Despite her frustrations, it was still a good day. That was still objectively true.

  A part of Lori was wondering if perhaps she should do be doing this testing outside of the boundaries of her demesne. It would probably be more effective, as it would reflect the conditions she'd need to use these bindings, but… well, she could still do the prototyping, iterating, testing, and calibrating here, so she would!

  Her first attempt to try to make aiming the unseen piercing light easier was to have a binding of lightwisps parallel to it that would cast a focused—but not piercing—ray of visible light in the same direction, so that all she needed to do was aim using the latter.

  That hadn't worked out as well as she'd thought it would. While she thought she had both pointed in the same direction, when she tested the binding it became obvious—at least, obvious through her perception of the wisps in her demesne—that the two bindings were ever so slightly not aligned. While only a slight deviation, distance magnified the effect, and by the time the beams reached the target she had made the were shining on spots three paces apart.

  Lori made several attempts at adjustments as she tried to get the two bindings to align, until she finally decided to reform the binding so that the piercing light and the light beam were part of the same binding and with the same directionality. That worked better, resulting in a very bright but narrow light with a stream of unseen piercing light in the core of it.

  It seemed a serviceable basis for directing lightning, so she anchored the binding to one of the quartz embedded to her staff—which vibrated slightly from the lightningwisps stored in it—and practiced aiming with it.

  Immediately, a certain deficiency became obvious. Despite the fact the binding was emitting a very bright light, it could not compete with the sun, and so she could only perceive it through her connection to her core. As she was also aiming a light on the river… well, it was hard to see. Concentrating, she claimed some darkwisps from the bottom of the river, and drew them upward to replace her previous target. The blackness the binding of darkwisps made was a bit harder to see against the water, alternately being very visible as the sunlight reflected off the water behind it, and being almost invisible against the dark blue water.

  Lori sighed, wondering how she was able to practice aiming with a bright light when she was aiming at a bright light.

  …

  Ah, right.

  She turned around, looking up at the hillside bluff that her Dungeon was built within. Raising her staff, she nodded in satisfaction as she saw the bright spot of light shining against the stone of the cliffside, and started moving her staff to see how the light responded. Moving it seemed simple enough, so she progressed to trying to aim at specific spots of the cliff. That was a bit harder. While getting the light to move across the cliff by simply adjusting her staff hadn't been difficult, now that she was trying to move it with intent she kept overcorrecting and moving past her targets. She found that grounding the butt of her staff and from there tilting and rolling it helped stabilize her aim. With that stability, she was able to quickly shift her aim to various marks on the cliff with relative ease.

  "Your Bindership?"

  Lori blinked, shifting her faze downwards. "What is it, Rian?"

  "Well, after you told everyone to expect fire, lightning and explosions, your people are very worriedly wondering why you seem to be aiming your magic at the Dungeon."

  It took a moment to realize what he was implying. "Rian, I'm not going to aim destructive bindings at my own Dungeon."

  "I'm sure everyone will be glad to hear that." He looked at her staff, then at the cliff. "So… what are you doing, if I may ask?"

  "Devising a way to aim lightning," Lori said, then corrected herself. "A better way to aim lightning. One that can actually be used outside of my demesne."

  "Ah… well, I have letters to finish up, so I'll get back to that, but when I'm done, do you want me to help you take notes?"

  Lori shook her head. "No, that will not be necessary."

  "All right then. Though if I may point out something…?"

  Lori waved a hand dismissively.

  "If you're using that light to aim your lightning… while it would be fine for aiming at inanimate objects and maybe beasts, if you use that to aim lightning at wizards, they're going to know you're aiming at them and might be able to devise some kind of counter-measure for it. Just something to consider." Rian turned away, humming softly and… yes, he seemed to be skipping in time to his humming. Her lord was such a child.

  Stolen story; please report.

  …

  Unfortunately, as was often the case, her lord had a point, ugh. She hated that.

  Sighing, Lori set aside the current incarnation of an aimable binding, deactivating it and but keeping it anchored to her staff for later reference so she could make the flow diagram for it. At the very worst, at least she had a means of aiming her lightning, even if it had an obvious weakness.

