Lori had a specific image of what life on the edges of a demesne was like. It involved flimsy buildings in some degree of disrepair, uneducated masses, poverty, and lords or ladies who were either lazy, corrupt, or incompetent. There'd be a militia base nearby, to give the edgeward settlement a reason to exist, as they'd provide the militia with goods or the services of bell-ringers. Beyond the edge, among the colors itself, would grow fields of crops that were technically illegal as they'd be against international treaty, though people were reportedly lax about that. Most people worked outside the demesne, tending to crops beyond the edge, hunting beasts and possibly making things without official oversight of the local lord or lady.

For good reason, she didn't want such a place in her demesne. After all, a properly run demesne wouldn't have such a place—except perhaps the militia to defend against external attack or banditry—and she intended hers to be properly run. However, it seemed that without her knowledge—but with her lord's tacit approval, since he knew about it—such a place had manifested in her demesne. She'd probably have to deal with that, once she was clear as to what exactly was going on and whether or not they had a Whisperer hidden among them.

After a long walk—more than two taums through the woods, with its changes in elevation, uneven ground, and obstructing undergrowth were not easy to traverse, or quick—they reached their destination. It was, strangely, not unlike the rising settlement near her core, with its two shelters, two bath houses—that were not hot springs despite some people pestering Rian, and even her, to make it so—and a growing number of box-like stone walls that just needed doors and roofs to become houses. Thankfully, there had been some people among them who were familiar enough with wood working to make doors, and simple tables and benches, even if the quality was a little crude.

The buildings at the edge appeared to be simple mounds, their outsides covered with dirt, possibly as insulation. While they seemed cruder than her own stone buildings, she was immediately disabused once she got a closer look at all the doors and windows. What she had thought was well-crafted wood—better, even, than the doors their shelters currently had—on closer examination turned out to be dark-brown metal, with perfectly flat surfaces, sharp lines, and perfect corners, as if they'd been built by a professional metal workshop at a demesne's capital, with their heavy metal rollers and experienced Whisperers.

Instead of merely being simple shutters, the windows themselves had transparent planes of glass on them, letting in what light there was. Or rather, letting light out, since several of the mound-like buildings seemed illuminated from within. Lori twitched when she saw those, and grudgingly reminded herself to put some kind of light in the houses… eventually.

The plain, dull colors of the buildings stood in sharp contrast to the ever-shifting, almost twinkling colors of the Iridescence, though they blended in the ground inside the demesne at a distance. The discrepancy between the crude-looking structures and the clearly valuable materials used to make them gave the buildings a strange set of unreality, like the backdrop sets of a play, but in reverse.

The air was filled with the smell of blood and offal, which seemed to be coming from a tall, lean-to-like structure also covered with dirt, but was almost five paces high at its tallest point. Lori couldn't see what was going on there from where she stood, but she could see that one of the thick vertical posts holding up the high roof also seemed to be made of the same brown-colored metal, and it sounded like there was a lot of activity there. No one was visible, though from the movement she could see in the windows, there seemed to be people in the mound-like buidlings.

"Yes, I know it's a lot of metal," Rian said as she turned to him with a frown. "No, we haven't been keeping a mine secret from you. It's… look, it's better if you find out from the source, all right? Vanessa's workshop is over there." He pointed at one of the mound-like structures. "And yes, I know you don't like remembering names, but you'll probably want to remember this one."

"Don't tell me what to do," Lori said, her grip tight on her staff. Belated, she focused on her awareness of the demesne's wisps, trying to watch behind her, and stiffened as she suddenly became aware of more about the area she was approaching. Each of the mound-like building was filled with lightwisps to a degree that implied they were brightly lit, but that simply confirmed what her eyes could already see. What had her paying attention was how the triangular, lean-to structure was surrounded by lightningwisps, all of them flowing as if bound and imbued… except they were neither. To her senses, the lightningwisps had not been filled with magic or organized into some kind of binding, even as they acted like they were both, flowing through the air around the structure, likely making the hairs of anyone who passed through them rise up and tingle.

That… that was wrong. What was… that shouldn't…

She realized she'd continued to follow Rian as he approached one of the mounds. While it had looked like a solid structure that had lacked the windows of the other mounds when they'd approached from behind, from the other side Lori saw that it was open on the end that faced the Iridescence.

Inside the open structure, a young woman was standing next to a pace-high table that seemed to be made from a single piece of metal, the legs and tabletop all one fused piece. A shovel lay on the table, its shaft clearly a tree branch—it was still covered in bark, though someone had made the effort to trim it—with a metal shovelhead. As they entered, Lori saw the woman adjusting the shape of the shovel with her bare hands as she muttered to herself. The seemingly-metal shovelhead moved like it was made of something far softer as the woman used both hands to make the sides of the shovel curl up.

Rian stopped and seemed content to wait as the woman continued on with her work, and out of habit learned working in several metal workshops Lori did the same. The woman was wearing very clean clothes, Lori noted. A pair of trousers of what looked like blue-dyed cloudbloom, and a dark red shirt that didn't seem to have any buttons at the neck, implying it was a knitted fabric instead of a woven one. What was someone wearing such an expensive shirt doing—?

And then all such thoughts vanished from Lori's mind as the woman put one hand on the butt end of the shovel's shaft and, with a shimmering in the air like a heat haze, metal suddenly wrapped around the end of the wood, flowing down the shaft for a hand's length even as a crossbar suddenly formed under the woman's hand, forming a handle for the shovel. As Lori stared, speechless, the woman put the shovel back on the metal tabletop—which looked to be made of the same metal as the handle, a small part of her noted—and tapped three points on the metal handle, causing the metal to recede and reveal the wood underneath.

