Demesne

When Lori came back to the kitchen, it was to find Rian waiting for her with a bowl of food. Beast meat that had been cooked over flame– it seemed someone had realized they could safely burn wood now– served with the stewed grains, wild berries, nuts and root vegetables they'd been eating over the last few days, and which they'd probably started preparing before the meat was butchered. It took a long time to cook stew using hot ingots of metal heated inside a sealed pit so the still-iridiated wood used in the fire couldn't harm anyone.

Lori sighed. "I'm going to have to dig a new latrine," she said. "All this meat is going to give people indigestion."

"Food's food," Rian said cheerfully. He looked out at the new stone structure she'd been erecting. "I've never seen trees explode like that before."

"Happens when you turn all the water inside them into steam," Lori said, taking a spoonful and blowing on it. "You could do the same by turning it into ice, but not as reliable."

"Heat expansion. Got it," Rian said, adding another point to the 'probably a lord column'. That wasn't a phrase uneducated people knew. Some people might know of the phenomenon, but not the phrase. "Couldn't you have just cut them with that water stream thing? We could have used the timber."

"Where's the fun in that?" Lori said, pretending she hadn't forgotten all about it. She swallowed the spoonful. Still a bit too hot, but her empty stomach ate it up all the same, even as she wished it were a little cooler. She blinked as she felt the firewisps in her body suck out the uncomfortable heat from the food, as well as her tongue, leaving it mildly warm but not burned.

Ooh. She could get used to this… and probably would have to.

To her surprise, Rian chuckled. "I supposed. Well, it'll be good for firewood anyway. At least we'd be able to get the kitchen warm, even if we don't finish all the walls by tonight."

"No need," Lori said, as she gave her stew a look and slowly, slowly had the firewisps pull the heat from it. A quick tap with her finger told her when it had reached an ideal eating temperature. She bound the wisps to keep it there as she took another spoonful. Ah, just right. She swallowed. "Most of us should be able to fit in the new shelter I built."

"Ah," Rian said, looking back towards the stone structure. "I wondered what that was. No windows?"

"I'll make light," Lori said. "It'll only be while everyone is awake, anyway. A closed structure will keep heat in better."

"What about ventilation?" he said.

Oh. Right.

"After lunch," she said. "You can't expect me to keep working on an empty stomach."

"We have enough for seconds," he said.

"Wonderful. I'm glad the beast I killed is managing to feed everyone," Lori said.

"I don't suppose there are any more of them?" Rian said.

Lori frowned and concentrated on her awareness of the wisps in her demesne. It took a while. While the entire demesne reacted with as much alacrity as if it were her own body, it was a body several orders of magnitude larger than what she was used to, such that she'd need a larger measure of volume to quantify it. She narrowed her awareness to the one pace of air immediately above the ground. That helped.

"I… think most of the smaller ones have left the demesne," she said. Iridiation was proportional to body volume. Smaller creatures would lose Iridescence faster in a demesne, so they would need to flee sooner. "And the larger beasts are moving out as well, I think? Hard to tell, I can't feel iridiation. But there aren't any close by."

Rian sighed. "Well, that's good. At least we don't have to worry about an injured beast suddenly coming out of nowhere to eat us."

"Not near the Dungeon, no," Lori said. Near the edges was another matter. Even in civilized lands, it wasn't unknown for beasts to cross the border briefly and hurt someone. "Now that we're not stuck behind the waterbreak, it'll be easier for people to collect food. There's a lot of what we've been eating growing around, so we should be fine until we can start growing our own crops. Maybe ask people to go seeling at the river so we'd have more meat."

"I'll ask around, see who volunteers," Rian said.

Lori nodded in satisfaction, then paused.

Ugh. Damned brat.

"Rian," she said, trying not to scowl. "Do you know where lords come from?"

"Well, when a lord and a lady love each other very much…" he began.

She glared at him.

"… they go to a special room," he said, grinning widely. "And nine months later the Dungeon Binder sends them a messenger with their new baby…"

"Could you be serious before I change my mind?" Lori said.

"Sorry," Rian said. "Where do lords come from? Besides their mother, that is."

