Lori ate breakfast feeling half asleep. She had a feeling she'd been awake for far longer than had been advisable, but without some kind of clock in her room, she didn't exactly know how long she'd stayed up beyond her usual bedtime. All she knew was that she'd spent that time dragging up what general knowledge about Mentalism she'd learned in passing, repeating them to herself and trying to use them in any way to begin gaining sufficient understanding of the subject to perhaps figure out how to start. In at least three separate instances she remembered feeling like she'd actually forgotten something she should know about the subject, only to not remember what she didn't remember, and sat there trying to decide to force herself to try to remember or just move on and try to remember something else.

It had felt excruciatingly like trying to remember answers to a surprise test when she had comfortably not thought of the material for weeks because she'd thought they wouldn't be bringing it up until the exams. Only somehow worse because it was all self-inflicted…

"Are you feeling all right?" Rian asked over breakfast that morning as he and Riz came with the food. "Do you feel sick? Should we see if we can still get Shana to heal you?"

Lori waved a hand dismissively. "I just didn't get much sleep last night," she said as she took one of the bowls. "I'll be fine."

"Shouldn't you be old enough to know when it's time to stop reading and go to sleep?" Rian said as he handed out the rest of the bowls to Umu and Mikon, while Riz set down the cups of water and Lori took one.

"Rian, shut up so I don't have to kick you," Lori said, and began to eat.

"Shutting up about it, your Bindership," he said brightly as he sat down. Mikon moved to make space as he did, but Riz sat down on her other side. The pink-haired weaver looked bemused for a moment, then shrugged and patted Riz's hand before getting started on her own breakfast. "But moving on to other matters, are we still on for this morning?"

"Yes, yes," Lori said. "Get the boat ready after breakfast, we're going as soon as possible."

"How far are we going?" Rian asked.

"I told you yesterday, weren't you listening? We're heading for the edge of the demesne."

"Do we need to go in any particular direction?" Rian asked. "Because I don't think you've been upriver yet, and neither have I. It's probably a good idea to see what's up there for ourselves."

Lori waved her hand again. "I have no preference, I simply need to get to the edge. Either direction is fine with me."

"Upriver it is, then," Rian said cheerfully. "Riz, do you mind coming along and bringing a spear? I'd like a second set of eyes to watch for beasts, just in case."

"Hmm?" Riz said, turning to look at him, then needing to lean forward slightly to look around Mikon. "Oh, sure Rian. Should I get a second person too?"

Rian looked towards Lori inquisitively, but she just waved her hand again. "If you think we need it. I'll be operating the tiller, so I can't really do much while we're moving."

Lori simply concentrated on her food as she let Rian take care of matters, trying to shed the 'stayed up late studying' feeling from her mind.

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"So… that's it?" Rian said as she finished setting up the little stone markers. One stood on the edge of her demesne, while the other was three paces outside of it. Both markers were hollow, to maximize the volume of the stones she'd been able to gather, standing on patches of riverbank that she had cleared of snow by the simple expedient of moving that snow into the river. Most would probably have turned it into steam, but that was just asking for the steam to condense almost immediately into snow again.

Lori nodded. "That's it," she said. "Tomorrow or the day after, we might need to come back so I can check on them, but we can return now."

"What, that quickly?" Rian said, surprised. "I thought you were going to do some kind of test?"

"The test will take time," she said. "Hence returning later."

Rian looked towards the two markers, standing on open ground surrounded by fallen snow. Above, leafless trees stood, looking dead. Shimmering color marked the difference between trees inside and outside of her demesne, the snow on the ground a blank whiteness free of color. The iridescence on the trees were occasionally patchy, as if they'd been rubbed off. She supposed that was snow falling on them. "All right then… I guess we go home now, before some beast decides to pop up."

Lori frowned, looking back out onto the stark, even whiteness. It had felt so strange to not be able to see the border between her demesne and the Iridescence until she'd walked through it. "Are there any beasts out there?"

"They'd have to be," Rian said. "Maybe sleeping in dens or huddled up together to stay warm. Those feathers of theirs are good for that. Why do you think we use it for blanket stuffing? A few of the small ones are probably awake and looking for food, and we might count."

Distantly, Lori saw movement between trees, glittering rainbow colors moving where they hadn't been before, then disappeared. Lori shivered, and carefully backed up towards the boat, keeping her eyes on where she had seen the movement. Off to one side, Riz and the one she'd brought along lowered their spears. They must have seen it too. "Let's get back," Lori said. "I have more work to do."

