Naturally, Rian had to destroy her beautiful dreams.

"It won't last forever. Given the incentives to find out how you did it, I wouldn't be surprised if other demesne stumble upon how to make their own beads within a year of us showing up in Covehold selling beads to workshops so they can power their bound tools," Rian said later when it was just the two of them playing chatrang in an alcove in the second level. Well, the two of them and the other three. Riz was once more napping on the bench with her head in Mikon's lap while the weaver watched the two of them play and held a ball of thread for Umu as the latter knitted something.

"I know that," Lori almost snapped in annoyance. Everyone wanted to have a monopoly and to break one if they didn't have it. "That's why it's best to maximize our profits while we do have the monopoly."

"That's going to hurt us later," Rian said. "Even if it's only one or two other competitors, we suffer a distinct disadvantage when it comes to location, since we're the demesne furthest away from Covehold. That means it will take longer and cost us more to bring our beads over to where the market for it is. I feel that instead of focusing on maximizing our profits, we need to maximize our reputation and customers. Even if there are others who are closer, if we have a reputation of being reliable and good to deal with, it will help offset problem of not being as immediate. People will seek us out to buy what we have, and having limited stocks will drive up the price by itself. It's how people work. And besides, having your customers practically run up to you and scream 'take my beads' is just good economics."

"Now you're just being facetious," Lori said, moving her Mentalist.

Rian peered down at her piece. "Mentalist, right…" he muttered. "Thought it was a Horotract for a moment there. Yes, yes, I know, the marks are different, that's why I looked. So, are we going to experiment with making more beads tomorrow?"

"'We'?"

"Of course I'm coming along, you're going to the edge of the demesne. Besides, you need someone to write notes for you, and I can operate the sled."

"Coming with you," Riz muttered, not opening her eyes.

"Thank you Riz, your company is greatly appreciated," Rian said as he moved his core behind his Whisperer.

"Remember, you volunteered," Lori pointed out.

"Yes, Great Binder, not being paid," Riz muttered. "Even if you have beads now."

Lori rolled her eyes. "I have five beads. If I paid you with one, what would you even do with it?"

"Use it to pay you to make our house warm for a week," Riz muttered as Mikon smiled fondly down at her. "Napping now."

"Huh. That's one way to set the bead standard…" Rian said thoughtfully. "One bead keeps a house warm with magic for a week, so a bead can buy a little under a week's worth of firewood…"

"We are not using that to set the standard."

"Well, we'll have to think about it eventually," Rian said. "So far, people understand that the copper is a resource held in trust for the entire demesne, but that's only because I worked really hard to get as many people from every family to agree to work at the mine at least once, so everyone feels they have a stake in it. But we're going to need to start using it eventually, one way or another. If we don't and it just sits there, people are going to be tempted to start stealing what they consider their share."

Lori grunted. "We'll sell half in the spring for more materials for the demesne," she said.

"Like window paper?" Rian asked hopefully.

"I still don't think that's really how it's done. Won't it get wet when it rains?"

"Not when it's oiled to repel water," Rian said. "Besides, they're meant to be behind shutters when weather happens— Oh. I just had a thought."

Lori sighed. "What now?"

"Now that you can make beads, could we set up the Coldhold so that it's maintained by a bead instead of you directly?" Rian said. "Like what you did to check if the bead we brought back really was a bead?"

Lori blinked as she considered that. It… was actually very viable. Most of the Coldhold's structure was merely bound to be solid, and therefore not conduct heat. Such a binding wouldn't need much imbuement. With enough beads… "It should be possible, but doing the same thing to the water jet driver would be wasteful," Lori said.

Rian looked thoughtful. "You know… you have beads. You have wire. You have glass. Isn't that what you need to make a bound tool?"

"Probably."

Rian raised an eyebrow. "'Probably'?"

"Bound tools such as drivers require more components, obviously. Metal for the drive shafts, gears, the casings… it will depend on what sort of bound tool I will try to make…"

"…you've never actually made a bound tool, have you?"

"It's made with Whispering. I am a trained Whisperer."

"Just not trained in bound tools, though?"

"I'm sure I can learn. Bound tool artificing was only a three year post-graduate course, and I've seen, used and examined several industrial bound tools when I was working."

"…it can't be that easy, otherwise making bound tools wouldn't need that long to be taught."

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"…well, regardless, I'm sure I can figure it out."

Rian sighed.

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Over the next few days, Lori and Rian went out to the moving edge of the demesne to conduct more experiments with beads. And of course, make more beads. With Rian taking notes—because otherwise it was just them doing wasteful and strange things, not proper scholarly research—and Riz and one of her friends keeping watch for beasts, Lori was able to confirm some of her initial suppositions about the process. The final size of the bead relied on how heavily imbued the binding used to claim the Iridescence was, and while it wasn't possible to make a bead with darkwisps alone, tests with all possible combinations of wisps showed that bead formation would definitely not occur if darkwisps weren't present.

Given what she knew now about how they were made, it made her wonder why beads were as unreactive as glass. It was literally made of wisps, magic, and Iridescence, yet like every bead type she had ever used, she couldn't anchor wisps to it. In fact, given it didn't dissolve in water, beads acted frustratingly nothing like the materials they were made of!

