"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 em 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.
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