Demesne Weekly Digest 5 (#15 -#17) (Patreon)

Yes, There Are Dragons

Lolilyuri felt terrible. Unfortunately, there was work to be done. It wasn't too bad. She could do the work sitting down for the most part, and it was a steady, repetitive work that she didn't have to think too much about. The situation was aggravating, but mostly she was angry at herself for losing track of the time. She'd been going to sleep early and not watching the positioning of the moons in the sky, which was why this had crept up on her suddenly.

The sawpit had been busy, cutting down trees and sawing them into boards and beams. The problem was, as Lori had once learned long ago while working in a lumberyard (one of many, many, many jobs she'd had to pay for school), wood needed to be cured before it could be used for building, or else it could warp as the wood dried out.

Her job, now as then, was to dry the wood such that it could be used in a matter of hours instead of months. Unfortunately, it wasn't as simple as just imbuing some wisps and walking away. Different woods cut from different trees would have different levels of moisture, and would have different needs, needing to be carefully watched. Also, they only had the one kiln. Lori had raised it, like she had many things, using packed earth, to better keep the area around the sawpit from being an oven. Green wood was stacked in, and she imbued fire-, air-, water- and lightningwisps in the way she'd learned to increase the temperature of the kiln, circulate the air and control the humidity, draw out the moisture in the wood, and heat the internal parts of the wood for faster curing. It was a delicate and dynamic process, and she had to supervise it lest it be like the time she got fired from her first lumberyard job and have the wood catch fire.

Still, after many years and many jobs in lumberyards, Lori had become confident in her skill in the process. Drying wood to turn it into kindling was one thing. Turning it into a building material was another thing entirely. Between her, the woodcutting parties and the sawyers, they were managing to keep up with the demesne's lumber needs.

So if she looked like she wasn't doing anything as she sat back next to the kiln with her eyes closed, that was absolutely not the case and she was very much hard at work! It just happened to be something she could do sitting down with her eyes closed!

Lori told Rian so through gritted teeth and in great detail when he found her sitting next to the kiln.

"Uh, noted," he said. "Do you need one of the doctors?"

"No," she said. "Now, why are you here? And I swear, if you start going on about philosophy and why any of us are here– "

"I'm not going to do that… anymore," Rian said, flashing a quick smile. "I thought you'd like to know, we managed to make thread from those plants you showed us. It'll take a while, but the carpenters are making us a loom, and the farmers are seeing if we can grow the ropeweeds closer to the village. Turns out the seeds are edible, and have a lot of oil, so if we're lucky we'll finally have some fried meat that doesn't taste bland."

"Yay," Lori said. "All our troubles are solved. I want a mattress first thing." A beat. "Ropeweeds?"

"That's what the children call it," Rian said. "Some of those who aren't as good as seeling have opted to make rope instead, so we'll hopefully also have more rope soon. I'll need to talk to them, find out if they've found other interesting plants out there."

"You realize you can have someone else do it, right?" Lori said. "You're a lord, you have the authority to do that. Well, until you quit later today."

"Which I definitely will, I'm not cut out for this lord thing," Rian said. "No, I'd better do it myself. No preconceived notions."

"Have the astrologer guy do it," Lori said.

"Cassan?" Rian said, sounding surprised.

"Is that his name?" Lori said. "He looked like he had some kind of academic training. And he has a notebook. Even if he can't tell if the plant is good for anything, he can write it down and not have to carry a plank of wood with him everywhere. Also, find out who the parents of the ones watching the children are. They obviously haven't been paying attention as the children have been making rope and they didn't even notice."

"They don't deserve to be punished for that," Rian said.

"I'm not punishing them," Lori said. "You're simply going to tell their parents how negligent they've been. Anything else is up to them."

"That's still going to get them punished," Rian said.

"That's a family matter," Lori said. "None of my business, and I don't want it to be. I only step in when people violate my laws."

"So, you won't interfere in family matters, but you'll come down on anyone urinating in public," Rian said, amused.

"My demesne is a civilized place, with latrines," Lori said testily. "Use them or leave."

––––––––––––––––––

The next day was a perfectly average morning in Lori's Demesne. The sun was rising, the songbugs on the outskirts of the demesne were (probably) singing, several children were getting an early start at killing small animals, people awkwardly socialized as they waited for latrines to become available, meals were cooked in the communal kitchen using large stone pots Lori had crafted on the journey from Covehold, Rian was in the middle of finishing his daily morning sword practice while several people enjoyed the sight of him shirtless, and Lori snapped violently awake knowing a dragon was coming.

