Demesne 39 - Runaway (Patreon)

The day had been full and exciting, and by the end of it Lori felt gritty and unclean. Not the gritty and unclean feeling the Iridescence left, which felt like being covered in fine, needle-like sand that had managed to embed itself on your skin, slowly penetrating inside you into your brain and entrapping her body's wisps, but the other kind, made of sweat and dust and too much exertion and excitement. She had gone out to the river with one of their seel-skin buckets to get water and use that to give herself a brief scrub in the small room she was to sleep alone in, the doorless doorway blocked by darkwisps and dire threats of violence, but it just wasn't the same as a proper bath. Still, it made her stop feeling too grimy to sleep, even if she still had to wear the same clothes.

She also found that Rian was a surprisingly fierce haggler as he quibbled how much 'very little' bread amounted to. It was surprisingly a lot, almost a 1/16th wedge of a round flatbread! Ugh, the man had better guard her door properly.

When it was time to sleep, the curtain of darkwisps came up again so she wouldn't have to put up with anyone staring at her when she slept. She put it in front of the window too. It wouldn't last long, barely an hour, but it was the principle of the thing!

It took a while to fall asleep, since the darkwisps obstructed light, not sound, and so she had to listen to the talk coming from the other room, low as it was, as Deil, Tackir and Rian repeatedly tried and failed to remedy Landoor's colorbrained belief he was now Lori's heir or something until she finally put the cloud of airwisps around her to use and bound it with the darkwisps to block out sound. Only then did she manage to fall asleep.

Lori and everyone else were awakened in the middle of the night– the bindings of both the darkwisps and the airwisps had faded away– by the sound of fierce knocking on the door of the wooden house. As Lori fumbled for her staff, she heard someone stumble awake and head for the door.

"Did Grem escape?" Rian said, his sleepy and tired. "Or did Binder Shanalorre run away from home?"

Lori rubbed her eyes to clear them as a suspicious voice said. "How did you know that? Did you do something to her?"

She heard Rian sigh. "Lori, their Binder ran away from home! I'm going to help them look! That all right with you?"

"How did you know she was gone?" the suspicious voice demanded again.

"Because she's an upset little girl who's just had a terrible day and probably wants to get away from a lot of things," Rian snapped back. His good cheer had apparently been diminished by the late hour. That, or he just couldn't be bothered to put up his usual cheerful act when he'd just been woken up in the middle of the night. "Now come on before she falls into the river and drowns. You three, with me. Yes, you too Landoor, stop trying to see through your nose, Binders can't do that and real ones don't bother. Get up, there's a little girl who might be in trouble. "

For a moment, Lori considered going back to sleep and only getting up when the demesne collapsed so she could find someone to tell her where the core was. Then she sighed, sat up in the dark, and pulled on her boots over her fresh socks. Throwing on her rain coat against the chill of the night and grabbing her bag full of lengths of firewood, she stepped out of the house, following the distant sounds of people and the light from the fire that had been made near the base of the central tree. People were gathering around the fire, some trying to make torches using wood and wax. The moonlight was dim, most of it blocked by the dome of living wood above,

There were only a few lanterns, filled with seel fat and smelling because of it, which didn't really do a lot to dispel the darkness. Vaguely-familiar militiamen were directing people to form search line, sweeping from the dome and outwards up the hill, while two other groups were being directed to search along the riverbanks.

Lori breathed in, going through the familiar exercises of gathering and building up magic before she channeled them up to the lightwisps in her eyes. Carefully, she imbued them, careful to keep them in her body, and the night slowly got brighter and brighter. The formerly insufficient lamps blazed bright, and from above bright shafts of colorful moonlight glowed though openings in the dome. With everything more visible, she looked around, looking for Rian or anyone who looked vaguely like one of her people, sticking to the shadowed edges of the crowd. She found that idiot Landoor, standing around looking lost and ignorant and not paying attention to the voices giving directions, one of the other men with him, who was paying attention. Granted, Lori wasn't either, but she wouldn't be searching with the group.

Eventually she saw Rian, walking quickly back from the direction of the river. He walked up to the militiamen organizing everyone with something closer to his usual self-confidence and assurance. "We checked our boat," she heard him say as she got closer. "It's still there, so she didn't use that to get away. I have one of my men stay with it, just in case. I looked as best as I could, but I couldn't see any signs that someone might have fallen in the water."

"Let's hope she didn’t'", a vaguely familiar man said gruffly. "Demesne's still up, so good chance she's not in the river. Get ready to move, we'll start with a house by house search and then sweep up into the woods."

"I'll see if I can beg for some better lights from my Binder," Rian said.

"Better you than me," the man said.

"She's much nicer once you get to know her," Rian lied, thought Lori couldn't understand why.

Rian stepped away from the man, looking through was must have been confusing light and shadows. Lori stayed exactly where she was, standing next to an empty house at the edge of the space. Finally, Rian seemed to spot her, and began walking towards were she was standing.

"There you are," Rian said. "I don't suppose you have any magic that can conveniently solve this problem, do you?"

