Chapter 1: Chapter One
Chapter Text
YEAR ONE
Pelican Town didn’t live up to its reputation on first impression. Its train station looked like any other train station. Its dirt and grass were laying comfortably, peacefully, warmed by the first few days of spring weather. Its pollen-tinted, un-smogged atmosphere was a welcome change of pace, certainly, but not an unexpected one.
Once Marlon was in the Adventurers Guild building for a while, he started to understand what the fuss was about.
“The situation is dire here, the papers aren’t reporting that part,” the man in front of him was saying. He’d introduced himself as Lewis — went as far as spelling it; apparently “Louis” had happened to him one time too many — and he was eager to recount the whole, sad story. He paced behind the cluttered shop counter he was using as a desk, unbothered by the creaky floorboard he kept hitting.
Marlon, sitting pin-straight in a wobbly wooden chair in front of this scene, drummed his fingers on his thigh. “One would assume that monsters imply a dire situation well enough.”
“Yes, but our local economy relies heavily on those mines, that’s what’s missing,” Lewis said. “Without them we only have a farm, a ranch, and the tourist season in autumn, and we don’t know yet how tourism will be affected by all this mess.”
The mess, as Marlon had learned early on in this rant, was also being reported incorrectly. The worst of the monsters — void spirits, as Lewis called them — weren’t a new development. There were records of them going back centuries. They’d had a hostile relationship with humans at first, but over time, they’d learned to coexist, only rarely giving the mining company any trouble. Thus, that heavy reliance was born, knocked off kilter by an influx of strange behavior in the non-monster wildlife that nobody was able to explain: bugs grew in size and started charging at people, crabs developed sharper claws, inanimate objects came to life. A different, unfamiliar crop of monsters. When the mining company gave in and pulled out, the town as a whole descended into panic.
Lewis continued, his footsteps getting lighter the more he got into his speech. “The timing couldn’t have been worse either. Our library and office of archeological studies has just expanded to include a museum, hoping to have a grand opening at the end of the season. They had a few good pieces lying around, but those caves must be full of other artifacts.”
“And that’s where you come in?” Marlon asked, hopeful that Lewis was building up to a conclusion.
“Right. I put the Guild initiative together with support from the librarians and the local blacksmith. If the suits at the mining company won’t learn to work around the changes to keep the townspeople afloat, we’ll have to do it ourselves.”
Marlon nodded as he settled his hand in his lap. “That’s a noble cause. It speaks volumes about you.”
Lewis seemed like he would appreciate the flattery, like the type of man who never outgrew being the teacher’s pet in primary school. Still, this wasn’t a lie. Marlon came from a community that was flanked on all sides by phosphate mines. They were the only employment opportunity for many, and the locals weren’t so passionate. They operated on bitterness and distrust, tired out by generations of struggle and mistreatment from their bosses. Had their mines been similarly overtaken, they would have let the town crumble to dust without a second thought.
From this one interaction, Marlon could tell there was no such bitterness here. Pelican Town was well loved by its residents, monsters or no monsters. The newspapers were reporting that part, but he couldn’t believe it until he was seeing it for himself. If his childhood hadn’t been enough to make it all sound like idealistic fiction, the five years he’d just spent bouncing from city to city would have done the job, each small town where he’d rested in-between looking more run-down than the last.
“Yes, well,” Lewis started, bashfully rubbing the back of his neck, “we’ve only just gotten our start here, this past winter. Only time will tell if it works out. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting an out-of-towner to show any interest.”
This was the type of discussion Marlon had prepared for, when he wasn’t busy dodging the ticket agents on the train. With Pelican Town as tight-knit as it was, he would have to proceed with care if he wanted his time here to be comfortable.
“I don’t think it’s so strange, with all due respect,” he said. “Reading between the lines in all those articles, there’s a sense that there’s something different about Pelican Town. Magical, even, in spite of the recent troubles. It’s only natural that a person would seize an opportunity to be a part of that.”
