Weekly Digest 74- (#227 - #229) (Patreon)

Back to Work

"Well, you're in a good mood," Rian said as she arrived to breakfast the next day.

"Rest is over. Time to get back to work," Lori said as she sat down.

Rian nodded with a smile as Umu sat next to him, pressed up against his side. Lori analyzed the smile, but it wasn't any of the permutations she knew… not that she could really remember them very well unless they were right in front of her. But if they weren't coming to mind, then it wasn't any of them! Ugh, how do people do this?

"Wonderful!" he said. "Well, if you're willing, I'd like to discuss with you how you can most efficiently contribute to constructing this flood barrier your Bindership."

"Rian, it's a flood barrier. I just need to make a stone wall that doesn't leak."

Rian's smile grew a little bigger, and now it was the smile he made when he was being deliberately annoying. "That sounds time consuming. When are you going to have the time for going to the edge and expanding the demesne like you usually do?"

Lori shrugged. "It will have to be delayed until I finish this project," she said. She knew how long it took her to build something. Oh sure, she could use earthwisps to move stone, but she couldn't just dump it into place and then walk away. She had to anchor it, make sure it didn't leak, shape it properly... everything took time.

"Ah. If only you had a reliable lord who could come up with plans and schedules and organize things for you to help you make the best use of the skills of the people whose names and skills you don't know."

Lori gave him a flat look. "Well, instead I have you."

"Ouch. That actually hurt. Come on, just hear me out."

Of course she would. Didn't she always? No matter how stupid the ideas were…

"All right, fine. What is your idea to let me continue with expansion and bead production while still building the flood barrier?"

"First, I should point out you really can't build the flood barrier yet," Rian said. "Since we didn't actually have anywhere to take it to after we dug it up, there's still piles dirt on the site next to trenches that go down to the bedrock. All that soil needs to be removed, and you can't move that soil yourself because you'll ruin it for planting. So my first recommendation is for you to designate and excavate a large new plot in the dungeon farm. We can carry down the soil into the dungeon farm so it doesn’t' go to waste while at the same time clearing the area for you to be able to work."

He was unfortunately right about what would happen if she moved the soil. And it wouldbe useful for the farm… "Fine," Lori said, nodding in agreement. "I'll excavate a new plot in the third level for the soil to go into. We can't actually plant in it, since that will require more preparation for the drainage, but it can store the soil for the time being, and we can just prepare it into a plot later. "

Rian nodded. "Of course, you won't actually be able to build while that's happening, since there will be a lot of people carrying the soil on carts and buckets back and forth, and it would just slow them down if you made them keep stopping to let you through with stone to make the flood barrier, so best to let them finish first before you begin. So you have plenty of time to go to the edge and make some beads, and maybe even expand the demesne." He smiled widely.

Lori sighed but she had to admit that he had a point. Moving anything with that much mass was dangerous, and doing so through traffic was just asking for someone to get injured. "I see your point," she said grudgingly. "I'll excavate the third level after breakfast. Prepare the sled so we can leave as soon as I'm done. How much soil is there to move?"

"Well, I'm not an expert, but… a lot?" At her glare, he shrugged. "It's not like we kept count of how many buckets. There's just a big pile of dirt where the snow's been cleared. You'd be better at estimating how much storage it needs."

Lori rolled her eyes and stood. The kitchen was only just starting to get ready to start serving breakfast, and she could already see Riz and Mikon in waiting in line for food. "I'll go look at it now, then."

"I'll go with you," Rian said, rising himself.

Lori waved dismissively, and Rian fell into step behind her as she headed for her Dungeon's entrance. "What else have you come up with?"

"Remember when we added the extensions to the chimneys?" Rian said. "When we couldn't risk you climbing up to the roof?"

"Yes…"

"Remember how you made softened stone that the stonemasons could work using their tools?"

"Yes?"

Rian nodded. "If you could see your way to softening some stone for us, we could help you with building the flood barrier. We can move a lot of stone with the shovels and carts."

Lori snorted as they passed through her Dungeon's open doors, ignoring the people coming in who stepped out of her way. Rian smiled and nodded at them. "Rian, while I appreciate that manpower is the most efficient way to move soil, it's not the same for stone. It's much more efficient for me to bind the stone and move it myself. I can move all the stone I need to flood barrier in one morning."

