Hey, I'm Ashe. They/them. Queer fantasy and sci-fi romance writer, voice actor, and ex game dev. Book reviews and nerd rants.
Look at my books: https://pixelsandpins.com/books/
Read: The Artifice of Us
https://www.tumblr.com/blog/theartificeofus
The Met Gala Isn't the Capitol, and I Need You to Stop
The Met Gala happened recently. For those unfamiliar, it’s ostensibly a fundraiser for The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is also a big fashion who-si-whatsit. It began in 1948, and it’s gone through a few iterations to get to the big celebrity blow-out that we’ve come to know. In the age of social media, there’s been a lot more attention on it from the average person. Live reactions. Critiques on the costuming. That sort of thing.
Since the first COVID shutdowns, class-consciousness trickled down to a new audience, and the Met Gala now tends to trigger an annual uptick in online conversations around wealth inequality.
Which, great! Let me be clear on that. I’m not a Met Gala apologist, and the inclusion of Jeff Bezos this year is certainly a…decision.
At the same time, your average social media billionaire-gourmand draws these very cursory conclusions that just go on to look like the same hot take over and over again ad nauseam.
Biggest example:
“This is just like the Hunger Games!”
1.) Please, dear god, read another book and/or watch another movie that covers the same themes from a different direction. I recommend the Snowpiercer graphic novel. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and House of Stairs by William Sleator are some other good choices, if memory serves. Throw a little Mad Max: Fury Road in there and analyze the visual difference in the styling of the wives vs the warboys vs Furiosa. It’s good shit.
2.) Only…kinda? But not really? Working class people engaging in a physical competition with each other for a country-wide audience (fostered by a culture of gambling) that creates wealth for the upper class while not personally profiting the competitors in a significant way except in extreme circumstances. That’s not the Met Gala, that’s college football.
3.) Yeah, no shit. Where do you think Suzanne Collins pulled the idea from? The theme of “the wealthy flaunting showy extravagance in peculiar ways in the midst of vast far-reaching poverty as stark contrast” is a common theme in fiction because that’s what real life looks like. I’m glad that fiction helped you see the pattern better, but come on, y’all. The eccentric fashion of The Capitol is meant to communicate their wealth because that’s a pre-established visual language. Not the other way around.
The yearly cries of “PANEM!” have clearly become a personal pet peeve.
But also, it sort of reveals what I’m talking about it terms of the general misunderstanding of how art and art patronage fits into the scaffolding of capitalism.
Events like the Met Gala aren’t above reproach. Critique them down to the nails and call them out for bad actors and actions. At the same time, these big events like the Oscars, Grammys, fashion week, etc. aren’t, by themselves, an orchestrated conspiracy to intellectually subdue the masses. It’s weird rich people promoting and engaging with art.
And art, as a whole, owes a massive amount of its endurance and capital viability to weird rich people.
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a major landmark in the history of art, was a commission from Pope Julius II. Michelangelo, reportedly, hated every moment of it, but he got paid. The entire Italian Renaissance was funded by a single family of bankers. Having been on both sides of the vendor table, money is what makes the artist alley happen. There’s some full-stack developer out there paying off a furry artist’s student loans one commission at a time. And even if you’re going to give away your art for free as a message to stoke rebellion in the masses, a can of spray paint is still $6 and you can’t do shit if you’ve died of starvation. We’re all locked in the money cage together.
The major functional difference between the average Patreon or Kickstarter and the Met Gala is scope and visibility. They have the shared end goal to crowdsource the continued existence of an ongoing artistic endeavor.
The Met Gala has been what’s keeping the Costume Institute open.
It begs the question “what else would you have them do when the other option is shutting down?” According to the New York Times [sorry, ironically, you might run into a paywall, but I still got a site my sources], they’re working on a solution that doesn’t rely on the Gala. But they could only get to that point because of what the Gala brings in in the first place. Then consider the people who got paid for their work that night. It’s a job creating event.
This is, again, not a defense of the Met Gala, but, rather, places it in the context of how it redistributes money. In practical terms of ethical cash-flow: “rich people” to “archival and curatorial art collection” isn’t the worst possible option. Despite even my own list of grievances with how this particular system works and how I think these people should be using their money at a macro-scale, it is, unfortunately, still kind of a net positive. Of all possible evils, the co-leads of Heated Rivalry taking the opportunity to dress-up as Pokemon gym leaders is just not the top of the list of world-shaking moral dilemmas.
If it’s not something you want to pay attention to because you feel as though it’s a “distraction,” cool, whatever. It’s going to blip out of the news cycle in a couple of days, and the places that actually matter will continue reporting on the world at-large. At the same time, you’re allowed to have a day or two where you just look at the pretty dresses.
And whatever sits in between those two.
Vocal moral indignation on social media about a fancy dress event doesn’t stop it from happening or get rid of the financial or artistic impetus at the core of it. It doesn’t stop rich people from being rich and spending their money on imploding submarines, trips to space, and anti-trans legislation. The limited avenues we have to affect change there all come down to how we use our own money, and that’s a conversation that requires room for complexity and nuance.
We are no longer restricted to what is delivered to us in the gladiatorial arena. The internet has given us the ability to engage in whatever we want to engage in of any intellectual depth we prefer. And because people are people, they’re going to take their bread and choose the circus sometimes. Either way, we still want the clowns to get paid.
You Can Call the Symbiote Venom: A Comic Textual Analysis
Who is Venom? What is the Venom symbiote’s “name?”
Why even ask this question? Why do we care? Because the fandom community around this character has very strong opinions around who and what “Venom” is. There’s a hostile undercurrent in regards to nomenclature that claims, with certainty, that only the bonded host and symbiote as a dual entity are named “Venom.” That the symbiote alone shouldn’t be referred to in the singular in this way. Ever. Ever ever. Writers doing so are “lazy.” That it’s just influence from the movies.
A more granular analysis of the language though, evidences textual support for something a lot more nuanced.
The Person-Mantle Relationship
There are a few things to consider, first, when we’re looking at super-hero and super-villain monikers. There is the name of the person, then the mantle of the hero or villain. There are half a dozen Robins, each one filling a functional niche as Batman’s sidekick. Dick Grayson, the first Robin, has also carried multiple mantles.
There’s also precedent for subtly anthropomorphizing clothing and costumes in real life. With furries, it’s not uncommon to “name your suit” as a sort of metonymy for the underlying fursona. A line of black flats becomes The Stacia, The Jennifer, and The Bobbi to give each shoe a sense of personality that’s easier to remember for marketing purposes.
Collectively, the symbiotes from the planet Klyntar present an interesting complication to the person-mantle dichotomy and the personalities we assign our clothing. Where most mantles are merely symbols and imagery sewn into fabric, symbiotes are living mantles with their own thoughts and feelings.
With this in mind, how does this constellation of naming actually play out in the narrative over time? For the sake of this examination we’ll use the phrase the “Venom symbiote” or “symbiote” to signify the specific parasitic organism in question and just “Venom” as the in-story mantle or villain persona.
The Symbiote Introduces Themselves
When Peter first encounters the Venom symbiote in 1984, he doesn’t know that they’re a sentient being. To Peter, the symbiote is merely “the suit” and “the costume.” Once he understands that the symbiote is sentient, “suit” and “costume” persist with the addition of “alien symbiote” and “creature” added to the array of references. And that does tend to remain the trend through the 80s and into the 90s, with “the suit” a regular phrasing up through the 2010s in particular.
At this point, the symbiote can’t talk themself. All the information we’re getting about them is through their host.
In 1988 [Amazing Spider-Man #300] we meet Eddie Brock as the new villain Venom. While the symbiote still can’t “talk,” Eddie has a much easier time understanding them and frequently communicates to the audience what the symbiote is saying or how they’re feeling. The first few appearances of Venom, Eddie actually goes back and forth a little on plural vs singular pronouns. In ASM 300, for example, he says “You may call me Venom.” In ASM 316 it’s “when I was Eddie Brock.” In the same issue, however, he also says “our shared hatred made us one entity…as Venom.”
So what we’re trying to piece together here is how Eddie views himself and his place in this partnership. How does he, as the holder of the mantle, define “Venom?”
There’s a very interesting clue to this puzzle in 1991 during Amazing Spider-Man #346-#347. In this arc, Spider-Man devises a way to get Venom out of his life for good by faking his own death and stranding Venom on an island. When Eddie believes he’s killed Spider-Man, he “disrobes” the symbiote and says that now “there’s no reason for Venom to exist.”
This suggests that Eddie, at this moment, sees the identity of “Venom” as something to put on and take off as he desires. “Venom” is a suit that “Eddie” wears. This aligns, generally, with the way other characters talk about Eddie, the symbiote, and Venom as sort of three different conceptual entities.
How does the symbiote feel about the persona of “Venom?”
A brief one-sided conversation in the 1992 Web of Spider-Man Annual reveals it’s the symbiote who came up with the mantle “Venom” to begin with:
“But as a new being, we’ll need a new name. What? Oh, that’s good. Like the poison Spider-Man forced me to write…We’ll call ourself Venom!”
This makes “Venom” the first name that the symbiote personally presents to the audience as a self-referential moniker. Going by the mantle “Venom” is their idea.
Carnage, Cletus, and “Red”
That same year, 1992, gives us our second symbiote-host combo to draw comparisons on, Carnage [Amazing Spider-Man #362]. At the beginning of his symbiotic journey, Cletus also uses an inconsistent combination of singular and plural pronouns, but most notably uses the phrase “I am Carnage” in contrast to “we are Venom.” He also communicates with the symbiote and calls them “red” at one point in conversation.
Now we see two common fan interpretations here. That “Red” is the symbiote’s “name” (whether assigned by Cletus or not), and that the use of the singular pronoun suggests the two are “more bonded” than Venom as a pair.
I would posit another interpretation based on what’s happening in the text at the time. That “Red” is just a throwaway that Cletus calls his symbiote because he has to call it something, and it’s not an overly personal nickname. Any redhead could become “Red” if you need to address them and you’re so inclined. After his first appearance, he very rarely addresses his symbiote directly, at all, and doesn’t continue to regularly call it “Red.”
(I personally can’t find any examples of Cletus ever calling the Carnage symbiote Red again after his first appearance, but I can’t comfortably make that claim without checking every single Carnage appearance.)
Compare this to Eddie who regularly refers to “his other” and eventually goes on to give his symbiote pet names like “my love.”
The Maximum Carnage storyline of 1993 also reveals that from the second appearance onward, we’re not actually looking at the exact same symbiote. Cletus says:
“But as far as I can tell, my symbiote managed to mutate my metabolism…I can now generate a dead ringer for the symbiote.”
All these pieces viewed together open up the possibility that Cletus uses the singular pronoun initially just because he doesn’t view the partnership as equal, and the symbiote is still more of a “suit” to him, at the time. It also calls into question how much of the continuity of sentience is left compared to whatever Cletus imprinted on or modified about the regenerated Carnage symbiote. This may be affirmed by Carnage’s continued usage of the singular pronoun. Or it may be the simpler explanation that Carnage is a special super-bond that creates a singular, but fragmented consciousness. All this to say it’s difficult to draw indisputable linguistic conclusions based on these early interactions.
When You Start Hopping Hosts
Around this time, also 1993, we have Venom’s first solo series, Lethal Protector. In this series and onward, “suit” and “costume” still stick around, but we also start to see “the other” increase in usage. This repositions the symbiote into less of a “thing” and more of a “creature.” It’s the first phase of the transition into a “who” from a “what,” and that shows up in some new naming and identification quirks.
In Lethal Protector #4, a Life Foundation scientist refers to the reproductive nodules he takes from the symbiote as “the last seeds of Venom.” Here, he is specifically referring to the symbiote as Venom because that’s the organism he’s taking the “seeds” from.
In Separation Anxiety from 1994, we get a moment where the symbiote and Eddie are separated long enough that the symbiote very briefly has their own thought-text boxes for the first time. In these, we see that the symbiote has enough intellect to recognize itself and Eddie as two separate beings. It calls out for Eddie and Peter by name.
The Planet of the Symbiotes arc happens in 1995, and we get a little more information about the symbiotes as a species. This storyline suggests that the symbiotes are essentially cultural blank slates. So whatever structured language patterns they use come from their hosts. This same year, Anne Weying hosts the Venom symbiote for the first time in Sinner Takes All, and the story refers to her as “She-Venom.”
Carnage gives us a cross-symbiote reference point in the 1996 story Web of Carnage. When Ben Reilly is taken over by the Carnage symbiote, he calls himself “Carnage” and “Spider-Carnage.”
In the interim, there’s a bit of inconsistency as to how physiologically unified Eddie and the symbiote are. At the end of Planet of the Symbiotes the text reads that they’re “no longer a bonding, but a becoming” and experiencing “and irrevocable linking of the spirit” that destroys them as true individuals. In the very next story, however, Eddie comfortably references them as two intellectually distinct beings, and the symbiote is perfectly willing to leave him when Eddie won’t eat brains in The Hunger.
So it’s very unclear what’s meant to be happening here in terms of individual sentience, and, therefore, how it might affect language going forward.
The text does establish, however, that both narratively and metatextually, a new host-symbiote pair doesn’t automatically come up with a new mantle to work under. Rather the name, or some version thereof, travels from host to host with the symbiote. The narrative is also giving you permission to call the symbiotes by their mantle independent from the host. As early as the mid-90s, the text is explicitly saying that no matter how Eddie refers to himself or the symbiote personally, at a broader scale people in-world and the writers themselves are playing much faster and looser with what a symbiote-based mantle actually means in reference to the original bond.
The Symbiotes Get a Voice
In 2003 we get a lot of new linguistic information to work with in Spectacular Spider-Man Vol. 2 #1-5. Now this particular volume of this series is chronology very weird. A lot of things are not consistent with the timeline set in The Amazing Spider-Man, so we kind of have to just handwave that away to move forward.
This is the first time that we see the symbiote themself actually do a significant amount of talking on their own terms. So we get a number of panels that expands on how the symbiote feels about their current position.
First, the story establishes that Eddie feels like “two people coming apart,” something he reveals while at a confessional. The first time we see Venom in full “monster” form they say to Spider-Man:
“I am everything of this world and nothing. You brought me here—why will you not grant me release?”
This suggests that Venom in this story (supported by the presence of new black text boxes) is the symbiote talking, not Eddie. So when the symbiote says “There is no Eddie Brock” this plays in tandem with Spider-Man’s psychic impression that Eddie’s specific consciousness is disappearing under the bigger dual-personality of Venom. So that begs the question, what is fueling that consciousness?
The story goes on to show that the symbiote has developed its own personality discreetly separate from Eddie. They engage in face-to-face conversation where the symbiote uses singular pronouns.
This story does affirm, through a conversation Spider-Man has with a detective, the continued pattern that Eddie wearing and bonded to the symbiote becomes Venom. However, when the symbiote is fronting the pair and says “you made me into the creature that is Venom,” it also suggests that the symbiote themself has a level of independent ownership over the name.
This pattern continues in Venom vs Carnage from 2004. We get a very brief glimpse of Cletus, but it is very clearly the symbiotes themselves talking to one another about the birth of Toxin. Spider-Man also implies there’s very little intellectual contribution coming from Eddie anymore while in “Venom form”, a continuation from the Spectacular Spider-Man arc. And in this story the symbiotes call each other Venom and Carnage. The Venom symbiote is the one who gives Toxin their name not Pat Mulligan. A name that Toxin goes on to keep from Pat to Eddie to Bren Waters to Rick Jones.
By this point the text establishes that the symbiote came up with the mantle of Venom, sees themself as a separate entity than Eddie, and to some degree outside of Eddie’s involvement identifies and self-refers with the name “Venom.”
Losing the Eddie Half
As we get to the first major host switch in 2004, we also see some stronger trends in how the rest of the world talks about Venom and the dichotomy between host and symbiote.
Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #6 features a super villain auction. The speech from the auctioneer reads:
“…this gentleman is Eddie Brock, Venom’s human host. Mister Brock and Venom coexist in a strange, symbiotic relationship…Venom, as you may have heard, is a super-powered, alien parasite.”
So while Eddie still doesn’t refer to the symbiote as Venom, at this point, everyone else around them does, including the next Venom, Angelo Fortunato, and his dad. That is the in-story public perception. The symbiote is Venom, and when you wear the symbiote you become Venom. We can surmise that it’s because the public still sees the symbiote as a suit rather than the more full-figured consciousness they’ve become.
This sentiment carries through the Mac Gargan era.
Mac and the symbiote have the occasional physical conversation, but they don’t have the same rapport. He also doesn’t get enough screen time to really explore what’s going on with them internally, and we get very little from the mouth of the symbiote themself. Generally speaking, other members of the Thunderbolts and the public call him Mac or Venom (then eventually fakeout Spider-Man). This is the era when the phrase the “Venom symbiote” starts to get used a bit more often.
Overall, there aren’t a lot of major linguistic changes during Mac’s Venom tenure.
Flash’s tenure begins in 2011 and presents a much more initially distant relationship with the Venom symbiote. The symbiote’s sedated, Flash is regularly pushing it down and holding it back, and for good chunks of his tenure, he’s able to comfortably remove the symbiote and store it away. Before going to space, Flash has limited conversations with the symbiote and struggles to get past animal instincts of destruction. There’s a lot of “the suit” and “the alien” and “the symbiote.” Flash calls himself Venom, and he’s acknowledged as Venom in the same way Eddie and Mac were.
At the same time, Flash also directly refers to the symbiote as an individual being named Venom. In Venom Vol. 2 #4 he states, “It’s one thing with Venom; you’ve got a good a guy controlling it.” Going forward, that’s the pattern for Flash and his commanding officers.
“Venom doesn’t like it.”
“Allowed Venom to bond with me.”
“Lost control of Venom.”
“Extracted from Venom.”
“Another Venom spawn.”
“Venom’s original host.”
This lays out a consistent nomenclature for other people in-universe when interacting with the symbiote and their mantle, a pattern that bears out with the Eddie-Toxin partnership.
There are also a few very quick moments in Volume 2 where it's possible Eddie, specifically, is also picking up this pattern. For example, the line "I know the urges that come with Venom. I couldn't control it." has some ambiguity as to whether he's referring to the state of being Venom as a pair or to the symbiote itself. This is worth noting because Eddie has always talked about the Venom symbiote a little bit differently than everyone else, even his other hosts. Depending on how you interpret his scenes with Flash, it could be evidence of a very early shift in his linguistic habits.
Well, I Guess Someone Could Just…Ask?
Venom: Space Knight runs from 2015-2016 and brings the stronger personality back from the early 2000s. After being cleansed, the symbiote is able to move around independently of Flash and have face to face conversations.
It’s Flash in issue 4 that first says “Next time we chat, tell me your name” to the symbiote. When they revisit the conversation a couple issues later, we never get a solid, on-page direct answer to the question. In issue 7 however, Flash admonishes Tarna, another symbiote host and Agent of the Cosmos, for being overly clinical when discussing their symbiotes:
Tarna: “And your klyntar can not be trusted.”
Flash: “He has a name, you know—“
Tarna: “Venom is not to be trusted.”
We have to assume, then, that as of roughly a decade ago, at minimum, the symbiote is perfectly fine with being referred to as Venom independently of the mantle he shares with his host. He's had plenty of time and ability to tell Flash “hey, I’d like us to go by something else because Venom is actually my special thing with Eddie,” and he never does.
Getting Back Together with the Ex
In 2016 [Venom Vol. 3], we see the return of Eddie as host, and he falls into his older habit of referring to the symbiote as his “other” while Flash still tends to call the symbiote Venom. This trend leads in to the next run and all the stories in between.
There is a very strong exception in the 2018 annual wherein Eddie says “It’s just been Venom and me for a long time.” Compared to his more ambiguous usage in Vol. 2, this is one of the first (if not the first) instance of Eddie explicitly calling the symbiote Venom outside the bonded state.