He was worried he’d laid it on a bit too thick, but Lewis looked receptive enough. He studied Marlon in a way that didn’t suggest confidence, but did suggest intrigue. He could work with that.
“I suppose that’s true,” Lewis responded. “It’s not something we’re used to hearing from city people, though. You did say you came from Zuzu, yes?”
“Zuzu by way of Gatsted and Kroyton,” Marlon answered, quickly tacking on, “I grew up in the Selcide Region, though. I know my way around a small town as well as I know my way around mining regulations.” His hometown’s population of five hundred and fifty was enormous compared to Pelican Town’s thirty, but Lewis didn’t need to know that.
Lewis stopped his pacing and gave Marlon a quizzical look across the counter. “How old did you say you were again?”
“I didn’t, but I just celebrated my twenty-first.” The “celebration” was a disappointing tryst in a men’s bathroom in exchange for some equally disappointing whiskey, but Lewis didn’t need to know that either.
It occurred to Marlon, far too late, that he should have added a few extra years instead of being truthful. He knew a lifetime of sun damage had aged him, his skin just as rough as his voice. He also knew the recent lack of food wasn’t doing him any favors, making the angles of his face harsh under a mess of untamed facial hair. And, of course…
“I’m, um… I’m not sure how to ask this next question,” Lewis hesitated. An admittedly decent try at politeness.
“The eyepatch?” Marlon asked, slipping into his answer like a well-worn pair of shoes. “I lost my left eye years ago, in an unfortunate incident involving a pile of cherry bombs and an irritated older brother. Seven children in one household, you can imagine how it got. You’ll find I’ve adapted to the limited vision quite well. I wouldn’t anticipate any problems.”
Lewis was still regarding Marlon as if he wasn’t sure what to make of him. “You know, you don’t have to be so formal. This isn’t a job interview, the Guild is more of a volunteer position with perks.”
“That’s no reason not to take it seriously.” Marlon’s recovery once again ran the risk of coming on too strong, but it was honest enough. “As you’ve said, it’s a dire situation for all of you here.”
Marlon hoped that the direness of his own situation wasn’t showing, at least not outside of the near-skeletal appearance. The third time was the charm, at first, with Zuzu. There was a culture of openness there that had afforded him a lot more safety than he was used to, and that safety made it easier to snap everything else into place. He’d even managed a cramped studio apartment in a five floor walk-up for a few seasons. An argument with his landlord had put an end to that, though, and the snowball effect from losing the stable shelter sent him right back where he started. He’d made a valiant effort, but he’d quickly learned that he did not have the strength to fight for territory on city streets again.
Going back home wasn’t an option, hadn’t been since the minute he was kicked out of it. He’d heard that the suburbs outside of Zuzu were thriving, but he doubted that he had the credentials to establish himself there. When articles about Pelican Town first started popping up in newspapers, Marlon realized that somewhere so small and isolated would be the perfect solution: a place empty enough that he could fly under the radar, surrounded by forests where he could forage for food, that would hopefully enable him to save enough money to run back to the city as soon as possible. Perhaps even a cheaper city out east, if he could string a few more train rides together.
Pelican Town needing bodies to help with a monster infestation only made it a better fit. If he hit the ground ready to help, it would endear him faster to anyone who was wary of strangers. If he was exceptionally lucky, it could even give him a layer of protection in case his sexual proclivities somehow came to light. The Ferngill Republic’s cities may have been largely accepting of homosexuality — there was even some recent talk of decriminalization from the capital — but the rest of the nation had quite a way to go.
If nothing else, Marlon seemed to be endearing himself to Lewis. “I appreciate your enthusiasm for our cause.” He held out his hand. “Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you.” Marlon rose from his chair and returned the handshake. “It’s good to be here.”
“It’s a bit late to get you set up today,” Lewis decided, glancing at his wristwatch. He met Marlon at the other side of the counter. “Come back tomorrow morning, around 10:00? I’ll show you around the caves.”
