Demesne 160 - Images Bound In Light (Patreon)

"Lori, it's lunch time."

Lori jerked up from the page she was reading, staring at Rian standing at the doorway to her room. "How did you get up here?" she demanded.

He pointed back the way he'd come. "You forgot to seal the hallway," he said. "I think you shouldn't read that during the day, it's very distracting. I mean, I understand, it's probably full of interesting and useful things, but… uh, I'll shut up now." Ah, he finally noticed her glare.

"I'll be down momentarily," she said.

"Lori, I know what it's like to read new books too, I know that means you're skipping lunch and not coming down for dinner," Rian said.

She glared at him.

"If you're not going to eat lunch, just tell me so I can eat? I have a farm to get organized for you, and I'd rather not do it on an empty stomach."

Lori exhaled loudly—it wasn't a sigh, those let out exasperation, not make more—and would have slapped the book shut until she remembered it was her only book. "Ugh, fine. I'll eat."

"Thank you for doing me this great favor," Rian said, voice flat. "Your Bindership's generosity is boundless. Shall we?"

This time she sighed, but closed the almanac around her finger and got off the bed. "Move," she said irritably, and Rian moved back from the door, leading the way down to the dining hall. Lori followed after him still annoyed but reluctantly conceding that she was hungry after all.

There were only two bowls waiting at the table. The three were already eating, and Riz made room for Rian to sit down between her and Umu. Lori just put down ther book next to her on the bench and grabbed one of the bowls and started to eat. It was a bit lukewarm for her, but a quick binding of firewisps fixed that. Rian seemed to have no problem eating it as it was.

Lori found she was very hungry, and she concentrated on eating until her bowl was half-empty. At that point, the food had become mostly tasteless from oversaturation, and she had to take a moment's break to drink. There were two cups on the table, and she grabbed one and filled it with water from the jug.

"Oh good, I can drink now," Rian muttered, grabbing the other cup.

Lori felt a strange, vague twinge at that which reminded her vividly of her mothers. She ignored it. "Rian, I need paper," she said.

"For the pinhole?" he said.

"For the pinhole," she confirmed.

"I'll have the carpenters shave off a sheet of wood from a plank," he said. "That should be thin enough to work, and less light will leak through compared to paper."

Lori blinked. That… was actually a good idea. "Good," Lori said.

"We can probably hang a piece of wood on a rope to have something to bind the image to," Rian continued. "And you can use magic to block out the light around it so only the light from the pinhole passes through. Someone should be in there to make sure that the page we want to copy is properly centered and we'll need a really bright light so that the image is clear—"

"All right, all right, you've clearly put a lot of thought into this," Lori interrupted irritably.

"I strive to anticipate your needs," Rian said, smiling cheerfully.

"Just how much of this book did you read?"

"I only looked over it," Rian admitted. "I needed to get it packed for travel, after all. No, I asked a couple of Whisperers in a drinking hole about it and about what parts they recommended. One of them even had his own copy and showed me."

"… were you recruiting them?" Lori said, glaring at him.

"You said not to, so I didn't," Rian said. "But I figured they'd know some good tricks we could try, and they did."

Lori kept glaring at him. The annoying thing was, he was probably telling the truth. And if he wasn't…

If he wasn't…

Well, she'd deal with killing him when it came to it.

Lori broke off her glare and continued eating. "Get the carpenters on that shaving. We'll use the walls of the Dungeon."

Rian glanced at the walls. "I'll find a spot no one is using to keep score of their lima games."

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The shaving of wood was ready soon after lunch. It was ready so fast Lori suspected Rian had already had it made and had simply been waiting for her to ask for something like it. The shaving was small, about the size of her open hand, and almost literally paper thin. It felt strangely delicate in her hands, and when Rian suggested she make a bone frame around the edges so they'd have something more secure to hold it by, she immediately had him go and retrieve some bone to do just that.

He came back with a bucket of several long bones that, from their wet look, had recently been washed by being thrown into the river, one end on each broken open, revealing the marrow was gone. Thankfully, they were clean of any rot or remains.

"I just realized that we'll need something to hold the frame and the sheet steady," Rian said. "Otherwise someone is going to have to hold it up, and it don't want that to be me, especially since I don't know how long this might take. Besides, having some kind of stand or something to hold it in place would be more reliable."

…

Riz wouldn't have thought of that.

"Excellent," Lori nodded. "Now go wash your hands while I heat the rot off the bones so I don’t get sick while handling it."

"Yes, your Bindership," Rian said, putting down the bucket.

By the time he came back—again wiping his hands on his trousers—Lori had heated the bones enough to be reasonably sure it wasn't going to make her sick, and the lack of smell after she was done indicated Rian had picked well and there was no more hidden meat or marrow to decay. She reduced the bones back to body temperature and picked up one bone of them, a shoulder blade that was nice and thick, and began to bind the earthwisps in the bone so she could shape it.