"I think you're underestimating how much weight we can move and carry."

"No, I am correctly estimating how strong the shovels we have are. Its beast bone bound around wooden sticks, not metal. The shovels will break from the weight," Lori said as they entered the ice tunnel and turned towards the opening towards the river bank. She could see that the floor of the tunnel was covered with dirt and globs of mud. "And even if they didn't, how are they supposed to get the stone up the stairs in any sort of timely manner? In buckets? That would take far too long, and we can't use carts because it will need to go up, not down. Focus on digging and moving the soil."

Rian sighed but nodded as they walked past the snow melter. "Yes, your Bindership."

When they exited the tunnel, Lori finally saw what Rian had been having people do yesterday. There was a light coating of snow on everything, but most of the ground was relatively clear. Well, save for the mud and piles of dirt that were only partly mud. Lori walked confidently, solidifying the waterwisps in the few patches of wet mud under her feet to make them firmer and keep mud off her feet as she walked around to get a better sense of how much dirt there was.

A trench had been dug in a line leading from the cliff face of the hill her dungeon's first level was inside. The trench was a pace or so wide, and more or less paralleled the river. She could see that the trench grew deeper and deeper as it moved away from the hill as the bedrock kept sloping downward, and there was still soil in it in some places. The trench was not yet complete, as there was still no trench between the laundry area and the shelter, just some markers made of bone stuck into the ground.

Her awareness of the wisps was just good enough to be able to differentiate between the bedrock and the soil—soil had more waterwisps and airwisps interspersed among them—so she was able to make judgement how much more soil there was still to dig. Most of those waterwisps was cold ice, though they melted into water the deeper underground it was. Still, it made the topmost layer very solid..

"Well?" Rian asked, shivering in place and standing with his hands in his armpits. His nose had already started to drip and ugh! "What do you think?"

"I think I'll have to dig up a long plot in the Dungeon farm," Lori said. "Possibly three."

"Three?"

"Two for storing the soil, and the third that needs to be prepared for becoming a farm plot so the soil has somewhere to go," she said. Preparing that farm plot wouldn't be easy. While she could theoretically still set of explosions of steam in the third level to reduce stone down into rocks of the right size for setting up the drainage for the farm plots, it would require a lot of preparation. However, the steam, even brief moments of it, would almost certainly be harmful to their crops. She would have to find another way to turn the stone she had on hand into appropriately sized rocks… "Is this all?"

"No, there's still a lot of soil to dig up," Rian said. "We've marked it out, but the serious digging is starting from the hill and making its way down. Without anywhere to really put the soil except in piles next to the trench."

Lori nodded absently. "I'll soften the soil," she said. "And put up some bindings for warmth. I'm done resting."

"We, your freezing cold subjects whose sweat freeze on their skin, kneel at your magnificence and worship at your feet at your benevolence."

"You're standing, not kneeling."

"I'll kneel as soon as I'm not so freezing cold the stuff dripping from my nose is no longer turning solid on my chin."

Oh, that was disgusting!

He did kneel when they got back to her Dungeon, though.

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After breakfast, Lori got to work. Setting a binding to provide warmth was simple, and she was able to serve two purposes at once by binding to firewisps to the very soil that was going to be dug up. That warmed the ground enough for the water to melt so it could be dug up, put the heat near the people who needed it, and ensured that no one accidentally stood inside a binding of firewisps and killed themselves by elevating the internal temperature of their bodies, since the binding would move with the soil.

She was aware that this meant that the Dungeon farm would start to get hotter as soil was brought into it, but she could deal with that at the end of the day. After that, she went down to the third level to excavate the plot where the soil would be stored. Making the stone flow out of the ground was a familiar exercise, and soon there was a deep, rectangular trench in the ground. She left the excavated stone in the third level for the time being, sticking it in one of the unfinished excavation corridors that didn't really have anything in it. After all, it wasn't like she needed the material right then.

