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/
“You have too many friends, Sunny.” Lidea leaned a little harder against the railing of the cart, stretching against the balls joint of eir shoulder until it relaxed with a pop. A bunch of older injuries had been kicking up, lately.
“Acquaintances,” Sunny replied. “Well enough to know I’m reliable, not too well they don’t like me.”
"Either way, they always seem to come out of the woodwork at the most convenient times." Lidea ran eir finger along the back of Sunny's collar, fingertip tracing the crease of his neck.
"It's the mercenary guild. Everyone knows everyone. Bunch of gossips." Sunny leaned down into the cart bench, settling up against Lidea's side. Eir arm came around and dropped gently on his shoulder.
The job Sunny had picked up for them had come through Beni, a career mercenary he knew through the guild. It was escorting a low-frequency magic detection device to an archaeological dig out in the Latolan hinterlands. Backroad and jungle escort was its own genre of job with various degrees of complexity and danger. This particular variation was one of the low-risk ones that didn’t require fully armed guards.
Banditry in the jungles of Latolan was risky, as a rule. Magi-tech didn’t have the black market resale value to make it worth it.
It was the logistics around magical technical artificery that required babysitting. Like the magical ink infuser at the print shop, they had been reduced to the role of a warm body. A failsafe in case of magical breakdown.
Ey let the toe of eir boot strike the large canvas and metal box as ey brought eir foot over. At least it meant they got to take a cart all the way out there instead of having to walk it.
Looking at the contract, they were also staying for a week to "offer non-specific practical magical assistance as needed to the archaeological research team." Probably hauling and toting. A little magical elbow grease. If a magician could do something with a flick of a staff, that was always going to be preferable to more hands-on strenuous means.
"What company is Beni with?" Lidea asked.
"Graymalkin. That's Bullet Montgomery's group."
Lidea had had the pleasure of meeting her. She was sensible. Pragmatic. A personality to match the nickname. Enjoyed the letter of the law more than most of her contemporaries, so she also knew how to fold it into whatever shape she needed.
Beni would probably be equally sensible, so there was some hope that she had arranged for a sensible job.
Latolan roadhouses had a certain, strange charm to them. They were only partially subsidized by local taxes, so you still had to pay a small fee. Not nearly as much as a night in private, professional lodging, but money changing hands added a lovely inn-keeping quality to the whole affair.
They were also always busy.
There were two country highways that concentrically circled the city. Within that wagon wheel, the major arteries of the city tapered down into ambling creepers between the outer edges of urbia and the first rim highway. If they weren’t covered in vines or otherwise washed out, it was a long day by fast horse cart along one of these roads between the official city limits and the farthest highway. That’s where the roadhouses were, a single building to serve anyone who had to come through that intersection. The first stings of the cold season were crawling in, so a surge of season-change traffic pressed against the small cluster of buildings.
Their cart driver—a human with a “D” name they were both magically inclined to forget almost as soon as they heard it — pulled into one of the cart staging areas. Lidea dropped to the ground with their bags while Sunny positioned the large crate onto the lift that would bring it down from the bed of the cart.
“Who are we meeting again? What’s his name?” Lidea looked out over the little pseudo-townlette. This was the biggest of the Latolan roadhouses, the lodging joined by a few outbuildings selling food, supplies, and repairs. It was the sort of job where you made all your money during several significant pockets, and had to make it last all year. Not terribly different from how they both managed their own funds.
“Sallah,” Sunny replied. The crate moved over the ground with a crunch and a lilt, rugged wheels picking up bits of rock as Sunny pushed it along. “His name’s Sallah. I don’t know him, but Beni said he’d know us.”
“Oh, I don’t like that at all.” Lidea also put eir hand on the crate, but didn’t really contribute any additional force of note. “If we’re going to be taking him with us the rest of the way, I would have liked a little more information ahead of time. You need to ask more questions about who we’re working with.”
“He’s a scientist, Liddy. He’s not going to murder us in our sleep.”
“We just won’t see it coming.”
Sunny chuffed at em then put more force into moving the cart, getting them down the front drive a little quicker.
The people coming in from the wilderness back to the city would still be a few more hours, so the crowd gathered downstairs was probably on their way out. Stopping for the night before they ventured out into the great unknown or continued down the ring of highway.
The jungle would take the composure out of all of them soon enough.
They had messaged ahead, but the front clerk was still sorting out rooms for the night. It was a delicate balance of humors. Groups of Monster Hunters and guild mages could be layered on top of each other if logistics required it, but the two sides would pick fights with each other if they were in too close of a proximity for too long. Some Revenant Knights in between could buffer the hostilities, but they didn’t travel to the same degree everyone else did. More of an honor class. One would think a bunch of professional adults could keep their shit together, but when alcohol started flowing, things became more complicated.
The tavern on the first floor met them with a low roar, thick tables peppered with people eating dinner.
“Oh, that’s them!” A gravelly, high-pitched voice rose above the rabble, and Lidea knew immediately it was for them. Ey looked out over the flittery crowd to find the source.
“Sallah’s a drakkaken,” Lidea said with just the slightest sigh of relief, laying eyes on a dragon-man at a far table waving at them dramatically.
“That’s…huh…” Sunny found him, too.
“I didn’t think the men were allowed to leave,” Lidea said.
Sunny shrugged.
They worked together to get the crate through the crowd and settled on the end of the bench near Sallah. He was short and square and scaled; his physique covered in layers of pastel cotton broadcloth. The drape wasn’t flowy, so the outer calf-length tunic fell straight and heavy over the top of his pants, the bottom tucked tightly into boots to keep the wet out. A scarf was tied up over his flat head and around his neck, disappearing down into the collar of his tunic. The face that stuck out from his veil had a square snout and large, damp eyes that closed independently of each other with a wet clicking sound.
This visible skin was a mottled cerulean blue with orange splotches arranged in what almost looked like an orderly fashion, a sort of brickwork of patterning. His voice cracked and kept hissing for half a moment after he stopped talking.
“Beni’s description was apt. Sit.” He patted the bench next to him. Lidea was the first to acquiesce and Sunny joined after a second of hesitation.
Sallah gestured down the table to the men he was sitting with. They were from the League of Monster Hunters, one human, one ariesian with tan horns that angled back before turning up.
Lidea tried not to dislike Monster Hunters. They performed a valid function in the grand scheme of things. Draconid leather armor to withstand bites from draconid teeth while working the Miraalan wilderness. A buckler on a lead that could short-circuit the electro-magic charge of certain seafliers. Boots and pants treated with a chemical that would stun a pixie catcher before it could sting you with its venomous thorns. A throw able hammer-axe for anything else. A lot of them were also veterinarians and wildlife rescuers, specifically focusing on animals with complex magical energies. Both the “monster” and “hunter” part of the name barely applied and referenced a series of sloppy translations.
The human founders saw magic as a danger, though. Thought people shouldn’t be allowed to possess inherent skills that others physically couldn’t do anything about. They had started the League under the pretense of eventual anti-magic law enforcement. They’re mistake, so to speak, was letting in ariesians, forgetting just how active their “passive” magical auras could be. Underestimated the effect even the weakest cal-ten-rah had on another person’s neurochemical release. Their failure to do research had changed the path of the League, and the shift had played out over the last hundred years.
The original ethos, though, festered under the surface, growing in compound in its members the longer they were in the organization. Lidea knew the history, and was disinclined to let it go.
These two were young enough to be one of the newer, progressively better generations.
Sallah pointed to the human. Curly black hair with a coarse beard and tan skin.
“This is my husband, Roman. That’s his teammate CeeCee.” Sallah tapped his thick, clawed fingers on the table. Across from each other, Sunny and Lidea both paused, both making sure they had heard all those words in the right order before moving on down the conceptual trail.
There was nothing preventing Monster Hunters from getting married; they usually just didn’t while they were still active in the field. On top of the usual difficulties that came with being a wanderer-by-trade, they had higher death rates than everyone else. That scared off potential romantic partners.
And that was the least weird part of the whole thing.
Sallah waved at someone else I the room, then turned back to the table.
“It’s a vegetable soup tonight,” he said. A little bowl of brown, speckled eggs sat in front of him. He popped one into his mouth, tiny sharp teeth crunching down loudly through the shell. The raw innards sloshed down his throat with a dire, wet sound.
“So you’re who Beni tricked into this?” Sallah said. “You must be the last people in the universe willing to put up with Thresh.”
“I’ve heard the name but never met him,” Sunny said.
“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” Lidea said.
“Well, that explains it.” Sallah ate another egg. A bowl of soup each appeared in front of them, delivered in a blur by an older woman. “Do either of you have any morning prayers you’ll need to do before we leave?”
“Just the usual,” Sunny hedged and Lidea shrugged along with the half-lie. Theoretically, they both grew up with structured prayers around times of day and certain activities. Starting a journey was supposed to be one of them, but they never bothered. Sallah nodded.
“I’ve got my dawn prayers, but I’d prefer to be on the road before then.” Sallah ate a piece of leafy lettuce this time.
“We can always stop at dawn,” Lidea said. “It’s not that big a deal. AllMind prayers aren’t that long, are they?”
“Not for males, no.” He tapped his fingers. “That’s fine, then.” He ate the last egg. "Alright! Well, now that I know you've made it, I'm going to turn in." Sallah swung out of the bench. Roman gave a nod to CeeCee then followed behind.
The three of them sat there in silence, eating their soup. CeeCee cleared his throat.
"I…uh…I try to give them as much time as possible together before I go up. But it's not always enough, if you catch me." He tapped his spoon on the side of the bowl. "If I need to crash with you two, would I be interrupting anything? Or…if I am interrupting, if it'd be a welcome one?" He winked there, giving a small pulse of his cal-ten-rah as a joke. Lidea rolled eir eyes at him, then realized Sunny was looking at em with a quizzical note.
"When we have our room, we'll give you the number," Lidea said, watching for any changes to Sunny's expression. "We're boring, but you can borrow some floor."
CeeCee nodded, digging back into his bowl.
#####
Lidea felt eir brow scrunch down tightly as ey stared at the back of the cart driver's head, the uneven, unindustrialized open landscape below them causing eir body to shake and vibrate. The effort was enough to form tears on the edge of eir eyes, and ey had to blink them off. Sunny's face settled close to eir ear.
"Stop trying to remember their name. You're going to give yourself a headache." Sunny's lips pressed to the space below eir ear briefly then pulled away.
"It doesn't bother you? At all? Why even give a name to begin with if the magic is just going to shake it all off?"
"You get used to it," Sallah said from the other side of the cart. He bit through a small loaf of a dense, bread something that smelled like sulfur. It felt like he was constantly eating ever since they stopped for morning prayers. Not meals, just a constant grazing on things he kept pulling from his bag.
“This is why I don’t stay on Latolan,” Lidea said. “Eveything had ten weird extra layers of nonsense.”
The Latolan outer-city cart drivers were inmates, prisoners from the local penitentiary serving for non-violent crimes. It gave them a job with a wage, knocked some years off their sentence, and reduced recidivism to almost nothing because they got to stay a part of the world. Lidea had had a nice little conversation with both of their drivers, so far. Ey had the memory of positive feelings, at least. The details never broke through to long-term memory, though, the result of a magic-pulse from a choker strapped loosely to their neck.
There must be a reason for it. Probably something ey could ask around about if ey found the right person. But it had to be isolating for them.
“What exactly do you do, Sallah?” Lidea asked, forcing emself away from the more unsavory topic.
“Paleoethnobotany,” Sallah chirped. “I’m also a plant behaviorist, but that’s really only useful on Latolan.”
“You from here?” Sunny asked. He would normally have let Lidea carry the conversation through the usual pleasantries, but a drakkaken — especially a male one — was decidedly weird enough even he felt himself wanting to pry.
Sallah nodded.
“Down past Shop Dollar. Grew up a temple minder.” Sallah took another bite of bread. “I spent three years in the courting pool without being picked even once by a woman. Can you believe that? Handsome boy like me. Look how vibrant by blue is.” He flicked his fingers around his face and chuckled. “Now five years is usually when people start wondering what’s wrong with you, and you have to prove the value you bring to a coupling.”
“No thank you,” Sallah said emphatically. He gestured to Lidea. “You know what it’s like. If you’re not useful to the grand design, eventually they stop paying attention to you.”
“That’s true,” Lidea admitted. “No elf is freer than one who can’t make more of them.”
“Now, it’s not like it’s a problem if I’m not taken by a wife. It happens. You find your place in society and get used to all the side-eyes and smirks.” Sallah clicked his teeth. “Or you do like me and get permission to stay on campus while getting your advanced degree and just never go back.” He shrugged. “Then you meet your husband, the Monster Hunter, while doing fieldwork for your dissertation.” Sallah ate the next bite of bread with more gusto. “There, now you have the more interesting highlights of my biography and can stop clutching your throat about it.”
“You must get a lot of questions,” Lidea said.
“Not as many as you’d think. People are generally obnoxiously polite.” Sallah hummed. “Or afraid. They keep spinning on what would get a drakkaken kicked out. Jokes on them. If you do something grievous enough to warrant something as extreme as exile, you’re more likely just be returned to the AllMind so it can recycle your energy.”
He clacked his teeth then went back to taking his notes. Neither Lidea nor Sunny wanted to confirm that “recycling” was what they thought it was. It was more pleasant that way.
#####
There weren’t any modern roads once you left the outermost ring of highway, just the embedded stony whispers of whoever lived on Latolan thousands of years ago. An experienced cart driver, however, could find the ghosts of other carts that had come before them or trace more level areas through the open landscape. Their driver was capable, bringing the narrow, one-horse cart deftly over the terrain. It was only when they had to break into the jungle that they struggled. It was here that Sallah showed what a “plant behaviorist” could actually do.
“Come on, my darlings. Scoot over.” Sallah had tied his overdress between his legs and rolled his pants up, exposing his thick, perpetually bent legs and soft boots. His stumpy tail made the shade of an outline under his clothes in this formation. He dragged a collapsible staff through the dirt ahead of the cart. With the hooked end, he picked up heavy vines, hauling them away to create something of a path.
Sunny walked between Sallah and the cart, scanning the ground for anything that might trip them all up. The machine they were carrying came with a sequence of mechanical parts that bored down into different materials and took samples. There was cushioning in the case, but if the cart pitched too dramatically and knocked the cart hard enough, one of those delicate mechanical parts could snap without leaving any exterior evidence. He could probably fix it, but there were so many cascading difficulties with that he’d prefer to keep it from happening altogether.
Lidea stayed in the cart, legs hanging off the back of it. Behind them, vines started moving in immediately to recover the ground behind them. Looking out through the jungle to the side, the willow trees stacked like brickwork, making the distance view hazy with mist and greenery. Directly behind them, though, the trees had maintained an aisle just wide enough for a small cart. Their spindly forms had pulled away from each other, leaving a sloping valley of vegetation behind.
As ey watched, one tree leaned into the path, breaking the shape of the pathway, sticking out from the surrounding clusters. A few of the thin trees nearby shuddered. The tree that had fallen out of place creaked back into line with the others.
Lidea rolled eir shoulders.
There were things about Latolan ey was never going to fully understand no matter how long ey kept an apartment here.
They pulled in to the site by evening, working extra slowly through the last half of the day. They crossed a short, hex-cell flexible metal fence, pulling part of it aside for the cart to move through. The plants pushed at the grid, trying to move over and into the clearing beyond. Sallah lifted one of the yellow bulbs draping over the fencing and offered it a piece of meat. It took it in its spiky mouth and retreated down into the brush. The plants along that length of fence retracted a little.
Neither of them were completely foreign to archaeological dig sites. When you traveled cross-country, you were apt to come across one in some backwater. In the days before they learned how to lock the gates into place, they opened semi-randomly, spilling people out across worlds. There was a whole cottage industry around studying and tracking the movement of these Palaeolithic migrants through the connected worlds. The ruins scattered through what they had explored of Latolan were the oldest, some pre-dating civilization on every other world. They were the only clue to whoever had lived and died here long long before the rest of them ever found the place.
This dig was small, only just getting its teeth in the ground. Coming down a gentle slope from the jungle, the tents were arranged in an orderly square, u-shape courtyard in the middle for easier access. A campfire and stove for cooking were set away from the entrance into the ring. The color of the tents was coordinated to some sort of key, but the only one they recognized immediately was broad neon orange and red stripes for medical and other emergency supplies.
“Sallah, my dear! You’ve brought my machine and the mages to go with it.” A dark figure moved toward them from the back flap of one of the tents.
“Goddamn it,” Lidea whispered to emself. Sunny heard eir and smirked.
With a name like “Thresh,” ey should have guessed he was a trenglate. It was nothing against trenglates. Not at all. Trenglates, like drakkaken, were magic-void, but it took a more constant, passive approach. Instead of being able to break it apart and push it out of an area on request, trenglates were constantly breathing it in. Sucking the magic out of every room they walked into.
Sunny swore he couldn’t feel it. Even other greenwitches ey had talked to about it said ey was being dramatic. Ey knew what ey felt.
Thresh met them as they made it halfway down the hill, and he moved into the ring of one of the upright lamps. He was just a shade taller than Lidea, but trenglates tended to hunch, top of their spine dragged down by a bulky polecat head. Under the sweater and slacks, he was painted in scales starting from the top of his head between his round ears, down his back, then around his arms and legs, leaving the belly and inside parts of his anatomy exposed. The scales were tan, thick, overlapping keratin plates, ranging from half an inch to three inches across depending on where they were on his body. The exposed skin (face, neck, and hands) was just a little lighter with a slight red undertone.
His three-fingered hands ended in claws, and they came gently around Sallah’s in a soft little bundle. They pressed snout to snout, muttered some things to each other, then pulled away.
“Scholar Thresh Ar-Teck,” he introduced, “You’re Grand Master Artificer Childress.” Thresh reached for Sunny first, and they exchanged handshakes. Even if he couldn’t feel it at a distance, touching Thresh skin to skin sparked a quick shock of magic as it moved between them. They both felt it, and Thresh pulled his hands away quickly.
“Pardon,” he apologized. He didn’t shake Lidea’s hand, instead just sort of holding them out flat.
