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)

  The second firing point is surrounded by a ring of glimmerlings, positioned on a similar ridgeline to where we have just departed from. While the waiting is a great beast preoccupying my thoughts, it has not been the only thing within my crystal mind, and I have been making measurements and estimations this whole short run such that my bombardment from this angle will be more effective than spending half the day guessing again. By the time Kalip drops to one knee among the resin creations, holding up his lightly furred arm against the galesun’s attention with Mela doing the same behind him, I am prepared to fight again.

  I pull back my drifting strands of thought. Set aside my observation of the fort and its watchful defenders; sentries on the wall, the rest prepared and taking turns staying as dry as possible. Take my leave of listening to the hum of the bees and their interwoven tapestry of duty and compassion. Stop listening to Yuea’s uncreative profanity as she watches the map. Though I continue to update the map, showing the split of the enemy forces as best I can, Shift Wood and a fragment of my attention keeping the commander updated.

  Musing and mulling are more my specialty than magic itself. Certainly more so than war. But war is what is here, and as much as I am prepared to fight, so too is my mirrored opponent.

  ”The bones?” Kalip asks in his rough voice as he carves a furrow in the damp mud at the edge of the ridgeline, letting himself take an archer’s position with some covering from the Green’s native life.

  ”They’re too close.” Mela’s own words are strained. She stopped drawing on Distant Vision during the duo’s withdrawal from the first point, and while my glimmerlings here have sight that is imperfect, even I can see the way her face pulls with the telltale signs of a headache. The hero’s ability may have let her twine her magic with mine faster than anyone else, but it does not protect her from the backlash.

  If I had to guess, I would say that Mela’s heroing does not protect her at all.

  I won’t think about that. Not now, hopefully not later either. The more I learn, the more I risk being caught in her magic, and I do not think that would end well for either of us. Instead I give Kalip a small mental nudge through Amalgamate Human to tell him I’ve heard, and send the glimmerlings out in a fan. Their flat resin feet squelching through the mud, a sensation I long to feel myself, before they reach the ridgeline and tuck themselves into misshapen balls to roll down toward the floor of the Green. Forward scouts, ready to delay the skeletal soldiers cutting their way through the vines and clinging brush toward us.

  Time matters now. I don’t know how the enemy apparatus has found us, but I could have done it in three different ways. So I simply note that they can do it, and attempt to bombard their main force again.

  Distant Trajectory, loaded with the last of the bartered Form Sphere from Lutra, is my first test. I need to know two things, before I commit my next three shots. And so Form Sphere itself gets a unique layered treatment with Link Spellwork, the payload itself paired with Congeal Glimmer.

  There is no time for ranging shots. My more far ranging glimmerlings and a persisting Distant Vision provide me foreign eyes as I let slip the magic into the air, and give in to mad hope so painfully that the cleric I was would have been proud of my faith in myself.

  There is a curtain in the sky over the target. A flock of hundreds of flying things, black blots that struggle against the galesun but seem unconcerned in the extreme with the damage they are taking every time their members are thrown into outcroppings or trees. The last time I launched my magic forth, it was stolen from me when it got too close once that curtain had gone up. So this time, I simply do not allow it to be taken.

  Judging where the Distant Trajectory projectile is would be somewhere on the list of guesses that would have made the scholar weep at the inaccuracy. But I count the heartbeats, and manage to begin to spin the stone orb into existence while it is high in the screaming grey sky far over the carpet of flyers. And, gracefully, out of range of whatever stole it from me the first time.

  I do not expect the boulder to hit anything when it falls. The birds do see it coming with enough time to get out of the way, which in its own way tells me what their sensing range is in terms of altitude. And the rock itself, somehow, manages to reduce one of the mobile corpses to an immobile amount of crushed flesh.

  But that is only half of my information gathering.

  I watch, with as many senses as I can, as the army continues to trek toward the fort. The fleshbeasts pulling the wagons are straining to move faster, the corpses advance like they are being more carefully controlled, and if they would hear me I would thank the grand devils for their intercession that the enemy army has not found the remains of the last road that was attempted toward us, because it is taking this new invader more time to rip apart the vegetation and natural obstacles of the Green in its way.

