Shine - Apparatus Of Change

  Soul of Unity

  Available Power : 36

  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 (1, War)

  Pressure Trigger (2, War)

  Blinding Trap (5, War)

  -

  Animosity : 0 - -

  Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

  Congeal Burn (2, Command)

  Trepidation : 0 -

  Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

  Avarice : -

  Consume Ecology (3, War)

  A swarmsire often told me, ‘what starts as temporary becomes comfortable’. They said it with powerful contempt. Comfort was not our way. Neither was compromise. I have changed irreconcilably from that hive, but I remember the importance of those ways. I remember that an emergency measure must never become the ‘way things are’, unless you are comfortable living in a forever emergency. I remember it well enough that when the elven collusion decides not to rescind the wartime harvest of their homeland, I am already leaving. I will find a new home. Surely not everyone can be this foolish. They are elves, for the love of het; if anyone were to understand that you cannot eat your world to the bone and expect to still live in it, it should be them. And yet. Here we are. With what matters tucked on my flanks, and the same old dream of finding a home where the feasting understands that all things must be cyclical. Or else, all things will be very, very temporary.

  When I awaken from the memory, I find myself doing so with the slow fading thought that I may eventually know what every possible covering of a person feels like to have. Fur, skin, scales, and now something I would think of as chitin; I am collecting the menagerie of the self within my memories.

  Another piece of another person. Another kill. The thought hurts, and I welcome the pain, because I hold the same conviction that the cleric once did. That no matter what choices I make, either mistakes or triumphs, I must remember who I wish to be.

  I do not wish to be a killer. Even if fighting is what I am called to, I do not need to want it, nor to revel in the battle. Too many of my old lives have known more than a few who would have loved the unique texture of combat as I experience it, and I would trust none of those individuals with anything more dangerous than soup. And even as I think that, I am already adding the condition that the soup should not be hot.

  So I take the memory of this new life, and hold it close. I remember what it was like to have antenna and compound eyes, I remember what it was like to not be valued except as an asset, and I remember what it meant to find a life outside of that. In many ways I can feel, this life that was tethered to the soul of Avarice was one that was deprived of much of what I find important.

  But now their life is my life. We are one person, of one mind. And though I am determined to remain myself as I wish myself to be, maybe, perhaps, their journey can continue with me to find some of what they most wanted for in life.

  As for that life, it is time to take stock of it.

  The fort still stands. Now that I am awake, and refreshed, I waste no time in using Form Wall and Claim Construction to begin rebuilding. So far, the Green has not seen fit to take umbrage with our presence, and so I only allow myself slight worry that it might change its unknowable mind. Link Spellwork with Claim Construction and Congeal Mantra performs what is becoming one of my favored workings; infusing the new wall with the tools it will need to become a better wall as time passes. It didn’t have the time last time, but maybe now, there will be the time to breathe between assaults.

  Some take notice of my actions. It would be impossible not to; the wall is still manned with sentries. The bees that are also roaming the calmer air around the fort don’t seem panicked though, and so the newer members of our home do not do more than point and call to each other as the wall is reformed.

  I will not, now, do them the disservice of calling them outsiders. It is likely they were only willing to stand and fight at our gate because the failure of our defense would be the death of everyone inside. But they did still stand and fight. And I have felt more than a few times the emotions of fighting when you do not want to.

  So right now, they are mine. My people, in my home. And while I do not think anyone has said as much to them, the humans and demons that are braving the sentry posts do all seem to radiate a care for this place that was not there even a tenday ago. They should, too. They fought for it, and it is as much theirs as mine.

  The two stormsuns that have risen are still up, and the galesun’s winds howl constantly around us. But its focus is elsewhere today, hopefully on the other side of the world and far from us. It is a fine storming when the worst of it lands on empty deserts and oceans, but I can feel in my crystal heart that it won’t stay that way forever. There is still a breeze firm enough to give my more ambitious bees lift under their wings without effort, and while it is currently only damp around the fort, one of my more keen-eyed scouts can see in the far distance a point where the rainsun is slowly rolling a floodsphere across a length of the Green.

  The means to outlast and survive storming have changed across so many lifetimes I have known. But the only one that remains consistent is silently hoping the suns don’t see you.

