Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

  Available Power : 2

  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)

  Shape Metal (5, Shape)

  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)

  Distant Trajectory (6, Arcane)

  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)

  I come out of the memory to find myself being moved. As always, actually finding that is an act easier spoken of than handled. I don’t have proprioception of my body, and no matter how comfortable I become with the slowly expanding senses of my magics, I do not instinctively feel anything. Bees and glimmerlings and knowings and viewings and threads reporting back from a hundred glimmer and mantra and plants and the map of my domain such as it is, it all paints for me a landscape of the world. It lets me learn and appreciate what is around me.

  But it isn’t feeling. It isn’t what I know from my lives, and it isn’t the same. The memory I have just woken from, she, the merchant, she felt the sensation of motion and the bite of the cold. The only thing I have ever felt for myself has been the pain of cracking, and the slow sense of inexorable isolation in my thoughts.

  So determining that I am moving requires offset Know Material rings. Knowing the relative direction requires Congeal Mantra thread watching. And seeing what’s actually happening calls upon me to figure out which of my bound are actually near me - it is two carried inkrats, and nothing else - and spend the small drips of nothingness that it costs to turn the spell and borrow their eyes.

  Kalip and Mela whip through the Green toward what I believe is a distant hilltop, but the inkrats are somewhat myopic, and it is a challenge to tell through the rapidly moving leaves and branches that fly past all while the galesun pushes them around.

  Kalip moves with purpose; his Amalgamate Human edited body something he has been meticulously practicing with, and he proves it by maintaining perfect momentum as he bounds across the ground and over the exposed outcrops of stone and root. The exposed skin of his legs and arms, where there isn’t fur, shrugs off the sting of twigs and thorns as he focuses entirely on the task.

  In contrast, Mela moves like she has either no practice at this speed, or a vendetta against standing vegetation. Her Heroism is something I have intentionally been not learning about, but whichever one she has seized upon, it doesn’t exactly matter; they all offer a level of strength and potency well beyond normal mortal ability. But while she has been training, and Kalip has been teaching as best he can, Mela isn’t used to prolonged running at this speed, and regularly she clips into heavy tree trunks with enough force to crack the bark, if not her own bones.

  Unfortunately for me, Mela is the one carrying me. At least I’m on her back, and not subject to the more destructive impacts.

  It’s the least of my concerns, though. I trust this young woman, who has been forced to grow so much so fast. Mela will not let me down. Neither will Kalip, though for a different reason and a different sense of duty. No, I instead cannot help my thoughts from sliding to the question that I did not want to ask when I formed this plan, or selected one of my newest spells, or spoke to Yuea on the morning of this battle. It is too late to worry now. I have committed to the course, by my magic if not my actions. But I cannot stop the anxiety. Is this right?

  We are heading to a vantage point to launch a preemptive assault on something that is potentially a great enemy. That is almost certainly evil, and has likely done great harm already.

  And that is quite a few words to mean ‘perhaps’, is it not?

  I gave Lutra a chance, and while it has been a challenge, it has been paying off. I gave so many of the others a chance. But I don’t plan to do that here. Why? Because this one is using military tactics? I use those tactics; my glimmerlings move like scout and territory squads, my living companions supplement my magic with arms and armor. Because this one struck first? It is entirely possible that those were autonomous units; after all, Sever Command simply splashed off them. Because this one uses corpses?

  Well. Yes, I suppose. It uses the dead. I have not directly seen it kill, but I have seen the path it has cut through villages outlying the Green. I have seen the aftermath. Maybe it didn’t do the killing itself, but Yuea’s troop, and the remains of the human and demon towns that were near each other on the border, they had refugees. Survivors. There have been no stragglers fleeing the destruction of those other places where this one has passed.

  I am justifying it to myself. I was once a soldier, many of her memories are mine now in a way that is vivid and living. I know what it means to make an opponent into an enemy, and I can see myself doing it now.

  And yet, I am not going to stop. Justification or reason, it doesn’t matter. I am not powerful enough to keep my friends safe, if this thing decides upon treachery. If they wanted to reach out in the spirit of diplomacy and peace, they had a chance. Now…

  You don’t march an army to the home of someone you want to befriend. Not unless you have a very poor idea of what friendship is. The scholar remembers; record after record of kingdoms that treated alliances like this, that used the spear as a passive threat behind every conversation. Those empires grew rapidly, and burned even faster.

  Self defense, I decide with all the conviction I can muster, is not a first strike. The cleric’s memories provide me with the endless rallying cry of those who strive for peace. “I do not want to do this.” It goes. “But I will if you make me.”