“Do you prefer the full Elven or alternate version of your title?” he asked em.
“Either way,” Lidea replied.
“Well, I’m not overly fond of Traditional elven, so Alpha Eliadea.” He nodded.
“Lidea,” ey corrected.
“Did Beni introduce us with our full titles?” Sunny rehung himself on the back of the cart and signaled they should all guide it down the hill. Thresh hopped to and took a position on the side of the cart.
“Beni gave me your dossiers when she said she found someone for the job. I didn’t realize you were more comfortably acquainted than that.” Trenglates had three broad accents when speaking Illurian to an eerie specificity. The one that Thresh used sounded like the echoing twang on a brassy string instrument. The “i’s” were wide and the “o’s” were short.
“Beni, darling,” Thresh called across the field, “your comrades take umbrage with me using their formal names and titles.”
“I didn’t realize she was here, too,” Lidea said.
“Mmhm.”
From the same tent Thresh had emerged, a human woman ducked under the flap and worked her way up the hill to meet them. She was of average human height, wide hips, full bust, and soft stomach. In the evening light, there was a peachy tinge to her bronze skin and a red cast to her dark brown hair. She had cropped her hair short into a bob that grazed her round chin and was probably sharp-edged about six weeks ago. When she got closer, she revealed a splash of freckles and light epicanthic folds over her eyes.
She stood with a tilt to her gait, hands on her hips. Whatever mercenary-grade armor she had been wearing, she was currently down to a shirt that opened loosely over her bosom, pants rolled up to the knee and unlaced boots.
Beni was completely and fully human if her aura was reading accurately.
“They’ll get over it,” she said, dropping her own hands on the cart to drag it downhill. “I see you all survived without Sallah talking you to death.”
“Good to see you, too, Beni,” Sallah said from the other side of the cart.
They managed down the hill and hauled the machine out into a blue-toned tent. Inside was packed with other equipment. They rolled the crate up next to a foldable table that was stacked neatly with some handwritten notebooks and a small box already filled with used film canisters.
Thresh brushed his hands.
“We’re all five of us in one tent. Diggers in another. Cutters in a third. Let me introduce you to everyone, then I’ll give you the brief in the morning. If I’m tired, you must be exhausted.”
“I already know everyone.” Sallah stretched. “I need to do prayers. I’ll find the tent later.” He touched his nose to Beni’s cheek, tapped his snout to Thresh’s, then flicked off into the darkness back toward the cart.
Thresh made a tsking sound at his back, then moved toward the door of the tent. Beni pulled up next to him and tucked her hand into the curvature of his claws. They walked out clasping hands. Lidea paused, found emself, then dropped eir hand into Sunny’s. Sunny tilted his head in consideration at their clasped hands.
“So everyone’s just dating, now, I guess,” Sunny said softly.
“Are we dating?” Lidea asked.
“My tongue was in your mouth last night before CeeCee showed up,” Sunny said even quieter.
“You know that doesn’t inherently mean anything,” Lidea retorted. Sunny squeezed eir hand. Hard. Ey squeezed back. “After this job, we’ll settle it. Assuming we’re not eaten by a plant.”
#####
Usually tents were rough-sleeping, but these were made for long-haul work. There were actual cot beds, raised off the floor a foot, washed-out rugs, and little hammocks for their bags. The only real issue was Beni's minor night terrors. A lot of mercenaries had them. Thresh would soothe her back to sleep quickly, and they all got on from there. As long as they weren't having loud, boisterous sex, everything was fine.
“It’s the scales I keep thinking about,” Lidea said into eir morning oatmeal, little more than a whisper.
“You’re going to embarrass me.” Sunny was getting genuinely annoyed with Lidea’s discomfort, and ey couldn’t really blame him. Ey didn’t even really know why ey felt the way ey felt. Ey didn’t know what ey felt. It was a constellation of feelings ey’d never had before, so putting words into them was failing at every turn. Ey felt like the only thing ey had to hold on to was sarcasm.
“I’ll stop,” ey said.
By breakfast, they had met all the members of the dozen-person manual labor crew, a combination of ariesian, stone elf, and human. All of them had varying degrees and advanced technical certifications of their own. Four were dedicated “cutters” working in rotating shifts. Their entire job was to monitor the encroaching jungle and push it back from the camp.
“Okay, so let me show you some photos.” Thresh sat at the table in front of them, rocking the table with his weight. He flicked on the lantern so they could see in the pre-sunrise darkness. “These were taken by a drone flyover.”
“What the fuck is a drone?” Lidea asked.
“It’s one of the newest things from Purvailan.” Thresh clacked his hands together. “A radio-controlled, toy-sized plane that can take pictures.”
“So, a balloon camera?” Lidea asked.
“You can control this,” Thresh clarified.
“You can control a balloon camera. You just have the little…fan…things.” Lidea made the motion with her hands of managing the control levers of the small, flying contraption.
“You are ruining my fun,” Thresh decided with a click of his teeth, then tapped his fingertips across the unrolled pictures.
“Go on, please. I’m sorry.” Lidea gestured gently through the length of eir fingers. Thresh growled at em lightly and pulled some glasses out of his shirt pocket.
“This wasn’t a particularly interesting site when they first found it. They just put it on the map and added it to the research queue. We did another survey earlier this year, and that’s when we got these pictures. From another angle, it’s multiple sites stacked on top of each other.” He started sketching on the pictures with the tip of his claw as though either of them fully understood what they were looking at.
“The main architecture is late fourth age, probably some of the last of the Latolanian buildings. There’s evidence to suggest they didn’t finish one of them.” Thresh’s voice rose and fell, flowing with the music of storytelling. “The next settlement came along during the fifth age. Then another and another, throughout the interstitial years. Newest thing I found was this one pottery shard.” He held out his hands to make the vague shape of a triangle.
“I don’t have the full setup to confirm tool marks or spectroscopy or any of the like.” Thresh’s voice rattled as he put together his caveats and diversions. He shook them free with a wiggle of his head. “But a little on-site, cursory examination, some of these artifacts only predate Latolan gate-lock by maybe a couple hundred years.” He clicked his fingers together in excitement.
“Um,” Lidea hedged. “That’s cool. Yeah.” There had been a lot of settlements during the interstitial years between the mysterious fall of the Latolanians and Latolan gate lock. It was how gate divers knew what they were looking at when they came through.
Sunny saw the trail that Thresh was laying down, though, if only because he knew how the machine they had brought worked and the kind magic it detected.
“You’re looking for evidence of a stable gate we don’t already know about,” Sunny guessed. Thresh gestured in the affirmative.
“Oh….okay.” This was an area of magicology where Lidea found emself faltering more often than ey would like. “So did you call in gate scientists?”
“Want to confirm before I bother someone in the government.” Thresh waved off the concern with a flick of his claws.
“That seems really stupid,” Lidea objected.
“Sunny works in lower frequencies,” Thresh said simply, continuing to set the idea aside with his hands. “Beni seems assured that he’ll be perfectly able to soft-verify my results.”
“That’s not the point,” Lidea said.
“Yeah, I should be able to do that,” Sunny said, standing up with his empty bowl. The machine was still in the tent, and he motioned toward it. “Let’s get to it.”
The core of the dig site was visible from camp, but it required a small trek down another slope to get to it. There was more unexcavated architecture disappearing off into the jungle.
The Latolanians had made it up to black gunpowder before vanishing to some inexplicable outside force, and researchers had, so far, failed to crack the writing. This left a lot of gaps that might never come together.
This fourth era ruin was the remains of huge, sturdy pillars aligned opposite each other in even rows. There was evidence of walls and ceilings, but large portions had been knocked away by time, plants, and weather. The interior of the buildings were floored with crushed stone that clinked like ceramic and might have been tiles at one point. The “outside” flooring was more intact, large red paving stones that were better designed to survive outdoor environments. The layout mirrored the arrangement of guildhalls around Tower Watch Plaza with the large meeting areas inside.
The assistants had dug out maybe a city block of area. Along the border, one cutter kept prodding the jungle back into place with a long, thin rod. Sallah moved up and down the site, taking pictures with instant film of the plants crawling up and draping over the exposed pillars. He labeled the photos then tucked them into a notebook as he went.
Lidea stayed back against one wall as Thresh took Sunny further into the middle of the dig site with the rolling crate. They had kept an alley in the wire gridding that marked the site, and they parked in the middle of it.
“Have you ever worked with something like this before?” Thresh asked, unlatching the case to set the machine up. The crate turned into a stand when oriented a given way, and Thresh positioned the machine over a gap on the hinge side of the crate.
“Just pin testers to check for lattice integrity. Nothing this big.” Sunny ran his hands over the thing, prodding the insides with little varying pulses of magic. Most of the machine was inside an opaque plastic case that hid the more complex machinations. These kinds of things used to be made of wood, lacquered in special anti-magic oils so the natural conduction of wood didn’t get in the way of the mechanics. The invention of petroleum plastic almost solved the problem, but it came with too many sticky caveats. Then Purvailan had cracked bio-plastics, and they were slowly introducing it as old machines wore out.
Inside, Sunny sensed gears clutched to gears, the centers inlaid with mineral circuits. The gears were attached to bars. The bars were attached to pivots and ball joints. Thresh shooed his hands away and pried open the side of the exterior to reveal a series of switches and flicking dials behind glass plates. One of these was a pressurized lever that unfolded into a hand crank. Thresh narrated as he went, starting with the lever.
“Drop this, and it engages the boring drill. Crank down, and you should hear and feel it.” Thresh gave a few rotations, then gestured that Sunny should continue if he wanted to. He jumped at the chance, muscling into the motion.
It was overly easy, at first, no resistance to tell him the drill was moving. He peeked underneath to watch the narrow drill emerge from a slot in the bottom. When it hit the dirt, it started to grind, requiring most of his strength. It would be easier if they could wet the ground before, but that might throw off frequency readings.
“Okay, now you have to get it all the way down,” Thresh continued to explain. “You’re listening for a really loud click. This machine can do the readings with the drill extended (as opposed to bringing it into a collection unit), so once it’s locked in, I’ll throw this switch. That should give us frequency and decay readings. We can then lock that reading in with this switch, then”—Thresh reached for another panel on the side of the machine and pulled out a small handheld device that attached to the machine with a cable—“you can send that number to this normal over-air frequency gauge. Then you can do the…beep beep thing.” He waved it through the air like the dowsing rod it was.
“Though I’ve never had to do that myself. I don’t know why you would when you’re looking for ground currents.” Thresh shrugged and clicked it back into place.
“It’s not a complicated add-on,” Sunny grunted, locking the drill into place with one final crank. Thresh flicked the switch, the machine buzzed, and they settled into waiting, Thresh falling back to sit on a piece of sideways architecture. He dusted some dirt off his pants.
“We didn’t get much of a chance to talk last night,” Thresh mused. “How long have you and Lidea been married?”
“We aren’t…married.”
“Oh! I’m sorry.” His hands made a series of nervous gestures mid-air. “That was indelicate to assume. Is there another word you two prefer?”
“What makes you think we’re anything that would need a special word?” Sunny paced a tight circle in the dirt. Thresh threw his hands up in frustration.
“I get so tired of being oh so terribly polite just for it to bite me in the ass because you human-types are so hung up on the vernacular of your relationship structures. Trenglates don’t have this problem. We don’t start the process of settling into our long-term partnerships until middle age, and by then we have our shit together. It is not my fault that you share a bed but don’t have a name for what you are. So you don’t get to be snappish at me.”
Sunny opened and closed his mouth on a few different possible responses.
“Well what’s Beni to you?” he asked sharply.
“My girlfriend. Easy. In Unified Karket it’s ‘one whom I provisionally share a household intending to be lifelong partners.’ We tend toward long cohabitations and short engagements.”
“You…live together? Does she not have her apartment at the mercenary guild hall? That’s where I ran into her, last.”
Thresh snapped his jaw.
“That I will admit is a little more complicated.”
“So you’re a hypocrite. Got it.”
“That’s not —“ The machine buzzed and dinged at them. Thresh shot up to look at the dial readout. “That is the hallmark of low-frequency gate magic.”
#####
Lidea sat on the edge of the pit, legs dangling against the interior wall of the dig site, feet a few inches from the ground below. Ey had moved on from watching Sunny doing something on the machine to two nearby ariesian grad students. They chatted in a language ey didn't immediately recognize as they took pictures and brushed away dirt. Ey kept trying to see what Thresh saw in terms of these layers and layers of settlement.
Ey could see the leftover buildings. That made sense as the oldest part of this whole thing. When one of the grad students pointed it out to em, ey found the patterns of old firepits. Those were the newest, and ey understood how they came to that conclusion. It was all the rest of it that was bothering em. Ey didn't like not knowing how things worked.
"Hey." Beni approached from the side and dropped next to em.
"Hey," Lidea replied. Beni tapped her hands on her knees.
"This isn't really your thing, is it?" Beni asked.
"Yes and no," Lidea shrugged. "The historical mystery is fascinating. I just want it to already be figured out then delivered to me in an amusing article in a niche magazine. I'm not a puzzle person."
"That's kind of how I feel about it," Beni said. "I'm not smart enough, I think. Need something hit efficiently or someone to live in the jungle for six-months on condensation, call me up. Otherwise, I don't really know what I'm doing."
"Why are you out here, then? Just spending time with Thresh?"
"Yeah, mostly." Beni took a drink from her flask, then offered it.
"Is it actually water or booze?" Lidea asked, taking it from her.
"Fruit water. I promise. Hydrate during the day, get drunk at night."
Lidea huffed a chuckle, took a sip, then handed it back. Beni took another drink herself.
"I have a surgery coming up, and there wasn't really time to fit in a new contract. So I figured I'd just take some time off doing whatever."
"Nothing too taxing, I hope," Lidea said, trying to tap around it gently. Ey figured, though, if Beni brought it up, she didn't mind talking about it.
"Fucked up ankle. Broke it a few years ago while I was out on a long job. Didn't realize, kept walking on it, healed up badly. It's turning into a problem, though. Got in with a great goblin orthopedic surgeon here on-world, though."
"Is specifying a goblin important?" Lidea floated the question, trying to get a sense of who Beni was. Beni crinkled her eyebrows at em.
"If someone's going to be cutting me open and fiddling with my insides, I'm aiming for a goblin first. They can fix anything. I will take the hit for being speciest or whatever."
"No, I was just curious." Lidea rubbed eir hands on eir pants, palms itchy. "What's the recovery time for something like that? Thresh going to take care of you?"
"Something like twelve weeks, and don't get me started. It's a whole fucking…thing…" Beni stared into the middle distance and drank from her flask absently.
"If you want to talk about it…" Lidea offered. Ey could sense it, the energy bursting from Beni's body. She clucked.
"That's the thing about my circle of friends: they're all also friends with Thresh. Some of them before me. So it's difficult to find someone to vent to."
"Well, I don't know him for shit, so bitch away."
"No…no I'm just stressed. We have a pattern that works for us because we both travel so much. If I stay home to recuperate, that messes the pattern up."
"I'm sorry. If I were available, I'd come play nursemaid."
"Yeah, well, if he ends up getting himself killed because of this dig, you might have to." They both shared a sensible chuckle.
"Hey, so," Lidea said, "now that we're clearly best friends, can I ask you a question that might be kind of…personal?"
"From behind," Beni said. "That's how you avoid the scales. Or if you wear thigh-high socks, you can do it on your back. On doesn’t really work.”
"Alright. Okay." Lidea nodded. "Also, what about the uh…shape? It splits, doesn't it? So it's like…two?"
"You get used to it," Beni smirked.
#####
"So what does he think is down there?" Lidea asked as they took a quick stroll around the edge of the camp.
"That's why he wants to go down there and look," Sunny replied excitedly. On their third day at the site, Sunny ha pulsed out a cavity below the ruins that ground-penetrating radar hadn't detected. He had taken to archaeology quickly, helping Thresh map out trails of low-frequency magic.
He had started acting strangely, though.
"I don't like the idea of you going down there with him. At least not without a bigger crew of engineers or whatever. Feels like we're running a skeleton crew.
"I won't do anything dangerous. I promise." Sunny grabbed eir hand and squeezed.
Sallah was sitting at the back flap of their tent as they approached, and he held up a finger to his mouth for silence. As they got closer, they heard what was he was listening to. Beni and Thresh were arguing. A lot of it was in Unified Karket, a language neither of them spoke, but then Beni broke through with Illurian.
"You can't do this again," she insisted. “Call this in and send it up the chain of command. Let government researchers in on this."
"Since when do we let the government tell us what to study, huh? And how to handle ourselves." Thresh let something hard slam down on the table. "I'm not letting them have this until I know exactly what it is. When did you become a rule-follower? "
"Last time they just benched you. This time they'll actually throw you in prison."
"What's a few years in minimal security. I can take it."
"Maybe I can't!"
They were both silent after that for a moment. Then Thresh shifted into Karket, and they lost the thread of the discussion. Sallah shifted away, half-crawling then back onto his feet away from the tent. Sunny and Lidea followed.
"What the hell was that?" Lidea asked.
"Thresh found something again. I don't know what. Something he thinks is important."
"That 'again' is pretty heavy there," Sunny pointed out. "And 'last time.'"
"Hey, I was there for the last one," Sallah said. "There might have been an inquiry, but we all did what we needed to do. I'm sure whatever this is, it's fine." He flexed his claws in agitation.
"What are we in the middle of, Sallah?" Lidea demanded.
"Nothing. At worst…you were following someone else's lead. You didn't know the procedure. At best, you're part of whatever the next big discovery is."
#####
The argument was still happening as they all tucked in for the night, Thresh and Beni in a cold war they didn't put words to. The next morning, well before they knew if the fight would continue, they all woke to shouting.
One of the cutters was running through the camp, screeching for help.
Lidea slid eggs onto a plate with some toast and a sliced pear. Ey settled it on the table just as Sunny was coming down the stairs. Ey had learned quickly — the first lesson of cohabitation perhaps — that ey didn’t know how to cook from raw ingredients. Sunny had always been the cook between them. When they knew they were traveling together, he was in charge of travel rations. He was the only person ey had ever met who could make a mixture of dehydrated fruits, nuts, and nutritional yeast feel like an actual meal. At home with a full kitchen at his disposal, he put together the kinds of meals a person spent all day looking forward to.