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Thankfully, the blacksmiths didn't need her help to make the copper pots. Copper was soft enough to be worked when it was solid, it just took time and a lot of hammering, and any softening needed from the metal being compacted too much could be done with the forge. After she went to check that the laundry area was working as intended, keeping most of the warmth from the hot water in, Lori retired to her room after a quick detour to the rock pile. The pile of excavated stone had grown so much she'd started a second pile on the other side of the entry way, the better to quickly construct a bulwark in the event of a dragon.

In her room, she sealed the hallway behind her before she took that stone, softened it, and used a stone blade and some leather to make some stone tablets so that she'd have something to write on for notes. Best to do it now before she forgot…

And she was procrastinating again.

Still, Lori finished the tablet she was working on before she pushed it aside and rose. She glanced back and forth between her bed and the floor, considering, before shaking her head and concentrating on a particular area of the floor, an area that had nothing on it and nothing nearby. She reached through her connection to her core and bound the earthwisps there. Slowly, carefully so that nothing would fall down, she made the stone flow back in a circle. The stone parted, revealing a space underneath her room.

Lori carefully looked over the edge of the hole and sighed in frustration. Then she reached down with her will and moved the stone pillar that she had made to step down into the hidden space so that it was directly under the hole she had made instead of a pace to the side. Walking to her bed, she took her bedroll and tossed it into the hole, and there was a soft sound as it struck the floor at the bottom. Carefully, Lori sat at the edge of the hole and lowered herself down until her foot made contact with the pillar. Still holding on to the edges of the hole she carefully made the stone comprising the pillar flow without turning viscous, compressing down and making it bulge outward to slowly lower her down.

Once the pillar was low enough that she was about to lose her grip on the edges of the hole, Lori stopped the binding and dismounted from the pillar onto the floor below next to her bedroll. She opened her bedroll and arrange it on the floor folded over on itself for cushioning. Then she sat down and faced her Dungeon's core.

Her core hung in the air in the exact, geometric center of her demesne, a glowing solid sphere. Its radiance wasn't intense, certainly not blinding, but back when her Dungeon had been a small cave that consisted of her core, bathroom and a space for her bed, she had needed to throw her raincoat over it at night for her to be able to sleep. A thin thread of gold still hung from it, melted from the process of claiming that had created her core in the first place.

The thought occurred to her that she should really get around to wiring her core to be able to provide power to some of her more permanent bindings. She had the wire now, and there were a lot of bindings that ran constantly enough it was worth the time to do it…

Lori shook her head sharply, rejecting the thought. No, no getting distracted—even by, admittedly, essential infrastructure that needed to be built—she needed to do this! Last night she hadn't made any progress on Mentalism beyond making her head ache at trying to remember things from years before that she hadn't really bothered to learn. Today, at least, she was at least going to work on expanding her demesne. She had put it off for months because it hadn't felt necessary, then because she didn't think she had time. After all, how necessary was it? They were barely using more than a fraction of the resources on one side of the river, much less the entire demesne…

But the Golden Sweetwood Company would potentially arrive next year, sending a new group of settlers, settlers with their own wizards, settlers that some of her people could potentially leave her for. After all, they had come under the auspices of the Golden Sweetwood Company themselves, and even though they had abandoned the demesne they had established in favor of hers… what was stopping them from doing so again?

She could imagine it easily. Her demesne hemmed in at all sides by other demesne, restricting her growth. Their own expansion blocking off gaps between them, until she was trapped completely, unable to grow anywhere but up and down… unless she took the initiative and attacked first, killing the Dungeon Binders around her and claiming the core of at least one such entrapping demesne, allowing her to expand in that direction…

Or she could start now and be too big to contain. Be the one that hemmed in anyone foolish enough to rise near her, stifle their growth herself. Now was the time. Her demesne was stable, secured, provisioned. For the next season, there was little she absolutely had to do, and no reason to do so. The population of her entire demesne could fit into her dungeon; they had protected stockpiles of essential resources. They had a dungeon farm begun, and while the plots they had currently built were too shallow for growing trees, they were just enough for shallow-rooted grain plants, already sprouting and growing. Rian could handle any problems that arose, and even if some crisis did arise, they had enough resources to make time to find a solution.

