? - ?

  Available Power : ?

  Authority : ?

  Nobility : ?

  Empathy : ?

  Spirituality : ?

  Ingenuity : ?

  Tenacity : ?

  Animosity : ?

  Trepidation : ?

  I can’t feel my hands. Paws. Claws. Hands.

  I can’t feel anything. I’m supposed to feel things that are real, but there’s nothing left. Just the world spinning, spinning, interminable spinning with no end or beginning in sight. Sight I do not have.

  It’s just nothing so deep it’s not even darkness. Lit up by a host of floating dots, unliving bundles of a delicate material softer than down and less defined than a snowflake. They cast no light, illuminate nothing to see. But they are everywhere.

  Drowning. I’m drowning. But I can swim. Can’t swim. Don’t know how to swim. Never learned how. Have been doing it my whole life.

  Which way is up? If I can find that I can escape. If the spinning stops, I can writhe my tail and propel myself toward the surface.

  I don’t have a tail. I don’t have legs. I shouldn’t-should have either-both but I have nothing. What is happening?

  There was a fight. Or a fall? It feels as though I’m still falling. Falling upward, toward Auor. No, that’s right, I had a dias to make it to, and I was in a hurry, and there was a cart, and something broke…

  No, that’s not right. I’ve never seen a dias before in my life. And I wouldn’t make it to an appointment regardless these days. Getting out of bed was a feat itself, and I was going to just rest my eyes…

  No. No no. I’m still falling. Am I dead?

  I remember things I never did. Or I did things I do not remember. When was I clothed in Agien robes? Did I always have fur? Was the blade in my grip always this long? What was I?

  What am I?

  Who am I

  The question rings throughout whatever I am surrounded by. I can see nothing but the endless storm, grains of sand whipped to a swirling maelstrom by unfelt wind. I can feel nothing but my own disorientation. Hear nothing but my thoughts. There is nothing.

  And yet the question booms with the voice of a thundering sky.

  Who. Am. I.

  The answer comes easily.

  I am a man who loves the land he works, taking pride in a long life of useful work.

  I am a toolborn seeker of knowledge and community, eager to see the next discovery.

  I am a sorrowful killer of killers, mind full of tactics with no one left to use them to protect.

  I am a bound woman of means and motive, mind and scales hardened against the cold world.

  I am a tired follower of the Grand Path, carrying hope wherever my hooves take me.

  I am a lost voice finding itself, looking for the worth in places once scorned.

  I am, or was, or will be, each of them.

  The memories piece themselves together. I only wish I could take credit for the assembly, but the pathetic truth is that, who or whatever I am, I am capable of little more than plummeting through the blank sky, buffeted by winds of these things that seem to drive themselves through my essence itself more with every second.

  The memories come back, but with them, a small piece of new knowledge. I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, were not meant to be separated again. Again? When were we ever whole? That seems like something any of these lives would have remembered. And if that is the case, but I am still me, then who am I to be thinking this now?

  Knowledge and attention for the last few days that each of us - or me - lived begins to fade. The sensation that I am who I am is tugged with it, a pain like nothing else shooting through the body I do not have. Like peeling off a scab that has not healed, ripping a wound in myself with a cruel and infecting intentionality.

  A thousand of the pieces of the storm flood into the gap. I caught my hand in the cold shaper once, and it felt something similar to this, except that was a hand and this is the same sensation amplified and applied to everything I ever was through lifetimes I don’t think I ever lived. It is somewhat worse.

  The small mote of sarcasm would have gotten a laugh from Yuea. Though perhaps not a serious or long one. I would smile, if I could.

  Or if I knew who Yuea was.

  It is something to grab onto though. Something to focus upon. Was that someone important? Or was that who did this to me? Or both?

  There is a tendency that the waystation storytellers have, to tell tales of exceptional characters simply ignoring their pain to achieve the results they need. It is a fine moment to add to a telling, and should someone listen for too long, they might come away with the mistaken impression that pain is something that one is always capable of ignoring, or overcoming.

  I cannot overcome this pain. I can barely think, every thought I have is a flash of a memory with a different body, and all of them feel wrong, so perhaps I am none of these people. Focus is a matter of tiny increments, bit by bit while wishing I was screaming out my agony, clawing my way toward the only answer I make myself want.

  Yuea. Where is that name from? I don’t remember it, I just know it, like a drifting voice on the wind. Somewhere in my head. The head I don’t have. Oh, I would beg for the falling and the rending pain to stop for just a moment if I thought anyone had the power to listen.