Venom Vol. 4, the run from 2018-2020 that gave us Knull, brings up the name question again. At the beginning of the run, it’s an offhand comment by Rex Mason asking whether Eddie knows the symbiote’s name. In the last issue, there’s a very famous conversation between Dylan and the symbiote that goes as follows:
Dylan: “What do I call you?”
Symbiote: “What do you mean?”
Dylan: “Well, like you and my dad…you guys are Venom. But, like…that’s you and him. Together. So, like, what’s your name?”
Symbiote: “Ah. I see. No one has…ever asked that.”
Then the symbiote goes on to explain that klyntar names are “emotional vibrations” through which they “distinguish ourselves in the collective hive.” This generally aligns with klyntar being heavily psychic creatures and refers more directly to their early years as a pair. However, this conversation is also factually inaccurate. The symbiote has, indeed, been asked this question before. [see Space Knight above]
So now we’re stuck with a pretty tricky continuity issue. Typically when you run into this sort of thing, you want to assume the most recent information is the most correct. But because we’re doing a linguistic character analysis, we can presume a level of realistically unreliable narrator and try to wiggle both sides of the continuity change together.
There are a few keys to doing that here.
First, there’s a line in the symbiote’s extended explanation that reads “my pattern was cast out of the hive.” So it’s a name he has some distance from.
We also have a scene later in the same issue where Eddie actively passes down the Venom moniker to Dylan, saying “No, son. You aren’t Venom. And neither am I….We are Venom together.” Earlier in the run (Vol. 4 #8), Eddie also acknowledges that “Flash Thompson was a badass Venom.” What this suggests is that even Eddie himself doesn’t see the mantle of Venom as exclusively belonging to him as a pair with the symbiote. More so, the mantle belongs to whomever forms the right partnership with the symbiote.
This helps us form a subtextual narrative. A symbiote had their klyntar “name” while in the hive. When they were cast out, they either lost access to the name or it became useless without the context of the hive. After going through a few hosts, they came upon one that presented the idea that they needed a name for their new, collective persona. The symbiote comes up with the name “Venom” in the local language. That name then serves a dual purpose as mantle for the partnership but also an identity for the symbiote to use individually as needed or wanted. Then the people around the symbiote who aren’t necessarily abreast of these details use the name Venom as a broad stand-in for lack of any better language. While at the same time, metatextually, the comic itself has started naming the symbiote Venom independent of the bond or partnership.
This allows us to keep moving without too much friction into Venom Volume 5 where now mostly Dylan and occasionally Eddie start referring to the symbiote as Venom. The symbiote has a much stronger personality and is becoming more and more a character in his own right. So it’s conceivable that changes in the filial relationship might come with subtle linguistic changes in the hosts. Coming into Venom Volume 6, it’s now standard practice for “Venom” to be both the name of the mantle worn by host and symbiote pairing and of the symbiote itself when necessary.
In Conclusion
So now who is Venom? It’s both the mantle of the symbiote-host pairing and the name of the symbiote itself. What is the symbiote’s name? In hive-mind psychic speak it’s an unpronounceable energy wave, and in English it’s Venom. This tracks, consistently, with all the other named symbiotes we’ve been presented. This organic linguistic cascade starts in the first decade of the character and has some remarkably consistent iteration.
A name is, at it’s core either whatever you respond to what someone else labels you. It’s not that linguistically black or white but it’s also really not that complicated. People use different names in different contexts and sometimes names morph and change. It’s okay for the same thing to happen to a fictional character through time, and there’s plenty of easy additional language to fall back on when clarity is needed. Ignoring how a text evolves means you’re losing story and character arcs.
"If I'd known we were going into jyantaur territory, I'm not sure I would have agreed to come with you." Lidea glanced over eir shoulder to gaze at the scar of canyon at the bottom of the slope behind them, watching the bridge they had crossed sway against the crosswinds. Beyond that, a splotch of silver glinted off the tops of the low-lying buildings of the travel complex.
Under the flat roofs, transport circles flared up with huge magical charges, sending people across the network that spread over the entire planet. They had been up before dawn to skip across a major artery coming west from Obeluang into the scrublands in the middle of the continent.
"It's not. It's cyndaren." Sunny moved to eir left side to use eir height to block the early morning sun.
"That's not really much better." Lidea dropped eir hand into his, rubbing her thumb over the back of his fingers. Eir wrist rubbed against his focus bracers, the magic charge inside interacting with eir own. Ey repositioned eir own magic staff where it kept bouncing off the back of eir thigh.
"Rather run into a cyndaren than a jyantaur."
"I'm not denying that, but I'd rather not be in Corre indige territory at all. They don't like us here."
"We're not going that far north. Probably only run into sylvan pockets."
He was right. The highway shot up to the coast, but they were only going as far as the escarpment. Round trip on foot, it was a long summer day but doable for endurance hikers. This assumed things stayed on schedule, which was not something to rely on. They were always ready to camp out overnight when invariably things went to shit.
They were ready for a lunch break when they reached the massive lift that would take them down the escarpment wall. Even the limited tectonic activity in the area was just enough to dissuade a lot of large-scale industrial or agricultural infrastructure.
While the lack of national organization — and therefore regulation — attracted the occasional illicit enterprise, the sparse local population managed an efficient and effective self-regulation. The same lack of constabulary that allowed a person to run a small, unregulated gambling venture meant a jilted client could take matters into their own hands without fear of legal retribution. As long as you could look after yourself, the unregulated zones of Correlan didn’t present any special danger. This wasn’t necessarily the case on other worlds.
The lift construction was a pair of glorified cages. Big enough to hold a two-horse cart with a solid roof to keep some of the weather out. Farther east, toward the mountains, they regularly used funiculars, but the sheer face here favored the dramatic vertical drop. A system of pulleys turned each cage into a counterweight for the other, and they rattled up and down the cliff side under the combined power of gravity and mechana-magic.
The contraption was manned by a teenage sylvan, cocoa-colored hair braided back against their round, rose-gold face. They set down their book, nodded through the window of their little climate-controlled booth and leaned forward.
The language that came out wasn't their native Illurian but Cottа́l, the more prominent human language in the region.
"Stand back from the yellow bar, please."
Lidea and Sunny followed orders, giving space for the long arm across the highway to raise and let them on the platform for the currently available lift cage. The platform of the cage shifted ever so slightly under their weight, and suddenly they were hanging over the edge of the escarpment. The face of the ridge spread out on either side of the lift mechanism, striating the view in either direction in red and purples. To the northeast, a soft blue smudge of mountains blew out against the cerulean sky.
That was about all Lidea could stand to look at before dropping eir eyes to the diamond plate metal under eir feet. When the lift moved, ey reached for the railing and grabbed on tight. Sunny folded his hand into eirs and squeezed.
"I can see the spot I want to check from here. There are some trees. We can eat lunch there."
"Mhm," Lidea grunted out through gritted teeth and a locked jaw.
"I figure we can do the protein bread and soft cheese for lunch. We also have some pouch meals, but it seems better to save those for dinner."
"Yep."
"Because I don't imagine any of the travel stops will be open for food. None of the good ones, at least. But we'll have access to water."
"Sunny stop. It's fine. I'm not going to force you to vamp for twenty minutes about food just to distract me from the fact that we're dropping through the air in a metal cage."
"Come here." Sunny dropped to the floor of the cage and pulled em down with him. Ey sat cross-legged, forcing eir eyes against the ties of his boots. He grabbed both eir hands and brought them down to rest in the gap between their crossed-legs. Ey watched his thumbs circle the top of eir knuckles and pinpoint focused eir attention on that specific sensation.
"Okay, yeah. That's working."
And they dropped down the mountainside like that.
Lidea watched him from beneath a cluster of trees as Sunny moved up and down the exposed rock wall, luxuriating in soft cheese on dense bread. Sunny was the only one ey knew that could make high-protein bread taste like actual bread instead of hardtack. There was actual hardtack at the bottom of the bag, but hopefully they wouldn’t have to break into it.
Sunny scanned the layers and the history of sedimentary rock they revealed. A minor earthquake two weeks ago had revealed new nodes of chert. It was a footnote for geologists, but newly revealed minerals presented juicy findings for even the most average artificer. Older long-wave magic energies often seeped into them, altering the construction of their magical lattice. He didn't know exactly what he could or would do with it yet, but that was the beauty of discovery. If all else failed, it was new lapidary material. Maybe he’d find a neat fossil.
“Lidea,” he called over his shoulder. “I want to move down a little.”
“Hold on. I’ll come with.” Lidea repacked their things and walked to meet him at a diagonal as he moved down the ledge of the cliff. He stopped, holding up his hand and signaling back to the trees. He moved slowly, ducking back into the sparse trees and brush. Lidea tucked down next to him.
“What’s up?” ey whispered low, but she saw them immediately.
They blended in with the scrubland grass and short trees, striped, pockmarked ungulates that took long strides between grazing spots. Cosacorre moved their huge, cylindrical bodies across the plains on four thick legs, two-toed feet launching them across the grasslands in great, pounding galumphs. Correlan grew things bigger than other worlds, and the herd was all mass and muscle. Their short, dual-pronged antlers spiraled up and down with short, sharp barbs that could tear out an eye when paired with the force behind their lunges. A third pair of limbs rotated out from the back of their shoulders, ending in pinchy three-fingered hands that brought flowers and grass to their snouts.
A particularly big one, the female in charge, lifted its square head and took a quick gaze over the landscape, glassy back eyes flicking around for danger, jaw moving around a smack of cud.
Lidea and Sunny both rolled onto the balls of their feet, bodies creaking with age in tandem as they settled into a position to book at a moment’s notice. Even a herd this size was relatively safe at this distance. Their technique for dealing with predation was "be big and heavy," so they didn’t lead with aggression. If they stayed out of sight and gave them space, there'd be no issues.
“I don’t come out to this part of the continent that often," Lidea said quietly. "Never seen one of these this close before."
"Same and same," Sunny replied.
"Where are you going?”
They both jumped, falling on top of each other while still trying to keep their voices down. A water elf moved out of the darkest cover of the trees, light casting down through the leaves to create speckles on his deep tawny skin. The light effects complemented his natural splash of dark freckles. He kept his curly, ash-brown hair in check with two scalp-grazing braids that ended just above his shoulders with little lace bows.
The water elf’s shirt was light-colored and billowy, clasped at the wrists and throat to protect him from the sun. His pants were darker and thicker, and he’d folded them up to his knees, creating leggy, sinewy space before his simple, flexible ankle boots. A wrap woven in bright, zig-zagging stripes was tied around his waist to keep it out of the way in the heat of the day.
He split his attention between watching the herd, digging for something quietly in the brush, and waiting for an answer to his question.
“Um,” Sunny hedged as he formed the shape of his answer. “Further down toward the new cleavage.”
The water elf nodded as he found his quarry in the bush. A small box painted to look like the surrounding foliage shifted between his hands as he popped a panel on the back.
“Oh, wildlife camera,” Lidea breathed. Ey had been rolling through eir brain what would bring a water elf this far from their territory along the southern coast, the complete other side of the canyon. Not that they couldn’t travel, of course. After humans, elves shared second place with ariesians in terms of their diasporic tendrils, but they also folded in on themselves. Water elves took this latter bit to an extreme and had practically opted out of society at large.
Sunny moved around behind Lidea to squat closer to the water elf.
“Is that the new image storage medium?”
“Yeah.”
The water elf pulled a silver disk the size of his palm out of the back and held it up to flash against the blue sky, light catching on a red gemstone in the center. There were images in black and white pressed into the concentric grooves, only visible with another specialty device. This was the smallest these disks had ever been. He tucked it into a little flap on the outside of his satchel and put in a new one.
“Go up that way,” the water elf said, pointing through the scant trees. “There’s a path through the rocks that they don’t like. That should swing you around.”
“Thanks,” Lidea said. "Let's get going, Sunny honey. We're on a timeline." Ey pressed eir hand around his wrist and pulled them off in the direction the water elf had pointed. They picked through the rocks, keeping a distance from the herd as they moved. Sunny grumbled a little, toeing rocks aside gently, checking them with a net of magic for anything interesting.
"Something the matter?" Lidea asked.
"I wanted to ask him more about the trail camera."
Lidea snapped eir tongue against eir teeth.
"Yeah, and you would have gotten deep in the weeds on it. We have a schedule."
"You don't have to manage me, Liddy."
"I-I'm sorry." Lidea touched eir fingers to the back of his hand. He hesitated, bouncing his hand off of eirs, then relented, folding his fingers into eirs.
"You're probably right. I would have gotten distracted."
"But I don't need to act like your mommy."
Sunny clenched eir hand, thinking through his touch.
"Compromise," Lidea suggested. "I'll only step in when I think you're being particularly curmudgeonly or distractible."
"I'm always curmudgeonly and distractible according to you, so…" But a pulse of warmth washed over him. He squeezed eir hand gently, then more firmly when he reached a drop in the ground that was wider than his gait, leaning on Lidea's complementary taller form. He let em lead him through the spikes of outcropping.
They found the new cleavage easily, bands of freshly exposed rock shimmering and sharp under the bans of more weathered stuff. A vague impression of the geologists who had preceded them peppered through the landscape, but nothing so specific to nail it down to a particular agency or school. A pocket of rock that had clearly been hit with a hammer. A scrap of cloth trash caught on the spine of a succulent. Everyone knew better than to leave their shit laying around in a territory that wasn't there's.
Lidea left Sunny to it and took off wandering further up the cliff face, running eir hands over the rocks. A few rock fliers fluttered out of a crevice and tried to chase em off. Ey obliged, skipping a little further down toward a deep groove. Ey walked eir eyes up and down it, looking for the imprint of fossils, one thing ey had picked up a knack for from time spent with Sunny.
A little squeak shook out from the crevice, and ey waited for the animal it belonged to scurry off or out. No sound of little claws on little rocks, though. Ey peered a little closer into the gap, curiosity taking em. There was something there, but it was bigger than expected. It chattered again and shifted, six limbs moving in the darkness. Lidea lit the top of eir staff and poked it into the crevice.
"Shit."
It wasn't an animal. It was a child.
Ey didn’t know corrocco’s well enough to guess their age to the year accurately, especially considering the massive difference in size between the three sexes. This was most definitely a kid, though, probably of primary school age.
"Darling, you have got to be far from home," ey muttered to emself, unsure if they understood Ilurian. Ey switched over to a combination of Universal Sign and Cottа́l.
"Hey, come on out. Do you need water?” The accompanying Sign was shorter and stockier, subjects and predicates smashed together to form ideas almost everyone could convey agnostic of their native spoken language. “Move to me. Need water?”
The mention of water got them to twitch eagerly, but they weren't moving. Which was actually smart. In their place, ey’d rather take eir chances with a rock crevice over some random person. Especially anyone even remotely human-looking.
Ey moved to eir knees to get smaller and dug in eir bag. This was what the badges and emblems of the higher ranks and orders were for: proof that you were being held to a higher echelon of expectation. Ey found eir metal badge and held it to the opening of the crevice.
"I'm a magician. A kýrio. If you come out, I can help you."
The badge was enough to convince them Lidea didn't intend them harm, and they scrambled out of the crevice to flop on the ground tiredly.
Even as a child, the corrocco almost hit eir chest when standing, most of their height in their back arms. They were bipedal on a technicality, long, flexible bodies carried on bendy legs that ended in prehensile claw-feet, these particular ones shod in soft sandals that left their toes free to grip whatever climbing surface was at hand. Their arms were longer than their legs, and they rested their symmetrical hands on their thighs as they crept closer, double thumbs tapping each other across their palms. Their back limbs formed the most distinct part of their silhouette, long stilting things that reached over their head before turning downward on a backward joint. They transferred their weight to them as they walked sometimes. Now, the child used them to launch themselves forward a few steps at once, dropping into a crouch across from Lidea.
They snatched the water flask from Lidea's hands and gulped down several long draws. The water splashed out over their hard, beaky mouth and shallow chin to wet the front of their rough spun tunic. Sweat coated their skin, making their fine, feathery hair damp right to the ends. Their wide, flat ears twitched at the sound of Sunny moving in the distance.
Lidea tapped the flask and brought it away from the corrocco's mouth.
"Little drinks, darling."
They nodded, eyes flashing huge at eir before narrowing down against the sun. They chattered in their native language of clicks and growls before remembering to add Sign.
"Thank you. Drink. Big thirsty. Hungry."
"My name's Lidea," ey said, digging into eir bag for some dried meat strips. "That's my friend Sunny down there. What's your name?"
They gave a Sign-name that had the words for "sky" and "glass " in it.
"Can I call you 'Sky?' Would that be okay?"
The coccorro rolled the thought around and then made half the sign for sky. "Blue."
"Blue? You prefer Blue?"
They nodded then grabbed for the jerky. Their small, sharp teeth shredded it, making quick work of the lean, dry meat.
"Slowly," Lidea reminded them, and they nodded again. Elves and sylvan kept multiple names for complex, sometimes stupid cultural reasons. The Corre indige did it because of physiology. They could make sounds other species couldn't even hear, and their laryngeal construction favored vibrating growls, squawks, and squeals to the exclusion of pretty much every other phoneme type. Cyndaren and pherax with an A chromosome had a broad enough set of sounds to speak languages outside their collective. Something to do with proteins that created extra malleable tissue. Blue would never be able to do that.
“What the fuck?” Sunny was tucking a rock into his bag as he picked over the rough terrain along the escarpment drop.
“Were there any alerts for missing kids at the travel station?” Lidea asked.
“I didn’t think to look.” Sunny sat next to them on a rock. “Hey, little buddy.”
Blue moved tighter into the Lidea, curling up in the cavity of eir arms and digging their face into eir shoulder.
“See who you can raise on the radio,” Lidea said. Ey hugged Blue tighter while Sunny dug around for the handheld.
“This is Grandmaster Artificer Childress calling for the constabulary. Stop.” Sunny held the radio up between them. It was the middle of the day, so the radio switchboard responded quickly.
“Received, Master Childress. Constabulary representative available on line 147. Stop.”
“Received. Switching.” Sunny fiddled with the dial to send him over to the right frequency, and the officer on the other end was already calling out for him.
Sunny ran the officer on the other end through the situation. Little Blue had indeed been reported missing two days ago, separated from a hunting party that had set out from one of the small corrocco villages at the base of the mountain. The search teams hadn’t made it that far yet.
He was double-B gender, eight years old. He would get bigger, eye-level in the end. Certainly not the size of his AB compatriots and double-A and. No major medical needs to speak of, so it was just a matter of getting him home safe and sound.
"If they can give us coordinates, we can bring him there," Lidea said. "Much faster than waiting for someone to come to us." Sunny conveyed this into the radio and received a hold in response. He rested the radio on his shoulder.
"If we do that," he said, "we're not making it back by tonight."
"That was already going to happen."
"Fair."
“Master Childress?” The radio buzzed, and Sunny returned to it.
“Sorry. I don’t know if you heard that, but we can take him to a neutral meeting point, stop.” They didn’t even know there were corrocco villages close enough to lose a child from. There was no way the corrocco would give them coordinates to an unmapped enclave.
“Let me confer with the locals. Hold for more information. Stop.”
The radio fell into static silence.
Blue had curled himself into Lidea’s body, but he leaned back now to give space to sign.
“Take home?” he asked.
“We’re working on it, buddy,” Lidea replied. Blue fell back against em, and ey ran eir hand up and down his back a few times. Ey set eir chin on his head and gave him a quick squeeze.