Ey wasn’t incompetent around a saucepan by any means, but the gap in skill was immense. Eggs and toast ey could do, though.
“How do you get the eggs perfect every time?” Sunny asked, dropping into his chair. Lidea joined him, taking eir chair across the table.
“I can manually manipulate the heat distribution across the bottom of the pan.” Lidea broke eir yoke, tore a piece of bread away, and dipped it into the center.
“Wait, are you serious?” Sunny paused with his fork hovering over his egg.
“Yeah…that’s…how I learned to do it. Throw a little magic in there. It’s actually slightly easier with these things.”
Lidea nodded down to eir fingerless gloves.
"I'd never thought of doing that," Sunny murmured. "How are those working out for you?"
Lidea flipped eir hands over a few times, flashing the cloth and filament gloves from all angles.
"I'm getting used to them, for sure. I don't know that I would ever want to change over completely."
"It's too difficult to go back and forth, though," Sunny said.
"I'm aware," Lidea snapped back. Ey tapped eir fork on the edge of the plate, and Sunny didn’t push the conversation.
Ey had always used some kind of staff or staff-like instrument. Ey, like a lot of young magicians, started with a big, bulky staff that strapped across eir shoulder blades. When ey first started traveling, ey switched to a small cudgel that ey could beat someone with in close combat, if ey needed to. Now ey preferred something in between, a thick rod that could extend like a combat baton with a flick. They must exist, but Paul was the only greenwitch ey personally knew that didn’t use some kind of rod or staff.
Sylvan magicians preferred gloves, finger cots, hand chains, and stacks of rings and bracelets. Anything that positioned the focus of magic directly in their hands.
Humans weren't so uniform. They learned on a few common artifacts, then branched into an entire array of different devices. There was the typical stock of bracers and pendants and staffs, but if something could be safely turned into a focus, someone had done it.
Eir staff had always been cumbersome on public transport and tight spaces, but it had never been a problem ey had to deal with for long stretches. Going back and forth to a workplace, though, this minor inconvenience was turning into a genuine hassle. Fingerless canvas gloves in the sylvan style were Sunny's first recommendation if Lidea wanted to try something new. They just didn't work the same. In the field, ey wasn’t sure they’d be able to keep up with em.
But then maybe that was okay. Maybe in-town the gloves were enough. But if that was the case, why would ey need to get accustomed to them at all? Not like ey was staying here, in the city, forever. This was Sunny's last day of classes, and ey had two more weeks on eir contract after that. Then they were back on the road.
Surely, they’d be back on the road.
The fact was, they hadn’t talked about it. Normally, Lidea would have started looking for eir next contract already. Ey just…hadn’t…Ey didn’t really know what was stopping em. Ey could have gone back to eir room at the guild within a week of being back and just…didn’t. Ey hadn’t given it up, either, not wanting to lose access to a space that belonged to em alone.
Sunny glanced up at the clock, then gobbled down the rest of his breakfast quickly. He moved to the freezer and pulled out a hank of steak, throwing it into the sink.
“Gonna make that for dinner.” He moved toward the door, grabbing his work bag from the hook, then doubled back to peck Lidea on the cheek. “See you tonight.” Then he was gone. Lidea pressed the tips of eir fingers to eir cheek. It was a weird passing thing he had started, brief glances across eir cheek that barely touched. It wasn’t an unheard of neutral greeting between all different people ey had met, especially sylvan, so it had taken a couple of days for em to notice Sunny had picked up the habit for himself.
Systematic desensitization to domestication.
Ey finished up eir own breakfast, then mentally worked through the couple of things in eir chore list that needed to happen before ey left. Sunny would have made the bed already, but ey needed to start the automated dish-washing machine and put the bags out for the laundry service.
Ey sighed. Was this the shape ey wanted eir life to take?
*****
"Sunny."
"Yasira."
The stone elf slotted in to walk alongside him as he walked out of one of the small restaurants near campus. It was a little too expensive for the average student, so it was one place faculty and staff could catch a meal with a reasonable chance they wouldn't run into any students.
The school wanted to take full advantage of having him for lectures, so they packed him for four ninety-minute lecture times a day, four days a week. Fridays were more open-ended study halls and times for one-on-ones. He didn’t have a huge number of students across his courses, which made up for the tight schedule. This morning had been full of practical exams, though, so this lunch was particularly precious.
"Come out for drinks tomorrow night with some of the other staff. Bring Lidea."
"Don’t you have a baby due any minute?” Sunny asked.
“Not here, yet, and with Indy already in the maternity spa…”
“You don’t like being home without her.” Sunny had lost track of Indy’s pregnancy until, suddenly, Yasira had them over to help with some minor remodeling of the kitchen. He had waited until Indy went into prenatal seclusion so it’d be a (welcome) surprise when she got home after her thirty-day postpartum period.
“I get it,” Yasira insisted. “It’s tradition. It’s healthy. But, you know…visiting hours stop at eight, and I miss my wife.” He pouted a little then threw his arm over Sunny’s shoulder. “How has Lidea found eir little break?”
"Difficult."
"Oh?"
"Ey hates it."
"How so?"
This was one of those times where, as much as he liked Yasira, he wished he was having this conversation with Lidea around. Ey knew how to frame things so he didn't have to talk so much, to explain himself with his own words. He got through his lectures because they were pre-planned.
"Ey's not used to being in one place for any real length of time. Ey's getting restless, but ey won't admit it because ey doesn't want to hurt my feelings."
"But otherwise, ey's having a good time? Exploring the city? Spending time together?"
"Uh…yeah…actually, yeah." All other things considered, he was enjoying being able to plan things with em more than a few days out. And he was pretty certain Lidea was happy with that turn of events, too. Probably. Right? Right.
"Professor Childress?" A student, a first-year from one of his intro rockhounding classes, appeared vaguely from the side. "Can I ask you some more detailed questions about being a mercenary auxiliary?" Sunny looked her over, a young human woman. Slim. Maybe athletic, but very little muscle mass. If he recalled exactly who she was in the sea of faces, she had made a good grade on her written test but her short practical yesterday had been lackluster.
Mercenaries would eat her alive. The smart thing would be to convince her not to go down that path if that's what she wanted to do. But then, that hadn't worked on him. And if he hadn't joined up with mercenaries, he never would have met Lidea.
"Alright, kid, what do you want to know?"
*****
Lidea wandered the printing floor, staying just the other side of the yellow tape that kept em safe from swinging arms. They had been feeding em middling administrative tasks that no one else wanted to do to keep em busy. And ey liked those tasks, that was the weird part. Ey could sit in a corner and just listen to a radio show while ey transferred and sorted data. If anyone could be good or bad at that kind of repetitive task, ey was performing well. Dana was regularly impressed with how quickly ey got through things.
They also only needed em in the building when they were running a magical ink print. Those weren't happening all the time, so ey’d taken to doing stock runs for the snack cabinet in the break room.
Late the week before was the first time ey actually had to really pay attention to the magic ink machinery. An arm had come loose that offset the intended print, and two veins of ink that should never touch overlaid on each other. Ey caught the spark of conflicting magic immediately and had the machine shut down within a minute, long before any permanent damage to the machines or the people nearby.
The printing mechanic fixed it within the hour, but Lidea questioned why these two inks were being printed this close together to begin with. This kicked off a week-long audit of their graphic design and production department. Were they adequately aware of the mechanical limitations and implications of the printing machines? Why were they designing products with such a narrow margin of error for magical blowouts? They were working with such small amounts of the magic-shift ink that the danger was low on an individual basis. Magic issues snowballed on top of each other, though, faster than you could typically anticipate. Better to cut them out at the source.
The designers drew up their designs on specialized art machines made up of a giant television-like screen and a fancy pen. Lidea was terrified of them. They showed em how to navigate the "files," though, and see which ink mixes they used to get which effects with which colors. Ey could then take that list of composite materials and make recommendations on what two things should maybe not touch.
Next week, ey would start writing up the proper, formal safe process manual that should really have already existed and hopefully get it done before the end of the contract. Now, ey needed to stretch eir legs.
"You're really good at this, you know." Dana caught em from the doorway as Lidea passed on one of eir circuits.
"Good at what?"
"Everything; that's kind of the point. You're doing the work of five people."
Lidea shrugged, fingers drifting to the back of eir neck.
"I just do what needs to be done, I guess."
"How does it compare to being on the road all the time?"
"Ah…well…" Lidea flapped eir hands on eir thighs then leaned against the wall next to the doorway. "I don't know. The predictability is nice. Sleeping in a bed every night is really nice. But…don't you ever get bored? Of just all this over and over and over?"
"Have you gotten bored in the last six weeks?"
"Yeah, a little."
Dana pressed her eyebrows together in confusion but gave a guffaw.
"And has it been that bad? Being bored?"
"Honestly, not really. It’s been fine. I can admit to that.”
Dana lightly smacked em on the shoulder with the back of her fingers.
"We don't really have anything open after your current contract is up, but I know a lot of people who would love to have you around to cover their ass. Just tell me." Dana moved back through the doorway. Lidea watched her go, and realized, with some dismay, the concept didn’t horrify em.
*****
“Good evening, George.” Lidea let the viney tendrils near the door curl up and over eir fingers. When Sunny talked to the plants, he always left little pauses as though they could answer. Lidea started doing the same, and sometimes ey felt the same thing that Sunny must. Little electro-magical prickles that glided over eir skin. Ey hadn’t found the pattern to it, yet, but ey could see the seeds of language in it.
The scent and sound of garlic and onion just meeting the surface of the skillet met em as ey entered through the front door. Sunny was chopping squash on the counter next to the stove, standing on the low wooden stool that brought him to a more comfortable height. He half-glanced over his shoulder at Lidea.
“Running a little behind on dinner prep. Could you feed the plants?” He nodded to some more gristly bits of meat on a plate.
“We’re not on a schedule, Sunny honey.” Lidea hung eir bag on the hook next to Sunny’s. He made an odd little face, and ey moved it over one hook on the bar. It was a weird little quirk of his that ey was still getting used to.
“There’s a show I want to watch tonight. To have enough time to eat dinner then go for a walk…”
“We can always skip the walk.” Lidea moved up to the counter to get the meat scraps.
“Would prefer not to.”
Lidea ran a hand along his back then moved to the stairs.
Anyone who wandered for a living had to have a level of organization to them. You didn’t survive long juggling contracts and travel plans without an eye toward detail. Everyone picked up their own little compulsions and habits to fall back on to create a sense of continuity from contract to contract. So Lidea had gone all this time not realizing just how intense Sunny was in his own space when he was at his most comfortable.
Sunny had offered to make space in his workshop for Lidea to set up eir own workbench. Ey didn't really have any hobbies, though. At least not the kind that required large amounts of space. Ey needed space for eir stuff, though. So they collapsed enough of his workspace to make room for a wall of stacked boxes, and a second-hand lounge chair for Lidea to sit and read in while Sunny tinkered. Outside eir clothes in the closet, this was the only room that had any of eir meager belongings. Ey hadn't really pressed to move more of emself into the house but neither had Sunny.
Lidea popped inside the workroom to grab eir cardigan off the back of the chair before moving onto the bedroom.
"I've got dinner, Josephine." It rustled out of its thorny coil and rolled across the floor toward em. A vine with a bulb spiraled up eir leg. A green bloom split down the middle and opened up a small, toothy mouth. Ey dropped a piece of meat into the pink interior. An opening filled with even more tiny teeth brought it down through the thick, green stalk. Another vine moved along the wall to drop on eir shoulder, and ey fed this mouth another piece of meat. It was a long, once a week process, feeding little chunks of protein into the myriad gullets that opened up before em.
Ey saved a piece for George and headed back downstairs. That one didn't need the hand feeding, plenty able to catch bugs on its own. It got "jealous," however, if it didn't get the same treats. Sunny hadn't quite been able to explain how he figured that one out.
Sunny was plating up as ey came back inside. Tabberey flank, a squash and spinach saute, and blended potato from a powdered mix.
“It’s about to expire,” Sunny explained when Lidea gave the soup a less than enthusiastic once-over.
It was a well-worn joke that the first few days home were a gastrointestinal disaster as your gut readjusted to “real food.” The joke felt a little burned around the edges when your “home base” was Latolan.
There were local farms, ranches, and apiaries to support a massive honey industry, but not at all to the scale and diversity to fully supply a city-state of this size to the expectations of its populace. There were fishing fleets, but the sea was up to a couple day’s travel away, depending on the weather. Tabberey — a small four-legged furry animal with a short reproductive cycle — had become an option through adaptive breeding, but they weren’t a native species to the planet. One communicable disease or bad genetic mutation could wipe out half the local population before they caught it, and the prices skyrocketed in response.
And that happened a lot on this world. More than their world of origin.
If you could live on insect protein, leafy greens, and millet, you could reliably put together a fresh, wholefood diet. Some did. Otherwise, you were relying on imports, and most of those were more processed, shelf-stable products.
So there wasn’t a tremendous change for either of them when they came “home,” but the powered potatoes were the worst of it.
“So, how was your day?” Lidea asked as ey dug into the flank.
“Fucking teenagers,” Sunny said. “I hate that I have to give them a test. Doesn’t feel worth it. Showing up should be enough.”
“They need some kind of grade.”
“Give ‘em all top scores. It’s already a GPA padding elective.” Sunny scooped a bite of potato into his mouth.
“You’re becoming anti-academic in your old age.” Lidea swallowed down a bit of potato, too, pushing through eir distaste for it.
“Just pragmatic. You hated school.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get why it exists. Think they could do some things differently.”
“Hm,” Sunny decided.
Lidea waited for him to ask about eir day. They were both through their flanks before ey decided ey was tired of waiting.
“The printer is looking at completely overhauling their design philosophy because of some of the stuff I pointed out.”
“Oh?”
Lidea tapped the tip of eir fork to the plate.
“Yeah. When the company set up their design reference procedures, they never actually talked to an artificer or a chemist or anything. They were just coming at it from an art perspective.”
“Hm.”
Would he give a shit how different pigments were made from their component parts? How the color looked to the eye depended on what interactive property you needed to create. The way the actual shape of the printed image affected the way the magical effect came through. Ey was only just learning a lot of it emself, but ey was jumping to talk about. And Sunny just…he didn’t know how to bounce. How to reciprocate. They were supposed to be working on this, and yet there’d been so little change in the past six weeks.
Ey pressed eir fork into the soft flesh of a piece of squash, testing its resistance. The fork made a little clinking sound as it pierced through to the plate. Sunny cringed at the sound.
“I think maybe I’ll skip the walk this evening. I’ll just put the dishes in the washer. Pick up around the house a little.”
Sunny cocked his head.
“Are you sure? We really need to make sure we stay conditioned.”
“I think I can skip one walk and be okay.” Lidea shifted eir focus back to eir plate.
Sunny looked at eir, searching eir face, but didn’t say anything to press the matter.
*****
Lidea felt better by the time Sunny came back from this walk. The dishwasher was going then ey’d put some clothing away and did a once over with the broom on the hard tile floor.
The show Sunny wanted to watch was an Areylan space movie about a woman who receives schematics for a space machine through radio waves from another planet. Areylan was locked off from the rest of the connected worlds, but there was a robust underground trade in their media. Enough that, eventually, it made its way to broadcast television a few decades after the fact.
It was a captivating character movie, but slow with a lot of technical jargon. By the end, Sunny had found his way into Lidea’s lap, head resting on eir thigh. Ey moved eir fingers through his hair, and the irritation from before didn’t feel so raw.
Sunny looked up, stretching his head into Lidea's hand, finding his eyes fluttering shut. Sunny wrinkled his nose.
"I should put the dishes away before bed," Sunny said.
"That's my job; I got it."
Sunny was already getting up.
"You fed the plants and put the dishes in the washer. I can unload them. No problem." He was already at the under-counter appliance by the time he reached the end of his gentle protests. He opened the hatch and hummed, examining the mesh drawers. He sighed. There was just something about the way Lidea arranged things inside that bothered him. Everything was kind of…scattered.
"Everything okay?" Lidea called from the living room.
"Just…the way you put the dishes in here." He started unloading from the top row.
"Did I do something wrong? Yours is the first automatic dishwasher I’ve used."
"No," Sunny replied.
"Did they not get clean?"
"No, they’re clean."
"Is there a more economical way to arrange them? Did a plate slide sideways or something? Increased chance of cracking that I didn’t notice?" Lidea's voice was getting steadily sharper as ey sat up.
"No," Sunny said, more quiet in contrast.
"Okay then." Lidea surged up off the couch and trotted into the kitchen, stopping a few feet away. "Then what's the problem?"
Sunny pressed his palms to the counter and leaned on them. He had been trying to avoid this, but it had been building slowly, sand piling on sand.
"Nothing. Just like the chores to be done right." The instant he said it, he knew he’d fucked up.
"What did I do not ‘right?’" Lidea's energy was puffing up, rolling and spinning. Ey had been waiting for this, too, but hoped Sunny would have come up with something more specific before it came to this. Why didn't he stop this before it got this far? It was his house, after all. His stuff, as he liked to remind em.
"Nothing."
"Okay, then if they got clean, then why does exactly how they're stacked matter?"
"It doesn't." Sunny dug back into the dish racks.
"So it's just a problem because I didn't do it the same way you did. It has to be done your way."
"And why shouldn't it?" Sunny put the cup he was holding back in the rack to avoid dropping it.
"I've lived in this house for years. I've already figured out how to fold the towels so they fit in the linen closet the right way. I’ve put my video tapes and books in the order they’re in for a reason. I've already had to squish all of my workshop into half the original space. I shouldn't have to change everything else if it doesn't need it."
"You asked me to marry you." Lidea lost all eir energy, collapsing from the inside until eir voice choked and faltered. "That comes with combining lives. Living together. This is supposed to be my home, too, according to your big-picture plans. I should be allowed to put the dishes in the dishwasher any which way I want as long as the job gets done. What the fuck does marriage look like to you?"