She could feel it in the distance, a sensation like… like the breeze that came at the forefront of an opening door, an immaterial bow wave being pushed in front of something more solid. It was a sensation she'd felt before, and as always it jolted her wide awake and filled her with mortal terror.

Lori stared in horror at her dungeon. Her small, four-room dungeon.

Rainbows.

She scrambled to her feet, wincing in residual discomfort as she sat down to put on her boots. She tried to think of what they needed to do even as she hoped that the dragon would pass them, and knew it wouldn't. Dragons were huge. Not getting caught in their shadow was too much to hope for.

Lori thrust one arm into the sleeve of her leather raincoat even as she grabbed her staff and rushed out of her new bedroom, crossing the now wide-open space that had formerly been all her living area. Her darkroom, its narrow opening protected by a lip to prevent light from the entrance from getting in, suddenly seemed too small and not dark enough…

She willed the boulder in front of the door away even as she dispersed the bound lightwisps that illuminated her cave, trying to plunge it into as much darkness as she could. Outside, though the ground was muddy, indicating it had rained in the night, found herself stepping out into a bright, cloudless sky. A rainbow hung on the horizon, its colors sending shivers down Lori's spine. The air was thick with humidity that would be agonizing when the day's heat came, although the discomfort lasted only long enough to her to will it away from her with waterwisps.

There were people about, some going to the river for a quick splash out of habit or convenience, others heading for the dining halls. Only a third of the shells of houses she'd set up had people living in them yet, and even those families weren't eating there yet.

Lori debated making a scene. Then she headed for the hospital instead.

Rian was already eating when she sat down with her own bowl. "Hey," he said, nodding at her. "Good morning."

"No, it's not," Lori said grimly as she sat down.

"Well, you're dour this morning," Rian said.

"There's a dragon coming," she said.

His spoon paused. "Are you joking?"

"Do I ever joke?"

"Well…"

"No, I never joke," Lori said, taking a breath. "It's not on the horizon yet, so I thought I'd have breakfast before declaring a state of emergency."

"Ah."

"Keep anyone from leaving until I finish eating, will you?" Lori said. "And have someone retrieve the children who've already finished eating."

Rian nodded grimly and stood up, leaving to do as she'd said. Then he came back, grabbed his half-finished bowl of food, and left again.

Sighing, Lori ate. It would probably be her last calm meal until the dragon passed.

Her hands shook.

––––––––––––––––––

"There's a dragon coming," Lori announced, and waited for everyone to get their fear under control.

Only the very young children– which the village didn't have, as no child that young would have been allowed onto the ships heading for this continent for a whole host of cost and safety reasons– wouldn't have known what a dragon was. Most demesne had a dragon pass it by at least once every year or two. So to Lori's surprise, there was surprisingly very little fear. For most, there seemed to be an air of annoyed resignation, as if told they'd need to do something inconvenient but required.

She frowned at everyone. "You all heard me right?" she said. "A dragon is coming." Even now she could feel it, the strange sensation like waves washing over her. She could feel their direction, and how they were slowly growing stronger. Lori felt like she should be swaying as the sensation swept over her again, all the wisps around her seeming to sway with her. She'd never found anything in any book or study that explained what that feeling was. It wasn't because of wisps: Deadspeakers, Mentalists and Horotracts all felt it too. Life wavered, thought eddied, and vistas eroded, all as if something were washing it away. "We need to get ready!"

"Binder Lori, relax," Rian said, once more seeming to speak for everyone. "We've all been through dragons before, there's no need to get upset."

"I think having a dragon bearing down on us is perfectly upsetting, Rian," Lori snapped. "We need to get to work while we still can."

"It's a dragon. We've lived through them before. Just get down into the shelters and wait it out," Rian said. "Our biggest problem will be getting bored. Sure, we might have to replace some roofs and dig up whatever falls on us afterwards, but it's not really that big of a problem."

Lori stared at him. Then she looked, really looked, at the people of her demesne. All of them bore the same relaxed, self-assured expression as her only lord.

"Rian, shelters are always built as least twenty paces underground for a reason," Lori ground out, addressing it to him, but explaining it to everyone. "Unless they're built that deep, it's perfectly possible for a dragon's wild manipulations of wisps to tear the ground apart and open the shelter up, and then people die because their bodies start fusing together, or they get caught in a twister and wrung like a dishrag until all their flesh is stripped from their bones, or they fall and never stop falling until they die of starvation or any number of things."

Rian blinked. "The shelters never seem that deep. You just go down some stairs and there they are."

"Yes, that's what happens when you use Horotacting to make a vista," Lori said. "Trust me, they're that deep, I used to have a job doing shelter cleaning and maintenance, and we always needed a Horotract to get down there."