Once the excavated plot was ready, people began bringing the soil down to the third level, carrying it in buckets being supported on poles to carry multiple ones at a time, and litters like the ones they used for carting latrine out of the dungeon. From the lack of smell, it probably wasn't the same ones.

While this was going on, Lori was able to go to the edge of the demesne to make beads. The plans for making Lori's Boat into a sled had yet to materialize, and she was fairly sure it was unlikely to any time soon. Rian either hadn't been able to come up with anything, or he was just too busy to work on the design.

The cold that slammed into her was as brutally uncomfortable as it always was, but fortunately the jar full of Iridescence was easy to find, and the added it had meant there was a little more of the nauseatingly colorful crystals inside the container than usual. This time she had remembered to make the bindings for the beads inside her demesne and imbued them while she was on the sled, so that by the time she got to the edge, all she had to do was take the imbued binding outside and claim the colors with it. Prepared like the, the process was much faster, and she was able to make several bead in rapid succession, not even needing to wait for beads to finish forming to make more.

It allowed her to see how two beads forming too close to one another behaved. In hindsight, it was a test she should have conducted sooner, or at least have thought of at all, but it was only while seeing all those beads growing inside the jar did she realize that she had not had the opportunity to note such behavior before. The beads seemed to repelled each other when they formed. Lori had watched as two beads amalgamating next to each other while pressed on all side actually managed to push on each other enough to pop into the air once there was room for the pressure to release.

She'll have to remember not to put more than one amalgamating bead into an enclosed mold or anything of the sort… as well as test how much pressure two beads repelling each other could generate. Could the pressure of beads repelling each other actually be used to exert enough pressure on the beads to crack their outer shells?

Something to think about…

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Rolling Stones

"Rian," Lori said as she deactivated the bindings on the air jet, "I need workers for a project."

Rian blinked, pausing in the middle of wiping his nose with his towel and ugh, that was disgusting, and he was going to wrap that thing back around his face too! "Er, sure. I'll ask around."

Riz's friend immediately made herself scarce, just barely evading the hand Riz reached out to try and grab her.

Lori nodded. "I'll need two or three people, no particular skills beyond being able to follow orders and use their hands. They will need to have their own leather gloves in relatively good condition, and good arm strength." If not, she'd have to provide either heating or cooling, which could be… well, it might require her to set up more bindings. "Not Landoor."

"That should be easy," Rian said as Riz looked conflicted. "When do you need them?"

"Now. Tell them to meet me near the laundry area, I just need to go retrieve something."

Riz seemed to settle whatever internal conflict she had, because she turned and immediately made herself scarce.

"I'll see what I can do," Rian said, turning. "Riz, could you— huh. I could have sworn she was just there." He looked perplexed for a moment, then shrugged. "Guess she had something to do… oh, well. I'll see who I can find, your Bindership, though it would help if I can tell them what you need them for."

"I need them to roll rocks," Lori said.

"Ah. How suitably vague of you."

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"Oh. You literally meant roll rocks," Rian said.

Lori stood outside the laundry area, on the stretch of ground that in warmer days would have been full of poles and washing lines full of clothes drying. Now, however, it was merely a relatively flat, snow-covered area, her snow pads letting her stand without sinking… much. The snow beneath her was slowly melting from the subtle warmth around her body. She'd have to move soon before she sank.

In front of her was a block of bound ice, of a height and smoothness to use as a table. The top was mostly level, because she'd turned it into water for a moment before freezing and binding it again. Next to the table was a pile of softened stone she'd gotten from the stone stockpile. The pile lay next to the ice block table, on which Lori was rolling a mass of softened stone.

"Yes. I said so, didn't I?" Lori said. The rock she was handling like bread dough was about the size of two fists put together, and was cool on her hands. She let the vaguely rounded mass of stone slip out over the edge of the block away from the mass of softened stone, dissipating the binding on it as she did so. "Or at the very least, assist me in figuring out the most efficient way of turning—what is she doing here?"

The brat stood next to Rian, along with two young men she didn't recognize, which was everyone. One had blue hair, while the other had dark green hair. Lori pegged them as Blue and Green.

"I asked for volunteers, they volunteered," Rian said with a shrug. "Karina was insistent about volunteering."

Karina waved. "Hello, Wiz Lori."

