Demesne

"Your Bindership! I'm so glad to see you're all—"

That was as far as Rian got as Lori took two steps forward clapped a hand over his mouth to silence whatever theatrics were going to come out. "Where are my notes, Rian?" she snarled at him.

A part of her, the part that liked good presentation in stories and plays, noted that she should have probably had some sort of pre-amble to that statement. Something like 'I'm only going to say this once' or 'I do not have time for any of your nonsense'. Possibly 'Answer me immediately or I'll kill repeatedly kick you'. However, that same part agreed that in many instances, statements like that made the character in question less threatening and more silly, or at least harder to take seriously. So, straightforward queries directly backed by violent action it was.

Fortunately for his life shins, Rian immediately pointed towards the dragon shelter.

"Show me," Lori ordered, letting him go and striding to the mine in question.

"Hi Riz! I'll see you later, I just have to deal with this!" she heard him say behind her, followed by hurried footsteps that fell into step besides her. "So, how's home looking like? Less… frosted, I hope?"

Lori ignored him, focusing on her destination. She moved as quickly as she could without running, each footfall heavy and deliberate.

"Your notes are fine, by the way. I made sure it was all dry and pressed them between some planks to try and flatten it out. And don't worry, I made sure to put sheets of paper between each page so that if any of the ink rubbed off it wouldn't be on any of the other notes."

Annoyance and relief filled Lori in turns, as she'd been afraid that he would try to flatten out her notes in a fit of misguided helpfulness and that ink would rub off on other pages. "Good," she managed to ground out, not letting herself feel relieved. If she felt relieved, it would ruin the righteous outrage filling her at Rian not putting her notes in her pack! "I'm displeased with you."

"Can't think of any reason why," Rian said cheerfully. "Did I somehow turn off all the lights in the demesne or something? Did I do it twice?"

What was he talking ab—?

Oh.

Lori twitched slightly as she remembered that in her half-asleep fumbling she had done that. Simply deactivated every lightwisp binding in the demesne. Fortunately she'd remembered what she'd been supposed to be doing and was able to correct the matter before she fell asleep, but… ugh, she'd been hoping everyone had been asleep and hadn't noticed. After all, it had been the middle of the night!

"Yeah, that was an eventful lunch," Rian continued, blissfully ignorant of Lori's thoughts. She subtly widened her pace to try to leave him behind. "It really upset the children, they thought something had happened to you out here, and that they were going to die soon because there was nothing protecting them from the dragon anymore."

Rainbows. He was keeping up. He was shorter than her, he should have shorter legs!

"If you insist on talking, inform me of River's Fork's status," Lori said curtly.

"We've been able to clear the dragonfrost, but it's mostly been the main paths," Rian said, gesturing ahead where there was a path bare of dragonfrost leading up to the dragon shelter. The ground around the shelter had also been cleared, which her lord exposited about immediately. "We cleared the ground around the shelter because no one wants to asphyxiate in our sleep. We also killed two of the three dragonborn abominations around the dome that Shana's—"

"Shanalorre's."

"…Shanalorre's Deadspeaking didn't incapacitate or kill. Actually, we think she might have healed wounds they'd taken."

Lori actually slowed slightly so she could give her lord a piecing look. "Two out of three?" she said pointedly. It was a very sharp point, and was very inclined to stab. "Are you telling me that there's a dragonborn abomination still alive around here?"

"Oh no, it's dead, it's just we didn't kill it. Too disgusting." He looked around, then grunted. "You can't see it from here, and since I had people use the dragonfrost to bury it you can't smell it much either. I'll point it out to you when we get up to the shelter. We've put off cleaning it up since we didn't have any Deadspeakers to take care of our people if anyone caught something from it."

"It can't be that bad," Lori said.

"Whatever that abomination was, it was inside out. Its guts, its lungs, its hearts, they were all on the outside, and they were bloody since the bugs had been nibbling at them. Given what's in something's intestines, no one wanted to be near that smell or whatever dustlife was floating with it. We were going to put arrows into its hearts to put it down, but when we finally got around to it, it was already dead. I think it was dehydration, although it could be anything, really. Having your insides on the outside is not conducive to staying alive."

"I'll take your word for it," Lori said.

They exited out from under the dome again, and Lori began to climb the slope towards the copper mine and dragon shelter.

"There, you can see the abomination over—oh, you're just going straight into the dragon shelter," Lori heard behind her as she went straight through the mine's open doors. The ventilation was active, drawing in air from the outside, but the secondary defenses were down, as exemplified by the lack of darkwisps or fatal binding of lightningwisps. Absently, Lori reached out to claim the binding of lightningwisps—it was anchored to a bound tool core full of white Iridescence, so it hadn't dissolved despite being out of imbuement—and reformed the binding into one that kept out bugs, anchoring the binding to the stone just inside the first door of the mine and the binding of airwisps for the ventilation.

She glanced at each alcove behind each door in passing, noting that the beams used to secure the doors were back in place. The tunnels smelled strongly of people—specifically unbathed people—and Lori grimaced in displeasure at the sign of slovenly behavior. She was shaking in her head in annoyance, already planning to inform Yllian to tell whoever had been so unsanitary when she'd put in so much effort to provide bath water when she entered the alcove behind the last door and her nose was struck with the smell at its strongest.