  They swarm past, all pretense of marching gone. And I learn two things in quick succession. One is grim; the wrenching sensation of having something dragged from me begins to pull at every glimmering as soon as the army is close enough. No, that is imprecise; it begins when the flyers are overhead, which is valuable information. The other thing I learn as I focus with all my attention on the threads connecting me to my creations, is that this grotesque theft does not come for the single glimmer concealed at the center of the stone sphere.

  I am glad that my glimmerlings are simple mobile limbs, and not thinking creatures like my bees. Because I refuse to be stolen from again, if it can be helped, and I learn a third thing as I rapidly lash out and overfill their core glimmers. My trick to use the seeming failure of the glimmerling creation as a weapon continues to be an option even once the glimmerlings are around it. Though from the way they warp and bulge and shift in the moments before their eruption, I suspect I could push them farther in growth if I had a hundred tendays of quiet with which to work.

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  But I do not have that, and never will, and it is well past time that I accept that.

  The intelligence is vital, but also disheartening. Many of my plans are cut short by the simple fact that enemy would benefit from them now. Shape Metal or Spawn Golem amidst the now dispersed ranks would simply be tools for my opponent. I can still detonate glimmer, which the enemy seems ignorant of the presence of even after watching me deny it the glimmerlings, but that isn’t a wide scale weapon. And I lack the ability to deploy it like I did against the last invader that got this far, owing to the fact that I can’t send anyone close to the flyers.

  Oh, ash, I can’t allow Kalip or Yuea anywhere near this thing.

  The thought is a grim reminder that, although I am no cruel taskmaster, the spell Amalgamate Human was not made with medical purposes in mind. It was made to make people into my weapons, and those strings are still there, even if I do not tug. They cannot be put into range of the enemy if I cannot steal them back.

  I should put something else in range instead.

  Distant Trajectory, this time with no elaborate connections. Instead, I pack it full of Congeal Glimmer and send it on its way, aimed two lengths ahead of the enemy’s army. There is a small incline coming up, and the soldier’s memories whisper about the likely point it will surmount. Even if it is cutting a straight line through the Green now, I know all too well the rapidity that the liquid nothing can be drained away, and as this one is unfortunately not a fool, it will likely try to be efficient.

  Which gives me ample time to begin the process of overfilling the glimmer, wishing for the triple third time that I could grimace as I lock the focus into place. Strikes waiting under fallen leaves and wet roots for the right time to be unleashed.

  I expend the remainder of Distant Trajectory on this plan, layering hundreds of the small creations across the floor of the Green, silently offering an apology to the wilds that I am about to damage in this newest war. I consider holding back, but we have enough time to move to a third point, letting my reservoirs refill themselves as I devise a new way to attempt to cause damage from this far away. I also consider simply attempting to overwhelm whatever magic is being used to take my own control away from me, but I find little value in handing the opposition more power when I am already existing in a deficit of it myself.

  Meanwhile, my glimmerlings have encountered the enemy. With their resin exteriors coated in mud and stuck through with scattered sticks and bits of dirt thrown around by the galesun, I am unsurprised that the armored skeletons did not consider them anything worth attacking until it was too late. I don’t have an accurate enumeration of the force sent our direction, but they are the lightest of the skeleton soldiers. Chain and some of what looks like folded bone armor, but no heavy plate. The glimmerlings charge the flank of the bound corpses, half my own force missing in the assault simply because the skeletons are moving so fast compared to any two-legged being that isn’t one of the pair carrying me.

  The resin scouts, reinforced as much as I can manage, impact the enemy with dull hammer blows. Four of them go down, and the curving line of resin glimmerlings moves at my command, the stragglers taking the time to smash skulls and joints to powder. Soft motes leak from the breaks, but I cannot tell which strike was the killing blow, which part of these things are vulnerable. Only that they can be put down.

  Half the pack continues, the others turn on the glimmerlings, stolen weapons clutched in knucklebones that should not be able to clench with that much force. Blades and spikes begin to make the exchange expensive, but the glimmerlings extract their own payment in broken bone. By the time the last of my handful of scouts are dispatched, the glimmer at their hearts no longer able to exert enough magic to move the broken bodies, I have cost the attack force fifteen of their number.

