The next day, production of the rocks for making the farm plot drainage continued, this time in the third level. Lori began preparing it after breakfast. Snow had to be bound to not melt and brought down, to act as a protective coating on the rocks to keep them from sticking to each other. In fact, they had enough volunteers that they could have people whose job was to keep the rocks from sticking to each other, and signal her when there were enough rocks that needed their binding removed.

A disquieting number of the volunteers were the children and after having the brat talk to them, the ones whose parents had made them volunteer were removed, causing several others who were there because they thought their participation was required to leave as well. In the end, only the brat and a few others remained. While the brat still insisted she chose to volunteer, the others were staying because they liked handling the softened stone, regarding it as playing for some reason. Children were very strange.

Halfway through the morning, Lori had the volunteers forming smaller rocks the size of a fist, since the bottom of the pit that would be a farm plot had gotten full. She herself was busy keeping everyone supplied with softened stone and removing the bindings on the rocks the volunteers had already formed.

While this was happening, the excavation of the soil continued. Lori would glance up every time a group came down to the third level with buckets and carts and cargo litters of soil, which was dumped into a separate pit that she had excavated of stone. She eventually need to dig more pits for the soil, since the first one had gotten full and there seemed to still be more being carried down.

Between the rocks that were being made and the soil, they had enough material for more farm plots. While it was far too late to plant more vigas this season, according to Rian, who'd talked to farmers, they'd be ready in time for the next season's vigas crop. The bulk of their vigas would still be grown and harvest outside, but apparently the Dungeon farm would be enough by itself to supply the starting seed for those crops by itself now, with perhaps a bit left over.

Speaking of which, the vigas in the farm would need to be harvested soon…

Where had all this work that she hadn't realized needed to be done been hiding before now?

At lunch, she went up and out to see the progress on the excavation, and reposition the bindings. While there were fewer piles of dirt around, and the ground where the work was being done was being kept clear of snow, there was still soil that needed to be dug up. The bindings that provided heat to the ground and people needed to be moved though, since the progression of the work meant that where people were had shifted places. Fortunately, that was simple enough.

"How much longer before you're done?" Lori asked Rian as they ate. Ah, bread, so nice and warm and delicious…

"We should be done by tomorrow, Rian said. "I'll have to ask people who know better than me to be sure, but if it's just digging, then yeah, tomorrow or the day after at the rate we're going, if we don't suffer another collapse. We've had to slow down to pack in the sides so they don't collapse into the trench. Normally the correct thing to do is to build supports to hold the walls of the trench in place, but that would take up planks and we simply can't waste them for something like this."

"If it will get you done faster, I can bind the ground to keep it from collapsing."

"Uh, wouldn't that ruin the soil? Isn't that the reason the soil needs to be dug up manually?"

"It would if I bound the earthwisps. Binding the waterwisps won't be as problematic. The ground is already frozen, after all, it just needs to stay that way. Isn't that why you need to warm it before you can dig?"

Rian groaned and sighed at the same time. "Ugh, right… I forgot about that. If you please, your Bindership? It would be very helpful… "

"I'll inspect the area after lunch, before I expand the demesne," Lori said dismissively.

"I'll tell your rock rollers they're done for the day, then?"

Lori rolled her eyes. "Rian, even I can do that much." It was easy to talk to people when you just stated things in a loud voice and didn't look at anyone.

"Aw… some day you won't even need me anymore…" Rian sniffed theatrically—because nothing was dripping down his nose, so he had to just be acting—rubbing at his eyes like he was crying. "You'll be able to talk to people all by yourself and remember their names…"

"That's never going to happen," Lori said flatly.

"It will once you get Mentalism. Then you'll always be able to remember everyone's names and faces. Forever."

Lori twitched. On the one hand, an occasionally problematic shortcoming of hers would finally stop complicating her interactions. On the other hand… people were annoying.

Mentalists could always remember. She wondered if they had a way to forget…?

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As Rian said, it took two days to finish excavating all the soil, although this included getting the soil that had been dug up out of the building site and down to the third level.