Abruptly, Lori slammed the butt of her staff into the ground, using earth- and airwisps to make it echo like thunder. People jumped at the noise, suddenly focusing on her. "Dragons might seem like just any other storm when you're in a demesne, but those are old demesne, build up over decades and centuries. They have plumbing and sewers and streetlights and ways to protect themselves from dragons. We don't! Colors of death, people, you know all the stories about dragons that I do! They can tear a demesne to the bedrock and leave no survivors, turn an entire city into a mound of insane screaming flesh that's killing and undying everything around it, and give you iridiation even from inside a demesne! And that last one is if you're lucky, so you die fast!"

Shocked silence filled the dining hall, and Lori finally saw fear.

"And if you don't believe that," Lori said. "Believe this." She pointed towards the kitchen and cold room. "All our food is in there, and they only safe place we have to hide from a dragon," she pointed in the general direction of her cave and the dungeon's core, "is over there! Dragons can take two or three days to pass by, and anyone who goes out in that time is going to die. Do you see the problem?"

They all looked towards the kitchen. Then towards the Dungeon.

It was then that the logistical problems finally presented themselves to everyone.

"And before you all start thinking of moving the food to the shelters," Lori said as the idea seemed to finally dawn on everyone, "consider this: all that damage after a dragon, with roofs fallen in and such. How thick do you think the roofs of the shelters are? And how thick to you think the hill on top of the Dungeon is?"

She didn't wait for some kind of moment of realization or someone answering her rhetorical question.

But neither did she just walk off dramatically.

"Get all the food into my Dungeon," Lori told Rian. "All the metal tools we can't afford to lose either. I'll turn one of my rooms into a cold room for it."

"What are you going to do?" Rian asked.

"Something I should have done sooner," Lori said. "Make my Dungeon bigger."

When she stepped out of the dining hall, a wind had risen. Steady wind that neither surged nor ebbed, rushing like someone's breath whispering past her ear. It flowed southward, and Lori got the feeling the wind wasn't being blown in, but inhaled.

On the horizon, just beginning to rise over the curve of the world, was the dragon.

For a moment, Lori stared. She couldn't help it. She'd never seen a dragon with her own eyes before, and the descriptions and sketches and illustrations in books seemed… nonsensical. At first she thought a wall of clouds stretched from east to west, not unlike the driving rains. And then she blinked and suddenly it seemed too thick to be clouds. They didn't roil like clouds did, getting bigger, or rising or falling slowly. It roiled like boiling water, bubbling and expanding and moving right before her very eyes, faster than any cloud. Bubbles would erupt into eerily silent lightning of many colors. Brilliant green, dull and burning red, even a light-defying dark purple that seemed black, slowly moving horizontally like the reaching arms of some impossibly long, narrow limb.

Even as she watched, one of the streaks of lightning bent in the middle like an elbow, sweeping it's already extended length towards the ground before touching the earth and suddenly it wasn't lightning but a great cone, it's point touching the ground… and then tears seemed to open all along the cone's length, and Lori found herself staring at eyes of–

Someone grabbed her and spun her around quickly, breaking her gaze.

"Don't stare at something's eyes," Rian said, looking intently at the ground. "Things never like it when you meet their eyes. They think you're challenging them."

Lori took a deep breath and realized she was shaking.

Then thunder came, not in a sudden crack, but a low, deep, ominous roll that seemed to keep on going and going and going…

"Get to the Dungeon!" Rian cried, his voice sounding surprisingly loud and normal over the continuous bass rumble of the dragon's thunder as he pushed Lori's staff into her hands. When had she dropped it? "Get it as big as you can! I'll take care of the rest, just get the Dungeon bigger!"

Clutching at her staff, Lori ran, already willing the stone to flow…

––––––––––––––––––

The Dragon and the Dark

Lori felt like her Dungeon was about to cave in and collapse on her.

That was unlikely to happen, since every earthwisp that wasn't turning stone into the consistency of wet clay was currently reinforcing the entire hill to increase its structural integrity and not collapse because of little things like 'its own weight'. Still, it was actually becoming problematic for Lori. It wasn't that she was running out of magic to imbue into the wisps. The power from the core seemed as endlessly inexhaustible as ever. Rather, she was having problems with proximity and multi-tasking. The stone was technically one large contiguous, if heterogeneous, mass, and her dual orders to both structurally reinforce and soften were making the wisps at the border of those two bindings confused. She had to keep both sets of bindings distinct, even as she willed softened rock out of her cave through the newly-expanded opening. It was giving her a bit of a headache, but she had to keep digging. She had to keep digging.

