Demesne

Days had passed, and Rian had yet to solve the 'what if there are rapids' problem. On the other hand, the hospital got a roof. Lori had to raise up stone pillars to support the ceiling beams, but that was simple to do.

She had to raise a bunch of support pillars in the middle of the houses she'd built, too. Apparently, while making them roomy and spacious was all well and good for the families that would be moving in– there was a priority list Rian had drawn up– it made it hard to put in roofs. Now with the pillars up, the roofs had something to rest on besides just the flat-topped walls. Lori took the hint and started adding in holes for posts to the edges of the stone walls so the roofs would have something to anchor to. Really, people should have just said so sooner. She was a wizard, not a mason, she couldn't be expected to know about these things!

"Maybe there aren't any rapids?" Rian said hopefully at lunch.

"Well, I'm glad you're so confident," Lori said, enjoying her bowl of stewed everything. They'd tried making varied kinds of meals, but had run into the problem of lacking spices, or even salt, and so everything came out a little bland unless they threw in a little of everything. Then it came out thick and flavorful. Unfortunately, it was all the same flavor. Even Lori, who liked a little predictable monotony in her life, was getting sort of bored with it. "And I'm sure if you're wrong you can stop the boat and turn it around in time with your years of sailing experience. You do know how to operate a sail, right?"

"You're made your point, can you please stop being so smug about it now?" Rian sighed. "Maybe we should send someone downriver to see. If they stick near the water they should be pretty safe, right?"

"Until a beast tried to eat them," Lori said. "Or a bug starts laying eggs in their ear while they sleep."

"That's not going to happen," Rian said.

"Oh? Why do you think I used to sleep with my hat covering my head?" Lori said. "You realize no one's going to volunteer for going downriver, right? You're going to have to go yourself."

"I know. That's part of the reason I'm delaying," Rian said. "I don't want to leave everyone alone with you."

"I'm not going to kill them," Lori said, insulted.

"I'm more worried about what would happen if you had to talk to them," Rian said.

"…all right, that's fair," Lori said. "Well, keep working on that. We still need supplies." She was pretty sure some of the sick people in the doctors' care were just lingering on their way to a slow, painful death, but you could say that about anybody, even the Deadspeakers who'd found a way to keep functioning after dying.

After lunch, she went back to building an expansion to the dining hall. The children had been catching a lot of seels, and while they had a lot more skin than meat, it all added up. Between them and the beasts Lori got called to kill, they actually had a surplus. So Lori was building a cold room. This way they could store the meat for longer. After all, they had plenty of water to make ice with, and this didn't affect the taste.

She had to quarry her Dungeon again to get the stone for it, and decided to carve out another room while doing so. This meant she finally had two rooms to her Dungeon.

When she finished building the simple box of stone, she dragged dirt up and over it on all sides to cover it so the sun's heat couldn't reach it. When she was done, the pile of dirt she'd made from building the shelters had shrunk slightly, and the dining hall looked like it abutted a small hill.

She walked away to get water from the river to turn to ice, and then paused. Then with an impatient sound, she turned and eyed the doorway into the cold room she'd molded. Then she recessed the top and bottom of the doorway slightly, just wide enough for a wooden beam to secure the door to. Nodding in satisfaction, she went to get ice.

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The next day, she had to come back and put in drainage, because ice melts.

Then, as everyone was busy putting on roofs, she finally seriously worked on her Dungeon.

She'd heard stories about famous Dungeons, the strongholds of famous Binders. They were generally underground, built under the cities they protected or deep within mountains next to them, built by ancient Binders in ancient times and meant to be able to house whole populations in times of war or dragons. They had guards with bodies of stone and hearts of fire; incorporeal sentries made of the spirits of the dead; twisted halls and chambers where people walked on the floors, walls and ceilings; furnaces where the very power of the core could be directed to create any substance the Binder needed; Hedon's Heart Demesne famously had a lake and a tropical island deep underground (not that she wanted one…); and even the smallest of Demesnes in the old continent could raise a shield to protect themselves from sudden dragons. Well, protect the important bits that mattered, anyway.

Lori wished they'd found a decent mountain to build next to, but she supposed over time she could just build up this cliff side into something comparable. She'd need to steal the lands around her Demesne to build up her mountain, but that was a price she was willing to pay. Still, she had a long way to go before she could build things like that.

Still, no time like right now when she didn't have to build anything else! She might not have any idea at all about how to do any of the interesting stuff– or even the simple stuff, like basic Deadspeaking, Horotracting and Mentalism– but she knew Whispering, and so she'd start there. If there was one thing she could definitively say Whispering could do better than the other branches of magic, it was megalomaniacal building projects!

Treeshade Demesne notwithstanding, of course. There was probably a good reason why only one Demesne in the world had their dungeon be a giant, living/unliving tree, and it wasn't because Deadspeaking was better than Whispering.