  The name is there though. Sitting in my thoughts, waiting in my thoughts. Yuea. And another, Kalip. Designations. Profiles. Information. I don’t know where it comes from or how I know it, but it flows rapidly, almost frantically, as I reach even vaguely in its direction. There is something there, something within the storm and the pressure and the ripping apart of everything that I ever was.

  A connection. A line I can grab onto, a drowning spearfisher thrown something by her companions.

  Without knowing what limb it is I move, I latch onto that connection, and something new pours down it into my senseless painful world. “-ack to the wall!” A yell. A shout. Is it meant for me? It’s a voice though, I can hear it. I have nothing to hear it with, but there it is regardless.

  A woman. The picture forms as I feel the knowledge clip neatly into place with the profile I can feel of her, like an intricate child’s puzzle coming together. She is hardened by life, angry at her empire, and thinks herself broken to the point that she is willing to sacrifice anything for what she sees as a valid cause. Her voice is rough, still slightly unfamiliar to her now, but bold and commanding. Her past is occluded, but someone has left what feel like familiar scholarly notes for whomever stumbled upon her next; she was born an aristocrat of some sort, turned into a living weapon either because of that or because of her rejection of it, and has never believed in anything in her life before now.

  I know her. I am supposed to know her.

  ”-if you die-!” I can hear her howling at someone, the voice singing through the connection, on toward someone I cannot see. The other one? Kalip? “-kill you myself!”

  Familiar. She’s so familiar. Not historically, not in a nostalgic way. But through the pain, I can sense that this is someone I’ve come to know on a personal level. I just… don’t know when I did that. Or who of me did that.

  The thin line of the connection stretching through the storm of stinging white resists my attempt to pull anything more from it. I don’t think it was supposed to even have those few semi-memories within it. But I latch onto it, slowing my fall, pulling myself toward what else it has within its bounds. There must be something.

  I need to know something.

  ”-listen to me you fuc-!”

  The voice fades, as I fall past it. Through the endlessly swirling storm of quiet things trying to push themselves between the gaps in my thoughts. Though the otherwise blank place, where there is nothing physical and only my own nausea as I feel parts of myself coming loose from the whirling gyre I have become. The words are swallowed by the raw pain and confusion again.

  There is a disconnect in who I am. I don’t actually know who I am, but I can remember being too many different people. That separation is the source of anguish, more so than the pressure and the pitfall. Because I am not ready for the pain that I have gotten used to.

  I remember being a farmer and burying every member of my family down to my own son, and the long climb out of despair that followed, but none of my memories ever came to terms with that. I remember being a scholar, and becoming inured to the harassment and disgust of the other species of my home, but none of the others ever had to live like that. I remember being a soldier and surviving injury after injury, where few have felt physical torment quite the same way. I remember being a merchant trapped and chained by social convention and law, in ways the others were never bound by. I remember being a cleric denied even the illusion of respect, and the lingering anger almost breaks the memories that are not prepared for it. I remember being a singer who had to burn down their own life just for a chance at being themself, and none of the others can understand how it was ever that easy.

  Am I supposed to choose? Pick which of these painful, terrifying, despairing lives I am supposed to have been? I don’t know that I want to, not that I know how I can want anything at all if I’m not any of them already. Every one of these people I can feel myself as were hurting, so very, very much. I don’t think I would like it much if I meant to be one of these people.

  The fall comes faster. The pressure intensifies. And the pain spikes before I catch my thoughts again.

  My thoughts. I am here. I can think. I am me.

  But I remember being someone else. Someones else.

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  So which is it, I try to ask of the vertigo. Was I someone, am I someone, was I meant to become someone? Make it make sense, I try with frail conviction to demand of the endless storm in the blackness as it further peels lives and minds away from me. The separate selves are a flower blossom, though given how much it hurts, I have a strong suspicion they are not meant to be.

  Suddenly I can feel it as I whip past something in the emptiness. My perpetual tumbling momentum barely grazing some part of whatever is me against an object that is not the storm, and is almost physical. It certainly feels physical, as the pain radiates through what I am pretending is a body on the impact.

  I don’t seem to slow down. But something from whatever I’ve hit sticks to me. Clinging tightly with the sensation of bristly fuzz, a hundred, a thousand tingling attempts to hold me in place. Dragging me backward, almost calling me to heel, before I break away without meaning to and the unseen object fades into the distance.

  Another piece of solidity cuts through the storm nearby, and I can only tell by how the ongoing rush of white is carved away as it splashes against it. A sound echoes off it, the soft rushing of wind through growing crops, something so simple but so pure that it makes me want to weep just to have an experience that isn’t agony. Another piece passes by just as that one is too far for me to still witness, though this one does not cling or speak.

