Weekly Digest 105 - (#332 - #334) (Patreon)

Seeling Is Not Shirking My Responsibilities!

“I’ll build the trap. Find me a place we can lure the beast so that I can anchor the bindings in place,” Lori declared after breakfast the next day.

"Uh, are you all right, Great Binder?" Riz said, making a vaguely concerned face.

The non-sequitur made Lori frown. "Of course I am. Why do you ask?"

"You seem to be breathing heavily. And you're clenching your hand so hard it's shaking."

She looked down at her hand. Ah. So she was. Why was that happening? Lori made her hand relax, entwining her fingers together. Much better. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "As I was saying, I will build the trap. Find me a place we can lure the beast so that I can anchor the bindings in place."

"What sort of location do you need, Great Binder?"

Lori considered the question. Given how she aimed to construct her trap…"Someplace close to the river would be best, relatively flat, and preferably twice the beast's length in diameter so its whole body can be caught. I'll be bringing rocks to anchor the trap to in any case." She'd debated how she would trigger the trap, whether she should be close enough to activate it or use a wire, but had ultimately decided neither was necessary. "I need to be within sight of the area of the trap to be able to activate it, but far enough that the beast can't reach me. The most reliable way it can't reach me is if I were in the middle of the river."

Whatsisname—Lori checked her rock—Kolinh slowly nodded. "I'll inform the hunters to look out for a suitable spot. We'll need to scout the area so we know where the beast likes to drink, and when. It will make it easier to set up the trap."

"How long will that take?"

"Ideally, it will be a few days, but… I will ask the hunters."

"Don't send them to scout until you get back to me on the matter," Lori said. "In the meantime, send out a party to go seeling in River's Fork and ONLY seeling." Lori hesitated, then sighed. "Shanalorre, can you please inquire with Karina if she will be amenable to joining them. Emphasize it's purely voluntary."

"As it happens, I have a petition from Karina asking if she may be allowed to visit River's Fork to go seeling there," Shanalorre said blandly. "I was going to raise the matter once we finished this discussion, but as it has become relevant…"

Lori managed not to wince even as she nodded. Her sole taxpayer was very… enthusiastic when it came to seeling and seel meat. Having to ask the young girl to use her talents and enthusiasm to keep River's Fork from starving—again—would have felt far too much like asking her to work, a guilt that was only slightly mitigated by the fact that the girl was apparently volunteering. It felt still felt too much like taking the girl's time to rest and relax for Lori's own benefit. "Why is she asking to do that?"

"She heard that River's Fork has having problems with food again, and approached me for more details. After I explained, she put forward her petition. Well, she had the idea for it, and I suggested I put it forward as a petition on her behalf, in keeping with established practices."

The brat had petitioned for it, Lori reminded herself. The brat had petitioned for it… "Very well. Inform her that she may go to River's Fork to go seeling there. She'll be traveling with the party we are sending."

"Uh, Great Binder, shouldn't we inform Karina's parents first?" Riz said. "So they don't get worried about her not being in the demesne? They probably haven't given their permission for her to go."

Lor's back straightened. "Why? It's Karina's petition, and if she wants to travel to another demesne, she has every right to."

Riz stared back for a moment, then sighed. "Um, please just let me inform them first, Great Binder? I'm sure Karina would want to tell her she's going anyway."

"I don't see why it should matter."

"I believe it's what Lord Rian would classify as a 'dealing with people' matter, Great Binder," Shanalorre interjected.

"Yes!" Riz exclaimed. "Yes, that's exactly it! Let me deal with this, Great Binder. I'll just speak to them the way Rian would, and then there won't be any problems with Karina going seeling."

Lori gave her a flat look, but rolled her eyes and waved a hand dismissively. "Fine, fine, take care of it. Shanalorre, I'll leave informing Karina to you."

"Yes, Great Binder."

"Kolinh, I need a wild choker."

"A… wild choker, Great Binder?"

"Yes. I need something to test the binding I'll be using for the trap."

"I presume you don't mean the ones we've been raising, Great Binder?"