  Moving away from the healthy fear of the sky, I sweep myself through the fort, sensing through myriad insect and glimmerling bodies as I take stock of how things are now. I find a good number of people confined to bed rest, those fighters who are covered in bruises and scrapes that I did not have enough Drain Health to heal fully. And at that realization, I remember to split a piece of my thoughts to Distant Vision, searching the Green for either threats or already dying creatures that I can ease the passing of in a way that will allow me to restore my friends.

  Jahn is the biggest surprise. The demon is being brought a small meal in the private bedroom he shares with Malpa and Muelly. Malpa seeming smugly vindicated as he holds the door open for the oversized honeybee to come in before him, allowing me to see the person who is more hurt than anyone else I have found.

  One of Jahn’s legs is broken. A still-fresh gash has carved a line through his face, and seems to have taken off a good chunk of one of his horns as well. And he seems to be missing a finger on one of his dark-skinned hands, right down to where the fur of his arm begins.

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  I am displeased, and Malpa seems to agree with me. Mostly I am displeased because they should have come to me sooner rather than waiting for me to stumble across them. Though I suppose I was, inconveniently, unconscious, drained, and possibly hallucinating. I guide several equally concerned bees into the room, much to Malpa’s amusement and Jahn’s increasing embarrassment, and redouble my efforts to locate at least some kind of mundane bug nest to Drain Health something from.

  What matters though is that they are both alive. Hurt can be fixed, while dead cannot. As far as I have found so far. I leave the two to their time together, and let the bees make their own decision on if they wish to remain.

  Of my other older companions, I find Muelly and Dipan in the fort’s reasonably accommodating kitchens. They are accompanied by Sharpen, Fisher, and the three other gobs that have been with us as long as the other rescues and whom I have regrettably not learned the names of. Collectively, the seven of them are making a noble attempt to prepare a midday meal for forty people, some of which are obligate herbivores, several of which are career soldiers who would eat dirt without a complaint if that was served to them by an authority figure, and one of whom is Muelly herself, who is apparently losing her mind.

  The kitchen is a scene of such perfect chaos that, if I were still the singer during the era when they were performing small tales for taverns, I would be intently jealous of the perfection of the room. Several things have spilled, there is currently an ongoing cascade of yams that Dipan is desperately trying to hold back, Sharpen is the most focused person in the place and is currently doggedly creating cubes out of a ground melon with their precious short sword, and something is on fire.

  The inkrat glimmerling has not been noticed yet, and I decide that, just this once, I am going to leave them to solve their own problem. I don’t even try to direct my glimmerling back out of the side door, instead having the inkrat melt into the shadows, and finding Oop already there and observing the madness for presumably the same reason.

  The madness is such a contest to how the kitchens have been running, though, that it begs a new question. Where, exactly, is Seraha? The weathered old demoness might not have been an expert, but she had found fewer problems in the kitchens with only a few helping hands than these seven are encountering as a collective. Even after our numbers multiplied, and our food became more limited.

  Finding her is not difficult, but I do hit a false lead first. Her classroom, what used to be one of the fort’s private rooms for the command staff, is not empty. The children freed from their hiding spot underground after the battle was done cluster here, listening attentively to their teacher as the residents of this outpost try to give these orphaned survivors a tiny piece of normalcy. But today, that teacher is someone different than any of them have come to expect.

  I watch Kalip through my bee’s borrowed eyes with a sense of quiet amusement. Currently, he has the tables they were using as desks pushed together, and is apparently walking them through how to sharpen the edge of a blade. There are other things on the tables that hint at him having walked the students through how to tie several kinds of knot, and how to fix a torn shirt as well. The kind of life craft that is convenient for anyone, but becomes invaluable for a soldier or survivor who sometimes won’t be able to rely on anyone but themselves.

  And I think the children realize. Because they are, more than curious, desperate to know anything that will help them repel their fear of what the world is becoming.

  But while the children’s education is fascinating, the room’s mantra occasionally feeding back into the education is informative, and Kalip’s attempt to pretend that he has slept at all is amusing to me, what the room does not provide is an answer to where Seraha is.

  That answer I find in Seraha’s private room.

