Demesne

"Don't you have something you need to be doing?" Lori said as she imbued the binding of lightwisps she'd formed. Technically, she already knew how to make piercing light. However, the one she'd learned only made a little red dot on walls, didn't go very far, and wasn't really useful for anything besides making petbugs chase it around the floor.

"At the moment, that's making sure you don't go into an enclosed room and make a binding that gets hot enough to set the air on fire," Rian said flatly. "Have to keep the Dungeon Binder alive, after all. Very important job. Second most important job in the demesne, keeping the Dungeon Binder alive, second only to being the Dungeon Binder herself. We wouldn't want the most important person to lock herself in a room and then set the air on fire, would we? That would be very dangerous and might kill her."

She gave him a flat unamused look that he returned. "Well, make yourself useful and take notes," she said, handing him the pen, ink, and the sheaf of blank papers. Rian took them, but he looked significantly less enthused than in previous instances when she'd had him taking notes.

"Of course, your bindership. What dangerous thing you shouldn't do in an enclosed room are we doing now?" His words aside, Rian immediately sat down and put his back to one of the posts on the dock used for tying up the boats—which was in fact currently being used to tie up some of their boats—setting the sheaf of blank papers on one knee before weighing it down with the tablet to keep it from being caught in the wind. There wasn't any at the moment, the air still cool and still, but it was a sensible precaution. The ink bottle was opened and placed to one side, where he wouldn't accidentally kick it, while the pen was tested on the corner of the current page before Rian visibly got ready to take notes, the test sheet on top of the tablet.

Lori contemplated kicking him in the shin, but that might send the papers flying. She'd do it later. "One of the notes I wrote of observations during the dragon was a phenomenon that involved intense and concentrated lightwisps. I'm replicating the binding in an attempt to reproduce the phenomenon in question."

The binding had been strange. While it was little like what she had learned, a look at all the directionality and the fact there was only one direction exactly had been enough for her to identify it as a binding that produced piercing light. What was strange was the fact the light being used was unseen light, similar to the kind that she used to cleanse dustlife from their water facilities. She'd never considered using unseen light so, but in hindsight it made sense. Unseen light was still light, and so could be used for piercing light.

"This is the first test to ascertain the effectiveness and accuracy of replication of flow diagram…" Lori paused. "Leave that part blank, I'll draw it in later. But in summary, we will be testing a binding that from analysis and observation will produce piercing light using unseen light."

"If the light is unseen, how will you know it worked?" Rian asked as he wrote. "Are you perhaps going to stick your hand in to see if it's working?"

Both shins.

"The desired effect will be obvious to me," Lori said instead, and Rian actually wrote that down. Huh. Well, she supposed that it had been a valid question. Maybe a kick and a half, then.

Lori anchored the binding to one of the stone posts and angled it down so that the piercing light would strike the water. Well, eventually. She'd aimed it at a point in the middle of the river.

"First test, with the binding exactly as diagrammed in my notes," Lori said. "Activating the binding now."

As Rian had pointed out, there was no visible sign that the binding was working. The spot in the river she was aiming at didn't change as far as Lori could see, and as stated, there was no visible sign that the binding was even activated at all.

However, through her awareness of the wisps in her demesne, Lori was quickly able to perceive that the test had been successful, as the same phenomenon that she had observed during the dragon's passing had occurred.

Almost as soon as the binding had activated, the air in the path of the piercing light had filled with lightningwisps. Even when she deactivated the binding, the lightningwisps had remained in a mostly straight line, though that line was beginning to be affected by what little winds there were.

"Test successful," Lori declared. "The reproduced binding is working as intended, reproducing the results that were originally observed."

"And those results are?" Rian prompted as he wrote.

"The piercing light consisting of unseen light generated lightningwisps along its path."

The pen Rian was holding stilled as he looked up sharply. "It does?"

Lori nodded. "Yes. I noticed it by chance when I was observing the dragon's working, and fortunately I was able to note how the binding had been formed before it ran out of imbuement and dissolved."

Rian tilted his head. "Would you have been able to use the path of lightningwisps to—"

"Throw around lightning like a character in a bad theater play?" Lori said. "Yes. I believe that when paired with the right binding, this binding in conjunction with the other will allow me to send lightning flowing through the path of lightningwisps."

He looked down at the notes on his lap, under the tablet. "Are you telling me that if I'd given you these notes sooner, you'd have had a perfect binding to use that would have let you just throw lightning at the typhon from a safe distance?"

The two of them were silent of a moment as Lori turned to glare at Rian.

"Why are you looking at me like that? You were the one who gave me your notes and gave me specific orders about when to give them back to you," Rian said. "And I didn't know what was in the notes, so there's no way I would have known this binding existed."

As much as she wanted to make it three shin kicks, he—ugh—had a point.

She still wanted to kick him, though.

"All right, preparing for the next test," Lori said, "reconfiguring the binding to consume half as much imbuement…"

After all, while she knew the binding worked, it could stand to be more efficient.

Lori managed to make a lot of progress with deciphering her notes over the next two days. With some adjustments and tests, she had been able to configure the unseen piercing light binding—as Rian had dubbed it in the notes—to be far less imbuement intensive, though the reduced consumption came at the cost of reducing the distance which the piercing unseen light travelled.

With the path of lightningwisps created by the unseen piercing light, sending lightning down the path was relatively simple, though it took Lori some time to create a proper binding for it. The binding she already knew for creating lightning consumed all of its imbuement and dissolved once activated, jumping from her and following the path of lightningwisps to whatever she'd pointed the unseen piercing light towards. While sufficient for throwing lightning at something, the fact that the binding was consumed after the lightning was created was annoying, since it meant she'd need to remake the binding every time.

