The storm continued for two more days, finally blowing itself out and going still after five days of intense wind and snow. Technically it stopped midday of the fifth day, but Rian had suggested giving it time, in case it had simply been a lull and not the end.

During those two days, Lori had continued expanding her demesne using her new methodology. The creation of the massive spherical binding, while still greatly intimidating in scale, had been made and remade again and again. Despite how annoyed she'd been at Rian for wanting to time how long each binding took to create, it had become clear that each iteration was finished incrementally faster than the one before.

Rian, predictably, had gone strange again now that he had a new number that was going up… or down, as the case had been. It wasn't even something that he'd had anything to do with!

Still, Lori couldn't deny that there was a certain satisfaction in being able to do multiple times a day with relative ease what had once been possible only daily, and with great suffering. Between the relatively more sedentary pace enforced on them by the storm and how little else she had to do, she had the time to expand her demesne nine more times. Three expansions per day had turned out to be insufficiently optimistic.

On the sixth day after the storm began, with the sun shining weakly through the hole left open in the entryway to the dungeon to assure them this wasn't some temporary lull, her whole demesne set out to dig out their homes from the snow. Nearly everything had been buried in the frozen water, snow piled so high on the roofs of houses the structures were essentially entombed.

As they had planned, the first order of business had been for Lori to create a tunnel through the snow to the tool shed, a house-sized stone building at the edge of their agricultural fields notable for its low ceiling and wide double door to accommodate the carts stored within. It was also deeply buried, but the roof was well-cured wood and had been put together by carpenters who knew what they were doing. The floor was covered in bugs, dead from either the cold or running out of air in the half week the storm had persisted.

The next building she tunneled to were the curing sheds, full of a mix of firewood, logs that were being stored in preparation for being cut into planks, beams and anything else they needed, and a supply of charcoal, made by the demesne's charcoal burners. There wasn't a lot of it, not enough to supply every house in the demesne—the supply had been meant to supply the smiths—but it was a fuel. She also passed by the second bath house on the way, because they needed the facilities.

The whole first day was busy, with only a brief stop for lunch, as Lori tunneled to connect to other disparate buildings of the demesne, and the successive days didn't get much easier. She was so busy she barely found the time to expand the demesne once a day. Thankfully, her new process was much more forgiving than her old one, affording her more recovery time, usually when she was just imbuing the binding in preparation for expansion.

Everyone else worked hard on getting the buildings with wooden roofs unburied, standing on top of the planks from the curing shed to distribute their weight on the snow so they wouldn't sink. There was a lot of digging, and Rian had needed to ask Lori to mark out with lightwisps the areas where there wasn't anything buried in the snow after there had been altercation's from people flinging their snow on top of other houses.

The laundry area's rather flimsy roof of branches had collapsed at one corner, which explained why Lori had woken up to find the binding keeping the area warm had dissipated, all the imbuement used up from melting the snow. The mushroom farm had been cold, far too cold, but while all the growing mushrooms seemed to have wilted, this apparently meant the mushrooms had simply gone into winter hibernation, and could be continued once it became warm enough to thaw and fruit again. The tannery, it was initially decided, was a lost cause until the snow melted, but eventually Lori had been convinced to tunnel there to save what skins and leathers had been left behind.

She also tunneled towards where the rest of the vigas had been stored, and in hindsight storing such an essential resource outside the Dungeon had clearly been a stupid idea. Fortunately the Dungeon had room. Even if there weren't many alcoves still standing empty, there was room in the side tunnels of the third level, at least until Lori continued with expanding it. Digging the houses out was put on hold the next day until all the storage jars of the precious grain had been properly moved to her Dungeon, every jar accounted for, their clay seals checked to make sure they were all still intact.

The second to last structure Lori had tunneled to had been the irrigation cistern, where all the waste water from the bath houses was delivered by the pipes, to find that it had predictably flooded recently, since the ground had become waterlogged and then frozen. The snow around it had darkened from the things in the water, soap and dirt that had been washed off, and the binding that had evaporated the water and fed it back to be used again in the second bath house had also been overwhelmed and dissipated. Thankfully, the pipes hadn't filled with frozen water, but she had needed to quickly devise a different means of dealing with their waste water.

Using the snow as building material, she'd made pipes of ice and a binding of air-, water-, and firewisps to turn waste water into snow and blast it out over the buried agricultural fields, while the heat that was removed from the water by the process kept the underground pipes warm to prevent the waste water from freezing solid and blocking them. Lori would have to check it ever so often and invert the firewisps to destroy excess heat if it became too much and started to make the snow around it boil—it took the same amount of magic to increase heat as it did to decrease it—but she'd need to keep it imbued anyway.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The very last structures she tunneled to were the dock for the Coldhold, which had fused to the frozen ice of the river, and the nearby water hub shed. She'd deactivated the latter once the river froze and no more new water was being pulled into the reservoir. So far, the snow melter was doing adequately for their water needs, even if it needed to be loaded with clean snow daily, but that was hardly a resource currently in short supply.

