Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 10

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)

-

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)

Muelly carries my body to the shore of the lake. The walk isn’t hurried, but she doesn’t move slowly either, and I vicariously join her through Oob and a pair of palm sized growing bees. The trees sway in the late day wind, the gust pushing heat around but bringing no relief. Green dominates the surroundings, but everywhere, the final blooms of the season splash the world in yellows, oranges, purples, and blues. I don’t look too much; I need Bind Insect at its best to keep healing the larger bees, and every bit matters. But I still look. How could I not? The world is beautiful, even when I have to borrow eyes to see it.

It’s strange - a phrase I find myself overusing - but I think I can feel the difference in who is trusted with my body.

Seraha carried me like I was a weapon primed to go off and she was terrified of it. When I was on Yuea’s flank, it was similar, except with the impression that she was excited and not afraid. And Mela, impressive as she is for her age, still carried me like she was a kid; a little reckless, a little overcautious, overthinking the wrong things and underthinking the right ones.

Muelly just carries me like it’s normal.

Trailing behind the demoness, Zhoy and Ruuet follow, the two growing children enjoying their evening without lessons to trail after their elder. I’m not comfortable with it; experience has taught us all that the place around the fort isn’t truly safe. But… well, there’s forty new people inside the fort now, and at least some of them have tried to kill me already, and the tenuous peace bought by cots and yams isn’t going to last forever unless we take steps to make it. So it’s not as if inside is perfectly safe for them either.

The refugees don’t know that the stealthy beetles listen in on them, and given what I’ve been hearing from a few of them, I’m not inclined to share. There are a handful from both the demon and human survivors who think - for opposite reasons - that the children are being done a disservice by being ‘made’ to interact with each other. It hasn’t gone beyond talk; it’s been a few candles, after all. But my spies are keeping their ears open.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Ruuet follows Zhoy as the chipper demon guides the slightly older human, the age difference not stopping her from being a proper big sister. They’re both sad they can’t borrow my water magic today, but I’ve found consistently in my many lives that children are far smarter than adults ever give them credit for, so long as you actually explain things to them.

“Almost there.” Muelly says, scrambling over a moss covered log. She’s far less deft at moving than Yuea, still flinches from every touch of a leaf or fly on her fur, and has the body of someone who lived a lavish life before the month of near-starvation diet that brought her weight down. But she feels more at peace than I remember her, when we first met.

Her words remind me that we aren’t just out for a pleasant stroll. And as the lake ahead comes into view of my scout bees, I see that Lutra has been… up to something.

The mud and broken stone shores of the freshwater lake, flush with reeds and fluffstalks and water lilies, are surrounded. Not by anything hostile, far from it. Instead, there are a number of… well, standing spheres. Orbs that appear to be formed from the clusters of rocks that made up the shores, pressed into balls that don’t appear to be held together by anything except for perfect balance. The different colors and textures of each individual stone making them look like abstract visions out of an old Agien mosaic.

Why are these here? I want to ask. I don’t have a way to, though Oob both senses and shares my confusion. The bees don’t actually care about them; their new minds unappreciative of the fact that this must have taken painstaking effort - or bizarre magic - to form, and also uncaring about art in general if that art isn’t in the form of a flower they can sun themselves in.

I still ask the bees to take a closer look around. The lake is large enough and there are tall enough reeds and grasses around its banks that I need them to ascend so I can get a good view. And I’m surprised to find that there aren’t just a few of these rock spheres, but quite a lot of them, dotting the shore in an uneven pattern.

“Lutra made the first few when you set out, and everything was fine.” Muelly has stopped, the kids laughing as they cut loose behind her and start climbing a tree. “Then… whatever happened to you. And they made more. They’re uncomfortable to be around. I can’t get close anymore.”

Muelly you cannot simply say things like that and then not explain any of the words. I ask Oob to poke her with one of his legs, and he readily agrees. Muelly’s twitch reflex to swat at the point of contact is suppressed before she accidentally flicks Oob off her shoulder.

As she tries to pry Oob’s legs off her shirt, being warily gentle with the clinging beetle, she keeps talking. “If you get too close to them now, it makes you stop… caring. Forget what you were doing or something. For everyone else, it makes them give up on whatever chore they were in the middle of. For the kids, it doesn’t do anything, actually. They find it fun. Uh… I can’t… though. I can’t.” She deposits Oob on a nearby rock, the beetle imperiously dusting away some of the dirt as he perches in the sun and looks over the lake shore with her. “It just makes me give up. I stop trying. So I can’t go near them. Which is why these two are here!” She brightens up instantly as she whips herself around and spreads her bare arms wide, the pain in her voice snapping out as she whirls on the children.

Zhoy and Ruuet squeal as they try to hide behind the fat leaves of the branch they’re hanging on the end of, the older of the two girls clinging to the tree as Zhoy kicks off with her hooves and sends herself out in a sprawling flight arc to be caught by Muelly, who grabs her out of the air with a heavy oof, spins the girl around, and then lets go to roll the little hellion across the ground toward the lake.