  More of a closet really, what passes for junior officer bunks in this fort is similar to what the singer knew of seafaring vessels during their lifetime. But she has it to herself, but for an inkrat that I have used to breach the seal of the battered wooden door and slip inside.

  I find her laying propped up in her bed, with a shaded lantern providing dim light as she reads a light tome. We did not find many texts here that weren’t reports and records, but what she has is something else; I hope for a sultry romance novel pilfered from the fallen commander’s quarters.

  It is a fine day to be sequestered. I write to her, Shift Wood running furrows into the thin panel of smoothed wood that many of my friends carry with them now.

  She startles slightly, seeming to not have noticed the inkrat enter and impulse its way along the edge of the bedframe to where it gave me a vantage point to write. “Oh. Hello little one.” Her voice is very quiet, even to my inkrat, and has a soft rasp to it.

  I examine the demoness more closely as I hear her. Her faded pink fur is thinner than when we met, but the same could be said for anyone who has lived out the stressful summer. Her eyes are tired, but who wouldn’t be; I am the only one who seems to have slept well since the most recent battle. Her hands shake, but… but…

  You do not seem well. I write, and so quickly after I wonder if I have wasted my opportunity to be direct.

  ”You could say that.” Seraha makes a small bleating laugh. “Nothing to worry about. You can leave me be.”

  That seems too much like a pressed dismissal to me. What is wrong? Is written next, old words smoothed away, my fine control over this one particular magic ever growing. Were you injured?

  Seraha sets her worn book down. Though it is more that it slips from fingers that cannot grasp longer than she can keep her focus on them. “Old.” The woman says quietly. “I’m just old. Getting to get to me, is all. Just old.”

  My worry begins to spike. Seraha has ever been one of the most composed of the survivors, even when things seemed at their lowest. In part, I believe it was a show, to keep the kids moving. But it was still how I came to know her, and seeing her speech drifting, and her voice so tired, is jarring.

  Old, says the woman that walked tens of thousands of lengths here with the rest of us. I try to joke with her, shifting the inkrat in what I hope will be seen as playful.

  ”And don’t my hooves just hurt aplenty.” Seraha sighs. “I’m not dying. Not yet. Don’t worry your…” she looks at the inkrat with misted eyes. “…your… whatever you have.” Seraha trails off.

  Just old. Just a perfectly normal part of life. Something natural and simple. And yet, I find, I am not in the mood to accept it today.

  So I write. The others miss you already. I tell her. As do I. And I do not like to see you in such a state.

  ”I just need real sleep.” Seraha mutters, eyes fluttering to stay open as she reads my words.

  But it will come more and more often.

  ”That’s getting old.”

  It doesn’t have to be. Not for you.

  Seraha doesn’t respond. From my inkrat’s small perspective looking up at the canyons of wrinkles in her face, I can’t even tell if she read the message before closing her eyes.

  If it weren’t for the half dozen other chores I am addressing outside, I would think it had been whole candlemarks. From Stone Pylons loaded with renewing and triggerable Form Party spellworks for any group that needs to venture past our walls, to Bind Crop weaving into mushrooms and field grains, pushing them to grow faster and before storming comes back to sweep our efforts against starvation clean again, to simple Bolster Nourishment on anything I can easily address within the fort for the same reason, I have a hundred small bees and glimmerlings guiding my eyes and aims as I work.

  It means that I do not feel quite so claustrophobic as some of my old lives might have, sitting with an ailing friend. The scholar would have given anything for the ability to be somewhere else while also being present, I know. The thief would have given anything to be just somewhere else.

  That is an odd thought. Odd, because it feels so natural. But it is a part of me, just as the others are now; a casual realization of who I once was, more complete than ever before. What was a fragment, now a seed.

  It does not prepare me for when Seraha answers. “I’m tired.” She says. Before I can begin to empathize, she continues. “Not tired in my hooves or tired in my breath. Tired of all of this.” She exhales with a slight cough. “Don’t fix me, little one. I want to break.”

  Would you be quite so tired if the pain of age was lessened? I ask. Because while I understand her; have felt that way in multiple lives, I do think that Seraha lacks the perspective to know what she can ask of me. Would you rather, if you are willing to carry on for a little while, carry on lighter?