Ey hadn't stormed off since ey was a teenager, but now eir legs were moving up the stairs to their shared room. Ey stood in the middle of the bedroom. Ey paused. Ey grabbed a pillow and eir blanket off the bed and went into the workshop instead. Ey curled up in the chair and stewed.
*****
Sunny laid in bed alone for the first time in six weeks. He hadn’t realized how accustomed to having Lidea there he had become. Bedsharing had gone from an occasional, novel treat on the road to an everyday expectation. He like having it as an everyday. He liked waking up and going ti bed next to Lidea, of the quiet ease of going about their days together. He loved it.
Fuck. He loved it. He loved Lidea. He loved Lidea, and he was fucking it all up. He should have kept things the way they were. The way they were had been working. They were both happy.
Josephine dropped a vine down from the window, across the floor, and over his shoulder. One of the thornier bits poked him hard in the fleshiest part of his cheek.
“Yeah, I know you like em.”
The plant poked him again.
“Yes. I’m going to fix it.”
Another vine reached underneath his body and pressed at his shoulder blades.
“Okay, I’ll do it now.”
The plant half rolled him out of bed, and he padded out of the room and down the hallway. He knocked on the workroom door, hoping ey was still awake.
“What do you want?” Lidea answered, hoarse.
“To apologize,” Sunny said. If he was upfront, maybe he could press right through to the core of the issue. Lidea didn’t hesitate.
“Come in.”
Lidea was curled up in the lounge chair, blanket pulled up around eir shoulders. Ey was really too tall for it, and eir legs stuck out weirdly over the arm. Sunny grabbed his rolling stool and moved it across from eir.
“I’m a dumb ass,” he opened with.
“Yes. You are.”
“Can I explain why I’m a dumb ass, or should I just jump right to groveling?”
“You grew up in a sylvan commune where you didn’t have any control over your environment. So when you finally had something that was yours and only yours, you over-corrected. Now you’re an asshole about it.”
Sunny stared at the bit of Lidea that was peeking over the top of the blanket.
“Well, then I’ll just leave if we’ve got it figured out.” Sunny stood, rattled, feeling it in his knees. Lidea grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back, the force swaying him back just enough he missed his chair and thumped lightly to the floor.
“Just because I get why you are the way you are doesn’t mean I like it,” Lidea said. “Or that I’m going to put up with it.”
“Sorry.” Sunny leaned against the arm of the lounge chair.
“I told you if this was going to work, I needed to feel like it was my home, too. Are we going to keep having this conversation?”
“No…maybe. I don’t know.”
Lidea threw eir head back and brought eir hand over to settle on Sunny’s scalp. Ey scratched it absently.
“I don’t have a problem doing things your way. I don’t actually care about most of it. And I don’t want you to feel like you can’t make recommendations. So I’m sorry for blowing up at you.”
“You shouldn’t be apologizing for anything,” Sunny sighed.
“Maybe.” Lidea scratched his scalp. “I’m not so naive to think we won’t have this conversation again. This is just going to be one of those things we have to keep coming back to. So I keep thinking…why? Why get ourselves into that cycle when everything was so much easier before?”
“Because I love you. I’m in love with you.” Sunny pushed his head up into Lidea’s hand. “I don’t know how you feel, but for me that’s worth it.”
Lidea kept scratching his head as ey thought.
“Something we don’t talk about, but elves don’t really…hm…I don’t know why elves get married. I mean…I know, but…” Lidea pulled eir hand back to scratch eir own head, trying to think. “My dad did his genetic due diligence, but he still chose my human mom as his wife, in the end. When I was a teenager, I asked him why? When everyone was so shitty to him about it. He said because he loved her. Grandmother has always said ‘that’s a stupid reason to do anything.’ The upper echelon get very careful with…breeding?... Pedigrees. That’s the word I’m looking for. So I just…My grandparents like each other well enough, but I don’t know if they love each other. And I don’t think I know the difference between the two.”
“Does that matter?” Sunny asked.
“I kinda feel like it should,” Lidea replied. Sunny clucked his tongue.
“I come from three generations of ‘I don’t know which one your bio-dad is, and it doesn’t really matter.’ Sylvan are raised by the collective and everything just…is…”
“So maybe we’re not designed for this sort of thing, you and me. If we’re not sure-“
“But I am sure,” Sunny insisted. He so rarely had such strong words, but here they were. “I’m sure that I want to spend my life with you. Is that enough?”
Lidea sighed.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Lidea flicked eir fingers through Sunny’s hair again. “Do we have any plans this weekend?”
“Yasira wants to go out for drinks tomorrow night.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Or, tonight, I guess.”
“We should do that,” Lidea said. “I think it’ll be good to be around other people together…if that makes sense.”
“Are you feeling-“
“Just…let’s go out for drinks. Then think about things.”
*****
“Holy shit, you actually came.” Yasira threw his arms around Sunny’s shoulders and lifted him a little off the floor. “Lidea.” He offered eir a hug, as well. Yasira guided them toward a group of tables at the back of the pub. There were a lot more people than Sunny expected, but he at least recognized most of them. Lidea gently touched his hand but didn’t take it.
They had been dancing and flitting around the central conflict all day, but they didn’t feel steeped in dread. Not yet. For Sunny, at least, something had clicked over in his brain. He wasn’t going to lose Lidea. If ey hadn’t gotten tired of him during this six-week intensive after all the years that preceded it, then ey was in it deeper than he realized. They would get through this minor hiccup.
You didn’t have to be a magician to work at a magic-craft oriented school. Yasira wasn’t one. But it certainly attracted that population. A group of any manner of magicians in one place made the ambient energy pulse and vibrate. They both sat in it, awash, letting it wrap warm and snug.
And neither of them had to carry the conversation. It was nice, Lidea thought, that ey didn’t have to do anything. That ey could just listen to other people, take in their stories as a nice little background narrative. Maybe ey had given Sunny a harder time that he deserved. Ey thought of themselves as an extrovert, a talker, but maybe that was only when ey framed themselves in terms of Sunny’s behavior. Here, ey was happy to sit next to Sunny and have everything sort of happen around them. Ey still wanted to know about his day and wanted him to be interested in eirs and actually talk about stuff, but had they really had a problem with that before? Ey had maybe started imagining a different version of their life together instead of just adjusting it to new circumstances.
“So you’re friends with Sunny?” A human woman took the seat next to em and leaned in. Margot, a telekinetic magician that Lidea had only just been introduced to that evening. Sunny had temporarily moved to the other end of the cluster of tables to confer with a colleague on something that had them laughing softly.
“Yeah,” Lidea replied. It was such a nothing question. Where the hell was ey supposed to go with that kind of opener? This was the reason Sunny didn’t talk to people.
“I’m a guild mage,” Margot said. “I always thought I wanted to travel and work, but…”
"Not for you?" Lidea prodded.
"Joined Guild Tessiar in college, but my parents encouraged me to keep after my degree. Decided I'd get the teaching certificate, travel, then do magework and teach in the field. But you really need more traditional teaching experience before trying to do travel teaching. Then I met my spouse, and they weren’t really interested in being with someone who traveled for work. I made the choice to stay home. Then we got divorced. So…now I don't know what I'm supposed to do."
"If you're looking for encouragement, it's never too late to do traveling work." Lidea took a sip of eir wine. Ey was midway through the second glass, working through them slowly. Still, there was a buzz in eir head and a warmth in eir cheeks.
"Hm. Maybe." Margot finished the last quarter of her mixed drink in one swallow. "What's the love life like on the road? I've heard some of you guys can really get around."
"I…um." Lidea hid from the question behind a sip of wine. "You're not wrong, I guess. Not really something I pay a lot of attention to personally."
Margot leaned in a little closer, arm skating along the back of Lidea's chair.
"I mean," she said, "If you're never in one place for too long, not like there are consequences. You can just…hook up and move on. No attachments."
"Yeah. That's an advantage for some people." Lidea leaned away. Hard. Was this flirting? Ey had never been good at noticing flirting and was terrible at doing it back. Ey cast down the table at Sunny, but he had moved.
"Margot!" Sunny was over eir shoulder, close to eir ear. "Back off. Lidea's not interested." His body was coiled in like a spring ready to pop. He wasn’t drunk, yet, but the tops of his cheeks were peachy with inebriation. A few people half-looked down the table but glanced off before it could turn into staring.
“We’re just talking, Sunny. Calm down.” Margot moved away, and Lidea realized how close she had actually gotten over the course of their brief conversation. It wasn’t a threatening or even necessarily unwanted closeness. There was a point in eir life, a younger age, when ey would have welcomed a little of this kind of attention. Right now, though, it was too much. A pressure that made eir skin crawl.
It also felt like a betrayal.
But to whom exactly?
“You’re not just talking,” Sunny insisted. “You’re flirting, and Lidea doesn’t like it.”
“Lidea can speak for emself.” Margot had kept her voice level, but now it was lifting a little.
“Ey’s trying to be polite.”
“Okay,” Margot turned back to Lidea, more serious this time. “I recognize that Sunny’s an intense guy, but you let him speak for you like this? He’s not your father, and he’s not your husband.”
Sunny’s fist clenched. Lidea’s reflexes kicked like a flash of lightning shooting down eir limbs. Eir fingers circled Sunny’s wrist, pinning it in place.
“Let’s go. We’re going.” Lidea threw enough cash to cover both their drinks on the table, then surged up, dragging him outside into the cold of the night. Ey moved quickly, pulling him away from the pub and down the street.
This part of the borough nearer Giddington Academy was dotted with small, partially walled-in parks, and Lidea yanked him around through an opening. The chest-high walls blocked off enough of the sounds for it to almost seem quiet. Ey found a bench under a streetlight and dragged Sunny in front of em until they were eye level with each other.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” ey asked. “Were you actually going to fight her? Do you know how insane that is?”
Sunny raked his hands down his face then locked them behind his head.
“I feel like I’m losing my mind,” he mumbled.
“You sound like it, too, so…I don’t know…maybe get your shit together.”
Sunny did a small turn, hands still clasped behind his neck. He huffed and puffed a few times. His guts were ready to rattle apart, the bile ready to bubble up his throat at the slightest provocation. There was no going back from any of this. Only through. He took a few steps back toward Lidea and let his body take over the last half of the motion.
When his lips met Lidea’s, whatever pressurized thing that was living in his chest burst and boiled out, burning his muscles and bones. He put his hands around Lidea’s jaw, terrified ey would pull away.
Ey didn’t.
The initial surprise of Sunny kissing em like this clipped quickly through a constellation of emotions. Confusion that it was happening. Anger that he had done it without express permission and consent. Acceptance that Sunny, of all people, kissing em wasn’t really that big of a deal considering everything else that came before it. Then confusion again that ey liked it. Ey liked it a lot. Enough that ey started kissing him back within half a moment.
Eir hands touched the outside of Sunny’s hands where they were resting on eir face and neck. Ey pulled them loose and dropped them down, weaving their fingers together. Sunny moved forward until he was standing between Lidea’s legs. They didn’t know what to do with their hands, trying to break away in various turns before settling back into the grip they were currently holding.
“Fucking finally, damn.”
Sunny sighed as he pulled away gently. Yasira had tracked them down in the brief span of time since they had stormed out.
“We’re gonna go home,” Sunny said.
“Yeah, you are,” Yasira winked.
“Shut up, not like that.” Sunny pinched his nose. “Can you smooth things over with the others?”
“Why do you care? Your contract’s over, for now.”
“Just…please.”
Yasira gave a flick of his hand and moved off beyond the wall.
Sunny turned back to Lidea and kissed em on the forehead. Through, not back.
*****
“This doesn’t suddenly fix everything. A little kissing in the park.” Lidea sat at the table picking at eir oatmeal while Sunny puttered around the kitchen.
“And back at home on the couch. Then this morning in bed.”
“That’s all been you.” Lidea pointed a spoon at him. “You broke the seal, and now you’re getting overly bold.”
“You’re not stopping me,” Sunny countered.
“Shut up.”
“No.” He moved away from the counter specifically to place a series of kisses and up and down eir jaw. “I found us a job.”
“Wh-what?” Lidea moved all eir focus back to Sunny.
“Monday after you’re done with the print shop. Ruins research group needs some extra mages on hand to help with equipment management. Artificer college put me onto it.”
“I’ve never really been out in the jungle.” Lidea considered the shape and color of eir oatmeal. “We don’t have to do that. Go on jobs. We can start…changing how we do things.”
“You’re bored,” Sunny said simply. “You’re not ready to give up traveling. So we go on jobs. For now.”
“And you’re…okay…with that?”
Sunny stopped mid-task to drop into the chair across from em. He flicked his fingers that ey should hold his hands. The mood grew very serious, very quick.
“The only thing I want right now is to be with you. So where you go, I go. Until you get tired of me.”
Lidea chuffed.
“You know that won’t actually happen. I can’t imagine it.”
“Then you’re stuck with me. We’ve already established that.” Sunny got up to go back to mindlessly wiping the countertops down. Ey watched his back for a moment.
Ey loved him. Maybe was finding the closest thing to “in love” that ey’d ever experienced. But ey’d wait to tell him when he wasn’t so smug about it.
Despite eir irritation with him, ey found emself grabbing his hand as they took the tram down to the grocers. They were part of a small group of people who disembarked in front of the large, low building. The doors auto-opened for them, inviting them into the foyer with the cart corral. Sunny picked up a rechargeable icebox from the station and attached it to the cart, pushing forward into the store.
Lidea didn’t really buy batches of groceries when ey was on world and had grown up in more of an open-air market with independent food sellers kind of environment. With so much importation, Tomar relied on a more corporate supermarket system. One that was at least aware that most people used public transport. Sunny eschewed grocery delivery, preferring to actually feel the items he planned to eat.
“What do you want to eat this week?” he asked as they moved through the fruits and vegetables first.
“You going to cook for me?” Lidea asked, putting some apples into a biodegradable mesh bag then settling them into the open area of the shopping cart.
“I cook for you all the time, already,” Sunny pointed out, referring to the road rations he frequently made for both of them.
“Yeah fair. Okay.”
They moved through breads and chips and other snacks, picking up things here and there, until they wheeled around to the meat and cheese and dairy and fish counters. These all went into the ice box to be kept cold and delivered separately.
"Professor Childress! I thought I saw your lecture on the schedule, but I wasn't sure if you confirmed." The ariesian woman caught them as they were debating on which ice cream they wanted to add to their cart. She ran on the petite side, pearline horns peeking out of a puff of black coily hair in its natural spun-sugar state. She honed in on Lidea sharply.
"Is this Lidea?" she asked with a sharp smile. She reached for Lidea's hand, and ey took it numbly. "I’m Dana Sinclair. My wife is head of the department he lectures under."
"Oh! Fun!" Lidea managed, gagging on the words and unsure how to react.
"How long are you in town for?" Dana asked, leaning on her grocery cart with a sharp elbow, almond eyes flicking under sharp eyeliner.
"Uhm. I don't know yet. Usually just a couple of weeks. I haven't picked up my next contract, yet, though." Lidea found eirself twiddling with the end of eir braid over eir shoulder. Dana clapped her hands sharply once.
"How do you feel about bookbinding and printing?"
"Neutral?" Lidea replied, but Dana was already digging in her purse for something.
"I work at a local shop, and we have some magic inlaid filigrees and blah blah blah. And regulation says we have to have at least one registered mage on staff to monitor etc etc." She found what she was looking for in her bag and came away with a business card. "Our current one is retiring this week, and the new one was supposed to start next Monday. But! They've been delayed by another job. We have a makeshift solution, but if you can fill in for eight weeks-"
"Eight weeks?"
"Yeah, if you're available! Come by tomorrow, and we can talk about it in more depth. Mid-morning." Dana tapped the address on the card, then vanished around the end of the aisle, some of the mystery spoiled by the squak and squeal of the cart. Lidea looked down at the card then shoved it in eir pocket.
"We should get chocolate," ey said, reaching for the small cardboard carton and dropping it in the icebox.
"Are you going to go check it out?" Sunny asked when ey kept silent.
"Eight weeks. I haven't stayed in one place that long in a really really long time."
"Maybe it's a chance for something new."
"I'll get restless. I can't…I don't think I can settle down that long."
"Have you ever tried?" Sunny asked, trying not to snap. Lidea stopped, leaning on the handle of the basket, knuckles paling as ey gripped tightly around it.
"No. No, I've never tried." Ey ground eir jaw. "I can maybe do that, at least."
*****
Lidea laid on the couch with eir head on the armrest, still wet hair wrapped in a towel to keep it off the upholstery. Ey had found a broadcast of a crime thriller from Purvailan that ey was mostly following. Ey didn’t know much about cars, but ey was pretty certain they didn’t explode all the time. Still, it was entertaining.
By the time they had made it back from the grocers, eir stuff had arrived from the storage locker. The afternoon had been spent picking apart haphazard boxes someone else had packed quickly to save eir stuff from the burst pipe. Spread out in the company of Sunny’s material existence, the transience of eir life flashed in stark contrast.
The discomfort in this new environment hadn’t started fading yet, but ey was accustomed to that specific feeling at this point. Ey was always in a state of readjustment, of constant adaptation. Lidea had become good at it, being in that state of flux and movement. Were eight weeks enough to lose that ability?
Ey traced the sound of Sunny's footsteps above and behind em. He'd dry his hair, go to bed, and probably fall asleep quickly. Ey counted the moments in the tension of eir jaw, trying to math how long all this would take him. Ideally, ey would just wait for him to be asleep and ey could slip into bed without conversation. Ey just wanted to sleep, right now, not face new and terrible patterns of existence. The show eventually ended (the husband was ultimately the murderer, of course), and that felt like enough time.
Sunny heard Lidea trying to walk as softly as possible down the hallway and laid still as ey opened the door, letting em have the space without the weight of his attention. He opened his eyes a slit and felt guilty immediately. But then Lidea's bare back was pale in the moonlight coming in through the window, and he couldn't pull away, memorizing the lines of eir spine and shoulders. Then ey slipped another, more billowy shirt on and moved toward the bathroom to brush eir teeth.
Sunny gripped the blanket tighter as ey came back toward the bed. Ey sat on the edge, hands resting on eir bare thighs.