Fortunately, she already had another binding that would make lightning, and it was simple to modify the lightning ball binding that she had developed to use against the typhon abomination. The lightning that the binding created easily followed the trail of lightningwisps, although the binding needed to be heavily imbued. The way that her hand became comfortably warm and the number of firewisps emanating from the binding moved her to add a layer of firewisps around the shell of the lightningball to contain the heat.

Lori was able to take a second try at observing the lightning ball binding she had observed from the dragon, and as before the lightning very quickly caused the air that had been compressed together to ignite. This time she had the presence of mind to be looking away when she activated the binding over the middle of the river. It was really more of a fire ball than a lightning ball, and when allowed to burn for more than a few moments quickly began spreading firewisps.

While wonderful and something Lori wished she'd known about when she'd had to set the inverted corpse on fire, at the moment it was useless to her. The heat that the binding generated was so great it wasn't safe for her to use it outside of her demesne, so unless she anchored the binding to a rock, she had no other way to use it at the moment. But then, her own rendition of the lightning ball she had made based on memories of this one also wasn't something she could simply activate in her hand and had still proven very useful.

Once the test was completed, Lori took hold of the notes again and continued perusing and deciphering her own writings, this time occupying Rian's alcove—that is, the alcove she knew Rian and the other three occupied when a dragon was passing overhead—while using a binding of airwisps to bring the sounds of the carpenters' alcove to her. The latter wasn't a perfect solution—she'd needed to shape the binding to go over the children playing among the support pillars in the middle of the open space of the second level because they had kept running back and forth through her binding and cause their yells to overwhelm the sounds of the carpenters—but it worked well enough, and people knew better than to bother her.

Some of the notes she'd read, while interesting, didn't lead to anything immediately helpful. For example, one of the notes had been about her observations on a wispling, which had gone on at length about how the binding it consisted of kept reforming without any sort of external claim, as well as how it seemed to be inhaling imbuement out of the very air. The various flow diagrams she had made, once carefully recreated, had all simply emitted light—just light, not even any form of unseen light—in various patterns, with no indication as to how to reproduce the wispling at all.

There were also notes for spiraling bindings of lightningwisps that according to her notes repelled each other, when they hadn't attracted each other. From the state of the handwriting, the notes had been written well into the dragon's passing, when Lori was now willing to admit she hadn't been thinking clearly, and she had noted down the strange behavior of what she now realized had been a lode presence. She vaguely recalled that it was possible to make a lode presence by creating a lightningwisp binding that functioned in a closed loop. It had been more of a party trick than anything else, letting you pull certain kinds of metal like iron towards the binding, but she didn't really know more than that. She'd never taken the classes on lode studies since they had been for more advanced studies. Not very useful unless they somehow dropped several nails in the water.

…

Lori tested the binding after borrowing an iron bar from the treasure room, and sure enough the binding caused the iron to move towards it, with subsequent tests showing that the stronger she made the lightning, the more strongly metal would be drawn.

Huh, was this how her professor had made a ball of iron float? Something this simple? Huh. If she'd known, she might have applied for those classes in lode studies.

Well, as amusing as it was, the binding was of limited utility. Maybe she'd try to make something float if she ever got very bored.

At least, that was what she had thought until she had encountered another note a little further on that had indicated that the flames generated by her lightningwisp fire ball could somehow be contained and channeled through spiraling loops of lightningwisps. The notes had been partially incoherent—in the middle had been the words 'remember to imbue the ice'—and the flow diagram had been… well, it might have been a spiral, if she squinted. Still, it was fortunate that she had a much more coherent diagram to follow.

The claim had been so strange that she'd actually gone outside and tested it above the middle of the river, creating a fire ball and then pricking a hole in the shell of airwisps to release the fire being compressed. That had resulted in a rather spectacular plume of fire—and had caused Lori to alter her thoughts on the usefulness and utility of the fire ball binding—but when she had surrounded the breach in shell with a spiraling tube of lightningwisps, she'd been surprised to find that the note had been correct.

It had been a good note to end on, and Lori went to sleep feeling satisfied.

The next day, instead of trying to decipher her notes, Lori had decided to do something more productive and try to find a way to combine the unseen piercing light binding with her lightning ball binding so that both effects could be utilized more efficiently instead of requiring the use of two separate bindings. It had taken several iterations, and one of the very first things she had learned was that unfortunately, the binding couldn't simply be anchored to her skin so that she could just point and activate it to direct lightning at something. The lightning was simply too hot, resulting in burns on her hands that had required treatment from both Taeclas—thankfully the woman had been wearing a head cloth with her name on it, because trying to check her belt pouch for the rock with the right name would have been painful—and Shanalorre to deal with her injuries.

Rian had been very annoying about it. He completely deserved those kicks to the shin!

Really, it was simply an insulation problem. Her final, completed binding could be anchored to the skin and used without burning herself!

She had also experimented with the phenomenon of lightning fire being possible to channel with spiraling lightningwisps. It… wasn't quite like trying to get water to flow through a tube. The spacing of the loops of the spiral had to be just so, or the fire would escape between them, and unlike water the fire would try to escape upwards. Still, with trial and error Lori had been able find a way to gather and channel the original plume—which had tried to go everywhere—into a more coherent stream. When contained like that, it had almost been like manipulating a water cutter.

Lori was very good at using a water cutter.

And this time she didn't get any burns!