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Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 48
🕑 Added 2022-11-08 03:46:53 +0000 UTCUnnamed - Apparatus Of Change
Available Power : 9
Authority : 5
Bind Insect (1, Command)
Fortify Space (2, Domain)
Distant Vision (2, Perceive)
Collect Plant (3, Shape)
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Nobility : 3
Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)
See Domain (1, Perceive)
Claim Construction (2, Domain)
Empathy : 4
Shift Water (1, Shape)
Imbue Mending (3, Civic)
Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)
-
Spirituality : 5
Shift Wood (1, Shape)
Small Promise (2, Domain)
Make Low Blade (2, War)
Congeal Mantra (1, Command)
Form Party (3, Civic)
Ingenuity : 4
Know Material (1, Perceive)
Form Wall (2, Shape)
Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)
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Tenacity : 3
Nudge Material (1, Shape)
Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)
Drain Endurance (2, War)
Shift Wood isn’t meant for this. Isn’t meant to be used for a lot of things, really, but infrastructure construction is ranked dramatically farther down the list of misuses than writing on bark or making small toys for children.
It’s a spell that moves wood, yes. But it’s meant to nudge it, in small bits and starts. It lets me smooth and meld wood in ways I would never have been capable of with hands of bone and flesh, but it isn’t a spell that creates sustained denial of the silent rules of the world. Which is to say, I cannot simple hold wood in the air and set it to soaring like a bird, unless I am able to pay the price for that in focus and the strange empty liquid that pools within and around and aside my magics.
Which is what makes building a bridge something of a challenge.
I’m not even trying to build a monument to the Pathwalker! I’m just trying to make a simple row of wood planks, wide enough to walk on, maybe with a little bit of a guide rail so the children don’t stumble into the deadly river. And I’m finding that the process of fighting the flow of the water, the pressure of doing it quickly, and the cost of failure, is adding up to an amount of anxiety that I have become unfortunately familiar to in my new life.
I sit on the shore, spinning in frantic wobbles as I throw my magics out, grabbing sticks and branches and chunks of logs from around me, and sliding them along the planks I have already made. I am not now, nor have I ever been, an engineer. I do not understand how to make the water stop fighting me. I am trying new things on the fly, burning too much of my magic to open tiny gates in the base of the growing bridge, or shooting down support poles to the river floor. These have mixed results.
We need to cross this river, you see. But it’s something of a challenge.
Because when we got here, we had a lead on what was chasing us, and a head start of perhaps days even with the slower pace without my linked spells feeding everyone the muscle strength they needed to move faster. And with all that in mind, it had seemed the simplest thing to take some time at the riverbank to rest, to clean off the dirt and sweat of the march, and to prepare for the last push to what could be real safety.
Dipan had gotten perhaps a half length into the water before an eel the size and disposition of a starved dog had sunk teeth that dripped with something noxious into his leg.
The scream alerted the others. Mela and Jahn dragged him back, the human pulling the big man up the bank while the demon pried the eel off his leg. Jahn was still partly in the water as he did so, and almost took a bite to his rear, but Kalip sent an arrow singing into the lightly churning waters, and I saw the death through multiple angles as his lucky shot took an eel in the eye. The glimmer in the arrowhead exploded, then; used up or overtaxed, and returning tenfold to me the power I’d spent on it.
They’d sacrificed half of one of the two spare pairs of pants to stem Dipan’s bleeding.
So then had come the next day of sitting by a riverbank that we couldn’t cross, trying to figure out a plan. Muelly and Mala, the fastest actually runners short of the people who were trained soldiers, had taken off down each direction of the bank, going an hour or two away to see if at any point things became manageable. But no such luck; the river was so wide that a running start and a perfect leap would still land Yuea not even a quarter of the way across.