Huh. She'd forgotten about those. "Wait, did those survive the dragon?"

"Yes, Great Binder. Lord Rian had them and the sweetbugs moved to the third level, where they were penned in their own tunnel."

Lori considered that, then sighed. She'd have to remember to making dedicated storage spaces for their domesticated chokers and sweetbugs. "Then yes, I don't mean them. Mildly injured chokers are fine. I just need them alive enough to kill."

"I… will see what I can do, Great Binder. "

Lori nodded. "Very well. Are there any other matters?"

Riz and Kolinh looked at each other.

"Given the current lack of ready meat due to the hunters being temporarily reassigned, should we suspend or increase the processing of smoked and cure meat, Great Binder?" Shanalorre asked. "I would recommend the latter if we will need to provide meat to River's Fork for the near-future. They weigh less and pack more heavily compared to frozen meat, as well as require less involvement on your part to bring to River's Fork, since they won't need to be kept cold."

Lori considered that. "I thought the curing shed was already operating at capacity?"

"I have spoken with—" Shanalorre paused a moment, then shook her head, "—the individual operating the facility. He says that he might be able to fit in a little more meat into the smoking racks."

Eventually, Lori shook her head. "Have him continue production at the current rate so far, but start getting what smoked and cured meat we currently have ready for transfer to River's Fork."

Shanalorre nodded. "Noted, Great Binder."

"With the Great Binder's permission, we can put a temporary halt to logging and sawing activities and have people divert to seeling," Kolinh said. "That should mitigate most of the impact of reassigning our hunters to look for this beast, and the number of people we throw at it should make up for young Karina being in River's Fork."

Lori considered that. "No," she said. "No, I'll handle seeling today. You'll need time and people to get me my chokers, after all. And it's been a while since I've been seeling. I could use the relaxation."

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Lori knew how to seel. She’d once spent an unproductive day learning to do so, cutting her own seeling rod, sharpening it, learning how to stand in wait, how to account for the water bending the light that passed through it when aiming for her prey…

She wasn’t any good at it, but she knew how.

That didn’t mean she didn’t know how to catch seels. She just did it her way.

After all, what was the point of being a Dungeon Binder if you couldn’t indulge yourself every so often?

The sun was merely pleasantly warm instead of agonizingly hot as it shone down at an angle, not yet mid-morning. The spot that the children usually went to catch seels was as loud and full of prey as usual, but already the children were sweating, and a few had set aside their seeling rods and shorts and had dipped into the river to cool themselves. Given how much they were exposing their backs and arms, Shanalorre would probably have more supplicants asking to be healed of sunburns again.

While the children were far more experienced at catching seels than they were a year ago, the sinuous fursh had also seemed to have gotten better at avoiding them. They could have caught some of the younger seels easily enough, but many seemed to be avoiding that now. Lori wasn’t sure if it was because they’d realized targeting the juveniles would eventually reduce the seel’s numbers or if it stemmed from competitiveness in getting bigger and bigger seels.

Off to the side, a young man hiding in the shade of a tree was looking bored as he watched over the children, and Lori vaguely recalled something about how the children weren’t allowed to clean the seels on their own because that work involved knives…

Lori ignored the children looking at her, though she glanced at the ones soaking in the river. Some were propelling themselves with their arms, slowly swimming through the water. One was splashing loudly, seemingly trying to move his arms as quickly as possible. He moved through the water quicker than the others, but it was only by a small margin.

She found a place to stand where she could look out over the seels. Most were in the water, although some were resting their upper bodies on rocks that broke the surface of the river. It seemed an awkward way to keep their heads above water, though Lori saw that some seemed to be watching the shore. She supposed it was how they kept an eye out for beasts? It made sense. They had to rest at some point, and there were only so many rocks in the middle of the river.