She dug deeper into the hill, finding rock and more rock, leaving randomly placed pillars of stone to help support the load behind her. Lori kept reinforcing and digging, knowing that they didn't have much time. It didn't need to be good, it just needed to not collapse in the next three days. Rian was directing the transfer of the foods they'd already managed to gather into her storage room and new cold room, filled with ice fresh from the river. But that wouldn't be enough. So after she dug in deep enough the light from outside grew dim and she had to bind lightwisps around her to see, she started to dig down. It wasn't much, a simple hole two paces wide. but she dug down and kept on digging. Stone flowed up against gravity, rising like some strange, marbled worm, as she made the hole deeper and deeper, drawing more rock from it that she sent out of the cave.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she gave start, then swayed as legs that had gone numb staying in one position failed her, and she nearly fell into her own hole. Rian's hand grabbed her bicep, his grip surprisingly strong and pulled her back from the brink.

"Be more careful," he said. "The food's all in, and the… the dragon's getting close. Can people come inside now?"

Lori looked down into the pit. It was just darkness. She willed the lightwisps bound near her to move and shine their light into the hole.

Even then, she couldn't see the bottom.

"How close is the dragon?" Lori said. She could still feel it, moving ever closer, much closer than before, but still not over any part of her demesne.

"Well, we have children crying because they see giant eyes in the sky, it's raining hail, and I saw a giant mouth that seemed to take up half the sky appear full of teeth that turned out to be tentacles that turned out to be heads with a non-symmetrical arrangement of eyes, so it's too close for my sanity," Rain said.

"I need to fill this with water so we'll have something to drink," Lori said.

"Is there any particular reason people can't come in while you're doing that?" Rian said.

"The possibility by getting torn apart by a stream of water and polluting our reservoir with their blood and offal?"

"I'll tell them to wait."

Lori nodded, considered the length of soft stone still oozing towards the entrance of the cave and decided to leave it be in case she needed to seal off their reservoir to keep people from pissing in it. There was just something about bodies of water that made people want to add their own contribution, and she'd rather that not be the case here. "Come on, let's be quick about this. And if anyone is in my bedroom, they'll be evicted to take their chances with the dragon."

"Well… no one is in your bedroom anymore."

Lori suddenly stopped in her tracks and rounded on him. "What?" she demanded through gritted teeth.

"Well, the sacrificial altar really creeped them out," Rian said.

"It's a table!"

"To be honest, it really does kind looks like an altar," Rian shrugged.

"It doesn’t even have a drainage hole for the blood!"

"I don't think they associate drainage holes with altar-ness."

"If they touched anything or took anything…" Lori began, already feeling the rising sense of violation.

"No one took anything," Rian assured her. "They wouldn't stay near the alta– table! But, uh, I wouldn't suggest going in there right now?"

Lori gave him a suspicious look. "Why?"

––––––––––––––––––

Someone had piled her bedroom full of metal tools. Saws, scissors, knives, pots, saws, pans, cooking ingots, chisels, axes, saws, various hammers, a surprising number of what initially looked like shortswords but seemed to be well-worn machetes, and three huge saws that were longer than she was tall. There was even a box full of paper packages that on examination were nails of various sizes, a pile consisting of wire of various thicknesses, some of which she recognized as spring steel, and… was that bar stock? Why did they need to get back to Covehold if they had so much stockpiled iron and steel?!

Staring at all this, it occurred to Lori that this was the closest she had yet to get to having a room filled with untold riches. Because all these refined metals were probably the most valuable things the settlement had if you didn't count the children, and Lori didn’t.

She briefly considered sleeping on them, then tossed aside the notion. Metal was still just rock, except harder.

But at least it looked like her pack hadn't been opened. She quickly checked it and sighed with relief that the glassware was still intact. Then she carefully pushed the pack and its contents under her bed.

"Have them at least take things off the bed, I sleep on that thing," Lori said, getting back to her feet.

"Right… I'll have them do that as soon as they're safe in here," Rian said, sounding surprisingly dry.

"And make sure they bring wood to cook with along with the other supplies they'll be bringing, we're not cutting up my bed for firewood," Lori said.

Rian blinked. "Um, of course. Obviously I thought of that..."

Lori gave him a look. He averted his gaze.

Shaking her head, she hurried to bring water inside her Dungeon.

Outside, the wind had risen from a whisper to a constant driving wind, and chips of ice fell from the sky. It was a small mercy they were only tiny chips instead of heavy stones. The wind still blew inexorably towards the dragon, as if it was sucking in the sky. Lori saw clouds being drawn towards the dragon, and some actually seemed to fuse with it, making the dragon seemed a many-headed thing, and whorls on the cloud started looking like eyes–

Lori tore her gaze away, running towards the river, staff in hand and hair flying free in the wind. She'd had to leave her hat in the cave or risk losing it.

