Demesne

Lori felt like her Dungeon was about to cave in and collapse on her.

That was unlikely to happen, since every earthwisp that wasn't turning stone into the consistency of wet clay was currently reinforcing the entire hill to increase its structural integrity and not collapse because of little things like 'its own weight'. Still, it was actually becoming problematic for Lori. It wasn't that she was running out of magic to imbue into the wisps. The power from the core seemed as endlessly inexhaustible as ever. Rather, she was having problems with proximity and multi-tasking. The stone was technically one large contiguous, if heterogeneous, mass, and her dual orders to both structurally reinforce and soften were making the wisps at the border of those two bindings confused. She had to keep both sets of bindings distinct, even as she willed softened rock out of her cave through the newly-expanded opening. It was giving her a bit of a headache, but she had to keep digging. She had to keep digging.

She dug deeper into the hill, finding rock and more rock, leaving randomly placed pillars of stone to help support the load behind her. Lori kept reinforcing and digging, knowing that they didn't have much time. It didn't need to be good, it just needed to not collapse in the next three days. Rian was directing the transfer of the foods they'd already managed to gather into her storage room and new cold room, filled with ice fresh from the river. But that wouldn't be enough. So after she dug in deep enough the light from outside grew dim and she had to bind lightwisps around her to see, she started to dig down. It wasn't much, a simple hole two paces wide. but she dug down and kept on digging. Stone flowed up against gravity, rising like some strange, marbled worm, as she made the hole deeper and deeper, drawing more rock from it that she sent out of the cave.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she gave start, then swayed as legs that had gone numb staying in one position failed her, and she nearly fell into her own hole. Rian's hand grabbed her bicep, his grip surprisingly strong and pulled her back from the brink.

"Be more careful," he said. "The food's all in, and the… the dragon's getting close. Can people come inside now?"

Lori looked down into the pit. It was just darkness. She willed the lightwisps bound near her to move and shine their light into the hole.

Even then, she couldn't see the bottom.

"How close is the dragon?" Lori said. She could still feel it, moving ever closer, much closer than before, but still not over any part of her demesne.

"Well, we have children crying because they see giant eyes in the sky, it's raining hail, and I saw a giant mouth that seemed to take up half the sky appear full of teeth that turned out to be tentacles that turned out to be heads with a non-symmetrical arrangement of eyes, so it's too close for my sanity," Rain said.

"I need to fill this with water so we'll have something to drink," Lori said.

"Is there any particular reason people can't come in while you're doing that?" Rian said.

"The possibility of getting torn apart by a stream of water and polluting our reservoir with their blood and offal?"

"I'll tell them to wait."

Lori nodded, considered the length of soft stone still oozing towards the entrance of the cave and decided to leave it be in case she needed to seal off their reservoir to keep people from pissing in it. There was just something about bodies of water that made people want to add their own contribution, and she'd rather that not be the case here. "Come on, let's be quick about this. And if anyone is in my bedroom, they'll be evicted to take their chances with the dragon."

"Well… no one is in your bedroom anymore."

Lori suddenly stopped in her tracks and rounded on him. "What?" she demanded through gritted teeth.

"Well, the sacrificial altar really creeped them out," Rian said.

"It's a table!"

"To be honest, it really does kinda look like an altar," Rian shrugged.

"It doesn’t even have a drainage hole for the blood!"

"I don't think they associate drainage holes with altar-ness."

"If they touched anything or took anything…" Lori began, already feeling the rising sense of violation.

"No one took anything," Rian assured her. "They wouldn't stay near the alta– table! But, uh, I wouldn't suggest going in there right now?"

Lori gave him a suspicious look. "Why?"

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Someone had piled her bedroom full of metal tools. Saws, scissors, knives, pots, saws, pans, cooking ingots, chisels, axes, saws, various hammers, a surprising number of what initially looked like shortswords but seemed to be well-worn machetes, and three huge saws that were longer than she was tall. There was even a box full of paper packages that on examination were nails of various sizes, a pile consisting of wire of various thicknesses, some of which she recognized as spring steel, and… was that bar stock? Why did they need to get back to Covehold if they had so much stockpiled iron and steel?!

