Demesne 299 - The Shed On The Edge (Patreon)

The rain began to fall about halfway to the edge. Lori had to adjust her grip on her hat and tried to divert the falling rain with a binding of airwisps. It was inconsistent cover, since while the direction the rain fell from was mostly consistent, occasional crosswinds blew water around her binding, which had to be quite high to sufficiently divert the raindrops. A binding of waterwisps to turn any oncoming raindrops into vapor would have worked better, but such a binding wouldn't have been able to move with the boat quickly enough to do any good.

She also had to get the water that fell into the boat out. While there was little danger of sinking, the rain water on the bound ice of Lori's Ice Boat rendered them dangerous slippery. Lori had to draw them together with waterwisps into a viscous glob, and then throw the water over the side into the river.

The sound came slowly and insidiously, or at least that's how it felt like to Lori. She had just finished throwing another viscous ball of water, the binding of waterwisps holding it together anchored to her hands, when she realized she was hearing it, even if she didn't know what it was. The sound was high-pitched and intermittent, cutting of briefly before resuming. The noise sounded distant, but if she was hearing it from the river, and over the sound of the rain…

Lori took an embarrassingly long time to place that the sound was.

It was beasts screaming in pain as the Iridescence was washed off their bodies by the rain.

The screams weren't as intense as they could be, not like the ones she'd heard when there'd been a powerful downpour. In this light rain, while the surface Iridescence on the beasts' feathers and on the few stretches of their bodies not covered would have been washed off, the water was unlikely to be plentiful enough to wash off the iridescence growing deep within their bodies. Feathers were very good for repelling water, after all. Still, there were parts of beasts not so thoroughly covered, such as around their eyes. No matter how they turned their head, at least one eye would have the Iridescence around it washed away, the flesh around the sensitive region becoming raw and irritated painfully as the iridescence under the skin was slowly drawn up and washed off the by rainwater.

It was a disturbing sound, one that multiplied as they drew closer to the edge, growing louder as they neared the border of her demesne. Lori felt like the cries were making her heart vibrate in her chest.

The edge looked different than it usually did. The rain had begun to wash off the growing iridescence from the tree. While the trees still glittered, enough had spots and streaks of dark color showing through, muted shades of green and brown. The rocks and ground on the riverbanks were almost bare, but little spots of glittering colors still shone, somehow untouched by the rain so far.

"Prepare to land here," Lori pointed where the ropeweed was a bit shorter than anywhere else along the bank. The rain had made the exact location of the edge a bit uncertain, and she didn't want to accidentally ride out of her demesne.

"Yes, your Bindership!" the woman operating the steam jet driver said, the boat beginning to turn. There was the sound of something heavy sliding, and she actually felt the boat slow a little as they maneuvered.

Once they landed, and everyone had gotten out of the boat, Lori was able to put together and anchor a binding that turned any water that would fall into the boat to vapor, so that it wouldn't fill up with water. So of course, when she finally finished the binding and anchored it in place, the rain stopped, because of course it did! From the dirty looks being directed at the clouds above, she wasn't the only one who thought so.

"Erzebed," Lori said, trying to keep her annoyance reined in, "check for any beasts we can't hear. The rest of you, start cutting ropeweed and loading the boat. If there's too much, come back for it later."

There were acknowledgements, but Lori had already turned away, gathering her container of effects from the boat so it wouldn't get buried by ropeweed. The ground was soft underneath, her boots sinking slightly into the mud, but not enough for her to be inclined to try and use a binding on it. Holding her container in her arms—and then turning it on its side to drain it once she realized it was full of water—Lori began to claim waterwisps, forming a binding that drew a thick, viscous mass of water out of the river. As Riz and her friend threw rocks to check for beasts, the two with the sickles began cutting ropeweed, and the one who'd been operating the boat began to gather the cut ropeweed into bundles, Lori began pulling torso-size globs of water from the river and binding them solid so they would flow.

"It's clear, Great Binder," Riz eventually reported, eyeing the solidified water around Lori. At some point, Lori had started solidifying the water in the river and then moving them out, so she had begun to make bigger and bigger boulder-like globs of ice, all still bound to stay solid.

"Thank you Riz," Lori said. "Keep watch while I work."

First, she started combining the globs of solidified water together, until they all formed a large, irregular mass. Flattening out the bottom and anchoring the waterwisps to the earthwisps on the ground, Lori slowly moved the large mass towards the edge, making sure to stand uphill from the mass should it start to slide along the ground from its own weight. Fortunately, that didn't happen and she was eventually able to get the mass to the edge.

Cautiously, Lori moved the mass a bit further inland, following the curve of the edge, until she reached a tree. The trunk was thick but bare near the ground, and part of the tree extended out into the colors. She carefully moved the mass of solidified water to press up against the tree and, moving slowly and carefully, began to enfold the lower part of the tree's trunk.

