Demesne

As much as she wanted to, Lori wasn't able to test the enlarged lightning ball on a living subject. Trying to put a seel into the binding wouldn't be demonstrative of the results of the binding on a dry subject, and trying to put the binding underwater would fundamentally change it. Given how busy everyone was, there wasn't time left in the day to catch a choker to use as a test subject. However, her tests had concluded to her satisfaction and a lightningball binding she felt would suffice for being able to kill decisively, so Lori felt everything was ready. She was ready.

"Is everything ready?" Lori asked Rian at dinner that night as she stirred her stew. While she had worked on developing the binding, she had left all the other matters up to him.

"As ready as we'll ever be," Rian said, looking tired. Kolinh, sitting on the bench with him, merely looked patient. "I'm sure you've noticed that the children from River's Fork are back. Again."

The sounds of the children eating at the table behind her were hard to miss. "Are they? I couldn't tell."

She didn't react as there was a splash and a cry behind her. One of the children's cups had tipped over, spilling water.

"Ah…" Rian said, nodding for some reason. Mikon, sitting next to him today, gently nudged him with her elbow, and he had a spoonful of stew before replying further. "Well, you have been busy taming lightning out of the sky and turning it into your own personal ball of death, so it's to be expected little details like that escaped you. The children from River's Fork are back and staying in Shanalorre's house again, and Shanalorre came back. With luck, the children will be back home tomorrow or the day after, once we've dealt with the typhon abomination."

"There's no need to rush," Shanalorre said from behind Lori at the other table. "Take as much time as needed to deal with the matter sufficiently."

"Your opinion is noted," Lori said flatly. She kept her gaze on Rian. "Beyond the children, what about the other preparations?"

Rian turned to the man sitting past Riz and Mikon as Lori ate her own food. "Kolinh?"

"There's very little preparation to be done, given the time we had available, what we will be dealing with, and what resources we have on hand," the older man said. His food was already halfway eaten, although he had ceased eating when the attention turned towards him, sticking the bread he'd been holding into his stew bowl. "With the assistance of the carpenters and Wiz Taeclas, we were able to make several pikes that should be more effective in keeping something the size of the abomination at bay. Those will be less effective among trees, but should someone actually need to try and drive it off they'll stand a better chance. However, I must stress very strongly that any plan where the militia will need to do such a thing will be doomed from the start."

"Because of the length of the pikes, they'll need to be carried in their own boat, or else it might capsize from the weight distribution," Rian said. "It would be easier on the Coldhold, but her Bindership hasn't pulled that out of the river yet. We have volunteers who will be coming along to wield them, and we will also be distributing them among those we sent to River's Fork earlier today. All the volunteers are former militia and have experience wielding them and working together. No civilian volunteers this time, although the hunters will be coming with us to supplement the scouts."

Lori frowned as she finished chewing the mouthful of bread she was masticating. "Why is that necessary? Shanalorre will be able to tell us exactly where it is. That's why she was sent there this morning, after all." Among other reasons.

"With all due respect to yourself and Binder Shanalorre, Great Binder," Kolinh said, putting down his spoon, "from what Binder Shanalorre describes, at best she will be able to point to where it is and perhaps give us an estimate as to the distance from her location. Binder Shanalorre will not be able to relay the terrain, nor be able to provide a proper analysis of it to be able to say whether a location will be suited towards trapping it, or whatever plan we will effect. While I am told that the hunters are confident it will take the path they have identified, if it doesn't we will need to adapt, and scouts will be able to find ideal locations for such adjustments better than Binder Shanalorre can."

She considered the statement and reluctantly nodded in acknowledgement. Lori supposed the argument had merit. While her awareness of the wisps in her demesne technically allowed her to examine every location within it, she would be hard pressed to describe any landmarks that wasn't the river or a man-made structure. Directing people to a location wasn't a problem for her, since if she needed to she could simply lay down a glowing line of lightwisps and mark the destination, but Shanalorre would be unable to do the same beyond pointing in a given direction and perhaps providing an estimated distance. "Noted. What else?"

"I gave permission that some of the small storage jars be converted into bombs," Rian said. "We don't really have the material for anything that explodes, but we were able to put together a mix of fat, straw and grass, and a little tinder to make smoke bombs, and we'll be preparing piles for smoke fires tomorrow as well, in case we need to cover up our scents or need to smoke out the abomination. I'm not sure how effective it will be, but the one we made earlier smoked well enough, so… hopefully we won't need it? We've gathered all the strong rope too, in case we need set some kind of trap."

Lori looked at him in askance. "Rian, what sort of trap could we possibly make?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, but Kolinh said it might be helpful. Besides, maybe we'll get stupidly lucky and manage to get a loop around the beast's foot or something."

"That sounds like a stupid idea from a bad play."