"Historically, the rise of the nobility is linked with the favor of the Dungeon Binder," Lori said. "Barring anomalous places like Crownsbond Demesne, where they have a king whom the Dungeon Binder swears fealty to, people become lords because the Dungeon Binder raises them up to be lords."

"Ah…" Rian said. "Look, I don't want to become a lord just because we know each other–"

"I don't like you that much," Lori said, the 'or at all' going unsaid. "I'm making you a lord because you're capable and can get people to work. People listen to you. So. I'm making you Lord Rian. Your job is to keep all of us from dying because we're out of food or out of wood or someone's son has slept with someone's daughter because there's nothing else to do around here and people are taking woodaxes to heads."

"Isn't that a lot of responsibility?" he said, for once actually looking alarmed.

"You're doing it already," Lori pointed out. "It's not like I asked you to start digging the cave for the Dungeon."

"Well, it needed to be done," he said. "The sooner we had a Dungeon protecting us, the safer everyone would have been. And if we helped, you'd be able to keep us safe with the water break while we worked."

"And the patrols keeping watch for wild beasts?"

"That's just common sense. There are dangerous beasts out there and we didn't have a Dungeon to protect us yet."

"And the woodcutting parties?"

"Well, we needed wood, didn't we? Someone had to do it, and those guys knew what to do."

"And having the children be messengers and water runners?"

"It kept them out of trouble."

"Well Rian, I need more of that," Lori said. "I need to get people to work while I keep everyone safe. Everyone keeps looking at me like I'm going to set them on fire."

"Well, you do glare at people a lot," he said. "It kinda makes people nervous. Especially when you're muttering about drowning people or setting them on fire."

Oh dear. Had she said those things out loud?

"Don't worry, I told them you were just cranky because you had wet socks," Rian said. "You're always cranky when your socks get wet."

The words were pulled out of her with rusty hooks. "Thank you," she managed to push out.

"You're welcome," he said cheerfully. "We're all in this together, after all."

"Uh huh," Lori said. "Well, you're a lord now. So that brat will finally be right when she calls you 'Lord Rian'."

"Be nice," Rian 'now-definitely-a-lord-ugh-what-had-she-done?' said. "Karina tries very hard to smile ever since I told her that if you smile, other people will smile too. She's doing what she can to help keep morale up. Her parents give her most of their food, so she feels guilty about not being able to do more."

What kind of strange person feels guilty about getting more to eat?

"Well, put her on seeling duty or something,' Lori muttered. "You're their lord now, you deal with it."

"I haven't agreed to this," Rian protested.

"What are you going to do, stop working?" Lori said.

"I might," Rian said. Even he seemed to know he didn’t actually believe that.

"Well, do it after we've gotten people moved into the shelter and had a night's dry sleep," Lori said. "You can quit tomorrow."

"Fine," Rian said, nodding in agreement. "I'll be lord for a day– well, half a day– but I'm quitting tomorrow! I'm not cut out for this sort of responsibility."

Lori nodded. "I'll knock out some air holes into the shelter after lunch. You talk to the doctors, see what needs to be set up to make the sick people comfortable without spreading whatever it is they have to the rest of us."

"Right," Rian said. "When you're done with the holes, remember to dig up those new latrines? I don’t think anyone wants to dig for a while."

"Fine. After lunch," Lori said.

Rian nodded and walked away, already looking around for men he could talk to.

Smirking to herself, Lori took her second spoonful of food. Ah, still just right. She was getting used to this already.

––––––––––––––––––.

After she finished eating– and eyed the large pot but ultimately forwent a second helping– Lori went back to her first building project as a Dungeon Binder.

While they weren't positioned in a flood plain, between the waterworn cliff face and the nearby river, it wasn't hard to assume that the rock underneath them was likely sedimentary. That meant she had to be careful when pulling the rock out of the ground with earthwisps. It would take more experience with earthwisps in general and this material specifically before she'd be able to identify lines of cleavage and tensile strength without examination and testing– read: hitting rocks with other rocks– so for the moment, she'd done what she could by making the composition of the stone as evenly distributed as she could before gently pulling it up out of the ground to form the half-cylinder arc of the shelter. It was a good, simple structure where the shape itself provided strength and support.

Normally, she could have done this in individual arcs, raising the stone up from the ground with support under them, then removing that support once the shape was set and the stone was supporting its own weight. Step to the side and raise another arc next to the first one, then fusing the two into one structure. The more arcs she made, the faster it would get as the earthwisps she bound would grow more and more used to her will.