  I am coming apart.

  I can feel myself breaking. I am dying or dead, I know. There is enough left of those foreign lives to understand that all of us met an end. Even though I do not know who I am, to them, I am still certain that I am sharing that fate.

  On an instinct, not knowing what I am doing, I separate part of my thoughts from the pain, and consider that I need to do something, and soon. Death is a puzzle to be solved, before it solves me. Foolish, perhaps, but I do not think this is what death looks like to most people. It certainly didn’t to the others.

  What do I know? Well. Something has happened. To me. And I know that I exist, even if I remember being other people. I know that I am being pulled apart. And I know that there are things in here with me, wherever here is.

  I also know I need to figure something out rather quickly, because despite trying desperately to remain calm, I have just felt some part of me tear away under the pressure. Lost to the swirling abyss that surrounds whatever I am, I do not know what part of which life it was, but there is a line of searing flame where it was torn off, and I do not believe I will survive that again.

  My fragmenting and fraying self tumbles past where I caught the line the first time, and I grab for it again. I am not going anywhere, I am simply falling and spinning endlessly. But that affords me a second chance. My grip is weaker, my speed greater, but I try to hang on, and from elsewhere, I hear a woman’s words again.

  ”-yourself together you fucking idiot rock! We need you back-!”

  Gone again.

  But not without leaving me with something important.

  Yuea. Her name is Yuea. I know who she is. I can catch glimpses of the shadows of our history together. My history. Mine, not the lives that are being pushed apart and broken at the hinges.

  That thought, that single little moment of crass demand from her, fills me with an understanding of what is familiar to me so powerful, that for just a moment, I forget the pain. Forget the abyss and the terror. Forget that I am continually being thrown into objects that are not objects and yet hurt all the same to impact. I grab the words, and hold tight to two truths.

  I am alive.

  And.

  Someone needs me.

  Failing and dying would have been unfortunate, but there is something much more complex to the pain of knowing that I might fail anyone else. I feel that I have failed too many people already. And I remember, so many times, these alien and outside lives have felt the same. The emotions are close to unbearable, but they aren’t some primal part of any of me. They’re learned things. Hard won pieces of knowledge about the price of mistakes and the depths of loss, collected over a very long time.

  I suppose, in this, all of us have something in common. Every one of the lives that are attached to me, waiting for a decision, they have all felt the same things I have.

  We’re all in this together.

  The thought, as fleeting as it is, spurs motion. The pressure peeling me apart experiences pushback. Counterforce applies to the memories that are being wetly ripped away from me. Not a lot, but some. Enough to stop the end, for a moment.

  And enough to give me a direction.

  If I was meant to choose one life to be mine, then I should have been informed. Because I have found a small surplus of determination now, and a greater amount of empathic greed. All of these are mine. Or will be, by the time I am done.

  I wind my thoughts through recollections of childhoods, through a half dozen first times for a hundred activities, through yearnings and regrets, and through so much loss I almost falter and surrender to the end at the touch of it.

  The pressure never lets up. The attempt to be methodical and steady in my work is undercut at every moment as I keep falling, impacting spellforms over and over again, barely even registering that I have a word for the things I am hitting as I am flung haphazardly across this place. More than once, I almost feel another part of me rip away, and it takes desperate frantic effort to clamp down on that life and wrench it closer again.

  These people, these lost souls, their time is done. But they aren’t gone. They are part of me. They are me. And the more I collect, the more I remember.

  I was every one of them, and I am every one of them. Who I am comes from who I was, and who I choose to be. I owe them everything, because they have given me the tools I need to be someone new. To choose something new. And as I use my fear like a needle to sew myself back together, I find that I am not simply stitching six lives together.

  I am holding on to six souls, with all the force that a seventh can muster.

  ”Shiny! Any time you-!”

  The line of connection is the first and last piece of my salvation. I follow it back to the source, the arcane effort coming naturally to me as if I have been doing this my whole life.

  Memory floods back. Waking up in the dark. Stumbling through seeing the world anew. Meeting people. Fighting alongside them. The Green, the enemy apparati, Auor’s new grin, the fort, the valley. The dead, the living, the in between. What it means to be an apparatus of change, and what I still do not know but can see the blank edges of as open questions.

  Who I was. Who I could yet still be. The magic, patterns laid out for me in simple words with complex workings.

  Ah. I am drowning not in a storm, but in power. The dust of the world shaken loose and pressing in on all sides. But just as this eternal moment of pain and decision has galvanized my spirit, so too has it galvanized my form. My old lives, my component souls, are pulled back together under my will; and once they are in place, the pressure of the soft motes works to seal them into their right pattern. Unbreaking, they weather the storm, with every new mote compressing their edges together and hardening them against further damage.

