Demesne Patron EX SS 21 – An Astrologer's Sometimes

Cassan sometimes wished he'd stayed in Covehold Demesne.

For all that it was barely even with a fairly prosperous rural backwater, Covehold Demesne had been a large town trying to grow into a small city, full of modern conveniences even if they were in diminished form. It had libraries, markets, banks, bellparlours, even schools. If the buildings and roads were a bit crude and dirty, if more vehicles were pulled by still-living beasts instead of undead or some kind of bead-powered driver, it was more a mark of how there weren't enough people, wizards especially, to do everything as thoroughly as the older, more established demesnes of the old continent.

He could have stayed behind when they'd gone on the terrifyingly constructed boat made of ice the fall before. They didn't need him to guide them on the way back, not really. Lord Rian had paid attention, noting things like the angle of the sun and particular stars on their trip, and had been fairly confident they could find their way back, even if they just decided to turn back towards land and simply hug the coast until they reached the bay that they'd passed though after following the river.

"It's not like Lori will notice you're gone," Lord Rian had said dryly when the younger man had suggested the idea to him before they'd actually left on the ice ship. "And anyone else would understand if you wanted to leave and go back somewhere more civilized. Lori tries, but…" Lord Rian had shrugged. "Her idea of how a Dungeon Binder is supposed to act is a few hundred years removed from the present day. And in those days that might have been good, but no one would blame you if you wanted better. Or easier, at least. Light indoor work with no heavy lifting is in short supply back home, after all. "

That was certainly true. Cassan's days now were filled with trying to gather the numbers that Lord Rian asked for from people who often didn't know and had to count. He had to work using a plank of wood and the end of a burnt stick, because his papers and inks were too precious to use for such mundane things. This was one of the few things he could do, so he did it, because while it wasn't an explicit law, everyone knew that in Binder Lori's demesne, those who didn't work didn't eat. Except for the children, of course, but often times they'd work anyway out of sheer boredom, or at least because they'd been asked and were willing.

Binder Lori. Binder Lolilyuri, more accurately, but no one really called her that except for Binder Shanalorre, and only because the child seemed to think addressing each other with full names was some kind of protocol. She shouldn't have been there. She shouldn't have been the Dungeon Binder of this place. Elceena should have been in the position, or Ahnree. Not the quiet, aloof young woman who'd pulled water out of the moisture in the air to refill their water wagons and whom everyone had thought had simply been a shy, quiet person who didn't do well with people, as opposed to the proud, condescending person who acted like she barely tolerated the existence of everyone in her vicinity.

But even without her dubious leadership, after a day of walking around taking notes, sometimes manually needing to count things himself because it was far faster than waiting for the person he was asking to get around to it, or going to sleep with muscles that ached from carrying pieces of dead trees because there hadn't been enough things to note but there was wood to carry, sometimes Cassan would lie back on his bedroll and wished he'd stayed in Covehold Demesne.

He'd had a job as a clerk when he'd lived there. It had barely paid enough beads for the rent on the room he'd shared with two other people—neither of whom had bothered to help in keeping it clean—and if it weren't for the fact that the boardinghouse's rent included breakfast and dinner—which had mostly consisted of tubers in several different forms, perhaps with eggs and beans thrown in if they were lucky and it had been a good market day— he'd never have been able to keep body and soul together, but at least there had been a civilized, soul-numbing certainty to the drudgery. That too much thankless work would be followed by not enough beads, and he'd continue to have a roof over his head for another blue month while he worked another storm month, and hoping he had enough savings to afford the difference.

Before that, he'd been an astrologer, working at the demesne's Alknowledge library to map out the hemisphere's stars. Unfortunately, the grant money had run out, and the library had decided to prioritize agricultural and botanical data, since getting that disseminated to the local demesnes were of utmost importance. He'd been able to continue his research, though he'd had to sort and file his own findings, but he'd lost his room in the library, and had unofficially started sleeping in the stacks.

That had ended when there'd been a change in the library's management, and he had been politely asked to leave. Cassan had been forced to find a job, leading to his dismal circumstances. Selling his telescope had been a very serious possibility, but the unlikelihood of finding a buyer for an astrological telescope who would give him more than scrap price had stayed his hand.