She also couldn't bind or even claim the beads in question. Not by touching it, not with a wire—all that did was imbue the wisps in her skin and in the binding around her—not with her demesne, not with a binding of wisps like the one used to make a bead… the beads didn't even identify as wisps in her awareness while within her demesne, simply another void like glass, or people. And even glass would probably appear in her awareness once it was heated to a molten state! So would people, for that matter.

"That probably means there's some kind of interaction that's going on that we don't understand yet," Rian suggested as he wrote down notes on the results of her trying to anchor various wisps and combinations of wisps. Even darkwisps had done nothing, not even being displaced from its position when Lori had waved the bead she was holding through it. "And our understanding of the interaction is limited by our inability to perceive it because we lack instruments. If we had a parvusight, for example, a closer look at its structure might be answer some questions and bring up new ones."

"I could try to make one," Lori mused. "It's all just concentrating light, after all…"

They made one in one of the alcoves in the second floor, putting a bead on a stone-molded stand to hold it in place while she'd spent time creating bindings of lightwisps to magnify and focus the image of the bead, and then doing it again with darkwisps to block out ambient light, and then doing it a third time while directing an intense light at the bead so that the magnified image wouldn't be so dark…

The resulting image, while clear and even aesthetic if you were of a mind for it, was utterly useless in providing any sort of answers, and Lori had dissolved the binding in frustration as she went to her room to calm down and expand the demesne.

Fortunately, other tests and experiments yielded more quantifiable answers, while creating even more questions in the process. One who followed the Mysteries of Alknowledge—or Rian, since she wasn't sure if it was the same thing—would say that was the natural state of the pursuit of knowledge. Lori, who was not a follower of the mysteries or Rian, found it annoying and time-consuming.

Lori found the process resulted in some measure of energy lost. She had taken the largest bead she had managed to make, one close to twenty chiyustri, and had dropped it into a small container of water to measure its volume. After dumping the water into a bowl to get the bead out with no water loss, she had swallowed the bead and had used only the magic stored within it to imbue the binding used to make the next bead.

The bead that had resulted was visibly smaller, and some imprecise calculations she and Rian had hastily done led them to conclude it had lost around a quarter of the total energy from the original bead.

"Maybe the amount goes into stabilizing the bead itself?" Rian suggested. "After all, given the materials involved, beads should dissolve in water but don't."

"A possibility, but unprovable, since there's no way to make softer beads," Lori said.

"No way that you know of," Rian pointed out. "For all we know, softer bead are some sort of secret material known only to Dungeon Binders that they use as mattress stuffing or something."

"It annoys me I can't actually refute that."

Rian smiled that smile he did when he was trying to look innocent while being annoying. Until she had met Rian, Lori had not realized it was actually possible to do that with one's face.

He also noticed something that Lori had never really considered or noticed: Iridescence did not react to beads. They didn't grow on beads, and putting beads down on Iridescence dust didn't suddenly cause them to start visibly crystallizing, as opposed to when an imbued binding occupied the same space as the colors. They only got a reaction when a metal wire in contact with a bead made contact with Iridescence.

Then the tainted rainbows started visibly crystallizing on the surface of the wire, spreading over the surface of the bead and the piece of ice Lori had used to press the wire between the two. They hadn't grown into either surface, but rather the crystal's growth simply covered over them. The growth stopped when she removed the wire, leaving the bead visibly reduced and the wire covered in a mostly symmetrical Iridescence growth blooming outwards from the wire at its core.

The experiment had put added context for why beads should never be placed in a metal container.

It was Rian who'd suggested they try to break apart the large bead.

"It's too big to use, and besides, seeing what the cross-section looks like might be helpful," he said as they'd been packing up the sled to go back to the Dungeon.

"You just want to hit it until it breaks," Riz accused fondly as she secured the spears.

"All right, I'll admit to that, but think about it. Have you ever seen a bead break?"

"No, because people are careful with their money and any changes to a bead that removes the denomination markings renders it not acceptable as legal tender," Lori pointed out. "Admittedly, the only way to significantly alter the shape of a bead is to put it into the bead receptacle of a bound tool, where it will start to get smaller as it's used."

"This isn't legal tender, it's a big rock that won't even fit in your mouth," Rian pointed out. "Which reminds me, we need to experiment to see how to put our own denomination markings for when we eventually start using it as money… But setting that aside, beads can't actually be unbreakable, or else it would have far more uses besides power and money. It would be used as ball bearings, when you need bearings that will never ground down."

"Rian, don't be absurd. If you use beads as bearings, the material it rests on can't be metal, or else there will be the possibility of seepage. And any device that can wear down bearings like that can't be made of anything but metal, or else other parts will start to fail."

"Hmm, good point. But I think we should at least try to break it. It will give us a lot of useful information about its material structure, if we manage it, and given its size, it will be a much more visible cross section than one of the small ones."

Lori considered the large bead now lying in its own stone shelf, on top of a piece of leather so that it didn't start seeping from possible metals in the stone. The only possible use she could currently think of for it was using it to power the wired bindings in her dungeon in place of the core, but if she did that, she'd have to remake all her bindings all over again when the bead ran out, and then she'd put the wire back on the core anyway…

And now that Rian had proposed the idea, she had to admit she was a curious about what would happen. If it was unbreakable… well, that would expand the things they could use it for…

"Sure, why not? It's not like it's currently useful for anything."

She could always make another one, after all.