"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.
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