"I can feel you still awake, Sunny," Lidea said quietly, low enough that he probably wouldn't have heard em if he wasn't wide awake still. He poked em in the hip. Ey smacked him a away a little and laid down, bringing the other blanket up to cover emself from the waist down, arms falling to eir side to lock eir body into place. Sunny reached over and touched eir hand. Ey let him but hesitated before reciprocating, turning eir hand over to let his fingers interlace.
"I know what you're trying to do." Ey had figured it out in eir nervous system before the ideas drifted up into eir brain to ruminate and form coherence. Sunny waited for em to elaborate, but he was fairly certain he knew what path eir brain was heading down. "You're boiling me alive." Sunny waited again, but Lidea had stopped. Maybe he didn't understand after all.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You asked me to marry you, and I didn't give you a hard yes. And now you're freaking out because you don't handle that kind of thing well. So you're boiling me alive. You're going to press little changes on me without me noticing until, suddenly, I’m waking up to make us breakfast before heading off to my office job while you get our two and a half kids ready for school.”
"Neither of us planned to have kids."
"That's not the point." Lidea pinched the bridge of eir nose. "The point is you're doing it, and you're not subtle."
"I’m not trying to do anything," Sunny countered, knowing immediately, as he said it, that he has probably been nudging them both without thinking about it.
Both of them were stubborn and struggled with change, but he had one big, specific alteration he wanted to make to his life: having Lidea be a part of it permanently. He kept thinking ey just needed to be shown what that life could look like, to bring the image that lived in his head into a space where Lidea could see it, too. So if he could just…push em…a little…
And now he saw exactly what ey was saying. What ey'd been saying this whole time and he was continuing to struggle to accept. They had always flowed together so easily, he didn't know how to handle real friction between them.
Lidea rolled over, away from him.
"I'm tired. And I've got that meeting at the bookbindery tomorrow."
"Are you thinking about taking the jo-"
"I'm tired," Lidea said more firmly. Sunny rolled over away from em, as well. He touched his shoulder-blades to eirs, and ey didn't pull away, at least.
*****
"So…what do you think?" Dana made a dramatic sweeping gesture through the windows that looked down over the bindery floor. The tour had been cursory, Dana running em through the basic process of receiving material to copying and printing it. This printer focused on informational and educational texts. They printed almost every medical pamphlet in the entire city.
The only set of machines they lingered on was the responsive magic ink process. It was an old and refined enough process, it could be used to create everything from tattoos to commercial food labeling. Here, they pressed ink into paper that could respond to various stimuli as needed by the brochure or pamphlet. Maybe a scroll of medicine side-effects or highlighting different parts of a diagram with just a tap. Once it was set up, the printer only needed an artificer for repair and maintenance, but workplace regulations demanded a magician be in the building while they ran. Whatever anyone’s personal opinion on the matter, the laws were stringent enough to have Dana recruiting in a grocery store.
Lidea wouldn't actually have to do anything, though. Not really. Dana said she'd find em something to do to fill the time if ey wanted, but honestly they just needed a warm body, for now.
"You know," Dana said when Lidea didn't respond, moving up next to em to look out the window. "Sunny mentioned you were big on social systems."
Lidea attempted a professional shrug. Ey wasn't like Sunny with his hyperfocus on geology and engineering. Ey just sort of picked things up as ey went, collected information about the world bit by bit as ey moved through it, let it wash over and through emand leave whatever flotsam behind.
"It's an interest, yeah," Lidea finally affirmed. This was the real world where people abided by social norms, not out in the wilds. Ey needed to resettle into the patterns of civilized conversation. "Does Sunny actually talk about me?"
"Oh, all the time. Only good stuff, I promise." Dana gave a vague pat on Lidea's arm. "So we've been taking some customer feedback for one of our off-world clients." Dana moved around to a small crate next to her desk and brought it up on top. It was full of loosely parceled papers with scrawly hand writing on them. "We haven't really had a chance to go through and process them, though. Could be a great little side project while you're here warming a chair."
"This feels like you're trying to hard sell me on the job," Lidea said. Dana rolled forward on her toes a little.
"Look, you'd be doing me a huge favor. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. We can't afford to shut down our magic printer, so I made a deal with guild Thannaly that they could throw whoever was available at me to make sure we have someone in the building. However, I don't need a bunch of random street mages I don't know coming through and having to do the paperwork over and over again. Sunny knows and trusts you. I trust Sunny. Transitive property." Dana gave em a pat on the back.
"Hey, it's basically a paid vacation. Give it a day to think on it."
Lidea shifted on eir feet, mirroring Dana's uncertainty. Maybe that was the way to think about this. Not a cage. But a break.
A rest. One ey needed.
*****
Sunny didn't normally need to do things like staff meetings, but he always liked to come back to campus a few days ahead of time to check paths to his lecture rooms and get a sense of any changes. This meant a small foray into one of the faculty lounges for coffee and sweet snacks. He ran into a few other faculty, some permanent, some in a more temporary position like his.
Giddington, right from its lowest levels, was about teaching kids how not just to live as magicians, but use those abilities professionally if they so choose. The upper-level education required at least a few classes that explored the pragmatic side of this. Those kinds of classes needed teachers who had that practical experience. Those people were often still working in the field, and there was no way to nail them down for a full semester of teaching. Six weeks was usually feasible, though, and they could work it into the schedule.
A lot of universities and through-level schools all over the connected worlds had similar sub-semester class slots, so he could probably pick up lectures anywhere. He enjoyed coming back home to Latolan, though. It was like a break. A reset. One day he was pretty certain he would just come home and stay home.
His hand got a little tighter around a mug.
He just had to fit Lidea into that, somehow.
"Sunny!"
"Yasira, hey." Sunny greeted a stone elf who had wobbled in through the door, tight white braids bouncing along his back. He had been a mercenary at one point then a broken back took him out permanently. He had hard shifted to teaching a few different history subjects at the secondary school level.
Yasira moved up to get his own mug of coffee, gray skin darker against the white of the ceramic.
"I wasn't sure if you were coming by early this time or not. Come out this weekend and catch up."
"Um, yeah, maybe. Let me double-check with Lidea." He pressed his lips together, trying to figure out how that selection of words sounded together.
"Oh, not gonna keep you from em, of all people." Yasira stirred his coffee with intent.
"Ey's actually in town longer this time, maybe. And ey's staying with me so…it's…I just want to make sure ey didn't have something planned."
Yasira looked him over.
"Lidea's staying with you. Does that…mean anything?"
"I don't know yet," Sunny admitted.
"Well," Yasira tapped his spoon on the edge of the mug. "My office number's the same. Let me know." But he made a clicking sound as he moved back out the door. Sunny pressed his palms to the countertop that held the coffee machine.
Yasira would make one casual remark to one of their shared circles of acquaintances, and the entire guild row would know by the end of the week. Probably needed to decide what it meant by then.
*****
The bed was empty when Sunny woke up. It had been every day so far. He was the first to go bed, as well. Lidea was purposefully giving up little margins of eir own sleep to not be in bed with him while they were both awake.
The days ending out the weekd had been…odd…He had taken em around, got some clothes that were more "work appropriate" for the bindery job ey had decided to take, went swimming in the spring-fed pool before it got too cold to bear. But Lidea refused to hold the ends of the conversation up, and that had dunked them into a weird, tense silence.
It was something Lidea had noticed a long time ago but had born it out because it seemed like such a minor quirk of their relationship. When ey thought about having to drag conversation out of Sunny for the next eight weeks solid, the weight started dropping heavier. Whey ey extrapolated that out to the rest of eir life, the thought turned eir bones brittle and eir muscles drawn. Maybe ey would grow used to it. Maybe it would become a pattern ey one day grew to miss when Sunny invariably preceded em into the planes beyond life. Ey wouldn't go down that road without fighting it, though.
And Sunny had picked up the change. Of course he had. Lidea suddenly fading into silence beside him meant he was barely talking. So much so he'd noticed his voice croaking and complaining in even just a short time. There was probably a full panoply of wrong things, but he was too stupid to figure them out from one another and address it. He needed Lidea to walk him through it, but that also didn't seem entirely fair.
He found em in his workshop down the hall, sitting in his rolling high-backed chair, staring blankly at the wall of tools.
"I knocked some of your books off the shelf by accident," Lidea said. "One of them was a photo album. Didn't look." Ey glanced toward where it had fallen on the floor, open to a page in the middle. Ey didn't know any of the faces in the photos except for a young, beardless, short-haired Sunny. The baby-face clean-cut affectation of a twenty year old artificer-in-training still trying to prove himself. Lidea was telling the truth, but only barely. Ey had squatted down, fingers to the edge of the page planning to turn the page. Ey didn't. Couldn't. It was peeking into Sunny's past without his permission. Ey didn't want that.
When Sunny looked, he saw a flash of one of the worst weeks of his life. Of Echo's face next to his in a class photo just before everything so bad for everyone involved. He toed the book shut. It still wasn't the right time to bring all that up. He picked up the others — reference manuals and notebooks with calculations — and stacked them back on the nearby shelf sloppily. He immediately hated that and set them up straight and tucked them in properly. That still wasn't good enough, so he shuffled them into the right order, moving some other things on the shelf so that it made sense again.
Lidea watched him the whole time.
"Okay, this shit. This is the thing I've been thinking about most." Lidea swiveled the chair toward him dramatically. Sunny shifted back and forth on his feet in front of Lidea.
"What are we talking about?" he asked, glad for the seed of conversation.
"If I'm going to be here for the next eight weeks, it has to feel like my home, too. It's only been a few days, so I haven't had a chance to really fuck up your environment yet, but it'll happen. Can you be cool when I do?"
"Yeah, absolutely." He wasn't going to ask em if he'd been particularly particular. He knew who he was, and Lidea was a saint for putting up with it so far without making a big deal out of it. Lidea swiveled in the chair, rocking on eir heels.
"I don't…hm…I've never had a place that's just mine. Long term, you want me to share this place with you, I need to figure out what that means."
"Understood."
Lidea glanced over him some more, giving him a chance to elaborate on his own terms.
"Something else." Ey tapped eir fingers along the crest of eir knee. Sunny felt his own hands tense to prepare for whatever this was. "I'm realizing that as much as I know you, I also don't. I don't know the version of you that lives here, just the one out there. I'd like to get to know this version."
"Okay."
"And I'm bad about this, too, but I want to know more about you before we met."
"Um." And they both felt that hesitation like a lake of sludge. "Alright," Sunny agreed.
"Alright."
"Okay."
The phone on the wall behind him rang, and Lidea jumped. Ey technically had a phone in eir room at the Thýlalykófoton, but it never rang. It hadn't gone off at Sunny's either, so ey sort of forgot they existed.
Sunny picked it up on the second ring.
"Sunny, you busy?" Yasira said through the phone.
"Yes and no."
"Come over and check the energy transfer unit on my bike."
"Is this an excuse to hang out because I never gave you an answer about going for drinks?"
"Yes."
"Fine."
Sunny hung up the phone with no additional conversation. Yasira would know.
"Want to go over to a friend’s house?" Sunny asked. Lidea wanted to know this "version" of him better. This was the best he could do, for now. Yasira would certainly spill some semi-convenient truths of Sunny's existence.
Lidea nodded.
"I'll break out one of my new pairs of pants."
******
It was hard to pin down any part of Tomar as “new.” The city, as an urban unit, had become as big as the wilderness was willing to let it, right now, and they had reached that footprint a generation ago. Eifanei, however, was among the first three provinces defined, wood elves desperate to make sure they had carved out their chunk of land. The center of the province was wood elf construction, blocky and austere and sensible.
From there, though, a ring of stone elf neighborhoods had formed with a cluster of bull elf blocks. In theory, there was a small sun elf neighborhood somewhere toward the middle, too, but in all the times Sunny had been through Eifanei, he had never found it. And he'd actively looked, boredom giving way to curiosity sometimes during his lengths of teaching. That mystery was probably by design.
Yasira's condominium was closer to the highway intersection, a tram stop up from the sprawling shopping plaza that covered all corners of it. Lidea stopped briefly at the sign at the entrance to the apartment homes. Ey looked for an ownership tag in the text below the neighborhood name.
One of the strong connecting threads of all elves was that they rarely had any kind of personal possession over their own home. Everything was technically owned by a clan leader, and you sort of "paid in" to live on your property. Not quite renting. Something that existed in the in-between spaces that humans had designed around property rights.
Eifanei wasn't clan-lands, though. It was direct District governance through Tomar. Ey tapped eir finger to the sign when ey found it. Ey'd figure out what exactly the "Eifanei Council" looked like from a logistical perspective, later. Despite technically living here, in this city on this word, ey kept a lot of distance from it.
"Liddy?"
"Coming." Lidea took a few long steps to catch up to him.
He brought them down a small garden path, through a lovely shared courtyard where some stone elf kids were playing disk throw, and up a flight of stairs. Yasira must have heard them coming, because he threw open the door for them as they approached.
“Get in here, you two.” Yasira grappled Sunny around the shoulders and pulled him into a hug, pressing Sunny’s face into his chest.
“Can’t breathe.”
Yasira released him, arms staying in a u-shape. He reached for Lidea with a handshake, but ey let him go in for the side hug.
“It’s great to actually meet you,” Yasira said. “I hear about you all the time.”
“Yeah, I’ve been getting that, lately.”
Yasira hooked them both under the elbow and brought them inside. The apartment was neat and boxy. The left was hallways into the bedrooms. The right side was a combined living room with a frosted glass door leading into the kitchen. It was open, and the smell of baking bread drifted out. A stone elf woman stood in the doorway, hair tucked under a blue scarf, floral dress hiding a profoundly pregnant belly.
Sunny spread his hands in surprise, gesturing to her midsection.
"Indy! What the hell, when did this happen?!" Sunny met her across the living space and shared another hug.
"We had only just found out the last time you were home. I'll pop before you head back out again." Indy patted Sunny on the back, then looked up at Lidea. "You're Lidea."
"Yeah, everyone seems to know me, but I don't know anyone." Lidea shifted nervously, letting Indy give em a side hug as well.
"Um…I…" Sunny floundered. He was cut off by a loud stomping from the floor above them.
"This is terrible timing, Sascha." Yasira grabbed a broom leaning against the wall and gave five raps to the ceiling, two evenly spaced then three quicker and closer together. The stomps returned the same pattern. It was one form of the distress signal shared between wanderers-by-trade when they met out in the wild.
"Damn it," Yasira muttered, dropping the broom against the wall. "Her asshole ex-boyfriend is back. Y'all come with. Maybe it's actually good timing."
Yasira breezed back through the front door, Sunny and Lidea hot on his heels. He brought them up the stairs and back down the space between apartments to the one just above his. The door was cracked open and voices were pouring out, raised and angry.
"Stay a few steps behind for a second." Yasira yanked the door open and barreled in.
This apartment was built like the one below, but inside were two people caught in the middle of a screaming match. The woman, Sascha presumably, was a stone elf mixed with a little something else, probably a sylvan grandparent. It wasn't super apparent in her appearance, but it ticked over in her aura. The man screaming at her, backing her into a corner, was fully human and several shades of angry.
Sunny felt a knot form in the base of his stomach. He had been here before, watching this kind of thing unfold with other friends who had called him in for backup. It never went smoothly for him.
Lidea touched eir fingers to the outside edge of eir shortstaff, unlatching it from the leather strapping that holstered it to eir thigh. It was an instinctual sort of movement birthed from the tension in the room. Not that ey was much of a fighter.
Yasira had hopped in between the couple as Lidea and Sunny moved around.
"Hey, man," Yasira said. "Let's all calm down, come on." He hooked his hand around the human's arm and started giving him a gentle push.
"Get your fucking hands off me," the ex-boyfriend snapped, yanking his arm out from under Yasira's grip. "This isn't any of your fucking business."
"You're stressing out my pregnant wife with all the yelling, friend; let's bring this all down a little."
It was standard mercenary technique to attempt de-escalation before ever wielding a weapon in earnest. If he were still an active member of the mercenary guild, he would have a lot of legal leeway to inflict grievous defensive injury without getting in trouble with the law. Even retired he could get away with a fair amount of violence. It was good he was disinclined toward it, and the mercenary screening process had done its job.
"I told you to back off. " The ex-boyfriend actively pushed Yasira this time, forcing the stone elf to yield a few steps. Sunny moved closer to Lidea, brushing the back of his fingers against Lidea's free hand. Yasira moved in a little closer, hands out in a placating fashion. The ex pulled back to swing.
Things shifted into slow motion for Lidea, then. It was actually one of the simpler approaches to magic and part of the irst set of systems young magicians learned. It wasn't hard, and ey didn't need to be careful.
Ey whipped eir staff out into an arc, drew magic up, then slammed the energy down against the human with a sweep. The solidified energy crashed down on his body in a flush of force, and he collapsed underneath it mid-punch. If he'd been expecting it, he probably would have dodged or withstood the magic, but he simply hadn't been prepared. He laid on the floor, flat, facing upward, breath knocked out of him.
Yasira squatted down next to him.
"How about you go downstairs, Sascha? Indy was making lunch. Let my friends and I have a conversation with him."
Sascha glanced between them all of them wide-eyed and sweating.
"Okay." Her voice was soft, doe-like, and she scampered out of her own apartment, grabbing her keys in a weird tumult of clumsiness.
Yasira turned back to the ex-boyfriend. The human moved again, breaking out of Lidea's pressure plates. He tried to swing again, but this time it was Sunny who dropped a boot lightly on his chest. Lidea always forgot about his cursory mercenary training until he did something on the edge of vicious like this. It felt…weird…like another version of him forming in front of em. But then, again, ey had been slowly increasing the pressure of eir own magic the whole time, securing the human aggressor more firmly to the floor.
Yasira pressed his hand to the ex-boyfriend's chest.
"Now, look. I like Sascha. She's sweet. Been helping us set up the nursery. And she moved here…to get away from you. Now I've been dealing with your shit for four months, and I’m starting to get tired of it. I've got a baby on the way that I need to focus on."
The human tried to sit up, and Yasira pushed him back down.
"My good friends here are in town for a bit, and they're a lot meaner than me."