Narrowing her eyes slightly, she focused on her awareness of the wisps in her demesne. The earthwisps mixed with waterwisps, darkwisps and minute amounts of airwisps that permeated the ground, defining the half-sphere that was the lower part of her demesne. The airwisps mixed with lightwisps, firewisps, small amounts of darkwisps and minute amounts of waterwisps and earthwisps that made up the above-ground sphere of her demesne. The long, flowing length of waterwisps that was the river, and the voids of wisps that were scattered through her sphere of awareness, voids she couldn’t perceive because they were in the body of a living being.

Those were what she focused on now, the voids in the river that were long and undulating and sinuous… surrounded by waterwisps.

And differing amounts of all the rest as well, but that wasn’t important at the moment.

She focused on one in particular, a long and bulky adult seel specimen swimming in a relatively open section of river. Relatively, because there were seels within a pace of it, but above the water, it looked like it was alone, swimming just enough to not be taken downriver by the current and keeping its head up.

Lori reached through her connection to her core and claimed the waterwisps around the seel. The way it moved though the watr would normally have made it hard to keep it surrounded by the wisps she claimed… so she just claimed all the waterwisps in all directions for five paces.

Then she formed all the waterwisps into a binding to increase the viscosity of the water, trapping the seel within her binding… along with parts of several seels that also intersected the water that she had claimed. The binding made the water thick and almost solid, and was the same one Lori used with the water she gathered from the bottoms of boats so she could throw it over the side. Some of the trapped seels were able to wiggle out of the viscous water, but the target she had aimed for and a couple of others that had been trapped headfirst in her binding, and their forelimbs, body shape and the viscosity were preventing them from extracting themselves. She claimed the waterwisps around them as well, adding them to the binding that made the water viscous.

She let out a sigh at how easy it was to claim more waterwisps in the river, and using them to impart force on the viscous glob of water and trapped seels to push it towards the riverbank, careful to avoid the children in the water. This… she’d missed this. No needing to reach out though metal contacts, not slowly having to claim outwards from a point because she was limited in what she could do. This… this was the power of having a core! No, more than power! This was the convenience!

With a surge of force redirected from the river’s current, the large, viscous glob of water was pushed up to a stretch of unoccupied rocky riverbank, oozing like a large blob of slime. Huh. The blob was bigger than the she thought at more than seven paces wide, although that was from getting squashed down by its own weight. The children present immediately noticed, and proved themselves to not be idiots as they immediately darted back out of its way or, even better, realized it wasn’t going to go anywhere near them and stayed put, but looked on curiously.

Lori anchored the waterwisps at the bottom to the rock as she reshaped the waterwisps, using the momentum of the push to keep it rolling. Some of the children pointed at the seels that had been caught in her viscous blob, which were rolling around inside. Lori carefully moved the three trapped seals apart—two of them were adult specimens, while one was slightly smaller, possibly a young adult—before she altered the binding of waterwisps she had trapping them to cause the water to solidify into ice, carefully deleting the firewisps this state change expelled out into the air. It was already hot, she didn’t need to make it any hotter.

Shoving the three seels trapped in ice between some convenient trees so they wouldn’t slide or move around, the binding keeping the water solid and not exchanging heat with the environment, Lori turned back to the river to capture more seels.

Hopefully the brat would show up as some point. She wasn’t sure where the seels were supposed to go next after they got caught.

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Reading Is Not Shirking My Responsibilities!

Lori never thought she’d see the brat looking envious. It seemed she hadn’t been able to join the hunters who had gone to River’s Fork to seel for meat there. Well, there was still tomorrow. The girl alternated between directing that envious gaze at Lori and pointing at the seels trapped in ice that Lori had trapped and dragged ashore, visibly counting them even as she kept losing track of which ones she’d already counted and having to start over. The only reason Lori had stopped pulling seels out of the water was because she’d run out of space to put them where they wouldn’t start sliding around because of the ice on them.

Still, the brat didn’t let her clear envy affect her. “All right everyone, find a club or a rock,” the brat called out to the other children. “They’re big, but they’ll still stop moving once you hit their head enough times! Loveld, you go run and get Auntie Armis, tell her we have a lot of big seels. Then find uncle Kolinh and tell him we need help here.”

