Episode 1-Arborist

“Marry me.”

“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. Eytapped 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?”

“I can do that.”