She didn't need to do that anymore.

With the quite frankly ridiculous amount of power at her disposal, she had cleared trees from a convenient patch of ground between the kitchen and the river that no one had put up their tents on, had the ground roil in waves to carry the felled wood to one side, then proceeded to raise up the shelter all in one piece, with no supports. The supports where there because in the final calculation, it took less energy to raise up supports than it did to reinforce the stone so it wouldn't fall until the structure was complete

Energy was no longer a consideration.

That done, she had excavated the ground under the arced roof, standing aside as mud, dirt, water, rocks and roots flowed as if one mass past her and into a convenient pile, before she'd hardened the floor and walls to the same stone consistency so that they'd support the arcing roof and sealed the openings on their end with more stone, save for a single wide entrance and a ramp leading down to the shelter's floor level.

Then she'd finally gone back for lunch.

Upon returning to her building, she found the floor of her shelter thick with rainwater.

Ah. Right. She'd forgotten that could happen.

Collecting lightwisps, she bound them inside the shelter to produce illumination so she could keep working. She pulled the water out of the shelter, and it streamed up the stone-hard ramp and joined with the muddy ground. For a moment, Lori glared at the shelter. The lining she'd made was thick enough that groundwater wouldn't seep in, but she'd need some other solution for rainwater…

Walking to the pile of excavated dirt, she touched with her staff. It shuddered, then started to flow after her as she proceeded to enclose the whole ramp, then added a recess to divert most rainwater away. Then she reconsidered it and leveled the ramp into steps. People would be stepping in with wet feet after all. They might slide.

Lori didn't have a spirit level, so she had to judge each step individually, using the beads in her money pouch to judge if they were, if not completely level, then at least level enough. She'd need to see about making a spirit level. She had a glass test tube raided from that other Whisperer's things, she could use that.

That done, she cut another channel at the base of the ramp-like stairs, to catch any water that slipped in, and made a small alcove next to the shelter proper's entrance to act as a catch basin. Someone would need to clean it every so often, but Rian would take care of it when she told him.

After that, she set about making windows.

Putting slit-like openings on one end of the cylindrical shelter was simple enough, since it was a flat wall that wasn't meant to be load bearing. She took advantage of this to put in a chimney there for a fire so they'd have somewhere to cook. Knocking holes into the sides of the arcing stone structure of the roof was another. She decided to make the airhole-windows stone arcs as well, to try and continue supporting the weight of the roof arc. She had to raise some buttresses inside the shelter to support them and help transfer the weight into the ground, ruining the smoothness of the walls, but after finishing the first one, the structure seemed to be holding, so she felt safe building a few more.

After all, if it collapsed, it wasn't like she'd be sleeping there.

The rain stopped about late-afternoon. Water had condensed on the walls as she'd worked, glistening in the smooth, white illumination of the lightwisps she'd bound. She made the waterwisps vibrate, flashing everything into water vapor and lowering the temperature of the shelter slightly for a moment, before the vapor went out the windows.

Behind her, tentative footsteps came down the ramp. Rian stuck his head in, tracking in mud. "Is it ready? We don't have much time before it gets dark."

"It's ready," Lori said. "They'll have to sleep on the ground, but they'll have air and a place to build a fire. We can fix any problems in the morning."

Rian nodded, looking relieved. "I'll get someone to bring in some wood," he said. "Can you make a fire with it while I get everyone ready to move in?"

Lori nodded absently, looking around the shelter. She'd probably have to put in another fireplace tomorrow, since it might be too big for the single one they had. But right now, she was tired. Her head felt fuzzy from moving magic around all day, and her feet were killing her. She wanted to take off her boots, warm up her socks, roll up in her blanket and go to sleep.

Outside, people were moving, carrying things to be moved into the shelter. Blankets, clothes, tools that could finally be properly protected from the rain…

Lori wanted to rest. Rest sounded good.

Still, there was one more thing she had to do.

She found a nice area away from the river and dug a few holes down, making them nice and deep, with a little water at the bottom. Then she raised some simple dirt walls around them.

The latrines done, Lori went to tell Rian they needed seats.