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Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 46
🕑 Added 2022-10-28 08:18:39 +0000 UTCBonus points to the comment that used almost the exact same terminology, one chapter ahead of time.
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Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change
Available Power : 6
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)
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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)
In retrospect, I probably should have realized I was making a mistake the second I cast the spell. Ideally, I would have realized slightly before the imprint of arcane energies onto the ground around us, but that would perhaps be asking too much. For all the accumulated knowledge inside of me, I am still new, and if there is one thing I remember from all my childhoods, it is that making mistakes is a part of growing.
But the benefits had been too good to ignore. We’d started making better time. I watched through my crows, using the extra magic to borrow their eyes as my primary method of exploration now and leaving my bees and beetles to simply feed off the excess of the Bind Insect spell. Even with the children and elder having somewhat slower paces, the increase in endurance to everyone was obvious.
We stopped two more times that day with me layering down a Fortify Space tied to a reversed Drain Endurance at one of the rest sites, and the party made more than three times the distance as the previous day. The next day, we continued the pattern, me leaving oases in the woods as we pressed forward, and stealing every scrap of endurance I could through Distant Vision of the enemies at the previous camp.
And then, as I realized that Distant Vision truly was distant and I was capable of still seeing the old camp even across almost nine thousand lengths of distance, the monsters moved. My old domain finally crumbled away, the enemy eating the remnants of my magic where it intersected the world.
We made it another half day before they started moving. I was barely paying attention to the travel or the use of my other spells. Though I did take tiny moments away from watching to Shift Wood a fallen tree across a gully into a more suitable bridge, and Shift Water to momentarily divert a stream to allow a quick crossing. And of course, the endless task of making glimmer and mantra, keeping one or two back from each batch to add to my bees.
I have so many things I would rather be doing than watching monsters chase us. But I do not have the focus. I must keep an eye on them. And as all three groups break away from the demolished domain patch, and the small dirt amalgamations race ahead of the others on an almost direct line of our trail, I start to feel worried.
They’re on the move. I write to Yuea, a crow landing near her with a piece of bark in its beak bearing my message. It deposits it with a caw that demands payment, and Yuea feeds it a roast seed from a pouch at her side. Small ones coming first, bugs behind. SIlkspinners aren’t moving, I think one died.
“Good.” She spits a seed husk to the side. “Did you eat it?”
No. I answer. I never claimed the pit traps.
“Hmph. Something to remember for next time. We’re going to have to fight this, you understand?” She idly claws at the red line across her collarbone and breast, the fighter having stopped wearing armor over it as she claimed it itched too much, but I suspect it hurts her far more than she lets on. “There should be a river ahead, a real river, we can lose our tracks in. Maybe. But that’s not for another two days of walking.”
I try to send Distant Vision ahead to look for a river, but my lack of ability to smoothly move the ring of space I can see and the sheer distances involved makes it a challenge that proves too much, if I am going to keep leaning so heavily on the spell today. And I will be, because I need to continue using Drain Endurance at range on the monsters after us, so that I might fuel pouring it back into the survivors. I will simply have to take Yuea’s word for it, and hope it does throw them off our trail.
Not for the first time, I wonder if I should simply imprint Sever Command upon my soul, and see if I can strand the monsters where they stand. I know that I can give my own bound commands or requests that persist when they leave my reach, but I cannot talk to them from too far away. If the others follow the same rules, and I have no reason to believe they do not, then I would be able to delay them for some time.
Of course, that is a strong ‘if’. And in the meantime, we still have a day or more before we are caught. Trying something now and learning it does not work would leave me with no options for a situation that we might yet have a different answer for. We still do not know how dangerous these new front runner beasts are.
Part of me wants to let myself wonder how dangerous a writhing shovelful of dirt could possibly be. But I feel as thought the old farmer’s soul would outright rebel if I besmirched the value - and potential danger - of good dirt.
Travel continued, my tense watching of the dirt creatures as they scrambled toward us broken only by taking time to Bolster Nourishment the evening meal, and use the liquid nothingness that powered Collect Plant so that no part of my rest went to waste. I wasn’t even particularly collecting anything of use this time; there were no obvious forabagles around us, and so I simply leaned on the full strength of the spell and added another sturdy tree to my inner gallery.