Lori grunted, looking at the brat intently. "Do they all have gloves?"

"Uh, no. Most of those with gloves suited for work are currently working and wearing them," Rian said. He raised his own hands. "Even I don't have gloves, I just borrow a pair sometimes from one of Riz's friends, and not very often at that."

Lori scowled, looking down at the block of ice she'd prepared.

"What exactly were you going to make them do?" Rian asked.

"I wasgoing to have them roll the stone into rocks so we'd have a supply of properly sized rocks for the drainage of the new plots in the Dungeon farm," Lori said, "but if they don't have gloves, then it would be too cold for them to handle the stone in this weather." It would be far more time-consuming than using explosions to blast sheets of rocks into smaller rocks, but it wasn't like they didn't have time and many people not doing anything.

"Couldn't you just… warm the stones?" Rian said as the three looked back and forth between the two of them. "I mean, you could, right?"

"Yes, but if the stones are warm, they'd melt the snow."

"Why is it important they not melt the snow?"

Lori gestured at the snow at her feet impatiently. "After the stones are rolled, they need to be put on the snow so they don't stick and clump together before I can undo the binding that makes them malleable. If they're warm, they'll melt through the snow."

"Ah, so the stone is softened stone, got it. You forgot to mention that."

…oh. She had, hadn't she?

"Well, the stone has been softened," she said, poking the pile of softened stone next to her. Her finger sank easily as if it were dough, if particularly hard dough. "The plan was to have them pull off stone from the pile like this." She sank her hand into the softened stone, pulling out a chunk. It was cool in her hands, which probably meant it was freezing. "Then they roll it with their hands like this—" she rolled it around in her hands, then put it down on the surface of the ice block and used the surface to help shape the softened stone into a roughly round shape, creating a sort of dome, "—and when it's shaped, they were supposed to put it on the ground until I can get around to removing the binding that softens it."

"And this is important, because…?"

Lori rolled her eyes. "Because otherwise the stones would stick to each other since I can't keep watching all the time to remove the binding from every individual stone as soon s they're done. They'll need the room to lay them out," she said, taking two more handfuls of softened stone and demonstrating. The stone did, in fact, fuse on contact because of the binding they both shared.

Rian nodded. "All right, I understand. Just one question, then."

Lori sighed. She'd explained the process as simply and clearly as she could. "What?"

"Can't you just bind the snow to not melt?"

Lori stared at Rian. Then she looked down at the stone at her feet, full of waterwisps.

Ugh, she hated it when he had a point.

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Rian's suggestion, annoyingly correct as it was, required some more infrastructure to set up. Snow had to be gathered in sufficient amounts—though that wasn't exactly hard—bound to not melt, imbued, then compressed by walking all over them to tamp them down. The surface needed to be malleable and textured enough so the stones wouldn't slid around after they were laid out, or else she'd have just used ice. Fortunately, she didn't have to do the first and last parts, though the brat had to be cautioned not to be so energetic about it lest she slip.

Once bound, the snow, like the ice, was actually not at all cold to the touch, since the binding kept them from exchanging heat with the environment around them. Combined with the firewisps she added to the binding of earthwisps that softened the stone, and the volunteer's hands were actually very warm as they worked. Lori showed them how to shape the softened stone on the block of ice to the dimensions and shape needed, which was also not cold because of the binding on it. Still, the minute heat from the stones was enough to melt the occasional bits of snow that got blown onto the block, the surface of which soon had a layer of water that rendered it frictionless.

With the three volunteers, Rian, and Lori herself, they went through the pile of stone she'd taken from the stockpile surprisingly quickly. Once everyone knew what they had to do, it only took them a few moments and gestures to get the stone to size and then down on the bed of bound snow before they were ripping of more softened stone from the pile.

Lori soon found herself too occupied to form the rocks herself. She was too busy removing the bindings on the finished rocks and going back to get more softened stone from the stockpile. It was only possible to move small amounts since she had to take it through the tunnels in the little windows of time when no one was bringing soil down to the Dungeon farm, and she also had to squeeze it past the back laundry area. Fortunately, there weren't many people doing their laundry.