One of the smaller boy reluctantly put down his rock—a little thing that fit in one hand—and went to do as asked, while the brat turned to Lori. “Wiz Lori, can you take the ice off their heads so we can hit them? Kuya Vov can start gutting them for us when they’re properly dead.” Off to the side, the young man who’d been keeping an eye on the children had a resigned look on his face as he sharpened his belt knife with a rock.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as that. While the juveniles and adolescents were easily killed by the blows to the head that the children could perform on them, the adults were much more resilient. They were also very loud, making many of the children reticent about approaching them. Try as they might, the children didn’t seem to be very successful at trying to kill the seels whose heads Lori had uncovered from the ice.

Fortunately, people started to arrive, no doubt called by the boy the brat had sent. There were exclamations at the sight of so many seels trapped in ice, but people quickly got to work. The children were dislodged as adults handled dealing with the seels. After a quick debated, shirts were removed and folded so that people could start pushing and guiding the trapped seels away from that part of the shore.

“Best we don’t bleed them all here, Great Binder,” Kolinh explained. “Otherwise the seels my start avoiding this place because they remember the smell. And it’ll be a mess if we start butchering them here. We don’t want the chokers to have any reason to come around to where the children are.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Lori said blandly. “Get these things turned into food and prepare to send a batch to River’s Fork. If not today when we pick up the hunters there, then tomorrow when they go back.” She titled her head for a moment. “Will this be enough to match what the hunting parties would normally been able to gather.”

“That and a bit more, Great Binder,” Kolinh said. “Are you considering taking over seeling for the demesne for the duration?”

Lori hadn’t been until that point, but now that the idea had been proposed… “Only while the hunters are occupied with tracking down the beast in question,” Lori said. “In the long term, there are better uses of my time. See to it they know this and that they don’t take their time with finding this beast.”

“Understood, Great Binder.”

She’d… have to do this again tomorrow, wouldn’t she? Lori eyed the river, but at the moment she was quite spoiled for choice when it came to seels to catch. Well, it wasn’t that bad. She could do it again tomorrow. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that another thing that she had done to exert her power had found its way to possibly becoming a repetitive exercise…

Lori followed the seels, but need not have bothered. Hammers, chisels and knives chipped at the ice around their heads, and blades were thrust through their furry necks until the seels’ aggravating wailing cut off, and they were allowed to bleed out onto the soil around the demesne’s fields. She didn’t know why they were doing that there. Perhaps the blood helped improve the fertility of the soil or something. Benches were used to raise up one end of the trapped seels to facilitate the exsanguination.

She left them to it. She didn’t want to be around when enough of the blood had been drained that people would start with the butchering in earnest.

Ah, perhaps that was it. So that it wouldn’t be far to carry the seels’ inedible innards to the soil they’d be fertilizing.

She let out another sigh as she realized she should have kept one of the seels for herself to test out the lethality of the binding she was planning too use in the trap to kill the beast haunting River’s Fork’s outskirts. For a moment, she considered going back to the river and catching a fresh seel…

Shaking her head, Lori headed back to her room. No, no, she didn’t want to be outside once the smell started. With so many seels being butchered at once, it would be nothing like the more usual daily butchering. No, she was going to lock herself in her room, and…uh… ah, she’d check her almanac Maybe there was a binding there whose warnings would tell her how to properly convert it into something lethal. While she had it in mind to use lightningwisps, she was willing to alter her plan if a better binding was brought to her attention.

And reading in her Dungeon would hopefully be far enough away to keep her from noticing the smell.

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As much as she enjoyed reading, Lori didn’t really have much time to read her almanac. She had to work most days, and on nights that she had to stay up, it was to think of whatever thing Rian had brought to her attention. As much as she would have wanted to read the book cover to cover, she really couldn’t afford the distraction of immersing herself in its words.

Oh, when she had first gotten it, she’d skimmed though the pages of its flow diagrams to get ideas for bindings, and she’d read over it’s listing of edible flora, which she’d copied with lightwisps to the walls of the entryway so that people could identify them as well when they went looking for food in the woods. Beyond that, however, it had become a reference that she checked when there was a matter that her knowledge, Rian’s and those he asked for help from, were lacking in. It was where she’d found the binding that used lightningwisps to repel bugs, for example.