Staring at all this, it occurred to Lori that this was the closest she had yet to get to having a room filled with untold riches. Because all these refined metals were probably the most valuable things the settlement had if you didn't count the children, and Lori didn’t.

She briefly considered sleeping on them, then tossed aside the notion. Metal was still just rock, except harder.

But at least it looked like her pack hadn't been opened. She quickly checked it and sighed with relief that the glassware was still intact. Then she carefully pushed the pack and its contents under her bed.

"Have them at least take things off the bed, I sleep on that thing," Lori said, getting back to her feet.

"Right… I'll have them do that as soon as they're safe in here," Rian said, sounding surprisingly dry.

"And make sure they bring wood to cook with along with the other supplies they'll be bringing, we're not cutting up my bed for firewood," Lori said.

Rian blinked. "Um, of course. Obviously I thought of that..."

Lori gave him a look. He averted his gaze.

Shaking her head, she hurried to bring water inside her Dungeon.

Outside, the wind had risen from a whisper to a constant driving wind, and chips of ice fell from the sky. It was a small mercy they were only tiny chips instead of heavy stones. The wind still blew inexorably towards the dragon, as if it was sucking in the sky. Lori saw clouds being drawn towards the dragon, and some actually seemed to fuse with it, making the dragon seemed a many-headed thing, and whorls on the cloud started looking like eyes–

Lori tore her gaze away, running towards the river, staff in hand and hair flying free in the wind. She'd had to leave her hat in the cave or risk losing it.

Her control over water wasn't as absolute as she would want it to be. Water that had just entered her demesne, such as by having just flowed in through the river or fallen from the sky, wasn't yet completely in her control. Conversely, water that had just flowed out of her demesne was still a little hers for maybe a pace or so past the official edge of her control. Here, however, so near her dungeon's core, the water was hers completely. Power from the core flowed through the land, imbuing the wisps in the water in front of her with her will, and the water rose, surface tension as unnatural as the reinforcement of the stone in her cave, holding it all together. Another thought, and the water rushed past her, gushing and flowing up the slope and towards her cave.

She'd torn one side of the cliff face completely open, and the whole cave, save for the round pillar which had the dungeon's core inside it, was visible to the outside. The water crashed and broke on the enormous, unnaturally blobby piles of now-hard stone that had been removed in the Dungeon's expansion. She willed the water to stay a whole and contiguous stream, sending it streaming past the line of beds from the hospital that had just been moved and arrayed along one wall.

People were already moving in under Rian's direction, mostly the sick and young children. The rest were milling outside the cave, blocked by the huge piles of stone. Most seemed to have managed to gather up their all possessions, and Lori supposed it had been as simple as just picking them up from the shelters. Other were carrying wood, already cut for kindling.

Overhead, that strange bass, rolling thunder echoed again, and Lori turned back towards the dragon. It had gotten closer as she'd worked on moving the water to the cave. It had mouths now, horrible torn-slit mouths all over its form, seemingly without heed to things like symmetry or even functionality. She saw eyes inside the mouth, turning this way and that, eyes with multiple corneas, eyes where the pupil was another mouth…!

Lori turned away and focused on providing a water supply for her Dungeon, even as it seemed like she could feel the dragon through the back of her neck.

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The skies above had turned glittering shades of many colors, shimmering like an oily poison by the time everyone had been secured in the Dungeon.

"Everyone's inside," Rian reported, needing to raise his voice to be heard between the rolling thunder that had risen to a shrill cry like a small animal being tortured and the wind that had been increasing in volume from a whisper to a roar. "With everything we could carry."

"Have them snuff out any lights," Lori said. "Once I seal us in, we can't waste air. They don't need to see."

"That'll scare the children," Rian said.

"Good! This is something to be scared about. And in the dark, people are less likely to move around."

Besides, she'd be needing the dark.

