“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.
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