Something plasmatic boiled in Sunny’s throat, and Lidea cocked eir head as ey watched him tense, crunching eir brows in question. Neither of them could have biological children. Sort of. His was a birth defect he could get fixed whenever he wanted. He had just never bothered because he didn’t want kids. Probably. Maybe. Lidea’s sterility was cancer. They could have saved enough function to procreate with additional assistance, but it would have involved a more complex treatment plan and a much higher risk of recurrence. Cutting everything out was easier and safer in the long term. It had been an obvious decision. Not like ey ever wanted children, anyway. Probably.
That “probably” never quite tilting over to “definitely” haunted both of them, emerging at weird times. This was one of them.
The radio crackled back to life.
“I’ve gotten confirmation. Stand by for coordinates.”
“They didn’t ask to talk to Blue,” Lidea realized out loud. Working from coordinates was doable, but they had gotten some overland directions to follow as well. North up the highway to a certain roadhouse where local “order enforcement” would sort out the rest.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know what the protocol is for this type of thing, but it feels like talking to the victim should be in there. How do they know we’re telling the truth and not just trying to get information on an unmapped village?”
“Radio ID,” Sunny reminded em.
“Someone could have stolen our radio. Or maybe we were under duress. I don’t know. I’m bothered.”
Sunny took eir hand.
“The neutral location of a roadhouse is probably the buffer.”
Lidea wasn’t super convinced and vocalized that in a low hum.
“Look,” Sunny snapped, then immediately regretted it. Lidea thought quicker than him, and that came with overthinking when time allotted for it. He liked the former, so he needed to be soft with the latter.
“It’s fine. No one would be dumb enough to lie their way through the front door of a closed territory.”
“I’m going to ask some procedural questions when we get back.”
“Of course you are.”
Lidea pulled eir hand away.
“What’re you implying?”
Sunny clenched his jaw. Lidea didn’t put words in his mouth, but ey was certainly ready to argue about this now. He didn’t want to. He wanted to deflect with silence. That wouldn’t solve it, though.
Lidea watched his face change shape in agitation. He was already slow to put his thoughts into words, reticent to talk at all, and here ey was making it more difficult for him. Ey offered him the space to explain by forcing eir face into a neutral expression. Ey sort of made it, but not quite.
They both watched Blue as he moved in front of them, scurrying in a zigzag across the road on his feet and back limbs, drawn to every new shiny thing he saw on the side of the road. He found a crop of yellow flowers and plucked a few. He doubled back to give them to Lidea.
“Hair,” he signed. Ey tucked it behind eir ear, and Blue clapped. He looked between them. “No fight.”
Both their bodies relaxed from the shoulders down.
“We’re not fighting, kiddo, just having a conversation.” Sunny ruffled his fingers through the tuft of slightly longer feathery fur on the top of his head. Blue narrowed his eyes at them.
“No. Fight.” His hands were harder. More insistent, tone of voice pushing home the intent. He skittered ahead of them up the road, stopping ten feet ahead as if an invisible leash tethered him to Lidea’s hip.
"I'm sorry," Sunny said quietly. "You get focused on things. When something needs to be fixed, that’s a good thing. But you can't fix everything. Then you spiral. I don't like watching you do that."
Lidea allowed a brief gap for any additions Sunny wanted to make, but he settled his jaw back into a squared, straight alignment. Ey cleared eir throat in the transition.
"I don't see questioning police procedure as being unproductive," ey said. "I would hope that if someone found me injured at the bottom of a crevasse and called it in, whoever is in charge on the other side would bother to check in with me directly. Even if the person calling it in was an archmage or a mercenary captain or a whatever. We put too much trust in the civilian elite titles. They don't mean shit it terms of actually being a good person."
"Is that what's getting to you?"
"Maybe." And it was one of the rare times Lidea didn't know how to verbalize what ey was feeling. Wasn't even sure ey knew what it was.
Evening was coming on when their target roadhouse came into view. Waiting outside was a pair of cyndaren. Logically, this shouldn't have been weird. They had crossed the line into their "patrol lands" hours ago. It felt weird, though, this sudden reminder that their morphology was foreign to this planet.
Blue waited for them to catch up and took Lidea’s hand for the rest of the journey.
One cyndaren trotted up to meet them. They were the smallest of the four Corre indige by a fair amount, so they stayed between Sunny and Lidea's eye line as they approached. They walked on four thick limbs ending in split hooves. Their back limbs held their tactile hands, and they kept them resting, upside down, on top of their back, feathery fur in shades of blue and green hiding the form and angle. A long neck led to a square head sculpted into a short sorta-snout and tall, triangular ears. From the top of that head, the feathery fur began as a full mane behind their ears, ran down the top of the neck, blended with the back limbs and shoulders, then continued down the spine into a long, wide, brushing tail.
Underneath all the fluff and fur, a canvas one-piece jumpsuit kept their relatively bare underbelly safe from the elements. A small pack bounced up and down in rhythm with their movement.
Their hooves stomped a few times as the cyndaren drew up, and they lowered their head in a bow.
"I'm Emissary Thaetl Near-the-Blue-Rock." Their Cottа́l was thick but clear, the slightest gurgle in the back of the throat. They pulled a little folding ID wallet from an outside pocket of their bag and flashed the card inside. The last line of quick reference identifying information had the letters "AB" in the general space of sex designation.
"Do you have a preferred pronoun?” Thaetl asked. “You bipeds have so many of them.”
"I use 'he,'" Sunny said, showing his own identification card. "My fiancé uses 'ey.'" Thaetl swayed hir head again.
"That's all square." Ze dipped hir head down to Blue. Ze rattled off in a shared chirping language, the cadence rising in question. Blue nodded and explained something with his hands. Not Sign just childish gestures to put his thoughts in order. Thaetl liked whatever response ze got and gestured back down the road.
"Come along. You're staying with us tonight." Ze started trotting away.
Both Lidea and Sunny jogged to catch up. In the meantime, the other cyndaren had sauntered closer and met them. This one's visible fur was a sickly combination of chartreuse and turquoise. The canvas jumpsuit covered more of them, covering their fur with stretches of dark gray. Their loose mane and tail were braided down into tidy knots.
"This is Officer Fellerwhal," Thaetl introduced. "Ze's just here to shoot you if you weren't who you said you were."
“See, and you were worried about safety protocols,” Sunny said to Lidea, a grim smirk lifting the edge of his mouth.
“Shoot us with what?” Lidea asked. It had never occurred to em in all these years what kinds of weapons this collective of peoples used.
“A gun,” Fellerwhal replied blankly.
“What kind of gun?” Sunny’s whole body lifted in intellectual interest. Weapons weren’t his specialty, but any kind of hybrid gadgetry would have an artificer gnashing their teeth in intrigue. Guns conceptually weren’t all that complex. A lot of mechanical parts that knocked on each other in predictable ways. Bullets, though… Bullets relied on a very specific kind of combustion physics that lost more and more of its reliability the denser the ambient magic became.
Telekinetic magic or knife skills were more consistent.
Fellerwhal looked Sunny up and done, beady, mellow eyes sharpening.
“A gun that shoots.” Ze made a clicking sound that smacked the roof of hir wide mouth then muttered something that was distinctly insulting sounding but not in a vitriolic way. A general annoyance.
“Wait, so,” Lidea jumped back in. “Where are you taking us?”
“Back to the village,” Thaetl replied. “Blue’s mother is on the way, and she’d like to meet you when she arrives tomorrow morning. You’re perfectly welcome to do whatever, obviously. The roadhouse is safe most of the time. We have nicer beds, though. All up to you.”
It felt like a threat. Almost. Like the dull edge of a knife pressed a little too hard into the softest part of the throat. Better to keep an unknown close than let it wander along your borders unattended.
“We’d be happy to take advantage of your hospitality,” Lidea said for both of them.
A village or township or enclave looking to properly hide itself did so with layers and layers of magic. The cyndaren here didn’t bother with that, the first buildings visible on the flattish plane as they rounded a corner in the road. The buildings were mostly single-storied, an occasional two-story with covered lifts on the outside leading into exterior doors. Made of stone and tabby, the walls were rough but sturdy, large and squat to allow room for cyndaren to maneuver inside more easily. These first sets of buildings had walls that hinged outward to open during nice weather. The tracks in the dirt suggested they had been open only a few hours ago. A few cyndaren were still closing up shop, feather-fur in shades between blue and yellow ruffling at them as they passed.
Thaetl and Fellerwhal chattered at each other in some snippy snarls before the emissary rounded back a little to talk to them.
"We need to pass through the residential rings, so behave."
"We didn't intend otherwise," Lidea said, trying to dedicate the path they were taking through the blocks to memory. Sunny looked around in a general discovery pattern, looking for the different ways that the buildings came together. Blue had fallen between them, holding each of their hands.
They broke through a ring of roads, and the structure of the city shifted. One road was wider than the others and lined with a hip-high stone wall on the side toward the center of town. Less of a barricade, more of a demarcation between zones. They all passed through a break in the wall, and the buildings immediately crowded in on each other, bigger and bulkier and closer together.
The buildings had alleys in them that gave way to a small plaza and park, where it looked like most of the local population had gathered for the evening. A thunder of soft hooves moved through the sparse grass, kicking at rocks. It was mostly children making the noise, adults choosing to lie on the grass, legs curled underneath their bodies. A few cyndaren looked up as they passed, a sea of undulating feathers in shades between yellow and blue. Occasionally, a red or orange body moved among them before settling back down into the crowd. Officer Fellerwhal got a few greetings, but the bipeds weren’t of particular interest to the adults. Blue, however, picked up a few same-age companions as they walked, chattering aimlessly in the way that children did.
As they rounded a corner, a deep voice called out, and one of the cyndaren kids underfoot pulled away with a sigh. Lidea and Sunny turned to find the source of the voice. This cyndaren was larger than the others by a significant but not unreasonable or garish amount. Some of that size was plumage, green and yellow so bright it was neon in the fading orange light. It fluffed and puffed, pulling the kid underneath a wing-arm.
“Back to Mom,” Sunny muttered weirdly in Illurian. Lidea took a more thorough look around, paying closer attention to the size and shape of the crowd. Ey switched to Illurian when ey spoke.
“They’re all AB-gender,” Lidea said. Sunny perked up and gave a look around as well.
“Is that weird?”
Lidea tapped her fingertips against each other.
“Just the way the As and Bs can go together. Reproductively. A with B; AB with both and each other.” Lidea worked the square in eir head. “Assuming even distribution across all possible match-ups, half the population would be AB, then a quarter each double-A and B. That was the only homozygous person we’ve seen so far.”
“Is there…are you suggesting something?” Sunny lifted the edge of an eyebrow, a gesture reserved for the most suspicious of impulses.
“Oh, no. Just interesting. There’s probably some other quirk that affects everything. Ariesian genetic reproduction is deceptively complicated in terms of how hormone levels affect the viability of eggs with certain chromosomes.”
“Are you talking about ariesian two-part sex designation?” Thaetl turned back and asked in Cottа́l.
“Yeah, a little!” Lidea said back in the same language. “Oh. You understand Illurian.”
“Enough,” Thaetl replied.
Lidea cringed.
“Sorry for being overly clinical about reproduction. I was just noticing stuff.” Lidea dug the hand that wasn’t holding Blue’s into eir hip, fingers pressing to eir bone, hoping to escape out of this completely.
“I just appreciate you using the preferred terms instead of saying ‘third gender,’” Thaetl said.
“Oh. Yeah. Vestiges of human binary language.” Lidea hummed, unsure where to go in the conversation before deciding it was fine for it to be over.
Even being a species totally unlike their own in almost every single way that mattered, they both recognized the building the cyndaren brought them to.
Next to the headquarters for the local enforcers (obvious by the cluster of cyndaren nearby in the same uniform), was another low, squat building. The only way in was through the fence that ran between the building and the station. So you didn’t have to go through the station to get to it, but there wasn’t a way to go to and from without someone in the building next door being alerted.
There were myriad complex social norms about offering shelter to the weary traveler, but closed communities were closed for a reason. This little house wasn’t a jail, per se, but a “we need to put you somewhere where we can watch you” building.
Through the gate, the house opened into a wide multipurpose room: kitchen, dining, sitting. Low sofas crouched in a circle around a low table, and the walls were lined with curtained doorways. One curtain twitched aside as they entered, and a head peeked out. It was the water elf from the trail cam. He narrowed his eyes a little and then moved back into the room beyond.
"Alright," Thaetl said. "Take whichever room you prefer. I'm going to take Blue to the crèche. He'll have some other kids to play with." Thaetl leaned down to inform Blue of this change, and they chattered back and forth about it nicely before leaving.
Fellerwahl moved around the main room a few times, checking corners for an unknown something. Ze swung hir head to indicate ze wanted to talk to them in the corner for a moment. Hir voice dropped low, eyes darting to the room where the water elf was.
"If you get any weird feelings from him, go next door and tell someone immediately."
"Is he dangerous or something?" Lidea kept eir voice low, too, while Sunny just cast over his shoulder, watching for more movement behind the curtain.
"I don't know," Fellerwahl admitted. "When they met him at the edge of the territory, they called into Maethe to see if he was who he said he was. His ID checked out, but they asked us to hold him. We try to do each other favors, so we…insisted he stay here…But that's about it. No legal reason to jail or confine him. Just want to get a feel for him. Maybe he slips something to you." Fellerwahl gave a rattly, unsure flick of hir head then brought hir voice up again.
"There should still be some kebabs and fruit in the icebox. Some sweetbread in the cupboard. Help yourself." With another unsure flick, ze trotted back out of the holding cabin.
"They don't trust me. That's fair." That water elf sauntered out of the room he had claimed and went in for a handshake. "Araceli. We never did formal introductions."
"Grandmaster Artificer Sunny Childress." Sunny met him first, taking his hands. "This is my fiancé Kýrio-"
"Lidea is fine," ey said, hip checking Sunny to share the greeting. "What happened since we saw you last?"
Araceli moved gently toward one of the sofas and flopped down. Lidea and Sunny did the same, suddenly tired, dropping their bags next to them on the floor.
"It's not that exciting, actually. I was just checking a trail cam close to their territory line, a local enforcer came across me, then checked my ID. Little bit of radioing, and now I’m being held hostage.”
"You know what that's about?" Lidea asked.
"Oh, a hundred percent. Don't worry about it, though. What are you two doing out here?" The shift was obliquely evasive.
"Rock-hounding," Sunny replied. The outside of Lidea's hand tapped his knee. Ey didn't like these circumstances but had no idea how to convey them without sounding ridiculous. Ey didn’t even know why ey was so nervous. Maybe just the adrenaline of the day hitting em over and over in fresh waves.
Sunny hooked a pinky finger around eirs and squeezed before letting go again. Lidea rolled eir neck and sighed, trying to press the tension out through eir pores.
“You have any idea why they would want to keep us? We volunteered to bring the corrocco kid back to a neutral location, but they strong-armed us into staying.”
Araceli kicked his feet up on the low table, purple and pink striped socks worn a little at the toes and heels.
“When you can’t keep the devil out, you draw him close enough to count his footsteps. The Corre indige don’t like each other. Never have. Thing is, though, outside the occasional individual friendly arrangement, they dislike the rest of us even more.”
“We did kind of collectively invade their planet.” Lidea propped eir feet on the low table, edge pressing into the line of eir boots where the sole met the heel.
“Born, raised, and living on Latolan; I didn’t invade shit.” Sunny made to put his own feet on the table, realized his legs were too short to reach it comfortably at the current angle, and brought his ankle to his knee instead.
“You keep saying that until one of the carnivorous plants finally gets you,” Lidea chided.
“Point being,” Araceli needled, ”they’re only holding me because favors are currency. They’re holding you because you’re an unknown quantity, and they need time to decide how to handle you.”
“Don’t much like that,” Sunny muttered.
“Yeah, well, you can leave whenever you want. They won’t stop you.” Araceli stretched and stood up. “I need to get up and at ‘em early.” He knocked on the doorframe of the room he had claimed and turned back before he went inside. “When I’m not here tomorrow morning, can you affirm for them I’m not some weirdo stalking the border for nefarious purposes? I’m literally just checking trail cams. You saw me out there.” He paused, head against the doorframe for a moment. “Or whatever at this point. Doesn’t matter. Sleep well.”
It was deep into the night when Sunny woke up with his arm around Lidea’s waist and head pressed into the top of eir spine. He didn’t remember settling himself in that way, but he must have moved in the middle of the night. The bedroom was sparse, with a single floor bed two side tables at the head. There was only one blanket and a couple of old but well-kept pillows. It was still hot at night, so they hadn’t bothered with the blanket. Such close bed-sharing was new, though. They had shared rooms plenty of times. Laid out on the floor within reaching distance.
When faced with a room with a large, shareable pallet, though, their fatigue had taken them. It just seemed easier than trying to come up with some other, more conservative solution.
But then again, he’d asked to marry em. Fully intended it unless Lidea raised some actual objection. Sharing a bed with your partner…your spouse…was a normal thing to do. The concept still felt so foreign. So far away.
Something rustled in the main room of the cabin. That’s what had woken him up without realizing it. Now Lidea was doing the same, stirring from sound asleep to wide awake the way they all conditioned themselves to sleep when on the road. Ey realized Sunny’s arm was around em and gave it a little pat on top.
“Probably just Araceli taking off in the middle of the night.” Lidea shifted a little to catch a peek through the curtains. This time, a little crackling cry joined the shuffling. Lidea rolled away, scrambling to eir feet from eir knees. Sunny followed, a little slower to react.
Blue sat on a couch in the main room, looking forlorn and confused. He perked up when he spotted them and scrambled over into Lidea’s arms.
“You need to go back to the creche, buddy,” Lidea cooed, unsure if he’d understand em without using sign.
“Not very secure if they let him get out,” Sunny said. “Maybe he’s safer here with us.”
“Yeah. Not like either of us knows where the crèche is.” Lidea considered the ajar front door and wondered how he had made it this far without being caught. Sunny moved over to close it and sighed, looking around for a clock.
“Whatever. Bring him in the room; we can make-“
Someone who knew what they were doing could break a window with less noise than you’d expect, but it was too loud to be covered by the general quiet of the night. It came from the room Araceli had been using. The next sounds were of someone breaking in instead of out. Sunny kneeled down next to where Lidea sat with Blue.
“Which of us is the better fighter?” he whispered.
“You. That training with mercenaries.”
Sunny grumbled. He was lucky he had forgotten to take off his cuffs, because they were the only thing he actually knew how to fight with. On the inside, in the space along his wrist, was a piece of thin-pressed metal. With a flex of magic, he pushed it out and reformed it to flow over his knuckles. He sculpted thick, sharp spikes on top, the kind that could rip into and out of skin with the flow of a well-placed punch.
He crouched as he moved forward, waiting for whoever was on the other side of the curtain to make a move. It was two people talking in low voices in another language he couldn't quite make out. It had the glissando of Traditional Elven but diverted roughly. Two silhouettes paired with the voices, and they shuffled around the room looking for something. Probably Araceli.
Sunny touched the edge of the curtain, moving it to look inside.
He didn't catch what hit him in the chest, but suddenly he was on his back, a sharp metal spike pressing into his shoulder without piercing it. A water elf was above him, narrow eyes flashing angrily in the dark.
"Where is he?" she snapped in Cottа́l.
"Back off!" For all eir protestations to the contrary, Lidea could really throw down when it was time for it. The short staff that was normally just eir magic focus became a bludgeon against the water elf's back. It staggered her, the end of the two-pronged spear slipping off Sunny's shoulder, tearing at it in the process. The water elf swung around, aiming for Lidea and catching eir in the knee. Ey slammed to the ground with a thunk but managed to swing eir body around back toward Sunny, avoiding whatever the next incoming strike might have been.
"Where is he?" the water elf repeated. "Did you help him escape? Did you do something to him?"
"For fuck's sake, Flor." The other water elf emerged from the room, yanking back the first before she struck again. "Do they look like fighters? And there's a kid here. Come on."