  Out of three hundred, of this style of corpse alone, that number feels small. But with every move, I learn. And now I know that this thing cannot work its magic through its bound as I can. It lacks Link Spellwork, or lacks the knowledge of what it can do. Far enough from the apparatus, and I may work with impunity.

  Through the Distant Vision tracking the fleshbeasts and the more complete corpses, though, I learn something else that is less enjoyable. The whole of the enemy convoy pauses, stopping as if waiting for something for what feels like a small forever before continuing. But something has changed. It is not the numbers or the movements, but Distant Vision gives me sight of the whole of things in a space as if I were almost the air itself. And I can see… strangely, now.

  A corpse moves out of time, and the one that should be behind it is not revealed. Instead, I catch a glimpse of one of the wagons, before it is obscured by a towering tree that should not be there, that should have been crushed by the spun magics this apparatus is using to dissolve the Green and pave a new path through it. But the tree is hale and tall, swaying in the galesun’s gaze but not destroyed, because it is a quarter-length to the side on the edge of my Distant Vision dome.

  While I have the time to do so, I rescind every complaint I have made about being unable to feel in this forced form. As in this moment, I know, beyond all doubt, that if I had a head it would ache so painfully that I would be trying to dig into it to stop the throbbing. Whatever the enemy has done, it has maddened all of the connections between places around it. I cannot even triangulate its position, as the geometry of space seems to have failed. The scholar would be so vindicated that his skipping of those lessons was correct.

  Why now, though? The answer, once I stop looking, seems obvious. It is worried about another surprise attack, from a larger force. It can see and direct the skeletons, or perhaps it has given them commands already, and it knows it has taken losses. So it is protecting its other force. A smart move, even if it shows off a trick early. But, I wonder, will it stop my trap?

  ”They’re here.” Kalip’s words cut through my observation. I look through his eyes at the skeletons moving through the Green below; obscured, and the trees run almost all the way up to the bluff we’re on, but there’s a gap that they’re fast approaching and the archer tracks them with flickering precision that doesn’t make me half as dizzy as the obfuscation of the enemy’s convoy. “Okay hero. What now?”

  ”You-“ Kalip notices the girl’s head snap toward him, but I can feel him suppressing a grin as he tries to make her think like a soldier and not a reckless kid. I am feeling too much of his thoughts, actually; and I ease back on Amalgamate Human’s binding as Mela answers. “Fine. There’s a lot of them, but they’re dumb, right? Last time they went feral when they lost that thing.” She points toward where one of the skeletons in the middle of the flowing swarm is holding an oily mass. “So if we can kill that, we can run again and they might not follow?”

  ”Good thought. How many are there?” Kalip instructs as he tests the draw on his bow, the mantra in his bones beginning to glow against the strings that connect them back to me.

  ”Forty? Fifty?”

  ”No, the blobs.”

  Mela jerks her head back to where the first skeletons have just exited the trees and are racing toward the muddy slope like there’s a prize for being the first to tear into the flesh at the top. “Two. No, three!” She shouts. “There might be more! So we split up, figure out who they follow, and lead them-“

  Below, one of the slick oily constructs, like smoking darkness, bursts in the bone hand of the skeleton carrying it. Just one though. “Did you…” Kalip looks my way, and I see myself through his eyes as he questions.

  ”No.” I reply to him quickly. “Look.” They’re changing how they’re moving. The pack was spread evenly, but now, they’ve shifted. They’re no longer headed toward all of us, they’re beginning to focus on a single point. On Mela. Oh. “Oh.” I vocalize into Kalip’s thoughts through out connection. “It can’t reach this far!” I tell him.

  The man who made a career out of war barely twitches, but I can feel the undercurrent in his thoughts. ”The orders are in the oil.” He says, nocking an arrow and taking aim. “And… it can hear us.” Whatever Mela was about to say in response is strangled as she cuts herself off. But she moves forward, her battered sword out, ready to buy Kalip time to shoot down the ones that are guiding the others.

  Kalip’s first shot impacts, and transforms a span of the Green’s floor into an eruption, splinters and shards of wood and stone fleeing the explosion from his imbued arrow as multiple skeletons are rent apart by the attack. But even in the short time it took to identify the problem, the others have reached the base of our position and are clawing their way up. Mela’s sword is an awkward weapon for this, and so I rip nearby materials free with Make Low Blade and put together a crude throwing javelin at her side. The hero’s scraped hand grips it firmly before she pitches it toward a target, spiking through a skeleton’s leg bones and leaving it stuck to the ground. By the time she recovers, another one is waiting for her.

