Lori never thought she'd see the brat looking envious. It seemed she hadn't been able to join the hunters who had gone to River's Fork to seel for meat there. Well, there was still tomorrow. The girl alternated between directing that envious gaze at Lori and pointing at the seels trapped in ice that Lori had trapped and dragged ashore, visibly counting them even as she kept losing track of which ones she'd already counted and having to start over. The only reason Lori had stopped pulling seels out of the water was because she'd run out of space to put them where they wouldn't start sliding around because of the ice on them.

Still, the brat didn't let her clear envy affect her. "All right everyone, find a club or a rock," the brat called out to the other children. "They're big, but they'll still stop moving once you hit their head enough times! Loveld, you go run and get Auntie Armis, tell her we have a lot of big seels. Then find uncle Kolinh and tell him we need help here."

One of the smaller boy reluctantly put down his rock—a little thing that fit in one hand—and went to do as asked, while the brat turned to Lori. "Wiz Lori, can you take the ice off their heads so we can hit them? Kuya Vov can start gutting them for us when they're properly dead." Off to the side, the young man who'd been keeping an eye on the children had a resigned look on his face as he sharpened his belt knife with a rock.

Unfortunately, it wasn't as simple as that. While the juveniles and adolescents were easily killed by the blows to the head that the children could perform on them, the adults were much more resilient. They were also very loud, making many of the children reticent about approaching them. Try as they might, the children didn't seem to be very successful at trying to kill the seels whose heads Lori had uncovered from the ice.

Fortunately, people started to arrive, no doubt called by the boy the brat had sent. There were exclamations at the sight of so many seels trapped in ice, but people quickly got to work. The children were dislodged as adults handled dealing with the seels. After a quick debate, shirts were removed and folded so that people could start pushing and guiding the trapped seels away from that part of the shore.

"Best we don't bleed them all here, Great Binder," Kolinh explained. "Otherwise the seels may start avoiding this place because they remember the smell. And it'll be a mess if we start butchering them here. We don't want the chokers to have any reason to come around to where the children are."

"I'll take your word for it," Lori said blandly. "Get these things turned into food and prepare to send a batch to River's Fork. If not today when we pick up the hunters there, then tomorrow when they go back." She titled her head for a moment. "Will this be enough to match what the hunting parties would normally been able to gather?"

"That and a bit more, Great Binder," Kolinh said. "Are you considering taking over seeling for the demesne for the duration?"

Lori hadn't been until that point, but now that the idea had been proposed… "Only while the hunters are occupied with tracking down the beast in question," Lori said. "In the long term, there are better uses of my time. See to it they know this and that they don't take their time with finding this beast."

"Understood, Great Binder."

She'd… have to do this again tomorrow, wouldn't she? Lori eyed the river, but at the moment she was quite spoiled for choice when it came to seels to catch. Well, it wasn't that bad. She could do it again tomorrow. Still, she couldn't help thinking that another thing that she had done to exert her power had found its way to possibly becoming a repetitive exercise…

Lori followed the seels, but need not have bothered. Hammers, chisels and knives chipped at the ice around their heads, and blades were thrust through their furry necks until the seels' aggravating wailing cut off, and they were allowed to bleed out onto the soil around the demesne's fields. She didn't know why they were doing that there. Perhaps the blood helped improve the fertility of the soil or something. Benches were used to raise up one end of the trapped seels to facilitate the exsanguination.

She left them to it. She didn't want to be around when enough of the blood had been drained that people would start with the butchering in earnest.

Ah, perhaps that was it. So that it wouldn't be far to carry the seels' inedible innards to the soil they'd be fertilizing.

She let out another sigh as she realized she should have kept one of the seels for herself to test out the lethality of the binding she was planning to use in the trap to kill the beast haunting River's Fork's outskirts. For a moment, she considered going back to the river and catching a fresh seel…

Shaking her head, Lori headed back to her room. No, no, she didn't want to be outside once the smell started. With so many seels being butchered at once, it would be nothing like the more usual daily butchering. No, she was going to lock herself in her room, and…uh… ah, she'd check her almanac Maybe there was a binding there whose warnings would tell her how to properly convert it into something lethal. While she had it in mind to use lightningwisps, she was willing to alter her plan if a better binding was brought to her attention.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

And reading in her Dungeon would hopefully be far enough away to keep her from noticing the smell.

––––––––––––––––––

As much as she enjoyed reading, Lori didn't really have much time to read her almanac. She had to work most days, and on nights that she had to stay up, it was to think of whatever thing Rian had brought to her attention. As much as she would have wanted to read the book cover to cover, she really couldn't afford the distraction of immersing herself in its words.