Lidea scooted across the room toward Blue and grabbed him closer, pulling him into eir body. He was shaking but calming down fast now that the fighting had ended.
"If we don't come back with him, we're fucked," said Flor, pulling back up to her full height and stowing her spear away on her back.
"Yeah, well, putting holes in academics isn't going to do that." This water elf was visibly older and leaned against the doorway casually. Both their outfits looked like uniforms, leather plating connected with small metal rings.
"We don't know where he went," Sunny said. "They stashed him here with us last night, but he snuck out at some point. We don't know anything." He moved up into a seated position, favoring the minor wound on his shoulder. Bringing Blue with eir, Lidea moved back to Sunny's side and tried to pull him around to look at the injury. He brushed eir off with a quiet assurance he was fine.
"What did he do, anyway?" Lidea asked. "If he has a warrant, just ask the cydaren to arrest him. This is way too much drama."
"It's what he's not doing," Flor snapped. "He's got a genetic responsibility as upper echelon, and he's skipping out."
"Arranged reproduction," Lidea said.
"Don't have an attitude," the older water elf said. "You're at least a little wood elf. You lot are worse."
"No attitude from me. Just thought we were the only ones this hard stuck on genes. The hit squad's a bit much." Lidea caught the weird glance that Sunny gave em, but flicked some fingers that they could discuss it later.
The older water elf gave a click of derision.
"You should see how the Corre indige manage themselves when they think the rest of us aren’t looking. The cyndaren have spent the last century controlling for a mostly AB population because the single letters are ‘less useful.’”
"Yeah, well, we're all monsters, I guess," Lidea said, moving to eir feet. "Can you…go…I guess? Let us get a few more hours of sleep?"
The two chatted with each other for a moment. Flor took off back into the room, moving out through the window again.
“I’ll be staying in case he comes back. You two sleep well.” The older water elf moved back into the room, behind Flor, closing the curtain behind them.
“It’s been barely twenty-four hours since we left the travel station, but it’s felt like a week.” Lidea rolled eir fingers through Sunny’s hair. He mumbled vaguely in reply. Blue had switched favorites to Sunny, and the corrocco wrapped an arm around Sunny’s arm.
Thaetl collected them early. He wasn’t surprised to see Blue had found his way out of the crèche and back to his rescuers. The more they ruminated on it, the apathy about his second disappearance started feeling more unsettling. Thaetl also didn’t seem to care that Araceli was gone and brushed off the story of the other water elves with disinterest.
When brought to the edge of the town again, they re-met Fellerwahl and regaled hir with the story. Ze had a response, but it rang more annoyed than concerned or distressed. The dynamic that underpinned this whole inter-species relationship was simply too complex to take in all at once.
“You called me your fiancé yesterday,” Lidea said. Ey had been running through every conversation since yesterday, looking for hints and clues of how they got to this point, standing on a road outside a cyndaren village. When ey scanned their first meeting with the cyndaren, that piece struck out at em.
“I asked you to marry me and you said yes,” Sunny replied, his body stiff as if he had been caught.
“If I recall, my response was ‘not no,’ which isn’t exactly a ‘yes.’”
“Well, is there something else you can be? Too old to be someone’s boyfriend.”
“Suitor?”
“I don’t…I don’t know. I’ll just say friend until we’re married, then I can say spouse.”
“You’re really just going to push it until I give in.”
“Manifesting.”
“They’re here.” Fellerwahl interrupted.
Blue saw the small group first, broke free, and ran right toward them.
The adult corrocco were Blue’s shape, just expanded to six feet tall from top of head to bottom of feet. The back arms only added another half a foot in height as their proportions filled out. Of the convoy of six, four of them were most likely AB-gendered, fur pattern a more saturated chestnut brown compared to Blue’s flaxen coloration. Two of them were double-A. Huge, one black, one mahogany, slower moving but covering more ground with each lumbering step. They weren’t scary in an active way, too placid looking to start a fight as long as they were allowed their space. You had to watch out for how they ended a fight.
Blue ran up to meet the black one, diving hard into her arms. They chattered and whistled, his probable mother smoothing his fur down with her hands and brushing his head with her chin. She asked him a question, and he pulled her over to where Lidea and Sunny were standing.
Thaetl had a quick conversation with the corrocco woman as she approached, nodded, then turned to them.
“She said it’s easier if I just direct translate. This is Tzi-tzi, the kid’s mother, and she’s eternally grateful for finding her youngest and taking care of him.”
Thaetl extended their introductions to the corrocco. She bowed, and Sunny and Lidea mirrored the motion, neither sure what corrocco customs actually looked like. Lidea, in particular, found emself suddenly overwhelmed with how much ey didn’t actually know about anything.
Tzi-tzi asked them a question, holding out her hand. Thaetl translated.
“She wants to offer you a mark of favor from her…cluster…sorry. I’ve never translated that into Cottа́l before. It’s like a matrilineal grouping.”
“What um…what does that entail?” Lidea asked, being sure to focus eir attention on Tzi-tzi instead of Thaetl. Tzi-zi gestured that Lidea should give her eir hand, and ey obeyed. Tzi-zi drew up Lidea’s sleeve and tapped the interior of eir forearm.
“It’s a magic brand,” she explained through Thaetl. “Invisible to your eyes, but we can see it. It’s proof you’ve done my people a kindness.”
“Favors are currency,” Sunny muttered in Illurian, then held out his arm. Lidea blinked around, thinking, then nodded in agreement.
“We’d be honored,” ey said for the both of them.
Tzi-zi bowed again. Lidea waited for her to pull out some kind of needle or blade. Instead, she extended a clawed finger and set the tip of it to the inside of eir forearm. She drew a delicate shape against her skin, the contact burning as it went. Not too terribly painful. Like touching a hot pan for just a little too long, but the sensation was narrowed down into a pinprick shape.
Then it was done, and Lidea brought eir arm up to eir eyes. Whatever Tzi-zi said to the contrary, ey could vaguely see it: a thin white line that formed an abstract shape of overlapping squares diminishing into a spiral. Even as ey looked at it, though, it faded. Ey pulled a strand of extra magic off eir staff and passed it over the marking with eir other hand. The mark glowed again for a few long beats before fading again. Magic activation — something Lidea was very familiar with.
Sunny turned to em as Tzi-tzi finished his up, studying the design and the process in awe.
Blue slammed into Lidea’s body in a final hug, and Lidea leaned down to return it, giving him a squeeze. He did the same with Sunny, chattering the whole time. Tzi-zi pressed her giant hand to the side of each of their faces, covering them completely, and gave another bow. Then the interaction was done, Tzi-zi grabbing Blue around the waist and hauling him into her side. Thaetl trotted after the group, escorting them back the way they came.
Fedderwahl moved up into their eyeline.
“Those are useful if you ever get stuck in corrocco lands without advanced permission. Storm. Emergency. But don’t press it.”
“Didn’t plan on it,” Lidea said.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of my territory.”
They had traveled at a fast clip for almost an hour before they felt comfortable enough to slow down to properly talk.
“I didn’t know corrocco could use magic,” Sunny said, a slight edge of concern in his voice.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” Lidea admitted. “It makes sense, though, with the level of native ambient magic. Evolution and whatnot.”
“Hm,” Sunny decided. “Even though you physically can’t anymore, have you really never considered having kids?”
Lidea felt the knot form in eir throat, but ey swallowed it down.
“Why?”
“Just you with Blue,” Sunny said.”
“I…uh…” Eir choked. “Wood elves don’t like it when you make a half-elf.”
“Well, yeah.”
“They’re also not overly fond of us reproducing as a whole. So I just…Dad’s side always made me feel like having kids was something I shouldn’t want. Then the decision was taken away from me. So…I don’t know. Fostering and adoption are obvious answers. But I never wanted to do that alone, so I never thought more about it.”
“What if you had someone to raise a child with?” Sunny asked.
Lidea considered him sideways, then reached for his hand, clutching it desperately. Let him sit with the silence as his answer for just a little awhile. At least until ey knew what the shape of that answer looked like.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
A stately pleasure-dome decreed.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
See in her cell sad Eloisa spread,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
If I should die, think only this of me,
Between what I see and what I say,
In this short Life that only lasts an hour
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
#i get knocked down but i get up again
#o‚ what a rogue and peasant slave am i!
#didnt make sense not to live for fun
#do you love the color of the sky?
#everybody wants to rule the world
#everybody walk the dinosaur
#and if i could‚ i’d make a deal with god:
#to keep it real i fuck him on the floor
I used to be on a Rocky Horror Picture Show Shadowcast
I was part of the cast and the technical directore for a Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast for just under three years, fifteen years ago. The cast I was on did a performance literally every Saturday night at midnight, and I was at almost every show during that time. Yeah, I was kind of insane, ngl.
So if if you’re going to your first RHPS event this year for Halloween (or if you’ve just ever been curious) here’s what’s happening on the back end.
What IS a RHPS Shadowcast?
There’re two parts to any shadowcast performance: the show and the audience interaction.
For the show what you’re looking at is actors mirroring the movie as it plays on the screen behind them. There’s a lot of improv and goofy site gags and just people being silly. Every cast takes “screen accuracy” a little differently in terms of costuming, but my group was always a little more loosey goosey. What of the characters I played pretty frequently was The Criminiologist (or Crim), and I made a Crim puppet (Crumpet). So I would just wear tech black and perform with him pretty consistently.
They audience participation involves props and callouts. You get a newspaper and you put it over your head during “There’s a Light.” You throw toilet paper across the theater during Rocky’s unwrapping.
Then you have callouts which is stuff you shout at the screen in response to certain cues. There are quite a few pretty common ones, but each cast has their own unique spin. You just kind of go with the flow and get silly.
A list of some screen callouts.
What it is like being on a cast like this?
As technical director, my job was to make sure all the technical spots were filled each night and training new cast on the technical roles. For our cast that was a spotlight, a homemade box of foot lights, sheet holders for the sillouette scenes, a few bits and baubles of props, throwing and catching Frank’s cape, and managing the Box of Death.
The Box of Death was a two-part table that could be turned into a cube with flaps for Frank’s throne and Columbia’s jukebox. It was a beautiful piece of work that the Cast Director’s husband designed and built that I did some prime, paint, and upholster on.
The biggest hurdle, because we were a weekly show, was maintaining a cast from week to week to week. I, personally, had a fuck of a time getting people to do tech after their required tech probation. We ran tech with just 2-3 people a lot. One person on spot. One person running floor lights and handling prop throwing. One person manning the floor (or the cast having to do it).
While I normally ran tech, I also played a few characters. Magenta once or twice. Brad quite a bit. Then if I had to run double duty, Eddie or Crim. I, in fact, played Crim a lot. Crumpet got a workout and consensually touched many a décolletage with his little felt puppet hand.
We also got together to put together prop bags for the shows, and that was usually a pretty good time. Eating pizza, little light drinking, watching a movie together. Sometimes that movie was terrible pornography (there’s a Rocky Horror parody porno). That’s pretty much the least sexy circumstance to watch porn, but I gotta tell ya it really does rewire your brain in a not terrible way.
Because my actual biggest takeaway from being on cast like this is a sense of comfort in my body and exposing it in a controlled fashion. Particulalry as a fat person. I spent nights walking around in tighty whities and a tank top, and there was no negative reaction. I’m out here in a corset, fishnets, and garter belt and people are clapping for me.
You get really really comfortable with partial nudity and sex and sexuality and your own body. You can do anything or dress any way within reason and no one cares. Everyone there is just sort of equally gross in terms of just experimenting with the raw, unfiltered human body.
But there’s also a reason I haven’t been to an RHPS shadowcast show in fifteen years. That shit will burn you out.
What should you expect at your first show?
If you’ve never seen the movie before and actually care about hearing it and understanding the plot, watch it ahead of time. You’re not going to be able to hear/understand shit at the live show.
Dress up! Keep in mind local decency laws, but you can either dress as a character or just slap on a corset and short shorts. Or don’t! There aren’t any rules apart from have fun. My first show, I wore a suit and a party hat like the party guests.
Most casts sell prop bags at the show, but you can also find a list online and bring your own props. Check the site of the venue because it’s very possible they don’t allow water guns, glitter, or rice. The cleanup on those is really high, so a lot of indoor venues have to prohibit them. When in doubt, err on the side of caution.
If you throw glitter or rice at a no glitter show, I will feel it in my bones like The Force then come hunt you down. Do not be an asshole.
(When in doubt, lean on that rule, in particular.)
A lot of casts will do a “virgin sacrifice” which is basically a little light hazing for anyone who’s never seen the live show before. My cast had you stand two deep, take an oath, and do a little light simulated doggy-style. I’ve also seen and heard, from other casts, Meg Ryan-style fake orgasm competitions, ass-to-ass balloon popping, and just general heckling. You don’t have to do any of it. You don’t have to self-volunteer as a “virgin.” And if the presented activity makes you uncomfortable, you can bail. You might get a little light teasing, but every cast I’ve known and met has been really big on consent.
You’ll also need to sort of gird yourself for the to screen callouts. The list I linked above has a lot of the ones I’m familiar with, but my cast had a lot of homegrown ones, as well. And some of them were dark. We had a few abortion jokes that we…rough but also kinda…actually kinda funny (I’m going to hell). We gained a cast member, though, for whom those kinds of jokes were really really uncomfortable. So we just either cut them or replaced them with something equally funny of a different variety. There’s also a callout (that I didn’t see on the link) where you make a kinda fucked up joke about a recently deceased person that, depending on the deceased, will either go really cringe or make you sad.
Think about famous deaths lately…
Yeah…
If that cast does that callout during “Time Warp” be fucking ready.
If there is something that you’re concerned about, you can usually contact the cast ahead of time and ask if they have any particularly gnarly call-outs or specifically ask if they have jokes about whatever subject you might be sensitive to. They’re probably not going to make a change just for you, but then you’ll at least know “hey, this is coming.” At the same time, you also can’t control the rest of the audience who might be coming in with who knows what. So you’re just going to have to deal with that uncertainty.
The big thing to remember is that if anything makes you uncomfortable, you can leave at any time, and no one is going to give you shit for it. If a cast member gives you shit for anything, you tell them I said they’re an asshole. That is not reflective of the art as a whole.
Most of all, have fun. That’s the goal.
"If I'd known we were going into jyantaur territory, I'm not sure I would have agreed to come with you." Lidea glanced over eir shoulder to gaze at the scar of canyon at the bottom of the slope behind them, watching the bridge they had crossed sway against the crosswinds. Beyond that, a splotch of silver glinted off the tops of the low-lying buildings of the travel complex.
Under the flat roofs, transport circles flared up with huge magical charges, sending people across the network that spread over the entire planet. They had been up before dawn to skip across a major artery coming west from Obeluang into the scrublands in the middle of the continent.
"It's not. It's cyndaren." Sunny moved to eir left side to use eir height to block the early morning sun.
"That's not really much better." Lidea dropped eir hand into his, rubbing her thumb over the back of his fingers. Eir wrist rubbed against his focus bracers, the magic charge inside interacting with eir own. Ey repositioned eir own magic staff where it kept bouncing off the back of eir thigh.
"Rather run into a cyndaren than a jyantaur."
"I'm not denying that, but I'd rather not be in Corre indige territory at all. They don't like us here."
"We're not going that far north. Probably only run into sylvan pockets."
He was right. The highway shot up to the coast, but they were only going as far as the escarpment. Round trip on foot, it was a long summer day but doable for endurance hikers. This assumed things stayed on schedule, which was not something to rely on. They were always ready to camp out overnight when invariably things went to shit.
They were ready for a lunch break when they reached the massive lift that would take them down the escarpment wall. Even the limited tectonic activity in the area was just enough to dissuade a lot of large-scale industrial or agricultural infrastructure.
While the lack of national organization — and therefore regulation — attracted the occasional illicit enterprise, the sparse local population managed an efficient and effective self-regulation. The same lack of constabulary that allowed a person to run a small, unregulated gambling venture meant a jilted client could take matters into their own hands without fear of legal retribution. As long as you could look after yourself, the unregulated zones of Correlan didn’t present any special danger. This wasn’t necessarily the case on other worlds.
The lift construction was a pair of glorified cages. Big enough to hold a two-horse cart with a solid roof to keep some of the weather out. Farther east, toward the mountains, they regularly used funiculars, but the sheer face here favored the dramatic vertical drop. A system of pulleys turned each cage into a counterweight for the other, and they rattled up and down the cliff side under the combined power of gravity and mechana-magic.
The contraption was manned by a teenage sylvan, cocoa-colored hair braided back against their round, rose-gold face. They set down their book, nodded through the window of their little climate-controlled booth and leaned forward.
The language that came out wasn't their native Illurian but Cottа́l, the more prominent human language in the region.
"Stand back from the yellow bar, please."
Lidea and Sunny followed orders, giving space for the long arm across the highway to raise and let them on the platform for the currently available lift cage. The platform of the cage shifted ever so slightly under their weight, and suddenly they were hanging over the edge of the escarpment. The face of the ridge spread out on either side of the lift mechanism, striating the view in either direction in red and purples. To the northeast, a soft blue smudge of mountains blew out against the cerulean sky.
That was about all Lidea could stand to look at before dropping eir eyes to the diamond plate metal under eir feet. When the lift moved, ey reached for the railing and grabbed on tight. Sunny folded his hand into eirs and squeezed.
"I can see the spot I want to check from here. There are some trees. We can eat lunch there."
"Mhm," Lidea grunted out through gritted teeth and a locked jaw.
"I figure we can do the protein bread and soft cheese for lunch. We also have some pouch meals, but it seems better to save those for dinner."
"Yep."
"Because I don't imagine any of the travel stops will be open for food. None of the good ones, at least. But we'll have access to water."
"Sunny stop. It's fine. I'm not going to force you to vamp for twenty minutes about food just to distract me from the fact that we're dropping through the air in a metal cage."
"Come here." Sunny dropped to the floor of the cage and pulled em down with him. Ey sat cross-legged, forcing eir eyes against the ties of his boots. He grabbed both eir hands and brought them down to rest in the gap between their crossed-legs. Ey watched his thumbs circle the top of eir knuckles and pinpoint focused eir attention on that specific sensation.
"Okay, yeah. That's working."
And they dropped down the mountainside like that.
Lidea watched him from beneath a cluster of trees as Sunny moved up and down the exposed rock wall, luxuriating in soft cheese on dense bread. Sunny was the only one ey knew that could make high-protein bread taste like actual bread instead of hardtack. There was actual hardtack at the bottom of the bag, but hopefully they wouldn’t have to break into it.
Sunny scanned the layers and the history of sedimentary rock they revealed. A minor earthquake two weeks ago had revealed new nodes of chert. It was a footnote for geologists, but newly revealed minerals presented juicy findings for even the most average artificer. Older long-wave magic energies often seeped into them, altering the construction of their magical lattice. He didn't know exactly what he could or would do with it yet, but that was the beauty of discovery. If all else failed, it was new lapidary material. Maybe he’d find a neat fossil.
“Lidea,” he called over his shoulder. “I want to move down a little.”
“Hold on. I’ll come with.” Lidea repacked their things and walked to meet him at a diagonal as he moved down the ledge of the cliff. He stopped, holding up his hand and signaling back to the trees. He moved slowly, ducking back into the sparse trees and brush. Lidea tucked down next to him.
“What’s up?” ey whispered low, but she saw them immediately.
They blended in with the scrubland grass and short trees, striped, pockmarked ungulates that took long strides between grazing spots. Cosacorre moved their huge, cylindrical bodies across the plains on four thick legs, two-toed feet launching them across the grasslands in great, pounding galumphs. Correlan grew things bigger than other worlds, and the herd was all mass and muscle. Their short, dual-pronged antlers spiraled up and down with short, sharp barbs that could tear out an eye when paired with the force behind their lunges. A third pair of limbs rotated out from the back of their shoulders, ending in pinchy three-fingered hands that brought flowers and grass to their snouts.