It wasn’t a well-loved book she’d read through completely several times before and had an idea of where everything was. As such, she still had to check the pages listing the topics the book contained every time she was looking for a topic. Lori had just carefully turned towards the listing of contents and was slowly paging towards the section listing the various flow diagrams in the book when he mind caught up with her eyes, and she turned back a couple of pages to stare at a listing she'd seen before but had never read before now, as she hadn't been interested in it.

Bestiary, the heading of the section said.

Beneath that was a listing of what might have been… names? Someone had fun with them that was certain, that was certain. She recognized some as the names from seminal works of fiction, usually of the 'Deadspoken creations turns against its creator' kind of works, though others were of the 'young boy-or-girl finds escaped Deadspoken creation and makes friends with it' genre that her mothers had bought for her when she'd been younger. A few were names from history and folk lore, like 'Iskandaliyalos', from the Empire Binder's storied construct that emitted deadly piercing light from its eyes, or Typhon, the mythical progenitor of dragons—though that latter was usually conflated with the storm moon in those silly superstitions.

She changed her plans, noting the page listing and opening the book there instead. To her relief, the entries had illustrations, well detailed line drawings that showed the proportions and profile of the beasts listen, as well as a scale comparing its size to the average person. Entries were organized by average body length, a decision that briefly baffled Lori, before she took a moment to think about it and realized that it was unlikely that someone had studied the local beasts in enough detail to sort them by the long-established classifications vitalogists used. Classifying by length, however, sorted the beasts by an obvious metric.

She paged forward, remembering that the beast in question was between ten and twelve paces in length. She started somewhere in the middle of the entries, but on seeing the length of the beast she opened to being a mere six to seven paces long—it looked like a chasmos, but the two long horns running down its jaw that went far past the four-legged beast's beak—she skipped ahead some more.

Eventually, she found what she was looking for. At least, it was the range for length right, as the almanac listed it as being between ten and eleven paces in length. In illustration showed it in profile with its tail and head outstretched, and a drawing of a koncallos below it in the same pose as a comparison. It was this beast whose name she had noticed in the listing, the one that had been given the grandiose—but on consideration very worrying—designation of a 'Typhon Beast'.

As she looked at the illustration of it, Lori didn't see what was so worrying. Typons were about the same length and height as a koncallos but—the things weighed how much?-!

She stared at the estimates of its weight, which on average was four times that of a koncallos at a calculated six to seven taugrains. That was… certainly far, far bulkier. She thought that the larger outline was from a thick coating of feathers, not significantly great body mass…

She examined the illustration closely now. The Typhon's head was far larger than the koncallos' in comparison to its body, with visibly larger teeth. She read the article, then did a double take. Its teeth were howlong? That was big enough to be used as a spearhead without needing to be shaped! The more she read, the more intimidating the beast seemed. It apparently like to kill exclusively using its jaws to cause traumatic damage, which given it had teeth longer than many knives was probably a very effective tactic.

There were more differences between it and a koncallos. The typhon beast's forelimbs were smaller, proportionately, compared to the other beasts, and they were apparently not used for latching on to its prey. The typhon also had three rows of increasingly larger knife-like growths running along its spine from near the tip of its tail to the back of its head, with the largest growths concentrated at the vicinity of its shoulder blades. The article hypothesized these were some sort of natural defense against othertyphon beasts, though it was listed as speculation since no one had yet witnessed two typhon beasts fighting.

The article was also full of warnings to not try to engage typhon beasts, as they had been known to swallow… people… whole… and that the beasts were… uh, was best engaged by… several wizards working in concert.

