"Well, you're in a good mood," Rian said as she arrived to breakfast the next day.

"Rest is over. Time to get back to work," Lori said as she sat down.

Rian nodded with a smile as Umu sat next to him, pressed up against his side. Lori analyzed the smile, but it wasn't any of the permutations she knew… not that she could really remember them very well unless they were right in front of her. But if they weren't coming to mind, then it wasn't any of them! Ugh, how do people do this?

"Wonderful!" he said. "Well, if you're willing, I'd like to discuss with you how you can most efficiently contribute to constructing this flood barrier your Bindership."

"Rian, it's a flood barrier. I just need to make a stone wall that doesn't leak."

Rian's smile grew a little bigger, and now it was the smile he made when he was being deliberately annoying. "That sounds time consuming. When are you going to have the time for going to the edge and expanding the demesne like you usually do?"

Lori shrugged. "It will have to be delayed until I finish this project," she said. She knew how long it took her to build something. Oh sure, she could use earthwisps to move stone, but she couldn't just dump it into place and then walk away. She had to anchor it, make sure it didn't leak, shape it properly... everything took time.

"Ah. If only you had a reliable lord who could come up with plans and schedules and organize things for you to help you make the best use of the skills of the people whose names and skills you don't know."

Lori gave him a flat look. "Well, instead I have you."

"Ouch. That actually hurt. Come on, just hear me out."

Of course she would. Didn't she always? No matter how stupid the ideas were…

"All right, fine. What is your idea to let me continue with expansion and bead production while still building the flood barrier?"

"First, I should point out you really can't build the flood barrier yet," Rian said. "Since we didn't actually have anywhere to take it to after we dug it up, there's still piles of dirt on the site next to trenches that go down to the bedrock. All that soil needs to be removed from there, and you can't move that soil yourself because you'll ruin it for planting. So my first recommendation is for you to designate and excavate a large new plot in the dungeon farm. We can carry down the soil into the dungeon farm so it doesn't go to waste while at the same time clearing the area for you to be able to work."

He was unfortunately right about what would happen if she moved the soil. And it would be useful for the farm… "Fine," Lori said, nodding in agreement. "I'll excavate a new plot in the third level for the soil to go into. We can't actually plant in it, since that will require more preparation for the drainage, but it can store the soil for the time being, and we can just prepare it into a plot later. "

Rian nodded. "Of course, you won't actually be able to build while that's happening, since there will be a lot of people carrying the soil on carts and buckets back and forth, and it would just slow them down if you made them keep stopping to let you through with stone to make the flood barrier, so best to let them finish first before you begin. So you have plenty of time to go to the edge and make some beads, and maybe even expand the demesne." He smiled widely.

Lori sighed but she had to admit that he had a point. Moving anything with that much mass was dangerous, and doing so through traffic was just asking for someone to get injured. "I see your point," she said grudgingly. "I'll excavate the third level after breakfast. Prepare the sled so we can leave as soon as I'm done. How much soil is there to move?"

"Well, I'm not an expert, but… a lot?" At her glare, he shrugged. "It's not like we kept count of how many buckets. There's just a big pile of dirt where the snow's been cleared. You'd be better at estimating how much storage it needs."

Lori rolled her eyes and stood. The kitchen was only just starting to get ready to start serving breakfast, and she could already see Riz and Mikon in waiting in line for food. "I'll go look at it now, then."

"I'll go with you," Rian said, rising himself.

Lori waved dismissively, and Rian fell into step behind her as she headed for her Dungeon's entrance. "What else have you come up with?"

"Remember when we added the extensions to the chimneys?" Rian said. "When we couldn't risk you climbing up to the roof?"

"Yes…"

"Remember how you made softened stone that the stonemasons could work using their tools?"

"Yes?"

Rian nodded. "If you could see your way to softening some stone for us, we could help you with building the flood barrier. We can move a lot of stone with the shovels and carts."

Lori snorted as they passed through her Dungeon's open doors, ignoring the people coming in who stepped out of her way. Rian smiled and nodded at them. "Rian, while I appreciate that manpower is the most efficient way to move soil, it's not the same for stone. It's much more efficient for me to bind the stone and move it myself. I can move all the stone I need to flood barrier in one morning."

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"I think you're underestimating how much weight we can move and carry."

"No, I am correctly estimating how strong the shovels we have are. Its beast bone bound around wooden sticks, not metal. The shovels are likely to break from the weight," Lori said as they entered the ice tunnel and turned towards the opening towards the river bank. She could see that the floor of the tunnel was covered with dirt and globs of mud. "And even if they didn't, how are they supposed to get the stone up the stairs in any sort of timely manner? In buckets? That would take far too long, and we can't use carts because it will need to go up, not down. Focus on digging and moving the soil."

Rian sighed but nodded as they walked past the snow melter. "Yes, your Bindership."

