The storm continued into the next day. Lori could feel her demesne getting buried in more and more water, solidified as it was. She had thought she would need to be the one to clear the entryway of snow so that they'd continue to get air into the Dungeon, and was pleasantly surprised that wasn't the case. With literally nothing else for them to do, Rian had organized people into a clearing detail, keeping the entryway open with ladders, newly made snow shovels that bore some resemblance to her stone shaping tool—which she managed to get back—and lots of people.

"We've got this under control," Rian said to her. "Plenty of people willing to work, we've finally got the tools, and we don't even need to worry about the reservoir overfilling, since right after this I think most of us are going to the baths to warm up. Go stay inside where it's warm and relax. Or maybe do what you were planning to do this afternoon."

All Lori had to do was to create a source of warmth in the entryway the morning after all the marriages so that no one would be tempted to start a fire, something easily done by adding firewisps to the lightwisps on the entryway ceiling. She set it to replicate sunlight, the unseen light more efficiently carrying the warmth. Beyond desiccating the latrines again after breakfast, her mornings were mostly free, with little in the way of further work for her to do.

She spent the morning rethinking how she was expanding her demesne.

Normally, she would have just gone straight to her room and begun expanding her demesne as she had been doing before, while continuing her experiments on the effects of the variables she had isolated. With the coming of the snow, however, and with literally everyone in her demesne who wasn't doing some work—which was a lot of them—just sitting around playing, talking, singing, relaxing or sleeping, she couldn't help but be influenced. Because she was not going to work her hardest when everyone else in her demesne decided they were on a rest break! That was just backwards! If she was working, everyone else should be working as well! And if she wasn't working, they should still be working!

She wanted to be just as lazy and unproductive! After all, there really wasn't much work to do and she had already done them. The farm was well within the parameters of a good growing environment, there was water if they needed to be watered and the drainage ensured the roots didn't get sodden and rotted. Rian had keeping the entryway clear well in hand, and there was really nothing left for her to do inside the dungeon. Even the cold rooms didn't need more solidified air.

But her demesne had to expand, and she was the only one who could do it. So she told Rian she'd be in her room and didn't need the clocks set, went up, closed the door but didn't seal it so he could come up and get her, and readied her bedroll in her little corner. It was as she was sitting down and getting ready to expand while thinking mournfully about how no one else needed to work as hard as this when the thought came to her.

Why did she need to hurry?

The question made her stop and think. During the past two weeks since she'd started expanding her demesne, she had been doing so with a certain haste, trying to get as much growth as possible as quickly as possible. This was mostly because her attention was a limited resource, and magic needed to be directed to circulate and imbue. If she stopped paying attention, the flow of magic would stop. And if she needed to pay attention anyway, then she might as well cause the magic to flow as quickly as possible. The problem was she needed to pay attention to the entire border of her demesne, a massive sphere four taums wide, since that was what she needed to imbue to expand.

Well, four taums and about twenty-two paces more now, she wasn't sure, she left obsessing over the exact numbers to Rian.

Most of her difficulty, and subsequently the cause of her headaches and tiredness, had been in adapting to the change in methodology needed when it came to where the magic needed to be directed. She had been taught to move magic in terms of flows, moving it from where it was gathered in her lungs and through the parts of her body filled with the relevant wisps that aligned it, before it progressed out to where the aligned magic could be channeled to the wisps she was going to claim and bind, usually through the wire on her staff.

She did not disperse magic to every square yustri of her skin at once, in equal measure, and she did not use all that skin to claim and bind simultaneously. Since that was almost exactly what she needed to do to expand her, it was understandably causing her difficulties. It was an entirely different concept of magic direction, since there was no one point to send all the magic. All points possible had to be imbued equally.

Now however, with the relaxed, lazy atmosphere of the demesne filling her with an envy and desire to be lazy as well, her mind stepped back to examine what she had been doing. Yes, obviously she had to grow her demesne as quickly as possible, but she didn't need to hurry the process, did she? The more of her magic she aligned and imbued to the wisps at her border, the more she could claim beyond it, and the more time she had to expand before the Iridescence consumed all the imbuement in the wisps in question. That part undoubtedly had to be done as quickly as possible. But the rest…

Theoretically, magic moved at the speed of thought… which was part of what made Mentalists so dangerous, because they could make their speed of thought, already so fast it couldn't reasonably be measured, even faster. In practice however, this speed didn't matter if the amount of magic being transferred was limited to small amounts, which was primarily restricted by how much magic a wizard could draw in when they breathed. Deeper breaths drew in more magic, but also had to be done slower, lest one start panting and hyperventilating.

