, and hope the true enemy is properly deceived when they cluster together.

I finish my target slightly after Kalip does his, and before my bees have managed to put down even a single of the manshu corpses following Mela.  At my behest, the bees pull ahead of her, half-length long fuzzy guides painting her a path with the glowing sigils in their fur and wings.

She moves treetop to treetop, her newfound strength and athleticism not translating to trained coordination.  Every other jump she is slamming through a branch, snapping boughs as she crashes into trunks holding on for dear life.  Mela could perhaps fight on her own, but that isn’t the point of this little chase.

The point is to buy time for my glimmerlings to finish detaching and moving the golems.

I still don’t know what a golem is, the spell gives me no impression of the intent of the magic as always, even though it is written into the parchment of a soul.  There is no one to guide me or teach me, no one to tell me if I am, perhaps, supposed to be using it to make soldiers or thinkers or makers.  If there were, they would be made upset, I think, by the fact that I have made self-swinging butcher blades.

Maybe that’s all a fighter is.  The soldier sometimes thought of herself that way.  But so did the singer, in moments of darkness and despair.  These things do not despair.  They simply wait to see their next target.

And right now, they wait for that condition while they are being carried at speed across fifty lengths of the Green on the backs of the largest glimmerlings I have made.

Yuea is too reckless as a combatant for me to ever truly trust not to self-destruct during a fight.  The way that I have watched her shatter enemies at the expense of her own health, either knowing my magic will heal her or not caring that she will die, means that she is an unstable unit to deploy into any actual skirmish.  But, the woman did not get to be a commander of a magetouched unit on nepotism alone.  She is a skilled strategist, and her lessons resonate with fragments from every life I have lived.

The merchant sees the weaving of a web, the farmer sees the preparing for future seasons, the singer sees the control of information, the cleric sees the prioritization, the soldier the fortification, the scholar the maps and timing.

And I see a plan taking shape.

Three packs of stolen corpses, three different paths through the Green.  They are spread out, but all obeying the same command to follow some impulse from the stone they carry.  At least one is on a clear approach to the fort.  It is safe to assume, given how quickly they devolve to ravenous assault when they spot anything moving, that they are not receiving new orders, but they might be sending knowledge back.   Unlikely, given how my own bound work.

The problem is, if we kill them all as they come within the different ranges of my abilities, it is as good as putting an arbalest’s target on our home.

So Kalip has killed one group farther out, and Mela now leads hers on a merry chase into where my glimmerlings have begun to affix the golems to new trees to harvest new kills.

Mela hits the ground, rolls, the bees half flying half hopping between tree trunks as they move with her, and the dead follow.  When the first blade whips out of its hiding place and bisects a skull, Mela falters before gagging from the smell and sight of what was once a person being ripped apart.  She turns to make a more appealing target, and the rest of them close in, cut down in ones and twos, sometimes with Mela’s help as she kicks a grasping body into one of the golems.  Mela has no trouble spotting the coarse grey-white stone standing out on every tree that holds a golem.

In short order, they are dead.  Truly dead.  A flurry of soft motes from all three battle sites flowing toward me at a leisurely pace.  And one of the glimmerlings grabs the slick rock, preparing to move and keeping Mela with the group.

Through the eyes of the bees, I can see the thing in a different way than I could with either the glimmerlings or Distant Vision.  It isn’t just like a patch of oil made solid, it twists and curls in small ways, like there is a current or vortex within it.  The lancer bees send me emotional impulses, trying to express a feeling they’ve never really know.  Like they are being guided somewhere, not like how I issue commands or requests, but more like a pull in their abdomens, a yearning toward a target.

Strange.

The motley party makes good time through the woods, between Mela’s love of throwing herself through the air, the bee’s flight, and the glimmerling’s casual disregard for the damage most creatures would take when walking off cliffs.  And soon enough they link up with the other two glimmerlings and their own stones.

It takes me considerable effort to Shift Wood through the eyes of my bees onto a tree trunk to write my message.  The wind is picking up again, the galesun swaying back our direction and causing even the thick tree that I am working on to whip itself to and fro.  But I get Mela the message, and send her on her way, recalling the others before the wind threatens to send my bees into the sky forever.

Their return to the fort is a close thing; one of the bees returns injured from a splinter the size of a dinner knife in her wing.  They will heal, but the pain they experience is still real.  Mela is back not too long after, having accomplished her goal, while my expendable glimmerlings continue the work of transplanting golems to another new home.

The result of the set of maneuvers that has exhausted Mela and left me with many of my magics drained away for at least a day is this; there are now three spots where packs of the dead fell in battle.  If the other apparatus is anything like myself, it will be able to determine where this happened by where the recovered shadows and motes come from.  It likely also has a link to the stones that it made, as I do to my glimmer and mantra.

So now, it will see a curved arc of deaths, and a fourth point where all three of the prizes have been collected.

If I were operating on reflex, going with my first reactions and not with deliberate planning drilled into me through Yuea’s lessons, that arc would cleanly tell it where my area of influence started, and the treasures would be buried in my home.  Instead, the arc leads in a curve that would have the fort on the ‘lower edge’ of where my falsified domain is.  The stones are buried, yes, but they are buried atop a hill that Mela has been told by Kalip was ‘good character building’ to climb.

And the golems, needing no further input from me, are scattered through the woods between that false home, and the direction of the enemy.

Tomorrow, galesun allowing, I will get Yuea to carry me out to this place that will be a deathtrap, so I can begin the process of converting it into a place to trap the dead.  I don’t know how valuable a single corpse is to a thing that uses them as foot soldiers and scouts, but we have ripped apart over sixty of them, and I cannot imagine that will not invite retaliation.

As our own defenders stand down with a sigh of relief that is swallowed by the buffeting gusts, and the children are allowed out of the cellars where the bees and verdlings were watching them carefully, I allow myself to relax slightly as well.  Take a moment to think, and evaluate.

It is within that moment that I feel the coalescence of the motes that have not stopped flowing all day.  From kills and deceptions, orders followed and territory secured, from Small Promises and Claimed Constructions, even from the uses that my Stone Pylons executed ineffectively.  All of it wraps together in my souls, pressing tightly until an ignition.  Until it becomes a star, a single point of light.

But as with many busy days, it is not a single point.  It is five.  Five.

I could easily afford a new spell, or to reinforce a soul.  I might even have enough to survive the slaying of an enemy apparatus.

I need time to think.  And as the storm intensifies to the point that small stones are whipped against our walls like bullets, I know that I will not be given that time in peace.

Drained and mentally exhausted, I move again to protect who I can, with what I have.