  ”Would that you could.” She laughs. “But while I am no Muelly, with her love of your timeless connection, I do know your tricks. You can’t fix getting old.”

  Maybe I can, though. I write. And I think, as I do, that I might not be lying either.

  There is a strange consideration to my magic. To every one of my workings, the spinning diagrams of spell forms nestled within my mind. In many ways, most ways, each spell is discrete. A singular tool for its own purpose. But that distinction is not a permanent fixture. I have, many times now, pushed and altered and in my own way specialized some of my magics to be the tools I need them to be.

  Nowhere is this more clear than in those spells that I have had overlap with other apparatuses in. Seeing my kin apply something as simple as Congeal Glimmer in ways that I could not come close to matching for a very long time, while my own applications were tilted away from massed hordes of expendable combatants, and toward creating transferable tools and boons for my bees. Even the spells that Lutra passes to me through Small Trade, I can see her own touches upon. Ways that the magic works that is ever so slightly counterintuitive to me, but makes perfect sense for her.

  And with all that in mind I have found one of my own spells that is only slightly changed so far. Still with that flexibility and open horizon that a new magic contains. Before I discover - or perhaps I was never discovering anything, but instead shaping - what it is fully capable of.

  Drain Health is something I have thus far used almost entirely to take so much health that it kills whatever I have targeted, and then reversed the flow of to pass that along to those I wish to heal. Health, as the word is written in the old linguistic form that I use when I try to tell the others of my magic, is not simply a matter of closing wounds however. It is talking of a more complete wholeness of a body. And in doing so, it is talking of a way to address the clear pain that it laying in a damaged military cot in front of my inkrat.

  I express this to Seraha. And, after a moment, I get a response from her that I have already predicted, my familiarity with the culture she shares with Muelly and Jahn letting me know in advance what her answer will be. “No.” Seraha says. “No, I can’t. I know… I know it isn’t free. I know you would have to take from someone else. I don’t want that. I don’t want to live if you have to kill another.”

  It is fortunate that will not be required then. I carve gentle furrows into the wood for her. Over the last candlemark, I have found two acceptable targets in the bound reavers of other apparatuses, far afield from us and hunting the latest survivors making their way toward our home. The words require me to Shift Wood more gently and precisely, clean lines getting smaller as I run out of space on the pane.

  ”You’ll run out of monsters eventually.” She whispers, leaning her head back against the hard pillow and threatening to shut her eyes, hourglass pupils turning from my writing toward the ceiling. “And then what, little one?”

  And then I will need to find another solution. I write, knowing she won’t see it until she wakes up. And then when that expires, another. That is not novel, Seraha, that is life. Solutions need not be permanent, so long as we can see when they must end. I do not… want you to die. You are my friend, no matter how we met, and you are important to many people here.

  I stop writing. Partly because I have exhausted the space available without beginning to carve into the wall or bed directly, and partly because Seraha is truly, it seems, asleep.

  The inkrat gently eases the book out of one of her weathered hands, moving its black liquid body with guided precision, and leaving nary a mark behind as it places the text away from the resting woman. A moment later, it scampers back over the same path so as to carry my own writing to a place that won’t make sleeping ever more uncomfortable.

  The conversation can conclude tomorrow. It gives me slight time to harvest more from the distant monsters that continue to prowl the Green during the momentary break in the season of storming. It gives me more time to consider the application of the absurd wealth of power that I have gained. And it gives me time to solidify our position here, before yet another nightmare begins.

  It also gives me time to speak to the others.

  I leave Seraha alone in spirit, but with the inkrat perched on the slim writing desk in her quarters, ready to call my attention should she need anything. And I go in search of guidance and companionship from those that I trust, both to receive and give.

  In the distance, the two stormsuns send birds fleeing a shared point, even as the Green welcomes to turning and soaking of the soil. A calm expression of their might as the season rolls onward. It is almost peaceful here in this battered fort, deep in the Green, away from the devastation we all know is ongoing.

  I use that moment of peace to once again empty Fortify Space out into layered shields against the galesun.

  True peace is something I will need to make myself. Not something that will arrive by coincidence while the storm suns point elsewhere.