They arrived back in River's Fork a little after noon. From the looks of it, lunch was over. Fortunately, Rian had prepared for this and had had some of breakfast saved for the second batch to eat, in case they missed lunch at either demesne.

Someone in River's Fork appeared to be as forward-thinking, for they were greeted with warm bread and other foods as well. Lori noted, however, that the number of foods was equal in number only to the second batch of miners, and did not include any portions for her and Rian. At least they had something to eat. Lori had even, against her better judgment, been generous and gave Rian one of the pink ladies she had brought along as a snack. Let that remind him of what he'd been missing when he'd foolishly given away many of the fruits she'd given him as tha—restitution for the use of this bed roll!

After a brief break to eat—Rian saying something about needing to design the boat to Covehold to be stable enough to eat in properly—Lori started making the other four cubes of ice that was part of their agreement with River's Fork, since their blacksmiths had confirmed that the ore sample they'd brought back had, in fact, contained copper.

It took a while, but Binder Shanalorre had provided some boards to lay the ice during construction so that it would be level, which at least helped with the getting it to the proper dimensions. Lori had even put a binding on the cubes with enough imbuement that the ice should reasonably reach whatever they were using for a coldroom long before it started to melt.

After that, Lori asked to be shown the air circulation arrangements for the mine. Which involved actually seeing the mine itself.

"Why does this need air circulation?" Lori said, sending light through the cave-like entrance on the side of the hill with the binding of lightwisps at the end of her staff. Unlike her dungeon, the entrance was supported by wooden beams, which seemed a bit unnecessary, since… "It's barely bigger than two of your houses put together."

That might have been a bit of an exaggeration. At a pace and a half wide, two paces tall and… well, she wasn't a Horotract. Deep enough that her light was just a bit too dim to each the end of the excavated mine? Call it maybe twelve to sixteen paces. Lori wasn't sure how much ore they managed to extract from this, but it was probably not equal to all the excavated space.

"Part of the air circulation is to keep it from growing too hot," Shanalorre said. "And while it doesn't seem that deep, I am told its deep enough that a group of people will quickly find themselves lightheaded, especially if they're doing demanding physical work."

Lori grunted. Well, she supposed it was a reasonable precaution to take.

She looked at the air circulation system they already had in place. It seemed to consist of tubes of either seelskin or canvas that hung from one of the upper corners of the mine. They hung limp now, but it was easy to imagine them bloated and filled with air. At intervals, usually where one tube connected to the next, the wooden tube used as a connector had a hole on the side to release air.

Lori could see it working. After all, in principle it wasn't that different from the air circulation arrangement of the second level of her demesne.

It was also immediately obvious why they'd asked for her help in providing air to circulate to this system.

"These are what you were going to use to as a backup system?" Lori said blandly, starring at pair of large bellows that had been secured to some sort of wooden frame just outside of the mines. Leather hoses connected the nozzles of the bellows to the long hose of tubing already in the mine. She'd seen them coming in and had hoped they were for use in something else, but alas, that hope was Iridiated and left to go mad.

"These were the bellows used for smelting the metal we managed to unearth," Shanalorre confirmed. "With men constantly pumping, we believed it would provide some air circulation, provided we closed all the vent holes in the tubing system so air would only escape from the end of the tube, forcing the old air out of the mine. We acknowledge it's insufficient for our needs. We were going to build a much larger one as soon as the wood had cured."

"Speaking as a man just looking at this thing," Rian said. "I wouldn't want to place my safety on this. I don't even think it's sturdy enough to take the constant pounding you're implying it'll have to take for ventilation to happen! If I had to rely on this, I wouldn't go into that mine."

"What happened to the original ventilation equipment?" Lori said. "You implied that it was destroyed when the dragon passed, but was there anything left of it? Perhaps it could still be salvaged or repaired?"

"A dragonscale fell on it," Lord Yllian said blandly. "The metal itself is useable but completely beyond our ability to repair. And besides…" He looked sideways at Shanalorre for a moment.

"Tell them, Lord Yllian," she said, looking aside.

The man sighed. "It was powered with beast's legs mounted to a frame that Binder Koschay had made undead to keep turning the handle of the device. Otherwise we'd have needed at least two people working together to get the thing turning."

Rian titled his head as if trying to imagine the mechanism, looking slightly disturbed. "Legs? Like, just pieces of beasts cut off and nailed to a frame?"