"Why would you think that?" Lori asked, confused.

"I don't, but I felt I had to ask in the infinitesimal chance the answer was yes." He seemed to have managed to recover his mask of good cheer and enthusiasm. "I think I managed to convince them that we have nothing to do with this. Though it would help if you'd shed a little light on the situation."

Lori gave him a withering look. He just smiled.

She reached to her side for one of the lengths of firewood, handing it to him. "Light the end of this and get back to me," she said.

Rian grabbed it and did just that, coming back with… well, it could be considered on fire. Little flames were licking on the wood, but it was hot and that was what mattered. She took it and held her staff diagonally, touching the fitful flames to the coalcharm on the end of her staff, which was in turn connected to the wire that ran along its whole length. Lori breathed in, gathering magic and passing it through her core, her muscles, out her hand and through the wire. At the last moment, she remembered to close her eyes with its bound lightwisps before binding the firewisps in the wood and causing them to burn.

The temperature of the firewisps shot up substantially, fueled by the magic she'd imbued, and the end burst into open flame, consuming the fuel available to it to feed the sudden heat.

Eyes closed, still breathing, Lori drew in magic, filling her lungs again and bringing the magic up to her eyes. She let the binding there dissolve as she pressed the staff to her face, pressing the wire to the thin curtain of her eyelids. Magic flowed through the wire of her staff and into the blazing light of the flame, and began gathering and binding the lightwisps emanating from the flame to her will. The end of the crude torch started to blaze with light, so bright she could see it through her eyelids.

"Nothing to see here folks, just a little magic," she heard Rian say as she kept imbuing with magic so it would last some time. "Why are you looking here? There's a little girl out there who needs help, remember?"

Finally, she pulled the staff away from her eyes, warily opening them to see the bright torch of light she'd bound to the end of the length of wood, which was still fitfully burning at the end. "Here," she said. "Is this enough light for you?"

"Is there any way you can have all the light going in one direction?" Rian said. "So that, you know, I don't blind myself using it?"

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The lightwisps now bound to send light in a cone so that Rian, as he said, wouldn't blind himself using it, the search parties went off, Rian and three others equipped with torches of bound lightwisps as they went traipsing through the dark.

Lori, of course, didn't join them. She might hurt herself, after all, which would be terrible for Lori's Demesne. And if that girl died suddenly, then who would claim this demesne in her stead? Obviously, the safest place for Lori was to stay behind.

She'd gotten a lot of colorful looks at that, but so what? It wasn't like what those people thought mattered.

Not that she was the only one who'd stayed. Several of the younger people had stayed behind to watch over the children and get the ones who'd woken up from the excitement to go back to sleep. Neither of the doctors had gone with the search parties, Binder Shanalorre's uncle among them. She'd gotten a very colorful look from him in particular before he resorted to pacing around the bonfire in the front of the tree. The other doctor, a much less cantankerous man, had found a place to sit down on one of the stairs of branches around the central tree and had gone back to sleep, seemingly confident that if someone was injured enough they needed him, they'd wake him up. Very intelligent fellow, that one.

Lori had found her own place to sit, her back to one of the wooden houses, trying to stay awake since without Rian she didn't want to risk sleeping. At least she'd gone to sleep early, as was her custom, and so she was actually fairly well rested right then, even if she wanted to go back to bed and sleep the remaining night away.

She stared up at the central tree, covered in strange, shifting shadows from the light of the moons shining through the dome of interwoven branches above. In one of the artificial, Deadspoken bulges on the tree that were being used for living space, a light shown from a window, probably some kind of candle. People had climbed up and down the tree, systematically searching every each of the built levels for the Dungeon Binder, before dispersing to do a door to door search of all the buildings that Lori hadn't bothered to join. The fact there didn't come back with the girl in question meant it was a smart decision, for the search would have just been a waste of energy on her part.

In her opinion, it was a futile endeavor. Binder Shanalorre no doubt possessed some kind of awareness of the demesne that would allow her to know where everyone was, and could use that to hide accordingly. It would be a simple matter of her hiding where no one had been yet, then going around them to where they'd already searched. They wouldn't find Shanalorre if she really didn't want to be found. Everyone was hopeful she could be found, however. After all, the Demesne was still up.

Still, Lori had to wonder: where could she be? The Dungeon Core? The Vyshke woman and her husband had said they had checked there– implying it was within the dome, and possibly under the main tree– and hadn't found her, although she really wasn't sure if that man actually would tell anyone if he found his niece…

Lori yawned, then grimaced and stood, pacing back and forth herself to stay awake. She stayed away from the pacing doctor. Beyond the dome, she saw the light's she'd made sweeping back and forth piercing through the darkness. People were still searching, then. She shook her head. If this were her demesne, they'd have found the girl already.

But then again, if this were her demesne, the girl might not have had reason to run away. She'd have just been an ordinary girl. All right, she'd have been a Savant, and one who'd lost her parents, but she wouldn't have mattered.

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Eventually, the sun rose. The Dungeon Binder had not yet been found.