Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 10

Authority : 6

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

See Commands (5, Perceive)

Bind Crop (4, Command)

Nobility : 4

Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)

See Domain (1, Perceive)

Claim Construction (2, Domain)

Stone Pylon (2, Shape)

Empathy : 4

Shift Water (1, Shape)

Imbue Mending (3, Civic)

Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)

Move Water (4, Shape)

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)

Sever Command (4, War)

Tenacity : 4

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

-

Animosity : -

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

“In Empire military doctrine, a heart strike is the practice of ignoring field armies, and instead dedicating every available resource to executing enemy leadership.” Yuea lectures me. I wish she wouldn’t sound so smug while she does it; one of my old lives was a soldier after all. She may not have been a ranker, but I understand the concepts of things like tactics.

While Yuea explains to me how her tyrannical empire has kept a terrifying grip on power through the use of near-suicidal assaults on the ruling castes of any nearby polity that thinks to challenge them, I let my mind wander.

Not very far, though. I’m still listening. But also, I’m making use of the scraps of metal from things like broken armor and scattered door hinges that have been collected from around the fort. That, some sturdy branches the kids have brought me with a healthy application of Shift Wood, Congeal Glimmer mixed in, and Make Low Blade to bring it all together. My philosopher’s recipe for charmed broadhead arrows.

I have gotten very, very good with Shift Wood. Enough that I can reliably wrap the newly formed arrowheads in the shafts with barely a thought. Make Low Blade continues to make arrowheads with faults or slightly dull edges, but the small glimmer, like an opalescent rock with veins of ore in it, will offset that.

It is frankly silly that this fort, so far from resupply, didn’t have a fletcher on site. But I suppose secrecy was their best defense, and it appears they’d stocked up heavily on pistols, over the more skill intensive bows. Which I can understand; it takes a lot of time to train up a proficient bowwoman.

“Are you even listening?” Yuea’s voice says, and I flick my attention back just in time to see the world bob through a beetle’s eyes. “No, not you. You probably pay more attention than Six does. I mean you.” She tries to stare through Oob’s eyes to me, and it doesn’t quite work. I’m not anywhere that can be looked at. Unless you count ‘downstairs’.

I’m listening. I write to her. I am also preparing Kalip’s armaments.

“Wood armor isn’t going to cut it. Also we’ve got real armor here. He can wear chain and pad like a good solider.” She pauses. “Do we need to get you armor? This sounds stupid, but it couldn’t hurt.”

It might hurt, we shouldn’t assume. But I wouldn’t mind. Also, no, I am making arrows. At the rate that my magics restore themselves, I can manage ten every candle.

Yuea stares at the beetle, leaning forward slowly as she presses curled hands into the surface of the dark wooden desk she’s standing behind. “You can make a hundred magic arrows every day?” She breathes out slowly.

Yuea, please. I can make two hundred and twenty of these a day, if I give up such petty concerns such as communicating, and… actually that is all I would need to give up. The benefits of having multiple knowledgeable sets of memories is that I am exceptionally proficient at doing simple arithmetic in my head. Useful, as to do it anywhere else, I would need to carve my work into walls and floors as I do with my map. The choking grasp is in the supply of metal. I can make them of bone or stone, but they break almost right away, and Kalip has told me they often deflect, extra luck or no.

I still am unsure if the glimmer actually are simple luck. It feels as though there is a deeper secret there. But I cannot tell exactly what, and scholarly research will have to wait until later. As always.

“Well that’s a gnawing treat.” Yuea nods, before coughing once, and dropping into her chair. My bees shift closer in concern as her hand comes away from her mouth tinged in blood, her veins glowing a soft blue under her skin. “Fuck.” She mutters quietly.

For once, I agree with her profanity.

I check her over with See Domain, and see almost exactly what I expect to. Many of my own magics on her are eroded away; casts of Small Promise that were acting as bandages over her magetouched infection have been worn down to almost nothing. I don’t actually know what this means for the promises themselves; am I no longer magically bound to them, with them sitting in tatters on her like this? The point is mostly moot, I don’t tend to make promises I won’t keep regardless. But I will need to make more to stabilize her.

Or do I?