There was one more complication that came when Mala went to carve into the eel to turn it into dinner. Along with the guts and uncomfortably black blood that spilled out, that even my crows wouldn’t deign to pick at, a small thick stone ring had dropped out onto the dirt. No one had any interest in eating the toxic sludge of a fish after that, but the small stone disc, bearing tiny runes that shifted and danced when focused on, had drawn attention.
Bite, it had written a hundred different ways. One of my crows tried to eat it before Yuea snatched it away at my request.
I didn’t want one of my bound eating anything that came out of the inside of a monster.
This still left the problem of the river. And so, after a dinner for the rest of the group of mushroom soup that, I offered to do what I did best. A little magic, and a little creativity. And so the survivors set to work with the few tools they had, and even downed a tree nearby to bring to me to get to work with. There was plenty of material nearby, but the more it was processed and set near the building site, the less of a strain on my magic.
Using my crows and bees as eyes and ears made it easy to aim the spells, and let the survivors spend time bringing me more material while also tending to their wounds and doing what they could to shore up their food situation.
Food is an omnipresent problem. Forage can fill a belly, and Bolster Nourishment can make it healthy enough I think, but it takes hours a day to find enough for each of them. And that time is a cost that must be respected. I respected it mostly while they scavenged for the wild grains and roots I’d taught them about, and once again, I thanked the memory of that long ago farmer, whom I shared the life of.
I tried several different spell combinations over that first day of working. Form Wall seemed like the clear answer to creating a structure like this, but it did little except create a new eddy near the riverbed as my wall grew from the lowest ground of the world. Imbue Mending would have been nice, if only it were not for the fact that the river often cracked away my work and swept it downstream long before any repairs could take hold. Nothing worked the way I wanted it to. Even my experiments with some of the extra stamina of Link Spellwork yielded nothing more than confusion on my part.
I considered spending some of my power to make it easier. But on what? Move Water to command the river to, as Yuea was apparently fond of say, fuck off? Refine Material to make stronger wood for myself to work with? There was, to my knowledge, no spell that would actually teach me how to do this, and so I was acting blindly. I knew how to work wood, had the magic to make this happen, but my ethereal hands were unsteady as I actually tried to put these things into action.
And then, it happened. Just as I’d started to make progress on designing the ugliest bridge I’d ever seen, the last of my chunks of domain fell.
I had been keeping an eye on See Domain this whole time, because while I wasn’t able to outright focus on too many things at once, I could easily allow the wash of information to flow past me like a less aggressive version of this very river. And out of that, notice changes and patterns, even if I didn’t get the full vista without pouring my whole mind into it. And now, something had changed again. Or rather, something had vanished.
For obvious reasons, I hadn’t used Fortify Space here. Hadn’t used Claim Construction on the walls that I’d put up either. But for all that I had left us in a place without the larger beacon of my domain glowing for the enemy to see, I still had an issue.
Because those weren’t the only things in my domain.
Fifteen people, eight adults and seven children, had something akin to a listing within the vision of See Domain. And one beehive, too. And a bunch of walking sticks that apparently counted for Claim Construction as long as the larger bees actually used them as resting places. Those, interestingly, also gave me a tiny supply of those soft motes. One or two a day, but with no diminishment.
I brought Distant Vision to bare, and tried to aim at where I’d left the last chunk of domain. Though it was hard; I didn’t actually know where I’d put it, and I’d been foolish enough and distracted enough to have split both my lines of sight off to scout behind us, trusting that I’d be able to find what I needed to later. But now it is gone, and I find that I cannot accurately point to where it once was. But I start guessing anyway, even as I set my crows to alert everyone.
They do so by cawing. Loudly. All at once. I think they find the idea of ‘singing’ together to be amusing. But it also works well as a good warning system without me needing to slap bees into the sides of the survivor’s heads until they notice.
One of the kids that’s been petting a crow starts crying as the crows end their own alarm and the adults start moving. The little girl doesn’t know what, exactly, is going on, but she knows something bad is coming. Because that’s what her life has been for the last several months.