Even when all the tunnels connecting everything had been finished, the ice walls lined with a layer of packed snow, there was always more for her to do. The sudden increase in usable latrines meant she had to put the plan Rian had proposed into action. It was a viscerally disgusting plan, even if she intellectually understood that all the things that rendered the material disgusting would have long since ceased to be relevant.

A part of her wanted to use bound ice as the building material in questions, simply because water was currently so plentiful, but eventually decided to use stone. Choosing where to put it was slightly more complicated, but she eventually decided to set it up just past Rian's house, just outside the mushroom farm. This required extending the tunnel slightly, creating an open space under the snow held back by ice walls. It was actually not that different from excavating her dungeon. She even made sure to place supporting pillars.

After the small space was made, she used stone to build a large stone tank that rose up to chest height, with a ramp leading above it so that the waste could be dumped inside. The size of the tank was to help prevent any misuse by putting the active biding well beyond arms reach. Why anyone would want to stick their arm in tank full of waste, she had no idea, but it wouldn't surprise her if someone did so just because she thought no one would actually be stupid enough to do so. The size would also allow it to be filled for a long time before it had to be opened and the contents removed so that the next step could be done.

A part of her hoped it would last all through the winter, but she was resigned to the unlikelihood of that. The waste of more than two hundred people, desiccated or not, would very quickly pile up.

When it inevitably did so, according to Rian's plan the box could be turned into a kiln, the insides lined with bound ice to act as an insulator, to bake the waste. This would simultaneously reduce the weight further and alchemically render the now-cooked waste of similar substance to charcoal. The resulting substance would be pressed into chunks and used as fuel to heat homes, or so the plan went. She had spoken to the charcoal burners Rian had spoken to, who assured her this was how it was done in small, cold villages in winter, and had confidently claimed they could do it. They even had the molds for pressing the… substance… into solid chunks. All she'd need to do was provide heat when the time came, and they'd do the rest.

The idea still made her shudder. But it was a solution to the latrine waste issue, and she didn't have to touch a thing, so she really had no good reason to refuse the plan, and Lori had tried very, very hard to find one.

Sometimes, not very often but sometimes, she really hated her own practical nature.

That same practical nature resigned her to the fact that people were unlikely to leave her Dungeon and go back to their homes until spring, or at least until they cleared the snow enough to be able to gather more firewood. Though at the rate progress was being made, that would also not be until spring. That didn't mean she had to like it.

"Well, can you blame us?" Rian said over dinner almost a week after the storm had ended as he put down the bowls of soup he was helping Riz carry. "It's still freezing out there, and the snow's still too thick for us to cut any new firewood. It's warmer in here."

"My Dungeon is for emergencies," Lori said as she took one of the bowls and a cup of water.

"A shortage of an essential resource is an emergency," Rian said as the three other women took their own bowls. "Until we can clear enough snow to be able to reach the tree line and start gathering more firewood, we'll have a wood shortage. And we're barely keeping ahead of the snow fall from burying everyone's houses again as it is, never mind making progress towards the treeline."

"Why are people doing that if they're not living in them?" Lori said irritably.

"For space to hang laundry," Rian said.

Lori stared at him. Then she glanced at Umu and Mikon, just to be sure. They both nodded in confirmation.

She sighed heavily. The sad thing was she really couldn't find any fault with that argument. People still needed to wash their clothes, and while the laundry area's roof covering had been repaired, there was otherwise nowhere else to hang the clothes out to dry except her dungeon.

"Look, it can't be helped," Rian said as he stirred his soup with his spoon a few times. "Either this was a really bad storm or this area just naturally gets a lot of snow at this time of year. And you were the one who decided to make clearing a path towards the forest your last priority. Not that I disagree that the desiccator was more important." He raised a spoonful, blew on it and ate.

"I know, I know," Lori said irritably. "I'll get to it tomorrow." Simply moving all the snow by binding all the waterwisps had been an option for her, of course, but the tunnels were secured against further snowfall. Also, a part of her was of the opinion that people should be kept busy lest they have the time to do something stupid. Clearing a path towards the treeline was just the sort of thing to aid people in keeping busy.

"That would be wonderful, thank you. Warm as it is in here, I'm starting to miss my bed." Given that she had previously slept on that bed, Lori doubted it was the bed itself he missed as she glanced at the women seated to either side of him. "We'll have to keep a watch kept after you do," Rian mused. "Wouldn't want chokers getting into the tunnels, after all. Maybe some kind of temporary door."

Lori snorted derisively. "I highly doubt any chokers survived the storm. Even if they did, they'd be buried in paces of snow."

"Life always finds a way," Rian said. "Those things had been living and surviving on this continent for who knows how long. This can't be the first time a storm like this had come around. They're out there somewhere. When spring comes, we'll probably up to our necks dealing with them, because they'll be hungry."

That… sounded annoyingly plausible. "Well, I'll leave that to you," Lori said. "Their meat will do us good."

"Every little bite helps," Rian… probably agreed.