Demesne

Burning a corpse was harder to do than Lori had thought as she glared at the uncooperative dead hunk of flesh.

She stood near the disgusting, bleeding, oozing thing that was the inverted abomination—for lack of a shorter term, since referring it as 'the inside-out one' was too wordy even in her own head—a binding to keep away bugs surrounding her body and anchored to her fingernails as well as the bone clips on her hat, watching as a small fire on a fleshy extremity that was now bare of dragonfrost burned but did not spread. Another binding of airwisps kept blowing the air towards the dead abomination and away from her in an attempt to reduce what she was smelling. It wasn't as successful as she'd wished, as she could still smell the thing, but the intensity was greatly reduced.

Lori was willing to admit she didn't have a lot of experience with burning corpses. She'd killed beasts before, but she'd done so cleanly, since they had wanted the bodies intact so they could skin it for leather, pluck it for feathers, and butcher it for meat. Still, she had thought it wouldn't be that hard. She'd picked up some fallen wood on the ground, melted off the dragonfrost, and then dried by claiming the waterwisps in the wood and pulling it out. It wasn't something she did to wood they intended to build with, since the abrupt desiccation damaged the grain and weakened the wood's structure, but this was firewood, so that didn't matter.

She'd warmed the wood with firewisps to give herself something to anchor to, and then anchored the binding of firewisps to it. It was a simple enough binding, one the raised the temperature significantly in a thumbnail-sized point, which she had used before to start cooking fires. Since it would be very hot, and her staff was only so long, she added a binding of lightwisps—also anchored to her nails—as a contact to access the binding at a distance. After all, lightwisps were plentiful around her, and now that she had learned to claim and bind it through the thinner sections of her skin, it was much more convenient to use.

Oh, how annoyed she'd been at seeing her classmates using lightwisps as threads of contact so easily and not realizing why…

After she had laid down the bound piece of wood under a promisingly fleshy part of the inverted abomination that didn't look too wet, and hurrying to some distance away because the smell had been more than her binding of airwisps could push away, Lori had activated the binding of firewisps. A line of faintly glowing white light had appeared, only visible because it was so dim under the dome because of the overcast and the bugs flying about, had connected the back of her hand to the wood. The wood had begun to smoke until an open flame appeared. The flame had flickered and died as the dragonfrost around it sublimated, the solidified air asphyxiating the fire as it would have a person.

Lori had needed to start again, specifically heating the area she wanted to set aflame and using a binding of airwisps to blow away the sublimating solidified air and snow to remove them from around the abomination's corpse. While the dragonfrost had been somewhat mitigating the decay of the flesh, it had not had much effect on the other sources of foul odors coming from the abomination. With the air cleared, Lori had ignited the piece of wood again. The wood had sizzled for a moment, the water that had gotten on it bubbling and steaming away before the thing had finally ignited once more, flame dancing on the blackened spot where her binding of firewisps had been centered.

She had quickly claimed and bound the firewisps from that flame, as well as the firewisps of the flame itself. In only a short time, the heat had begun to penetrate the flesh that the flame was under, and Lori was able to bind those firewisps too, the fire growing as she fed it air while at the same time blowing away any sublimating dragonfrost. The smell of cooking meat began to fill the air, which quickly turned into the smell of charring and burning meat.

Forming all of the firewisps into one binding, still connected to her with a line of lightwisps, Lori was able to begin increasing the temperature of the flesh further. The bits of wood she had gathered were being consumed faster at the increased heat, but that was fine. The corpse itself would start burning any moment now. After all, it was already charring and burning, and that was basically the meat turning into charcoal, right? Soon she'd be able to deactivate the binding and the process would become self-sustaining, although she'd still have to worry about the flames being snuffed out by the sublimating dragonfrost.

It would be any moment now.

…

Any moment now…

…

What was wrong with this corpse!-? Why wasn't the rest of it catching fire? She'd tried to deactivate the binding of firewisps, and when she had done so the flames had slowly started to weaken and sputter out!