…

Lori forced herself to keep reading, even as her hands started to shake and she felt herself breaking in a sweat that had nothing to do with exertion. Strangely, the almanac's article recommended fences as the best means of keeping the beast away, especially from frequented water courses, especially thorn fences. What? Ah, there was a reference to a flow diagram in the book, illustrating how a Deadspeaker could reshape wood into what the aforementioned thorn fence…

There was a distressing lack of detail as to how to get the typhon beast out of an area it had already occupied, though there was a note that the smell of typhon beast urine repelled most beasts… and ending with a declaration that the reader should report all typhon beast sightings to their Dungeon Binder so that… they could ask… other demesne… for assistance…

…

That sounded very ominous for Lori's chances of killing this by herself.

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Testing For The Trap

Lori was surprise to find there where not as many people as usual in the dining hall at lunch. The children were there, hair wet from either bath or a quick dip in the river, but many tables seemed depleted, leaving mostly women present. Even Riz was absent, with only Umu and Mikon sitting across from Lori. Mikon didn't seem worried, so nothing bad had probably happened to her temporary-Rian, but it was curious.

"Where's Erzebed?" she asked Mikon.

"She's helping with butchering the seels, your Bindership" Mikon said. "The ice you trapped them in is melting, so before they break out, Riz and the others are going to get them cleaned and gutted. Because of the smells, everyone's skipping lunch so their stomachs are empty. They'll eat after they finish and bathe."

Ah. She supposed she had taken a lot of seels out of the river, which would need a lot of people to process. "I see. Inform Riz that I need to speak to her at her earliest convenience," Lori said. Then she paused. "No, I will clarify that I need to speak to her after she's done eating," she amended.

"I'll tell her, your Bind.ship."

She nodded, and went back to her food. It had just the right amount of salt.

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"Great Binder? You wished to speak to me?"

Lori looked up from the almanac at the knock on the door. She'd been reading the bestiary entries, mostly to have something to do, and had been amused to find that the beasts they called chokers were also in the bestiary… as 'chokers'. "Enter, it's open." Riz opened the door, stepping in carefully and closing the door behind her. Her temporary-Rian was looking recently bathed, though she still had a sweat beading on her brow. All in all, she looked as refreshed at to be expected given how hot it was outside. "Erzebed. We have a hunter who actually saw the beast that's driving others beasts away from the area around River's Fork, correct?"

Riz nodded. "Yes, Great Binder. Ralii was the one who saw it."

"You know I won't know who that is," Lori said. "Is he in the demesne right now or is he one of those who went to River's Fork earlier?"

"He's in River's Fork right now, Great Binder. What do you need him for?"

"There are illustrations of beasts in this almanac. I need him to point out if the beast he saw is any of the ones here."

Her temporary-Rian blinked. "I'll tell him when he gets back, Great Binder."

Lori nodded. "Tell me how the butchering went. Were you able to process all of the seels?"

"Yes, Great Binder. We managed to butcher all thirty-one seels, and they're all in the cold rooms now. The furs are going to be cured once the other hunters get back."

Lori frowned. "Why do they need to get back?"

"The hunters are the ones who run the tannery, Great Binder. They're usually not all out hunting at once, but since they were sent to River's Fork to add to the foodstores—"

"I understand. Can you tell me how much food we have, or do I need to ask Shanalorre that?"

"The Lady Binder would be able to tell you the exact amount, but from what I saw, the cold rooms were full. Completely full. We had to bring in some bring in some benches so that the meat would just be on the floor when we filled up the some of the walkways between shelves. It's not going to stay that was for all that long, at the rate we eat, but the cold rooms are the most full that they've ever been."

Lori tilted her head, then nodded as she finally closed the almanac in her hands, sliding the book under her pillow. "Tell…" she reached into her pocket and drew out a rock, checking the name on it, "Kolinh that he's to prioritize meat that's been in the cold rooms longer for sending to River's Fork. Tomorrow, send Karina with some volunteers to seel in River's Fork, while the rest of the hunters scout to find the beast so I can trap and kill it." She began to put on her boots.

"I'll tell him, Great Binder. Uh, do you need me for anything else?"

Lori waved a hand dismissively. "No, you may go."