“I’ll be there,” Marlon told him. He snuck a look at his own very old wristwatch to make sure it was still ticking.
Lewis ushered him out of the building and into the crisp mountain air, much cooler now that the sun had set. He flicked off the interior lights before he locked the door, but left the porch light on for an older man who was sitting there, cleaning a sword with great concentration. Marlon didn’t pay him any attention. He was focused on the lake up ahead. The dark water shimmered under a nearly-full moon and an impressive display of stars, more than he’d seen in a long while. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get used to this brand of serenity again.
“Where are you staying?” Lewis asked. “I’d be happy to walk with you if you need directions.”
Marlon didn’t see the need to come up with a detailed lie; he’d showed up in town with nothing but an under-filled knapsack and the clothes on his back, his position was painfully obvious. He felt, though, that his plan to sleep on the train platform might be frowned upon. “I believe I passed signs for a campsite on my way in?”
Lewis nodded and offered him a sympathetic smile, another decent attempt at politeness. “It’s a beautiful location, it’ll be nice to see it getting some use.”
“Seemed like it,” Marlon agreed. “I’ll be fine on my own from here, don’t let me keep you if you have places to be.”
Lewis checked his watch again. “I probably should be going, yes, but I look forward to working with you tomorrow.”
“Likewise.”
Marlon watched Lewis leave, releasing a weighted sigh when he was certain he was out of earshot. That gung-ho attitude had been a lot for a first day, especially since Marlon was already exhausted from the trip. Trying to match it for so long left him ready to collapse.
Pulling his knapsack higher on his shoulder, he started the walk back to the station. He didn’t make it very far before he heard a voice from behind him, gentle but loud enough to carry from a distance. “Wait, young man.”
He turned around and saw the gentleman from the porch walking towards him, the sword he’d been cleaning sheathed easily at his waist. Marlon studied the man as he waited for him to approach: wide straw hat on his head, silver-streaked beard hanging down to his chest, mud-caked boots and pant hems.
The man smiled when he reached him. “You don’t have a tent.”
On instinct, Marlon shuffled backwards. “No, I don’t.”
“If you’ll wait here a moment, I can bring you one.”
Marlon looked this stranger up and down again, trying to find the catch and coming up empty. He was too tired for this. “No, thank you. I wouldn’t be able to compensate you for it.”
“Nonsense,” the man insisted. “It hasn’t been touched since my son was a boy, I’m sure my wife will be thrilled to have it out of the crawlspace. That’s compensation enough.”
“I couldn’t accept that kindness from a stranger,” Marlon answered. He’d expected some level of small town hospitality, sure, but not to this degree. He was certain that, having only been off the train for a few hours, he didn’t qualify for this sort of treatment.
The man in front of him didn’t seem to agree. He held out a hand to shake, and when Marlon took it, he immediately brought up his other hand, building an enclosure of calloused warmth. “Roger Montgomery,” he introduced himself, still smiling.
“Marlon,” he responded tentatively, keeping his surname to himself, returning the handshake on autopilot.
“Well, now that we’re not strangers anymore—” Roger released his hand “—you have no reason to argue with me.” He winked, and patted Marlon on the shoulder as he walked past him on the footpath.
Marlon tried to shake off his confusion at this interaction, tuning into the wilderness noises around him. He had to admit, shelter that he had permission to use sounded luxurious. He didn’t know what sort of law enforcement would be after him if he set himself up under a public structure. He also didn’t know, though, if he wanted to owe Roger any favors, especially not right after meeting him. Besides, Pelican Town had newsworthy wildlife. Even if it was only a problem in the caves, it made camping near the caves for real wholly unappealing.
Rather than stay put as requested, Marlon kept walking, exploring his moonlit surroundings. There wasn’t much to see other than the lake, just trees and shrubs. When he reached the mouth of the caves, he watched them for a long while, until the fear of the unknown flickering behind his rib cage was too hard to stand.
