"Stacks?" Lori said skeptically.

"I'll explain over lunch," Rian said. "Since, you know, I came out here to tell you it was lunch time and all?"

Lori grunted, taking one last look at her unfinished wall. The segment she was working on was basically just a pile of softened stone that she'd plopped down and looked like melted candle wax. It annoyed her just to look at it. "Fine. Come on."

She shouldered her stone shaping tool, trudging back towards the Dungeon.

"So," she said once she was seated at her table. "Explain yourself."

"You need to start building the wall from the bottom up," Rian said as Umu shuffled closer to him, ignoring their conversation to wrap her arms around his.

"Rian, I know all about how you need a secure foundation to build on," Lori said. "I might not remember who any of them were, but I remember the meeting with the masons and engineers."

"You're going to make them cry, you know that?" Rian said, sighing as he said it. "But no, not that. You're forgetting your basic wall building, your Bindership. Which is regrettable, because back when you were making ordinary walls for houses, you did it right without having to be told how."

"Rian…" Lori growled.

"Your Bindership, instead of building the wall by trying to grow it sideways, you need to grow it from the bottom upwards," Rian said. He said it simply, like it was something blatantly obvious. "Before, when you've made walls, you didn't try to raise up a pillar, then added material to the side of the pillar and grow it sideways." He mimed holding up his arm, and then pulling at something imaginary from it with his other hand, moving carefully so as not to dislodge the weaver holding it. "You put stone down on the ground and pulled it upwards to make walls."

"This wall can't be shaped like that, Rian," Lori said. "It will be under different stresses, horizontal instead of vertical."

"So? It's still a wall. You build it the same way. From the bottom upwards. Look, from what I could see, you're trying to shape the wall so that's it wider at that base so that it can withstand the water pressure, right?"

"Obviously."

"And I just bet that what's slowing you down is you're trying to build it so that it has perfectly sloped sides, right?"

"Rian, is this going somewhere relevant?"

Rian sighed, an annoyingly fond expression on his face. "Perfectionists," he said, sounding exasperated. "Your Bindership, if you want this thing build quickly, forget about the having perfectly sloped sides and focus on having the wide base. I know in your head you see the wall as having sloped sides, but on a practical level it doesn't need them. What matters is the base is wide and gradually narrows as the wall gets higher."

"Which is why it has sloped sides," Lori explained patiently. Rian wasn't usually this idiotic.

Rian had the gall to put on a patient expression that had Lori gritting her teeth at the very sight of it, anger starting to smolder inside her, hands clenching into fists as—

"I'll be right back," Rian said, extricating himself from Umu—who pouted—and leaving.

Lori glared at him as he left, breathing in deeply and gathering magic to calm herself. No, no, don't be angry just because he made that face. That annoying, condescending, 'I'm doing you a favor by explaining this nonsense to you, why are you so stupid that you don't understand this' face.

When Rian came back, he still had on that face, but he was also carrying an armful of the wooden cups everyone drank from. He put them down on the table. Why did he have so many?

"All right," Rian said. He took three of the cups and arranged them in a line. Then he placed cups on top of those cups. "Here we have a wall, a good presentation of, say, the walls of the houses you've built." He made a show of pressing down on them. "As you can see, they're very good at bearing vertical forces, but not horizontal ones." At this he poked sideways at one of the cups at the bottom, pushing it far enough that it tumbled over and the cup on top of it fell off.

"Get to the point, Rian," Lori said through gritted teeth. The only reason she hadn't kicked him yet was because he was standing behind his bench.

"However, the wall you're trying to make is wide at the base, to be able to better bear those horizontal forces," Rian said. "Like this." He placed three cups in a line like a wall. Than he placed two cups on top of those, over the point where the bottom cups touched their neighbor. Finally, he placed a single cup at the very top. "This is the outline of the wall you're trying to build, right?"

Well, it was exaggerated, but… "Essentially," Lori said, annoyed.

Rian nodded. "This is how you build the flood wall faster. You build it like this."

"I'm already building it like that!"

"No," Rian said. "You're building it like this." He put down to cups next to each other in a line towards her, then put a cup on top of where they met. Then he put down to cups next to the previous two, and put a cup on top of those. He did this three more times, and Lori found herself staring bemusedly at a five-cup wide wall.

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Rian pushed that wall aside. "You need to build it like this." He put down five pairs of cups in a line five cups wide. Then he put a cup on top of each pair. The same wall of cups as before faced her.

Lori stared at the wall of wooden cups.

"It's basic brick laying," Rian said with a sigh. "Basic stacking, really. Have a wide base, than have the next layer on top be slightly less wide, and so one and so forth until you reach the top. So start building the base first. Please tell me you understand it now?"

…

Argh! So simple! So obvious! How could she have missed it!

Well, she knew the answer to that. She'd been concerned about making sure the cross-section of the wall was the right shape she hadn't really thought of the most efficient way to build the wall that way! Instead, she'd been trying to personally hand-shape everything! Working harder instead of smarter like an idiot!

"Ah, I take it by that emphatic fist slam onto the table that you do," Rian said as the wall of cups came tumbling down. He and Umu frantically tried to keep the cups from rolling off the table. "So, does this help?"