  “Up, here!” Kalip’s yell over the rain and wind causes a shift in Mela’s run. She slows to a stop, staring up at the muddy hill like she’s considering taking the half candle it would require to run around to the sloped side, until Kalip launches himself upward hard enough to shatter the tree branch he is perched on. Hands like claws carving handholds in the mud as he begins to scale the edifice.

  Below, Mela’s sigh is heard by only my inkrat, and me, before she starts climbing in a much more cautious way.

  Soon, our self defense begins. Before the soldiers meet and the battle lines are drawn and the field is set. Simply one apparatus testing another.

  Maybe that is what is bothering me. I have always been the one being tested. The one defending and adapting to assaults. Not the one probing for weaknesses to exploit.

  Except that isn’t true at all, is it? The majority of my eyes and points of sensation are currently at a fort that we took from something by force. Every memory I have, every life I lived including this one, all of them would have to acknowledge that I have been growing more and more skilled at the art of combat against any given apparatus of change.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  At that conquered fort, while we ascend to our first firing position, things are moving.

  Yuea stands in the courtyard, arranging surviving soldiers into units that ignore the ongoing drizzle. She barks orders and has a dozen glimmerlings at her disposal helping to pass out weapons and armor, among a few other helpers. The commander tells them, bluntly, that she gives precisely zero fucks what they think their grudges with each other are. That it doesn’t matter if they’re human, or demon, that they are going to fight together like their lives depend on it.

  She pauses only briefly when she walks past the squad that Malpa and Jahn are standing in, the two men closer to each other than the others, both of them carrying the best spears I could make for them on short notice. Yuea frowns and I can feel her about to say something through Amalgamate Human, but she holds it back, and continues explaining the battlefield we will be using and the tactics that will keep them alive.

  Form Party is one of those. Now that she has assembled them, it isn’t hard for me to target groups and wrap them in loops of the spell. Binding them to each other, letting them communicate and understand each other more than would be possible with mere words. Especially for the verdling and gobs who are mixed into the militia, people who the others are far from familiar with even if they know the shapes from around the fort.

  Imbue Mending touches each of their sets of armor. Whether it is salvaged leather, hastily repaired lengths of chain, or the pieces of flexible wood guards that I have been trying to manufacture when I have the time. Our equipment is poor, but even still, if it can repair itself, it might mean fewer casualties. Even if it saves a single life, it is worth it. After all, I am not expending the spell for anything else.

  The adults understand. Most of them were soldiers. Even Jahn, before trying his skill at being a baker, was part of a town militia. They know that they are being asked to risk death. The gobs don’t exactly grasp it, but they know what loss is, and they are prepared to meet the world they were born into, which is harsh and unfair, but real all the same.

  The children understand too. The few of them that are out in the rain and wind help Yuea to distribute weapons, and when those run out, they share small charms with the soldiers. All of them have their idea of what brings good luck, and it is here that I learn that many of them have begun to tap into Shift Wood, as small hands and scared eyes pass the adults wooden coins with carved designs on them.

  A human soldier I have never spoken with takes a small good luck charm from Zhoy’s hand as the little demoness offers it to her without guile or fear. I don’t think she notices or is old enough to comprehend, but as she moves on, her honeybee guardian sees the woman’s spine straighten and her grip on her weapon tighten. The soldier shares a glance with the demon standing next to her; my soldier’s history tells me they will never be friends. But they will not let that stop them working together.

  The children may not understand what they represent to these survivors, may not realize what they draw out from the heart, but they realize that the threat is real. Not a single one of them isn’t an orphan. All of them have lost friends or siblings to get this far. And so far, no one has lied to them and told them that it’s over.

  So they’re scared. And they offer what they can to the people they see going out to fight the monsters. The bees understand too, though they see it I think as the grid of community and duty to each other that they are extrapolating from when they were small and much more mortal. They aren’t wrong though.

  And when Yuea and the soldiers move out of the gate, and the few staying behind seal the walls behind them, the children dry off inside and go to one of Seraha’s lessons and pretend things are normal. The mantra-modified walls of the fort helping them to learn, and later, to sleep peacefully, to play without harm.

  Except, unlike normal, through their bees they whisper tiny prayers to me that they don’t yet know the shape of. And far away, ascending a muddy slope, I stop worrying about justifications or diplomacy, and remember why I am fighting this enemy.

  They have come to our home to kill these children, and I will not let them. It is, after all, sometimes very simple.

  ”Hup.” Kalip grunts as he grabs Mela’s wrist and hoists her over the edge. “Okay. We’re here. What do you need from us?” He addresses me.