Her control over water wasn't as absolute as she would want it to be. Water that had just entered her demesne, such as by having just flowed in through the river or fallen from the sky, wasn't yet completely in her control. Conversely, water that had just flowed out of her demesne was still a little hers for maybe a pace or so past the official edge of her control. Here, however, so near her dungeon's core, the water was hers completely. Power from the core flowed through the land, imbuing the wisps in the water in front of her with her will, and the water rose, surface tension as unnatural as the reinforcement of the stone in her cave, holding it all together. Another thought, and the water rushed past her, gushing and flowing up the slope and towards her cave.

She'd torn one side of the cliff face completely open, and the whole cave, save for the round pillar which had the dungeon's core inside it, was visible to the outside. The water crashed and broke on the enormous, unnaturally blobby piles of now-hard stone that had been removed in the Dungeon's expansion. She willed the water to stay a whole and contiguous stream, sending it streaming past the line of beds from the hospital that had just been moved and arrayed along one wall.

People were already moving in under Rian's direction, mostly the sick and young children. The rest were milling outside the cave, blocked by the huge piles of stone. Most seemed to have managed to gather up their all possessions, and Lori supposed it had been as simple as just picking them up from the shelters. Other were carrying wood, already cut for kindling.

Overhead, that strange bass, rolling thunder echoed again, and Lori turned back towards the dragon. It had gotten closer as she'd worked on moving the water to the cave. It had mouths now, horrible torn-slit mouths all over its form, seemingly without heed to things like symmetry or even functionality. She saw eyes inside the mouth, turning this way and that, eyes with multiple corneas, eyes where the pupil was another mouth…!

Lori turned away and focused on providing a water supply for her Dungeon, even as it seemed like she could feel the dragon through the back of her neck.

––––––––––––––––––

The skies above had turned glittering shades of many colors, shimmering like an oily poison by the time everyone had been secured in the Dungeon.

"Everyone's inside," Rian reported, needing to raise his voice to be heard between the rolling thunder that had risen to a shrill cry like a small animal being tortured and the wind that had been increasing in volume from a whisper to a roar. "With everything we could carry."

"Have them snuff out any lights," Lori said. "Once I seal us in, we can't waste air. They don't need to see."

"That'll scare the children," Rian said.

"Good! This is something to be scared about. And in the dark, people are less likely to move around."

Besides, she'd be needing the dark.

As she stood at the mouth of the cave, drawing back the stone to rebuild the door she had torn down, and pulling all the other excavated stone with it to create a heavy stone shell to bury them in so the dragon couldn't reach them, she stared out over the settlement. It suddenly struck her how much this place had grown. She remembered mud and trees and ramshackle tents little removed from hovels and a large tent where they made food.

All that was gone now. Where there had been trees and tents, flat hard-packed earth stood, dotted with the shells of houses. While many still waited for roofs, many more had been covered and even had doors and windows of plain wooden boards. The dining hall seemed to stand over everything, a cheerful beacon of comfort. The shelters she'd built stood side by side, and seeming surprisingly close now that all the trees around it had been cleared, and she was surprised to see some flowers of some sort had been planted around them. The bathhouses, a little closer to the river, looked surprisingly cheerful. Since when had there been so many benches and crude treestump tables in front of it? In the distance, she could even make out one of the curing sheds near the sawpit, and a small, earthen chimney that she didn't remember building close to the river.

The claypit, she realized. For some reason, she hoped the little kiln survived. She hadn't seen any fruits from its labors yet.

At the edge of her awareness, she felt the wisps at the edge of her demesne…twist as the dragon passed over them.

No more delaying.

Lori stepped back and on either side of her the enormous stone bulwarks that had risen around the front of her dungeon, solid stone paces deep, closed to block out the sight of the Iridescent sky, leaving only a narrow, slit-like tube for air, plunging the dungeon into darkness. She heard the cries of surprise, heard Rian's voice trying to keep everyone call, heard the children wail and call for their parents…

In the dark, she breathed in, even as she made the magic from the core move. She passed the magic through her lungs, through her esophagus and mouth and ear canals and nostrils, and out into the darkwisps filling her cave. They filled the dark vaults, lay thick within the dark room she had built, and filled the reservoirs as surely as the water did. They were in the lavatories and crude pipes, in the gaps between the piles of metal tools, under her bed and in the miniscule veins of the wood people had brought. They lay just beneath people's clothes, hidden in their hair, squeezed in between their toes, filling their pockets.

Lolilyuri, wizard, Dungeon Binder, determined… bound the darkness to her will.

