Demesne

It wasn't often that Lori participated in premediated death. Most of the times that she had killed beasts with her water cutter had been in the moment, when she had seen a beast too close to the their traveling caravan and had taken action, or that time she'd decapitated seels to prepare them for butchering, before she'd just left that for other people to do. The last time had been when she had tested her lightningwisp bindings on those chokers.

Killing the typhon abomination would be nothing like that, she knew. The chokers were tested under controlled, almost ideal conditions within her demesne, and she'd had time to place and anchor the bindings as she wanted. As killing the typhon beast would be occurring in River's Fork, she would need to plan her binding well ahead of time, or she'd have to kill Shanalorre so Lori could take River's Fork's now-unclaimed core and kill the typhon abomination that way.

…

No, no, Shanalorre was still too useful as a healer. Killing her to kill the typhon abomination was a poor exchange.

So, Lori needed a thorough plan. A binding that she could adapt to, or would be useful in, wherever terrain was between the typhon abomination and the central dome so that she could activate the binding when the abomination stepped into it, without having to rely on some sort of bait to do so. A binding that wouldn't explode violently, or at least not explode violently unless she wanted it to, though as she had seen an explosion wasn't really all that reliable at causing instantaneous death. An explosion needed solid fragments to propel violently into a body to be more effective, or so she had read in one of her novels. The binding she needed was one that she could set up relatively quickly, or better yet form completely somewhere else and then simply anchor in place at the chosen location.

Once, when she had first learned of the typhon beast, she had thought to form several bindings of lightningwisps on the ground and anchor all of them to a higher point so that it would form a sort of cone. When activated, lightning would have emanated from the ground and then up to the upper anchor point, travelling back and forth between the two points and passing through the typhon abomination as it stood between those points.

There had always been difficulties with that plan. As the typhon abomination had originally been outside of the demesne, any binding she had prepared and anchored into place would have eventually been consumed by the Iridescence, degrading its effectiveness the longer the binding went unused. Lori would have also needed to find some way to create that high point she would have anchored to, which would have involved ladders and trying to find somewhere she could wrap that anchor around. There would always have been the danger that the typhon beast would have appeared while she was still preparing the bindings, which… well, it would have been unpleasant. With the typhon abomination now within the boundaries of River's Fork demesne, there was no longer any danger of her bindings being consumed by the Iridescence, and Shanalorre would be able to keep track of where the abomination was.

Now she just had to settle on the best binding to kill it with.

Some kind of watercutter was out. In addition to the range being so short, such a binding would need a ready supply of water, and the kind of laminar flow required for cutting through flesh would require her active control. An airwisp-based binding wouldn't be able to do much on its own. Theoretically she'd be able to asphyxiate the typhon abomination with one, but that would require somehow anchoring the binding around the abomination's head, which… wouldn't be possible. Her best offensive and murderous choices were still lightningwisps and firewisps.

Firewisps were… simple. Originally, she had thought that she needed a way to set the typhon abomination on fire, but her recent experience with trying to set fire to a corpse had shown her how actually difficult that was. However, one didn't actually didn't need to set a body on fire to make that body incapable of staying alive. When she had gone to school, Lori had been warned about how dangerous it was for a body part to intersect a binding of firewisps that altered temperature, because the body's internal temperature needed to remain at a specific range or else organs would start to degrade and cease functioning.

Thus, a simple means of killing the typhon abomination would simply to place an extensive binding of firewisps that would alter the temperature of anything that passed through it. Warmer or colder, it didn't matter as long as the temperature of the affected body diverged significantly enough from standard body temperature for a sufficient length of time. The problem was the immediate discomfort this caused would quickly motivate the abomination to vacate the area, which… well, she supposed it would actually be useful, as the binding could be used to act as a deterrent to keep the typhonbeast from a certain places.

Actually, on consideration, Lori could probably add something like that to the outside of her demesne when a dragon passed. Perhaps it would help reduce the numbers of dragonborn abominations even further as they were deterred from entering her demesne.

It would also be useful, she supposed, as a means of diverting or directing the typhon abomination. However as a means of doing lethal damage to it, it was far too slow if the firewisps only heated or cooled the body by a small amount that was theoretically lethal but not immediately fatal. And if she set the firewisps to instantly increase the temperature to, say, ten times the boiling point of water or the temperature where a corpse would finally ignite and start burning, that would probably be fatal, but it would also make the area in which the binding was placed so hot that the abomination would avoid it unless she also made another binding of firewisps to contain the heat to a given volume. If she used such a binding, she would need to activate it when the typhon abomination entered it.

With their current circumstances, it wouldn't be all that difficult. She could set the bindings in place, connect them together with lightwisps, and when Shanalorre informed her that the typhon abomination had entered the volume of the binding, Lori could activate the binding at some distance using the channel of lightwisps. Relatively simple, nicely fatal, and save for putting the bindings in place, she didn't actually have to be anywhere near the typhon abomination.

Unfortunately, there were good reasons to not use firewisp bindings. For one thing, 'hot enough for a corpse to catch fire' is also 'hot enough for trees to catch fire' unless she was very careful to avoid having her binding intersect with trees, and with the dragonfrost all having melted or sublimated away naturally, there was nothing left to prevent those fires from spreading. While she could do so by immediately reforming her firewisps to destroy heat rather than create it, that wouldn't do anything if the fire managed to spread beyond the areas that her binding was placed in.