Taking in a bead could mitigate this, but not completely, since it simply altered the problem into how to efficiently utilize all the power the bead provided, since beads had to be swallowed to extract their magic for use. While you could theoretically retrieve the bead… no. Just… no. Besides, such beads are no longer considered legal tender since being partially used reduced their size from what it was supposed to be, as well scoured off the markings on it, so the only other use for them was to put them in a bound tool or swallowing them again…

No. Just… no.

One learned to either take controlled breaths while channeling magic at a very slow and even rate, or drew in several rapid breaths over a period before imbuing in a single, massive burst. The latter technique resulted in a net loss from inefficiency, as an amount of magic also exited with one's breath unless one was actively channeling, ultimately resulting in more effort for less gain, or at least that's how Lori's teachers had taught.

Her own research, and some of her favorite novels, had taught her that such bursts were useful if one needed a large imbuement of magic quickly, such as if one got caught in a violent altercation and needed a sudden work of magic to dramatically turn the tide in your favor. Perhaps this was something officially taught to wizards who became part of the militia. Regardless, it wasn't what Lori had learned, though she knew of it.

It was also considered wasteful, since magic, once imbued into wisps (or vertices, or thoughts, or life), could not be retrieved. Better not quite enough than too much, they had been taught, because the former could be corrected, the latter could not. While it didn't really affect the end result, since a binding (or a vista, or a formation, or a meaning) could be altered and utilized for something else, or simply dissolved even when it still retained imbuement, such over-imbuement was considered sloppy work unless you were binding (or defining, or arranging, or taming) something that was meant to last for a long time and therefore be constantly imbued.

With her core, however, she had no such restriction. And while the steps leading to expansion needed her attention, the consequences of her attention lapsing, now that she considered it, weren't actually serious. The flow of magic would stop, but most of what she had prepared would still be in place. The wisps would remain claimed, bound and imbued, but with no binding in place to consume magic, and with the wisps still being within her demesne, imbuement loss from dissipation would be slow, provided she didn't decide to go off to have a lunch and a nap. Loss would be even further reduced if the wisps were organized into a deactivated binding, the imposed order rendering loss from dissipation almost negligible.

But… she hadn't done any of that. She simply had taken the procedure she had used to create her core and scaled it upwards while directing it outward in all directions. And it had worked… but that had been all she had done to change it.

Part of the reason why she'd been wasting so much time and effort with quickly imbuing was because, now that she thought about it, she had never properly anchored the airwisps and waterwisps so that they wouldn't be blown away by the weather, holding on to them by active concentration as she had done when she had originally formed her core. This had resulted in more of her attention being taken up with holding the wisps in place while imbuing them. As they were being imbued, she had felt the effort was necessary, but now…

As Lori lay there, she realized she had made the most stupid beginner mistake possible when it came to an extended undertaking: she had worked harder instead of smarter. She had taken what she had known and had simply done more of it, expending greater effort in expectation of greater results. She had used a massive, inefficient burst when she should have acted in a slow, steady and methodical fashion. Lori had, because of her own efforts, been utterly mentally spent once she had expanded her entire demesne in one large burst, pushing back the awareness of her wisps soon afterwards as she lay back and let exhaustion take her.

How much imbuement had been left in the wisps she had used that had simply dissipated natural overnight since they hadn't been formed into an organized binding? How much of her efforts had she simply wasted?

Lori felt a self-directed rage rising as she realized how much less work she could have been putting into expanding at the rate she had been… and how much more growth she could have had for the same effort. Even something as simple as binding the wisps she had used to expand such that their imbuement wouldn't deteriorate completely overnight would have let her realize she'd been doing something wrong, would have given her wisps that were already heavily imbued. She could have skipped the intermediate step of directing magic towards them before she could expand. She could have imbued and expanded one day, then immediately expanded again the following day after a night's rest with the remaining imbuement before sitting down and channeling magic to the edge again for another attempt! She could have been twice as efficient!