The four moved quickly. So quickly, in fact, that Rian had to stop helping make rocks and find more people to move the finished rocks away so the three could have more space to put down any further rocks they made. Soon they had more volunteers whose job was to remove the rocks—after Lori had removed the bindings softening them—off the beds of bound snow and eventually just start carrying down to the third level to store them.

When noon and lunch came, they had a surprisingly large pile of rocks in the third level, a total of five volunteers making rocks, and as many more moving the finished stones out of the way and carrying them to the third level. It was not yet enough to for a plot—they'd need smaller and smaller rocks—but it was surprising progress for half a morning. If they continued on into the afternoon, and maybe got more workers… well, they'd have enough large rocks for the bottom layer of a plot's drainage.

"This… was surprisingly more labor intensive and efficient than I thought it would be," Lori said, sitting down heavily on her bench.

"You want to make it faster, just form the stone out into a long roll and have someone go from one end to the other cutting it to size with a shovel," Rian groaned. Next to him, Mikon put an arm across his shoulders as she patted him comfortingly. Normally Lori would have chided him for exaggerating his tiredness, since all he did was run around looking for people to do the real work. However, as Lori had spent her time running around getting stone, removing bindings from stone, then turning seemingly immediately as the stone she'd gotten turned out not to be enough and she had to get more, she instead could only sympathize.

It was a truly bizarre sensation. Usually people were too idiotic to sympathize with.

Lori actually took a moment to consider the method Rian proposed. "It would sink into the snow," she said, closing her eyes tiredly.

"So turn the snow into ice and make some kind of channel or rest in the middle for the stone to go into."

"Too imprecise," she countered. "No quality control for the rock's size. No real way to make sure the pieces don't stick together while the person cutting moves on."

Rian grunted. "The shape doesn't have to be perfect," he said, "but I suppose I can understand how it would be hard to keep the pieces from sticking after they've been cut." He sighed. "Pour snow over the stone before cutting to act as a separator coating?"

Lori considered that. It sounded annoyingly doable. "I'll consider it." She barely strangled the urge to sigh herself. "Tell everyone we're done for the day and to take all the finished rocks to the third level. We'll start again tomorrow. I'll see if I can make the process more efficient." A scowl came over her face as she realized something. "It might be simpler to set up the work down in the third level. We'll have ready access to more stone, and the rocks can immediately go into a storage plot. The volunteers moving the rocks won't have to go as far… " Moving snow bound to not melt would be simple enough, and if they needed more… well, it was downhill, they could bring down a whole cart of snow.

"I'm sure they'll enjoy being completely warm," Rian said. "You might actually get more volunteers than you'll be able to use. Will you be doing those preparations today or tomorrow? You still haven't expanded the demesne today, right?"

"Maybe later today. Or tomorrow," Lori sighed. "Something to do while the soil is being dug up… How much longer will that be?"

"It should be done tomorrow or the day after," Rian said. "We're going to have to leave a stretch undone so that people can reach the laundry area."

"No, dig it out anyway," Lori said. "I'll start there and dump stone for people to walk on. Less disruption that way."

"I'll tell people this afternoon. Hopefully, I can get people to get all their laundry done before then so we don't have a bunch of people trying to jump over or go back and forth while we're digging."

Lori grunted. "Find more volunteers as well. If we're lucky, we'll be able to prepare a surplus of rocks for farming plots before the thaw happens. Ugh, we should have been doing this before now!" So many days of winter, wasted!

"It's not like we'd have had the soil before now," Rian said. "We live, we learn, we'll be ready for next winter and all the other winters to come. Relax, Lori. We're here for the rest of our lives. Let's not cut those lives short by working too hard."

"You just want to procrastinate," she accused.

"Only a little," he admitted cheerfully.

Lori sighed. Rian might be the least idiotic of her idiots… but he was still one of her idiots.

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Building The Flood Barrier

The next day, production of the rocks for making the farm plot drainage continued, this time in the third level. Lori began preparing it after breakfast. Snow had to be bound to not melt and brought down, to act as a protective coating on the rocks to keep them from sticking to each other. In fact, they had enough volunteers that they could have people whose job was to keep the rocks from sticking to each other, and signal her when there were enough rocks that needed their binding removed.