Given all that, it was hardly a surprise he'd jumped on the first alternative that had been offered to him. It had been like one of those contrived coincidences from a novel, where he'd encountered an old classmate from school, and that one fortuitous meeting had changed everything. He hoped he hadn't looked as pathetic as he had probably been, but there had to have been a touch of pity when Elceena had invited him to join the expedition she and her friend were putting together to found a new demesne.

Her offer—to join as their secretary, record keeper, historian and archivist, keeping track of all the little bits of minutiae that helped smooth a town's day to day life—had been both tempting and exciting, even if he'd had doubts later. Even after he'd stopped to think about what sort of person would pay good beads to hire someone to explicitly record their rise from wizard to Dungeon Binder, and what that action said about both their good sense and their ego.

Someone might have said it wasn't all that different from what he'd been doing before, acting as a clerk and staring at numbers, but there was a difference when the person you were working for knew you, wanted your work, and respected you for it. He had quit his job as soon as feasible, left the boarding house, and had joined the settlement expedition.

Oh, he knew the failure rates. Every season of the year and a half he'd been in Covehold, there had been talk of the new demesnes that had failed, having left too late to start planting, not clearing enough ground to feed everyone, and overestimating their yields. Settlements that had tried to bravely go at it alone, and had been insufficiently prepared to shelter everyone from dragons. It was a thing spoken about with dark humor and derision, because so many had died it had stopped being tragic and so had started being funny out of a lack of other options besides turning towards callousness.

So he'd told Elceena, and her partner in the endeavor Ahnree, because he hadn't wanted them to make the same mistakes. They had planned together for a season, projecting the optimum time their expedition should leave so they'd still have time to plant their crops. The three of them had researched and studied and learned the underlying reasons that new settlements had failed. Lack of food, lack of water, lack of infrastructure… they'd even done their best to find people who had survived those failed and fallen demesne and interviewed them, learning of how and why the demesne had failed from one who had gone through it and lived to tell the tale. Few wanted to remember, much less speak to strangers about it, but a few had. They'd listened and learned.

They heard of Dungeon Binders who thought they could run their demesne as tyrants, demanding much and offering little, using their power to punish and intimidate.

They heard of Dungeon Binders who'd tried to please everyone, and had become increasingly irrelevant, pushed aside and ignored or had become a bitter recluse who secluded themselves and just took what food and material they needed to survive, for however long that had been.

They heard of demesne who tried to keep pushing and pushing, trying to be completely self-sufficient and independent from Covehold and the other demesne around them, who ended up exhausting all their resources as they stripped the land bare, turned the ground fallow, and worked their people to the bone and rebellion.

They heard of demesne who had decided they'd become bandits and just stealeverything they needed from everyone around them, protecting themselves from retribution with the power of a Dungeon Binder's protection, who subsequently found themselves ruthlessly crushed by an allianceof angry Dungeon Binders.

They heard of demesne were tempers had frayed, where distrust had run rampant, where people had stopped helping each other and started living only for themselves.

They heard the story of a lone wizard who had claimed a demesne all to himself, killing anyone who entered and using their corpses to build and work for him.

From each disturbing story, they drew what lessons they could. They identified concerns to be handled, matters to be prioritized, infrastructure that was utterly necessary and things that could be safely delayed.

And those were just the ones people had been willing to talk about. Some of the rumors hinted at were even worse, of demesnes run by sexual deviants who did unspeakable things to men, women, children, or some combination thereof. Demesne that had been founded by those who thought they could run it like a trading company, with every forcible employed and beholden to the company no matter how old, forcing everyone to work to meet outrageous quotas, and requiring ruinous demands to be allowed to leave…

Some interviews had made them want to drink to forget, but they couldn't. They had to discuss each one and consider how to prevent the demesne they wanted to found from becoming like any of the horror stories. Some were easy enough to do, like not becoming reclusive, murderous maniacs, but others had been because of slow breakdowns in the society of the demesnes in questions, building up over several seasons. Elceena and Ahnree had discussed possible preventive measures as Cassan had listened and added what he could, all as he wrote it down for posterity as he had been hired to do.