When they exited the tunnel, Lori finally saw what Rian had been having people do yesterday. There was a light coating of snow on everything, but most of the ground was relatively clear. Well, save for the mud and piles of dirt that were only partly mud. Lori walked confidently, solidifying the waterwisps in the few patches of wet mud under her feet to make them firmer and keep mud off her feet as she walked around to get a better sense of how much dirt there was.

A trench had been dug in a line leading from the cliff face of the hill her dungeon's first level was inside. The trench was a pace or so wide, and more or less paralleled the river. She could see that the trench grew deeper and deeper as it moved away from the hill as the bedrock kept sloping downward, and there was still soil in it in some places. The trench was not yet complete, as there was still no trench between the laundry area and the shelter, just some markers made of bone stuck into the ground.

Her awareness of the wisps was just good enough to be able to differentiate between the bedrock and the soil—soil had more waterwisps and airwisps interspersed among them—so she was able to judge how much more soil there was still to dig. Most of those waterwisps was cold ice, though they melted into water the deeper underground it was. Still, it made the topmost layer very solid.

"Well?" Rian asked, shivering in place and standing with his hands in his armpits. His nose had already started to drip and ugh! "What do you think?"

"I think I'll have to dig up a long plot in the Dungeon farm," Lori said. "Possibly three."

"Three?"

"Two for storing the soil, and the third that needs to be prepared for becoming a farm plot so the soil has somewhere to go," she said. Preparing that farm plot wouldn't be easy. While she could theoretically still set off explosions of steam in the third level to reduce stone down into rocks of the right size for setting up the drainage for the farm plots, it would require a lot of preparation. However, the steam, even brief moments of it, would almost certainly be harmful to their crops. She would have to find another way to turn the stone she had on hand into appropriately sized rocks… "Is this all?"

"No, there's still a lot of soil to dig up," Rian said. "We've marked it out, but the serious digging is starting from the hill and making its way down. And there isn't really anywhere to put the soil except in piles next to the trench."

Lori nodded absently. "I'll soften the soil," she said. "And put up some bindings for warmth. I'm done resting."

"We, your freezing cold subjects whose sweat has turned into ice on their skin, kneel at your magnificence and worship at your feet at your benevolence."

"You're standing, not kneeling."

"I'll kneel as soon as I'm not so freezing cold the stuff dripping from my nose is no longer turning solid on my chin."

Oh, that was disgusting!

He did kneel when they got back to her Dungeon, though.

––––––––––––––––––

After breakfast, Lori got to work. Setting a binding to provide warmth was simple, and she was able to serve two purposes at once by anchoring the binding of firewisps to the very soil that was going to be dug up. That warmed the ground enough for the water to melt so it could be excavated more easily, put the heat near the people who needed it, and ensured that no one accidentally stood inside a binding of firewisps and killed themselves by elevating the internal temperature of their bodies, since the binding would move with the soil.

She was aware that this meant that the Dungeon farm would start to get hotter as soil was brought into it, but she could deal with that at the end of the day. After that, she went down to the third level to excavate the plot where the soil would be stored. Making the stone flow out of the ground was a familiar exercise, and soon there was a deep, rectangular trench in the ground. She left the excavated stone in the third level for the time being, sticking it in one of the unfinished excavation corridors that didn't really have anything in it. After all, it wasn't like she needed the material right then.

Once the excavated plot was ready, people began bringing the soil down to the third level, carrying it in buckets being supported on poles to carry multiple ones at a time, and litters like the ones they used for carting latrine out of the dungeon. From the lack of smell, it probably wasn't the same ones.

While this was going on, Lori was able to go to the edge of the demesne to make beads. The plans for making Lori's Boat into a sled had yet to materialize, and she was fairly sure it was unlikely to any time soon. Rian either hadn't been able to come up with anything, or he was just too busy to work on the design.

The cold that slammed into her was as brutally uncomfortable as it always was, but fortunately the jar full of Iridescence was easy to find, and the longer time since she'd been out here had meant there was a little more of the nauseatingly colorful crystals inside the container than usual. This time she had remembered to make the bindings for the beads inside her demesne and imbued them while she was on the sled, so that by the time she got to the edge, all she had to do was take the imbued binding outside and claim the colors with it. Prepared like that, the process was much faster, and she was able to make several beads in rapid succession, not even needing to wait for beads to finish forming to make more.

It allowed her to see how two beads forming too close to one another behaved. In hindsight, it was a test she should have conducted sooner, or at least thought of it at all, but it was only while seeing all those beads growing inside the jar did she realize that she had not had the opportunity to note such behavior before. The beads seemed to repel each other when they formed. Lori had watched as two beads amalgamating next to each other while pressed on all sides actually managed to push on each other enough to pop into the air once there was room for the pressure to release.

She'll have to remember not to put more than one amalgamating bead into an enclosed mold or anything of the sort… as well as test how much pressure two beads repelling each other could generate. Could the pressure of beads repelling each other actually be used to exert enough pressure on the beads to crack their outer shells?

Something to think about…