  I use Amalgamate Human to reply over the slowly growing weather. ”Nothing.” I keep my speech short, saving every bit of the spell’s supply of useful nothingness for him and Yuea to employ later. “Find a place to wait. Ranging now.”

  I know, vaguely, where the enemy army is and how fast it is moving. The mud and harsh winds are slowing them down, but not by much. While we’ve been positioning here, I’ve been moving resin glimmerlings into position to scout for me, and I make use of them now.

  Inside my magics, I begin to build a practice projectile. I use Make Low Blade because it will be something that can be seen, but is otherwise useless to me at the moment. A supply I won’t miss.

  The magic itself is placed like tensely folded pages into the outer shell of Distant Trajectory. The new magic, barely tested, straining to be put into motion. If I let it, I think it would simply go, without regard for intent. But I hold back on trying that, and instead, point it. Angle and force - the force itself is not physical, but something else, adding to the challenge - the scholar’s old drilled in knowledge of math and the singer’s adept skill at guessing when it came to use of an arbalest both coming into play to help me put this where I want it.

  I send the tiny package of magic into the sky. I cannot see it go, but something in the spell itself gives me a thread that tells me it is in flight.

  When I feel that thread end, I watch carefully through my scouts. And hundreds of lengths away, one of my glimmerlings catches sight of where pieces of detritus and pebbles try to pull themselves into the shape of a knife. Unsuccessfully, as I am not guiding the spell and have given it almost no strength to work, but still.

  I try twice more, getting a feel for the range and how to aim, before I am confident. My scouts move out, and I track their position and how I will need to fire. Their approach to the enemy army comes at an angle, but still from the front, so there may not be a large window of time in which to bombard them in this first salvo. But anything that softens the foe before it reaches the field that our militia is marching to is worth it.

  ”Ready.” I tell Kalip, who passes it on to Mela. The girl is tense; she doesn’t want to be here, she wants to be with the others. But we need her, because if we are located, I will need the two fastest and strongest to get me to safety.

  ”Okay.” Kalip is watching the sky, shading his eyes against the ongoing drizzle. “We going to see anything?”

  I don’t reply. He probably won’t. I’ll tell them if there’s an issue if it’s needed. For now, I bring in all of my thoughts and focus them on this one task.

  Through the trees, the dead approach. They move in clusters, not quite military columns but close enough. Like a wall of corpses, I know from previous scouting with wide Distant Vision casts that they are in a box formation, with the larger beasts pulling carts and covered wagons spaced through their midst. The exact count is something I cannot gives, but arithmetic and observation gives an estimate of two hundred of the more intact bodies, and three hundred of the skeletal figures weighed down by stolen armor. There are eleven of the massive flesh creatures, more than when the army began its march on us. But there are also, I know, slightly fewer of the dead soldiers; even puppeted adroitly they have still experienced attrition to the terrain and weather. Storming is not kind to anything caught out in the season, and the galesun does not discriminate.

  Through my posted glimmerlings, I take aim. Taps on the wood that Mela and Kalip are wearing inform them that I am taking action, focusing, but beyond that I do not waste time in telling them that I have begun.

  Borrowed magic from Lutra, acquired through a Small Trade that brought profit to us both, is worked into the shape that I wish for it to take. Loaded into a projectile made up of Distant Trajectory, the arcane modification to the structure of the spell itself turning it into ammunition for an unseen rifle with a range measured in a thousand lengths. Maybe more, if I reinforce my Spirituality soul again.

  It hasn’t been so long since this life started for me. Barely any time to study and experiment. But there is a ruthless teacher in the experience of raw survival, and I have become far more adept at magic than I ever expected myself to be in any life I have lived. The working comes easy now, as I pull back my mind to focus fully on this one task. Not simple, not basic, but something well within my ability that I do with precision and quiet mastery.

  And then I cast, and before I see it land through the eyes of my glimmerlings, I am working on the next.

  The spell peels back the sky around it. I can’t see it directly, we’re too close for Distant Vision, and I can’t feel it either, through any of my sense arcana. But I know that the world itself doesn’t like it when magic bursts across the air and draws stone from the elsewhere that I have been keeping it safe. I imagine the ripple through the windy grey, imagine what sensation would play on the skin of someone standing nearby, imagine the pressure as the spell takes hold.

  Six hundred units of stone in a roughly Formed Sphere hit the Green with all the weight and speed that its twenty length fall has given it. This, I do see, through the eyes of a small glimmerling scout. I see trees surrender to the weight and snap like twigs, I see the column of dead soldiers fail to react quickly enough, I see what used to be men and women reduced to broken piles of wet red and black paste, pulped flesh mingled with mud and mast.

