Demesne

The community meeting progressed. As the morning wore on, people began to relax a little more as there were no other explosions of violence.

Still, there was some subtle movement to try and push through the subject of getting land. Someone proposed that they should, in fact, map out the area. Purely so people wouldn't get lost, of course. By their current reckoning, the area of the demesne was four taums in diameter, which everyone found impressive and just made Lori smug. She knew it was bigger than some of the settlements they'd encountered just outside of Covehold, many of which were barely a taum wide. Covehold itself had been 10 taums in diameter, with most of it already filling up with buildings. It likely could have been larger: from the placement of buildings in the center of the demesne, Covehold's core was likely underground.

When they'd chosen their spot between the cliff and the river, there had been people who'd insisted Lori set up the core right then and there, but she'd refused, since a core out in the open, completely unprotected, was just asking for trouble. Besides, she'd needed time to synchronize with the area's wisps, or else the resulting Dungeon would have had a significantly smaller demesne…

She remembered the small, taum-wide settlements outside Covehold that had charged them outrageous 'visitors tax' just to sleep inside their borders for the night and smiled maliciously.

The one who was currently speaking– something about moving the beast-baiting tower to the river since beasts would be more vulnerable when they stopped for a drink– suddenly stopped speaking, looking at her fearfully. Lori smoothed her features, looking down at the stone tablet she'd been drawing on. The tablet had been added to, and she had some doodles for bound tools. They'd need wire and glass though, and she'd rather have raw material than try to break down the glassware she had…

At lunch, they decided to finish the meeting so that people could eat and get back to things they needed to do, like cut wood and put up roofs and try to figure out how to make hinges for doors with the materials and tools they had. There was some disarray as tables and chairs were put back in place, while Rian copied the notes he'd written on the tabletop to a plank of wood.

"Take all this to my cave," Lori said, gesturing at rocks and wood and bark and skins. "I'll transfer them to something smaller. Especially the list of things we needed."

"That will be helpful, thanks," Rian said, nodding. He continued writing the notes onto the plank. Shrugging, Lori went to get two bowls of whatever they were having for lunch. She supposed she should get him something to eat. And people liked Rian more than her, so they were probably less likely to poison food they thought might go to him.

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Lunch was attained and eaten. Neither had been poisoned.

After lunch, she helped Rian and some people he'd asked for help carry all the various note… objects? Note objects to her cave, careful to not smudge the writing on whatever surface it had been written on. She saw people giving her table suspicious looks, and despite her iterating that it was, in fact, a table and not a sacrificial altar (why would she put a sacrificial altar in her bedroom? It would stink!), no one seemed to believe her. Idiots. She wasn't a Dungeon worshipper! What was the point of worshipping something you'd made? That she still needed to make, if you wanted to get technical. A Dungeon didn't normally consist of just a bedroom.

Everyone filed out of the room, even as they looked around curiously at everything. She shooed them out, walking out after them to get some rock from the pile next to the cave entrance. She'd have to make some tablets, and they'd need to be a little thick since she wouldn't be around to keep imbuing them…

Lori blinked as she stepped back into her cave. The chunk of rock flowing behind her thumped into the back of her legs, making her stumble and nearly fall. She stepped aside to avoid being trampled her by own rock. "I thought you'd already left," Lori said. She directed the flowing chunk of rock, it's layers and strata and materials flowing together as she made the earthwisps flow despite not being molten.

"We need to talk," Rian said, standing on the other side of her table.

"About what?" Lori asked, bending down to scoop up some stone. It was cold in her hands, as cold as you expected stone in the shadow of a cliff to be.

"About what you did back there," Rian said as Lori plopped the stone down on a sheet of seel skin she'd unrolled on the table.

"You'll have to be more specific, it's been a long morning," Lori said as she tore off a handful of rock and began spreading it on the sheet to make a flat tablet.

"I'm talking about how you used your magic on Missus Naineb," Rian said. He sounded heroically firm and determined, like an actor on stage trying to project to the back rows.

Lori's head finally snapped up to glare at him. "Oh, you mean when she challenged my authority and judgement and I put her in her place by reminding her I can kill her at any time and her opinion doesn't matter to me?" Lori said.

"You can't do that!" Rian said.

"I just did it this morning, so obviously I can," Lori said.

"Well, you shouldn't have!" Rian said. "It's wrong!"

"Are you saying I should have executed her?" Lori said. "That seems too much for a first verbal offense."

"No executing! I'm saying you shouldn't have done it at all!" Rian said.

Lori sighed. Well, she supposed she'd made him a lord for exactly his expertise in charming these simple fools, so she should probably listen to what he had to say. She willed it, and the boulder outside her cave flowed to block the entrance as the air started to vibrate to obfuscate the sounds exiting the gaps around it. "Well, what exactly do you think I should have done to the person who challenged my authority for the second time that day? Wait for it to happen a third time?"