A disquieting number of the volunteers were the children and after having the brat talk to them, the ones whose parents had made them volunteer were removed, causing several others who were there because they thought their participation was required to leave as well. In the end, only the brat and a few others remained. While the brat still insisted she chose to volunteer, the others were staying because they liked handling the softened stone, regarding it as playing for some reason. Children were very strange.

Halfway through the morning, Lori had the volunteers forming smaller rocks the size of a fist, since the bottom of the pit that would be a farm plot had gotten full. She herself was busy keeping everyone supplied with softened stone and removing the bindings on the rocks the volunteers had already formed.

While this was happening, the excavation of the soil continued. Lori would glance up every time a group came down to the third level with buckets and carts and cargo litters of soil, which was dumped into a separate pit that she had excavated of stone. She eventually need to dig more pits for the soil, since the first one had gotten full and there seemed to still be more being carried down.

Between the rocks that were being made and the soil, they had enough material for several more farm plots. While it was far too late to plant more vigas this season, according to Rian, who'd talked to farmers, they'd be ready in time for the next season's vigas crop. The bulk of their vigas would still be grown and harvest outside, but apparently the Dungeon farm would be enough by itself to supply the starting seed for those crops by itself now, with perhaps a bit left over.

Speaking of which, apparently the vigas in the farm would need to be harvested soon…

Where had all this work been hiding that she hadn't realized they needed to be done before now?

At lunch, she went up and out to see the progress on the excavation, and reposition the bindings. While there were fewer piles of dirt around, and the ground where the work was being done was being kept clear of snow, there was still soil that needed to be dug up. The bindings that provided heat to the ground and people needed to be moved though, since the progression of the work meant that where people were had moved. Fortunately, that was simple enough.

"How much longer before you're done," Lori asked Rian as they ate. Ah, bread, so nice and warm and delicious…

"We should be done by tomorrow" Rian said. "I'll have to ask people who know better than me to be sure, but if it's just digging, then yeah, tomorrow or the day after at the rate we're going, if we don't suffer another collapse. We've had to slow down to pack in the sides so they don't collapse into the trench. Normally the correct thing to do is to build supports to hold the walls of the trench in place, but that would take up planks and we simply can't waste them for something like this."

"If it will get you done faster, I can bind the ground to keep it from collapsing."

"Uh, wouldn't that ruin the soil? Isn't that the reason the soil needs to be dug up manually?"

"It would if I bound the earthwisps. Binding the waterwisps won't be as problematic. The ground is already frozen, after all, it just needs to stay that way. Isn't that why you need to warm it before you can dig?"

Rian groaned and sighed at the same time. "Ugh, right… I forgot about that. If you please, your Bindership? It would be very helpful… "

"I'll inspect the area after lunch, before I expand the demesne," Lori said dismissively.

"I'll tell your rock rollers they're done for the day, then?"

Lori rolled her eyes. "Rian, even I can do that much." It was easy to talk to people when you just stated things in a loud voice and didn't look at anyone.

"Aw… some day you won't even need me anymore…" Rian sniffed theatrically—because nothing was dripping down his nose, so he had to just be acting—rubbing at his eyes like he was crying. "You'll be able to talk to people all by yourself and remember their names…"

"That's never going to happen," Lori said flatly.

"It will once you get Mentalism. Then you'll always be able to remember everyone's names and faces. Forever."

Lori twitched. On the one hand, a occasionally problematic shortcoming of hers would finally stop complicating her interactions. On the other hand… people were annoying.

Mentalists could always remember. She wondered if they had a way to forget…?

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As Rian said, it took two days to finish excavating all the soil, although this included getting the soil that had been dug up out of the building site and down to the third level.

In that time, Lori had her volunteers reduce the size of the rocks they were making once more. By the time soil—although it was more mud, most of the time—was no longer being carried down to the third level, they had managed to finish preparing the drainage for a farming plot. Large rocks at the bottom, smaller rocks on top, then even smaller rocks on top of that, then some stone slabs spaced to let water through but keep the soil separate from the rocks until it could all pack down enough to not fill up the gaps between the rocks. Finally there was the topmost layer of soil and desiccated latrine waste mix. Lori had opened a hole in the side of the plot to connect it with the other plots so that excess water could drain out to the drainage cistern.