A particularly big one, the female in charge, lifted its square head and took a quick gaze over the landscape, glassy back eyes flicking around for danger, jaw moving around a smack of cud.
Lidea and Sunny both rolled onto the balls of their feet, bodies creaking with age in tandem as they settled into a position to book at a moment’s notice. Even a herd this size was relatively safe at this distance. Their technique for dealing with predation was "be big and heavy," so they didn’t lead with aggression. If they stayed out of sight and gave them space, there'd be no issues.
“I don’t come out to this part of the continent that often," Lidea said quietly. "Never seen one of these this close before."
"Same and same," Sunny replied.
"Where are you going?”
They both jumped, falling on top of each other while still trying to keep their voices down. A water elf moved out of the darkest cover of the trees, light casting down through the leaves to create speckles on his deep tawny skin. The light effects complemented his natural splash of dark freckles. He kept his curly, ash-brown hair in check with two scalp-grazing braids that ended just above his shoulders with little lace bows.
The water elf’s shirt was light-colored and billowy, clasped at the wrists and throat to protect him from the sun. His pants were darker and thicker, and he’d folded them up to his knees, creating leggy, sinewy space before his simple, flexible ankle boots. A wrap woven in bright, zig-zagging stripes was tied around his waist to keep it out of the way in the heat of the day.
He split his attention between watching the herd, digging for something quietly in the brush, and waiting for an answer to his question.
“Um,” Sunny hedged as he formed the shape of his answer. “Further down toward the new cleavage.”
The water elf nodded as he found his quarry in the bush. A small box painted to look like the surrounding foliage shifted between his hands as he popped a panel on the back.
“Oh, wildlife camera,” Lidea breathed. Ey had been rolling through eir brain what would bring a water elf this far from their territory along the southern coast, the complete other side of the canyon. Not that they couldn’t travel, of course. After humans, elves shared second place with ariesians in terms of their diasporic tendrils, but they also folded in on themselves. Water elves took this latter bit to an extreme and had practically opted out of society at large.
Sunny moved around behind Lidea to squat closer to the water elf.
“Is that the new image storage medium?”
“Yeah.”
The water elf pulled a silver disk the size of his palm out of the back and held it up to flash against the blue sky, light catching on a red gemstone in the center. There were images in black and white pressed into the concentric grooves, only visible with another specialty device. This was the smallest these disks had ever been. He tucked it into a little flap on the outside of his satchel and put in a new one.
“Go up that way,” the water elf said, pointing through the scant trees. “There’s a path through the rocks that they don’t like. That should swing you around.”
“Thanks,” Lidea said. "Let's get going, Sunny honey. We're on a timeline." Ey pressed eir hand around his wrist and pulled them off in the direction the water elf had pointed. They picked through the rocks, keeping a distance from the herd as they moved. Sunny grumbled a little, toeing rocks aside gently, checking them with a net of magic for anything interesting.
"Something the matter?" Lidea asked.
"I wanted to ask him more about the trail camera."
Lidea snapped eir tongue against eir teeth.
"Yeah, and you would have gotten deep in the weeds on it. We have a schedule."
"You don't have to manage me, Liddy."
"I-I'm sorry." Lidea touched eir fingers to the back of his hand. He hesitated, bouncing his hand off of eirs, then relented, folding his fingers into eirs.
"You're probably right. I would have gotten distracted."
"But I don't need to act like your mommy."
Sunny clenched eir hand, thinking through his touch.
"Compromise," Lidea suggested. "I'll only step in when I think you're being particularly curmudgeonly or distractible."
"I'm always curmudgeonly and distractible according to you, so…" But a pulse of warmth washed over him. He squeezed eir hand gently, then more firmly when he reached a drop in the ground that was wider than his gait, leaning on Lidea's complementary taller form. He let em lead him through the spikes of outcropping.
They found the new cleavage easily, bands of freshly exposed rock shimmering and sharp under the bans of more weathered stuff. A vague impression of the geologists who had preceded them peppered through the landscape, but nothing so specific to nail it down to a particular agency or school. A pocket of rock that had clearly been hit with a hammer. A scrap of cloth trash caught on the spine of a succulent. Everyone knew better than to leave their shit laying around in a territory that wasn't there's.
Lidea left Sunny to it and took off wandering further up the cliff face, running eir hands over the rocks. A few rock fliers fluttered out of a crevice and tried to chase em off. Ey obliged, skipping a little further down toward a deep groove. Ey walked eir eyes up and down it, looking for the imprint of fossils, one thing ey had picked up a knack for from time spent with Sunny.
A little squeak shook out from the crevice, and ey waited for the animal it belonged to scurry off or out. No sound of little claws on little rocks, though. Ey peered a little closer into the gap, curiosity taking em. There was something there, but it was bigger than expected. It chattered again and shifted, six limbs moving in the darkness. Lidea lit the top of eir staff and poked it into the crevice.
"Shit."
It wasn't an animal. It was a child.
Ey didn’t know corrocco’s well enough to guess their age to the year accurately, especially considering the massive difference in size between the three sexes. This was most definitely a kid, though, probably of primary school age.
"Darling, you have got to be far from home," ey muttered to emself, unsure if they understood Ilurian. Ey switched over to a combination of Universal Sign and Cottа́l.
"Hey, come on out. Do you need water?” The accompanying Sign was shorter and stockier, subjects and predicates smashed together to form ideas almost everyone could convey agnostic of their native spoken language. “Move to me. Need water?”
The mention of water got them to twitch eagerly, but they weren't moving. Which was actually smart. In their place, ey’d rather take eir chances with a rock crevice over some random person. Especially anyone even remotely human-looking.
Ey moved to eir knees to get smaller and dug in eir bag. This was what the badges and emblems of the higher ranks and orders were for: proof that you were being held to a higher echelon of expectation. Ey found eir metal badge and held it to the opening of the crevice.
"I'm a magician. A kýrio. If you come out, I can help you."
The badge was enough to convince them Lidea didn't intend them harm, and they scrambled out of the crevice to flop on the ground tiredly.
Even as a child, the corrocco almost hit eir chest when standing, most of their height in their back arms. They were bipedal on a technicality, long, flexible bodies carried on bendy legs that ended in prehensile claw-feet, these particular ones shod in soft sandals that left their toes free to grip whatever climbing surface was at hand. Their arms were longer than their legs, and they rested their symmetrical hands on their thighs as they crept closer, double thumbs tapping each other across their palms. Their back limbs formed the most distinct part of their silhouette, long stilting things that reached over their head before turning downward on a backward joint. They transferred their weight to them as they walked sometimes. Now, the child used them to launch themselves forward a few steps at once, dropping into a crouch across from Lidea.
They snatched the water flask from Lidea's hands and gulped down several long draws. The water splashed out over their hard, beaky mouth and shallow chin to wet the front of their rough spun tunic. Sweat coated their skin, making their fine, feathery hair damp right to the ends. Their wide, flat ears twitched at the sound of Sunny moving in the distance.
Lidea tapped the flask and brought it away from the corrocco's mouth.
"Little drinks, darling."
They nodded, eyes flashing huge at eir before narrowing down against the sun. They chattered in their native language of clicks and growls before remembering to add Sign.
"Thank you. Drink. Big thirsty. Hungry."
"My name's Lidea," ey said, digging into eir bag for some dried meat strips. "That's my friend Sunny down there. What's your name?"
They gave a Sign-name that had the words for "sky" and "glass " in it.
"Can I call you 'Sky?' Would that be okay?"
The coccorro rolled the thought around and then made half the sign for sky. "Blue."
"Blue? You prefer Blue?"
They nodded then grabbed for the jerky. Their small, sharp teeth shredded it, making quick work of the lean, dry meat.
"Slowly," Lidea reminded them, and they nodded again. Elves and sylvan kept multiple names for complex, sometimes stupid cultural reasons. The Corre indige did it because of physiology. They could make sounds other species couldn't even hear, and their laryngeal construction favored vibrating growls, squawks, and squeals to the exclusion of pretty much every other phoneme type. Cyndaren and pherax with an A chromosome had a broad enough set of sounds to speak languages outside their collective. Something to do with proteins that created extra malleable tissue. Blue would never be able to do that.
“What the fuck?” Sunny was tucking a rock into his bag as he picked over the rough terrain along the escarpment drop.
“Were there any alerts for missing kids at the travel station?” Lidea asked.
“I didn’t think to look.” Sunny sat next to them on a rock. “Hey, little buddy.”
Blue moved tighter into the Lidea, curling up in the cavity of eir arms and digging their face into eir shoulder.
“See who you can raise on the radio,” Lidea said. Ey hugged Blue tighter while Sunny dug around for the handheld.
“This is Grandmaster Artificer Childress calling for the constabulary. Stop.” Sunny held the radio up between them. It was the middle of the day, so the radio switchboard responded quickly.
“Received, Master Childress. Constabulary representative available on line 147. Stop.”
“Received. Switching.” Sunny fiddled with the dial to send him over to the right frequency, and the officer on the other end was already calling out for him.
Sunny ran the officer on the other end through the situation. Little Blue had indeed been reported missing two days ago, separated from a hunting party that had set out from one of the small corrocco villages at the base of the mountain. The search teams hadn’t made it that far yet.
He was double-B gender, eight years old. He would get bigger, eye-level in the end. Certainly not the size of his AB compatriots and double-A and. No major medical needs to speak of, so it was just a matter of getting him home safe and sound.
"If they can give us coordinates, we can bring him there," Lidea said. "Much faster than waiting for someone to come to us." Sunny conveyed this into the radio and received a hold in response. He rested the radio on his shoulder.
"If we do that," he said, "we're not making it back by tonight."
"That was already going to happen."
"Fair."
“Master Childress?” The radio buzzed, and Sunny returned to it.
“Sorry. I don’t know if you heard that, but we can take him to a neutral meeting point, stop.” They didn’t even know there were corrocco villages close enough to lose a child from. There was no way the corrocco would give them coordinates to an unmapped enclave.
“Let me confer with the locals. Hold for more information. Stop.”
The radio fell into static silence.
Blue had curled himself into Lidea’s body, but he leaned back now to give space to sign.
“Take home?” he asked.
“We’re working on it, buddy,” Lidea replied. Blue fell back against em, and ey ran eir hand up and down his back a few times. Ey set eir chin on his head and gave him a quick squeeze.
Something plasmatic boiled in Sunny’s throat, and Lidea cocked eir head as ey watched him tense, crunching eir brows in question. Neither of them could have biological children. Sort of. His was a birth defect he could get fixed whenever he wanted. He had just never bothered because he didn’t want kids. Probably. Maybe. Lidea’s sterility was cancer. They could have saved enough function to procreate with additional assistance, but it would have involved a more complex treatment plan and a much higher risk of recurrence. Cutting everything out was easier and safer in the long term. It had been an obvious decision. Not like ey ever wanted children, anyway. Probably.
That “probably” never quite tilting over to “definitely” haunted both of them, emerging at weird times. This was one of them.
The radio crackled back to life.
“I’ve gotten confirmation. Stand by for coordinates.”
“They didn’t ask to talk to Blue,” Lidea realized out loud. Working from coordinates was doable, but they had gotten some overland directions to follow as well. North up the highway to a certain roadhouse where local “order enforcement” would sort out the rest.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know what the protocol is for this type of thing, but it feels like talking to the victim should be in there. How do they know we’re telling the truth and not just trying to get information on an unmapped village?”
“Radio ID,” Sunny reminded em.
“Someone could have stolen our radio. Or maybe we were under duress. I don’t know. I’m bothered.”
Sunny took eir hand.
“The neutral location of a roadhouse is probably the buffer.”
Lidea wasn’t super convinced and vocalized that in a low hum.
“Look,” Sunny snapped, then immediately regretted it. Lidea thought quicker than him, and that came with overthinking when time allotted for it. He liked the former, so he needed to be soft with the latter.
“It’s fine. No one would be dumb enough to lie their way through the front door of a closed territory.”
“I’m going to ask some procedural questions when we get back.”
“Of course you are.”
Lidea pulled eir hand away.
“What’re you implying?”
Sunny clenched his jaw. Lidea didn’t put words in his mouth, but ey was certainly ready to argue about this now. He didn’t want to. He wanted to deflect with silence. That wouldn’t solve it, though.
Lidea watched his face change shape in agitation. He was already slow to put his thoughts into words, reticent to talk at all, and here ey was making it more difficult for him. Ey offered him the space to explain by forcing eir face into a neutral expression. Ey sort of made it, but not quite.
They both watched Blue as he moved in front of them, scurrying in a zigzag across the road on his feet and back limbs, drawn to every new shiny thing he saw on the side of the road. He found a crop of yellow flowers and plucked a few. He doubled back to give them to Lidea.
“Hair,” he signed. Ey tucked it behind eir ear, and Blue clapped. He looked between them. “No fight.”
Both their bodies relaxed from the shoulders down.
“We’re not fighting, kiddo, just having a conversation.” Sunny ruffled his fingers through the tuft of slightly longer feathery fur on the top of his head. Blue narrowed his eyes at them.
“No. Fight.” His hands were harder. More insistent, tone of voice pushing home the intent. He skittered ahead of them up the road, stopping ten feet ahead as if an invisible leash tethered him to Lidea’s hip.
"I'm sorry," Sunny said quietly. "You get focused on things. When something needs to be fixed, that’s a good thing. But you can't fix everything. Then you spiral. I don't like watching you do that."
Lidea allowed a brief gap for any additions Sunny wanted to make, but he settled his jaw back into a squared, straight alignment. Ey cleared eir throat in the transition.
"I don't see questioning police procedure as being unproductive," ey said. "I would hope that if someone found me injured at the bottom of a crevasse and called it in, whoever is in charge on the other side would bother to check in with me directly. Even if the person calling it in was an archmage or a mercenary captain or a whatever. We put too much trust in the civilian elite titles. They don't mean shit it terms of actually being a good person."
"Is that what's getting to you?"
"Maybe." And it was one of the rare times Lidea didn't know how to verbalize what ey was feeling. Wasn't even sure ey knew what it was.
Evening was coming on when their target roadhouse came into view. Waiting outside was a pair of cyndaren. Logically, this shouldn't have been weird. They had crossed the line into their "patrol lands" hours ago. It felt weird, though, this sudden reminder that their morphology was foreign to this planet.
Blue waited for them to catch up and took Lidea’s hand for the rest of the journey.
One cyndaren trotted up to meet them. They were the smallest of the four Corre indige by a fair amount, so they stayed between Sunny and Lidea's eye line as they approached. They walked on four thick limbs ending in split hooves. Their back limbs held their tactile hands, and they kept them resting, upside down, on top of their back, feathery fur in shades of blue and green hiding the form and angle. A long neck led to a square head sculpted into a short sorta-snout and tall, triangular ears. From the top of that head, the feathery fur began as a full mane behind their ears, ran down the top of the neck, blended with the back limbs and shoulders, then continued down the spine into a long, wide, brushing tail.
Underneath all the fluff and fur, a canvas one-piece jumpsuit kept their relatively bare underbelly safe from the elements. A small pack bounced up and down in rhythm with their movement.
Their hooves stomped a few times as the cyndaren drew up, and they lowered their head in a bow.
"I'm Emissary Thaetl Near-the-Blue-Rock." Their Cottа́l was thick but clear, the slightest gurgle in the back of the throat. They pulled a little folding ID wallet from an outside pocket of their bag and flashed the card inside. The last line of quick reference identifying information had the letters "AB" in the general space of sex designation.
"Do you have a preferred pronoun?” Thaetl asked. “You bipeds have so many of them.”
"I use 'he,'" Sunny said, showing his own identification card. "My fiancé uses 'ey.'" Thaetl swayed hir head again.
"That's all square." Ze dipped hir head down to Blue. Ze rattled off in a shared chirping language, the cadence rising in question. Blue nodded and explained something with his hands. Not Sign just childish gestures to put his thoughts in order. Thaetl liked whatever response ze got and gestured back down the road.
"Come along. You're staying with us tonight." Ze started trotting away.
Both Lidea and Sunny jogged to catch up. In the meantime, the other cyndaren had sauntered closer and met them. This one's visible fur was a sickly combination of chartreuse and turquoise. The canvas jumpsuit covered more of them, covering their fur with stretches of dark gray. Their loose mane and tail were braided down into tidy knots.
"This is Officer Fellerwhal," Thaetl introduced. "Ze's just here to shoot you if you weren't who you said you were."
“See, and you were worried about safety protocols,” Sunny said to Lidea, a grim smirk lifting the edge of his mouth.
“Shoot us with what?” Lidea asked. It had never occurred to em in all these years what kinds of weapons this collective of peoples used.
“A gun,” Fellerwhal replied blankly.
“What kind of gun?” Sunny’s whole body lifted in intellectual interest. Weapons weren’t his specialty, but any kind of hybrid gadgetry would have an artificer gnashing their teeth in intrigue. Guns conceptually weren’t all that complex. A lot of mechanical parts that knocked on each other in predictable ways. Bullets, though… Bullets relied on a very specific kind of combustion physics that lost more and more of its reliability the denser the ambient magic became.
Telekinetic magic or knife skills were more consistent.
Fellerwhal looked Sunny up and done, beady, mellow eyes sharpening.
“A gun that shoots.” Ze made a clicking sound that smacked the roof of hir wide mouth then muttered something that was distinctly insulting sounding but not in a vitriolic way. A general annoyance.
“Wait, so,” Lidea jumped back in. “Where are you taking us?”
“Back to the village,” Thaetl replied. “Blue’s mother is on the way, and she’d like to meet you when she arrives tomorrow morning. You’re perfectly welcome to do whatever, obviously. The roadhouse is safe most of the time. We have nicer beds, though. All up to you.”
It felt like a threat. Almost. Like the dull edge of a knife pressed a little too hard into the softest part of the throat. Better to keep an unknown close than let it wander along your borders unattended.
“We’d be happy to take advantage of your hospitality,” Lidea said for both of them.
A village or township or enclave looking to properly hide itself did so with layers and layers of magic. The cyndaren here didn’t bother with that, the first buildings visible on the flattish plane as they rounded a corner in the road. The buildings were mostly single-storied, an occasional two-story with covered lifts on the outside leading into exterior doors. Made of stone and tabby, the walls were rough but sturdy, large and squat to allow room for cyndaren to maneuver inside more easily. These first sets of buildings had walls that hinged outward to open during nice weather. The tracks in the dirt suggested they had been open only a few hours ago. A few cyndaren were still closing up shop, feather-fur in shades between blue and yellow ruffling at them as they passed.
Thaetl and Fellerwhal chattered at each other in some snippy snarls before the emissary rounded back a little to talk to them.
"We need to pass through the residential rings, so behave."
"We didn't intend otherwise," Lidea said, trying to dedicate the path they were taking through the blocks to memory. Sunny looked around in a general discovery pattern, looking for the different ways that the buildings came together. Blue had fallen between them, holding each of their hands.
They broke through a ring of roads, and the structure of the city shifted. One road was wider than the others and lined with a hip-high stone wall on the side toward the center of town. Less of a barricade, more of a demarcation between zones. They all passed through a break in the wall, and the buildings immediately crowded in on each other, bigger and bulkier and closer together.
The buildings had alleys in them that gave way to a small plaza and park, where it looked like most of the local population had gathered for the evening. A thunder of soft hooves moved through the sparse grass, kicking at rocks. It was mostly children making the noise, adults choosing to lie on the grass, legs curled underneath their bodies. A few cyndaren looked up as they passed, a sea of undulating feathers in shades between yellow and blue. Occasionally, a red or orange body moved among them before settling back down into the crowd. Officer Fellerwhal got a few greetings, but the bipeds weren’t of particular interest to the adults. Blue, however, picked up a few same-age companions as they walked, chattering aimlessly in the way that children did.
