Demesne

Lori had to work slowly and carefully as she desiccated the waste in the latrines. After all, she didn't want the waste to explode from a steam or vapor explosion. That would have been extremely unpleasant for everyone involved, herself included, as the smell would likely have remained for a long time afterwards. As a result, she worked carefully, first extracting what loose water she could—well, 'water'—and slowly converting it to vapor so it would escape out of the latrine.

…

It was then Lori realized that there wasn't anywhere for the vapor to escape from except out the seat. It… had never really been necessary. The previous times she'd had to desiccate her Dungeon's latrine waste, there wasn't nearly so much of it, as she had done so gradually over a period of time, not all at once. Well, she'd been thinking of improving the dungeon's latrines anyway. Clearly, she had to make a gas escape vent for the latrines. While such a vent would be a dangerous point of entry for dragonborn abominations, she'd just have to remember to close them just like anything else.

Forming a pipe through the stone was simple enough, and she simply let it open up to the outside of her Dungeon. She made sure the opening wasn't out in her entryway, but outside of it, in the space between her entryway and the water hub shed. Once the pipe was in place and the vapor she'd already converted had escaped, Lori proceeded to turn the rest of the loose 'water' into vapor.

Once all of that 'water' was removed, she was finally able to proceed with desiccating the waste. The waste was naturally inclined to be warm, so she simply bound those firewisps and formed them into a binding to begin gradually heating the waste. As the binding generated more and more firewisps, she claimed those and formed a binding around the latrine's waste receptacle to contain the heat, both because one just didn't let one's Dungeon get too hot or too cold, and because keeping the heat contained meant all the water and the waste got hot faster.

Then she claimed some of the waterwisps, and made a binding that would gently draw waterwisps in the receptacle towards where the gas escape vent was. That way both the liquid and gaseous water would slowly begin moving in that direction as the waste got hotter and more and more water turned to vapor.

That done—and making sure that the latrines remained shut so that no one would try to add anymore waste and burn themselves—Lori moved out of her dungeon to deal with the escaping gas from the latrine.

From the entryway, everything looked dark and overcast, but when Lori stepped out of the threshold and looked up, she saw what Riz meant about the dragon blocking the sun. For a moment, she just looked up and stared. She had never seen the main body of the dragon, as she had sealed off River's Fork's dragon shelter well before it had arrived, and looking up at the sky obscured by the long threads streaming from horizon to horizon, she was unsure if that was what the main body also looked like.

How long had those things been up there? How much longer would they be there? How far did they extend? Would they be spaced wider apart as the dragon moved further away and the long threads reached their end? She couldn't feel them, not the way she could feel an oncoming dragon. There were no pulsing waves that pushed at the wisps in her body or in her demesne coming from them, and the ones that she had felt emanating from the dragon were long gone. So what were these things? And what damage would they cause if they fell out of the sky onto her demesnes?

…

She'll probably find out when they actually fall.

Still, the overcast they caused did present a problem. It was approaching noon—despite everything, the sun was still visible behind the threads—but the light outside was very dim. Granted, it was probably much cooler than it had been all summer—she was feeing comfortably cool rather than comfortably warm, and while that wasn't much of a temperature range it was notable to her—but that wasn't as important. Fortunately, the lightwisps she's anchored to the outside of several buildings were still imbued and active because the buildings were being reinforced by earthwisps bindings that were connected together through the bedrock and was being imbued directly by her core, so the areas around the building was well-lit, but she'd need to provide more light in the areas beyond those so that people would be able to work properly.

It was another thing she had to add to the list of things she needed to do to get her demesne back to a working state.

But first, the latrines.

As expected, the output end of the gas escape she'd made was already giving the area around it the distinct smell of human waste, even if most of what was coming out was water vapor. Lori took a moment to rebuild the output vent so that it released higher up, which seemed to lessen the smell. It also let her make sure that there was a lot of stone between the pipe and the surface so that there was less risk of the pipe being exposed from external damage to the stone and an abomination getting in. Granted, there was little chance of that anyway, since the stone was reinforced by earthwisps, but she had to account for such possibilities.

She checked the latrine through her connections with the demesne's wisps. The water inside was getting hot and escaping from the waste as the vapor that had already escaped was drawn up and out through the vent, lowering the humidity of the air inside, letting more vapor be drawn out from the waste. That seemed to be well in hand, so she felt safe in moving on to other matters.

Taking a moment to check the containers of darkwisps that she'd established around the borders of her demesne—and telling herself this would be the last time she'd check today—Lori moved on to consider what else she had to fix.

Her gaze fell on a pile of dragonfrost on the inside of the flood walls, and it took her a moment to realize it was the pottery kiln. That meant the pile next to it was the shed where the pottery-to-be was allowed to dry before being fired. But wait… wasn't there a claypit?