"Huh, that's new. Having trouble?"

She turned her glare towards Rian, who was holding his rock with the lightwisps anchored to it. At the moment, the lightwisps were sharing the rock with a binding of lightningwisps to keep back bugs, although the latter binding's radius wasn't very wide. Rian had to occasionally kick and jump to dislodge bugs landing on his knees and lower legs. This was quite unfortunate as he was wearing tsinelas instead of boots, leaving his feet mostly bare and putting his footwear in very real danger of being chewed up by bugs. At the moment, he was enthusiastically dancing in place to keep the bugs from having a stationary target. "Obviously," she replied.

Had she made his binding smaller than it could have been? Of course! He hadn't put her notes into her pack.

He glanced at the rather pathetic little fire. It was a small fraction of the inverted abomination, which was three times the size of the wooden houses they had here in River's Fork, and was far more heavy since it was presumably not simply hollow and full of air. Rian nodded. "Yup, that's why we haven't tried burning it yet. A cute little bonfire isn't going to be burning this thing. We'd need something bigger and hotter, and with wood we would have needed a lot of it." He turned back towards her. "So… now that your test-fire is done, are you going to desiccate the flesh so you can speed things up and burn this now?"

Lori paused. "Desiccate?"

"Well, it's probably not needed since you've already managed to set a bit of it on fire. After all, flesh is wet. You're not going to burn it properly without drying it out. It's why we would have needed a lot of fuel. Not only does it need to be really hot to burn flesh, we need to at least get rid of all the water first to even get started."

Lori turned to look towards the burning flesh, where the flames were already flickering and beginning to die, and sighed as she realized what the problem was. She activated the binding again, adding more heat, even as she used the thread of lightwisps connecting her to the firewisps to feel out the rest of the dead flesh, seeking out for waterwisps. And where there was waterwisps, there was water.

Most people didn't understand why water snuffed out fire. It wasn't just because the water separated the fire from the air needed to fuel itself. There were alchemical mixtures that could burn even when wet or immersed in water, but water can snuff those out too. This was because water could absorb a lot of heat before it started to get hotter.

That same water in the flesh of the abomination was absorbing the heat from Lori's firewisps, and the outer-most layer of that water was probably frozen from the dragonfrost around them, further increasing the capacity of that water to absorb heat. That was why the part of the corpse she'd managed to ignite slowly kept dying when she deactivated the binding. Even with the binding active, the cold and frozen water in the flesh that wasn't actively on fire was vastly slowing down how quickly the surrounding flesh grew hot, inhibiting the rest of the corpse catching fire.

Ugh, this was going to be another thing she had to do slowly, wasn't it?

Well, at least firewisps were easy to make a lot of.

"By the way, lunch is almost ready."

Lori waved a hand dismissively as she started walking around the abomination corpse, refamiliarizing herself with its dimensions. "Yes, yes, I'll be there. Just need to do this…"

It was unusual for her to alter and reposition a binding while it was still actually functioning. Most of the time, it was highly unsafe. Still, the firewisps were only creating heat, a function that didn't really change even as she claimed more and more of the firewisps that the binding was generating, while using others as anchor points as she walked around the corpse of the inverted abomination.

Around the corpse, the dragonfrost was popping as the heat affected the solidified air, causing little pops and cracks that had Lori stepped back and cautiously raising one hand to try and shield her face from any flying debris. Frost turned to slush as the dragonfrost that intersected the firewisp binding melted, turning into water that poured over solidified air and caused it to bubble up cold mist that was blown away by the airwisp binding Lori was using to push the terrible smells of the corpse away from her.

The smell was quite… intense, but she pushed through, and soon she had surrounded the bottom edges of the dead abomination with a single binding of firewisps, from which originated an ever-expanding puddle of water and cold mist. In the process, her initial ignition point had sputtered and gone out, leaving behind only the smell of burnt meat. Still, she knew she could ignite that point again, so for the moment she let it be as she continued spreading the binding, and generating more and more firewisps.

