Demesne

Throwing lightning is more complicated than simply imbuing lightningwisps, willing them to go in a direction and expecting results. Doing it like that is the common beginner mistake, since it just means a lot of lightning goes everywhere. Despite the popular image of lightning coming down from the sky, or the standard theater depiction of just gesturing at a foe and expecting lightning to leap from one's hands to strike them down, this is an incredibly inefficient and dangerous method. For one thing, throwing lightning from bare hands means using one's own internal lightningwisps, which will leave one's arm dangerously numb and likely in danger of organ failure as the lightningwisps needed by the body to function are depleted.

The best way to use lightningwisps was with touch, or with a conductive wire. Barring that, if one really needed to throw lightning, then do it the way nature does it: send a stream of lightningwisps to prepare a path, carried forth on a current of airwisps, and THEN throw lightning. It's slow to do and loses accuracy over distance, but it's much more controllable than just throwing it out like a rock.

Lolilyuri knew all this, so as soon as Rian got out of the way, she drew the lightningwisps from one of the quartz in her staff, prepared a path for the lightning to go and, because she learned to do this in school, bound airwisps to her ears to keep from being deafened before unleashing lightning imbued with power from her core. It struck the wedgelike mouth, and there was a smell of strange gases and sizzling water.

She was rewarded by the wedge drawing back and slamming into the opening again. More rock crumbled as whatever it was kept trying to get in.

"I thought you said it was dead?!" she demanded.

"You said it was dead first, I just said it wasn't breathing!" Rian said, picking up one of the dropped spears. "What now?"

Lori moved the earth.

The stone she'd piled in the ground of the cave to act as a bulwark heaved, surging forward to physically repulse whatever was trying to batter its way in. There was a tremendous crash as whatever was out there was pushed away from the Dungeon. The ground shuddered as it rolled, then shuddered again at the sounds of limbs being flailed against the ground. Whatever it was, it was trying to get back to its feet.

Still, while it was unsettled, Lori took the opportunity to see just what it was that was attacking them, stepping up to where Rian had crouched and sticking her head out the entrance.

In the empty space in front of the Dungeon's entrance, lying on its back and struggling to right itself, was a small islandshell. Its pale underbelly gleamed in the afternoon sun, looking like thick leather plates as its fins tried to gain any sort of purchase, its movements making it slide downslope ever so slightly. Its shell alone seemed to be more than four paces long, maybe five, and its eyes were bigger than Lori's head. Or at least the sockets of where its eyes should be. The eye facing her was gone, leaving a gaping hole in its skull that let Lori see cavities and internal features and what looked like slugs eating its flesh.

Someone let out a long whistle next to Lori. "Whoa," Rian said. "That's big. Smaller than I thought they would be, though."

"That's because it's likely an infant," Lori said. "It can't be more than a year out of the egg. Look, it hasn't grown any shell spines yet."

"These things get bigger?" Rian exclaimed.

"Of course," Lori said. "It's why they're called islandshells. From a distance they look like islands. I suppose it became some sort of undead because of the dragon."

They watched as it kept struggling to get back upright.

"I guess the dragon must have picked it up from the ocean and carried it along… somehow?" Rian said, sounding skeptical.

Lori shrugged. "It's been known to happen. I've read of dragons dropping all sorts of things on land. Dilians, graspers, giant graspers, adult islandshells, all kinds of fursh… there have been ships as big as the Armada's dockships too. One got dropped in the middle of the Shining Desert. Still had people in it. They died before one of their wizards could manage to build a Dungeon."

"I should be surprised you know all these depressing things, but I'm not," Rian said. "It somehow seems exactly like you. Are you going to put it on ice? Because you still haven’t–"

"No, I'm not putting it on ice," Lori said regretfully. Then she winced. "Ugh, I need to make sure those two are still frozen. If they're walking around…"

"That would be creepy. I liked Ahnree," Rian said. "Elceena was a bit hard to deal with though."

Lori frowned at him. "What are you talking about?"

"Ahnree and Elceena?" Rian said. "The two people whose corpses you have buried in ice?"

Oh. Just names. Lori didn't bother paying attention. "Get the pieces of your spear and the volunteers together while I deal with this," she said.

Rian looked at the islandshell, then at her. "May I ask how? Because that thing is huge, still moving and already dead. How are you going to kill it properly?"

"Bloodthirsty today, aren't you?" Lori said. "I just have to keep it on its back until it stops moving. Then we can harvest it for the leather, the shell and the bones. That's already one house, easy." She stepped out towards the undead islandshell,

Rian's hand at her shoulder stopped her, and she turned to him in annoyance.

"You already missed one dead thing," Rian said. "What if there are two?"

Lori stared at him. "Good point. Other people should go first."

"Can we not phrase it that way?" Rian said. "I mean, it's true, but phrasing…"

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Once Rian's spear was repaired, Lori had raised up the islandshell on pillars of rock so that there would not be enough leverage for it to flip itself over, and Rian had given their volunteers some motivating, heroic drivel to dull their self-preservation instincts, they and the volunteers crept out of the Dungeon, and Lori had pulled some stone from the bulwark to form a boulder and rolled it in front of the entryway. That way, if all of them died, at least those in the cave could push it out of the way. Lori stood in the center of their formation, drying and compacting the ground so it wouldn't slow them down as she kept track of the things she could sense. Rian stood at the forefront, spear in hand, head swiveling side to side and occasionally up and down, as if he expected bugs to suddenly descend on them or for things to pop up out of the ground.