She built the frame, squeezing the shaving between two bone squares and fusing the squares together where they touched. The resulting frame was… well, it worked, it was light and rigid, and it didn't deform the shaved wood sheet, which was all they needed…

The frame was mounted on a stand, also made from earthwisp-shaped bone, a simple tripod that she could fuse the bone frame to. The hole on the frame was made using the finest, narrowest needle from her sewing kit, pierced through with Rian's confident, steady hand. That done, they mounted it onto the tripod, and Rian adjusted the frame so that it was parallel to the wall they would be using to test this. The wall wasn't perfectly flat, but it was flat enough, and this was just a test to see if they could make what was described in the almanac work.

"All right, what now?" Rian asked.

Lori referred again to the almanac in her hands just to be sure, then nodded. "Now one side of the pinhole needs to be completely dark and contain the surface I'll be binding the lightwisps on, while the other side needs to contain what I'll be copying, and has to be brightly lit. It's advised that the former be at least large enough for me to be in, so I can see what I'm binding. There's a warning that what I will be copying with be upside-down and inverted, so this should only be used for images where the orientation doesn't matter."

"The Whisperer I spoke said that darkwisps are enough and that you don't need an actual room," Rian said. "They also use this for surveying, apparently."

Lori blinked, frowning. "Surveying? What's the point of using this for surveying?" Confirmation she could just use darkwisps to block out light was helpful, and she reached out across her Dungeon to start binding the darkwisps available.

"To make images of the terrain that they can bring back," Rian said. "We said they also tried this as a way of making records of contracts, but it didn't work since the binding needed to be regularly renewed, and making bound tools to preserve the image like they do in the old continent was expensive."

"That's probably an understatement," Lori said as she began moving the darkwisps towards her location. They moved instantly, not bound by limits of mass, moving where there was nothing opaque blocking the way. "Having bound images made in the old continent was expensive. Here, it must be exorbitant."

"Probably," Rian said as what seemed like a cloud of darkness began streaming from the side corridor with the treasure rooms, the water reservoir and, once she had extinguished the lightwisps there, the third level. Her lord stared at the moving darkness in fascination. He reached towards it curiously, then hesitated. "Um, is it all right that I touch it? I just… want to see what it's like?"

Lori raised an eyebrow at her lord, a small, amused smile on her face. "Go ahead," she said. "You won't feel anything, though. Darkwisps and darkness have no mass or substance, only volume. It is space absent light."

"Huh…" Rian said, waving a hand into the blackness. He spun his hand around, and seemed fascinated when it didn't alter or deform. "You're right. It just feels like normal air. If I closed my eyes, I wouldn't even know it was there. I'd have thought it would be a little colder…"

"Only in intense sunlight where lightwisps and firewisps are mixed," Lori said. "Even then, it's of little help. The substance occupying its volume would be the air already present, and that air would still be hot."

Rian shook his head. Why was he smiling like that? "That's so… strange. I mean, why is there a wisp for the absence of light? It's not because of some kind of symmetry. I mean, there aren't any coldwisps or vacuumwisps for places where there aren't any firewisps or things with solid mass?"

Lori shrugged. "That's just how Whispering works. Trying to find reasons 'why' is a task for philosophers: a waste of time and beads, and only done by people who are not qualified to do anything else. However, it is not true that darkwisps are defined only by the absence of light. They have other properties. Like glass, they act as an insulator against magic. No Whispering, Horotracting, Deadspeaking and especially Mentalism can pass through a volume of darkwisps without expending imbuement to overcome the darkwisp's own imbuement, unless they had a dedicate channel through the darkwisps like a wire or some other substance that their wisps, life, thoughts or vistas can move through. It's what I use to protect my Dungeon against dragons."

Rian frowned. "Wait, it acts like glass?" he said, eyes suddenly intent. "Like, can it do everything glass can do? Can it protect against the Iridescence?"

Lori was ready for this. Everyone always asked this. "To a limited degree," she said. She held up her arm, wrapping some darkwisps around it. "If I cover my arm like this when I leave the demesne, the darkwisps will insulate me against the colors. However, this covering is irrelevant, as my arm is still not completely covered. The colors would come in from the wrists and the elbow." Lori pulled the Darkwisps all around herself, shrouding herself completely. "To completely protect myself, I would need to completely cover myself. However, I'm sure you can see the problem with this approach."

Rian frowned, looking up and down at her. "I don't see—" He blinked. "Ah. You can't cover your eyes, or else you can't see where you're going. That's a way for the Iridescence to get in."

Lori nodded. "That can be mitigated by glass, but even then, such a binding requires constant imbuement, for the Iridescence would be constantly bearing upon it from all directions. A Whisperer would only be able to keep imbuing it for so long, and would be unable to form any sort of binding as they did so. The darkwisps would insulate them from all other wisps in their environment, and if they used a wire as a channel, it would be a way for the Iridescence to circumvent the darkwisps, rendering all this effort moot."

Lori braced herself for some sort of bright idea, some 'what about?', 'did you think about?', 'have you considered?', as if Whisperers having been thinking of the uses, applications and limitations of their own magic for centuries.

"Well, that's unfortunate," Rian sighed. "But at least I learned something new. And it sounds like this could really help us with our cargo!"

Lori blinked. What? "What?"

