Demesne

The reservoir was, from what Lori could tell, still clear, and no one had used it as a lavatory. She was almost impressed.

She had everyone clear a path to the reservoir, with Rian in charge of keeping the way clear, as she sat on a convenient bench she'd formed from the stone bulwark in front of the original cliff face just outside the dungeon and drew water from the river. While the river had looked clear from what they had distantly seen, it was better not to take chances, and turning the water to vapor was the best way to ensure nothing was tainting it. A thick stream of vapor rose from the river, carried on airwisps past her and into the dungeon, where it condensed back into water at the reservoir. After it was filled she'd boil the water just to doubly ensure it wasn't tainted. That it circulated new, less smelly air into the dungeon was a minor bonus. She'd changed the binding of airwisps at the lavatory so the air in there would be replaced by the new ones coming in.

It was slow work, but they needed water, and she was refining the process so she wouldn't have to oversee every step. Bound waterwisps at the river to turn water into vapor, a circulating current of airwisps to move it to the dungeon, and another binding to condense it back again. That made it so she only intermittently needed to devote her attention to each step, leaving her time to sit around and physically do nothing. That was always a good sign of a streamlined process.

She'd never really seen their settlement at night, having turned in early before now. She'd never had reason to. It wasn't like they had a nice restaurant or something that made her want to go out and stay up late. As soon as she was done eating dinner, it was back to her Dungeon, and if Rian needed to speak to her about anything, he either knocked on her boulder or waited until breakfast. As she looked upon the wonders of the natural world, she had to conclude she wasn’t missing much of anything. It was mostly lots of dark and nothing, nothing at all like the bright, vibrant lights of the demesne of her youth. Honestly, it was lacking even compared to the time before she'd managed to build the Dungeon. Say what you would about the Iridescence, but it was beautiful, glinting in strange, poisonous colors even in the dim light.

Now those nighttime colors were gone in the safety of the demesne. Only the blue moon and the storm moon were out, casting their pale lights on the world, and she gathered the meager lightwisps they cast until she could bind enough to light the area around her. Small luminescent bugs flicked back and forth in the night, winking in and out as they danced randomly, sometimes briefly outlining the larger bugs that hunted them a moment before they were eaten. The air was filled with the distant sound of the river flowing, the honking of seels, the slowing struggles of the islandshell, the clicking, chirping and occasional death cries of bugs. The bug population had recovered quickly after the Iridescence had been purged from the demesne, though it was mostly smaller bugs, who had weathered the iridiation leaving their bodies because they'd been eggs or not far enough along in their life cycle to be pained by it. Some of the larger bugs had only just started coming back, gestating from their aquatic stages or slowly coming in from being hatched at the edges of the demesne.

Lori checked the progress of the reservoir. Filling slowly, since for all its volume, water vapor condensed into very little water. But it was filling, and at a rate that wouldn't take all night, so Lori let it be. She glanced inside the Dungeon, lit by the cook fire for dinner and bound lightwisps. Despite Rian's chiding, some of the children were playing in the stream of water vapor, laughing and running and trying futilely to catch the passing cloud. Rian seemed to be trying to get them to sit down. She shrugged. Not her problem. She went back to refilling the water reservoir, and considered making some sort of stone pipe arrangement where the water was vaporized in a vessel before quickly being condensed and flowed into a pipe for faster transfer. Something to try tomorrow.

She sat there, staring into the dark, occasionally making sure her bindings weren't deviating from what she wanted it to do. A part of her was mildly aghast at how wasteful the whole arrangement was, just to transport water. It would have been far more efficient to do what she'd done previously and made the water flow uphill. But she had seemingly inexhaustible magic and time, and no reason to be frugal with either.

She heard a sound from the entryway and turned sharply, clutching her staff. A thin, vaguely familiar man stood there, cringing back from her, some sort of leather case in his hands.

"What?" Lori demanded.

"S-sorry to disturb you, your Bindership," he said. "I just wanted to see the stars."

Lori blinked, then squinted. She willed some of her lightwisps to move and illuminate his face, bringing nervous features and pink hair into view. "Oh, you're the astrologer," she vaguely recalled.

"J-just an amateur, your Bindership," he said. "May I step out?"

"Don't go too far," Lori said. "There are things out there." She saw him glance toward the islandshell, still flailing on its back.

"Oh my…" he said. "It's still alive?"

"No, it's undead," Lori said. "I'm just waiting for it to stop moving."

He stared at the islandshell again, but eventually started setting up a tripod. It was a metal tripod of some silvery grey metal, and very light from the how easily he handled it.

She stared at him intently as he set up his telescope and calibrated it with his compass, then began to check through a notebook in the case, seemingly comparing increments on the base with the compass. After a while, Lori shrugged and leaned back, checking on the reservoir again. It was rising steadily as water fell into it in a steady drizzle–

Lori blinked, then chuckled as she realized she was making it rain inside her Dungeon.

Leaning back and raising a footrest for her feet, she watched the moons as she waited for the water to fill.

––––––––––––––––––

The next day, they started rebuilding. Or at least clearing. After a night sleeping in an impromptu alcove carved into the stone next to the entrance with a thin opening to serve as an airhole, lying on a bed of rock and a pillow of rock, Lori was very ready to get people out of her dungeon and back to being useful, contributing members of her demesne.