Independent of me, the crow cocks his head toward her, and slowly reaches forward to gently tap the tip of his beak to her nose. She tries to ignore it, but the crow does so again, and then whips his head away as the girl looks at the bird sitting in her lap. She sniffs, and slowly, resumes petting her, getting an approving nod and a much gentler caw in appreciation.
Yuea doesn’t cry. I think she might have forgotten how, if she ever did. I have a hard time imagining her as a child. Instead, she stalks toward the crude table I speak from like an angry thorn dog, greeting the two crows there with a simple, “What now?”
“Something cheerful, I hope.” Malpa says. He’s been… not cheerful, but more put together, more alive, the last few days here. Some of my memories say it would be rude to comment on why. Many of my memories would like me to - secretly or publically - hound him for details about his relationship. The singer, especially, would have liked to know. The singer, I think, loved gossip. Didn’t just use it, or need it, but thrived within it.
I might later. For now, I write to them. Last domain down. I say. I won’t be able to make another one for a half day.
“Then the things’ll be arrowing for us.” Jahn nods as he joins the group. He is shirtless and his fur is matted; he’s been doing a lot of the work hewing wood for me to attempt to rapidly learn architecture with. “How long?”
I don’t know where the domain was. I admit to them. And I’ve lost them. Can’t see. Could be soon, though I think at least two candles.
“Will we be able to cross by then?” Yuea asks, and doesn’t really try to hide how little she believes we will be able to cross by then. She doesn’t exactly shoot an eviscerating look at my ‘bridge’, which is good, because it wouldn’t survive that if she did. I don’t think Yuea can kill people by looking at them, but I don’t want to test it. As if reading my mind, she adds another strike against my ego. “You don’t know how to build a bridge, do you?”
Do you? I ask, though without intended malice. I would welcome help.
She just grunts, while Malpa tries to smother a laugh. He speaks before her. “River like this, bridge is probably hard without time and a lot of hands.” The man says. “I don’t blame you. But if you could go faster…” He trails off. One of my crows seems to be considering pecking him, and I ask her politely not to.
We don’t spend much time talking. I need Shift Wood, as fast as it regenerates every drop counts, and I have no time to waste. And they need to be on watch, or rapidly grabbing what forage they can from around us.
I ask to be relocated to near the river, though, so I can more accurately aim my magics at things near me.
And I get back to work, fumbling with fusing branches and sticks.
A candle and two marks later, my crows start screaming again. Both out loud, and to me through our bond. Then my bees send pulses of alert to me, the bigger ones who have had more time with my magic to grow and enlighten themselves. The hive cannot stay dormant for long, and I’ve given them free reign to spread into the surroundings and harvest their own food supply, and now I worry that might have been a mistake as the tiny tethers between myself and them start going dark. Not all of them, but in twos and threes, the small unaltered bees under my command dying suddenly and without warning.
And I am scrambling now. No trying to reserve my magic, no trying to be clever. Just brute force arcana and adapting knowledge as fast as I possibly can. Because those small monsters of swirling dust and claws of dirt have found us, and I have not been fast enough.
“It’s time to go!” I hear Seraha call, her voice shepherding children to cluster near my body as my mind frantically tries to assemble a bridge. I have two crows helping me see, the other two swooping back from their scouting duty as it is no longer needed. I need to see, I can’t let them go now.
“Outta fucking time, sparkles!” Yuea yells, and I wonder briefly who she is talking to until I realize that I’ve earned a nickname. “Get that up, or we’re gonna find out who can swim fastest!” I feel a thrum through some of my tethers. The ones to the glimmer-carrier blades and arrows that I’ve made for them.
I focus. My world narrows to one spell and one viewpoint and one objective. I try to remember what I’ve tried so far, what ideas I’ve had for what might work with what I can do. It’s hard. My mind is clear and unburdened by things like hunger or exhaustion, but I can only push myself so far, and it is frustrating. I am not a person anymore; I should not be this limited.