In that time, Lori had her volunteers reduce the size of the rocks they were making once more. By the time soil—although it was more mud, most of the time—was no longer being carried down to the third level, they had managed to finish preparing the drainage for a farming plot. Large rocks at the bottom, smaller rocks on top, then even smaller rocks on top of that, then some stone slabs spaced to let water through but keep the soil separate from the rocks until it could all pack down enough to not fill up the gaps between the rocks. Finally there was the topmost layer of soil and desiccated latrine waste mix. Lori had opened a hole in the side of the plot to connect it with the other plots so that excess water could drain out to the drainage cistern.

It was probably what she'd be doing once she finished with the flood barrier, getting more rocks for the farm plot drainage produced. The soil would still have to be dealt with, after all.

After all the delays from the digging, and her own frustrations with the project that she was able to admit might have been more a result of tiredness rather than actual difficulties, raising up a flood barrier was almost… comfortable. The familiar activity of building a structure with stone and earthwisps allowed her to relax, even if the barrier she would be building would be radically different from what she had built previously.

Her flood barrier could not simply be a stone wall of the sort she had made before, a raised vertical plane of stone like the walls she had built for houses and the entryway of her Dungeon. The problem with trying to wall off water was that your wall didn't just have to be strong enough to hold back the water in contact with it. Any single point of such a wall had to hold back the weight of not just the water on the same level as it, but the weight of all the water above that point as well, which was pressing its weight down on the water below it as well as against the wall.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

This meant that there would be more force being exerted at the bottom of any barrier holding back water than at the top. Logically, that meant the bottom part of the wall had to be thicker to hold back the greater weight.

So instead of a wall with a rectangular cross section, Lori had to build a wall with a triangular one. Well, technically a trapezoidal one. And it couldn't be a tall, narrow trapezoid either, but a trapezoid with a broad base and a wide angle at its peak. It would also result in a wall that would be at least as wide at that base than it was tall, meaning there was a limit to how high she could make the barrier.

Thankfully, the discolorations and other marks on the cliff wall facing the river gave them an indicator of the historical average height of the river's flooding, and it was… well, it was well below her Dungeon's current entrance, but that was only the average. There could be brief periods that were much, much higher, and she had to build accordingly.

Fortunately, making a wall twice as high as the average indicated on the cliff wall wasn't too much of a problem. The height indicated was a pace above the river's usual water level for most of the year, a wall two and a bit paces tall was simple enough to make.

Lori started construction by filling in the excavated trench with stone excavated from the plots in the third level. After all, the volume of the trench should be similar to the volume of the stone, even with all the stone that had been used to make rocks for drainage, because the stone had come from the plots that she had made to hold all the soil from the trench. Probably more. They hadn't exactly wasted time tamping down the mud and soil that had been dumped into the plots, after all.

Even so, she still had to draw some stone from her stockpile next to the passageway into her dungeon. Technically, it was no longer so much an actual pile as a permanent stone bulwark over the front of her dungeon, but it was still where she dumped all the stone she'd excavated until she needed to use it for something, because that way it was ready in case of a dragon. She'd have liked to think that much mass wasn't really needed to protect her Dungeon anymore, since they'd already survived twice with a defensive bulwark of far less, but someday a dragon might drop a full grown islandshell on them…

Yes, best to have a lot of stone between them and outside, just in case.

Filling in the stone foundation that had formerly been a trench took two days of work. Lori had to do it one batch at a time so that there wasn't so much mass moving as to be dangerously uncontrollable, and had to remove all air and water bubbles inside the stone before setting it into place to ensure there were no structural weak points. By the end of the second day of work, however, the foundation had been set, a solid extension of the underground bedrock that would be able to securely anchor any stone structure she build on top of it.

During this time, Lori had forgone making any more beads, as she wanted to get this finished as soon as possible for her own peace of mind. Expanding the demesne was also curtailed, as she was simply too tired to be able to stay awake to perform the steps. She told herself the sooner the flood barrier was finished, the sooner she could go back to doing both.

Once the stone foundation was in place, she started building the wall atop it, starting from the cliff face closest to the river, where the weathering of the stone and slight discolorations helped indicate how high the water could normally rise. Beyond the shape of the wall she was making, it was the same familiar exercise. Binding earthwisps to soften stone, then moving the stone to where it needed to be by making it ripple and undulate like a soft tube filled with fluid, before fusing it with the stone-filled trench so that it was one contiguous stone structure.