She bound the darkness in the cave. She bound the darkness in the empty shelters, in shadows hiding in the corners of roofed houses, in the empty cold room and drainage pipes and cistern and spigot and cold hearth of the dining hall. She bound the darkness in the curing sheds and in the little lips of shadow inside the unfired clay forms, and under roots and in the cracked bark of old trees, and under the shade of leaves and falls of rocks and the hidden nooks and corners and in the lee of broken eggs hidden inside unseen hollows.

The darkwisps and the darkness responded, flowing through the air hole into the outside, rising from where they hid, streaming and coalescing and growing as all around the demesne darkness answered their Binder's call. She imbued the dark with magic, made it spread unnaturally into the light of day in defiance of nature. They spread like a shroud, cloaking the stony bulwark and the cliffs, spreading sideways to either side of the hill, growing as the darkness of the demesne joined it. The darkness moved faster than the light, for while the light had to travel, the dark was always there. Air didn't slow it, didn't affect it. It had no body, no weight. No sprig of moss so much as stirred even as a flood of shadow erupted, rich in magic, filling with all the power Lori could have the core imbue into it.

Yet for all that, it did have a limited volume. Not enough to plunge the whole demesne in darkness, as some demesne were capable of doing. Not enough to blot out the sun and cloak them all in night. But enough to wrap around the empty buildings and homes, around the signs of civilization built by hands and sweat and toil and wisps and will. Enough to be a dark vanguard with shields held high in front of a stony bulwark and, as the dragon came, to bear the raw, untamed, chaotic, unspeakably twisted magics of the dragon.

As the first wave of the unspeakable power and abnormal, eldritch power carrying streams of insane thoughts, impossibly twisted vistas, illbound wisps and rampant life washed over Lori's Demesne, matched only by the mind and will of its Dungeon Binder, Lori stood in the dark and hoped she was enough.

––––––––––––––––––

Stories In The Dark

Lolilyuri could hear another dragon-born abomination trying to crawl through the air hole again. There was too much chittering and the sound of multiple wings, and the void it left in her sense of the demesne's wisps was all wrong to be any ordinary sort of bug. She pushed magic into the darkness she was controlling directly over the Dungeon's entrance to reinforce it for a moment, then focused her attention in front of her and contracted the air hole from a wide opening into a slit a finger wide. The sound of shell cracking was interspersed with bones breaking, and it might have been Lori's imagination, but she thought she'd felt a sudden mist as of pulped insides being ejected violently out of a body. The hair on the back of her neck rose as she still heard something moving.

She took the coal at her side and some wood split for kindling that Rian had piled next to her, and put the firewisps in one into the other. The coal cooled to almost nothing as the firewood burst into open flame that Lori directed into a stream through the little slit. There was sizzling and a nauseatingly sweet smell like burning sugar. She kept the flame going until the wood in her hand was consumed. When the dark came back and she had to blink the bright afterimage burned into her eyes, the air hole was mercifully silent, if smelling like a burnt batch of poisonous caramels..

Cautiously, she expanded it back to size, and the sounds of the dragon passing– of eerie silences, of stoning grinding and rumbling, of trees and wood snapping, of things being displaced, of stranger sounds she couldn't identify– entered though the pitch-black opening with the air. She went back to reinforcing the darkness over the Dungeon and the other structures she still had control over. She'd already lost one of the shelters and some of the houses in a moment of inattention, the chaotic forces the dragon was throwing around wearing away her darkwisps until it had been depleted of the magic she had imbued, breaking apart and letting the dragon's touch reach the stones she had raised before she could reinforce them. That had been hours ago.

The structures were still mostly there, but there were strange voids of wisps all around it. And there were other voids roaming around outside, voids that did not feel like beast or bug or anything that swam through her river, but she couldn't focus on them, she had to maintain the darkness. Wind and rain and hail and rocks being lifted up and dropped from the sky passed through her field of darkwisps without any resistance whatsoever, but she managed to hold back the dragon's chaotic magic. In addition to the force of a storm, the dragon altered the world around it. Space twisted, and time stopped flowing smoothly. Formless, invisible power clawed and ripped and flung the lands as easily as someone's cloak dragging across the ground as they walked. Gravity inverted and spiraled and magnified and halved and trees started moving as if they had muscles instead of wood. Wisps were bound in ways she didn't think were possible or sane, producing invisible light that boiled all the water it touched, rocks compacting so densely they warped the very world around them before flaring like the sun and exploding, lightning wisps that came together and broke down all matter they touched into something that was neither stone nor fluid nor air and burned hotter than any fire she'd ever made…

