“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.