"Our cargo!" Rian said cheerfully. "If we pack our cargo with darkwisps, then Iridescence can't grow on it, right? At least, as long as its all completely covered. Even if it won't last for the whole trip, it'll mean we don't have to expose our cargo to water damage or wear from the holes the Iridescence pokes into things. That means we'll have, say, skins with fewer holes poked through that need to be repaired by Deadspeaking, which means we can sell it for a bit more."

Lori stared at him. "That… wouldn't work," she said. "Even if I fill, say, a jar with darkwisps, the contents will still be making contact with the sides of the jar, which will channel the Iridescence through. It will be admittedly slower transmission than if it were out in the open air, but it will still happen."

"Ah," Rian said, suddenly grinning widely. "But what if you cover the WHOLE jar, inside and out?"

"Then there would still be where the jar was in contact with the ground," Lori said.

"But what if the jar was resting on was something that insulated against Iridescence?" Rian said. "Like glass? Or ice?"

Lori blinked and suddenly stopped, staring at nothing.

"Could it work?" Rian said excitedly.

It could work. It could actually work... If it did, it meant… it meant…

It meant they could transport water and Iridescence perishable goods. Books. Paper. Food that was something other than stew in a jar.

"We will need to experiment," Lori said calmly. "Later. For now, we are already in the middle of something."

Rian blinked, then looked at the frame of bone as if he'd forgotten it was there. He actually looked embarrassed. "You're right, you're right. Sorry for getting distracted. We need to get this done first." He shook his head. "What do you need me to do now…?"

Once they were both focused again, creating the pinhole imager, as the almanac had called it, was relatively simple and quick. Lori bound the darkwisps to define a 'room', with the frame and the pinhole along one 'wall. The 'room' had only darkwisps for walls, allowing light to pass through within the 'room's' confines, but not letting any in or out except through the little pinhole. At that point, the imager was basically done, with only a few adjustments to be made for a better image.

Rian stood in front of lit side of the pinhole, holding up the almanac to the hole. His eyes were closed because all around the frame of the pinhole was a ring-shaped binding of lightwisps that cast a brilliant radiance on him and what he was holding. This, according to the almanac, was useful for a brighter image, though it also warned that adjustments needed to be made, lest the image be too bright and rendered useless. Lori, standing inside the dark side of the pinhole imager, observed the spray of light the pinhole was casting on the wall and willed the ring of light to slowly grow dimmer. The image on the wall slowly began to resolve, forming shapes and colors…

Eventually, a slightly warped image was on the wall. The cover of the book, upside-down and inverted as if it was a reflection in a mirror. It was moving, shifting as Rian adjusted his grip or moved a little to maintain his balance as he stood there patiently. The image was faint, as Lori had needed to reduce the amount of light the binding emitted so she could make out the fine details. Slowly, carefully, she bound the lightwisps streaming through the pinhole and carefully applied a variant of the binding she used to see better in the dark, as recommended by the almanac. The image on the wall grew brighter, more defined despite the contours of the wall preventing it from being perfect.

"Hand me the tablet and turn to the first image we need to copy," Lori said, her voice passing though the darkwisps to Rian. It was, as she had said, only empty air after all.

The image of the book's cover disappeared, and Lori found herself staring at her Dungeon's dining hall, if all the tables and benches hung from the ceiling. The image was clear enough, if a bit fuzzy at the edges, and things that were farther were dark, as if in deep shadow. Then the image shifted again to upside-down parts of Rian. "Here!" he said, and she stuck out her hand, feeling a flat tablet made from bone carefully placed on it. The image shifted again as Rian carefully opened the book to the first image, then held it up.

"Turn it upside down," Lori ordered. "Now closer. Closer. Closer! Wait, not that close!" The image resolved, and she adjust both bindings of lightwisps again. She held up the bone tablet, putting it in the path of the light from the pinhole. She positioned it so that the image took up most of the board and adjused the bindings again until the image was to her satisfaction. Well, almost. "Stop moving!" she told Rian. "You're off center, move back— that's too much! Good, stay there and move it up—no, the other way! There! Stay there!"

"My arms are starting to ache," Rian sighed.

"Hold a little longer!" Honestly, it was only holding up a book. It wasn't even that heavy. She was the one doing all the work. She held up the tablet again, held perfectly still, then claimed and bound the lightwisps in immediate contact with the tablet's surface. Carefully, she moved the tablet as she imbued the binding, making it glow brighter. She nodded in satisfaction as she stared at the image of the line drawing from the almanac, reproduced larger on the glowing surface of the tablet. "Done. You can relax now."

A loud sigh, almost a moan of relief followed, the image projected on the wall changing as Rian lowered his arms. Really, it wasn't that long or that heavy. "Did it work?" he asked.

"It worked," Lori said, carefully parting the darkwisps so they wouldn't abrade on the lightwisps on the tablet. "The image has been reproduced."

Rian looked at the image on the tablet with relief. Then he blinked and his eyes widened. He stared down at the almanac in his hands. With a tone of mounting dread, he asked. "How many images are we copying?"

"All of the ones about edible food and useful plants, of course," Lori said.

Rian groaned.

Why was he complaining so much? He only had to hold up the book. She was the one who was doing the real work.