As they rounded a corner, a deep voice called out, and one of the cyndaren kids underfoot pulled away with a sigh. Lidea and Sunny turned to find the source of the voice. This cyndaren was larger than the others by a significant but not unreasonable or garish amount. Some of that size was plumage, green and yellow so bright it was neon in the fading orange light. It fluffed and puffed, pulling the kid underneath a wing-arm.
“Back to Mom,” Sunny muttered weirdly in Illurian. Lidea took a more thorough look around, paying closer attention to the size and shape of the crowd. Ey switched to Illurian when ey spoke.
“They’re all AB-gender,” Lidea said. Sunny perked up and gave a look around as well.
“Is that weird?”
Lidea tapped her fingertips against each other.
“Just the way the As and Bs can go together. Reproductively. A with B; AB with both and each other.” Lidea worked the square in eir head. “Assuming even distribution across all possible match-ups, half the population would be AB, then a quarter each double-A and B. That was the only homozygous person we’ve seen so far.”
“Is there…are you suggesting something?” Sunny lifted the edge of an eyebrow, a gesture reserved for the most suspicious of impulses.
“Oh, no. Just interesting. There’s probably some other quirk that affects everything. Ariesian genetic reproduction is deceptively complicated in terms of how hormone levels affect the viability of eggs with certain chromosomes.”
“Are you talking about ariesian two-part sex designation?” Thaetl turned back and asked in Cottа́l.
“Yeah, a little!” Lidea said back in the same language. “Oh. You understand Illurian.”
“Enough,” Thaetl replied.
Lidea cringed.
“Sorry for being overly clinical about reproduction. I was just noticing stuff.” Lidea dug the hand that wasn’t holding Blue’s into eir hip, fingers pressing to eir bone, hoping to escape out of this completely.
“I just appreciate you using the preferred terms instead of saying ‘third gender,’” Thaetl said.
“Oh. Yeah. Vestiges of human binary language.” Lidea hummed, unsure where to go in the conversation before deciding it was fine for it to be over.
Even being a species totally unlike their own in almost every single way that mattered, they both recognized the building the cyndaren brought them to.
Next to the headquarters for the local enforcers (obvious by the cluster of cyndaren nearby in the same uniform), was another low, squat building. The only way in was through the fence that ran between the building and the station. So you didn’t have to go through the station to get to it, but there wasn’t a way to go to and from without someone in the building next door being alerted.
There were myriad complex social norms about offering shelter to the weary traveler, but closed communities were closed for a reason. This little house wasn’t a jail, per se, but a “we need to put you somewhere where we can watch you” building.
Through the gate, the house opened into a wide multipurpose room: kitchen, dining, sitting. Low sofas crouched in a circle around a low table, and the walls were lined with curtained doorways. One curtain twitched aside as they entered, and a head peeked out. It was the water elf from the trail cam. He narrowed his eyes a little and then moved back into the room beyond.
"Alright," Thaetl said. "Take whichever room you prefer. I'm going to take Blue to the crèche. He'll have some other kids to play with." Thaetl leaned down to inform Blue of this change, and they chattered back and forth about it nicely before leaving.
Fellerwahl moved around the main room a few times, checking corners for an unknown something. Ze swung hir head to indicate ze wanted to talk to them in the corner for a moment. Hir voice dropped low, eyes darting to the room where the water elf was.
"If you get any weird feelings from him, go next door and tell someone immediately."
"Is he dangerous or something?" Lidea kept eir voice low, too, while Sunny just cast over his shoulder, watching for more movement behind the curtain.
"I don't know," Fellerwahl admitted. "When they met him at the edge of the territory, they called into Maethe to see if he was who he said he was. His ID checked out, but they asked us to hold him. We try to do each other favors, so we…insisted he stay here…But that's about it. No legal reason to jail or confine him. Just want to get a feel for him. Maybe he slips something to you." Fellerwahl gave a rattly, unsure flick of hir head then brought hir voice up again.
"There should still be some kebabs and fruit in the icebox. Some sweetbread in the cupboard. Help yourself." With another unsure flick, ze trotted back out of the holding cabin.
"They don't trust me. That's fair." That water elf sauntered out of the room he had claimed and went in for a handshake. "Araceli. We never did formal introductions."
"Grandmaster Artificer Sunny Childress." Sunny met him first, taking his hands. "This is my fiancé Kýrio-"
"Lidea is fine," ey said, hip checking Sunny to share the greeting. "What happened since we saw you last?"
Araceli moved gently toward one of the sofas and flopped down. Lidea and Sunny did the same, suddenly tired, dropping their bags next to them on the floor.
"It's not that exciting, actually. I was just checking a trail cam close to their territory line, a local enforcer came across me, then checked my ID. Little bit of radioing, and now I’m being held hostage.”
"You know what that's about?" Lidea asked.
"Oh, a hundred percent. Don't worry about it, though. What are you two doing out here?" The shift was obliquely evasive.
"Rock-hounding," Sunny replied. The outside of Lidea's hand tapped his knee. Ey didn't like these circumstances but had no idea how to convey them without sounding ridiculous. Ey didn’t even know why ey was so nervous. Maybe just the adrenaline of the day hitting em over and over in fresh waves.
Sunny hooked a pinky finger around eirs and squeezed before letting go again. Lidea rolled eir neck and sighed, trying to press the tension out through eir pores.
“You have any idea why they would want to keep us? We volunteered to bring the corrocco kid back to a neutral location, but they strong-armed us into staying.”
Araceli kicked his feet up on the low table, purple and pink striped socks worn a little at the toes and heels.
“When you can’t keep the devil out, you draw him close enough to count his footsteps. The Corre indige don’t like each other. Never have. Thing is, though, outside the occasional individual friendly arrangement, they dislike the rest of us even more.”
“We did kind of collectively invade their planet.” Lidea propped eir feet on the low table, edge pressing into the line of eir boots where the sole met the heel.
“Born, raised, and living on Latolan; I didn’t invade shit.” Sunny made to put his own feet on the table, realized his legs were too short to reach it comfortably at the current angle, and brought his ankle to his knee instead.
“You keep saying that until one of the carnivorous plants finally gets you,” Lidea chided.
“Point being,” Araceli needled, ”they’re only holding me because favors are currency. They’re holding you because you’re an unknown quantity, and they need time to decide how to handle you.”
“Don’t much like that,” Sunny muttered.
“Yeah, well, you can leave whenever you want. They won’t stop you.” Araceli stretched and stood up. “I need to get up and at ‘em early.” He knocked on the doorframe of the room he had claimed and turned back before he went inside. “When I’m not here tomorrow morning, can you affirm for them I’m not some weirdo stalking the border for nefarious purposes? I’m literally just checking trail cams. You saw me out there.” He paused, head against the doorframe for a moment. “Or whatever at this point. Doesn’t matter. Sleep well.”
It was deep into the night when Sunny woke up with his arm around Lidea’s waist and head pressed into the top of eir spine. He didn’t remember settling himself in that way, but he must have moved in the middle of the night. The bedroom was sparse, with a single floor bed two side tables at the head. There was only one blanket and a couple of old but well-kept pillows. It was still hot at night, so they hadn’t bothered with the blanket. Such close bed-sharing was new, though. They had shared rooms plenty of times. Laid out on the floor within reaching distance.
When faced with a room with a large, shareable pallet, though, their fatigue had taken them. It just seemed easier than trying to come up with some other, more conservative solution.
But then again, he’d asked to marry em. Fully intended it unless Lidea raised some actual objection. Sharing a bed with your partner…your spouse…was a normal thing to do. The concept still felt so foreign. So far away.
Something rustled in the main room of the cabin. That’s what had woken him up without realizing it. Now Lidea was doing the same, stirring from sound asleep to wide awake the way they all conditioned themselves to sleep when on the road. Ey realized Sunny’s arm was around em and gave it a little pat on top.
“Probably just Araceli taking off in the middle of the night.” Lidea shifted a little to catch a peek through the curtains. This time, a little crackling cry joined the shuffling. Lidea rolled away, scrambling to eir feet from eir knees. Sunny followed, a little slower to react.
Blue sat on a couch in the main room, looking forlorn and confused. He perked up when he spotted them and scrambled over into Lidea’s arms.
“You need to go back to the creche, buddy,” Lidea cooed, unsure if he’d understand em without using sign.
“Not very secure if they let him get out,” Sunny said. “Maybe he’s safer here with us.”
“Yeah. Not like either of us knows where the crèche is.” Lidea considered the ajar front door and wondered how he had made it this far without being caught. Sunny moved over to close it and sighed, looking around for a clock.
“Whatever. Bring him in the room; we can make-“
Someone who knew what they were doing could break a window with less noise than you’d expect, but it was too loud to be covered by the general quiet of the night. It came from the room Araceli had been using. The next sounds were of someone breaking in instead of out. Sunny kneeled down next to where Lidea sat with Blue.
“Which of us is the better fighter?” he whispered.
“You. That training with mercenaries.”
Sunny grumbled. He was lucky he had forgotten to take off his cuffs, because they were the only thing he actually knew how to fight with. On the inside, in the space along his wrist, was a piece of thin-pressed metal. With a flex of magic, he pushed it out and reformed it to flow over his knuckles. He sculpted thick, sharp spikes on top, the kind that could rip into and out of skin with the flow of a well-placed punch.
He crouched as he moved forward, waiting for whoever was on the other side of the curtain to make a move. It was two people talking in low voices in another language he couldn't quite make out. It had the glissando of Traditional Elven but diverted roughly. Two silhouettes paired with the voices, and they shuffled around the room looking for something. Probably Araceli.
Sunny touched the edge of the curtain, moving it to look inside.
He didn't catch what hit him in the chest, but suddenly he was on his back, a sharp metal spike pressing into his shoulder without piercing it. A water elf was above him, narrow eyes flashing angrily in the dark.
"Where is he?" she snapped in Cottа́l.
"Back off!" For all eir protestations to the contrary, Lidea could really throw down when it was time for it. The short staff that was normally just eir magic focus became a bludgeon against the water elf's back. It staggered her, the end of the two-pronged spear slipping off Sunny's shoulder, tearing at it in the process. The water elf swung around, aiming for Lidea and catching eir in the knee. Ey slammed to the ground with a thunk but managed to swing eir body around back toward Sunny, avoiding whatever the next incoming strike might have been.
"Where is he?" the water elf repeated. "Did you help him escape? Did you do something to him?"
"For fuck's sake, Flor." The other water elf emerged from the room, yanking back the first before she struck again. "Do they look like fighters? And there's a kid here. Come on."
Lidea scooted across the room toward Blue and grabbed him closer, pulling him into eir body. He was shaking but calming down fast now that the fighting had ended.
"If we don't come back with him, we're fucked," said Flor, pulling back up to her full height and stowing her spear away on her back.
"Yeah, well, putting holes in academics isn't going to do that." This water elf was visibly older and leaned against the doorway casually. Both their outfits looked like uniforms, leather plating connected with small metal rings.
"We don't know where he went," Sunny said. "They stashed him here with us last night, but he snuck out at some point. We don't know anything." He moved up into a seated position, favoring the minor wound on his shoulder. Bringing Blue with eir, Lidea moved back to Sunny's side and tried to pull him around to look at the injury. He brushed eir off with a quiet assurance he was fine.
"What did he do, anyway?" Lidea asked. "If he has a warrant, just ask the cydaren to arrest him. This is way too much drama."
"It's what he's not doing," Flor snapped. "He's got a genetic responsibility as upper echelon, and he's skipping out."
"Arranged reproduction," Lidea said.
"Don't have an attitude," the older water elf said. "You're at least a little wood elf. You lot are worse."
"No attitude from me. Just thought we were the only ones this hard stuck on genes. The hit squad's a bit much." Lidea caught the weird glance that Sunny gave em, but flicked some fingers that they could discuss it later.
The older water elf gave a click of derision.
"You should see how the Corre indige manage themselves when they think the rest of us aren’t looking. The cyndaren have spent the last century controlling for a mostly AB population because the single letters are ‘less useful.’”
"Yeah, well, we're all monsters, I guess," Lidea said, moving to eir feet. "Can you…go…I guess? Let us get a few more hours of sleep?"
The two chatted with each other for a moment. Flor took off back into the room, moving out through the window again.
“I’ll be staying in case he comes back. You two sleep well.” The older water elf moved back into the room, behind Flor, closing the curtain behind them.
“It’s been barely twenty-four hours since we left the travel station, but it’s felt like a week.” Lidea rolled eir fingers through Sunny’s hair. He mumbled vaguely in reply. Blue had switched favorites to Sunny, and the corrocco wrapped an arm around Sunny’s arm.
Thaetl collected them early. He wasn’t surprised to see Blue had found his way out of the crèche and back to his rescuers. The more they ruminated on it, the apathy about his second disappearance started feeling more unsettling. Thaetl also didn’t seem to care that Araceli was gone and brushed off the story of the other water elves with disinterest.
When brought to the edge of the town again, they re-met Fellerwahl and regaled hir with the story. Ze had a response, but it rang more annoyed than concerned or distressed. The dynamic that underpinned this whole inter-species relationship was simply too complex to take in all at once.
“You called me your fiancé yesterday,” Lidea said. Ey had been running through every conversation since yesterday, looking for hints and clues of how they got to this point, standing on a road outside a cyndaren village. When ey scanned their first meeting with the cyndaren, that piece struck out at em.
“I asked you to marry me and you said yes,” Sunny replied, his body stiff as if he had been caught.
“If I recall, my response was ‘not no,’ which isn’t exactly a ‘yes.’”
“Well, is there something else you can be? Too old to be someone’s boyfriend.”
“Suitor?”
“I don’t…I don’t know. I’ll just say friend until we’re married, then I can say spouse.”
“You’re really just going to push it until I give in.”
“Manifesting.”
“They’re here.” Fellerwahl interrupted.
Blue saw the small group first, broke free, and ran right toward them.
The adult corrocco were Blue’s shape, just expanded to six feet tall from top of head to bottom of feet. The back arms only added another half a foot in height as their proportions filled out. Of the convoy of six, four of them were most likely AB-gendered, fur pattern a more saturated chestnut brown compared to Blue’s flaxen coloration. Two of them were double-A. Huge, one black, one mahogany, slower moving but covering more ground with each lumbering step. They weren’t scary in an active way, too placid looking to start a fight as long as they were allowed their space. You had to watch out for how they ended a fight.
Blue ran up to meet the black one, diving hard into her arms. They chattered and whistled, his probable mother smoothing his fur down with her hands and brushing his head with her chin. She asked him a question, and he pulled her over to where Lidea and Sunny were standing.
Thaetl had a quick conversation with the corrocco woman as she approached, nodded, then turned to them.
“She said it’s easier if I just direct translate. This is Tzi-tzi, the kid’s mother, and she’s eternally grateful for finding her youngest and taking care of him.”
Thaetl extended their introductions to the corrocco. She bowed, and Sunny and Lidea mirrored the motion, neither sure what corrocco customs actually looked like. Lidea, in particular, found emself suddenly overwhelmed with how much ey didn’t actually know about anything.
Tzi-tzi asked them a question, holding out her hand. Thaetl translated.
“She wants to offer you a mark of favor from her…cluster…sorry. I’ve never translated that into Cottа́l before. It’s like a matrilineal grouping.”
“What um…what does that entail?” Lidea asked, being sure to focus eir attention on Tzi-tzi instead of Thaetl. Tzi-zi gestured that Lidea should give her eir hand, and ey obeyed. Tzi-zi drew up Lidea’s sleeve and tapped the interior of eir forearm.
“It’s a magic brand,” she explained through Thaetl. “Invisible to your eyes, but we can see it. It’s proof you’ve done my people a kindness.”
“Favors are currency,” Sunny muttered in Illurian, then held out his arm. Lidea blinked around, thinking, then nodded in agreement.
“We’d be honored,” ey said for the both of them.
Tzi-zi bowed again. Lidea waited for her to pull out some kind of needle or blade. Instead, she extended a clawed finger and set the tip of it to the inside of eir forearm. She drew a delicate shape against her skin, the contact burning as it went. Not too terribly painful. Like touching a hot pan for just a little too long, but the sensation was narrowed down into a pinprick shape.
Then it was done, and Lidea brought eir arm up to eir eyes. Whatever Tzi-zi said to the contrary, ey could vaguely see it: a thin white line that formed an abstract shape of overlapping squares diminishing into a spiral. Even as ey looked at it, though, it faded. Ey pulled a strand of extra magic off eir staff and passed it over the marking with eir other hand. The mark glowed again for a few long beats before fading again. Magic activation — something Lidea was very familiar with.
Sunny turned to em as Tzi-tzi finished his up, studying the design and the process in awe.
Blue slammed into Lidea’s body in a final hug, and Lidea leaned down to return it, giving him a squeeze. He did the same with Sunny, chattering the whole time. Tzi-zi pressed her giant hand to the side of each of their faces, covering them completely, and gave another bow. Then the interaction was done, Tzi-zi grabbing Blue around the waist and hauling him into her side. Thaetl trotted after the group, escorting them back the way they came.
Fedderwahl moved up into their eyeline.
“Those are useful if you ever get stuck in corrocco lands without advanced permission. Storm. Emergency. But don’t press it.”
“Didn’t plan on it,” Lidea said.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of my territory.”
They had traveled at a fast clip for almost an hour before they felt comfortable enough to slow down to properly talk.
“I didn’t know corrocco could use magic,” Sunny said, a slight edge of concern in his voice.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” Lidea admitted. “It makes sense, though, with the level of native ambient magic. Evolution and whatnot.”
“Hm,” Sunny decided. “Even though you physically can’t anymore, have you really never considered having kids?”
Lidea felt the knot form in eir throat, but ey swallowed it down.
“Why?”
“Just you with Blue,” Sunny said.”
“I…uh…” Eir choked. “Wood elves don’t like it when you make a half-elf.”
“Well, yeah.”
“They’re also not overly fond of us reproducing as a whole. So I just…Dad’s side always made me feel like having kids was something I shouldn’t want. Then the decision was taken away from me. So…I don’t know. Fostering and adoption are obvious answers. But I never wanted to do that alone, so I never thought more about it.”
“What if you had someone to raise a child with?” Sunny asked.
Lidea considered him sideways, then reached for his hand, clutching it desperately. Let him sit with the silence as his answer for just a little awhile. At least until ey knew what the shape of that answer looked like.
"Usually, two people go through a few more steps before getting to that point." Lidea ran eir fingers through Sunny's thick, black hair, fighting around the angles created with his head positioned in eir lap.
Ey dropped a fingertip over his thick eyebrows and sun-worn skin, freckled and tan. A hawkish triangular nose made his amber eyes look even deeper set under his prominent brow. A lot of mercenaries and other wanderers-by-trade who plied their profession across the connected worlds found themselves in a fight with their facial hair. A beard that was too long could be grabbed in a hand-to-hand fight, but taking time to shave while trying to keep up with the interworld gate schedules could be a pain in the ass. Sunny's never got too long, though, a remnant of his sylvan heritage. Maybe not. That was the problem with muddled bloodlines. A person never knew what they were going to get. The maelstrom of genetics had made Sunny short and broad, almost square when he hunched over. Both their bodies ran that fine line between functionally muscular and lean from frequent underfeeding. They both gained weight quickly when they had full access to consistent food.
One of those periods was about to come up, and ey looked forward to having a little extra softness for a while.
"I mean, we've certainly gotten past the getting to know you phase," Lidea sighed. "Sometimes I think I'd like to know you less after all these years."