After breakfast, and another check around the settlement, this time with more volunteers, everyone came out of the Dungeon to start rebuilding. The children, seeling rods in hand, went to catch more food, this time accompanied by more people despite the children's protests that so many would scare the seels away and make their catch poorer. Of course, no one listened, because they were children and what they said didn't matter. People were also told to stay away from the baths, since it was still flooded and had waterwisplings inside it. There were far fewer than there had originally been but they were much bigger.

As people cleared out the rocks, fallen wood, fallen trees, dirt and other debris with the simple tools at hand, setting the stones to one side for either building material or to be examined later, Lori got to work clearing out the flooded shelter.

There were, in facts, seels in the shelter, as well as a lot of water. Technically there was one seel, all fused together by their tails into a many headed abomination. Some of the smaller heads were dead, devoured by the larger ones, leaving only bloody stumps of fur and bone.

Lori had asked some of those with hunting experience to be on hand with wooden clubs as she bound the waterwisps in the shelter and had the water flow up and out though the entrance, pulling the seel abomination along with it. As the seel abomination was being beaten to death with clubs, Lori checked inside the shelter. Apart from some wooden debris and mud that hadn't been swept out with the water, the inside of the shelter was empty. She checked on the structural integrity of the stone walls, curved roof, air circulating windows and fireplaces, and repaired any cracks or structural weaknesses that she found. After some thought, she decided to raise up central pillars to help support the roof, to avoid a collapse similar to the other shelter. It made the space seem more cramped, but she wasn't going to be sleeping in there, so that didn't matter. The mud she compacted into the walls, and she dried the wooden debris for firewood, leaving them where they lay. Someone else could cut them up and put them in the fireplace.

That done, she headed warily for the other shelter, her quiver of firewood at her side and a new coal in her coalcharm. She circled around to the collapsed part of the roof and watched the reeds growing from it. While they superficially resembled the reeds along the river, they moved disconcertingly. It took a while to realize that they sometimes seemed to move against the wind. In the interest of intelligent inquiry, Lori touched one of her coalcharms to one of the lengths of wood she was carrying, transferring firewisps to the latter until a small tendril of smoke showed it as smouldering. Then she stood back and threw the lengths of wood at the reeds growing from the collapsed shelter. It struck one reed a glancing blow.

Even though she was half-expecting it, Lori still jumped in surprise as the reeds struck at the log like beasts pouncing from tall grass, mouth-like openings full of sharp, beast-like teeth snapping open and embedding themselves in the log. She stared in heartsick shock as more reeds struck at the wood. Some missed and instead clamped onto another reed, many of which snapped off and left strange twitching fibers…

Lori had seen enough. With a thought, she imbued the firewisps in the wood with power, binding them to burn. There was the crack of an explosion as the wood exploded violently in a large, burning ball of heat and light, consumed instantly for energy.

There were cries of alarm around the settlement, but Lori ignored them, focusing on the reeds. Many had been caught in the blast, and some had even lit on fire. Quickly, Lori bound the firewisps, and imbued them with more magic to make them burn brighter. Small flames, burning feebly on the still-wet plant, suddenly flared to life, and there were sizzles and pops as moisture in the reed exploded into steam, which were thrashing violently. She imbued it with more magic, made the flame hotter, made it consume more fuel despite that fuel being full of water. It was an inefficient, magic-intensive binding, but there was no way Lori was going to get any closer to that plant… abomination… thing. Not until it was dead enough for her to claim every wisp it had and make it boil…

"Everything all right?"

Lori turned, but it was only Rian. "Fine," she said. "Just burning this."

Rian glanced at the burning reeds. "Plant monster?"

"I suppose that's a concise way of putting it," Lori said.

Rian sigh. "I don't suppose you could maybe warn everyone before you start using magic that makes things explode?" he said. "I know you don't like talking to people, but a few words to keep people from panicking would be very helpful, especially when some of them are holding sharp and pointy objects, or are standing on wet rocks and are likely to fall on more rocks. Please?"

"Fine," Lori said, hiding her discomfort. Right, safety…

"By the way, can you stop by Lanwei when you have time?" Rian said. "He's identified some metal ores among the rocks that fell from the dragon, but he doesn't have a furnace yet, so we were hoping you could help with smelting them?"

"Which one's Lanwei?" Lori asked as she made the reeds burn. They were thrashing a bit less violently now.

"He was with us yesterday, remember?" Rian said. "Big man, clean-shaven, balding in front, hair tied back?"

Lori frowned, vaguely remembering someone like that. "Don't know him."

"Don't know–" Rian sighed. "Well, tell me when you have time and I'll introduce you. Maybe you can use the ores as a reference so you can look for them underground."

Lori blinked. That was a thought that hadn't occurred to her. "I'll remember that," she said.

"Right, well…" Rian glanced back at the burning reeds, which had stopped moving and were just on fire now. "I'll let you get back to your pyromania. Remember, please warn us."

Waving him aside, Lori stepped around and felt inside the collapsed shelter, finding more voids of wisps. It was also, like the other shelter, flooded.

As she bound the firewisps, pulling them down into the shelter towards the voids she could feel there, she made the water she could bind boil.

Soon the insides of the collapsed shelter echoed with the sounds of more thrashing.

Hopefully she'd be able to finish fixing the shelters by lunch. That would give her time to get the baths unflooded and maybe have time to make something to hold a waterwispling…