Demesne

The days passed. As they did, the settlement developed and the number of buildings grew.

Wood was cut. The kitchen got real walls, and then the walls became raised stone, so the wood was used for a proper roof, and then the dimensions were expanded to be able to seat nearly everyone. Tables and chairs were made. A washing area was set up, and Lolilyuri raised a stone cistern to provide water for it, which she had to refill with river water every few days. One of the men with carpentry skills and tools was even able to make a decent spigot to attach to it.

It turned out that food was plentiful in the woods and the slopes on the other side of the raised cliff the dungeon had been dug in. At first, the foragers stripped every plant bare, until Rian ordered that the wild vegetables be, essentially, brought back alive so they could try to raise them on the not-bad argument that as plants native to the region, they were likely to grow better than their own crops.

Lori spent her time exercising her new power by clearing land. She and the ones cutting the wood for the settlement had a deal: they'd cut the wood into planks or pillars and whatever else they needed, and she wouldn't bring down the trees by turning all the water inside them into steam and making them explode. Apparently they didn't get a lot of usable wood when she did it that way. Steaming the wood to more quickly cure it wasn't nearly as much fun.

It was boring, but she had to settle for using fast, narrow streams of water to cut through the trees so the settlement could use them. Blowing up the stumps just wasn't the same.

Also, she learned that you apparently couldn't till soil by moving earthwisps, since that just made the soil move as a solid mass. Who knew? It turns out properly tilling soil required aerating it, and while there might be a way to use air- and earthwisps to get it done, all she'd managed to do was blow a lot of mud around.

Well, at least they had shovels to do it with.

They had more beast-skull shovels now, as they had managed to devise an ingenious system of hunting beasts. It went like this: someone stood on a tall stone pillar on the outskirts of the demesne, equipped with a signal pole and some spears, which were essentially just sharpened sticks. They'd bait any beast that came by– and beasts came by surprisingly frequently– and raise the pole to let people know they had a beast. While they'd try to keep the beast's attention, Lori would rush there as quickly as she could and kill the beast before it decided to leave or managed to jump high enough to eat the settler.

They didn't catch one every day, but the beasts were big enough that the meat lasted a long time. That meant their numbers of shovels grew. It also allowed the settlement to finally make new clothes using the beast skins. And while the beast feathers were pretty tough, with enough work the down and barbs scraped off the rachis worked as pillows. Not everyone had them, but Lori did. It went with her new wooden bed. Granted, her bed had no mattress, but it was marginally softer than sand or rock.

After clearing land for wood and planting the wild vegetables came building homes. While everyone was gathering food or resources– and in the doctors' cases, trying to keep sick people from dying– Lori started building individual homes for families. She didn't mess around with elegant stone arcs. She pulled dirt and stone up from the ground, compressed them into walls and floors, knocked out a few holes for windows, stuck in squares of wood for frames before adding dirt back over them and called it done. She didn't have the time, inclination, or ladder to get high up and put in roofs. If people didn't want to share her shelters, then they could put the roofs and doors on themselves.

Honestly, she hadn't realized becoming a Dungeon Binder meant working on building nearly everything but her Dungeon. So far, it was still a cave with a bed and a hole in the ground for the dungeon's core. She'd already almost fallen in twice.

She'd tried moving the core around, but had immediately run into the problem of it not liking being moved, which she half-expected. She could move it if she really, really tried, but it had been a difficult experience. She hadn't been able to just grab it and pull. Against purely physical forces, it had been resolutely immobile. She'd needed to bind and will it to move, and even then it had caused a strong, nauseating feeling within her, like it was already right where it should be and moving it was a stupid idea. It reminded her of the time they'd been asked to reshape the bones in their own body, just so they'd understand what a horrible idea it was. She'd only been able to move it a few handspans, and by the end of it she was tired, sweating and feeling like her body was the wrong shape under her skin. That feeling faded after a few hours, but it certainly explained why demesne almost never changed location, even though there were a few stories about it being done, usually in truly desperate circumstances that ended either epically great or epically terrible. She gained a new understanding of how desperate the people involved had been, to try and move their core.

So she used it as a place to hang her hat and raincoat. It might as well be useful.

That didn't mean she didn't try to improve her cave. The ground had been evened out and, using the old trick with water and channels cut into the rock, leveled. That had been pretty much all that's she'd had time for, in the moments where she was lying in bed waiting to get tired enough to not mind she was sleeping on a pile consisting of her rain cloak over her other clothes. If someone knew how to weave reeds or strips of wood or vines into a more adequate back support than bare, rough planks, Rian hadn't managed to get them on the wall list yet.