Sunny rolled his eyes at em then closed them, focusing on the way eir long fingers stretched and scratched over his scalp. Ey was only half elf, but those were the genes that most strongly sketched their blueprint on eir body. Long, pulled thin against eir will, all bones and knobs and angles. Cartilage built at the top of eir ears to create points that ey had pierced through multiple times. Nothing big, of course.
Hair was the clue to the human side. Eirs was mahogany and left just long enough to form a spikey ponytail.
"Anyway, to jump to marriage when we're not even courting or dating or whatever the kids are calling it," Lidea wavered. "Not your most coherent strategy."
"We like each other well enough," Sunny replied. "People from noble houses marry for less."
"Well, we have the privileges of the civilian class, so we have to work a little harder at it. I think starting with kissing, at least."
Sunny made a noncommittal sound.
"Alpha Lidea?" The voice chirruped and flickered through the forest, finding eir in the old hunting blind and bludgeoning her over the head with one version of eir professional title.
"What do you need?" ey called back. The voice of one of the engineer corps was closer the next time it spoke.
"Can you turn off the stay-away magic? We need to move through here."
Lidea grumbled and then dropped eir hand to a small staff leaning against the wall of the blind. Ey pushed magic through it, and the wall of energy fell away in the distance. Steps moved off back into the trees.
Sunny sat up and turned.
"I didn't feel any stay-away magic," he said.
"I keyed it to let you through. I never want you to stay away."
"Hm."
He moved to his feet, and Lidea followed silently. If the crew was finishing out their initial area inspection, they would be needed soon.
They were silent as they moved through the trees back toward the edge of the town and outlying areas. The farms were generally safe from the sudden influx of water. That was the kind of mistake early settlers only needed to make once. They found a path through a giant rhubarb field, the hybrid bred for mass swallowing Sunny with its height. At the turns in the track, he pivoted gently toward Lidea, watching eir feet to see which way to move. He grunted at an apple-green flag staked into the soil, a reflective yellow stripe down the middle, and Lidea glanced down.
"Higher than usual this year if the waterline came this far," ey said.
"Silvertop Ford, probably," Sunny offered, skimming off the cream of the more complex hypothetical below it. That particular ford was in sylvan territory. Maintaining the integrity of the immediate local ecosystem to their standards didn't always align with the human-elven installed infrastructure nearby. Compromise was sometimes tricky, and the symptoms revealed themselves far too long after the fact. No one ever got hurt or went hungry, but sylvan didn't have a head for other people's purely monetary profits.
The color-coded flags dotted the roadway as they moved toward the center of town, shifting from somewhat cheery greens and yellows to oranges and reds marking more serious damage. Loose cobbles in the paving. Trees that had been buffeted by enough fast-moving water to pull them lightly from their soft soil, newly exposed roots crawling over dislodged rock clusters.
Despite the number of times they had been lent out to the corps of engineers, neither of them had bothered to commit the flag system to memory beyond vague notions of escalation. There was a key in their field books if it ever mattered, but they had developed an intrinsic understanding of any given crisis zone. If not, they could take direction.
Sunny paused mid-stride as the field path met the main highway. A fingerling of river shimmered at the far end of a muddy wallow. The recent flood had pushed silt and rocks a hundred yards, tearing up the narrow band of land between here and there. His eyes scanned the tousled landscape, and his hand found its mark with a diving strike. He stood, tossing the gray round rock in his hand a few times. A spark of magic rattled up underneath the embossed metal and leather bands around his wrists. He ran his thumb along the midline of the stone, and it cracked perfectly into two hemispheres. He opened it to reveal the white and blue architecture inside and held it up to Lidea.
"That's a pretty one," Lidea commented. Sunny nodded, opening the flap of his shoulder bag to peek inside. His nose crinkled on what he found. Instead, he unlatched an outer pocket on Lidea's backpack and tucked the rock inside. He gave it a pat and started walking again. Lidea rolled eir eyes and picked up eir pace behind him, almost overtaking him within a few of her doubly long steps.
The river reabsorbed its tendrils as they went, the edge of it growing closer and closer to the road as it widened until the only thing separating a hapless cart from the water was a narrow strip of grass and a sharp cliff.
Engineer corps members and volunteers swarmed the center of town as they followed the river into the main square. Half were beset with purpose, hauling burlap bags of sand away from their temporary levees toward either disposal or storage as appropriate. A bundle of agricultural and ecological specialists were finishing up taking samples from both the water and the river's edge, checking for changes in salinity or mineral deposits. It didn't change much about procedures, but data was data.
"We go through this every typhoon season," Sunny muttered.
"At least we're nowhere near the worst of it. Would you rather be down south?"
"Fuck, no."
Lidea smirked and let out a gentle huff in jest.
"What would you have them do exactly? They've built their whole lives and economy around the river."
"Not without a bridge, they don't."
Lidea followed his gaze to a wide stone bridge with an arc knocked out of the middle of it. The water below was black and brackish, still, occasional chunks of debris breaking the surface to reveal recognizable pieces of road and architecture. A piece of wood that sliced through the small rapids carried the telltale marks of a heavy cargo cart, so someone somewhere might have lost part of their shipment.
A smaller group of Engineer Corps were working out how to build a temporary scaffolding across the main bridge to the other side of town. One of the engineers— a bulky human with dark skin and a head of small black braids —found Sunny out of the corner of her eye.
"Grand Master Artificer Childress."
The full title was chunky with gristle and fat, and Sunny physically hunched under the weight of it.
"Whaddya need?" he called back, walking toward the broken bridge. "You all shouldn't be standing here on it like this. 'snot stable." The small group of engineers jumped back from the arc of the bridge immediately, huddling on solid land. The higher-ranking engineer — so labeled by the string of patches over her uniformed chest — moved with a little less panic.
"Is there anything you can do to get us across this gap?" the engineer asked. "Just a temporary measure. Maybe a handcart at a time, at most."
"When're the big rigs getting here? Cranes and shit?"
"Couple of days out still."
Lidea chuffed in annoyance from the road. They didn't get to go home until their part of the job was done. Their part of the job was done when all the foundations for reconstruction were in place. Those foundations were built on geographic surveys and heavy machinery. It's not that things were off-schedule or untimely. This was a rather good turnaround for hauling in big equipment during hurricane season. The whole privilege of working this far up the river, however, was that the jobs didn't usually require that extra effort. They were supposed to be shorter and less involved. Both of them had earned the right to slack off a little.
Sunny moved forward against his own advice and squatted at the edge of the break, throwing his shoulder bag over his back when it tried to drop between his thighs and got in the way.
"Matter," he muttered. "Need some more matter." The cluster of junior engineers scrambled, looking for solid materials. Sunny pawed at the bridge, hands sketching out the weaknesses and points of fracture with echograms of magic. He hummed and hawed as he thought, muttering under his breath about stress fractures and the limestone deposits underscoring the riverbed.
"Kýriolykós Lidea, can we get your help with something?" Lidea had been focusing on Sunny's form, but felt the movement of the young ariesian man drawing closer for several yards at this point. Ey startled a little at the Traditional Elven version of her title, though.
The ariesian had buzzed his raspberry blond hair short enough that the fleshy base of his dark gray spiral horns were particularly pronounced. He had attached a leather pencil pouch to the apex of his right horn, and the ends of his pens were decorated with brightly colored feathers. His uniform was Illurian Royal Agricultural Council, but the badges and accent suggested he was on loan from the Myrian Empire. Ey nodded for him to lead on.
Even with his concentration on the bridge, Sunny felt her move away, threads of intertwined magic pulling apart with a clutching, cracking yawn. He shook his head to snap back to attention. They both had work to do.
Lidea only half-watched where ey was going, trusting the expert paving of city civil engineers to get em where ey needed to be. Further from the coast, the houses took on a peaked shape, forming high cavities for heat to float into. The oldest buildings were most likely local wood and river clay. Ey knew to look for that much after all this time traveling with Sunny. The rest was outside the confines of eir expertise.
Maintaining a river town took a population of some degree, but humans in this part of the continent were disinclined toward bulking up into proper cities. Rugged individualism pushed them into clusters of homesteads, pretending to be independent from the urban center that gave them them the ability to live.
Outside a stout town hall, a pedal bus was poised to launch, and they swung on board. The collective faire was adding a round of charge to the battery, and ey settled into one of the pedal seats. The age of the model showed in the grind of the drive belt as ey set eir feet to the wooden foot holds. They crawled forward, gently passing a combination of exhausted locals and uniformed laborers, all color- and style-coded for their position and affiliation.
The locals preferred a flowy, light-colored, knee-length tunic, belted with a beaded sash, embroidered vest on top to bring color and shape. Sometimes ankle-length dresses or ballooning pants but always flowing and draped. The official uniforms from the local Royalty built from that base, changing out a pleated skirt for the tunic and adding a structured jacket. Emissaries from the Connected Government, like the Corps of Engineers, were put in uniforms cut to the same patterns wood elves had been wearing for a couple of centuries. A shirt with a stand-up collar and simple structure, long and straight all the way through the hips, over boxy pants of various lengths. Eir own outfit was of a similar make, long asymmetric coat over linen leggings. At one point it had been a bloody maroon, but time had faded it into a threadbare dust-brown. Ey touched eir shoulder, suddenly unsure if ey had pinned eir embroidered epaulet in place, the thing that displayed her rank and station within eir given organization. Ey hadn't. Ah well.
Ey couldn't see in her mind's eyes what Sunny had chosen to wear today, but he most certainly wasn't wearing any of his badges.
The tram trundled past the post office, a butcher, a bakery, a wagon works, dry goods store, a cheesemonger, a second bakery. There were agreements in places like this to not compete directly with one another. In the absence of a proper patisserie, one of those establishments focused on sweeter or more delicate foods.
The ariesian agricultural agent had them get off in front of a hospital building, fat and squat even for three stories. The river shuddered at the bottom of a long, wide incline. It was plenty to keep the river from threatening the bottom floors of the hospital but not quite enough to save the trees in the back garden. A few had taken enough damage to the trunks to form large gashes, and all of them had lost some lower branches. These were already stacked up neatly.
As they approached down a side path, ey immediately understood why they had asked em to come.
"Bidderbark tree is an interesting choice for a hospital garden," ey said.
"Yeah," the ariesian replied. "Scholar Andiero asked the hospital admin, and they said it's been here longer than any of them."
"Certainly big enough around for it."
A fae-child — tall and angular with tan skin, light hair, and pointed ears — met eir at the edge of the path, holding out a hand for a shake. Ey took it, bracing for the weird flow of energy that would come through their bio-magical auras. Humans read like humans. Elves read like elves. No two cross-breeds, like eirself, read the same, their shape determined by whatever specific genetic ratios they came away with.
Fae-children were the only uniformally balanced genetic blend of the two species, a self-propagating hybrid germinated at the nexus of two ancient population clusters. That perfection grated against eir comparatively piecemeal bio-magic field and caught itself on the ragged edges.
Ey withstood the handshake long enough to not seem rude, then let eirself be lead to the base of the tree in question. A massive gash leaked black-green xylem where debris had smashed a foot-wide hole in the widest part of the tree. Magic poured out, invisible syrup that formed a sticky pool at the base of the tree. It had the hollow of footsteps where anyone insensitive to magic would have walked through aimlessly. Ey hovered on the edge, considering its dimensions.
Every world had a different magical density. Here, Correlan, leaned toward the denser side, but it had wild variances that weren't nearly as common on other worlds. This particular patch of northeast Illuria was stable, so this amount of concentrated magic didn't require more than a basic standard of care. On a higher-density world or area, ey would be struggling through some nausea, at minimum, in a situation like this.
Lidea's short staff came out of a hip holster, and ey shook out a collapsible part in the interior. With the metal tip touched to the soil, ey used the differential in energy to trace the edge of the pooling magic in the dirt.
"More than I realized," Scholar Andiero chirped. "Do you have any experience in magi-horticulture?"
"I'm more of a physicist," Lidea replied absently, still trying to sketch the rate and flow of the magic spill. This seemed like a lot of magic energy loss by pure volume alone. Ey gazed up through the branches of the tree looking for signs of sickness and decay. Nothing stood out immediately, but then...again...ey wasn't an arborist.
"So what I'm thinking," Andiero began. Lidea stopped her with a raised hand.
Ey sunk eir staff into the soil between two roots, trying not to damage any of the tree as ey pushed deeper. Pulling in through the mineral cluster at the head of the staff, ey pulsed magic down into the dirt. A fractal diagram of magic blew up under eir feet, hiccuping around tree roots and rocks, fermented magic chunnels through the limestone groundwork. The tree wasn't dying because it was maintaining it's magic pressure by drawing up groundmagic to supplement what it brought in through its leaves. This wouldn't be a problem if it was cycling it regularly back into the atmosphere. It wasn't though; instead, slopping its homeostasis across the grass. But then again again, ey wasn't an ecologist.
Ey was just a weirdo who could change the frequency of magic and move it around.
Lidea pulled eir staff from the ground then back to Andiero.
"You need to watch for magic hollows when you're working down here," Lidea said starkly. Ey gestured at the tree. "What else do you need me for?"
Sunny touched Lidea's elbow as ey stood watching the arborists graft compatible donor material to the hole in the tree. As their energies approached one another, their auras reached out to grab each other again. Sunny only needed to move vaguely in the same direction to track em down, following the beacon of eir magic effusion in the general static energy of life.
"Lid?" he asked.
"They're fixing the tree. They didn't have a magician with them but needed to make sure the magic flow was restored."
"There're tools for that."
"And yet they still need us sometimes."
Sunny grunted in something between derision and annoyance.
"Subterranean magic pockets," Sunny said.
"Yeah, I noticed them, too. How's the bridge repair?"
"Idiots don't know what they're looking for."
"You need to be nicer to the corps people," Lidea admonished. "They're just doing their job, same as us."
"I don't call them idiots to their faces." Sunny's body hunched a little shorter in the semblance of a pout.
"You know, I actually like working despite complaints to the contrary. Like the ability to trade my paycheck for goods and services. And we might be in demand, but you still have to be nice to people. Don't have infinite goodwill."
"You might not, but I do."
"What you have isn't goodwill, it's a hostage negotiation." Lidea pressed eir palm to his temple and shoved him a little. Sunny flashed a microsecond of a grin. Statistically, he couldn't be the only one in the entire connected worlds who could do exactly what he did, but damn if he wasn't the only one on the mercenary guild payroll and available for hire.
"They recently renovated the hospital," Lidea said. "There might be leftover construction material somewhere."
"That was my plan in coming over here."
"You didn't just miss me?"
"Always miss you." Sunny moved away from eir elbow to head for the hospital.
Sunny felt eir eyes on his back as he worked. His wasn't a talent that tended toward flourishes and flair, but the overwhelming urge to show off rose in his chest when Lidea was around to watch. He needed to concentrate. He moved the sensation of Lidea's presence into the back of his mind, into a little display case where he could look at it whenever he needed to but wouldn't otherwise bother him.
He had found chunks of concrete and steel in a disposal staging area. After getting some junior engineers to haul it back, he was able to scrap together enough good matter to make this bridge functional.
Concrete was good. He could separate the aggregates from the cement, reshape them, push water in and out until things hardened back into place.
He worked quickly, breathing magic in through his forearm bracers, enjoying the familiar burn as the energy ran hot along his ulnar nerve from elbow to pinky finger. It dripped over his fingers, and he shifted the waveforms to what he needed, decades of education blending with instinct to push the job forward before the higher parts of his brain caught up.
Sunny called over an engineer to stabilize him via his back brace while he leaned over the first stretch of the gap. He pulled the two sides together and let out a breath. He shook off the engineer and moved down the line, watching the water disappear under him as he brought the bridge back together. One slip, one badly placed reinforcement, and he would tumble into the river below, carried downstream to wherever.
He'd probably be fine. The water level was mostly back to normal. They hadn't even seen any flow reversal this far up according to the scientists he had been eavesdropping on, while the engineers failed to get him what he needed. It didn't flow particularly fast through town, and it bottomed out not far downstream from where he had picked up the geode. Some dockworkers on the pedal tram had brought it up in a conversation about pre-planning for the dry season. As long as he kept his senses about him, head above water, he'd find a place to get a foothold and drag himself out of the water, soggy but in good shape.
No need to test it.
The last seam closed up, and he patted it. He stood and shifted his weight across the fixed expanse, stomping his boots and in key locations, listening for the echo of magic through the material. He nodded.
"No more than six hundred kilos across here at a time, for now. No pedal cars. No horses. Just people with hand trucks. Make it work." He had gotten the actual load limit closer to a thousand, but no one ever adhered strictly to the posted load limits. When they invariably overshot it, they'd still be in safe territory. Lower loads would also, hopefully, save him from having to make any repairs before the big equipment got here.
"Do you all understand?" He peered around at the engineers, and they nodded. "I need verbal confirmation."
The senior engineer who had first greeted them, stepped forward.
"Six hundred kilos. Only hand carts. No vehicles or pack animals."
Sunny nodded that he was satisfied with this exchange, then moved away to stand beside Lidea.
"Tree?" he asked.
"Fixed up and flowing again from what I can sense. But I'm not an arborist."
"Hm." Sunny glanced over the crowd who had shown up to watch him work, all of them now scurrying back to whatever they were supposed to be doing. "Do we have our room assignments?"
"Was about to go check." Lidea touched eir fingers to his spine then threw eir gaze across the square to a four-story hotel, the tallest building in town made into a command center.
Correlan Disaster Relief and Management (part of a bigger interworld government program) was very good at what they did mostly because it was run by elves who worked there for several decades at a time. Probably a century for the oldest ones. It was a lot easier to nail down and streamline procedures when they weren't losing traction to training new advocates.
"Where did you leave your duffel this morning?" Lidea asked him as they moved in into the lobby, looking around at the "stuff" staging area, the place where incoming contractors could leave their suitcases, packs, or other equipment until they figured out where to put it permanently.
"Already have a room. Came in with Hart company last night."
Lidea hummed. At some point in the past, ey would have asked him why he had spoken in "we's" and "us's" when it was only eir room assignment they were concerned about, but ey had long ago learned to drop those kinds of curiosities.
"Eliadea kat Panapole? I was told to expect you, soon."
Lidea whipped around to a young wood elf woman, prim and sleek, cornsilk hair pulled into a tight braid down her back. Her narrow eyes flashed cerulean blue over her clipboard, a shade of stark surprise pulling at her features in a reflection of Lidea's physical response.
"I don't typically use my full Elven name," Lidea said.
"Oh. Pardon. I'm sorry, your common name isn't-"
"Lidea." Lidea tilted the clipboard down to find her name. "Where have they put me..." Ey rolled eir hand that the wood elf woman should introduce herself.
"Oh. Hades." She made a half bow at her waist. "Um. Yeah. Let me see where they put you." It was taking everything in Hades to skip the full introduction with markers of origin, but Lidea had set the precedent in the conversation. Ey might have been half human. Ey might have been a greenwitch. But ey was still older with a CV that made up for eir physiological failings.
"Kid," Lidea said, "just put down that I'm bunking with Sunny Childress." Ey turned to Sunny. "They gave you your own room, right?"
"Always do."
"Okay. Problem solved, and it probably opens up a room."
Hades's fingers clutched around the board.
"Oh. Um. Okay." She made a quick, scratching note. "Then...um...anything else I can help you with?"
"You look nervous. Calm down." Lidea clucked. Ey waved Hades off then moved to retrieve eir bag from where ey had stationed it.
"Kýriolykós Lidea, I-"
Lidea glanced over eir shoulder to see whatever thing the girl needed. She just snapped her jaw shut and shook her head.
"Nevermind." Her braid swished as she scurried off toward something else.
"Kids," Sunny muttered.
"You thought any more about what I said this morning?"
Sunny's voice felt heavy in the dark, dripping down over his lips and chin and into the whorls of his ears. Lidea squirmed on the floor next to him, trying to get comfortable. Who got the bed was an argument they always cut through by just making a giant shared palette on the floor. It was worse and worse for their backs as the years progressed.