…

Oh. Had her smell really been that bad? It hadn't seemed like it at the time…

"The smell isn't as bad close to the ground, so I've been sleeping there," Rian said, coming up behind her. "Wait a bit, I'll get your notes."

Her notes were being held between two bone tablets held together with cord, which were pressing the stack of notes flat. Rian had placed the pressed notes in the second bead receptacles, of all places. Lori had to keep herself from simply snatching the notes out of his hand as he handed them to her, sitting down on the sleeping niche—where the smell seemed to have infused the very rock—and enduring as she undid the bows that the cords had been knotted into. Rian didn't offer to help, trusting she was perfectly capable of undoing such simple knots by herself.

Carefully, she laid down the pressed stack on the stone next to her and pulled up the top tablet, and was met with a blank sheet of paper. She carefully pulled that up, and was glad to find it hadn't adhered to the notes underneath it nor pulled up ink. That spoke well of the quality of both the ink and the paper from Covehold Demesne, she supposed.

…

Ugh, she just remembered they had a contractual obligation to deliver another batch of beads before winter. Did they have time to do that before the Golden Sweetwood Company arrived?

She shook her head, dropping that flow of thought as she concentrated on carefully peeling apart the pressed layers. "The pages aren't in order," she said.

"That was the order they were stacked in when I found them," Rian said. "Not my fault you didn't number the pages."

Lori grunted. True, she hadn't numbered the pages, but that didn't mean the order the pages should have been in wasn't ob—wait, did this page come first or that one?

"So… what's so interesting about these notes that you neglected sleeping and bathing like you were trying to get to the end of a new book you'd been looking forward to?" Rian asked.

Lori wanted to protest that she'd never neglected bathing when she'd finally bought a new book, but given the current circumstances, that wasn't a flattering comparison. "They're notes on my observations of bindings that the dragon made," she said. "The ones I could understand, at least. Many seemed nonsensical and half-completed, and others were utterly strange, but I took note of what I could."

"Huh. Shanalorre said the dragon was low enough that it entered the border of her demesne. I suppose you'd actually be able to see what it does when it's that close," Rian said thoughtfully. "So, does that mean you saw wisplings getting made? You weren't really able to study any last year because cleaning up the demesne took so long, were you?"

She was surprised Rian remembered that. "I'm surprised you remembered that."

Rian shrugged. "I was vividly reminded because of the similarity of circumstances. Well, now that you've seen your notes, can we get to work now? We need you to burn the inverted abomination because it would take too much wood for us to do it normally, and there's still dragonfrost on all the trees. Lidz told me he managed to deactivate the bindings on them before they'd left, so they haven't been trying to grow for the past two weeks, but I'm concerned having so much dragonfrost on them is damaging the trees. Nature doesn't usually get cold enough to solidify air. There's a very real risk this killed a lot of our fruit trees. A lot of all our trees, for that matter, and Shanalorre's meaning doesn't work on plants."

Lori glared at him. Ugh, she hated it when he had a point.

It turned out that they had been having difficulty clearing out the various houses in River's Fork because they were all full of bugs.

To be more specific, the houses were full of bugs because the dome was full of bugs. The structure had managed to prevent much of the dragonfrost from reaching the ground, and the rest had acted as some degree of insulation. Given that there had been several dragonborn abominations in the dome, not simply the three that Rian had mentioned, and the bugs had several ample food sources of meat, fat, and in a few instances leaves and fruit to subsist on while the dragon had been in progress.

The remaining people in River's Fork had done their best to try and dispose of the dead abominations and do something about the bugs, but it had been difficult without proper protective clothing. While they had gloves and thick jackets, they had lacked protective veils and screens to keep the bugs away from their head, leading to several people being painfully stung or bitten as a result of trying to drag the abomination corpses out of the dome. Trying to use spear shafts and rope as improvised catchpoles to ensnare a limb and drag the abominations that way had been more successful, but there had just been so many bugs swarming that some injuries had still been gathered.

This also meant that the bugs were difficult to dislodge from the houses because unlike in Lori's demesne, they had not turned upon each other and reduced their numbers, as they had other food sources. The inverted abomination, for one thing. Lori's first course of action was to make portable bug-repellant bindings, as a means of trying to herd the swarms of bugs out of the buildings.

They were simple enough to make by putting some softened stone onto some sturdy branches, and then anchoring the binding of lightningwisps to the stone. This limited the area that the binding could cover, as lightningwisps could only extend so far from an anchor point before beginning to be affected by the naturally occurring lightningwisps in the air, but that was more than enough when the intent was to use the binding as a goad to move and drive away the bugs.

Soon the air was full of dislodged bugs, which… well, wasn't really much of a change, but with their new protection, her idiots in River's Fork were now able to finally make progress in dragging away the abomination corpses.

Lori, meanwhile, had to burn a corpse because moving it would spread contaminants everywhere, and they had no time to scavenge for wood.

She had never burned a corpse before.

It should be fun.