I am halfway through working out the wording of how to swear to her that we can talk to Kalip this afternoon about using Amalgamate Human on Yuea, when I have a thought. I still let that Small Promise slip into the world, and get her nod in replay, watching carefully through See Domain as my magic reforms an incomplete shell around the magetouched infection inside her. But then I consider something else.

Instead of letting my old promises be ground away, and replacing them with new ones, I reach out with the magic of Small Promise like a brush of lacquer, and draw the spell across the damaged bits of my domain. Reforming and healing the damage to the older magic, giving silent reassurance that I have forgotten none of the little promises I made to her.

I’ve had to make several, since we got to this fort. Especially when my shortsightedness in the first batch that I used as a kind of soul bandage led to them being fulfilled. Promising her a real meal might have been a mistake, as the first time Seraha was let loose with the full might of the fort’s food supplies and a kitchen had been a powerful symbolic night for the survivors, but it had also torn a hole in Yuea’s protections that I had been forced to scramble to fix when I noticed it a tenday ago. Yuea, of course, had been ignoring the feeling, and pretending she could burrow through it. Because Yuea is an idiot.

Are you alright? I ask her when I am done, and the foreign magic has been recontained.

Yuea sucks in a deep breath, the first of many as she slumps in her chair, holding up a rather rude hand gesture to my bees. I explain to the elder of them when they ask that she is trying to project bravery by being rude to me, so I won’t question how hurt she is. The bee asks me why anyone would do that, and I reply that I think Yuea never had a proper hive. The bee finds this unacceptable, and crawls closer to the wounded soldier, trying to figure out how to properly offer grooming and comfort to Yuea. The other bee doesn’t quite understand, but follows the lead of their more grown and smarter companion, while I watch with an unseen happiness at Yuea’s sudden predicament.

The woman is just not good at accepting kindness, and the bees are almost incapable of holding it back. It makes for a good indicator of how quickly my fix has put Yuea back together.

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“Can we go back to planning a war?” Yuea demands, failing to push a bee away from where it is running its forelegs through her hair.

If you are feeling better. I write in large letters so it’s easier for her to read without moving.

Yuea snorts, and strangles the cough that threatens to burst out. “I’m fine.” She lies. “Fucking looking forward to being a monster, though. I bet monsters don’t get sore shoulders.”

Everyone gets sore shoulders. I tell her sadly. I check with the memories of each of my lives, letting my thoughts run through Shift Wood at a casual pace. Yes. I can confirm this. It doesn’t matter what species, everyone’s shoulders eventually become sore. I wonder if it has to do with bedding? Bees do not become sore. I should design a honeycomb bed for the people here. What spell would it take to work with honeycomb? It is not wood…

“We’ve got between five and twenty days before we all almost die again, you promised to work your magic on me tonight, there’s a mountain of things to be done, and you’re thinking about bees again.” Yuea looks like she can’t decide if she should use her limited lung capacity on a sigh or a laugh.

I consider her words. She’s right, of course. You are correct. Let us plan. You were speaking of your empire’s terror tactics.

“They’re effective.” Yuea snapped. “And in this case, with the ability to actually move our entire population on short notice, we actually can afford to leave this place undefended.”

Except it’s obviously tracking us.

“It’s tracking you. I doubt it even cares about us.”

Well, it was taking prisoners. I point out grimly.

“All the more reason to take it out and ignore its little army. Or, even better, do your thing, whittle them down, make it send reinforcements, and clear a path for Jahn and Kalip and me to cut in and kill the fucker.”

Assuming that Amalgamate Human works on you, doesn’t kill you, leaves you as yourself, and helps at all. Which is an unhealthy number of assumptions. I can practically feel the spycraft training of the singer screaming at me to never assume anything during a critical moment.

Yuea isn’t paying attention, instead staring at my map like she can somehow prophesy details from it that I haven’t filled in. “As it is.” She dismisses what I’m saying when she glances down at my list of concerns. “How’re your eyes today? Can you fill this in?” She taps the repurposed table that I have attached to the wall. “I’d like to see where any natural obstacles are. Chart a route around the incoming, so we can cut past as fast as possible.”