Once a part of the solidified water was enfolded around the trunk, securing the mass—theoretically, Lori was finally able to start shaping it. A part of her was still exasperated that she was actually going with Rian's idea to build this structure with ice, but… well, it actually did work, and it meant she didn't have to try and excavate rocks out of the ground to build her shed. She anchored the mass of solidified water to the ground, moving the ice so that the shed had a thick, heavy base to distribute the weight. When it became clear she didn't have enough mass, she just drew more water from the river and now would have been a good time to have water falling out of the sky!

Still, it wasn't too dissimilar from working with stone and earthwisps, and she'd built enough things with using that material that she was able to build her shed with a decent amount of confidence, skill and speed. It took time, but well before noon she had a dome-like structure of ice that was half-inside, half-outside of her demesne. The walls weren't perfectly clear, since there was river sediment suspended in it, but she could still see through the walls of the building and out the other side.

As buildings went, it was the most fragile one she'd made—the top of the dome was a mere three yustri or so thick, though the dome got thicker the lower down it went—but it kept the rain off, and she had some small confidence that if a beast tried charging at the walls, it would last long enough for her to run deeper into her demesne…provided that the beast was about her height and not one of the big, heavy, slow moving ones…

Well, she could add more water to the walls to make it thicker next time, maybe add rocks to the base to make it more secure…

For now, noon was nearing, so she had Riz gather some rocks and stepped inside the cover of her new shed—she was just barely able to stand inside it—and set about getting her experiments ready. First, she extracted the two sealed bone containers full of white iridescence from her container and, after checking above her in case some water had appeared to drip down into the samples—none had—she opened each container one at a time to check the state of the contents. The samples appeared unchanged, even when she bound some lightwisps to shine more light on them.

She sealed the containers again, then took the rocks Riz had gathered reshaped them to make two small, hollow containers. Each little bone container was put into a stone to protect it in case chokers or bugs made their way into her ice shed. Then she stepped over the border of her demense—there was a sudden change of temperature as the air became a bit cooler for her—to place the shaped stone container containers up against the wall of the shed that was deepest into the colors. Taking her belt knife, she softened the tops of the hollowed stones and wrote which one contained which sample.

Then she set about testing the production molds.

Finding Iridescence that she could use was a bit difficult because of the rain, but Lori was able to scrape some off the dry, overhanging parts of the trees with her belt knife, and used her hat as a shade to keep water off the samples. Riz and her friend followed her, keeping watch for danger. When she turned around to go back to the shed to get to work, however, Lori realized the shed had only one door.

And it was on the side of the shed that was inside her demesne.

A mildly amused Riz held Lori's hat over the little prototype tray full of Iridescence as Lori went back inside the demesne and entered the shed, then opened a small hole in the shed wall which Riz was able to pass the prototype tray through. Unfortunately, a little water dripped into the tray, dissolving the Iridescence in two of the cells, but she enough to samples to redistribute after she'd gotten rid of the water.

Once Riz had walked around the shed and given Lori her hat back, Lori began to test the prototype. Instead of using heavily imbued bindings to amalgamate into beads, she only imbued then with a small amount of magic, just enough for them to start amalgamating with the iridescence to form a bead, then actively imbued them using the copper ingot as a contact point to channel magic.

All the beads began to form properly, though their growth was slower than normal because she was imbuing them. She held the tray carefully at a slight angle, not wanting to have the amalgamating beads roll around such that they lost contact with the ingot and stop forming.

The one formed from pressing down a bead of the size she wanted onto bone to leave an impression was the first of the prototypes to fail. It probably would have worked if she'd laid the tray on a completely flat and level surface, but she had clearly made the area where the bead would contact the ingot too small. She debated trying it again later once this batch was finished, but had to decide against it. If it would only work in ideal conditions… well, it would probably be a long time before she'd have anything approaching ideal conditions during production.

Other failures soon followed. These were the molds similar to the imprint one, with concave bowl-like sides where she'd made the contact area too small to account for the bead rolling around too far to the side. Disappointing, but at least she didn't have to worry about trying to figure out why the molds failed.

In the end of the first production run, only four molds worked as intended all the way to the end, creating beads of the size she wanted. They were the shallow ring-shaped one, one shaped like an angled trench, the shallow square one with inclined sides which had been an angular take on the concave molds, and a mold that had a simple incline in it. In each, the bead had been lifted up from the metal contact point by its own growth, though the resulting beads weren't all the same size. Well, she'd done her best by using an actual bead to try and calibrate the molds, but at least the results were all pretty close.

She marked the outside of the molds that had worked so she wouldn't forget. Now, all she had to do was simply to show them to her carpenters, and possibly her smiths, and have them build a tray for bead mass production using the shape that was the easiest for them to mass produce. Once she had that, she could begin true mass production of beads.

Lori could hardly wait. She would have her monopoly!