All this attentiveness meant they didn't miss the state of the settlement as they checked all the nearby buildings for things hiding in them, living or dead. Rocks, fallen trees, puzzle-like pieces of wood that had come apart in the dragon's passing, branches and a few whole trees, their trunks shattered stumps, were strewn about randomly. One of the shelters had collapsed, its roof caved in, and reeds were growing out of the opening. Everyone stayed well away from it, as even at a distance they could see the leaves were moving strangely even without any wind, and it was, by Lori's reckoning, definitely alive. The other shelter still stood, but Lori could feel it was full of water, and from the sounds coming from it, seels and other things had gotten in. The baths were similarly flooded, and Lori felt some kind of waterwisplings inside of it, feeding on each other like starving bugs slowly picking off the weakest among them. The dining hall's roof had fallen in, shattering the tables and benches that had been too heavy to move, and for some reason trees were growing from it, as well as the small dirt mound that was the dining hall's cold room. Ralii and Armis, the two with experience with hunting beasts in the wild (as opposed to being baited from a tower) grimly pointed at tracks. Many were the familiar three-toed footprints of beasts, though some, the hunters said, seemed too deep for their size, and were surrounded by strange drag marks.

To everyone's bemusement, the field where they'd been digging latrines was full of young saplings, growing so thickly together there was almost no space between them, their roots almost seeming to meld into a single whole. A tall, thick-trunked tree was growing from each latrine hole, rising high into the sky.

Nearly all of the houses had lost their wooden roofs, the wood ripped from their mountings on the walls, and a few of the houses had collapsed, their mix of compressed dirt and stone strewn about. Lori had to stare at the only one with a roof remaining. The wood seemed to have been turned to a dark stone. She could feel the earthwisps in it, with only a few patches of wood left.

"Is that coal?" someone asked.

Rian poked it with the tip of his spear. "Not soft enough," he said. "It's definitely not wood, though."

"It's known to happen," Lori said. "Dragon claws leave patches where matter is somehow altered. Turning trees to stone, buildings to glass, that sort of thing. If we're lucky, we'll find some patches of ground turned into metal. Those are rare, though, or so I've heard. The rocks are more likely to be metal."

"Claws?" Rian said.

"The slow lightning," Lori elaborated.

Everyone looked around at all the rocks strewn about. Many were clearly regular rocks, but a few definitely looked different. The blacksmith with them, something Smith, who Lori only remembered because he was huge and had his profession as a second name, was eyeing a large reddish brown rock nearby.

"Right," Rian said. "Beast hunt now, rock hunt later. Lori, you said there was one nearby?"

Lori pointed with her staff. "Near the sawpit," she said. "It didn't seem to be moving much, but it was big."

"Then we go to the sawpit," Rian said. "And hopefully it'll as easy as that one." He pointed at the undead islandshell, still struggling to right itself.

"You didn't do a single useful thing," Lori said flatly.

"Exactly," Rian said. "Easy, and with no danger to it at all."

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"Okay, that just looks pathetic," Rian commented.

Two of the curing sheds had collapsed, but a lot of the wood still seemed to be there, just buried under the debris. The sides of the sawpit had fallen in a little, but that was a minor problem. There wasn't much you could do to really hurt a hole in the ground.

This abomination walked on three muscular limbs instead of two, with a fourth limb sticking upward from between its two tails and occasionally kicking as if trying to launch itself to a sudden blinding burst of speed. And it needed the third limb, since its body was so big it seemed obese, with two distinctly different color patterns wrapped around it, contrasting so sharply there seemed to be seams along its sides. It was also lopsided, and had a tendency to list to the left, since there was more weight on that side of its body. Its tails swung, trying to stabilize it, but kept hitting each other and unbalancing it even more. It often stumbled forward, and had to catch itself on its foreclaws. Unlike the legs, all four were in front and seemed fully functional and sharp.

It had a single head, but was supported by two necks that met at the base of the lopsided skull and again at shoulders. It only had two eyes, one on the side of its head, and one on the top of its head. Both of its toothy jaws seemed capable of biting though, even if one of them was turned sideways and flapping vertically. The colorful frill around its neck was twisted around, and made it look like it had an askew collar. With the way it was stumbling and the piteous, confused cries coming from both mouths, it seemed like a drunkard trying to make sense of where it was. the abomination seemed to be ignoring the sounds made by the undead islandshell entirely, and Lori wondered if it's hearing had been adversely affected. But no, they probably weren't that lucky.

"I feel like we're putting it out of its misery," Rian said quietly as they tried to stay behind it so as not to be seen. "How is this dangerous?"

"It might look pathetic, but it still has claws and teeth, and now it has double the dietary needs," Lori pointed out.

"I suppose," Rian said. "Still, it seems kind of sad. It was just minding its own business, and then a dragon happens, and now it's deformed and we're here to kill it just because it's near where we live."

"It’s a large predator that's not writhing in agony from being inside a demesne," Lori pointed out. "If we don't kill it, it might spawn, and then this demesne will start filling with beasts out to kill and eat us."

Rian hefted his spear. "Well, let's kill it and hope the meat isn't poisonous or anything. After you, Binder Lori."