But I am, and I have to live with the condition. So I keep moving wood around. The nearby stockpile all I have left before I need to get painfully creative. A flat path on the river’s surface won’t work. Supports have had minimal effectiveness, since I cannot prepare them before dropping them into the rushing water, and they are easily swept away as I try to grow them. The wood floats too easily, but not easily enough.
Someone screams. A yelp of pain and fear, that trails off rather than stopping abruptly. The soldier’s old thoughts let me know this is good; it means they’re not dead.
Some of the crows are yelling at me. They’re trying to kill these stupid things that are bothering their food carriers, and they aren’t dying. They need help.
Without consideration, I Link Spellwork to their bond and Nudge Material, and give them beaks and claws that rend the world. They shut up at me, and rejoin the fight happening behind me. The spell reserves start dropping. I ignore it.
I try a new idea. I form a log into a platform. The wood floats. But it doesn’t float enough. But air floats. I hollow out the platform, seal it with my magic. I carve it into a rough square, and try again. It almost works. It almost works. It bobs on the surface, less pulled by the rushing water. But the connection is too rigid; it snaps away from the first few platforms I have stabilized against the shore, and I only barely catch it.
Flickers shine along my bonds with some of the bees. Glimmer and mantra pulsing small magics as they ebb and flow. The mantra’s words become sharper. The glimmer’s sheen becomes duller. I glance through my crows and bees in flickers of arcane sight; there are so many of the tiny dirt things. The survivors are killing them, for now, but there is a carpet of them pouring through the forest; a tide of gnashing claws.
I can build this bridge. I can. What we need now is time. And I have a tool for that. Four points of power write themselves onto my soul in the shape of a spell. And through my crows, I launch it like a siege weapon into the crowds of dirt monsters. Sever Command lands in splashes of liquid invisible fire. And where it touches, the creatures stop. I keep it away from my own people; I somehow feel it would be disruptive in a way I can’t measure.
But it works. The mobs still. Some of them continue their advance, but swaths of them stop. And on their own, they are not hard for Yuea or Jahn to cut down. My crows also seem to be enjoying being able to split them into pieces with their beaks.
But there is no time to waste. They are starting to move again, though not with the determined and maddened advance of before. I’ve bought time, and every chance I get, I add more of the spell to the bigger portions of the crowd of small terrors. But it is temporary, and I have a bridge to build.
The platform worked. I adjust it a little, adding the slats on the bottom for water to flow through that I sort of suspect help. But then I have an idea. The connector was too rigid. But we still have rope. Enough rope? I don’t know. I set one of the construction spotter crows to fetch the rope.
And then I realize something horrifying.
I do not have a spell named Nudge Rope, Shift Rope, Move Rope, Manipulate Rope, Alter Rope, Command Rope, or Bind Rope. In fact, I have nothing to interact with rope except for Nudge Material, which my crows have almost fully consumed already.
I glance through my other crow. Mela and Muelly have fallen back from the wall, they are near Seraha and the kids, using the long spears I made for them to crush any of the creatures that make it past the front line. The others are engaged in a constant trial of interception, where no single enemy can kill them, but the enemies never stop coming, only briefly pause to give them breath as I Sever Command as often as I can.
The crow drags the length of rope from one of the packs back, in short hops. And I realize I have nothing to write to them with here. No time to make a smooth tablet of wood, and no spare magic for it either. No Nudge Material left to me. The crow caws around the material it is pulling, but it is lost in the noise.
I’ve already made four of the platforms. They’re just waiting here. I can make more, I know I can. But…
The rope is picked up. The crow hops away. Caws again, out loud and to me. And I look through his eyes and see one of the kids. The older boy, Sivs I remember is his name. And I have no time or options left, so I ask the crow to caw again to get his attention, and draw him over to the shore.