Zhoy springs to her feet as Ruuet drops in a much less potentially lethal manner from their climbing tree, and the two of them tear off to play by the lakeside. I almost flinch as the surface of the water ripples with liquid spikes when the two approach, but Muelly settles a hand on my surface. “Watch.” She says quietly.

The water smoothed out, and I pushed my bees back from moving to intercept the two girls. Then it starts to churn with more mundane activity, as a half dozen eels, looking more like tiny leviathans than anything else, breach the surface near the muddy bank the girls are running down. One of them whips itself back and forth, before swimming up out of the surface of the lake; the lake flowing with it, a tube of water that undulates along with the actually-quite-large eel as it swims in a shallow loop around the laughing Zhoy.

The young girls try to catch the eel for a few minutes before it tricks them into the water, and the other smaller eels start crowding around, carrying Zhoy and Ruuet along like passengers on a linkline, wakes in the surface like miniature flurries of white.

“The kids love it here.” Muelly says to me. “But we can’t talk to Lutra, and I don’t think they can talk to us. And… and they put up this wall.” She flicks a pair of curled fingers toward the irregular line of rock orbs. “It doesn’t look like a wall, but it’s a wall. You can trust me.”

I do trust her. I also think I partially understand the why of it. Lutra has been terrified and frantic the entire time I’ve known them - all two days of brief contact - and so this seems to be natural. I’d be actually worried if they had hurt anyone. Though I suppose I am worried, for what it clearly did to Muelly.

Why is she the one who brought me here, if she’s the one most susceptible to being done real harm by this magic? I need to talk to Lutra somehow.

See Domain shows the lake as a very soft place. The cataloging of things within Lutra’s domain doesn’t fail, though. This is no Fortified Space, and I can see things within the magic. Their eels, which leads me to believe that all bonds are intrinsically domain-affiliated. A small portion of the water around where their body is submerged, which registers as a natural domain of some kind. The children, who are… strange. Zhoy and Ruuet show to me as being covered by two domains; Lutra’s and my own. My own is internal to them, but there is a thinner kind of domain from the other apparatus that layers atop them.

I focus See Domain, pouring more of its reserve of the void into the spell to look closer. And there, emanating from those stone clusters, is something that covers the ground like mist. Light and airy, the magic is only barely part of a domain. But still there. It covers the kids, though does not try to press into them. Instead, it just… waits. Surrounding the lake, and waiting for…

There is another domain here.

On the far shore, there is an alien domain. One that speaks of combat and blood. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I see. Pinpointing it geographically is a challenge, and I can’t exactly ask Muelly to move me. So I send my bees up high, and get Oob to make a beetle’s chirp and frantic wave to get Muelly to call the children back from their fun.

Flying overhead high enough to avoid the misty domain from the orbs, I tell my bees to find whatever it is I’ve spotted, and prepare to fight if needed. As soon as I give the command, the water begins to ripple and churn below them, and I feel a mounting fear. And then the bees see it.

Perhaps a tenth of a length tall, it would tower over everyone if it were standing upright. Skin like bark, five limbs I can see that don’t seem to correspond to arms or legs in a way I understand. It is lying collapsed in the reeds, just past one of the rock orbs.

The creature has eyes like liquid amber, and it is still breathing. But it does not move.

It looks very angry.

I order the bees to wait, and not to strike, and the lake starts to calm. And I start to make a connection. Not about where this thing came from, or why it is slowly dying without resistance this close to the fort, but about Lutra.

When I told the bees to prepare to fight, they reacted. When I told them to wait, they calmed. They must have See Commands, or something similar to it. A different or lesser version perhaps, as they didn’t distinguish that the command had nothing to do with them. Either that, or this thing is their own bond, though I highly doubt that.

Lutra has been protecting this place. Somehow.

I really need to talk to them. And with nothing in Authority that I could take to make that happen easily, that means I need Spirituality to heal. Badly.

As if in response to my desire, a point of power slips away from me. Like oil in nonexistent fingers, it roils through the grip of my mind and magic, and ‘out’ into the material of my soul.

And one of the cracks heals. Not all of it. Not a lot. But something.

I ask my bees and Oob to rejoin Muelly, who has somehow succeeded in coaxing the two kids back away from the lake and is looking at the bees with concern. Their hurried flight didn’t go unnoticed. We start the walk back to the fort, and I’m grateful that she lets me enjoy the quiet for a while, as I have something new to focus on.

One by one, I begin trying to push more power into the soul of Spirituality itself. Not to strengthen, or to add, but to heal. I barely manage one by the time we return. But at least I know that with enough quiet time, and a steady supply of power from my Small Promises and Claimed Constructions, that I could be whole again.

A steady supply of quiet seems deeply unlikely.

Malpa and Jahn meet us at the fort’s gate, frowns on their faces. And I bring my focus back, as I prepare for the next problem.

The rhythm of life, really. Quiet to crisis and back again.