  I leave a part of my thoughts to handle the production of ammunition for just a few breaths, and look back across the Green. Sixty lengths away, the confusing bubble of space around the convoy has begun taking the path of least resistance - I believe - up the slope I have littered with charged glimmer. The sensation that all connections between points has been scrambled like they’re made for a Mist Eve feast leaves me uncomfortable about my chances of inflicting damage, but with the majority of the army at least within the same radius of Distant Vision as where I have left the traps, there is no reason in waiting now. I cannot steal spells.

  I can do very little, despite my growing power.

  But I can try.

  Scores of explosions mar the Green as the glimmer follow my imperfect directions and destroy themselves and everything nearby. Clods of mud and dirt spray in bubbles that scatter through the confused space, the hardy plants that are capable of weathering storming above ground find themselves at odds with the pressure of the blasts, adding their own ripped apart vegetation to the chaos, and for a brief moment, the pouring rain that falls in odd directions is shoved back in a cluster of destructive spheres.

  There are hundreds of walking corpses when I begin the attack. By the time I am done, I have reduced the number of them surviving - if that is even an appropriate word - by half. Counting is edging against impossibility with the way things are around my target, but I know how many are dead. Left unmoving behind the caravan as it rushes to escape my zone of death.

  The twisted space passes along with the wagons, all of them but one intact, the enemy putting on a burst of speed to clear what it must think is a targeted space. The wagon left behind, and the dead and hollowed out fleshbeast that was pulling it, have spilled sideways, revealing a grisly cargo. Hundreds of bodies, stacked with mercantile precision, litter the floor alongside the armored forms of the previously moving corpses.

  Human, demon, some gobs. Men, women, children, all of them dead through extreme violence, bodies hacked at and drained of blood, sometimes scarred with flame, some of them with what looks like a dark infection staining their skin. Bundled up and brought along as… what? Extra ammunition should the first mass of bodies prove insufficient?

  I am rapidly losing any sense that I should pity this enemy.

  The cost to them has been great. Over eighty of their corpse puppets destroyed. And from the look of things, they have no intention of stopping to replenish now. Though they may have time to do so when they approach and need to circle the cliff around the fort to find the entrance to the valley that their army can actually march down.

  But right now, I need time to make a plan with the information I have collected, and form a third strike. We may yet have time to thin their numbers further before they reach our walls.

  Communicating without words is, I find with a grim amusement, something I have quite a bit of practice on. Tapping with Shift Wood lets me give coded commands to the two with me, and my writing with it lets me hopefully speak unseen back at the fort itself. Passing on intelligence gathered, and readying them for what is to come.

  Kalip and Mela have thinned the ranks of the bones themselves, but Kalip is clearly exhausted from his own use of the magic that I find effortless, and Mela has done almost as much damage to her sword as she has to the skulls she has shattered. If we had time, and fewer magically warped skeletons clawing for them, I would have her take one from the scattered equipment of the fallen below.

  But we don’t, and so instead I fire a shaped Collect Material focused into a specific piece of the information of Know Material, stealing all the metal far enough from us that I can, though the spell struggles with and ultimate ignores the armor and weapons still borne by our foes without doing anything more than draining that vital magical fluid from the reserve.

  I will make her a sword later. It will not be very good, but perhaps it will be hers for a while.

  The two of them, harried and tiring, do not hesitate when I indicate it is time to run. Kalip grabs the single large glimmer I have the stamina to congeal, and pitches it with his reforged wolven muscles to allow me to detonate it within a clump of skeletons that Mela has swept off the edge of the ridge and left clustered below. Thinning their numbers, and leaving the rest as staggered as mindless corpse weapons can ever be, before the two of them take almost identical deep breaths and begin to run.

  The rainsun chooses that moment to partner with the galesun for the day, and the duo race into falling sheets of vigorously flying water as Kalip’s pathfinding leads them toward our last planned point of engagement.

  I try to focus on recovering. And the enemy follows.