I cannot do cartography. Surprisingly. Crop rotation, medicine production, history, teaching literature, songweaving, commerce, murder, I have many skill sets within my memories, but not how to draw a map. I pause as she is not actually reading that part, and shift a bee so that I can move my carving to the wall near my map within Yuea’s sight line. I admit, I am becoming aggravated with having to ‘speak’ within eyesight, or else risk being forgotten. What form of obstacles? I switch to business with her. Would you not simply cut a straight line past the ‘road’ they are making?

“Hills or gulleys can slow us down.” Yuea says simply. “Anything like the river, which I assume we’ll have to cut over again. Can you build a bridge at a distance?”

No… though perhaps I could… no. How did Kalip return with the newly formed? They must have crossed somewhere, you should ask him.

Yuea traces a finger along the carving of the river. “He’s out shooting with the boy.” She says. “You could ask him. You’ve got eyes everywhere.”

My bees have their own lives. Also they don’t like the noise of the blasts. I will wait until this evening.

“Bah. Alright. What about a pillar to keep the water back?”

Move Water was barely able to hold back a small part of the river to allow the final crossing, and that was with my Empathy at the fourth or fifth step. The pylons I build act as though they are at the first. That will not work.

“Build more of them.” Yuea says, like it’s obvious. “What?” She says when the bee on her arm takes my instruction to cross its forelegs at her. “It’s not like there’s some arbitrary limit, is there? Just make ten of the gnawing things, and turn them on when someone needs to run through. You can do that, right?”

It irritates me that she might be right. I check in with the one Stone Pylon that I have, its own reserve of strength full now, patiently asking what it should be doing with the Nudge Material that I imbued it with. I tell Yuea to wait, while I check something, and I try to give the pillar a complex order.

The first one is too complicated. I try to tell it to push the dirt out of hair or fur that comes close enough to it, but the pylon only barely seems to know what dirt is. I try something simpler, and just order it to apply the spell to the ground near itself. Almost instantly it does so, and I watch through a few bees in the area as it selects a random spot, and just shifts it rapidly until its stockpile is half drained, and I catch up to telling it to stop.

Complexity is limited, obviously. But how limited? I tell it to use the spell to move dirt from a certain spot in a specific direction, as long as it has more than a third of its reservoir full, and it obeys instantly. And then keeps obeying the first part of the command, ignoring all my qualifiers, until it is drained completely and the magic stops. “Obeys” is the wrong word. It isn’t alive, it’s simply capable of following an instruction of on or off. It is very strange. If it were alive, perhaps it could tell me what I am doing wrong.

I refocus on Yuea while I continue trying to spin slightly more complicated orders for my pylon. I believe I could figure it out. Though I am not sure I could apply the needed force, no matter how many I build.

“Shit.” She mutters. “We need a bridge there. But not while the haterocks are out there. Can you-“

The what?

“Look, you get a pass for being nice. But let’s not lie to ourselves about the other things that look like you trying to kill us. And there’s at least three over on the other side that we need to off. Do you need to be close to them to eat their magic?”

Of course that’s what she’s thinking of. I don’t know. I say.

“Then we’ll need to get you armor. Can’t risk passing that up.”

More importantly, my magic works best when I am in proximity. It consumes too much of my resources to continually be using Distant Vision to cast at range, and I cannot link spells through that method.

“Talking to you is a constant headache.” Yuea says bluntly as she falters on the first sentence. “What the fuck is this word even… oh, ‘close’. Okay. We need more intel, and more resources. You find any new birds yet?”

How, exactly, would I do that? I ask her, confused.

“Throw your stupid promise of a good nest out into the Green?” Yuea asks like I’m an idiot. Which, to be fair, I might be. “Get some more crows, figure out how to let them vomit fire or something. Something to harass them while the silkspinners try to get closer. Again, draw out more of the homeguard, make it easier for a heart strike.”

Yes, I can do that. I say, already running through a list of spells I could have been using more effectively. I leave this choice to you; do I find you the best path through, or do I focus scouting attention on the army and their road? And… do we care about notice?

“No, why?” Yuea asks.

Sever Command. I could perhaps stall them for some time. Though this may provoke an adaptation from the enemy. If they are anything like me, they may have power in reserve to react to situations, and it would spoil any potential for an ambush.