  The pain is not from the pressure, the pain is from the ignition. Mote after mote pressed in, and turned into blazing points of power within me. A currency, or a key, or a signal to something higher. It does not matter, they are part of the equation of what I am. And while the storm presses in, the power presses out, holding the old lives in place until they can be locked to their proper spaces.

  And finally, after enduring a shaking of the self that would put the ruinsun to shame, I am… well. Calling it ready would be a lie of the highest order. But I have no more time, will get no further chance, and am needed. So no matter how prepared I am, I ask the question.

  Who am I.

  Undecided - Apparatus Of Change

  Available Power : ?

  A simple farmer : 7

  A curious scholar : 6

  A regretful soldier : 5

  A determined merchant : 6

  A faithful cleric : 5

  A fleeing singer : 6

  Animosity : ?

  Trepidation : ?

  But it isn’t true, is it?

  Because there are two more parts of me. Wanted or not, they are here now. They are as much who I am as any other piece. And whatever pain or regret or violence is in their past, it has long since ceased to matter.

  Power floods through a body I am beginning to be able to feel again, even if only to know that it is cracked and faceted close to beyond recognition. But I can handle this last bit of change. Change is always painful. But that pain does not need to end in sorrow.

  I take it all in. The good, the bad, the fragmented and lost bits of people who aren’t my responsibility, it doesn’t matter that they would never be able to blame me for ignoring them. It matters, now, to me, that I can be the person that would accept them anyway. Accept myself anyway.

  Again, I ask. Who am I?

  Undecided - Apparatus Of Change

  Available Power : ?

  A simple farmer : 7

  A curious scholar : 6

  A regretful soldier : 5

  A determined merchant : 6

  A faithful cleric : 5

  A fleeing singer : 6

  A lost hunter, a hurting killer : 0

  A hopeful thief : 0

  Almost. It’s almost me.

  But not quite. There’s one thing left to do before the storm is over. Now, while I can see this whole of myself, while my own soul of Unity is burning like a bonfire with possibilities, sending motes of ash and ember skyward as it draws together these pieces of myself, unwilling to leave any part to die alone in the dark.

  It has been far too long.

  Yuea is never going to call me anything else anyway. But I refuse to make it easy on the woman.

  I know who I am now.

  Shine - Apparatus Of Change

  Soul of Unity

  Available Power : 35

  Authority : 7

  Nobility : 6

  Empathy : 5

  Spirituality : 6

  Ingenuity : 5

  Tenacity : 6

  Animosity : 0

  Trepidation : 0

  “Shiny!” Yuea’s howl of fear for me is the first thing I hear upon reforming myself. “Get up you fucking stupid rock!”

  Amalgamate Human shows me where she is, where Kalip is, and what they’re seeing. Bind Insect gives me a fuller picture of the situation around the fort and the abattoir that the approach to the valley has become.

  There is a battle occuring. Despite killing the enemy apparatus, its corpse troops seem determined to tear down the walls and everyone within them.

  Focusing on the spellforms is still a challenge. Everything feels - feels! - tender and sore. And while the worst of my own storm is over, there is still an endless flow of soft motes coming from my bound, my golems, my mantra and glimmer, the walls themselves, almost everything I have touched that stands resisting the assault. Well, except the hole in the wall. That is, in short, concerning.

  This needs to stop. Now.

  ”Yuea. Turn two handspans to your right and throw your blade.” Is the first thing I say to my friend to announce my survival.

  She obeys without hesitation, the notched and dulled sword leaving her hand like a shot and going through three skeletons before they can overwhelm the breach in the wall behind her. I start flooding her through Amalgamate Human to restore all the damage to her body, mostly self-inflicted. I think Yuea would have been able to stand against this horde herself, if needed, but the problem now is that there is a hole in my home and a second weak point in the main gate, and one woman, no matter how powerful, is not enough to stop hundreds.

  So it is a good thing, then, that she has allies. And that those allies have me.

  As I begin to divide myself into a score of workings, one final thing arrives at the dying gasp of the storm that was the death of my opponent. Almost like a spiteful final strike from something that had already given orders for its bound to kill us all anyway. A small fragment of another soul. One new spell, and with it, a piece of another life, forcing its way into the person that I have begun calling myself.

  And I smile to myself as it sinks in without complaint or concern. There is room within me to carry every lost soul. So what is one more?

  I will actually pay attention to it and what it brings me later. Because right now, there is a tide that requires turning.