The second reason to not use firewisps was because forming, placing and anchoring the bindings into place would be very labor and time intensive. Even if she made the firewisp bindings somewhere else beforehand—which she would need to do anyway, because she would need a lot of firewisps—anchoring all those bindings in place would be time-consuming, especially if she was actively trying to avoid a forest fire. While she'd be willing to do so—trees were a useful resource, no matter what that crazy Deadspeaker who named plants said—she probably wouldn't have that time, depending on how quickly the typhon abomination was moving. It was not beyond possibility that when she returned to River's Fork the next day the abomination could already be on the shores of the river opposite the central dome.

Lightningwisps… were also a fire risk, but a slightly more manageable one. Lightning wouldn't heat up large volumes of air for extended periods of time for one thing, and while lightning strikes would still cause what it hit to catch flame, they would be relatively isolated spots, with the heat quickly dispersing to the surrounding mass. It would still be a fire hazard, but given the nature of lightning it would need to be active for less time than a firewisp binding to kill the abomination. However, it had the advantage of being far less time-intensive to make than the firewisp bindings, especially if she applied the principles she had learned through her lightning balls.

Using lightning also had the advantage of being more likely to hold the abomination in place as the thoughts passing through its nerves were disrupted, and with her lightning balls she would no longer need a high anchor point to cover a wide enough area for lightning to intersect the abomination's body. The principle was so simple, in hindsight. Lightning flowed along paths that lightningwisps already occupied, so simply contain the lightning within a shell of lightningwisps and airwisps to contain the lightning until it struck the target.

If she made the containment portion of the binding larger... say, large enough for the abomination to be inside…

Of course, she had to do a few tests to make sure her binding did as she wanted. It wouldn't do to just have it explode, after all.

Well, explode when she didn't want it to. Exploding when she did want it to would be wonderful.

––––––––––––––––––

"Uh, your Bindership? Your Bindership?"

Rian's voice was slightly raised, as if he felt he needed to be heard over something loud. Either that or he was still a bit deaf from the explosion that had occurred earlier. "What is it, Rian?" Lori said, turning towards him. He was a dark shape against darkness until Lori deactivated the lightwisp bindings over her face that had been limiting the amount of light reaching her eyes.

"Should we be worried about that?" he said, pointing at the binding she was maintaining above the middle of the river.

Lori rolled her eyes. "No, of course not. Why would you think it as something to be concerned about?"

"Well, people usually find a ball of blinding light that seems to be shooting out lightning worrying," Rian said, "myself among them." The binding Lori had made over the river shot out a stream of lightning that curved down to touch the surface of the river, and Rian flinched despite the lack of thunder.

She rolled her eyes. "Will that be all, Rian?"

"Yeah, that's it. I'll tell everyone you're just having fun, and there's nothing to worry about."

"I am not simply having fun. This is work. Research. Needful preparation."

"Noted, your Bindership. I'll tell everyone you're enjoying your work, then."

Rolling her eyes gain, she turned back towards her binding, activating the lightwisps over her eyes again to block out the brightness emanating from the binding. While her connection to her core made her capable of being aware of all the wisps in her demesne, some things needed to been seen with her own eyes. The binding was a more advanced iteration of the same one she had tried to use against the abomination they had encountered in River's Fork. A binding of lightningwisps surrounded by airwisps to keep it centered, then a shell of lightningwisps and airwisps to keep the lightning contained. This binding, however, was three paces in diameter. Lori had made the binding intentionally oversized so she could see it better from a distance.

In the center of the binding, lighting shone, burning as it made the very air into fire. Not literally fire, of course, though from the firewisps generated one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Even though the binding of lightwisps over her eyes, Lori couldn't make out much in the way of detail. It was lightning that lashed out in all directions until the bolts struck the shell of lightning- and airwisps, stopping the bolts from progressing further. She had been adjusting it to try and increase the number of bolts that were emanating from the center of the binding, but the number of bolts actually seemed to be decreasing…

Ah, right, the concentrations of lightningwisps in the air around the inside of the shell had increased due to the bolts coming from the center. If she remembered correctly, sparks moved from places of high concentration to low concentration—not unlike heat, really—so if she wanted more bolts…

Working with lightningwisps like this wasn't something she had a lot of experience with compared to her experience with waterwisps and firewisps. She had a lot of experience with the latter two from using it in either in her day to day life or her professional life when she had been employed in workshops. Perhaps if she'd gotten her metal-welding certification… well, too late for that.

Her use of lightningwisps had mostly been restricted to classroom exercises, where she had formed bindings to empirically demonstrate principles or as practical exams of her comprehension and understanding. Which wasn't to say she was incapable or unskilled with lightningwisps, but rather its idiosyncratic properties didn't come as readily to mind to her because she had mostly used it in controlled classroom conditions and with educational bindings. However, if this lightning ball binding was effective, that might be changing in the future.

Humming to herself, Lori claimed some of the loose lightningwisps and began to form them into a spike between the lightningwisps in the center of the binding and shell, giving the wisps in the spike directionality to move the loose lightningwisps back to the center of the binding. The spike began to 'pull' loose lightinngwisps from around the lightning- and airwisp shell and along the spike's length. As loose lightningwisps were drawn back to the center, bolts immediately began to fly in all directions again, filling the whole three pace diameter with glowing white bolts, the air with the smell of lightning-struck air, and her ears with the sound of buzzing so constant it was nearly a hum sometimes.

Lori nodded in satisfaction. Yes, that seemed to fix the problem of the bolts occurring less as time went on, though to make it more effective she should probably give the shell some directionality as well…

She had today to perfect this binding. Tomorrow… tomorrow she was going to use it to kill that spiky-backed thing scaring beasts away from her second demesne so they could finally go back to hunting again!