It was probably what she'd be doing once she finished with the flood barrier, getting more rocks for the farm plot drainage produced. The soil would still have to be dealt with, after all.

After all the delays from the digging, and her own frustrations with the project that she was able to admit might have been more a result of tiredness rather than actual difficulties, raising up a flood barrier was almost… comfortable. The familiar activity of building a structure with stone and earthwisps allowed her to relax, even if the barrier she would be building would be radically different from what she had built previously.

Her flood barrier could not simply be a stone wall of the sort she had made before, a raised vertical plane of stone like the walls she had built for houses and the entryway of her Dungeon. The problem with trying to wall off water was that your wall didn't just have to be strong enough to hold back the water in contact with it. Any single point of such a wall had to hold back the weight of not just the water on the same level as it, but the weight of all the water abovethat point as well, which was pressing its weight down on the water below it as well as against the wall.

This meant that there would be more force being exerted at the bottom of any barrier holding back water than at the top. Logically, that meant the bottom part of the wall had to be thicker to hold back the greater weight.

So instead of a wall with a rectangular cross section, Lori had to build a wall with a triangular one. Well, technically a trapezoidal one. And it couldn't be a tall, narrow trapezoid either, but a trapezoid with a broad base and a wide angle at its peak. It would also result in a wall that would be at least as wide at that base than it was tall, meaning there was a limit to how high she could make the barrier.

Thankfully, the discolorations and other marks on the cliff wall facing the river gave them an indicator of the historical average height of the river's flooding, and it was… well, it was well below her Dungeon's current entrance, but that was only the average. There could be brief periods that were much, much higher, and she had to build accordingly.

Fortunately, making a wall twice as high as the average indicated on the cliff wall wasn't too much of a problem. The height indicated was a pace above the river's usual water level for most of the year, a wall two and a bit paces tall was simple enough to make.

Lori started construction by filling in the excavated trench with stone excavated from the plots in the third level. After all, the volume of the trench should be similar to the volume of the stone, even with all the stone that had been used to make rocks for drainage, because the stone had come from the plots that she had made to hold all the soil from the trench. Probably more. They hadn't exactly wasted time tamping down the mud and soil that had been dumped into the plots, after all.

Even so, she still had to draw some stone from her stockpile next to the passageway into her dungeon. Technically, it was no longer so much an actual pile as a permanent stone bulwark over the front of her dungeon, but it was still where she dumped all the stone she'd excavated unto she needed to use it for something, because that way it was ready in case of a dragon. She'd have liked to think that much mass wasn't really needed to protect her Dungeon anymore, since they'd already survived twice with a defensive bulwark of far less, but someday a dragon might drop a full grown islandshell on them…

Yes, best to have a lot of stone between them and outside, just in case.

Filling in the stone foundation that had formerly been a trench took two days of work. Lori had to do it one batch at a time so that there wasn't so much mass moving as to be dangerously uncontrollable, and had to remove all air and water bubbles inside the stone before setting it into place to ensure there were no structural weak points. By the end of the second day of work, however, the foundation had been set, a solid extension of the underground bedrock that would be able to securely anchor and stone structure she build on top of it.

During this time, Lori had forgone making any more beads, as she wanted to get this finished as soon as possible for her own peace of mind. Expanding the demesne was also curtailed, as she was simply too tired to be able to stay awake to perform the steps. She told herself the sooner the flood barrier was finished, the sooner she could go back to doing both.

Once the stone foundation was in place, she stared building the wall atop it, starting from the cliff face closest to the river, where the weathering of the stone and slight discolorations helped indicate how high the water could normally rise. Beyond the shape of the wall she was making, it was the same familiar exercise.  Binding earthwisps to soften stone, then moving the stone to where it needed to be by making it ripple and undulate like a soft tube filled with fluid, before fusing it with the stone-filled trench so that it was one contiguous stone structure.