Lori could feel these abominations and more hammering into the bulwark of darkness she had raised, immaterial powers that struck her barriers and were repulsed, leaving the matter they had been bound to slam violent against her shell of stone. They contributed to the unnatural, chaotic, unspeakable sounds she heard through the airway as they shattered or exploded or in some instances were so hot they fused to the stone and would have melted their way in if Lori hadn't ripped the heat from them. The stone had cracked, and she had needed to frantically repair the damage, leaving her darkness to be worm away without her supporting it…

She'd been at this for hours, sitting in the dark in front of the air hole, eyes unseeing as she relied on her connection to the dungeon core and the sense it granted her of the wisps in her demesne to understand what was going on outside. The stories always said how the Dungeon Binder was aware of everything that went on in their demesne. Lori was starting to think that was either greatly hyperbolic, or she needed more practice.

Occasionally Rian came, bringing her wood or a skin of water that was nice and cold and didn't taste pissed in. There was no food but for some fruits the children had brought, something that had been sweet and mushy and runny and made Lori want to strip all the trees in her demesne bare to find more. Also, the children had definitely been planning to keep whatever this fruit was a secret among themselves, the greedy things. She wondered what they had called it.

She'd had to stop sitting down and start to pacing as the hours wore on and she grew tired, her eyelids drooping in the dark, as the sun set still more dragon passed overhead. It wasn't unheard of for a dragon to be over a hundred taums long. There was a good chance that Covehold was still in the dragon's shadow with them, under its own shield of darkness. Or…

Lori blink, realizing she'd been staring into the dark for a while now and might have fallen asleep with her eyes open. She hurriedly checked the darkwisps, and hastily imbued them with more magic. In any other situation, that she was putting in them would have lasted the wisps days, but it took power to resist the phenomena that surrounded the dragon.

As she imbued, she went back to her thought. What sort of wizard had founded Covehold? Had they been any more prepared than she had been? Had they worked out how to use the other forms of magic yet? Because this would go a lot easier if she could use Deadspeaking to cleanse her body of tiredness, or use Mentalism to be partly asleep while the other part kept imbuing. Colors, if she could just Horotract a little, they'd be a taum underground and not need to worry about anything breaking in…

She straightened to find someone shaking her shoulder as she stood leaning against the wall. "Wah…?" she said blearily, wondering what he was doing in her room and why did it smell like blood and caramel…

Panic seized her, and Lori reached up, seeing the darkness start to collapse. Hurriedly, she imbued it once more, dragging out the darkwisps that had suddenly snapped back in place in the cave after the magic imbued into them had run out, rebuilding the bulwark. "W-who's there?" she asked. Her coal had died, but someone had risked a single candle in the cave, and it was just enough light to give the dark contrast.

"It's me," Rian said, voice low, sounding almost as tired as she felt. "I came to check on you when something started trying to come in and it didn't die right away. Are you alright?"

"I need you to slap me," Lori said. "Hard. In the face."

"Practically speaking, slapping someone doesn't actually make them more awake," Rian said.

"No, but adrenaline will, on account I'll be angry at the idiot who just–"

Something struck her in the shin, and Lori let out a cry of anger and dropped her staff. It clattered loudly to the ground as she leaned against the wall. "Breath, that hurt!" she roared.

"You're welcome," Rian said, sounding annoyingly cheerful enough to strangle. "And hey, this way, no risk of brain injury."

"Thank you," Lori snarled through gritted teeth. Well, her blood was up and there was definitely adrenaline in her system, so… success? "Did it get in?"

"I dealt with it," Rian said. His shadowed outline moved, and something caught a glint of the distant candlelight. There was a sword in his left hand, barely a darker shape in the gloom. Lori bound the lighwisps in her eyes, and suddenly the cave seemed to brighten in shades of black and white, and in his hands, hidden from the rest of the cave with his body, was a sword. A thick, almost tarry substance was smeared on it, slowly trickling down like thickening tree sap.

"I didn't know you were left-handed," she said for lack of anything else to say as she rebuilt the darkness outside.

"I'm not," Rian said, grimacing. Whatever the tar was, some of it had splattered on his hand. "I hope this thing doesn't etch. I don't know if any of the blacksmiths can fix it if it does."

"How long has it been?" Lori said.

"I don't know. Midnight? It could be the next day for all we know," Rian said. "I don't suppose you learned a magical way to tell what time it is?"

Lori rubbed at her eyes. In the dark of her own mind, she could feel the darkwisps outside, eroding erratically at the dragon's influence on the world. She imbued it, reaffirming the binding of her will. "I don't know if I can last…" she said quietly.

"Do you want me to tell you a story?" Rian said, leaning on the wall next to her. He slumped, and Lori realized he must have been as tired as she was.