It is while sitting around the fire - actually sitting around the fire, my crystal body providing small splashes of reflected flickering light as I am placed as part of the circle of survivors - that one of the humans gets my attention. Malpa reaches out a foot and taps at the ground in front of one of my crows, where three of the four of them are bunched together trying to sleep after a long day. The other one is being given pets by the children. The children hate the march, but the crows delight them, and delight in the attention, and as long as the little ones know not to be too rough, the small morale boost is critical. It is especially adorable to see some of the glimmer- and mantra-infused bees getting in on the attention as well.
I know you’re trying to sleep, but could you help me here? I ask one of the crows. With a rustle of black feathers, one of them cocks their head toward my core. I think it’s the first one, the one I originally made my Small Promise to. An impression comes back to me through our bond; the image of a bee. You can’t eat the bees, we’ve been over this. I want to sigh again. A deep breath would be invaluable for dealing with these farm pests. But then the crow presses back, showing me two bees this time, one of them distinctly larger than the other, and with glowing black runes across her wings.
Ah. A request then. That’s interesting, coming from a bird that has only been with me a few days. But then, I suppose crows were always too smart for their own good to begin with; beginning to draw on my magic to make themselves even more clever is almost inevitable. Yes, I tell it, you may have one of the next glimmer.
The crow caws through our bond, and then out loud more softly, as it unfurls and hops forward to stare at Malpa, the scarred man setting one of my flat pieces of bark between himself and the crow. “Been wondering.” He says with the kind of casual campfire talk voice that makes the core of my self ache with nostalgia. “You have two spells unpicked, yeah?”
Three, now. I write, finding it comes easier and easier to divulge my secrets to these people. Because, after all, they aren’t really secrets, are they? They’re just more resources for us to use to get through this. Like how Mela isn’t actually ‘meant’ to know spearfishing - the human empire having a strange thing about women and fish, the scholar and cleric parts of my memory leaving me with phantom hunger to know why - or how no one needs to question that Jahn is capable of hitting a target with a thrown axe from twenty paces. We have not known each other for lifetimes, we are not close to each other at present.
But we are in this together. And we cannot afford to mistrust each other. If our trust is betrayed, it doesn’t matter, because for everyone around me, they would have been dead anyway.
Malpa brings my attention back to the present. “You should fill one.” He says simply, and the crow spots an agreeing nod from the demon girl sitting next to… sitting very next to Malpa. Well, that’s an interesting thing to note. Six lifetimes of seeing body language from different angles makes it transparent like gullglass what’s going on there.
Still. A question was asked. Well, a statement was made, that I should reply to, before commenting on the silent romance happening before me. I need to be ready to react. I write, trying to use as little of Shift Wood as possible and still coming up with a much harsher expenditure than I wanted. The spell recovers fast, at this point, but it is still frustrating. We will be set upon some time tomorrow. I don’t want to be helpless.
“You’ve got three though.” Malpa grumbles. “And you don’t get tired the same as us. Just make some promises and follow through, and you’ll be back in no time, eh?”
I don’t think it… I stop writing, letting the crow take a break from focusing on the spoken words to beg to take a taste of whatever kind of camp soup is in the bowl Malpa is cupping in a grizzled hand. I don’t think it works that way. But have I ever tested it? Small Promise is a strange, strange magic compared to all my others. And I should actually think, instead of making rushed assumptions pressured by the lack of time I’ve had to really stretch my magic.
I could vaguely promise to treat people well, and it would work, though give me only a small trickle of power. I could promise to adhere to a course of action, and it would work, and it seemed that if I did so even when the outcome wasn’t perfect for me, it gave me quite a bit more power. But also, I had experienced the spell allowing me to bind the promises of those around me. Twice now, Yuea had made promises to others; once to Jahn when they first met to give the demons a fair place, and once…
Once to one of the firebugs. That she was going to kill it. A promise she filled admirably.
Though I am suddenly cautious about making any more Small Promises. Because it occurs to me that I have yet to actually break any of them; not that it seems advantageous to me to do so, regardless. But… what would have happened, if it had been Kalip and not Yuea to land the killing strike? What if the firebug had struck her down instead, and survived entirely? What would have happened to me, in addition to the loss of a friend?