In another shimmer, a shining steel nail suddenly appeared gripped in the woman's left hand, which she casually placed point-first over one of the holes, adjusting it so it would go straight through the shaft. She leaned down, raising up her empty right hand as if she was lifting a hammer, and suddenly there was a hammer there, seemingly growing from under her fingers, the shaft end of the shaft shimmering as it extended up and formed a striking head. Lori watched as she hammered in the nail until it was deep into the shaft, then ran a finger over the remainder that protruded up. The nail shortened, seemingly—no, clearly fusing with the rest of the metal of the handle. The young woman moved with a practiced casualness and confidence that spoke of experience and familiarity.

Rian coughed. "Hey, Vanessa."

The woman raised a hand. "Hold on Rian, just let me finish this." Moving with slightly more haste—an experienced apprentice or early journeywoman, then. No master would rush even a little because of an interruption—she hammered two more nails into the holes of the handle, securing it to the shaft. "Ah, done." She picked up the shovel. "I've got another shovel done for Hatari—oh shit."

"Vanessa, you know Binder Lori," Rian said bright cheerfulness. "She had some very intelligent questions about the tools people have been using, and I decided she deserved answers. Can you help her out?"

The woman's eyes flicked between Rian and Lori as her grip shifted on the shovel in her hands. Noticing the change, Lori deliberately raised up her staff, holding it metal-capped butt-end up—

And then Rian was standing between them. "Now, now, no need for that," he said hastily. "There are no enemies here. We're all in this together if we want to survive in the middle of nowhere. Vanessa, put that down. Please?"

The woman glared at him, but sighed and lowered the shovel, grounding the tip down on the ground that, now that Lori glanced at him, seemed to be a sort of sturdy metal mesh raised over bare dirt. "Well, I suppose this was going to happen eventually. Um, hi… Lori, right? I mean, your Bindership." She said the title awkwardly, as if she didn't quite believe it. "I come in peace?"

"I was told that I would be given explanations as to where the tools being used to farm were coming from. I thought I would be learning of a previously unknown Whisperer providing heat for whatever forge was smithing them." Lori gave the woman a flat look. "Explain. Now."

The woman twitched, her face changing into a frown, but she glanced at Rian, and altered her expression with clear reluctance. "I can… make metal."

"Clearly. How?" Such creation of matter… it was impossible. Matter could be altered, changed in state, but not simply just created. At least, not by anything known to humanity. Such things were, perhaps, the domain of dragons, who did strange things to magic and… and…

And wouldn't have Dungeon Binders had the opportunity to observe them when within their demes—?

No, no, focus!

"It's… just something I can do," the woman said, her eyes darting between Lori, Rian, and the opening leading out to the Iridescence. "I convert magic into steel "

"Rainbows," Lori snapped.

The woman shrugged, seemingly unphased by Lori's disbelief. "Believe me or not, that's what's happening." She held out one hand, palm up and slightly cupped, and as Lori watched a small metal bearing appeared in another heat haze-like shimmer, visibly growing larger until it was the size of a bead. "See? It clearly happened, so it's not impossible." She raised her hand and dropped the metal bead onto the tabletop, where it made a resonant sound of impact.

"As you can see, this isn't just something I can tell you to explain where the tools came from," Rian said. He'd moved aside once he thought they weren't going to attack one another, forming a triangle with each of them as a point. "I mean, you saw it happen, and you're still questioning it."

Lori stared at the metal bead, which had begun to roll along the table until the woman's hand scooped it up again.

"I know what you're thinking," the woman said. "You can't use me to corner the metal market. The steel is temporary." She held up the bead between two finger, and as Lori watched, the metal shimmered again and disappeared. "That's the quick way. The other way is that it slowly turns to dust once it runs out of… imbuement? Imbuement. Once it runs out, the metal will cease to exist. Useful for a quick scam, but not something that can be sold ethically. The only reason our tools are lasting is because I keep them imbued."

…

Well, there went that idea.

"And is that all you can do?" Lori said, focusing on the woman again.

The woman licked her lips, then coughed, covering her mouth. "S-sorry," she ground out. "Spit went down the wrong way."

"Just tell her the truth, Vanessa," Rian sighed. "She's smart, she's educated, and do you really want her to have a reason to be perpetually suspicious of you? My life is going to be hard enough after this, and this was basically just omission. If you straight up tell her an untruth, she might actually set you on fire like she keeps muttering about."

"She can try," the woman said, voice confident, even as she looked at Lori contemplatively. She sighed. "What the hell. There's not much point in lying anyway. I can do fibers and fabrics too, for a given value of 'fabric'." She touched the thumbs and forefingers of her hands together as if pinching something with all of them, and then pulled her two hands apart. A string appeared as she did, each end seemingly held between her pinched fingers, growing longer as her hands grew further apart. Then she flicked her hands downward, and from the single thread fell a white square of thin fabric. "I'm not very good at it though. The clothes I'm wearing took a while to make, and since it's not my efficiency my fabric dissolves a lot faster than my metal. And I can control temperature."

"Temperature," Lori said blandly. "Only temperature?"

"Hot and cold," the woman nodded.

"So you aren't the one who caused the lightningwisps around the structure over there," Lori said, pointing in the direction of the large lean-to-like building.

Rian made a strange gesture towards her with both hands, raising his eyebrows at the woman.

"No…" the woman said, suddenly slow and reluctant again.

"So there's someone else," Lori said, turning her glare at Rian. "Would they be the Whisperer?"

Rian sighed. He looked at the woman. "Perhaps it's time we got the others for this?" he said.

The woman sighed. "Yeah, probably for the best. This is above my paygrade."

"Others?" Lori said sharply. "What others?"

Rian smiled. It was a sickly thing. "Remember when you said you picked me to be your lord because the other candidates were clearly leaders of their own groups?"