Lidea turned over to trace his profile in the low-light with eir eyes. Ey tapped the tip of his nose.
"What does being married look like to you, exactly? Neither of us can have kids. You have your seminars you go back to Latolan for, but I just have my room at the guild. I'm only there maybe a collective twelve weeks out of the whole year. Yeah, we've gotten really good at syncing our schedules to work on jobs together, but we still go weeks without seeing each other. What kind of life do you want to build?
Sunny stared at the wooden ceiling, running the question through a sieve, trying to find the most substantial parts of the answer.
"I can put your name on the deed of my house," Sunny replied. "The gaps between jobs you could live there instead of the guild. If we're next of kin, we can make medical decisions for each other."
Lidea reached across the small gap. Ey scrabbled with the floor until ey found his head and ran eir fingers through his hair.
"Pragmatic. Like always." Eir thumb drifted over the slope of his forehead. "What would our married life look like? Two ships passing in the night? It it a closed marriage? Open? Open with caveats? Good old mercenary monogamy?"
Sunny tensed under eir hand.
"Oh. Sex. Right."
"You asked me to marry you without thinking about the sex part?"
"Well, is there someone you're hooking up with right now?" His voice cracked with panic, something deep he had never seen before creaking open to reveal it's bloody inner workings.
"No, not really. I actually don't know how long it's been. You know me, it's not a high priority."
"Yeah..." He lifted his hand to lay gently on top of hers on the crest of his head. Eir fingers were cold. He brought eir hand down to rest on his chest, warming it. They had never held hands before. Maybe that's where they needed to start if ey was ever going to take his proposal seriously. Ey didn't pull eir hand back, and they both fell asleep in the silence.
It was a nice morning for a little light alcohol on a deck overlooking the river in a small café that hadn't managed to take any damage from the recent flooding. Sunny had already thrown back a couple of vodka and tomato cocktails, but Lidea had to sip eir sparkling human-made wine slowly to not get drunk. It was one of the elven heritages that no one escaped.
On top of the table, they both leaned over a packet of geological maps of the city and surrounding areas provided by the Corps of Engineers, dragging color-coded markers into lopsided polygons around points of magical interest.
"This cluster of bidderbark trees makes me nervous," Lidea said, tapping an image from a hot air balloon camera. "They don't normally grow this close together naturally, and they should have been cleared out a little. Wonder if its the same germ line with the tree behind the hospital. Some kind of...spreader event...What do you think?" Lidea glanced over at Sunny. He stared at the picture, sipping his drink for a few long moments before realizing Lidea had asked him something.
"I'm not an arborist."
Lidea kicked his ankle a little.
"I can do some sketchouts of the area, but I'd need your help," Lidea said, tilting eir head into a little bit of a pout.
"You don't have to try to convince me."
"Lidea?"
Hades appeared awkwardly In a pocket door on the edge of the deck.
"I was told you don't like your full title," she said as she approached. "They told me you and Sunny would be together, probably-"
"I will have you use my full title," Sunny said, voice deadpan. Lidea clucked at him.
"Ignore him. What did you need, darling?" They all politely ignored that full elven lifespans probably closed the perceived age-gap between them. Hades had the sense of upper echeleon about her, too, and they coddled their young.
"I did another once-over of the assignments, and I can put you in your own room. I figured out what happened on the first organization round."
"We were assigned the same room right from the get-go, but your higher up forgot to tell you or make the note in the paperwork.." Lidea found eirself arching an eyebrow in a way particular to wood elves, and ey forced eir face to relax out of it.
"Uh...yes..." Hades responded.
"Well, now you know," Sunny grumbled, leaning back over the map to escape the conversation. Hades leaned against the railing of the patio.
"So you don't need the extra room?" she asked.
"No, we're fine. You can go."
Yet Hades stayed hovering a few feet away, worrying the end of her braid over her shoulder. Lidea ignored her, dropping back down over the map to pick up where ey left off. Another several awkward moments passed while Hades decided on whatever other thing she wanted to bring up. She finally left without making that decision, in the end.
"Fucking elves," Sunny said. Lidea waited for him to follow up on that.
"Present company excluded?" ey suggested.
"No. The elf part of you is the worst part."
"You're going to ask me to marry you then insult me?" Ey elbowed him, causing the marker to skitter. Sunny looked up at eir, deadpan.
"Being insulting doesn't detract from a true statement."
Ey met his toothless gaze, and he matched eir energy.
"I guess you get a permanent pass. You're lucky you're cute." Ey pulled the sheaf of maps together. "Get the markers. Let's go look at these trees." Ey moved away from the table toward the patio door.
Sunny stared after eir for a moment.
"Wait, you think I'm cute?" He scrambled to pick up the markers and then followed.
"Why didn't you just go for an archery?" Sunny asked as they tracked down the path of the river. The main bridge was still holding fine as they moved over it even though Sunny had to snap at some people for taking a horse across.
This was the part of working recoveries that wore not just on them but every wanderer-by-trade that had been around for even a short amount of time. The almost disasters. The efforts that were more administrative than truly dangerous.
When a whole town was wiped out by a tornado, everyone walked on tenterhooks, picking through things delicately. Secondary grievous injury was always one misstep away when the building underneath was ready to collapse, and people acted like it.
When the danger wasn't so obvious, people were more likely to walk right into it without realizing. In their experience, the smaller jobs had the most injuries per person on the ground. That was why they so often took them this many years in, with the hope of offsetting those numbers with experience.
"Hm?" Lidea leaned into Sunny to indicate ey hadn't parsed his question.
"You're half human. You could have joined a mage guild and become an archmage. A kýrio is the same level of title."
"You could have done the same. Become a guild mage instead of a mercenary guild auxiliary."
"Hm. Material magic's a long way off from out-industrialized. Even then, we always need artificers."
"Yet, you're still doing site work. You could have your own artificer tower cluster. Cushy job on a Royal Magic Council. Actually teach full time. You could be very comfortable right now, and you choose...this." Ey kicked a rock into the brackish water.
"If I were in one spot, how often would I get to see you?" he replied to himself more than anything. He cleared his throat. "You deflected."
"The one time you want to press conversation..." Ey ran her fingers through his hair. "If you're a magician with at least one full-blooded elven grandparent, you're part of the Thýlalykófoton automatically. And if you're part of the Thýla, the mage guilds don't really want you. You can technically apply, but there's a lot of fluff about 'taking a spot.' You have to be very, very desirable. By the time I got to that point, I was already a year out from a kýrio. I'm not going to take an archery under those conditions. You either want me or you don't. Here."
Ey gestured toward the hospital across the river, using it to orient themselves to the patch of bidderbark trees. Sunny kept watching em as ey moved eir short staff through the grass, looking for magical currents underground.
"Can you give it a little imaging pulse, Sunny? I want to see where the roots are." Ey looked over eir shoulder to see him staring at em. "What?"
"You've never told me that story," he said. He pressed the heels of his shoes with the opposite toes, and they unlatched down the top, straps falling open into wide U shapes. He took off his socks and tucked them into his boots before stepping into the still-soggy grass. The bands around the lowers parts of his calves that matched the function of the ones around his forearms shimmied down into place around his ankles. He picked a current of magic up through them and shifted it to run under the soles of his feet and around his toes.
"It's not really a story, though, is it? Just...a set of circumstances. I don't know; it's never come up." Ey sunk her staff harder into the ground, focusing on the feel of that instead of the strange shape their conversation had taken. "Why did you even ask?"
"Because you hate your elven title so much. And I've never been able to get a good read on which half you prefer to lean on." He walked between stands of trees, digging the balls of his feet down with every step.
"Who says I need to 'lean' any which way?" Ey pulled eir staff from the ground and found another reference location to push it down into. A few more would give em the spatial data ey wanted.
"I'm not saying that," Sunny grumbled. This was why it was better he just keep his mouth shut. If he didn't talk, he didn't step in something unsettling. He glanced around a tree to watch em for a moment. Ey didn't look mad. Just tired, leaning on eir staff and tracing something under the dirt that he couldn't see, at the moment.
"I'm sorry if that came across offensive," he said quietly.
"I'm just trying to figure out what you're getting at, Sunny honey." Ey pulled the staff out and prodded at a different spot. "You're typically a little more straightforward. To a fault, even." Ey leaned on the staff and tracked him through the trees as he weaved in and out. "You don't have to pretend to be gentle with me."
Maybe I want to be, he thought. He cleared his throat again, throwing most of his concentration back into scouting the patterns of trees under the soil.
"Before I ever actually met you in-person, that you used the de-gendered Elven pronouns gave me a certain impression of you. Then you spent the next few years proving me wrong every single time I thought I had you figured out."
"Maybe you shouldn't draw broad conclusions based on parentage and linguistic preferences," ey said.
"Well, yes, I figured that out in the last decade." He checked his heel against the base of a tree, listening for an echo through the root structure.
"Has it really been a decade?"
"Twelve years last month if my math is right."
"That's more exact than I expected." Lidea pulled eir staff up and found a final measuring spot. Ey pushed as deeply as possible, stumbling when the end of the staff found a magic pocket. Sunny wandered back to stand next to Lidea.
"There's a picture of us on our first actual job together, and I wrote the date on the back. I was looking at it recently, and worked backward from memory."
"You keep a picture of us around?"
"Yes."
"Hm." Ey reached over and spread eir fingers through his hair. "You're so weird." Ey pulled eir staff up. "Let me see if I can project the magic eddies."
Ey drew up magic through the staff and left the converted energy hovering around the focus, thinking. Changing the color of light into a discernible shape was taught early because of how deceptively difficult it was to master. Ey did some quick calculus, then sketched out the path in eir head. With a mental flick, a fractaline path of orange-red light shot through the air in front of eir, branching and joining and re-branching to show the crossing paths of magic working through the underlayers of dirt and rock.
In the meantime, Sunny pulled his pouch of marking chalk from deep within his messenger bag. He went back into the trees to sprinkle it along the root lines and crushed it into the grass, leaving behind filmy white marks. He traced the light projections with his eyes as he circled them, ducking underneath them absently.
"This one." He patted a tree of significant girth. "It's pooling here. Creating an oversaturation."
"Yeah, but that's way too old a tree to just cut down."
"Not if it's dying," Sunny replied.
"Hm. Do you have another color to mark it with?"
He trotted back to his messenger bag and dug inside.
"Yeah. Some yellow, orange, red, pink. Guess we can just—"
A bell sounded from the center of town. A fire alert that could branch into other smaller disasters as needed.
They didn't talk. They just ran.
A fire cart dashed along the river, heading downstream A cluster of engineers ran behind it at top speed, falling behind. Lidea used eir long legs to catch up to the group ahead of Sunny.
"What's happening?" Ey kept pace with one of the engineers.
"Someone rammed a handcart into the railing of the bridge, and it gave way. A few people fell over."
"Shit." Sunny caught up with them, his shorter legs pumping extra hard to keep up. Another fire cart started coming up behind them, and Lidea leapt up on the back tailgate, threading eir arm through the ring grip. Sunny got smaller behind em as the cart picked up speed.
They caught up to a section of river that had flattened out into a shallower region, and a crowd had gathered on either side. Four people had been dragged downstream by the flow of the water, and now they grappled on ragged rocks jutting out of the river.
The fire crew on the other side had a floating line with a slightly weighted end, and one of them was swinging it around by the head. It flew across the water, landing only three-quarters of the way across.
"I've got it!" Lidea called out, skidding down the bank to get a littler closer to the water. Ey moved magic like a lasso on the end of eir staff, catching the other end of the floating line in a loop and dragging it all the way across. The fire team on this side of the river caught and anchored it.
From here, the rescue should have been easy. One victim was local fishing stock, so she knew immediately how to hook her elbow over the line and pull herself to the nearest shore. The two engineers watched her and figured it out quickly. They would have gotten training on this sort of thing, but the difference in theory versus practice made them a little less sure of their footing. The fourth victim was stuck, unmoving, right in the middle of the river, clinging desperately to a rock, one quick burst of water away from being knocked free.
Hades.
Damn it.
The emergency situation training for administration was generally "don't get into an emergency situation."
"Hades!" Lidea called. "Grab the line!" Hades spat the water out of her mouth and tried to lift her voice above the sound of the water.
"My foot is caught!"
"Damn it," Lidea muttered under eir breath. Ey turned to the fire and rescue next to eir. "How can I help with that?"
"How're your fluid mechanics?" he asked.
"Decent to good."
He nodded.
"Wait for these two to clear —" the fisher and one of the engineers were slowly approaching the shore, two rescuers waiting for them with outstretched arms "—can you do a barrier bubble around her? Get the water off her back..."
"...to see if she can dislodge herself. I know exactly what you're thinking. Okay." Lidea eased a little closer to the river while the rescuer shouted instructions to Hades.
Bubbles and fields were easy. Converting energy to force was the backbone of magical artifacting. Which also meant it was easy to be lazy. Ey focused in, pulling magic through the staff and forming it into a gently convex plate. From the shore, it wouldn't have looked like anything except maybe an indiscernible glint of slightly refracted light. Ey cast it along the surface of the water, skimming the edge to get a feel for the speed of the flow. From the top, the field slid down into the water, forming an airgap between Hades and the water rushing at her. The river split around her, forming faster moving ridges of piled water.
"Can you get your foot out?" The rescuer called. Lidea spread the field a little wider and pulled it back to give her more space, bearing down hard on the press of water beating at the shield. With a wriggle, though, Hades did it, yanking her foot free with her hands under her thigh. She gave a thumbs up and made to reach for the line. It was now on the other side of the field, though, and Hades's arm wouldn't pass through.
"Grab the line from this side," the rescuer shouted. "Grab it from this side and pass it around the field." He made a motion with his arms, showing the repositioning of the float line.
Hades stood in the hollow of the river, thinking, hands clenching and unclenching in fear and agitation. She visibly mouthed a few words of encouragement to herself, then reached for the line. She managed to get it over the top of the field. She gripped it hard and nodded that she was ready to start pulling herself through the water.
"I can move the force shield alongside her," Lidea said.
"Do it," the rescuer nodded and gestured that Hades should move toward them. They went slowly but steadily, moving step by step along the slushy, slippery bottom of the river. Hades was only a yard away when she slipped. She went down hard, smacking her head on the side of a rock. Not quite enough to knock out but enough to daze. Enough for the waster that had washed around the side of the shielding to take her away again.
Lidea dropped her staff and ran, dragging the bulb of magic behind em and letting eir shield break. The magic became a hook, and ey cast it out into the water, fishing, trying to find a body to stick to. It snagged a couple of large fish before finally finding Hades and pulling her back.
Ey bared down, using everything ey had to lift Hades's head above water. The pre-condensed magic was running out, and ey didn't know how to make more while still keeping a hook wrapped around Hades. Time and energy was running low for non-magical rescue crew to figure out a solution, but ey could hold.
Then the ground started to slip from under em, cracking at eir heel. The pressure of concentrated magic from above and riverlettes of ground-magic below were doing the very thing they were both worried about. The whole shoreline threatened to fall away into the water.
Time was about to narrow to a fine, intractable point.
It was a stupid play and ey knew it immediately.
That was the thing about advanced titles, though. They were all too often rewards for doing stupid shit and living to tell the tale.
"Clear the riverside," ey shouted. Keeping one hand curled around the magic net that kept the still struggling Hades aloft, ey used the other to drag eir staff closer through the still attached rope of magic. It whipped up into eir hand and ey slammed it into the dirt. Like ey hoped, it hit a pocket of energy. The magic surged up through the staff, bursting out of the focus at the top.
Ey pulled it down into the flow of magic and splashed the extra energy straight down into the water sloppily. Hades flopped in the crater of space. With the pressure of the rushing water gone, Lidea closed the net tighter around Hades's body and yanked it toward em. The elf tumbled onto the riverside with a gasp and scrambled for higher ground. Arms came around her to drag her in.
Lidea lost what happened after that as the ground gave way below her. The world became water and movement, one after the other in rapid succession.
"Lidea!"
Sunny felt the shift underground first, then traced back to the swell of magic above it, all as he crested the edge of the embankment. That elf-woman, Hades, was in the water, but Lidea snared her, body flowing through the movements lithely, drawing magic into graceful arcs that wrapped and ribboned em. Magic moved so fast when ey used it. He had never been able to keep up.
Another rattle of magic, and then the elven woman was safe on the shore. Then Sunny watched as Lidea's body lilted, thrown off balance by the counterweight of magic and the swell of water displaced by it.
It was all too quick. He needed to think. To combine parts and pieces at a level where they could braid together to create structure.
Fuck it.
He sunk his hands into the ground, looking for the edges of the riverbed and the limestone underneath it. It was stupid. Everything he was about to do was stupid.
The riverbed broke under his command and lifted, reaching upward past the surface of the water. Behind the line of rocks, the water rolled up on itself, foaming into a swath of whitewater. On the opposite side, the water slowed to a manageable stream. Lidea skidded to a halt, tumbling head over heels until ey flopped on eir side. Ey was breathing.
A rescuer got to em first, dragging em back up to the embankment. Sunny let the magic go, and the riverbed settled back into place slowly. The water rushed forward, filling everything back in as it went.
Sunny scrambled across the grass, trying to reach for Lidea.
"Childress, stop."
An arm came around his chest, lifting him as he lunged forward.
"They need to stabilize eir spine and get em to the hospital." The paramedic's voice rankled at his ears, but he fell back panting. He dropped to his knees, elbows in the soil to compose himself. This was something that could ultimately be fixed with magic, just not the kind he could do.
Sunny started, waking up from a doze to a hand moving through his hair. Lidea was next to him in the small family lounge on the first story emergency lounge of the hospital, leaning over the chair.
"Are you okay?" Sunny sat up, his hands finding a place around eir cheeks. Had he ever really touched em like this? It felt foreign on his skin but familiar in the deeper parts of him. Lidea nodded, wan and bruised on what little skin was visible.
"Did you really wait this whole time?" ey asked.
"They're really strict about family here. If I were your next of kin..." Sunny let that trail off. He had no intention of ever pushing em on the matter of marriage. Particularly not when ey was recovering like this. But he'd also had a lot of time to ruminate while waiting for em to be released.
"How's the elf, uh...Hades?" Sunny said, diverting.
"She got really cracked on the head. It sounds like they're keeping her. They wanted to do the same with me, but — "
"You don't like hospitals," Sunny finished for em.
"I do not." Lidea dropped eir free hand on his arm and rubbed it slowly, friction against his burr of arm hair creating a trickle of static between them.
"I didn't think you were dead," Sunny said, letting the words fall out unfiltered. "I was pretty certain you'd be just fine because that's the kind of person you are. But I kept thinking about that sort of...inevitability. And I...I don't want to do the rest of this without you. And I want more. I want to spend the rest of my life trying to build one with you."
"So you want to get married?"
Sunny lifted his arms and then dropped them with uncertain acquiescence.
Lidea curled eir hand harder in his hair then pulled him in. Ey pressed a kiss to the edge of his mouth, quick, bright, disappearing as soon as it started. Ey slipped eir hand into Sunny's.
"Not saying no, but maybe we take it one step at a time?"
Half-elven Lidea and a-little-of-everything Sunny can do magic (in fact are officially some of the best at it), and it pays pretty okay. Enough to make it worth it to travel around between worlds, taking odd jobs and contracts from their respective guilds. They've been best friends for a decade, passing in and out of each other's day-to-day lives depending on the job. But, as they get older, one of them is starting to look for something more.
An episodic, romantic fantasy adventure released in self-contained shorts. A queer deconstruction of the nature of romantic and platonic relationships and the nature of marriage.
On Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/401040239-the-artifice-of-us
On Inkitt: https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1549398
On site: https://pixelsandpins.com/theartificeofus/
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