"I'm not sure why this guy isn't black and blue already, honestly," Lidea said. Ey had no idea where the words came from, but they felt right. Felt tough in this weird little playacting they were doing. Sunny ground his boot a little, enough to force a grunt out of the man on the floor. The truth was they were all old and tired and didn't really have the energy to beat up some random twenty-something.
"So how are we handling this?" Yasira hissed. The question hung heavy for a moment. The human shifted and whined.
"I'll go. I won't…I won't come back."
Sunny lifted his foot, and Lidea let the magic slide off him. The human rolled to his knees and scrambled out the door, hands brushing and dragging on the floor as he went. Yasira stood back up with a creak in his spine.
"I expected the tough guy act from Sunny, but you're not bad either, Lidea." Yasira arched backward, hands on his hips. "Okay. Let's head back."
Yasira led them through the door, locking behind them with a latch from the inside.
"Be there in just a second," Sunny said, sending Yasira back toward the stairs with a shrug. He turned to Lidea. "I feel like I need to apologize for that."
"Why? You're mercenary auxiliary, so you're going to know mercenaries. And mercenaries do shit like this. You think I've been walking around blind to that this whole time?"
"I…I don't know." Sunny leaned over the railing, looking out over the courtyard below and the glimpses of city beyond. "You were fast in there," he said as Lidea joined him. "I've never seen you do magic quite like that."
"I mean, that's just what my magic looks like when I don't bother refining it, force and energy."
"Never really thought about it, I guess." Sunny hung his hands on the railing. There were a lot of things he hadn't really thought about. Just moved forward without assessing. "That won't be us," he said, gesturing to the door of the apartment behind him.
"What?" Lidea asked.
"That. Sascha's boyfriend. Whatever happened there. We're not like them."
"Well, I mean, yeah. If you ever thought you could come into my home and yell at me, you're leaving in a body bag."
"I…okay, yeah, that's fair, you'd beat my ass."
"And you'd deserve it." But Lidea weaved eir fingers into his hair, flicking at his ear with eir thumb. “Is that something you were worried about?"
"I thought I had ruined it by pressuring you to live with me."
"Nah," Lidea breathed. "We just needed some air." Ey kissed him on the side of the head. "I just watched you step on a man's chest, and it didn't scare me off. Might take even more than I realized," Lidea mused. "Let's go eat whatever Indy was making."
Lidea dropped eir hand into Sunny's and pulled him toward the stairs. He'd have been satisfied if the "even more" wasn't so terrifying to face.
There were a few interesting things about Tomar that set it apart from anywhere else in all the connected worlds. It was the only large permanent city on the entirety of Latolan; a city-state of something like twelve thousand square miles. Smaller settlements and individual homesteads and farms spread out in a wonky halo a hundred miles out at its farthest reach, but the semi-sentient jungle had a habit of pushing in, encroaching back into the places they had burned it out from.
It was also the only place where a relatively high number of inter-world gates had opened into such a small area. If any of them went through a cataclysmic overload, it would cascade to all the others, and the only thing left would be a crater, disintegrating everything in a three hundred-mile radius in an explosion of magical fusion.
Yet both Sunny and Lidea kept home bases in Tomar along with eight and a half million some-odd other people.
It was impossible to get used to coming through an inter-world gate, and everyone adjusted for it differently. For Lidea, it was like eir brain shut down then restarted, firing back up over the course of a few minutes. Ey was vaguely aware of time passing, but eir perception never matched the time elapsed. Ey could feel the journey in eir legs, though, as ey walked eir body over a bridge of concentrated magical energy.
Sunny described it as simply ceasing to exist as a discrete sapient being for a short while. When he re-materialized, though, he could read in his bones, to the second, how long it had taken him to move between two points. He had tested it with a mechanical stopwatch before.
"You good, Liddy?" Sunny touched the outside of eir hand as ey wobbled in the hallway outside the gate room. The attendant that had helped em down the steps and out into the passage was already on the way back to help the next uneasy traveler.
Lidea snapped to, shaking eir head into shape. Ey grabbed Sunny's hand tighter and nodded.
"Yeah, just need to walk it off."
Lidea let him guide em up the hallway, past one of the waiting rooms, and into the main foyer. Gate stations were universally low and flat, built around the spontaneous openings through space and time.
No magic-fueled machinery. No electricity.
Light came in through skylights and windows, transported through the building with mirrors. In the too dark early mornings and evening, oil lamps did the job. The ticketing system lived just off-site and was updated manually over the course of the day with a team of runners.
Lidea glanced at the black ticker board above the curved travel information desk. One of the help-desk employees changed it out by hand every hour on the hour. They had come across the Erykeanós gate, piping them through from Correlan. After the Tourney in midwestern Illuria, they had traveled slowly toward the east coast. There were a few days to kill in the capital city, Lyric. Then they headed to the gate station just outside of town with a whole crowd of other travelers switching from summer to fall locations.
Down another L-shaped part of the building was another gate, this one going to Azelan. It didn’t welcome nearly the same level of traffic, just a simple trickle of pale people in velvet waistcoats and lace parasols.
A batch of runners with their blue bags of afternoon tickets was disappearing around the side of the building as they exited out onto the promenade in front of the gate station. Tomar was small enough it didn't need transport circles, choosing to usher people through the streets with a robust public transport system.
The color-coded trains of Tomar were a menace of form and function, a half dozen systems on top of each other to move everyone around in a system of complex patterns. Practically no one drove their own vehicles, so the streets were alight with primarily bikes, cars for hire, and the slow-moving pedal trams. These were set into grids with street-level railed trains that moved a little quicker.
These were all below them as they took the high-speed elevated express monorail. It had only a few stops, one or two per borough, latticed in an oddly shaped but spatially efficient polygon.
The ancient, narrow buildings of Düzlem had fallen away quickly from the lift platform as it traveled up to the monorail, and now they slid off in a rolling tide of clay and thatch roof tiles. The border into the next borough to the north, Westlake, was harsh, once flashy glass buildings, now neatly blacked out against the sun. From above, brightly colored marquees and wall-high murals became neon constellations in a cool gray galaxy of angular semi-expressionist architecture. The rail picked up a small group of people in long sleeves and dark glasses, probably hemaphagic vampires.
The monorail cut the corner of Starlight Vale on this edge, far south of the luxury mansions in the foothills, then rattled on vaguely east over Eifanei. The simple, boxy architecture of the mini-elven enclave was all clean ivory, ochre, and green. On other worlds, the roofs would be covered in native grass and flowers. Here, that was maybe too dangerous, so they’d settled with toothless moss and lichen. If it picked up any elves, they didn’t come through their car.
Continuing northeast, the buildings went old and brown again, but with a soothing red cast over the wider avenues and taller buildings. The monorail slowed with a sudden drop as it neared their stop. Tower Watch rose to meet them as they took another lift down, aiming for transfer to a tram.
*****
The yellow route tram stopped in front of Tower Watch Plaza, an orderly mish-mash of social, civil, and commercial space. Guild Row was typically the thing a person came here for, though, so the feeder buildings faded into the background. The large, ornate buildings crouched around a central cobblestone courtyard, each one home to a headquarters of a major inter-world network of various professionals or magical inclinations. The Council of Vampires, The Mercenary Guild (capital M implied over the smaller mercenary guilds), a few of the Mage Guilds with their specific specialties. And sitting low and solid among them, slightly out of place with it's more brutalist architecture, was the main office of the Thýlalykófoton, the place where greenwitches gathered.
It was quiet. It was always quiet. And it felt like a hospital, eggshell walls with blue and green accents as a floral patterned striped down the center. The first area was a small foyer with a round secretary’s desk in the middle. The guild beyond was partitioned off by a wall with a few doors leading into the rest of the building. The secretary was a young person, elf-shaped in all the normal anatomical ways, but with dark brown hair. They didn't have the sense of magical inclination around them, though. Numerically, there were only so many magician elves. During staff shortages, other elves with slight defects (by wood elf standards) sometimes slipped in to fill the gaps.
Wood elves were too weird for their own good sometimes.
Lidea gave the receptionist a little wave and moved toward the door farthest to the right. A sensor box nearby recognized eir specific magical signature, and the door unlocked for em. While every elf with an active magical inclination belonged to the organization automatically, only members of the central college like Lidea were received with special treatment. Ey couldn’t say, to this day, what rubric they used to induct certain members into an elevated position. A letter had simply shown up at eir family home explaining what they had on offer for em. Ey had never pressed it further.
The Thýlalykófoton had a small dormitory, maybe a dozen rooms on two floors. Only three had inhabitants on a more permanent basis, but they stood empty for large periods of time. Through the door, they moved into a small hallway that had a little sitting room off to the left side. A double door on the opposite side of the sitting room led into the rest of the building. Across the hall from the sitting room was the first set of stairs, but there was a sign on them claiming they were out of commission.
"What the hell is this?" Lidea muttered, flicking the sign with eir fingertips. Eir room was on the top floor, but there was another U-shaped staircase at the end of this hallway. As they moved down it, however, the wood floors, normally pristine, felt squishy underfoot.
"Lidea!" Ey turned to an elderly stone elf woman, thick silver hair in youth, now white and brittle, leaning on a cane to support her she moved from the sitting room and into the hallways.
Mattie had been head of the college in her youth, and now she spent retirement handling the onerous task of paperwork. Lidea hugged her gently, squeezing a body made of stringy muscle with firm pressure.
"I wanted to catch you before you made it this far," Mattie croaked. "You can't stay in your room right now. There was a pipe leak, and now the mold is just…it's just everywhere. We hoped to have it fixed by the time you birdies came home to roost, but-"
"No, I understand. That's…that's annoying; I'm not going to lie." Lidea's shoulders dropped.
"Your stuff is okay. We moved it into storage. And we've got a voucher for a hotel for you. So! It's all squared away. Just come by my office." Mattie turned immediately, heading back to the main part of the building. Lidea moved eir bag up on eir shoulder and turned to Sunny. Ey ran eir hand through his.
"Head on to your place. I'll catch up with you later. See what terrible hotel they put me up at."
Sunny didn't move, though, stalling as he worked up the courage for the next ask.
"Why don’t you just stay with me?"
"What?"
"You're only in for a little while, right? Until you catch your next contract? I've got the room."
"Um." Ey studied him. Noticed the way he glanced off holding eye contact. Ey wanted to stay with him, ey realized. Ey didn't really want to part, unsure when ey'd see him next with his lectures coming up. Why had ey never really realized that feeling before?
"Okay," ey said, and felt both their hands tighten around each other.
*****
Instead of the elevated train, they took the street-level rail one borough over into Oslo. The slower ride let them cool down from all the hurried travel so far and enjoy the gentle slide from packed buildings into something resembling the suburbia of more industrialized areas. Sunny’s terrace home was up in a slightly hilly area about three low-speed tram stops from Giddington Academy, the all-through school he lectured at in short stints a few times a year. Lidea stood at the hip-high iron gate that sat at the end of the paving stone path. Ey had only ever seen the outside, and that had only been a few times, standing in this exact spot.
It was a cute house. All the terrace houses were. Quaint little boxy things purpose-built as a cohesive neighborhood. There was a walking park, playground, skating arena, and swimming pool with slides and fountains all within a few blocks. These were the neighborhoods that contrasted the more ephemeral quality of the rest of the city, the place where people hunkered down and actually stayed for generations on end. The all-inclusiveness of the neighborhood made it happen. This area had a strong proliferation of magician families, drawn to the magical education juggernaut that was Giddington. Even young magicians who stayed in more general schooling took night and weekend extracurriculars at magical schools, and Giddington was happy to offer them to all locals who qualified.
So Sunny’s neighbors, peeking out their windows to see his return, knew him pretty well in an academic sense, even if he was only “home” half the year at most.
The "trees" on Latolan were a fibrous flowering plant that grew fast and strong, twenty feet tall and five in diameter. They imported steel for the twenty-story buildings of Old Town and Westlake and the roller coaster park in the Lochburg river loop, but the local plants were perfectly sufficient for houses and even larger, low-stress buildings.
Sunny's townhouse unit was part of a cluster of four that shared the front courtyard, all painted coordinating pastel colors with white trim. Sunny's was peachy-pink. Leafy, thorny bushes underneath his front windows had been threshed back, but only barely. His neighbors on either side had made the smarter choice of having totally potted plants, but even these overspilled their containers.
"Liddy?" Sunny looked back down the path. He had spent the whole day so far looking back for em, it felt, constantly searching the path behind him.
"Will your door plants bite me?" ey asked. Sunny dropped his hand to the tangle of vines by the door, and one of them lifted to him. It wrapped around his finger, testing his aura and looking for bio-magical familiarity. It gave a little squeeze, then retreated, satisfied.
"George is fine," Sunny replied. His plants liked him specifically because he didn't cut them back unless they really, desperately needed it. And even then, they usually asked first. Deadheads and poorly developed leaves were an energy drain.
In the front window, a roll of vines pressed against the glass, seeking Sunny’s aura through the barrier. Lidea moved up behind him, giving a little space to the plant that was now creeping up to sense em out. “George” brushed against eir leg, decided it approved, then circled back into the mass of thickety bush.
“See?” Sunny let them inside, opening straight into the dining area of the first floor. To the left, bleeding in from the dining space, the far wall of the kitchen created a division between the spaces, a little window peeking into a sitting room beyond. The stairs along the right wall disappeared into a dim upstairs.
The walls were a mellow olive green from front to back with complementary neutral clay tiles all the way through. Sunny set his bag down on a small, round, wooden dining table, just big enough for four chairs. Based on the extra shine along the back of the chair and the marks in the floor, he only ever used one spot. Lidea followed suit, laying eir bag on the table next to his.
Ey had planned to pick out only the things ey actually needed from storage. Then ey saw all of it in a single three by four space and didn’t know how to process that eir whole life fit in a closet. Sunny encouraged em just to have it sent over to his house to sort through, and it was still on the way.
Lidea followed as Sunny drifted through the house, frozen in a state of disuse. The kitchen cabinets were blue white, the more ecru of the refrigerator standing out awkwardly in contrast. Sunny opened it to reveal only a handful of things in the door, mostly bottles of sauce and jars of jam.
“Need to go to the market,” Sunny said, closing it again. Lidea moved along the right wall, peeking into the living space. A matching overstuffed couch and chair floated in the middle of the room, a dark vegetal purple, tied together with a simple, low-pile rug in dual-toned stripes of mustard yellow. Around the corner of the outer wall of the stairwell, built-in bookshelves were packed full of military histories, chronicles of technological invention, and engineering manuals. Even so close to overfull, the books lined up like soldiers, small gaps created with bookends to separate out different sub-subjects.
The left wall, facing the couch, had a low wooden cabinet with a boxy television on it. On the first shelf of the cabinet, the face of a gray videotape player peeked out from the blackness. Lidea toed open one door of the cabinet to find rows and rows of neatly shelved video and audio tapes.
Even after all these years of traveling, it still felt weird for video tapes to just…exist in someone's home like this.
Things like film and recorded tapes didn't cross gates well, making it functionally impossible for the average person coming across on foot. It took the level of shielding that only governments and large corporations could construct. The demand for Purvailan-recorded media was high enough, however, that going through such a complex trade process still proved lucrative. It brought with it a trade — often underground — in Areylan-recorded media as well. The higher the magical density, though, the more that ambient pressure degraded various kinds of film and tape. Not everything could be transferred to a magic-friendly format, so you either invested in more shielding or expected to lose the recording eventually.
So on Correlan, where Lidea grew up, the expense of importing videotapes and television sets made them a communal purchase. Gathering at eir grandmother's home with eir cousins and a few of the neighbor kids for weekly movie nights was a fond childhood memory.
Latolan was a lot closer in magical density to Purvailan, so a lot of those problems disappeared. Thus, a personal collection of media became more accessible.
A cord hung out of the back of the television, hooking into the wall. Latolan also had live broadcast television of shows created on-world, and ey had no idea how that worked. Ey could work eir head around videotapes because it was just photographic film and phonographs spliced together somehow. Ey perfectly understood the propagation of sound waves through the atmosphere to create radio. How both light and sound could travel through a cable in the wall right into your television was too weird, though. Too foreign.
Eir brain would probably pop if ey ever actually went to Purvailan.
“Liddy,” Sunny grumbled from the bottom of the stairs. He started moving up them, expecting Lidea to follow. Ey stalked up after him, running the edge of eir pinky up the railing. The wall at the top of the stairs was full of photos in simple wooden frames. Lidea glanced over them, recognizing faces of people they both knew in some of the group shots. Lidea emself was in a lot of these photos. More than ey was prepared to actually face in real life.
Sunny went for the closed door to the left first and opened it into a small workshop room with a thick artificer’s workbench and a pegboard wall full of perfectly aligned tools. Lidea knew, without looking, that around the corner of the door would be stacks of drawers with tiny bits and baubles in them. Every artificer workshop was the same. Sunny’s were probably actually labeled, though.
Everything as it should be, Sunny moved down the hallway, past one door into the bathroom, toward his bedroom, feet loud as they moved off the rug runner to the tiled floor. He was waiting for em to notice, to voice the thing he had been purposefully avoiding drawing attention to because it raised too many additional cascading questions. His bedroom was as he left it, large bed against the long wall to his right. Directly across from the door, the sheer curtains on the window let in the softer light that the flowering plant there preferred. He walked over to the low console table to greet Josephine, and it flicked a thorny vine at him.
“Hello, darling.” He checked the self-watering valve with a turn, letting it drip a little into the soil. It squeaked, so he followed the flexible tube with his eyes across the floor. It went through the attached door into the bathroom, then up under the sink. Lidea moved into his field of vision as he checked the connector points, and ey could see the thoughts churning as ey looked over his neatly made bed.
“Is your couch a convertible bed?” ey asked.
“Uh…no.”
“Your workroom-“
“This is the only bed in the house,” Sunny said.
“So…what are we doing? Are we temporarily converting your workshop?”
Sunny turned to look at em head-on.
“We share a bed all the time.” Sunny flopped his hands against his thighs.
“It’s different when we’re on the road. We don’t usually have a choice.”
“Okay, come on.” Sunny sat on the bench at the end of the bed. “We almost always have a choice, and we always choose to share. I don’t know why you’re denying that.”