The boy moves without hesitation. He’s barely old enough to start proper tutoring, and yet he runs with that coil of rope like he’s been running toward problems his whole life. Which, as far as I know, the kid has.
I get the crow to tap the hook I made on the platform, and the boy threads the rope in. Then the next, and the next. He makes some inexpert knots, but I don’t know if they’ll be needed. It takes more valuable time to instruct him to hold the rope tight, but he digs his feet into the mud of the shore of the deadly river, and I throw the platforms out.
They bob in the water, pulled by the current instantly. But the rope doesn’t break, and they can’t be dragged too far.
I make another platform. And another. And guide one out into place, as Sivs tests my growing bridge; the boy’s steps pushing the platforms down, but not far enough to swamp them, as his bare feet slap across the altered wood to take the rope out and connect the next platform as I lay them down, one by one.
We’re halfway across the river, and I’m working faster now. I hear caws and screams, I see chunks of my tethers to my bees go dark, I watch blades and glimmer shatter. I make another platform. And another. I don’t stop, even as I go from rapidly fabricating the things like some form of storybook divinity machine to building them at the crawling pace of having to wait for the stamina of Shift Wood to recover in drips. But I keep making them.
And then there’s no more wood. I peek through my crow, and see the other shore, tantilizingly close. But not close enough. Not with the monsters in the water.
Four more points of power, I spend like coin at the tavern. Now, I am going to follow my imaginary Yuea advice from earlier.
And then all that is left is to get the others across. My crows take wing, my bees retreat. They were already packed to move, they just need to fall back, and I have saved enough Sever Command to buy them that time.
I pull forth a spell that I know lets me communicate, perfect for one single message in situations like this. Small Promise sings to life, and I call out to them, in my own voice. The bridge will hold, if you can make it.
Flickers of magic from all my tethered spells. Form Party especially has been alive and flourishing through this battle. Now, it alights again, and I watch through my crow and the last bits of energy that Bind Willing Avian has as Seraha tries to guide the flock of children across the river. I didn’t have enough wood for guardrails. I hope they will make it.
My bridge bobs and shifts and tips. But it does not break, and at the end of it, small arms straining to hold the rope in place, Sivs sits with utter faith in me on the edge of a platform next to the open water.
I mass my spellwork and Sever Command in a crescent around the walls and the tougher survivors on the front line of the fight. Then instinct guides me to try something, and I keep the spell flowing out. The other survivors start moving, their adult weight pushing the bridge segments down more, but as long as they go one at a time, not enough to dip them into the river.
Someone grabs the beehive. Others grab packs. They move.
My ‘perspective’ tilts and shifts, Know Material and my intuition on ranges altering as I am picked up. I can see everyone else through my crows as the birds circle overhead. I think it’s Yuea who’s grabbed me. She made it, too. They all made it.
Then the kids start to make it to the end of the bridge, and I open up my new spell, guiding my casting through the crows.
Move Water is less elegant than Shift Water. It’s designed, I think, to haul large volumes over large distances. It’s not for detail work or small workings.
It’s perfect for when I want to tell the river to fuck off.
Empathy is not my strongest soul, but I have been developing it along with the others regardless, and I have enough liquid nothingness surrounding the spell to hold this for a workable window of time. The bridge ends just within reach of the other shore; and now, it ends just before a half-length drop to the dry riverbed.
Seraha goes first, the older demoness dropping before the children, her shod hoof smashing into the head of the one eel thing that I missed sweeping out and was floundering on the dry bed. And is now dead. She catches the small girl who goes next, sets her down and orders her up the shore. Then the next boy, and the next. The old woman’s face showing clear pain as she does so, but she moves them all before she starts moving herself, slipping on the rocky shore that isn’t perfectly dry.
The other survivors follow, Kalip driving a knife into the wall of water and pulling out an eel that had tried to lunge for them. Malpa stumbling, caught and helped by Muelly, the girl’s spear more of a splintered stick at this point. They climb the bank quickly.