From the sound of it, she had more work to do this afternoon. So much still-warm, fresh meat in their cold rooms meant she should check the bindings of firewisps that delete heat could handle the load. She might need to make solidified and liquefied air to help with the heat. And she just knew that people had placed obstructions that blocked the airways that kept temperatures even all across the cold rooms.

Her boots in place, Lori went to deal with this.

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She checked over the cold rooms, temporarily anchoring bindings of airwisps and firewisps in places to compensate for the pathways blocked by cooling seel meat. The meat was cooling, but she could feel little concentrations of firewisps deep in the meat. She claimed those firewisps, forming them into a binding that deleted heat so that they'd cool from the inside.

It probably wasn't necessary, but between the sheer amount of still-warm meat that had been placed in the cold rooms, the number of people who'd been in and out of the rooms, and the how the doors had no doubt been left open, a lot of heat had entered the room where they kept their food. Best to mitigate that heat so that dustlife didn’t start growing on their food and making them sick.

Riz found her in her Dungeon's baths at about late afternoon as she was making ice for River's Fork's food storage. She was needing to use water from the reservoir, so that it wouldn't be caustic and potentially damage or poison the food it was meant to cool. It was a bit early in the week, but she might as well, and it would keep the meat that would be transported there from getting too hot. "Great Binder?"

"What is it, Erzebed?"

"Kolinh is here with the chokers you asked for."

Lori blinked in confusion before she recalled what she had ordered earlier this morning. "He didn't bring them inside my Dungeon, did he?" she said.

"They're outside, Great Binder," Riz assured her.

She nodded, relieved. "I'll be right out, I just need to set these aside in the cold room for tomorrow."

Riz glanced at the blocks of ice. "Do you need help with that, Great Binder?"

"I can handle it. Tell him to take the chokers to the dock, I'll experiment on them there."

"Do you want me there too, Great Binder?"

Lori considered that, then nodded. "Yes, that might be needed. Are the chokers injured?"

"Probably a little bruised, and their jaws have been tied shut, but they're all there."

"Good. I'll be out shortly."

Lori slid the block of ice she'd made in the baths towards the nearest cold room, the binding on waterwisps on it keeping it solid, and not taking in heat from its surroundings. It didn't need the cold, but it was a good place to keep the ice for the evening.

Once she'd anchored the block to the floor so that it wouldn't move, she went out to see the chokers. The sun was low in the sky, but she could still see it above the trees, so she still had perhaps an hour of natural light to work with. Not that she couldn't make her own light, but that would mean being somewhere she could anchor the bindings, and she didn't want to do this inside her Dungeon.

Outside, she found Riz, and… uh—she reached into her belt pouch and checked the rock—Kolinh were waiting for her, as were a few men. The chokers were there, as promised. Each choker had been tied to stripped branches, hanging by their limbs and tail, which had been bound to the branch with ropeweed cords. Their heads were similarly tied to the branch by the cord muzzling them, holding them in place.

For a moment, Lori considered how they were secured. She'd thought they'd only have a leash around their necks, but this was much more secure.

"How dangerous would it be to tie one of them by their neck to the post at the end of the dock?" Lori asked. "I need to test how my trap affects their ability to move."

Kolinh and the men made reluctant faces, eyeing the chokers. "We should be able to do it, Great Binder," he said, in the tones of a man who would rather not.

Lori had no sympathy. If she might have to try and kill one of those typhon beasts by herself, he could put up with a little inconvenience. "Do it, then. In the meantime, lay one of the chokers at the foot of the stairs on the other side of the wall. Erzebed, warn off people so that they don't get close."

She received different variants of "Yes, Great Binder" as Kolinh and the him with him got to work.

Unfortunately, they couldn't just lay down one of the restrained chokers on the ground. When they did, it started flopping around like a landed seel, the branch it was on rattling loudly, and the men picked it up before it could potentially escape. In the end, Lori softened the ground—it was mostly packed dirt at this point, and she might as well solidify it properly—so they could stick one end of the branch into it to hold the branch upright, the beast hanging upside-down to try to disorient it.