Oh, when she had first gotten it, she'd skimmed though the pages of its flow diagrams to get ideas for bindings, and she'd read over its listing of edible flora, which she'd copied with lightwisps to the walls of the entryway so that people could identify them as well when they went looking for food in the woods. Beyond that, however, it had become a reference that she checked when there was a matter that her knowledge, Rian's and those he asked for help from, were lacking in. It was where she'd found the binding that used lightningwisps to repel bugs, for example.

It wasn't a well-loved book she'd read through completely several times before and had an idea of where everything was. As such, she still had to check the pages listing the topics the book contained every time she was looking for a topic. Lori had just carefully turned towards the listing of contents and was slowly paging towards the section listing the various flow diagrams in the book when her mind caught up with her eyes, and she turned back a couple of pages to stare at a listing she'd seen before but had never read before now, as she hadn't been interested in it.

Beastiary, the heading of the section said.

Beneath that was a listing of what might have been… names? Someone had fun with them, that was certain. She recognized some as the names from seminal works of fiction, usually of the 'Deadspoken creations turns against its creator' kind of stories, though others were of the 'young boy-or-girl finds escaped Deadspoken creation and makes friends with it' genre that her mothers had bought for her when she'd been younger. A few were names from history and folk lore, like 'Iskandaliyalos', from the Empire Binder's storied construct that emitted deadly piercing light from its eyes, or Typhon, the mythical progenitor of dragons—though that latter was usually conflated with the storm moon in those silly superstitions.

She changed her plans, noting the page listing and opening the book there instead. To her relief, the entries had illustrations, well-detailed line drawings that showed the proportions and profile of the beasts listed, as well as a scale comparing its size to the average person. Entries were organized by average body length, a decision that briefly baffled Lori, before she took a moment to think about it and realized that it was unlikely that someone had studied the local beasts in enough detail to sort them by the long-established classifications vitalogists used. Classifying by length, however, sorted the beasts by an obvious metric.

Lori paged forward, remembering that the beast in question was between ten and twelve paces in length. She started somewhere in the middle of the entries, but on seeing the length of the beast she opened to being a mere six to seven paces long—it looked like a chasmos, but the two long horns running down its jaw that went far past the four-legged beast's beak—she skipped ahead some more.

Eventually, she found what she was looking for. At least, it was the right range for length, as the almanac listed it as being between ten and eleven paces long. Its illustration showed it in profile with its tail and head outstretched, and a drawing of a koncallos below it in the same pose as a comparison. It was this beast whose name she had noticed in the listing, the one that had been given the grandiose—but on consideration very worrying—designation of a 'Typhon Beast'.

As she looked at the illustration of it, Lori didn't see what was so worrying. Typhons were about the same length and height as a koncallos but—the things weighed how much?-!

She stared at the estimates of its weight, which on average was four times that of a koncallos at a calculated six to seven taugrains. That was… certainly far, far bulkier. She thought that the larger outline was from a thick coating of feathers, not significantly greater body mass…

She examined the illustration closely now. The Typhon's head was far larger than the koncallos' in comparison to its body, with visibly larger teeth. She read the article, then did a double take. Its teeth were how long? That was big enough to be used as a spearhead without needing to be shaped! The more she read, the more intimidating the beast seemed. It apparently like to kill exclusively using its jaws to cause traumatic damage, which given it had teeth longer than many knives was probably a very effective tactic.

There were more differences between it and a koncallos. The typhon beast's forelimbs were smaller, proportionately, compared to the other beasts, and they were apparently not used for latching on to its prey. The typhon also had three rows of increasingly larger knife-like growths running along its spine from near the tip of its tail to the back of its head, with the largest growths concentrated at the vicinity of its shoulder blades. The article hypothesized these were some sort of natural defense against other typhon beasts, though it was listed as speculation since no one had yet witnessed two typhon beasts fighting.

The article was also full of warnings to not try to engage typhon beasts, as they had been known to swallow… people… whole… and that the beasts were… uh, was best engaged by… several wizards working in concert.

…

Lori forced herself to keep reading, even as her hands started to shake and she felt herself breaking in a sweat that had nothing to do with exertion. Strangely, the almanac's article recommended fences as the best means of keeping the beast away, especially from frequented water courses, with thorn fences being the most effective. What? Ah, there was a reference to a flow diagram in the book, illustrating how a Deadspeaker could reshape wood into the aforementioned thorn fence…

There was a distressing lack of detail as to how to get the typhon beast out of an area it had already occupied, though there was a note that the smell of typhon beast urine repelled most beasts… and ending with a declaration that the reader should report all typhon beast sightings to their Dungeon Binder so that… they could ask… other demesne… for assistance…

…

That sounded very ominous for Lori's chances of killing this by herself.