"Isn't that for putting me to sleep?" Lori said.

"That depends on what sort of story you're being told," Rian said. "Would you consider yourself a learned person?"

"Yes…?" Lori said, wondering where this was going.

"Would you be offended at gross ignorance of what you consider basic principles?" Rian said.

"Where is this going?" Lori asked suspiciously, even as her attention flickered upwards to the darkwisps on the other side of the stone bulwark next to them.

"Well, there's this story that I heard," Rian said, letting his back slide down the wall to sit on the ground, the sword carefully to one side.

Lori rubbed her eyes, but sat down more carefully, still giving Rian a suspicious look as she let the binding in her eyes lapse, and the cave snapped back to darkness. "What story?" she asked, even as she kept one metaphorical hand on the metaphorical staff that was imbuing the darkwisps.

"Well, it goes like this: a hunter… no wait, it was a miner–" Rian corrected himself, "is digging in his mine, searching for iron."

"Wait, he owns the mine?"

"Well, it's his mine, so I suppose."

"Then why is he digging by himself? If he owns the mine, he should be wealthy enough to hire other people to dig for him!"

"Maybe he doesn't have the beads? Spent it all on buying the mine?"

"That's no excuse, any bank would be willing to let him put up the mine as collateral for a loan. If he had enough confidence it would make beads, he'd have done at least that already, just to cover overhead and expenses!"

"Look, that's how it goes! He's in a mine, he owns the mine, and he's digging by himself."

"About that. That's very unsafe. What if he had an accident in the mine? He could become stuck there and die because no one knows he's hurt. You can't just assume the Dungeon Binder will keep an eye on you just because you're operating one of their mines."

"Ah, I knew I forgot something! This isn't in a demesne, it's on the outside, so Iridescence everywhere."

"Okay, this story is becoming even more stupid. You mean he's mining, alone, by himself, out in the Iridescence? Then he's obviously got money, at the very least he'll need a hose and pressure tank to spray the area he'll be mining with Iridescence so it doesn't powder and start building up in his lungs."

"Nope, no washing rig. He's mining by himself, just his pick axe and his lantern to light his way, mining deep in his mine."

"Deep in his mine? Rian, are you relating the circumstances of a suicide to me?"

"I haven't even finished setting up the story! Just let me finish, okay?"

"… fine…"

"So, there's a miner, digging in his mine, all by himself. He's been excavating for day, but has little to show for it–"

"Obviously, if he's trying to run an iron mine as a one-man operation. "

"– but every day, he wakes up hoping this will be the day he strikes it rich."

"Wait, hoping he strikes it rich? Are you telling me he's unsuccessful not because he's excavating a seam by himself, but because he hasn't even found anything worth mining in the first place? This IS a suicide! Your miner is on the path to financial ruin! Next you'll tell me he's too cheap to bathe!"

"Well, the way I heard it, he's already covered in Iridescence, and he figures he only has one day left or he'll die."

"If he's covered by Iridescence, he doesn't have one day, he already has brain damage from it affecting the lighningwisps in his brain. This IS a suicide story."

"Look, it's not a suicide! Let me keep telling it."

"There better be a change in his circumstances, or at the very least he turns around and takes a bath to wash the iridiation off…"

"While mining a particularly stubborn and hard wall, he accidentally cuts himself, causing blood to well up from his cut."

"And dooming himself to death, as that much Iridescence on the skin, and then an open wound… he's a dead man."

"The blood smears on the stubbornly hard stone, which suddenly glows with brilliant light. All of a sudden, the iridescence starts melting away as the glowing stone wall reveals itself to be a Dungeon Core! By offering it some of his blood, he had made a pact with it, becoming a Dungeon Binder, gaining powers and abilities far above mere ordinary men."

Silence. A deep, wrathful silence broken only by sporadic strange and eldritch noises from the air hole leading outside.

"Rian," Lori said, her tone quiet and threatening, "are you seriously telling me some coloredbrained 'How some ignorant yokel became a Dungeon Binder' story?"

"This was the start of his days as a powerful Dungeon Binder, and how he offered just rule and an easy life to all who lived in his demesne," Rian said cheerfully.

Lori took a deep breath.

Sleeping people were awakened to the outraged, offended cry of, "THAT'S NOT HOW DUNGEONS WORK!!!!!"

As Lori began angrily lambasting all the illogical elements of the opening scene of the story alone, Rian leaned back and smiled in the most irritating way possible.

Outside, the dragon continued to pass over Lori's Demesne, Lorian, wreaking havoc upon the world with its touch. Beneath it, the bulwark of darkness never wavered.