Once it was secured, Lori drew some lightningwisps from her body. The tip of the smallest finger of her left hand became numb and unresponsive for a moment, before feeling returned as the lightningwisps moved back to that part of her body. The lightningwisps she drew out were formed into a simple binding that that sent weak, invisible lightning flowing back and forth though the air between her hands. With every passage, lightningwisps were left in the lightning's wake, which she claimed and added to the binding, making more and more lightningwisps until she had enough for what she needed.

The choker was struggling on its stick as it tried to turn its head the right way around. Lori ignored it as she formed the lightningwisps into a binding. What she made was the modification of the binding that kept bugs out of her dungeon, the one she had used to try and protect her Dungeon and the dragon shelter she'd been in from dragonborn abominations.

She'd tested this binding before, on chokers, bugs and seels. While she knew it would kill those things, it didn't do so immediately. The larger the creature was, the longer it took, though it served wonderfully as a deterrent from the pain it inflicted. Since only bug-sized abominations would have managed to enter through the air vents, the binding had been calibrated to bring quick death to anything of that size.

Since the possible typhon beast was much, much larger, she needed to refamiliarize herself with how she needed to calibrate the binding. Lori anchored the binding around the choker on the branch, extending the binding upward so that some parts of the bindings passed through the beast. Since she'd already claimed those wisps, she could perceive them even though the wisps were technically inside a living creature, which lets her continue to form the binding.

"Erzebed, I need a rock," she said. "Something the size of my palm."

Thankfully, Riz didn't ask any strange questions, instead quickly heading towards the nearby river bank and coming up with a damp rock. Lori accepted the rock, claiming and binding the earthwisps and making the rocks soften so she could stretch it out into a ring that she slipped over the top of the branch before tightening and solidifying the rock. She then anchored the binding of lightningwisps to that rock, giving the binding of lightningwisps a conical shape.

Lori began imbuing the still-deactivate binding as she calibrated it so that the lightningwisps would create lightning that was on par with what she would use if she were trying to kill something with lightning. This would normally be far too powerful, since such powerful lightning would expend a great amount of imbuement for a two to three heartbeats—which would be far too much and very inefficient for their defenses—but as a trap which she would heavily imbue…

Well, they wouldbe trying to kill a very large beast.

She imbued the binding and kept imbuing it as she nodded to be man who'd been holding on to the top of the branch. "Let go and step back," she ordered. "No, well back. This far back. Erzebed, keep people away." Lori turned and began to walk towards the laundry area, moving to stand behind one of the few remaining stone walls from the renovations she had made during the winter. She didn’t want the glare that would result from the lightning blazing in her eyes.

The fact that she'd hidden behind a wall seemed to inspire something, because people moved to stand well-back.

Lori gave the struggling choker tied to the stick one last look before she stepped back and activated the binding of lightningwisps.

There was a flash of light that briefly painted the ground on either side of the stone wall Lori was standing behind white and a simultaneous explosion that sounded very much like thunder. As her ears rang, she noted that the binding of lightningwisps she had dissolved, all its imbuement consumed, and that firewisps had radiated out of where the binding had been. As she quickly began claiming the loose lightningwisps in the air, forming them back into a binding, Lori carefully leaned around the stone wall.

The stick to which the choker had been secured had been shattered, and a shorter, blackened, smoking stump worse up from the ground where it had been. A crumple, blackened, smoking heap that had formerly been a choker was next to it, very much dead.

Through the ringing in her ears, she could hear very loud swearing and cry that sounded like something was choking.

Lori stared at the result of her little experiment.

She would definitely have to alter the calibration for her final trap. The binding consumed its imbuement far too fast. The lightning would have to be weaker and over a longer period, unless she wanted her trap to explode. And given her trap would need to be at least twelve paces in diameter, and almost certainly far larger to fit all of the beast she meant to trap, and no doubt many trees as well. She couldn't have all of that explode, especially since she'd need to be in line of sight to be able to trigger the trap.

Well, she had two more chokers. She was certain she could narrow it down to something more reasonable.