"She didn't challenge you," Rian said.

"She challenged whether I had any authority to make the declarations I did," Lori said. "She did not recognize my power as the Dungeon Binder of this demesne. I corrected that."

"That was no reason to drown her!" Rian said.

Lori snorted. "It's stone and earth, Rian. Even when acting against its nature by being made to move like a fluid, the density of even packed earth is so much greater than the human body that she was always going to float. The only way she'd have died from that was if someone had held her head under the ground. It was an impressive and terrifying, but ultimately harmless spectacle to remind her who she was talking to."

"That still doesn't make it right!" Rian said. "People don't do that to each other!"

"People will do that to each other unless they're reminded there's a force that will stop them," Lori said. "We're in the middle of nowhere, Rian. It was only a matter of time before people realized that and started murdering people they didn't like."

"No, they wouldn't," Rian argued. "We live in a civilized society."

"'Lived', past tense," Lori corrected. "We left all that behind to come here. This isn't civilization. It's what comes before we have enough infrastructure and order to sustain a civilization."

"You can't just attack people because you don't like what they said! It doesn't matter who you are," Rian said. "There are rules, laws!"

"Yes, there are now. Because I told everyone what they were this morning," Lori said. "A society only stays civilized because it's backed by the power to punish those who breaks its rules. And I am that power." She looked at him intently. "Really Rian, think about this. Who can punish me for what I did? You? Them? If they kill me, the Dungeon stops functioning and the demesne stops protecting them from the Iridescence. If they hold me prisoner, I can kill them. If they beat me to try to stop me from Whispering, I can kill them. If they all come at me together armed, I can kill them. And if they actually succeed, and I die, so will they. So how can they punish me? Stop letting me have food? That works for about the time it takes for me to beat someone up and take their food away from them. Stop making furniture for me? I can take someone else's. It'll be as easy as taking a barrel."

Rian winced.

"This is what all civilizations are built on, Rian," Lori said. "It rests on acknowledging that the Dungeon Binder is the most powerful person in the demesne."

"Not all of them," Rian said.

"If you're talking about the Armada, then I will point out that a completely ocean-going society still needs Whisperers to desalinate fresh water in viable quantities, Deadspeakers to repair the wood of their ships, Horotracts to expand the ships' internal dimensions to allow them the space to farm, and Mentalists to… well, I'm not sure what Mentalists do in the Armada, but they probably do something," Lori said. "These would make them essential to the continuance of their civilization, making them Dungeon Binders in all but name. Unless you mean those stories of people altered to breath underwater, in which case I find it unlikely we can imitate their example, as such people…" Lori frowned, thought of some Deadspeakers she'd known in school, never mind historical examples, and amended herself. "Such people are unlikely to exist in enough numbers or be sexually compatible enough to produce a propagating society."

For a long moment, there was silence.

"You're smart. You're probably right," Rian said, sounding the more bitter than she had ever heard him be. The brat chiding Lori about bad girls not getting dessert had had more sharpness in her voice, though. "But that doesn't make what you did any less wrong."

Lori rolled her eyes. "If you find such things offensive to your sensibilities, then find a way to see that I don't have to do it again. You still have time before you quit being a lord, after all. These are the sorts of problems lords need to solve, aren't they? If you can find an intelligent solution, then I will implement it."

He gave her a look.

"What? I'd rather not have to do that every time," Lori said. "Violence begets more violence, so I'd rather the violence be rare and memorable. Is there anything else, or can I get to transcribing all these notes into something more permanent and portable?"

Rian let out a sigh "Yeah, that's it," he said. "I'll… let you get to work then."

"Thank you," she said. "If I don't come to dinner, please bring me something, I'll probably still be transcribing."

"Sure," he said, and she nodded, and willed. The boulder began to move out of the way, revealing the wan sunlight.

Just outside the cave, Rian paused and half-turned.

"You're wrong though," he said, speaking like he was some sort of main character dramatically getting the last word at the end of a chapter. "Her opinion did matter to you. Otherwise you wouldn't have gotten mad."

And then he left.

"Useless thespian," Lori muttered, shaking her head. She willed the boulder back in place.

Finally alone, she willed the lightwisps to glow brighter, giving her a clear, ambient light that came from no particular direction as she sat on the small pillar of stone jutting out from the floor she used as a stool. Her bed was still the only wooden furniture she had.

Taking a comforting, familiar breath and channeling the magic through her bones and out her fingernails, she imbued the now-hard stone on the seel skin to soften again so she could shape it into a flat tablet she could write on…