Yuea thinks. Then sighs. “I don’t know.” She says. “We need more information. And more soldiers, in truth.” She looks into the faceted eyes of the bee that she’s given up on trying to shoo off her, and I look back at her. “You sure you can’t just manufacture soldiers for us?”

I have promises that stop me. Not that I would want to weaponized any living thing regardless. I reply.

“Idealist.” The word comes out in the same cadence as her profanity. “What about making the dirt things like the one rock did? Shock troops, like magemade constructs?”

My command spells are all about changing already living creatures. I tell her sadly. And they…are… I trail off, leaving my sentence unfinished. Because I have errored in my telling. I have command spells that don’t do that; Congeal Glimmer and Congeal Mantra are both registered as command in the strange arcane script of my souls. Which is interesting, and information I relay to Yuea.

She nods. “Okay. I change my vote.” She says.

What?

“The vote. On how you use your glimmer. You promised, Shiny.” Yuea’s expression reminds me of a parent, teaching their child a hard lesson. “I change mine to ‘figure out how to make constructs’.”

I don’t think that was one of the options.

“Oh? So you think it’s unfair?” Yuea demands.

No, but-

“Great. I’m going to go irritate our farmers into agreeing with me. Jahn’s sensible, they’ll understand.” Yuea starts to stand.

He. Also you could have just asked me, instead of going directly to magically coercing me. I am… not angry. I don’t quite understand the feeling welling up in my thoughts. Hurt, somehow, yes. But also simply nervous, almost to the point of panic. The sudden thought of someone else taking control of me, even if I did technically agree to it, driving me into a spiral of anxiety.

She pauses to glance at the words. “It’s a demon faith thing.” Yuea says to my correction, perhaps not realizing what she reveals about herself in doing so. “Also, you’d be against it. Your whole thing about not using bugs as weapons is getting in the way.”

Ask Jahn what he wants before you talk about his faith. Also, I was already thinking about this earlier. I would agree, though tentatively. I don’t need you corrupting the vote just to get your way. Why are you doing this?

“Honestly, I kinda thought the vote was something you needed.” Yuea shrugs. “It also wasn’t the worst idea. It sorta made everyone feel closer, somehow. Maybe I’m an idiot.”

Maybe I am too. I did promise to abide by a fair vote, after all, and we’ve been leaving that off for some time. I can’t see the spell exactly; I didn’t promise anyone in particular, just myself, and I don’t register to my own sight in See Domain. So I don’t know how the Small Promise is doing, or if it’s degraded.

Before Yuea leaves, I add one last message. You’re right. Partly. I will reform the vote, as it is important. I may yet use it for other spells as well. I will also begin work on living glimmer. But next time, consider asking me before moving directly to the most hurtful plan you can concoct.

The bees I have on Yuea seem nervously torn between leaving the woman I am leaking anger toward, or trying to console her in her obvious confusion. I nudge them to go, that I’ll be fine here with Oob. Well, ‘here’. I’m still downstairs, and outside, and a thousand lengths away. I find that I am in many places at once these days. And yet, it still hurts in all of them right now.

Maybe Yuea is used to another way of doing things. But the almost casual disregard she showed just then stings. And despite being the one I thought would be closest to me, she feels abruptly distant.

Oob offers me a burst of reassurance as he takes wing and leaps to the desk nearest my map.; the beetle confident that I will need him to listen to Yuea again. The feeling of a scowl I was holding starts to break apart as I find amusement in my bound insect. I touch on his mind more directly through Bind Insect, letting him trade bits of gossip to me while I calm myself, and reminding him that I find his assistance both welcome and enjoyable.

Soon enough, I feel more myself again. And with my emotions under control, I get to work. After all, being annoyed and hurt doesn’t actually stop the problem of our incoming assault. Distant Visions begin to scout as I fill in blank spots on the map with increasing detail, plans form for where I will want to be carried in the next few days to build new Stone Pylons, and I begin keeping an eye on when Small Promise will be recovered enough to shout out to any nearby birds.

And then, I turn every bit of leftover focus I have to a new task.

I wish to know what, exactly, Congeal Glimmer does.