"Of course not," Shanalorre said, and there were a note of pride in her voice. "My father was a learned and experienced Deadspeaker. He found a way to fuse a beast's hips to wood, and from there the leg operated as if it were still whole."

Rian twitched. "Well, I'm sure it worked…?" he said hesitantly, glancing at Lord Yllian.

"It worked very well, yes," the other man said.

"If you can disconnect these things, I can install a temporary replacement that will last until the next day or so while I get to work on building a more permanent solution," Lori said. "I assume you'll want to do the removal yourself to preserve materials?"

Shanalorre nodded and gestured to her lord, who waved. Some men who had been loitering nearby approached, and he began directing them to disassemble the bellows and frame. "What else do you need?"

"I might need help with carpentry and carrying when I come back," Lori said. She looked at what the men were doing and frowned. "Disassemble the frame, but keep it nearby. It might be suitable for the solution I have in mind. For now, I will install a temporary measure as soon as it is disassembled."

They all looked at the stone funnel cone Lori had had carried from Lori's Boat.

"So, just to be clear, are you really just going to stick that on one end…?"

"It will draw in air from the wide end and force it out the other side," Lori said. "As a result, air will move."

Shanlorre gave it a skeptical look. "How do we activate it?"

"You don't," Lori said. "I do. Once it's activated, it will continue circulating air until it runs out of imbuement."

"That seems… wasteful," Shanalorre said.

"Hence why it will only last two days, at most," Lori said. "It will continue on through the night, not stopping, circulating air until the airwisps run out."

"Is there no way to make it last longer?" Shanalorre said.

Lori shrugged. "I can reduce the intake rate," she said. "That would extend its duration by another day. But once it's activated, it's activated. There's no deactivating it unless myself or someone else capable of Whispering overrides my claim and binds it to stop."

"So it will run through the night, while the mine is empty and it isn't needed…" Shanalorre said.

"It's meant as a temporary measure until I can build something more permanent," Lori said. "You're welcome to do it yourself. Or simply using the bellows is an option. I suggest you decide, as I do not wish to linger, and I intend to leave as soon as I install this and activate it."

Shanalorre let out a breath that sounded impatient. "Fine. I suppose we have no alternative."

It wasn't that simple, of course. The frame that had held the bellows were repurposed to hold the funnel stable—they simply lay it on the beams so that the wide end served as a base— while Lori altered the narrow end and a leather tube was affixed to it. Lori made the stone bulge slightly so that the tube wouldn't just be tugged off. Then, once it was secure, Lori activated it.

It was mildly anticlimactic.

The airwisps she had bound to the interior of the funnel and imbued when she had made the funnel yesterday, a distinct layer that took up the entire interior of the funnel, began to draw in air, similar to the ventilation systems she had in her Dungeon. They watched the leather tub that had been secured to one end of the funnel suddenly bloat like a fat slug, and from the inside of the mine they heard the sound of rushing air.

"All right," Lori said. She picked up a rock off the ground and bound the lightwisps she'd had on the end of her staff to it. "Rian, take this and go in there to the end. I will begin reducing the output, and you yell if you can no longer feel sufficient movement from the end of the tubes. Hopefully that will allow this to last longer."

Rian sighed. "You know, when I agreed to this, I could have sworn you said I only had to deal with people…" he said, but he went into the mine anyway.

It took far longer than Lori thought it would, since the sound of the air actually managed to muffle Rian's words, and Shanalorre had to condescend to having the pair who dismantled the bellows to go into the mine and stand at intervals so they could relay Rian's message. Eventually, however, they were able to find a level of output that allowed the binding on the funnel to be active for the next four days, perhaps five.

"I hope that's enough," Rian said as Lori took a moment to deactivate the binding and imbue a little more into it. "It's a bit windy, but people should still be able to breathe even with some kind of open flame burning."

Lori blinked. "Why would there be an open flame burning?" Lori said.

"They'll need light for when they're digging," Rian said, "And it's not like they have any other way to make it, right?"

Lori considered that. "The binding will last for four days, but no longer," she said as she bound it to a slightly higher level of output. "Hopefully by then I'll be back with a replacement for this." She glanced at Shanalorre. "I might need the assistance of your carpenters to fit it into place."

"I will notify them," Shanalorre said. "I suppose you're leaving now?"

Lori shook her head, reaching into her pack and pulling out a stone bowl. "Not quite," she said, taking her waterskin and pouring some of it into a bowl. "May I ask you to put this somewhere it won't be disturbed? It's for a test I'm conducting. It will help in determining the efficacy of the device I will be constructing to replace this." She gestured towards the dormant funnel.