Unlike her usual method of construction, where she just raised up the wall in a line, she had to construct the wall while moving from her starting point down the length of the stone foundation to help her build to a more-or-less consistent shape with her stone-shaping tool and Whispering. Every so often she had to measure the height of the wall, measure the width of the base, grimace, and then get more stone to widen the base and by extension add more mass to the slopes of the walls. It was slow work, since the material she had to move amounted to less overall wall length than it normally did.

Usually, this sort of pace wouldn't bother her. Her projects were finished when they were finished. However, with every passing day, the time grew closer and closer to a sudden shift in temperature that would result in the river turning back to water. And while she could use her Whispering to keep the river frozen—she had to stop for a moment as she realized that, yes, actually keeping a river frozen was something she could just do now—it would only be the portion of the river within her demesne. They would still be flooded as water came down from upstream, and without the well-worn path of the river to guide it, the water would go everywhere, spreading out from its usual path, likely leading to a worse flood if it just simply flowed over the frozen river…

On the afternoon of the second day after she finished the foundation and started building the wall proper, with what looked like less than a tenth of the wall done, Lori had to admit this was project was probably going to take longer than she was comfortable with. The greater mass needed for the wall, the necessity of shaping to have the proper cross-section so that it could withstand the weight of flood waters, it was all slowing her down far more than she thought it would. She could probably move faster if she was less careful but…

No. She was notgoing to let her Dungeon flood. If she wasn't careful, she was going to end up with a break and the wall and all the work would have been for nothing. Their vigas was stored in the lower levels of her Dungeon now, as were all the carpentry tools. No. No, she couldn't let it flood.

Yet, she couldn't just leisurely build it at her own pace, either. Shanalorre had said the child had been born on the 34thof first storm. The 34th day of the new year. That meant winter was going to end in about 30 days or so. That was the problem. For all she knew, it would suddenly start getting warm enough for everything to begin thawing next week. Or three days from now.  Or five weeks from now. She didn't really know when winter really started to end in this region, and neither did anyone else. So the flood barrier had to be finished as soon as possible

Lori sighed. While there was probably a way to build this wall while maintaining the necessary building standard… she couldn't think of how. And there were too many things that needed her attention for her to be stuck building this for a week and half, even if she could risk taking that long.

She was going to have to ask for help—

"Lori, it's lunch time."

She turned to find Rian, bundled up in his winter rope with his towel wrapped around his face. Just looking at him, it was hard to tell if the season was getting any warmer, since he'd been wearing the same thing at the first fall of snow.

"Rian," she said, nodding at him, "I need help building the flood wall."

She was going to kick him in the shins if any of the annoying smiles made an appearance.

He tilted his head to an exaggerated degree, which was probably a deliberate choice since the towel kept most of his face hidden. "What, really? You seem to be doing fine to me. Though… well, I suppose the surface of the wall isn't as even as it usually is, for you…?"

"It looks like a child tried to make a sweetened egg foam treat." The surface of the stone was uneven, and surfaces she'd thought had been flat… weren't.

"I'm going to guess that child was you," Rian said. "Well, appearance aside, did it at least taste good?"

"It tasted like egg with sugar,"  Lori said, frowning at the memory.

"You didn't fold it enough, did you? You're supposed to fold in air until the texture changes, that's why it's foam and not just egg."

"Enough about sweetened egg foam treats!" Lori wondered if there was anyone in the demesne who knew how to make it with honey if they could get their hands on some eggs… "I need to get all this done faster without compromising the flood barrier's effectiveness. As it is, it's going to take far longer than I am comfortable with to build it by myself."

Rian raised an eyebrow. "You… actually want us to help you build something? Not just have us come in after your done, actually help you build it?"

"Yes," Lori said. Why was he focusing on that? "You always have ideas. Figure out how we can get it done faster with all the idle people in the demesne. Also, see if you can come up with some sort of idea for how I could build the flood wall more efficiently."

Rian smiled. She couldn't see it, but she could tell he smiled. Lori got ready to kick him, depending on what he said next. "You worked in a lot of different places, right? Did you ever work with masons?"

Lori gave him a wary look. "No…"

"Ah. That explains it. If you had, you wouldn't have to ask me this. Well, the answer's simple enough, at least."

Lori blinked. "It is?"

Rian nodded. "You just have to start thinking in stacks… "