  Now, she had to find a new way to aim…

  Hmm… perhaps she could skip having a bright light entirely and simply aim using the piercing light? With the right binding, she could make the unseen light visible to her…

  It seemed a promising idea, though given the effects of that color of unseen light on flesh, she'd have to use something else as a proof of concept—

  Actually, there were other colors of unseen light, weren't there? If she used one of those as a beam of light with which to aim, she could keep using the aiming binding she'd already conceived while at the same time not having to worry about the weakness that Rian pointed out by using a binding that would let her see that unseen color. For a moment she considered altering the binding she already had, but decided to make a new one to get into the habit of doing it. With only one check to reference the original binding, Lori formed a new one, with the part of the binding that shone a wide but directed beam of visible light altered to emit unseen light as well.

  After testing the binding to ensure that the two colors of light had the same directionality so that they properly aimed at the same spot—they did, and without needing adjustment, so she had confidence that she could easily keep reproducing this binding in the future—Lori claimed the lightwisps in her left eye and carefully formed them into a binding that would convert a specific color of unseen light into another color. In this particular instance, it would shift it into the color red, which was the simplest to do although turning it into any other color was really no significant difficulty.

  Double checking the binding, Lori activated it.

  The world seen through her left eye immediately turned into shades of red.

  The Dungeon Binder winced, instinctively closing her eyes on instinct. Ah, she'd forgotten about that, since it had been a while. Usually when she needed to see in the dark, she just made a light instead of trying to see unseen light, but she'd sometimes resorted to it when she was trying to sneak past her mothers under the cover of darkness. Thus she'd forgotten that this color of unseen light glowed from anything hot, and despite the year moving towards winter the sun was still bathing the world in its heat.

  She slowly opened her eyes again, even as she adjusted the binding. The intensity of the redness decreased, and she was able to see the original colors of things, though the redness was still overlaid on most things. Everything that was stone glowed a bright red, as did the exposed skin of the people she saw. The sky remained as blue as ever, and when she turned to glance at the river it was still dark.

  When she activated her new aiming binding, it didn't work as she'd thought it was. She had thought that it would result in the beam of unseen light becoming visible, and it did to a degree. However, this was only when it seemed to strike dust in the air, which after some rueful thought made sense. Piercing light all moved in the same direction, which was where she pointing it at. As sight occurred when light reached her eyes, of course she'd only see the beam when it struck something in the air that would reflect it in some other direction.

  That being said, the spot where the beam of unseen light shone with a large red circle was only visible through her left eye. She began moving her staff back and forth as she began practicing her aim again, moving the invisible red circle from one feature on the cliffside to another. Nodding in satisfaction, she turned back to the water and the targets of lightwisps and darkwisps still there, and aimed with the binding.

  …

  Ah. Darkwisps didn't reflect light, right. And the water didn't seem to reflect the unseen light very well, at least at this angle.

  …

  Lori sighed.

  It took a little more thought to work out how to aim over the water. Lori claimed waterwisps and anchored them to the stone supports at the end of the dock, then formed them into bindings that turned river water into vapor that rose into the air. It created a light mist directly above the bindings, which wasn't enough to obscure her view but was enough to reflect some of the unseen light so she could see where she was aiming. Using the part of the beam made visible by the mist, she was able to aim at her target in the river and for the first time activated the other binding of unseen piercing light

  The much narrower but far more intense beam of unseen light activated, and the air that it passed through quickly became filled with lightningwisps all the way until it struck the surface of the river… about ten yustri to the left of her target.

  …

  Well, that was still pretty good.

  It took her two more tries—claiming and binding the resulting lightningwisps each time to clear the air—before she finally hit the binding of lightwisps she'd been aiming at. Having such a wide beam for the 'aiming' binding meant that there was a large margin for error, but making it smaller meant it was harder to see at a distance, which sort of defeated the purpose of having an aid to aiming.

  And given the need to ground the butt of her staff for stability, it also meant she had to remain stationary. Raising her staff and trying to aim the binding while not resting the butt of her staff on the ground gave it a tendency to swing, adding a complicating factor to try and account for. Holding the staff in both hands fixed this problem, but it meant she had to turn with her whole body to aim to either side and raising her aim up and down became very uncertain. Really, the only reason she could aim at all was because the mist she had raised at the end of the dock showed her the path of the aiming beam, so she could align the spot on her staff where the binding was anchored and the path in the mist with the target in the middle of the river.

  …

  Lori stared at the mist, then looked down as she raised her left hand with thumb and forefinger extended. She looked at the mist again, then at her staff, then held up her extended extremities next to the aiming binding, noting how easy it was to align the tips of her thumb and finger.

  Turning, she headed back to her dungeon. Bone. She needed a length of bone, and she was fairly sure the one she'd brought from River's Fork yesterday was still in her room…