With the abomination's lower portion now encompassed by the firewisp binding and the mist cleared as the last of the solidified air sublimated away to leave only water, Lori stepped further back, the line of lightwisps connecting her to the rest of the binding as she had the firewisps produce in earnest heat. It was a strong, even heat and soon the dragonfrost that had been thrown around the corpse was melting and sublimating, the cold mist dispersing in the heat.

The abomination's flesh began crackling and sizzling merrily, and soon the disturbingly delicious smell of cooking meat filled the air once more. It also caused the bugs that had continued swarming and nibbling at the parts of the abomination's flesh that hadn't been covered in dragonfrost take flight and fly down lower, no doubt following the scent, only to be repulsed by the heat of the firewisps. A few fell to the ground, their wings withering as they got too close, falling into the sludgy mixture of water, abomination blood, and whatever humors had been released by the ruptured organs hanging from the inverted abomination.

Still, it seemed to be working. The point that she had initially been able to set on fire reignited, and the streaks of golden abomination blood that were usually thick and dense seemed to melt and become runny. There wasn't much abomination blood left, as most of the exposed blood had been licked up and devoured by bugs, but there was some and one little rolling droplet made contact with the flames of the initial ignition point. The abomination blood burst into cloyingly sweet-smelling fire that quickly moved along the trail that the blood had left behind, setting a portion of the corpse alight. That flame quickly burned out, but for the next little while parts of the corpse started bursting into sweet-smelling fire, which mixed alarmingly with the smell of burning meat.

Eventually, finally, the corpse started to burn. She stared at it, because one needed to make sure that fire didn't go out of control, and to do that one needed to watch very carefully and intently. Even from where she was standing, nearly ten paces away, she could feel the heat of the flames on her face from the burning corpse. It was nothing like watching a candle burn, or wax-soaked raw cloudblooms. The now-hot flesh was bubbling, and from a novel she'd read where a plot point had been someone had died by immolation, she knew that meant that the fat in the flesh was being rendered out and now burning as fuel, adding to the blaze…

"Oh good, you finally got it going," Rian said cheerfully as he suddenly seemed to appear next to her. He looked tired, and was covered in sweat, still dancing in place to keep bugs from settling on his feet and lower legs as he hopped very high and kicked back and forth when a rather large bug settled down on his ankle. One hand still held the rock his binding was anchored to, while the other was pinching his nose shut to force him to breathe though his mouth and avoid most of the smell. "Ah, what a waste. All that meat, and whatever leather there might be on the inside… completely inaccessible because it's too disgusting to touch."

"Hmm…"

"By the way, you missed lunch, since you were having so much fun playing with fire."

Lori's flow of thought ground to a halt, and she turned towards Rian, even as she suddenly realized how hungry she was. "What?"

"You missed lunch. I told you it was almost ready, remember, and you said you'd be there, you just needed to do something…? When I came back and saw that the food I'd set aside for you still hadn't been eaten, I came here."

She stared at him, the burning corpse hot on one side of her face. Her stomach kicked her from the inside to remind her it was still empty. Turning, she began to head towards the mine, where the food had likely been served because she could see the dining pavilion was still empty. "Where is it?" she demanded.

Rian fell into step beside her. "I'll show you. And may I just say, I'm really glad you're starting to be more trusting of people."

Lori gave him a bewildered look. "I'm always trusting." She trusted her idiots to act like idiots.

"Well, I'm glad you now trust people to not spit on or poison your food after it's been left unattended for so long."

"…"

Lori kept walked for a few moments. "Get me some fruit from storage," she ground out.

"Are you sure? The stew and bread was pretty good. It's probably cold now, but that's not a problem for—"

"Get me fruit."

"Well, if you say so, your Bindership. But if you're not going to eat the stew, does that mean I can have it?"

Lori gave him a level look. "What if someone spat on it or it's poisoned?"

"I'm a trusting soul. I'm willing to take the risk."