Unless by some bizarre turn of events a large group of people suddenly arrived and necessitated her quickly building emergency shelters for them to sleep in as well as the necessary expansion of current infrastructure that would need to follow to cope with the sudden population boom, Lori wasn't needed by her demesne beyond keeping the currently active bindings imbued. Any work she could do wasn't something that was desperately needed.

No more excuses. No more delaying. It was time she did this. She had all she needed, now.

Basic principles. Anyone who could create a demesne could expand it. The process was the same. All she had to do was… do it.

Lori sat on her folded bedroll and let herself… relax. Let herself become aware of the wisps around her. All of the wisps around her. The darkwisps under her clothes, in her shadow, in the folds of her bedroll, in the minute cracks in the stone. The lightwisps emanating from the core itself, filling the air, burrowing just slightly under the surface of her skin. Lightningwisps flowing inside her head, down her spine, though her extremities, going back and forth. Everywhere, airwisps, filling every open seemingly empty space. Waterwisps floating as vapor, churning in her mouth as fluid, spread all across her demesne's surface as a solid. Firewisps floated all around her, inside her, clung to the edges of the voids of wisps that were people. Earthwisps under her, all around her, filling one half of her demesne just as air filled the other half.

It had been a long time since she'd allowed herself to simply… revel… in this feeling, of everything around her already bearing her affinity, the lightest claim of her will, waiting only for her to bind and imbue. For months, almost every day, she had ignored it, focusing on the bindings she had to form, the problems she had to solve with them. The chores she had to do.

For a long moment, Lolilyuri just sat there, letting herself feel everything. In the darkness behind her eyes, she let the feeling fill her, of every wisp in her demesne, from the air and light and water vapor at its greatest height to the earth and stone and water in its depths far, far beneath her. She felt her demesne's boundaries, of dirt covered in snow, felt the river passing through it all, flowing and twisting with the land's contours. Felt the water in the trees.

Then she took a deep breath and let the moment pass. She had bindings to form. Problems to solve. Chores to do.

She drifted on her awareness, focusing on the edges of her demesne. Where it seemed like she simply… stopped. Where her demesne ended, and she knew the Iridescence began. Beyond that point, the wisps weren't hers.

So she had to claim them and change that.

There was power in the core, power that could reach any wisp in her demesne when she needed it, imbue any wisp as she needed it. She let the power course from the core, letting it flow through the land, the water, the air, through the light and darkness, let the magic flow through her to pass through heat and lightning.

Lori didn't know how long she sat there, channeling the power in her core, aligning them to all seven wisps, gathering the aligned magic on the edge of her demesne. She kept her eyes closed, trying to minimize distractions as she spread that magic all across her demesne's border. It was a familiar sensation spread to a scale she hadn't realized was possible, even if she should have. After all, ever since she had formed the core, the demesne had acted as an extension of her body. It was why she could control the wisps inside it.

Long before she had become a Dungeon Binder, she had already been controlling wisps outside her body.

She could feel them, beyond the boundaries of her demesne, touching its surface. Wisps. Unclaimed, but not free.

All across the surface of the sphere defined by her demesne, her magic bound the wisps just within her borders. Then she reached out and claimed. In all directions at once, wisps of earth, of air, of fire, of water, of light and dark and lightning surged out from her demesne, out into the world of tainted Iridescence. Her wisps and magic met the colors that grew beyond the edge of safety, and she began to lose control. The Iridescence greedily trapped her wisps, drawing the imbuement from them, and Lori knew that beyond her sight, on the edge of her demesne, the colors were growing as they used her very magic as fuel to crystallize.

She didn't stop. She drew more power from her core, pushing it out beyond her demesne's borders as the Iridescence devoured more and more power, greedily trapped more and more of her wisps. And in the moment, as the bane of all life fed on her magic, as it was overwhelmed by more wisps and more power than it could use to grow more of itself, Lori reached through her awareness, through all the wisps she had claimed and bound on the edges of her demesne, through the claim and the binding they were part of to the wisps that the Iridescence had trapped in its structure, still imbued, still hers, still a part of her even as they were being trapped and drained…

Lori reached out… and bound the Iridescence to her will.

Her wisps became part of the Iridescence and the Iridescence became part of her wisps before melting away. In front of her eyes, her core seemed to ripple.

Eyes still closed, Lori barely managed keep from hitting her head on the cold stone ground as she collapsed.