"I… suppose I can find a place for it," Shanalorre said hesitantly.

"Excellent," Lori said, reaching into her pack and drawing her syringe case. "If you will wait one moment…"

She had boiled it clean before they left and kept the container sealed. The container itself she had blasted with steam. Hopefully that would be enough.

She pulled one arm out of her coat and concentrated on her body, feeling for waterwisps…

"Lori? What are you— NOT AGAIN!" Rian cried shrilly as she jabbed herself in the crook of her elbow and began to draw blood.

"Eeeeh!" Surprisingly, Binder Shanalorre cried out as well, running to hide behind a surprised Lord Yllian and hiding her face. Lori and the lord exchanged a brief look.

"Rian, please act like an adult," Lori said as she withdrew the needle from her arm, wincing as pain bloomed. She had jerked involuntarily at the cries, and now the site of the extraction throbbed.

"Doesn't that hurt?" Rian exclaimed.

"Of course it hurt. It hurts more when someone surprises me and makes me tense," Lori snapped as she pressed on the plunger of the syringe, sending all the blood down into the bowl of water.

There was an 'eep' as Shanalorre, who had started to peek around her lord, hurriedly hid her face behind him again as she quickly breathed in and out.

Lori cleaned the syringe with the last of the water before putting it back in its case, her mind already claiming and imbuing the waterwisps from the blood in the water as she did so. Well, that was already partially a success. She could, in fact, claim and maintain a connection even within another's demesne. Next would come seeing if the connection held when she left the demesne, and again when she re-entered her own…

"Shall I heal you, Binder Lolilyuri?" Binder Shanalorre's voice said, her face now composed again. "While your wound is again self-inflicted, it could still become infected, and antiseptic is a scarce resource until we have managed to cultivate enough sweetbugs and honey."

Lori glanced down at her arm. "If you do not mind, Binder Shanalorre."

Shanalorre nodded, and reached out to touch her arm. Lori wondered why the small Deadspeaker wasn't doing this through her link with the demesne. Perhaps she hadn't worked out how? Or was this just more familiar and therefore reassuring for her.

Fingers touched her skin, and Lori felt the familiar… dissonance of Deadspeaking being used on her. It was always so strange, being touched by a magic she couldn't counter or affect. She felt the wisps in her seemingly ripple slightly, as if sand moved by the waves, but every sense she possessed told her there had been no wave.

She thought that would have changed since she became Binder, that she'd at least feel something new, but she supposed she was still too unfamiliar with Deadspeaking to perceive what was being done to her.

She wondered if it was equally unnerving to Shanalorre, the feeling of Lori performing Whispering in the child Binder's demesne? The demesne was an extension of their bodies, after all, so…

Lori shook her head to clear the thought away as the stinging pain and pulsing throb receded, and she watched the small puncture would close. "Done," Shanalorre informed her, before turning to look at the now dark-tinged stone bowl with morbid fascination. "May I ask what that was in aid of?"

"A test of an idea I have been experimenting with," Lori said.

"This isn't some strange, subtle attempt to wrest my demesne away from me by making me touch your blood, is it?" Shanalorre said blandly. "I think I remember that from some story…"

Lori barely managed to keep herself from screaming. "That's not how dungeons work," she managed to say in a normal tone. "No, this is merely a test of basic principles over time. I merely need it somewhere it will not be disturbed to minimize the possibility of bad results."

"Will an empty house do?" Shanalorre said.

"That will be suitable, provided it is covered," Lori said, taking out a second stone bowl from her pack. She hadn't had time to modify it to fit as a lid, but they were roughly the same dimensions, so it should work as a cover. Carefully, she placed it over the bowl.

"Could you find a piece of wood to use as a tray, Lord Yllian?" Shanalorre said, still looking at the bowl skeptically. "To make it easier to move?"

As the bemused older lord turned and had someone do just that, Lori finished putting everything back in her pack. "I believe it is time to go," Lori said, looking up at the sun, which indicated it was about mid-afternoon. "I hope you can begin soon, Binder Shanalorre. I will return within four days with a replacement air circulator."

"I look forward to it, Binder Lolilyuri," Shanalorre said.

Lori nodded, shouldered her pack, grabbed her staff, and gestured for Rian to follow her as she began heading back for Lori's Boat.

"Uh, your Bindership?" Rian called out to her. "Shouldn't you activate this air thing again before we leave?"