"Look, all I know is the abomination probably doesn't know how to untie knots. If we manage to do that, we might be able to tie the other end to a tree, and keep it mostly in place enough so you can work your magic on it somehow."

She rolled her eyes. "It won't come to that."

"We're hoping it won't come to that," Rian said. "If things go unpredictably wrong, I want to give everyone options beyond 'poke it with long sticks' or 'run away'. To that end, we'd also been making stone-tipped arrows. Or rather, we've been putting the stone and bone arrowheads you've already made onto new shafts."

"I don't think poking at the abomination with even smaller sticks will do much good, Rian."

"They will if you put some kind of binding on the arrowhead. Preferably one that explodes, I know you have a few. We had the one arrow before, but given what happened last time we could have used it… well, more arrows means more chances that they'll hit."

Lori considered that. "I'll need to do some more testing, but the arrows probably need to be within my line of sight," she said. Although… yes, that binding might work. "Once I've put the binding onto it, they'll need to be handled with care, or the binding might be set off while the arrow is being held." It shouldn't come to that, if she made the binding correctly. Of course, she'd need to do some testing of that binding to make sure that that binding worked as intended…

"How much testing will you need?" Rian asked. "Another day? Because that would give us more time to prepare and make bombs. Though after this is over, Gunvi is going to need to make a lot of replacements. We need those pots for everyday use, after all."

…

"Rian… are you trying to procrastinate?" Lori said flatly.

He blinked, looking surprised. "What? No! Why would you…?" He paused. "All right, I think I see why you'd think I was doing that, but I'm not trying to procrastinate here! It's just we'd benefit from having more time to prepare."

"So… procrastinate."

"Again, I can see why you'd think that, but that's not what I'm doing!"

Lori gave her lord one more suspicious look before looking over her shoulder. "Shanalorre, how close is the abomination to the dome?"

There was a pause as Shanalorre no doubt tried to translate her perceptions into something understandable to those without it. "Very close, Great Binder. From what I can perceive, it has stopped moving within sight of the river. If it weren't for all the trees obstructing sight, the typhon abomination would likely be visible from the top of the hill the mine is in. It… seems to be devouring another, smaller abomination that it managed to catch. According to the hunters, beasts generally do not stay in the vicinity of their kills after they have fed, but most of the directions it is likely to move towards will soon bring it to the river, which will put it in view of the dome the next time it goes to drink."

That… sounded very close. "That sounds very close," Lori noted.

"How close is it in terms of… oh, the diameter of the dome?" Rian asked.

There was a brief pause. "Measured from the edge of the dome facing the abomination towards the abomination's approximate center… about five to six dome diameters' distance, approximately. Unfortunately, I cannot be more precise than that."

That was… concerningly near, put in context. Lori didn't have an exact measure of the dome's diameter, but she had walked through and around it enough time to have a sense of the dome's size. Walking four or five times across its length wouldn't be that much distance. Lori wouldn't even complain about needing to walk somewhere that far.

"It appears that procrastinating isn't an option, Rian," Lori said.

"I wasn't suggesting that we—ugh, never mind. Yes, that's disturbingly close. If it's eating, then it might head for water soon to wash off the blood, and that would put it even closer. With everyone in the dragon shelter, there shouldn't be any risk of people being endangered, but if it's close to the dome it would limit the bindings you could use without causing damage to the dome's infrastructure buildings. Kolinh, can we deal with the abomination tomorrow with what we have?"

"It would depend on how the Great Binder intends to approach the abomination," Kolinh said. "We would at best simply be distractions to try and guide the thing to where the Great Binder needs it to be."

"Couldn't we stand well back and cheer her on as her plan goes perfectly and no one is any danger whatsoever?" Rian said hopefully.

"Probably," the other man said, "but I wouldn't count on it. It's very hard to get a beast to go where you want it, never mind an abomination."

Rian sighed. "Ah, my hopes and dreams, dashed by this cruel world…"

"Rian, stop being a useless thespian. Is there anything else?"

Rian looked towards Kolinh for a moment, as if waiting for the man to bring up anything else. When the man stayed silent, her lord shook his head. "No, I think that's all of it."

"Then finish your food and get me those arrows. I'll see about what kind of binding I can anchor onto them." She'd need to make the lightningball bindings in any case, and for that she'd need a lot of lightningwisps—which was why she hadn't dissolved the lightning ball she'd made earlier, merely deactivated it, as well as binding all the loose lightningwisps it had generated—so she might as well anchor bindings to the arrows as well. Wait, she needed something to anchor those lightning balls too. "And river stones."

For some reason, Rian turned and gave Kolinh a smug look. "See? I told you gathering all those rocks was a good idea."

"So you did," Kolinh said, handing Rian one of his micans. "I'll have them brought in, Great Binder. Where do you want them?"