The wall of the shelter, with the list of names and specializations all written in dirty and smudging wood char lines, had become a sort of part census, part chore list. Rian, with his near-satirical exactness and thoroughness, had written 'Lolilyuri 'Lori'– Dungeon Binder, Whisperer, Wizard' at the top. Beneath that, he'd written his own name next to the word 'Lord (temporary)'.

After that came a long list of names, trades, useful skills and specialties. Some, like Lori, had only their given names, although Rian had added the nicknames of those who preferred such things, as he had with her (she liked her given name, but had gotten tired of people mispronouncing it). Others had two names, as if they were from a noble house. Oh, Lori knew that in some demesnes the naming conventions where different, like using the name of the demesne the way nobles used house names, which was why she had a carpenter named Yonas Steamfissure and his family, while in other places people had a profession name, like the blacksmith named Lanwei Smith. It seemed ostentatious to her. Also, more annoying names to remember. Why did some people feel like they had to double their names? Well, she didn't need to remember them. That was what the list was for. Now, if she could just get people to write their names on their clothes…

The '(temporary)' amused her though. Rian still seemed to think he was going to quit, even after several days of putting it off. As if she'd let him. He was too useful.

––––––––––––––––––

The next day dawned bright and clear and sunny. No matter which direction Lori looked, no matter how much she bound lightwisps to gather light and magnify the range of her view, she couldn't see any walls of water waiting to come down from the sky to ruin their day.

It was incredibly suspicious.

"I'd call you paranoid, but you're always like this," Rian said over breakfast. They had tables now, so they sat across from each other. She ignored Umu and Mikon sitting at the table behind him, alternately enjoying the view of his backside and glaring at her. He was just completely oblivious, despite the intensity of their gazes that should have bored holes through his trousers. For alleged romantic rivals, they are awfully quick to join forces against what they thought was a third party. Idiots.

"So you're accusing me of being paranoid all the time?" she said. If people still had any spices on them, they were hoarding it, so the meal was flavored with the meat's natural fat, the bitter acridness of the vegetable's greenery, and the mushiness of the root vegetables. Lori switched from the stew to the grilled seel meat, washing away the taste the stew left in her mouth. She didn't know who was leaving a dead seel near her cave every day, but it was just that little bit more meat.

"It's a sunny day," Rian said. "Why would you think that anything bad will happen to us because of it?"

"Because sunny days are when iridescence grows back quickly," Lori said grimly. "It's hot, it's dry, there's a lot of thermal energy to quicken the Iridescence's growth… don't have any people up on the beast-baiting towers today. In fact, have everyone stay close by."

Rian grimaced. "Ah. I forgot, what with all the rain we've been having," he said. "I'll let everyone know. Well, it's not a bad day to work near the river. Maybe everyone can do laundry or go seeling or have a bath or something. With all the seels we've been catching, we certainly have enough tallow."

Lori suddenly became aware of every itchy part of her body. "We have soap?"

"The chandler, Chandler, says he has some ready," Rian said. "Thanks to you we haven't had to make candles yet, so he's been saving up the seel tallow and ash, and making soap."

"So our first community fair is going to be a public bathing event," Lori said flatly. "Joy. Aren't we having enough problems with horny idiots? Do we really need to actually encourage people to get naked and wet in the middle of the day?" She made a note to designate someplace downstream for bathing. These idiots would probably bathe right next to where the children did their seeling from sheer laziness otherwise.

Lori had recently needed to start leaving the entrance to her cave blocked off after she'd caught two young men trying to sneak in during lunch, in the process of taking their shirts off. From then on, morbid curiosity had her noticing how some people didn't always attend the midday meal. Or skipped the morning meal. Or skipped– or at least were late to– the evening meal.​ Really, ever since she'd noticed she hadn't been able to stop. No matter how much she'd tried. Why had her social apathy chosen to abandon her now, in her hour of need? Like some twisted joke, her facial recognition seemed to have improved because of it, even if she still couldn't name people. She wondered what they got first, a wedding, a baby, or someone with an axe to the head?

All the children were always present for meals. She'd since insisted on that, and insisted no one start eating until all the children were there, in their special low table in the middle of the room. She wasn't having any of THAT in her demesne. You always heard stories about some places…

For once, Rian actually looked uncomfortable. "Well, it's not like people have anything else to do," he muttered. "We don't even have a bar."

"Really? You're telling me in all this time since we set out from Covehold, no one's managed to get a still running?" Lori said, not believing it.

"They did, but I appropriated it," Rian said. "We needed the barrel for food storage. Our latitude is low enough that we can probably expect snow, so we should start testing to see which foods keep and for how long."

"Wow. People must really like you, to not try and hang you after you did that," Lori said.

"Oh, I told them it was by your authority," Rian said. "Requisitioned by the government."

Lori glared at him. Rian just replied with a wide-eyed, innocent and earnest smile.