“And I don’t know why you’re pressuring me like this,” Lidea snapped. Sunny pressed his jaw tighter, thinking, making sure he didn’t say the wrong thing.
“I’m sorry if that’s what it’s feeling like.” Sunny stopped before he talked himself into a corner. He ran through a few options before settling into uncertainty. “I don’t know what you want me to do or say from here.”
The night had been pleasantly cool, the first phase of fall finally wrestling summer to the ground. It would start building heat soon as the sun came up to wash over the sea of tents and other festival infrastructure. This whole loud, overwhelming event had begun as a constellation of Correlan-wide seasonal celebrations many centuries ago, and now the Stone Moon Grand Tourney had become this…thing. This giant, bloated festival of sports and markets and after-dark side-eye debauchery that brought people in from all over the connected worlds.
Thankfully, it was in Illuria this year, the best location in the four-year cycle.
Unfortunately, that meant it attracted the highest numbers, the boundaries of the thing burgeoning out more and more each year until it spread farther out into the countryside. There was only so much open space left in this part of the world, so the physical limits would cinch around it soon enough.
Lidea cracked eir eyes open and met the one-way mesh of a window and the gloamy pre-dawn beyond. Ey sat up on eir elbows groggily, shifting into a cross-legged position. Looking east, shying north, far away in the distance beyond the peaks of tents and the structures of the fairgrounds, a thin, spindly tower poked the pink part of the sky. You wouldn't know the Apolais Beacon was there if you weren't looking for it, and unless you had grown up in the Apolais Independent Incorporation, you probably wouldn’t know what it was.
At the base was an artificer's tower, a less than literal description of a place a master artificer had made their center of operations. The spindle — the thing that could be seen from such a massive distance — was a remnant of centuries-old magical machinery. Something in the way they used to hold open the space tunnels for the transport circles. Even if ey wasn’t so hungover, ey couldn’t remember all the details.
Ey was as close to "home" as ey had been since the last Tourney, and it was near enough.
Arms came around eir waist, and ey looked down into Sunny's face pressed into the outside of eir thigh, body contorted into a weird shape. He grunted at em, rubbing his forehead against eir leg. Ey dropped eir fingers into his hair and ran them through. He needed a trim and a shave, by his own typical grooming standard, but ey liked it when he grew a little wild. Maybe ey'd tell him one day.
"Coffee?" A goblin dropped down on eir other side with a camping-appropriate steel mug, chipper to the point of irritation. Phyll’s clematis complexion was ragged with sunburn, high points blotched with raspberry. Ze was bald, like all goblins, with four small horns in a square around the crown of hir head. One was chipped a little, but that could be buffed out as the horn grew. Otherwise, hir head was round with gigantic eyes, wide mouth, shallow chin, and a broad nose.
Hir akimbo limbs were knobby, little protrusions of cartilage on the elbows sticking out when ze bent and hyperflexed hir arms. The fingers around the proffered coffee cup had four segments, knuckles popping and wriggling as they curved.
Ze was short and squat otherwise, the soft body of the troella sub-type proportionate to the four and a half foot frame.
"You look like shit," Phyll said.
"Never smoking with you again," Lidea croaked.
Ey closed eir eyes and pieced together the day before. Sunny and ey had arrived the day before, about midmorning, and checked into their pre-made single-family tent. In their youth, they would have loaded in all their own supplies and taken to the outskirts of civilian camping. Nope. Not now. Not when Lidea was technically here as an exhibitionist, so ey could rent the space on the Thýlalykófoton’s credit.
Their tent had been, by sheer coincidence, near a three-family rental tent full of goblins. Not just goblins, but members of one of the Miraalan technical guilds who all threw in together to rent a tent so they could trawl the magical engineering marketplace. And among those members of a Miraalan technical guild, was Phyll, someone Sunny had been in school with.
Sunny didn't volunteer stories from university without some kind of trigger, but when he did, something interesting always unfolded. Usually involving a harrowing encounter with a lapidary saw. The instant he saw Phyll was across from him, his whole body had lit up.
This was fine. Lidea was happy to let him reminiscence with an old friend while ey wandered the first round of vendors. Ey had had to meet with eir exhibition partner, Ajax, to make sure the equipment had made it across the inter-world bridge from Latolan in one piece.
Their demonstration was on multi-frequency magic, fastest and easiest with multiple magicians. None of this was new technique, just perpetually complicated. A stone elf artificer who used to contract with the Thýlalykófoton, Constantine, had cracked a way to get a machine to mimic magic frequency conversion in the same way magicians did it.
Barely.
Artificery was never going to completely replace what a magician could do, but they inched closer and closer every few years.
"Are you sure they didn't hook up?" Ajax had asked during a brief lull while they waited for the machine to charge up. He was also a greenwitch, but of the full wood elf variety. His response to the extra-heavy cultural isolation that came with this disposition was to shave his head down to a peach fuzz.
Lidea had blinked at him a few times.
"What?" ey had replied, still unsure how to respond.
"Sunny and this goblin friend. Did they hook up in college?" Ajax's face had been passive, no particular feeling revealing itself either way.
"I don't…think so." Lidea had run through eir memory, looking for spaces in the conversation where clues might have been left behind. "Does it matter?"
Ajax gave the gentlest shift of his shoulders.
"Not to me, but I'm not the one currently dating him."
"We're not…dating…" Lidea had said, unsure if she even believed emself. Here Ajax had stared at em, eyebrows lifting into the stratosphere.
"Alright. Sure." Then he had turned back to the machine, waiting for damage to present itself.
Now, Lidea looked down at the arm around eir waste and the low bed ey had shared with him the night before. Ey didn't actually know what they were doing, which was stupid for a person eir age.
"Fill me in a little, Phyll," Lidea said. "Someone changed out the hookah to something stronger. Sunny said I should stop. I ignored him. Took a puff. Nothing. I got nothing after that."
"Oh, yeah, your delicate elven constitution was absolutely torched." Phyll ran hir hand up and down eir back. "You passed out, and Sunny hauled you back to your tent. He didn't want to leave you, so I came over here to hang out with him while we watched you."
"Oh…thank you. That's…I didn't mean to take you away from your friends."
"I see them all the time. It's been two years since I've seen Sunny, and taking care of a passed-out person was a good excuse to find quality time."
There was just…something…something about the phrase "quality time” that just…sat on em. That squished eir lungs down into eir chest until they refused to expand.
Sunny finally stirred around eir.
"Anything specific you need to do today?" Sunny murmured, nuzzling into eir thigh.
"I'll check in with Ajax again tonight to make sure we're ready for tomorrow morning, but no. nothing specific. We can just hang out and relax."
"We're all going to see the joust," Phyll offered.
"Maybe," Sunny yawned. "Coffee, then we'll see."
Lidea ruffled his hair and set down eir own drink.
"I'm going to use the latrine, then we can talk."
Sunny reluctantly let eir get up, and ey ducked out of the tent, slipping on eir shoes. Across the way, the goblins were already in full-swing, and they waved at eir. Their tunics and breeches and skirts were cut along plainer lines than goblins usually wore. To compensate, each piece was intricately embroidered with brightly colored animals and flowers. They all had coordinating wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces and their horns covered.
Ey stumbled past them, bringing a hand to eir braid absently. There were flower petals in eir hair, tucked under the textured strands. Where had…? Right. Flower crowns. One goblin had made eir a flower crown as a blessing on eir upcoming "performance." Ey didn't know where it was, at the moment, but Sunny would have kept it safe. It was bad luck to damage a goblin blessing.
The latrines pulled up on eir right, and ey stepped into line behind an ariesian with tan horns. They nodded at eir, and ey offered something half-hearted back.
“Kýriolykós Lidea!”
It was a young half-elf, bits and pieces of a sylvan heritage populating the other part of their anatomy. Ey recognized them as one of the younger members of the Thýlalykófoton who wasn’t planning on being a mage. There were other benefits to finding camaraderie in magical affliction.
“There’s a problem,” they said.
"Shit."
*****
“Well, I’m super screwed, maybe.” Lidea burst back into the tent, annoyed. Ey flopped on the floor next to Sunny, legs sprawling. He sat cross-legged in front of a small mirror hung from a tent upright, running a comb through his hair, slicking it back into something that looked like it was intentional. His beard wasn’t quite long enough to do anything but scratch into a fluff with his fingertips, but he was planning on shaving clean again before his upcoming fall lectures.
Lidea absently scratched his chin through his beard, and his opinion started changing.
“What’s happening?” A fresh pot of coffee was brewing in the percolator, and Sunny flipped it off at the base as it reached temp.
“Ajax let himself be convinced to drink dyerga beer, got too drunk too fast, tripped, fell, and cracked his head open.” Lidea drug eir thermos out of eir bag and half-emptied the kettle into it.
“Holy fuck. Is he okay?” Sunny dropped his comb gently on his leg.
“They took him to the provincial hospital, so he’ll be fine. Obviously he can’t do the presentation, though, so I went to the radio room to call in. See what they want to do. And, apparently, I need to go solo.”
"Isn't the whole point that it's a two-person process?"
“Eh.” Lidea threw eir head against Sunny’s shoulder. “Constantine isn’t a greenwitch, so it was supposed to be her and two magicians doing the demo. Ajax volunteered because he actually likes this kind of thing then bullied Babylon into doing it with him. She ran into some shit with her kid’s dad that got her stuck on Areylan, of all places. No problem. I draw the short end of the stick for the job. Then Constantine has a fucking stroke, and she’s not medically cleared to come across a gate in time. Okay fine. Ajax and I can handle it just the two of us. I’ve studied the manual and the theory. Then this shit. The whole project is cursed.”
Sunny drifted a hand around eir back, curling his fingers around eir waist and pressing into eir skin. Lidea focused on the sensation of them, warm and rough.
"Ding dong." Phyll peaked around the frame of the still-open tent flap. "Saw Lidea come back. Everything okay?"
Sunny gave another squeeze around eir waist before dropping his hand to fall behind em.
"Eir presentation partner ended up in the hospital," Sunny said.
"Oh, shit. I heard the medical sirens last night. But…" Phyll shrugged. Sunny considered the goblin for a minute, a plan forming up.
"Liddy, would one of the other greenwitches help you if you asked?" Sunny asked.
“If I begged and pleaded, maybe.”
"You gonna be in trouble if you let someone else look at the written material?"
Lidea immediately understood what Sunny was asking, and the realization cracked over Phyll a few seconds later.
"I can figure anything out from a well-written manual," Phyll said. "Unless it's written in High Elven…"
"It's not," Lidea said, getting up and moving toward one of eir bags. Ey pulled out a blue and red ring notebook, two inches thick. "Some side notes in Traditional Elven." Ey handed it over.
"Oh, I can read that. That's fine." Phyll opened the notebook, and eir eyes squinted through the text. "Need my reading glasses, but I have this."
"Okay. Okay." Lidea clapped eir hands a few times. "You two combine your powers to make sure the damn thing doesn’t blow up. I'm going to go bribe someone into doing this with me."
*****
Lidea found emself hesitating more and more as ey moved further through the open camping area toward where a group of other greenwitches had set up camp. Maybe a third of the members of the Thýlalykófoton’s members actually gave a shit about the organization at a structural level. The largest outer rings of membership were populated by the automatic entry of any elven magician that showed interest. Lidea settled comfortably into the middle rings. The Thýlalykófoton sourced jobs for em. Ey went to meetings. Ey was here doing this presentation in exchange for a ticket on their dime.
But then there was the super-intense inner core that kept the whole thing running. They formed a clique that fell together into a dense ball. For things like the Tourney, they camped together and changed the whole mood of everything around them.
Their campsite was just off the main path, and all the other nearby campers had created a ring of space around them. Tents formed a rectangle, with all doors facing the center. Standalone awnings covered most of the open space to create a sort of interior courtyard with a hole in the middle for a central campfire. The front of the rectangle was lined with hip-high tables, creating the sense of an entryway. One side was dishwashing; the other, a larger group food prep space.
The elves emerging from their tents for breakfast and coffee were mostly wood elves with the occasional bits of other things running over their features. Two stone elves came out of smaller tents along the back wall. If ey was recognizing them properly, they had been saved from childhood body trafficking by the Thýlalykófoton. Lidea was aware of those specific efforts but had never pressed anyone on the details. In the corner was Evire, the only sun elf Lidea knew by name, her dark beaded braids clacking as she looked up from whatever ineffable book she was reading alongside her coffee. Lidea had always gotten the impression she was less of a volunteer member and more an installation. An ambassador-spy sent in by sun elf elders to make sure the rest of them weren’t tearing the worlds apart.
A dozen sets of eyes in total, turned to em as ey moved into the camp circle, then flicked away again, guilty hearts knowing they weren’t going to step in and volunteer their help.
"No one wants to do it, Lidea."
Lidea closed eir eyes hard in frustration, then rolled eir head around to the wood elf sitting under the nearest awning. Paul balanced his prosthetic arm across his knee and fiddled with something inside. His long blond hair, drawn into a high ponytail, was dyed with threads of lavender and pink this quarter.
"That's bullshit, Paul," Lidea insisted. "We're supposed to be working together."
Paul rolled his eyes and pulled his arm up over his elbow, fastening the harness up around the outside of his upper arm to lock into place. He flexed his prosthetic hand with a small magi-mechanical sound. Something about the movement wasn’t to his satisfaction, and he took the arm off again.
"If I could help you, I would. But I can't risk damage to my focus." He patted his arm. Yes, there was a slight chance the feedback from the demonstration machine could ricochet through eir own focus and damage it. But that risk was marginal at best, or else the contraption wouldn’t be demo ready.
At the same time, any risk was too much risk when your focus was also a functional part of your body.
But he could also just admit he didn’t want to do the damn presentation either, instead of hiding behind his arm. Again. That excuse was going to run out, one day.
"Lidea. You here to grovel?" From the tent behind Paul, a giant of a man ducked through the doorway. Archmage Ivan Magnusson was half human and half elf like eir, but of different varieties of both. The bull elf side of his parentage gave him his lean muscle, flaxen hair, and sharp blue eyes. While bull elves were the biggest of them, for Ivan it was the human side that drew him up, the genetics of the Cofash ethno-subspecies stacking him seven feet tall.
He was also a vampire, which pissed Lidea off when ey thought about it. Trans-hemaphagic transformation had been the only way to treat a hyper-rare genetic condition that manifested in his teens. Elven and phagic genes didn’t play well together without some kind of biological buffer or outside intervention, so his medical case was genuinely cool.
In all the connected worlds, they estimated a double-digit number of phagic magicians, and a very small subset of those were actively registered on professional or academic rosters. Lidea had heard fewer than twenty at one point. Four of these people also had elven lineage of some sort. Four people with this specific combination of biological traits out of something like twenty billion people of a dozen different species and twice more magical inclinations. It should have been a treat to be on a first-name basis with one of them.
It was too bad he was such a fucking asshole.
"Ivan," Lidea grumbled. "You have the most power to help me here. You've read the manual."
"And?" He pulled his large gray hat on, looking down at her in the halo of the wide brim, buttoning his long sleeve white shirt at his wrists. The frog-shaped cufflinks shimmered silver with emerald inlays.
"And you're an incredible magician who could do this demonstration in his sleep." The words were ashy in eir mouth, made worse by the fact they weren't wrong. It was an open secret that several of the phagic magicians were Arches for purely political reasons. Ivan had earned it multiple times over.
"Ivan," Paul murmured, "you can not be a dick here. For once."
Ivan shifted his gaze to the back of Paul's head and drilled into him. He clucked his tongue.
"Jean-Marie Auclair is very close to not paying on a bet. She's here for the Tourney. You get her to make good on it by tonight, I'll be in a good enough mood to help you tomorrow morning."
Lidea considered him for a moment, debating whether this was actually worth it.
Lady Jean-Marie Auclair, Duchess of Chandlay had been nice the one time Lidea had occasion to speak with her. It was the suspicious brand of nice, though. The kind that was perfectly fine if your interactions were cursory. Lidea wasn't inclined to go beyond that first layer to find what was underneath, but ey was comfortable enough to gently plead eir case.
Except Jean-Marie Auclair was also the head of community management for the Interworld Office of Phagic Affairs. She was the talking head for everything involving the phagic community.
Getting to her was going to require going deep into vampire territory.
Which was really really annoying, and Ivan knew it.
Lidea tilted at him, the pros and cons populating a side by side list in eir head.
"Done. Be ready for tomorrow." Lidea turned on eir heel, grabbing an apple from the food prep area, and biting down on it viciously as ey walked off.
*****
"I'm annoyed at how much I understand this," Phyll said aimlessly. Ze had taken the manual apart and reordered the pages to match the flow of hir thought process better.
"What do you mean?" Sunny was flipping back and forth between two pages, memorizing the switches that needed to fly in what order to get certain effects.
"Because if it was this straightforward the whole time, I feel like one of us should have cracked it first."
"A goblin?"
"Yeah. Getting beat to something by a kunyukena artificer…”
"Oooh, we're using slurs now?" Sunny cast a spurious glance hir direction, but he didn't actually care. Ariesians were the only ones who took offense at the inference they "evolved from monkeys" as the word implied in its original language. For the rest of them, it was just sort of half-accurate in the grand scheme of things.
"Only for you," Phyll replied. Ze looked up from the spread out papers. "Okay…I need to see this thing. You think they'll let me?"
"They won’t care enough to turn us away, I’m sure." Sunny flipped to the back of the manual and glanced over a handwritten note about beats for the presentation. "I think I need to be the other magician."
"You're a long-wave. You work in completely different frequency ranges."
"It gives me a headache, but I just need to practice." Sunny looked down at his bracers. He brought magic in and let it spin around inside of them, circling his wrists. He pushed it faster and faster, the tension pulling at his muscles until all the small tendons in his hands started to burn and shear.
In his palm, he formed a small fire, the type of energy change this demonstration was looking for. It hurt, and he shook it off.
"Maybe," he muttered to himself, then looked up. Phyll was watching him.
"Alright. What's the deal with the elf? You've told me all about em, but told em nothing about me. And after all these years, we've never met. What's the deal?"
“We’ve barely seen each other since university. It’s just a coincidence I’ve never introduced you two.”