  The rock rolls through the marching army slowly, inertia bled away after the initial impact and its meeting with the quickly softening mud. It stops. The glimmerling shows me exactly where it comes to a rest. Shows me the dead soldiers performing their march right past where it has just eliminated at least a score of their number. Shows me that I missed my intended target of one of the wagons that may contain the adversary. Shows me the exact moment when the whole army stops; stops clearing through the Green, stops moving in orderly columns, stops looking even mockingly like people.

  Dead eyes and mouths hang open as the mobile corpses begin to scramble in a way that reminds me all too closely of insects. Bolting in random directions, spreading out, refusing to make themselves easy targets for me.

  It isn’t fast enough. The second overgun shot from Distant Trajectory is already in the air. And the third. I can spin the pieces of the spells fast enough that each impact overlaps the one prior, the limitation is the availability of Distant Trajectory as a spell, the amount of stone I have stockpiled, and the limitation of Lutra’s own magic that has been traded to me.

  So I make the shots count. I’ve found the range now, I know where I am aiming, and scattering the foot soldiers isn’t going to stop me from shooting.

  The second mass of rock destroys a thin line of fleeing corpses. The third misses my target entirely and hits only ground before becoming stuck in a stream bed and redirecting the flow of water that has been gradually building as the rainsun rises higher.

  The fourth hits one of the flesh beasts. The long, creation is almost lizardlike, exposed pink muscle and sinew wrapped around plodding thick legs and a wide gash of a mouth at the end of a long neck that stretches out from its body. And it is too slow to flee as my accuracy improves with the first three shots, and one of the stones crushes it to death. Unlike the dead, this creation screams in pain as it falls. What appears to be a mournful animal wail that makes me wish there was something else that could have been done here.

  But it is pulling a supply wagon, which contains supplies of war or more bodies or something worse, and so it must be stopped too.

  The monstrous red lizard’s mouth hangs open as it continues to scream its death. And then the scream I cannot hear freezes, the creature’s distended fleshy maw hanging open like a portal.

  From its half-crushed gullet, dark flying blots began to pour out. Birds, bats, gloams, it is hard to tell when they swarm at careless speeds. Dead or collared, it does not matter. They flood from the creature that is itself just as much a troop transport as the wagon it was carrying.

  The flyers begin spreading out in a curtain, fighting against the nature of storming but still acting in an unnatural way which my growing warrior instincts scream at me over. When an apparatus needs a condition to be true, it does not wait, after all. It makes that condition real, and then makes use of it.

  Another Distant Trajectory overgun shot closed in on the scattering army. And I felt something truly strange, which I would have found to be an impressive feat at this point if I weren’t engaged with a foe.

  Unlike many of my spells, Distant Trajectory did not provide feedback within the otherwise empty space I could perceive inside myself. That collection of constructs that gave me a hundred portals to the world itself, through the eyes of my bees, through Yuea and Kalip’s active thoughts, through knowledge of my fortified and claimed places, it didn’t have anything of the sort within it for my new magic.

  And yet, I still felt it, a spiral tug pulling something out of my cobbled souls, as the spell was stolen from me.

  The Form Sphere projectile went with it, though not with the same visceral wet force. Had this been any other condition, I would have relished the sudden burst of novel sensation that ran through me. But it was hard to do that when my bombardment was crashing into the green fifty lengths away from my target, the targeted spell broken open early.

  “They’re splitting up.” Mela says, and I feel the girl’s less visceral pull on Distant Vision. She’s spotting through my magic, and I don’t think she even realizes she’s doing it. “Two groups. One is… heading toward us?” She can see the ground, but not the map. She’s not wrong though.

  “We need to move.” I tell Kalip, almost writing it against the wood of his armor without thinking about it.

  ”Heard.” His soldier’s tone resonates with my own old remembered life as he answers us both. “Second position. Let’s go.” He taps Mela on her shoulder, the duo rising to their feet in unison, Kalip going from standing to hurtling through the Green in the span of heartbeats, with his student right behind him.

  Out in the Green, a pack of skeletal troops adjust their course in an arc as we move. I watch them with a sour anger as we head for another wooded hill, quietly waiting. Waiting for Distant Trajectory to refill, waiting for the time to strike again, waiting for news from the fort on some hidden blade sent their way, waiting for the answer to this madness to arrive, waiting for this invader to get out of my home, just waiting.

  I don’t like anything about it.