As she stood at the mouth of the cave, drawing back the stone to rebuild the door she had torn down, and pulling all the other excavated stone with it to create a heavy stone shell to bury them in so the dragon couldn't reach them, she stared out over the settlement. It suddenly struck her how much this place had grown. She remembered mud and trees and ramshackle tents little removed from hovels and a large tent where they made food.

All that was gone now. Where there had been trees and tents, flat hard-packed earth stood, dotted with the shells of houses. While many still waited for roofs, many more had been covered and even had doors and windows of plain wooden boards. The dining hall seemed to stand over everything, a cheerful beacon of comfort. The shelters she'd built stood side by side, and seeming surprisingly close now that all the trees around it had been cleared, and she was surprised to see some flowers of some sort had been planted around them. The bathhouses, a little closer to the river, looked surprisingly cheerful. Since when had there been so many benches and crude treestump tables in front of it? In the distance, she could even make out one of the curing sheds near the sawpit, and a small, earthen chimney that she didn't remember building close to the river.

The claypit, she realized. For some reason, she hoped the little kiln survived. She hadn't seen any fruits from its labors yet.

At the edge of her awareness, she felt the wisps at the edge of her demesne…twist as the dragon passed over them.

No more delaying.

Lori stepped back and on either side of her the enormous stone bulwarks that had risen around the front of her dungeon, solid stone paces deep, closed to block out the sight of the Iridescent sky, leaving only a narrow, slit-like tube for air, plunging the dungeon into darkness. She heard the cries of surprise, heard Rian's voice trying to keep everyone calm, heard the children wail and call for their parents…

In the dark, she breathed in, even as she made the magic from the core move. She passed the magic through her lungs, through her esophagus and mouth and ear canals and nostrils, and out into the darkwisps filling her cave. They filled the dark vaults, lay thick within the dark room she had built, and filled the reservoirs as surely as the water did. They were in the lavatories and crude pipes, in the gaps between the piles of metal tools, under her bed and in the miniscule veins of the wood people had brought. They lay just beneath people's clothes, hidden in their hair, squeezed in between their toes, filling their pockets.

Lolilyuri, wizard, Dungeon Binder, determined… bound the darkness to her will.

She bound the darkness in the cave. She bound the darkness in the empty shelters, in shadows hiding in the corners of roofed houses, in the empty cold room and drainage pipes and cistern and spigot and cold hearth of the dining hall. She bound the darkness in the curing sheds and in the little lips of shadow inside the unfired clay forms, and under roots and in the cracked bark of old trees, and under the shade of leaves and falls of rocks and the hidden nooks and corners and in the lee of broken eggs hidden inside unseen hollows.

The darkwisps and the darkness responded, flowing through the air hole into the outside, rising from where they hid, streaming and coalescing and growing as all around the demesne darkness answered their Binder's call. She imbued the dark with magic, made it spread unnaturally into the light of day in defiance of nature. They spread like a shroud, cloaking the stony bulwark and the cliffs, spreading sideways to either side of the hill, growing as the darkness of the demesne joined it. The darkness moved faster than the light, for while the light had to travel, the dark was always there. Air didn't slow it, didn't affect it. It had no body, no weight. No sprig of moss so much as stirred even as a flood of shadow erupted, rich in magic, filling with all the power Lori could have the core imbue into it.

Yet for all that, it did have a limited volume. Not enough to plunge the whole demesne in darkness, as some demesne were capable of doing. Not enough to blot out the sun and cloak them all in night. But enough to wrap around the empty buildings and homes, around the signs of civilization built by hands and sweat and toil and wisps and will. Enough to be a dark vanguard with shields held high in front of a stony bulwark and, as the dragon came, to bear the raw, untamed, chaotic, unspeakably twisted magics of the dragon.

As the first wave of the unspeakable power and abnormal, eldritch force carrying streams of insane thoughts, impossibly twisted vistas, illbound wisps and rampant life washed over Lori's Demesne, matched only by the mind and will of its Dungeon Binder, Lori stood in the dark and hoped she was enough.