Unlike her usual method of construction, where she just raised up the wall in a line, she had to construct the wall while moving from her starting point down the length of the stone foundation to help her build to a more-or-less consistent shape with her stone-shaping tool and Whispering. Every so often she had to measure the height of the wall, measure the width of the base, grimace, and then get more stone to widen the base and by extension add more mass to the slopes of the walls. It was slow work, since the material she had to move amounted to less overall wall length than it normally did.

Usually, this sort of pace wouldn't bother her. Her projects were finished when they were finished. However, with every passing day, the time grew closer and closer to a sudden shift in temperature that would result in the river turning back to water. And while she could use her Whispering to keep the river frozen—she had to stop for a moment as she realized that, yes, actually keeping a river frozen was something she could just do now—it would only be the portion of the river within her demesne. They would still be flooded as water came down from upstream, and without the well-worn path of the river to guide it, the water would go everywhere, spreading out from its usual path, likely leading to a worse flood if it just simply flowed over the frozen river…

On the afternoon of the second day after she finished the foundation and started building the wall proper, with what looked like less than a tenth of the wall done, Lori had to admit this project was probably going to take longer than she was comfortable with. The greater mass needed for the wall, the necessity of shaping to have the proper cross-section so that it could withstand the weight of flood waters, it was all slowing her down far more than she thought it would. She could probably move faster if she was less careful but…

No. She was not going to let her Dungeon flood. If she wasn't careful, she was going to end up with a break and the wall and all the work would have been for nothing. Their vigas was stored in the lower levels of her Dungeon now, as were all the carpentry tools. No. No, she couldn't let it flood.

Yet, she couldn't just leisurely build it at her own pace, either. Shanalorre had said the child had been born on the 34thof first storm. The 34thday of the new year. That meant winter was going to end in about 30 days or so. That was the problem. For all she knew, it would suddenly start getting warm enough for everything to begin thawing next week. Or three days from now. Or five weeks from now. She didn't really know when winter really started to end in this region, and neither did anyone else. So the flood barrier had to be finished as soon as possible

Lori sighed. While there was probably a way to build this wall while maintaining the necessary building standard… she couldn't think of how. And there were too many things that needed her attention for her to be stuck building this for a week and half, even if she could risk taking that long.

She was going to have to ask for help—

"Lori, it's lunch time."

She turned to find Rian, bundled up in his winter robe with his towel wrapped around his face. Just looking at him, it was hard to tell if the season was getting any warmer, since he'd been wearing the same thing at the first fall of snow.

"Rian," she said, nodding at him, "I need help building the flood wall."

She was going to kick him in the shins if any of the annoying smiles made an appearance.

He tilted his head to an exaggerated degree, which was probably a deliberate choice since the towel kept most of his face hidden. "What, really? You seem to be doing fine to me. Though… well, I suppose the surface of the wall isn't as even as it usually is, for you…?"

"It looks like a child tried to make a sweetened egg foam treat." The surface of the stone was uneven, and surfaces she'd thought had been flat… weren't.

"I'm going to guess that child was you," Rian said. "Well, appearance aside, did it at least taste good?"

"It tasted like egg with sugar," Lori said, frowning at the memory.

"You didn't fold it enough, did you? You're supposed to fold in air until the texture changes, that's why it's foam and not just egg."

"Enough about sweetened egg foam treats!" Lori wondered if there was anyone in the demesne who knew how to make it with honey if they could get their hands on some eggs… "I need to get all this done faster without compromising the flood barrier's effectiveness. As it is, it's going to take far longer than I am comfortable with to build it by myself."

Rian raised an eyebrow. "You… actually want us to help you build something? Not just have us come in after your done, actually help you build it?"

"Yes," Lori said. Why was he focusing on that? "You always have ideas. Figure out how we can get it done faster with all the idle people in the demesne. Also, see if you can come up with some sort of idea for how I could build the flood wall more efficiently."

Rian smiled. She couldn't see it, but she could tell he smiled. Lori got ready to kick him, depending on what he said next. "You worked in a lot of different places, right? Did you ever work with masons?"

Lori gave him a wary look. "No…"

"Ah. That explains it. If you had, you wouldn't have to ask me this. Well, the answer's simple enough, at least."

Lori blinked. "It is?"

Rian nodded. "You just have to start thinking in stacks… "