I am not eager to find out. So I edit my message to Malpa slightly. I don’t think it is wise to make promises, without something worth promising. I say. And that sounds suitably mystical that I almost believe it fully myself. But… I add as he starts saying something, I agree I should push my own growth. Though what exactly I am unsure of.
And just like that, soft conversation breaks out from everyone present. And I feel a calm warmth come over me as I sit with my companions, even if I cannot truly see them with my own eyes or hear them with my own ears, and simply let the conversation flow by.
It isn’t that I don’t have ideas on how I should advance myself. But more that it cannot hurt to hear them discuss new thoughts that even six old lives would not have taught me. Ideas that don’t come naturally to me, and plans that don’t perfectly line up with my own. Even if my answers are ‘no’, at least then I will know what I do not want, and the value of that is immense in this new and terrifying world I find myself in.
I do not think I will be using my power to change the blank pages of my soul’s tome into working spells, though. Not quite yet. Flexibility, I still believe, could save us all. And maybe that is fear speaking, but it is fear that is founded in my short history, and not, I hope, irrational ravings. Besides that, Empathy offers me nothing that jumps to be used, Ingenuity I am keeping in reserve for the mentioned warspell, and Authority has so many choices that could each make me a living all on their lonesome in a major city from any of my old lives. But we do not have a major city. We have trees. And, hopefully, in the next few days, a river.
The survivors settle in for the night, for fitful sleep and grimly determined guard rotations. Some of the older kids even volunteering to fill some of the early hours so that the adults might get more sleep.
And my own guard shift comes into focus. Distant Vision, with a single spell maintained, allows me to watch constantly with no breaks and no risk of running out the spell’s reservoir. And I use it to track the trail of the dirt monsters as they pursue us.
They are quick, but not fast. They scramble over obstacles and are unobstructed by dense vegetation or gullies or any other problems that slow our own march. But they do not have the speed of even a jogging adult. Steadily, tirelessly, they approach, but not so fast that we do not have some time.
And then they stop.
All of them. Piling into a rough circle. I try to get a count; thirty, forty perhaps? But it is as I do so that I realize with dark horror what is happening.
I recognize the space they have stopped at. Because it is my space. My domain. The first small point in the wilds outside our camp where I set down a Fortify Space. Before I really knew what the creatures were doing to my past domain. They settle into the temporary campsite, and the domain cracks and splinters into more fodder that they consume for their own apparatus.
This, on its own, is not so bad. It is a shame I cannot dismiss my Fortify Space spell. Once something is within my domain, it seems to be a permanent feature of the thing. I am, it would seem, expected to take ground but never give it. A thought the soldier would find foolish in the extreme.
What is bad, is the fact that I know what I have done to the next casting of Fortify Space.
A small oasis, within the trees. A place where the stolen endurance that dwells in my inner gallery of acquisitions is shared, spread back out into the world and anyone within it.
And even with this delay to destroy this space, they will be there sometime tomorrow.
We have a problem. I write suddenly. And I would like to apologize now, while we have time. Because I think we are going to have to move quickly.
Comments
Christopher Walls
Thanks for the chapter! The idea of making small promises with the intent of using them to gain more power is something our App has already done- the promise to the bear of safe passage is one example. Doing so again isn't a bad idea. I find it interesting that the crows are actively requesting to be enhanced now, and am quite interested in seeing how they change from the enhancement. Perhaps sever command could be a way to break a linked spell? It'd be interesting to see if they could try to break the linked endurance emittance and domain space spells. As always, I'm very much looking forward to seeing what comes next.
Christopher Walls
No, you see, they're low on foodstuffs, they're looking for bagels.
Twi
Forabagles = foragables?
am
Or I guess it's more of a "this is the only way we've been keeping ahead, and we can't do it anymore" situation
am
But it's a short term problem, right? Even if the monsters drain the store, they'll proceed to destroy the domain and App can go back to doing the same thing from the next campsite. I guess worst case is if the enemy core understands the utility and doesn't destroy that space, but the extent of it is no more drain buff. And there's no way App could have been smarter and avoided this, so far as we know.
Argus
The problem is App can’t keep using it to keep people going if the monsters are taking everything themselves.
am
I'm not quite clear on the consequences of the monsters getting access to the drain buff space. Is the problem that they'll use it? Our protagonist only has a limited store of drained energy, so that shouldn't be a major problem, and the monsters will want to destroy the domain anyway?