First she moved her bed and table into the room she'd excavated while getting stone for the cold room, so that people couldn't just immediately enter her bedroom. Then she took a moment to completely encase the core in stone, so that no one could just get to it.

After that, Lolilyuri began to reallocate dimensions.

Aware of the great weight of the rest of the hill pressing down on her little dungeon, Lori worked carefully, making sure to have earthwisps reinforce the walls and ceiling at all times. High, vaulting ceilings were filled in by flowing stone pulled up from the sides of the open space, reducing her overhead clearance but expanding her floor area. That done, she raised up walls to define rooms. She made a darkroom, its opening closed into a narrow slit, and then another room to act as a storage room, when she actually had her own stuff to store. She thought about making some sort of experimental space, but really, without any materials like glassware or wires it just wouldn't be worth it.

She also finally made a private lavatory, delicately making piping through the stone that would bring the waste outside. Not right next to her cave though. She made an underground hollow in the dirt with stone reinforced sides to keep it from collapsing. Then since she was messing around with pipes in the stone anyway, added a stone cistern she could fill with water so she could take baths, a hole for water to drain through, and made a private bathroom for herself.

Being able to bathe and relieve yourself in the comfort of your own home. Finally, her Dungeon was starting to be civilized.

She had to make proper air holes along her door, since she was uncertain if sleeping in a new room far from the door could potentially asphyxiate her. Lori had a responsibility to her demesne to stay alive, after all.

When she left to go to dinner, she found a seel hanging outside her door. She'd long added a hole in the cliff wall from which someone could hang a branch skewering a seel. She noted it seemed a rather large example of the species. Not a juvenile then. She was getting an adolescent today. She supposed the hunter's skills were increasing. That or they'd just gotten particularly lucky.

Shrugging, she took it to the kitchen so it could be part of her breakfast tomorrow.

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"I have good news," Rian said as he joined her for breakfast.

"Someone found a metal ore we can mine?" Lori said.

"Better."

"One of the doctors found an introductory textbook on Deadspeaking?"

"Fine, just news then," Rian said with a sigh. "One of the sick children seems to be getting better. The doctors say they hear less fluid in his lungs."

"Oh good, we'll have a new worker soon. They can go seeling with the others"

"That's what you're taking from this?" Rian said.

"It's not anyone I know," Lori said. "All the people I know are at this table."

"You're making me both annoyed and sad for you at the same time," Rian said.

"That's none of my business," Lori said. "So, how goes finding a way to get to Covehold?"

"Well, the more I think about it, the more I think we should send someone downriver to scout," Rian said. "Given just the bends we can see, we need to know if the river is actually going away from Covehold. Also, if we're sharing this river with anyone else, I think we should know before they just show up."

"Seems sound," Lori nodded.

"And I think you should come with me when scout the river," Rian said.

"Absolutely not," Lori said. "I risked my life to finally have my own Dungeon–"

"We all did," Rian interjected.

"– and I'm not letting you take me away from it," Lori finished firmly.

"You've traveled before."

"Yes, and it was horrible. So I'm never doing it again. I will stay in sight of my cave all the days of my life from now on. "

"You're being dramatic," the hypocrite accused. "We survived, didn't we?"

"Yes, and I have no intention of jeopardizing that," Lori said. "What if I die and the demesne disappears?"

"What if everyone else dies and you're left here by yourself?" Rian said.

"I can learn to catch seels. It's not that hard."

"You’ve never even done it before," Rian pointed out.

"I'm sure I can learn," Lori said. "How hard can it be? I mean, we have the children doing it, so it's certainly doable."

Lori paused and tilted her head. "Actually, there's nothing I urgently need to build today. Maybe I will go learn how to catch seels."

"Please don't make the river explode," Rian said. "The children work very hard every day and they don't need you exploding their place of work."

"I wasn't going to," Lori said indignantly. She definitely had been planning to make the river explode. Shockwaves killed very well in water, after all.

"Hmmm…" Rian 'hmmmed'.

"Actually… do you know how to go seeling?" Lori said.

"Are we turning this into a contest?" Rian said.

"Don't be silly. This is a needful survival skill, not some kind of game."

"You realize the children compete to see who brings in the most seels, right?"

"Good. We can never have too much food and soap."

"Oh. Too bad. I guess you know you're going to lose."

"Just because I intend to learn a child's job doesn’t actually make me a child, you know. I'm not going to agree to explore the river with you if I lose."

"Well, unlike you, I'm busy. I have a lot to do before I quit being a lord today."

"Ah. Well, I'll see you later then."

Finishing her breakfast, Lori went forth intending to find some brats and figure out how to catch seels. It couldn't actually be that hard, could it?