Things were going slower than Rudra had expected.
For hours he lied into the water, snout pressed against the mouth of a canal. Atfirst most of the workers just stood several feets away from him holding up their axes and hammers like they were effective against a four hundred feet beast with a bad temper.
Atfirst nobody approached. Then Prince Mamon barked an order at the foreman. The foreman, in return, glares at his workers. Finally the workers shoved a few young apprentices forward - people who were expendable.
His every breath sent the workers into a panic. However, they soon developed an instinct of coping with Rudra's breathing rythm- working frantically when the air was comparitive more still during his inhale and grabbing their tools or eachother during his exhale. Still, loose materials like sand, dry moss, saw dust would simply fly away until they learnt to protect those things.
Surprisingly enough, Rudra's breathing was not the worst issue. It was his eyes.
Rudra's eyes were one of the most intimidating parts about him- aside from his fire and talons. The irises were deep molted amber red- not like warm honey - never that- but something darker, more... dangerous. Like coal which was about to catch fire. The eyes were set amidst his jet black scales like a pair of unknown gems casting faint ruby glow on the scales near the eye socket.
Now and then one or two workers would accidentally make eye contact with Rudra. And they would just ...stop, standing completely frozen. They would stare at their own distorted reflections in the eye of the most terrible beast they would probably meet in their entire life this close and survive and their colleagues had to physically shake them to break the trance and bring them back to reality.
Things were as miserable for Rudra as it was for the workers. Rudra wasn't just putting his snout in the canal mouth. He had to brace himself - front legs planted wide - weight forward to push back the against the river's current for hours, for days. The riverbed under him kept becoming softer and softer, made footing impossibly treacherous. Rudra had to dig his claws deeper and deeper into mud and slit every few hours to maintain his posture. He was certain that he was the first dragon in history to get muscle cramps from being a glorified cofferdam.
Overtime the cold water started seeping around his scales. It didn't exactly made him suffer. But it was still .... Inconvenient, especially in the harsh winter of Benevia.
Rudra's body heat kept warming the freezing water constantly making a miserable cloud of steam- very uncomfortable and undignified.
All of this and if he showed even a rumble of a discomfort- it vibrated through the half-built dam structures and rattled the tools and stones, sending the workers running for their lives.
Ofcourse Nayan was there trying her best to reassure the foreman and the workers. But then, comforting and reassuring others were never her strong suits.
Everytime the conversations would go like this:
Foreman: "He is going to eat us all alive!"
Nayan: "First of all, he doesn't like eating humans, maybe a cow, a few goats..."
Foreman: "That's not the point! He's angry!"
Nayan: "He's not angry, just cold maybe."
Foreman: "How can you tell?!"
Nayan: "Just look at his tail!"
Foreman looked at the tail and understood nothing. He had never felt less reassured about anything in his life.
Accidents happened. A few workers would have to climb over his snout to reach a certain point of the structure they were building. They tried to look as professional as they could while stepping on the oily scales of a living breathing dragon. Some would accidentally drop a hammer on his snout- resulting Rudra to flinch- which sent three four workers diving into the water to save their tails.
Speaking of tails, the foreman ended up trusting Nayan's nonsense theory and set two people as 'Tail Watcher' to keep an eye on Rudra's mood.
Again. If Rudra could roll his eyes, he would.
Eventually, they started getting habituated with the whole absurd situation. The workers got used to his breathing- the whole work side expanding and contracting slightly with each exhale and inhale. Tools rattled. Torches flickered. New workers still gagged now and then but the veterans stopped minding his breath within couple of days and that itself was somehow more concerning. They treated the whole experience like they were working near living-breathing bellows.
At some point, Rudra started watching the workers - not just with his eyes, but with his other senses.
He felt someone struggling to stand on the structure because of his breath. Slowly and impossibly carefully he shifted back a few inches giving the man enough place for footing. He just wanted the work to be done fast enough. But it just made the worker pause for good three seconds.
Just when Rudra expected the worker to break into a run, he started working. A few minutes later he went away. Rudra spotted him talking with a cluster of other workers, all of whom eyed him with grace serious expressions.
Rudra didn't want to know what those little ants were planning. Didn't care.
And then came a bard. He didn't have any instrument. He just sat there humming songs in old languages- probably an attempt to keep the dragon calm.
Did it work? The workers didn't know. But they didn't want to find out what happened when the bard stopped.
As for Rudra, he didn't care about the song. He just cared that the workers felt safe enough to work faster.
He would block one canal at a time and the workers would set the dam before he would go to the next one. At some point he fell asleep and Nayan would throw bricks at his head to wake his up when it was time to go to another canal.
After several days, all the canals had their own dams with proper suice gate. Rudra stepped back from the workers and construction sites to watch the flood water slowly but surely return back to the river and the scent of damp, wet earth filling up the entire area.
The workers were rejoicing- probably happy to have survived working with a dragon. They had their little hands up in the air, jumping like toddlers would jump when spotting something particularly shiny and stupid.
Rudra stepped into Rā, the river having more open space that the land itself and stretched his neck that had started hurting like one's neck hurt while sitting in the same spot and reading for hours.
The laughter stoped. Rudra looked back at the low bank to see the workers had gathered around the foreman who was eyeing him nervously. Rudra stepped back further into the river to make him understand his lack of appetite for skinny, smelly workers. But the foreman did the strangest thing. He gave Rudra a wobbly smile which confused Rudra more.
The foreman took one step at him, his mouth open. He was trying to say something.
Rudra lowered his head, a little curious about what all this fuzz was about when Nayan came running.
"Rudra! The Parthan Healer had come!"
Rudra found Nayan fast and then spotted the figure behind her. A man in his early forties. Gray hair, charcol coat, rolled up sleeves and scale-leather apron specifically made from shed draconic material- that resisted heat and caustic fluids that came with the work. It was Rudra's own shed. One which he had produced almost twenty winters ago when he had first transformed.
He looked at the eyes, those eyes he still recalled vividly. Cold, indifferent..... cruel.
His name was Soreth. Rudra could never forget his name.
Afterall, he was the first and last healer to ever treat him.