Lori checked her awareness of the demesnes' wisps. Ah, yes, the claypit was there… but it was currently full of waterwisps and voids. The pit must have been filled over the week that the dragon had been passing, and the mass of frozen air and water was sufficiently insulated to not melt and sublimate yet… not that anything seemed to be growing warm anytime soon. The ground, the trees, the buildings… all were covered with the dragonfrost, and while she wasn't sure how thick the dragonfrost had originally been… because she hadn't been paying attention at the time…

Given how the claypit was completely filled, there was a lot of dragonfrost, which would be impractical to try and dig out. Given that, clearing the claypit would be a good test for methods she could use to clear the dragonfrost from the rest of her demesne.

First she made sure to set a binding of airwisps in place to draw away air upwards, since if she managed to sublimate the solidified air, than she would be releasing a large amount of exhalation in the air. While it was unlikely to cause asphyxiation out in the open like this, best not to risk it.

The simplest way to induce the solidified air to sublimate would simply be to increase its temperature so that it would simply become gaseous again, but there were two problems with that. The first was that if she turned all the solidified air back into… well, air, at the same time, the technical term for it would be an 'explosion'. And while she liked explosions, setting them off on the roofs of her demesne's houses, on their fields, and on every single tree and yustri of bareground would be very irresponsible. Probably enjoyable, no doubt… but also definitely irresponsible. And if she did it, then she'd have people continuing to stay in her Dungeon as their roof was repaired.

…

So she could probably set off the ones on the roof of Rian's house, since that was stone so she could repair it quickly…

…

Ahem. The second reason was that the dragonfrost was so cold they didn't have firewisps she could perceive to claim and bind, meaning any firewisps she would use on them needed to be claimed and bound some distance away. Now that she was looking, there were actually very little in the way of extant firewisps in her demesne that wasn't centered around the voids of wisps her that were her idiots. Not to say there wasn't any, but they were near small voids that were probably beasts or bugs that had probably huddled together for warmth. There were very few of those. Had many been killed by asphyxiation or cold?

…

Oh, she'd forgotten to make arrangements for the chokers they were trying to domesticate again, hadn't she?

…

Well, too late to do anything about it. Right now she had to work out ways to deal with dragonfrost.

All things considered, there was a way for her to generate heat in the vicinity of the solidified air. All she had to do was claim the waterwisps of the ice and frost around them and solidify it completely, rendering it far colder. Doing so would generate firewisps as heat was ejected from the water, and she would be able to claim those as the basis of a binding to start generating heat. Once she had firewisps generating heat, all she needed to do was raise the temperature around the dragonfrost to be higher than the temperature at which exhalation solidified. That wouldn't even require her to melt the ice, as the air would sublimate well before it grew that warm.

It all sounded perfectly sensible in theory, so now she simply had to put it into practice.

She took a moment to check on her Dungeon's latrines. The heat was building, and more and more water was turning to vapor and escaping out of the gas escape vent. The desiccation was proceeding nicely, then. If the waste wasn't completely desiccated by lunch time, then—

Lori paused, and looked at the latrines again, and at the very hot water vapor escaping from the vent she had recently made. She looked towards the claypit.

Hmm…

Lori watched—from a distance and some elevation—as the dragonfrost in the claypit slowly melted away. She had anchored warm water vapor over the claypit, the firewisps set to maintain the vapor's warm temperature, and the waterwisps keeping the vapor together, preventing it from condensing into liquid, and not allowing other waterwisps to escape from the binding.

It was actually quite soothing to watch. The warm vapor heated the dragonfrost, and the firewisps ensured that the vapor never grew cold even as the air grew warmer and warmer. At first this had resulted in the topmost solidified air sublimating, but in the process the air actually drew in heat from the air and ice around it, causing the ice to grow colder. Once there was no more solidified air on the top-most layer, the ice actually insulated the lower layers of solidified air from the warmth.

At least, until Lori had forcibly converted the top layer of ice into water.

On contact with the now-liquid water, the solidified air immediately sublimated, bubbling up through the water and once more cooling it as the air drew in heat. However, the resulting water vapor rose up and encountered the binding that prevented the vapor from escaping and increased the water vapor's temperature substantially. As this vapor wasn't bound to remain vaporous, it quickly condensed back into water, joining the puddle below, now much warmer and beginning to thaw the ice and the continue to cause the solidified air to sublimate.

It was a nicely perpetuating cycle. As more and more water became vapor, the air in the claypit became both saturated and very warm. Once saturation was reached, it actually started to rain under the binding, warm water condensing from vapor and drizzling down to join the slowly growing pool that caused more and more ice to melt and solidified air to sublimate.

Now, all she needed to do was find a way to scale this to cover large swathes of her demesne…