She spent that morning carefully creating a massive binding over the skyward half of her demesne. The binding was not meant to do anything but be a means of correcting her mistake of inefficiency when imbued, reducing imbuement dissipation so that any remaining could be utilized the next day. While she had technically already done this before, had done this every time she had expanded her demesne by having all of her wisps reach beyond her demesne's border, that had been freeform control, actively controlling the wisps with her will. It had been the same way she made stone flow to move it around or made water move uphill when she needed to carry it up from the river, requiring active attention, thought and control on her part.

This sort of binding, holding wisps in place and having them do a single, specific thing was more akin to filling a water clock. It would do what it was supposed to as long as it had imbuement, and since what it was supposed to do was nothing but keep its shape and therefore not lose any imbuement…

It was almost annoyingly easy. She picked a spot to start at—where the river entered her demesne, and she had experimented on whether increasing the concentration of wisps affected expansion, and did those results actually mean what she thought they did now?—and simply bound the wisps there, from the border of the demesne to perhaps a pace inwards. She couldn't be sure about the exact volume without being there. Then she had simply… continued. Her attention had moved turnwise along her border, continually extending that one binding, until her attention was right back where she had started. It had taken… how long?

Lori opened her eyes and grabbed one of the water clocks, filling it with water from her bathroom. Putting it back on its shelf with the catch bucket underneath it, she let it flow, then closed her eyes and repeated her previous exercise. The area she was binding was about… well, it was smaller than the width of the river, and the river wasn't any narrower here than in front of her dungeon… call the width of what she was binding perhaps twenty paces wide? She started at the same place, and then proceeded turnwise as she had before, binding the wisps directly above her previous binding, imbuing with just enough magic to keep the binding from collapsing.

When she completed the second revolution along her demesne's border, the contents of the water clock had only dropped a miniscule amount. Less than three minutes had passed, probably. The water clock didn't have markings that fine, so she had to estimate, and refraction might have made her estimate incorrect.

Lori stared as the waterclock again, then closed her eyes for a third time, leaned back, and continued forming a binding that would encompass the border of the entire skyward half of her demesne. When she had opened her eyes again, the water clocks was just dripping itself empty, the last of the drops falling into the catch bucket below. Possibly a little over an hour to finish the whole procedure.

It only occurred to her afterwards that besides protecting her demesne from dragons, this was probably the largest, most Dungeon Binder-worthy accomplishment she had ever done. Nearly everything else she had built so far, she could have done with sufficient beads. But this? Almost literally claiming the sky above? It was truly something only a Dungeon Binder could have accomplished. For a single person to equal it would have taken a truly absurd number of beads just to provide the magic needed to keep the whole binding sufficiently imbued to prevent it from collapsing naturally, never mind having to actually form the binding in question.

Repeating the exercise underground didn't take much longer. If anything, it actually went faster, because earthwisps weren't inclined to move, and what little water there remained relatively still. At the end of a little under an hour, probably, she had managed to place a binding that encompassed the entire border of her demesne, from sky to depths.

Lori lay back against her bedroll, satisfied. That had gone much faster than she had thought. She supposed it had been concentrating her attention at a relatively single spot instead of trying to reach all points of her demesne's border at once. The massive binding was imbued but inactive, and would last long enough for her to take a short rest so she could relax her mind and not get a headache. Then she would just have to sit down and put herself through the headache-inducing experience of imbuing every spot on the border of her demesne simultaneously and…

…and…

…

In her mind's eye, Lori stared at the massive, spherical binding she had created. Slowly, with the air of someone who'd realized something that should have been extremely obvious, she picked the same spot as before, where the river entered her demesne, and began imbuing the wisps there with magic from her core.

Through the binding, the magic spread out to every wisp upon the borders of her demesne at once.

…

Like Skykeep Demesne tearing itself out of the ground in story and legend, the hateful, rage-filled scream of utterly furious, incandescently burning frustration ripped itself out of her chest and kept on rising.