"Yes," Lori ground out.

Rian nodded, looking relieved. "If you really want the walls looking neat with smooth slopes, I know some people who are excellent masons with the tools right to shape mortar and plaster into exactly those kinds of smooth slopes. You know, so you can get done faster?"

––––––––––––––––––

Rian's idea for how she could build the flood wall faster was annoying in its simplicity. It was the sort of simple idea that in hindsight should have been obvious, but for some reason hadn't been. Not until Rian had told her. After he had…

Well. She put it into practice after lunch.

Stacks, Rian had said.

Lori stared down at the… well. It was rock she'd taken from the stockpile, extending in a line over the stone foundation. It hadn't been shaped, simply… moved and dumped there, running parallel to the river. At its highest point, the long, extrusion-looking pile of stone rose up to a quarter of the way up her thigh, and Lori was not a short woman.

It had taken… well, about an hour or so to get all the stone from the stockpile and in place, and most of that was from being careful while she was moving the stone. The whole time, she had to resist the urge to make everything neat and flat and level and consistently shaped. A part of her, the same part that almost physically hurt when she had to listen to amateurish dragon shelter party music, was feeling something of the usual pain, but she pressed it down. It was just for now, she told herself. It was just for now…

The low, mound-like wall of stone extended in a line all the way until the point the stone foundation turned inwards and stopped paralleling the river, and was not quite a pace and a half wide at its widest point, its surface uneven. By its very nature, the stone was imperfect and riddled with structural flaws in the form of folds of trapped air and water, since she'd just basically moved stone there and dumped it into place. However, it was far, far greater in overall volume than that pitiful length of wall she'd been working on for the past days and a half. If one were using that as a benchmark, then she had, technically, already greatly increased her rate of construction.

Lori then spent the next two hours or so fixing all the mistakes. Removing the bubbles of air trapped in the stone that weakened the structure, making sure the stone lay flat on the ground so that it distributed its weight evenly, and fusing it to the stone foundation that fused to the bedrock.

Then, once that was done, she got more stone and did it again, using Whispering to pile—or according to Rian, stack—the softened stone atop the first mound wall. This was a bit harder, since she needed to push the stone upwards, even if she could fuse the stone to the mound and shift and shape the stone to rise. She had to do it carefully, lest the angle and the weight of the stone cause something to crack, leading to the whole thing falling over. Still, she managed it, having the stone roll up slowly from one end of the forming wall to the other.

Once the second layer of stone was in place, she had to fix mistakes all over again. Try as she might, air somehow still got trapped as stone flowed up and over, and she had to go back and forth along the wall twice to be able to get rid of the air and water pockets. There was no further attempts to make it smooth or clean it up to appease the part of her that cringed on looking at it. Just get rid of the weak points between the two layers of stone she'd just basically dragged into place and threw over each other.

By the end of the day, however, she had a long, wide wall that rose just above her stomach to just under her sternum in spots—try as she might, she couldn't get the heights evened out without spending time hand-shaping the stone—that was mostly free of structural defects. Simply from volume of the stone in the wall alone, she estimated that she'd finished building somewhere between a third and half of the overall flood barrier.

True, it was ugly, uneven, and looked like giant lines of beast excrement that had been extruded across the ground, but it was technically a wall, technically made of solid stone, and technically the right, wide-bottomed shape for resisting the pressures of flooding. And… she could just fix it later, right? Make the slopes smooth and even…

"This is going to be a permanent fixture of my demesne, isn't it?" Lori muttered disgustedly. A temporary measure that became permanent…

Lori was frantically using her stone-shaping tool to try and flatten out the slopes of the sides when Rian came to call her for dinner.

"Nice! It's coming up faster now," Rian said cheerfully, so he was probably smiling widely under that towel. "At this rate, you'll be done in four or five days!"

"Yes, yes, it worked," Lori irritably She sighed, knowing she'd have to go back inside soon. There was no way she was going to work out here at night, even if she could simply by binding lightwisps in the air. They got most of their snow at night, and trying to build like she had been while it was snowing…

No. There'd be too much trapped snow. She'd be spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get the pockets of water out of the stone. Best to just wait until people have shoveled and swept out all the snow tomorrow.

"Oh, cheer up," Rian said. "I spoke to the masons, they're ready to help you touch it up tomorrow. Just have a little warmth and softened stone ready for them, and they'll take care of making the outside the smooth, even slopes that you want."

Lori grimaced. On the one hand, she didn't want other people nearby, getting in the way of her work and interfering because they thought they had an opinion she cared about. On the other hand… "They'd better," she said.

"Look, come inside for dinner, and I'll tell you the plan we came up with for tomorrow," Rian said.

Sighing, Lori pulled back her stone-shaping tool. "Fine, fine, let's go eat."

Looking at the wall she had made one last time, she cringed once more. Rian had better be right about the masons being able to do something about this. Even if it could act as an effective flood barrier, making something that looked so slapdash… it almost physically hurt, it really did.

Sighing one last time, Lori turned away and followed Rian inside for dinner.