"Okay, so why does Lidea know nothing about me? Or, apparently, anything from university at all?"
Sunny closed his hands, even short, his nails cutting into his palms.
"Why do you think?" Sunny snapped. "What could have possibly happened during university that I maybe don't want Lidea to know about?"
Phyll stared at him, and the tension grew thick and undulating.
"You asked this person to marry you. You want to spend your life with em. And ey don't know about Echo?"
Sunny looked away, trying to avoid answering.
"You know you have to tell em," Phyll said darkly.
"I know." Sunny kept staring at the ground, waiting for Phyll to press the matter. He wanted hir to. Wanted someone to care enough to make a bigger deal out of it than it needed to be.
"Come on," Phyll said instead. "Go with me to convince some greenwitches to let me see their magic machine." Ze got up silently and made for the exit of the tent.
*****
There was a host of cascading legal structures that forced outside events of a certain size to create areas that served people with biological photosensitivity. In theory, this included hemaphages and dyerga and chimoniads and whatever was left of the night elves. In reality, ey was about to walk into a space wall-to-wall with vampires.
And they were just…so weird. As people.
The photosensitive section of the campground was obvious from a distance, huge umbrella-like structures erected above the tops of the tents. Ropy strands dropped from some of the horizontal bars, and a very light current of magic strung between them. Through the energy curtains, the interior of the area beyond looked dimmer.
Lidea passed through a pair of wooden uprights, denoting the shift between inside and outside. It wasn’t twilight so much as the perpetual edge of a total eclipse, the UV tangibly falling off eir skin as ey passed under the tents.
“Good morning!” a woman greeted em from the front of her tent, bouncing a toddler on her knee. When you knew what you were looking for, vampires of different sorts had a variety of small biological tells. Things that made them stand out from the rest of the human and sylvan populations from which they originated. Nothing obvious enough to tell just passing in the street.
Supposedly there were also tiny differences between organically genetic hemaphages and those that transitioned later in life, but Lidea wouldn’t be able to tell even if that was something that mattered to em. Vampires were vampires. Or…phages? Lidea knew there was a semantic difference between “vampire” and “phage.” No one had ever corrected em, though, so ey’d never dug into it.
Having so many in one space created a wave of ambient magic that rippled through eir body. It wasn’t unpleasant by any means, little crumbs of feel-good glamour magic riding the same railings. Ey needed to get in and get out before ey got distracted. Lidea turned vaguely to the woman who had greeted her to find she had been joined by a few more, watching Lidea closely as ey moved farther into the camp. Elves (even half) didn’t taste very good, so ey wasn’t of interest in that regard.
“Sorry. Magic swell got me.” Lidea shook eir head a little, and the confused faces softened into understanding. “I’m trying to find The Duchess of Chandlay. Do any of you know her?”
Of course, they all would. She was a celebrity. Ey was eagerly pointed further into the area and told to look for a bright green tent with sunflower bunting strung between some temporary outdoor lights. It was easy to find, the huge tent paired with a little porch area and a cluster of attendants. Being visibily elven would save eir from some of the formalities of human nobility, but really being native to two different worlds stripped a lot of that weight away. The only human title Lidea really cared about was the Queen of Illuria, and even then barely. Still, politeness would get em farther than not.
“Excuse me!” Ey called from a distance. The little group of people turned sharply. “Is the duchess available?” The day was starting to open up, people in the campgrounds moving to the market and sports fields. Hemaphages ran on different schedules, though.
“What’s this concerning?” A woman approached from a tent off to the side. An engot, another subspecies of human from Azelan that were inherently vampiric. Her hair was a natural bright blonde-red, braided down over her shoulder, all of it low-contrast with her pale skin, bluish in tone from the traces of visible blood vessels. Her mouth moved oddly around two sets of canine teeth, the outer set just a little longer than the rest of her teeth.
“Kýriolykós Eliadea kat Panapole.” Lidea introduced eirself with the full throatfull of words, holding out a hand for a shake that the engot returned. “Lidea.”
With titles passed between them, some of the tension eased out of the encounter. Lidea forgot, sometimes, that ey was part of an echelon of people that carried some semblance of weight at a titular level. Ey was…important…in a limited way.
“Nice to meet you,” Lidea said. “So I’m acquaintances with Archmage Magnusson — “
“Oh, merde, did they say Magnusson?” The bright, feminine voice came from inside the tent.
“Yes,” Allegra called back.
“Can you entertain them for a moment?”
Allegra made a sardonic face but didn’t answer back.
“You don’t have to entertain me,” Lidea assured.
“I live in her duchy, so I think I might.” Allegra reached for a tin camping carafe on a nearby table. “Unless you like coin tricks, the best I can offer is topping off your coffee.” She tapped it against the edge of Lidea’s thermos. Lidea nodded and opened it to allow a quick infusion.
“Certainly need it,” Lidea said. “Made the mistake of smoking with goblins last night.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Allegra muttered.
“Yeah, not doing that again.”
“Alright. I’m here. What does that asshole want?”
Jean-Marie was a short, plump woman with rich, dark skin and a deceptively cute face with bronze eyes and a perfect cupid’s bow. In professional appearances, she wore deep purple lipstick and intricate scalp braids with rings tucked into the plaits. Now, her face was clear-skinned, and she’d picked out her curls into a voluminous halo. She tapped her white lacquered nails against her khaki slacks.
Lidea gave a little half bow and spread eir hands in uncertainty.
“Your grace, I’m not going to waste your time with details. I need something from Ivan Magnusson. He says he’ll help me if I can convince you to pay up on some bet by tonight.”
Jean-Marie snorted.
“Alright. And you believe him?”
“He’s a dick, but he’s not a liar.”
“That’s certainly a point.” Jean-Marie looked eir up and down. She turned to call into her tent. “Lucas, come here a moment.” An ariesian emerged from the tent, tight spiraling horns deep black. His shirt was open, fresh bite marks startlingly obvious on his golden skin. He pulled up next to her, four-fingered hand touching the outside of her fingers much the same way Lidea found emself touching Sunny’s.
“Ivan’s rushing a bit for me to make good on that bet from last week, but it’s still really up to you.”
Lucas clucked.
“So I’m the one cashing the checks that you write.”
“You knew what this was,” Jean-Marie replied, the edge of a snap in her voice. Lidea turned eir gaze away subtly. Ey didn’t know much about how vampires conducted themselves on a personal romantic basis, but ey knew when to stay out of an awkward dynamic.
“Okay,” Lucas decided aloud after a string of silent communication. He turned on Lidea. “What I’m hearing is you need a favor from Ivan. And he’ll help you out,if I let him put his teeth (and other various parts) in me. So really, I’m the one doing you a favor. And I don’t know you.”
“That’s fair,” Lidea said. “I just got put into a real shit situation that I’m trying to figure my way out of. Obviously, I’m not here to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do. Just covering basis. Thank you for even talking to me.” Lidea turned to leave.
“Wait,” Lucas reached out a hand vaguely. “I can be convinced for caramel liqueur candies.”
“I…what?”
“There’s a sylvan confectioner called SugarCream that brings a storefront to every Stone Moon Tourney. I hate waiting in line for them, though.”
“I can do that,” Lidea nodded. “Okay.” Ey hovered there for a moment longer, unsure how such a weird interaction was supposed to end. With a half-hearted shrug, ey turned and moved back out the way ey had come.
*****
"If you're looking for Lidea, ey's already been here and gone." Paul was in front of his tent, near the entrance of the area the greenwitches had set up. He was noodling with his prosthetic with a tiny screwdriver.
"Can we look at the magical pressure machine?" Sunny anticipated the elf would need the star-shaped driver next, saw that it was on a table a foot away, and retrieved it for him. He was right, and Paul exchanged the drivers.
"Do you need a hand?" Paul's arm was a particularly clever design from a dyerga artificer who famously hadn’t pursued an official Mastery despite his talent. Magically enhanced and enabled prosthetics were common, but double-dipping as a focus was such a bold choice. Most magicians needed a regular break from having their focus on their person. Paul couldn’t do that without losing basic functionality.
Except again, the design was particularly clever.
Paul could turn the magical elements of his arm off, leaving just mechanics behind. It was super fucking cool, and Sunny would love the ability to sit down with it and see exactly how it worked.
"I always need a hand," Paul muttered. "But no. I'm good." He snapped down whatever it was he was adjusting, set the arm to the side, and stood. "It's in Ajax's tent. Come on."
"You're just going to show us?" Phyll asked. “Takes ten layers of non-disclosure agreements to see a prototype device where I’m from.”
"I don't give a shit," Paul said. "Not my ass on the line." He led them across the group of tents to a small one in the corner. Unzipping revealed a tent that had barely been used. The air mattress, sleeping sack, and pillow were still made up neatly. If there had been a bag of clothes, it was gone, but a small box of supplies was left behind. A section of the tent door had ripped, and a rock pressed sharply up through the tarpaulin floor. A dark spot across the top had been missed on the cleanup. Sunny could follow the narrative of drunkenly tripping over the lip of the tent, falling, and busting a head.
The machine was in two parts against the tent wall, manual next to it, everything neatly arranged.
Phyll squatted down next to the bottom part of the machine and ran hir fingers over the buttons. "Can we take this outside and put it together?"
"Do whatever," Paul shrugged and moved away from the door of the tent.
"They really don't want to actually help with this," Phyll said, leveraging hir hands under the top part of the machine to drag it out in the open space in front of the tent.
"Because this project is mostly Constantine’s baby, from what I understand," Sunny replied, following out with the bottom half of the machine.
"Yeah, but it's extremely cool," Phyll argued. "A machine that can auto-adjust frequency would be huge on Miraalan."
"That's where she's from." Sunny let out a series of grunts as he set down his part of the machine. "It's neat, but it also could fill in lower complexity tasks. Makes people nervous."
"So mages who were doing the bare minimum might lose their jobs, possibly several iterations from now.” Phyll rolled hir eyes.
"Yeah, basically."
"That's stupid," Phyll said, lifting the top of the machine onto the bottom, making sure the contacts snapped into place.
"Because you're thinking like a goblin." Sunny locked down the connections on his side. This was one of the things that stood between them, that always kept him at arm's length from the goblin. The same thing that made it weird to return to his mother in the sylvan enclave. The same thing that made those two disparate groups get along so well.
"You lose your current job, what happens?” Sunny asked. “What do you do?"
"N-nothing?" Phyll replied. "I'd just be assigned a temporary position until I found a new one. I don't understand the question."
"Yeah, exactly." The functional socialist utopia of goblindom would cover hir in any and all times of need. The Universal Basic Income he collected as a resident of Tomar covered a lot of gaps, but it wasn't the same.
Phyll huffed at him, then focused on studying the machine some more.
The thing wasn't pretty, lacking the sleek casing that would typically accompany a machine like this in regular use. It was intricate though, tendrils of metal and ceramic filigree reaching up from a solid base. When Phyll flicked a switch, millions of threads of gemdust inlays pulsed through the uprights before the light settled down into the base.
It hurt to be this close to it. It desperately needed additional shielding. Another reason, maybe, no one else wanted to do this outside the creator. Phyll was dripping with excitement, though, hopping between hir feet and rubbing hir hands together.
"Let's get it away from everyone,” ze said. “I want to see what this thing can actually do."
Sunny sighed.
"Alright. Shut it down and let's find a place where we won't accidentally hurt anyone."
*****
It was easy to find SugarCream in the section of the marketplace where all the specialty food stalls had been installed. It had the longest line, zig-zagging between some stone benches. Lidea considered eir options.
There was no point standing in line if ey couldn’t get the specific thing ey was there for.
Ey moved a little closer to where the candies were displayed, looking for evidence of their stock. Several varieties were already sold out. Cherry, hot cinnamon, and, low and behold, an “out of stock” sign across where the caramel had once been.
“Shit,” ey muttered to emself and paused to think.
“Those go quickly,” said the sylvan behind the counter, chestnut hair plastered to their peach skin with sweat.
“Will you have any more?” Lidea hedged, already feeling the answer.
“Oh, dear no. We sold a large preorder to a group of trenglates. They might sell some back to you.”
“At twice the price.”
“I can still point you in the right direction,” the sylvan said before needing to hop away to attend to the business.
Lidea stared at the glass case of candy. At the line of people. At the sylvan who had offered the next clue in the thread. Looked at the possibility of having to track down a group of cranky people covered in scales with sharp claws and teeth.
“This is too fucking stupid. I’m not doing this.”
*****
Lidea spent the entire walk back to the camping area deciding whether ey was going to confront Ivan a second time. He made the decision for em, approaching from the path that led toward the gaming arenas. He stopped in front of em, letting em share the shade of his lavender parasol.
“Lidea.”
“Look.” Lidea poked him in the ribs. “I was willing to play your mind games, but it’s gone too far.”
“Oh, hell, you actually went to talk to her.”
“Are you going to help me or not? Just tell me so I can figure out what I’m doing with the rest of my day.” Lidea huffed, shoulders falling and rising in irritation. Ivan shifted his massive weight onto one foot and looked em over.
“This righteous indignation thing isn’t cute. I’m the one who made sure your little boyfriend got a free ticket, yet I’m suddenly the bad guy for not asking ‘how high’ when you say ‘jump?’”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The Thýla is stingy with plus-ones when they arrange free tickets or have events. Internally, the board draws the line at being officially partnered in some capacity, legally or spiritually. We just don’t tell anyone that’s what we’re doing.”
“I never noticed…”
“Yeah, that’s the point. I argued that if they wanted you to do this presentation without a fuss, they needed to give you an extra ticket for Childress, too. So, get him to help you with this. I’m sure he’s capable of it.”
Ivan shifted around em to move on down the road.
“Why would you argue so hard to treat Sunny like my husband?” Lidea asked to the back of his shoulder.
“Because I have eyes,” he replied as he kept walking.
*****
“Run it again.”
“I think we need to stop, Sunny.”
“I can do it. Just crank it up.”
Phyll sighed and flicked the switches in the base. Sunny let the magic wash over him, looking for a frequency to hold on to. Constantine had built this thing to work with greenwitch and more standard variegated magicians. This wasn’t built for someone like Sunny. The frequencies were outside his range.
But he told Lidea he’d help em, and that was what he was going to do.
Sunny sunk his shoeless feet into the ground, grabbing the parched grass with his toes. There were two pieces of fruit on the ground between him and the machine. The goal was to freeze one and steam the other, plying two strands of magic at the same time. In a real-life scenario, a single magician would just do one after the other as quickly as possible. Two magicians would take an apple each. It wasn’t actually that impressive. With the machine, he could theoretically do both simultaneously. From a technical perspective, it had a lot of really interesting use cases beyond cooking fruit.
Heavy on “theoretically,” though.
He had to match the output of the machine first, force feedback with it to get control from the outside, and then branch two strands of magic. It started fine at first, even working at a higher frequency than he was accustomed to. Then his bones popped against each other, muscles trying to pull away to make space for the energy that was moving through his body. He bared down, trying to compress. His vision went spotty, breath hitching.
This was stupid.
Why was he doing this?
“Okay. We’re done. You’re done.”
Phyll shut down the machine. Hir hands came around Sunny’s jaw and lifted his head for a better look.
“Pupils are huge, and your nose is bleeding. You’re not doing this.” Sunny felt Phyll wipe under his nose, and blood came away on hir sleeve. Sunny fell back to sit in the grass, letting his bloody nose drip free.
“Why are you pushing this hard?” Phyll asked.
"Because I asked em to marry me, and ey haven't said yes, yet. Not really. And I'm going to have to tell em about Echo one day. I'm going to have to tell em about a lot of things. Things no one knows about."
Phyll’s hands were a little less gentle as ze touched fingers to his shoulder and chin.
"And when that all comes to light, I want to be the person who made eir life easier, not harder. To make up for the rest of it."
Phyll chuffed.
"Yeah, hate to break it to you, but you’re not exactly making anyone’s life better if you have an aneurysm. Your priorities are fucked up."
"Sunny, holy shit."
Lidea saw his back first, his body hunching over, then his face, streaks of blood across his upper lip. Ey dropped next to him in the grass, hands wrapping around his face. Ey brushed blood from his nose.
"You need to go to the hospital," ey said.
"I'm fine," Sunny barked back.
Ey knew better than to fight him on it. Ey got up and ran eir fingers over the filigree. Ey turned it on at the base then flicked it off immediately.
"Shit…" ey sighed. "Yeah, no one's turning this on. It's not supposed to do this. Something broke. Maybe when Ajax…I don't know. I'm not an artificer. But it's putting off an antagonist wave."
"Wait…how…shit…if it's high frequency, I wouldn't have felt it. Shit."
"And you were trying to feedback on it…" Lidea dropped to squat in front of him, exploring the angles of the machine. "Never do something this reckless again. Ever."
"Yeah…yeah okay." Sunny pinched the bridge of his nose. "You smell like vampire."
"Yeah, I've gotta run you through my day so far." Ey found an apple sitting in the grass. It was squishy, steamed inside the barrier of its skin.
*****
There was something deeply satisfying about spending the latter part of the day watching handsome people in armor smash at each other with various weapons. An axe met a shield, and the stadium erupted in cheers.
"Who are we rooting for, again?" Sunny asked, leaning his head against Lidea's shoulder, reaching into their shared box of caramelized popcorn. Phyll had broken off to return to hir other friends, threatening Sunny with a good time later. A threat neither of them would be following up on.
"Gal in blue is from my hometown, so that one."
Sunny squinted down at the fighters.
"You're from Apolais?" he asked.
"Have I really never brought it up?" Ey took eir own handful of popcorn and munched. "We don't talk about things from when we were growing up, do we? Just kind of left it all behind."
"We don't have to," Sunny said sharply.
"I feel like it should get hashed out eventually. Secrets make bad bedfellows."
"Hm…" Sunny felt his hands clench, and he forcibly released them. Lidea saw it out of the corner of eir eye, but didn't turn eir head. That had made him nervous. Whatever ey had said had agitated him. Ey threw eir arm around him to change the mood of conversation.
"We've got time. Don't have to rush it."
They both settled into silence, watching the fight and pretending that something dark hadn't dropped between them.
"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?"