The notebooks he'd written it all on were damaged now, grown through with Iridescence over the journey to where Lorian had been founded. They hadn't been able to procure a glass box and it would have taken damage anyway as he took them out to record things. Most pages were still readable, but many were delicate, and there was no reason now to try to recover the words. Elceena and Ahnree were dead, their corpses frozen and buried somewhere in the demesne, waiting for the day Binder Lori would be able to raise them up as undead. It wouldn't be them anymore, of course. Simply bodies moved by Deadspeaking, guided by Mentalism, tools of Binder Lori's will.

While he had informed Lord Rian about what he knew of the plans Elceena and Ahnree had made, the promises they had given to some of the people who had joined the expedition, the intentions they'd had, he knew it was futile. The hopes and dreams of those two were not his own. While he had been entranced by their wish to build a settlement where people could live happily, if not easily, born from Elceena's desire to be a good and just ruler and provider, it had not been his dream. Perhaps it would have been as he watched it grow, as he slowly helped them make it a reality, but…

For all the help he had given, he had simply been a record keeper. He hadn't been one of the architects, much less one of the dreamers. He had simply been their audience.

Cassan sometimes wished he'd stayed in Covehold Demesne. That he'd kept his simple clerical job, dealing with ledgers and sheets paper on which were full of lists of inventories. Wished he was still being paid in actual beads that he could spend in a store, instead of this beadless place where there was nothing to buy and nothing to buy with. Wished he'd never taken Elceena's increasingly-in-hindsight egotistical offer no matter how friendly and sincere and genuinely enthusiastic she'd been when she'd made it.

Those usually happened on days when he'd had latrine duty, because the numbers hadn't been ready yet, and the choice was either that or more heavy lifting. Theoretically, the heavy lifting would get easier the more he did it and grew muscles as a result, but he'd always been naturally scrawny, and even after all these months, the load never seemed to get easier or lighter. Despite how much he regretted it, most of the time he chose latrine duty. Binder Lori had done something that made the waste dry out nowadays, lessening the smell and making it easier to shovel out to the waste pit.

The thoughts usually left him after he'd had a bath and a soak in the tubs. Hot water was always in supply, such that people could actually be indulgent with it after work. The novelty of being able to have hot baths every day—sometimes twice a day—had still not worn off, though children had to be scolded when they played on the wet floor, since they might slip.

With most people now out of the shelters, it had become a sort of dormitory, and with some added braziers in strategic spots, they'd been able to clear the spot in front of the fireplaces to make a gathering area. With benches for people to sit on, rough cushions made from leather sacks stuffed with straws or feather, and even some footstools made from some bits of plank and the ends of stripped branches, it was actually more comfortable than some of the homes. After dinner, they'd play board games in front of the fire, sew, or simply chat with visitors who lived outside the shelter.

While Binder Lori's demesne was nothing like what Elceena and Ahnree had wanted to make, it wasn't one of the horror stories. Despite her clear inclinations, Binder Lori hadn't actually done anything abominable. Even that time she'd melted the ground under Naineb's feet had been a mostly isolated incident.

He supposed it could be worse. As long as no one broke any of the laws on her surprisingly mostly-reasonable list, or talked to her directly unless she talked to them first, she was surprisingly tolerant of what they did… or perhaps simply apathetic. And unlike some of the new Dungeon Binders they had heard of, she was perfectly willing to work. And no matter how uncomfortable the shelter had been when it had first been made, Cassan remembered how it had been built first, with a place to set a fire. Binder Lori had simply slept in the cave that would become her dungeon.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Cassan wished that Elceena and Ahnree hadn't died. Would they have been able to make a demesne a successful as this one? With Ahnree to use Deadspeaking on the crops, trees and beasts for food and materials, and both Elceena and Lori using Whispering, surely the demesne they would make would have been even better? With the two to mitigate Binder Lori's tendencies…

…

No. Binder Lori would never have tolerated anyone dictating such terms to her, and if anyone but she had become Dungeon Binder, Cassan wouldn't put it past her to simply leave to create her own demesne, intentionally becoming a direct competitor out of spite. Or worse, perhaps.

Sometimes, Cassan took his telescope out into the night, charting the stars. No grant paid him, no library filed his findings. There was simply, his telescope, an old note book, and a dwindling supply of writing implements as he pursued his passion after a hard day's work, and wondered if, in another life, in Binder Elceena's demesne, he would have had the time to do this, or whether he would have been too busy writing down the biography of someone trying to make a dream come true.