And then it’s just Yuea and Sivs on the bridge. She takes the rope from him, sends him down holding me. He carries my body like it’s a relic. Which I’d rather he didn’t; we could move faster and I don’t want to be underwater either. And then, before Yuea joins him, Move Water starts to fail me. The river is too much and too fast, and I’ve burned away my collective effort with my new spell. And the water rushes into the gap I left, sweeping away eel guts and any hope of passage, just as the second to last survivors makes it up the bank.
On the other side, the dirt things have recovered, and started forward again. They swarm over the bridge, dropping off in ones and twos into the river; but there’s hundreds of them, and by virtue of having the numbers to throw away, they are swarming across the bridge.
Yuea grins at the oncoming wave of monsters. Then she drops the rope, without a care in the world. She crouches, and leaps the remaining length and a half to the other shore in a spray of… something. Something familiar to my soft motes, but not quite. Sharper. More deliberate. And they don’t come to me naturally.
I collect them anyway. Almost without meaning to. I draw them in, and feel them… settle. Accepting. I don’t know what this means yet. But I can learn.
Ironically, my bridge does not float away when Yuea releases the rope. Sivs tied his knots well enough to hold for a short time, and so while the bridge curves and starts to float away, it doesn’t break or sink. She seems disappointed, going off what my beetles share with me that she’s been yelling.
I think I am strong enough to help her out.
Shift Wood draws a line of weakness down the center of the bridge’s platforms. The dirt claw creatures continue to cluster and build up more and more numbers, chasing after us. I draw a second line down the bridge, following my first spell, with Drain Endurance, and I take from them what they cost us.
Then I push with Shift Wood, applying a woodworker’s precision pressure to the line I made. This, this I know. I’ve worked with weak wood before. And when I can make something weak on my own… this is as easy as breathing, for an old farmer and cleric who liked to whittle.
The pocket of air spills open. The bridge tumbles apart; pieces held together with the rope drifting apart as I cut away the hooks holding them. A hundred, two hundred, five hundred of the tiny creatures spilling into a river that kills them almost instantly as the water soaks and ablates and rips apart their dirt forms.
A flood of soft motes pours off the surface like a river all its own. And I drink of it like a woman dying of thirst who just found a spring.
But I’m not the only one.
Part of it is diverted, pulls downward to the riverbed. A pattern I’ve only ever seen once before outside of myself; when the creatures were busy destroying my domains.
There is another apparatus in this river. A fact I knew, really. But there is not much that I can do about it now. And really, as far as threats to life go, ‘some particularly dangerous fish’ isn’t very high up my list of problems. Keep to your river, my sibling, and I will keep to the shore. Consider this bounty a peace offering.
In fact…
Small Promise, which has just given me even more of its bounty from the bridge holding for whom I swore an oath to would, comes to me again.
I offer you this in the hopes that we can get along. I promise I don’t hate you, and I want to coexist. I will talk, if you can find a way to talk to me.
It’s a simple promise. A small one, really. Probably nothing will come of it, in truth. But I make it anyway. And I know it is heard.
I turn my mind away from the river and the potential nightmare at its bottom. We’ve made it safely across, and while danger hounds us on all sides, at least that danger cannot cross the water. The survivors are exhausted, hurt, and only barely have time for a short rest before we need to move on.
Link Spellwork, Drain Endurance, Fortify Space. An oasis in the reeds and tall grass that we sit in. A circle of life and recovery. I admit, this one will perhaps not last long. But I think we have all earned it. Because soon, we need to move on again, and I am not the one with legs that ache.
But I can take that ache away, and keep them alive to feel it again, and that is what matters.
Comments
Twi
I'm happily surprised they got away without losing any people! (Pour one out for all the brave bugs and crows, though.) And interesting to see App try to reach out to the river apparatus after all the shit it put them through. I see the emotional logic, but it's certainly a bold move right after their fortress was nearly ended by killer carp!