Marlon hadn’t paused to think, really, about what he was getting himself into. He knew he needed a place where he could stretch his money farther, and he’d picked up enough self defense against natural threats to assume he could handle the supernatural. That was all it took to get him on the train. Now that he was here, every rustling leaf and snapping twig set him more on edge, made him miss the familiar danger signals of gunshots and sirens.
He wound along the rest of the path, quickening his pace even though his legs were still aching from tucking himself under train seats. He was out of breath faster than he would have liked — he really needed to get his hands on some food — but he didn’t let himself stop. Maybe if he made it to the station fast enough, Roger would give up on looking for him when he came back.
Marlon was reminded quickly, unfortunately, that tiredness bred confusion. Only five minutes or so had passed when he realized that he didn’t recognize the tiny clearing he found himself in. The only clue he had to orient himself was the faint light from the Guild building, now way off in the distance. He tried to walk back towards it, catching himself just before he slid down a steep, rocky slope.
“Good, you found the campsite,” Roger’s voice rang out from behind him.
In the midst of recovering from the shock of his near fall, Marlon turned around to see Roger holding an entire crate of goods, which he thrust into his arms without waiting for a reaction. The contents were laid out neatly: a folded-up canvas tent held down by its stakes, a sleeping bag, a sack of potatoes, a roll of aluminum foil, a bar of soap, and an oil lantern.
He couldn’t stop himself from gaping at the spread. “I can’t—”
“I didn’t have a spare knife, I’m afraid,” Roger interrupted. “The potatoes will bake nicely whole over a fire, of course, but they’re much better diced with wild leeks and onions.”
Marlon had a knife of his own, but that seemed irrelevant at the moment. He tried again, looking Roger directly in the eyes this time. “I can’t accept this.”
“You already have,” Roger pointed out, gesturing to Marlon’s hands. “Please come by my farm when you start running low, I’ll have much more to offer later in the season.”
Rendered entirely speechless, Marlon could only watch as Roger took his leave once again. He stood there holding the crate until his arms started shaking from the weight, wondering all the while what planet he’d just dropped onto.
———————————
“So, you’ve seen the elevator and minecarts,” Lewis said, wrapping up his tour of the Pelican Town mines. “There are ladders around too, lots of ways to navigate. The boots you’re wearing now look like they’ll do nicely even on the lower levels. Your feet do feel okay so far, right?”
“Perfectly fine,” Marlon answered. In truth, the soles were a little worse for wear, and his feet had gotten cold and sore quickly, after only the first half hour on the cave floor. He made a mental note to figure out reinforcements.
“Good. And you looked very comfortable with the sword.”
Marlon nodded, pleased that he’d faked it well. It was no easy feat when the monsters he was slicing at were imaginary. The real things were mostly down deeper, apparently, and Lewis wasn’t willing to send fresh meat into the grinder with only one other person for backup. He also noted that the Guild only fought in self defense, so practice monsters weren’t an option. Marlon thought that was odd, but didn’t press it. There must have been a reason, if the town was truly so familiar with the void spirits before they went haywire.
“Then all you need is a pickaxe,” Lewis said. “We don’t have any spares at the office, but I swung by the blacksmith’s this morning and he said he’d have one ready later in the week.”
“For how much?”
“You’ll pay him back with any ore you find. That’s part of the deal I cut with him when we started the Guild. Once the cost of the pickaxe is settled, he’ll buy your ore outright. I’m putting out feelers for interested businesses in neighboring towns too.”
That was the detail Marlon was waiting for, but didn’t want to ask about for fear of looking needy. He supposed it was a moot point, since Roger had him figured out anyway, but he wanted to maintain what dignity he could. “That works,” was all he said to Lewis, and he was certain he sounded too relieved anyway.
“The librarians can’t offer any rewards for museum donations,” Lewis continued. “They’re paying to keep the lights on in the office, though, more than a fair trade.”
“Do they own the building?” Marlon asked. He’d assumed that the town did.
Lewis was suddenly avoiding eye contact as he headed towards the elevator to leave. “Uh, no, it’s mine.”
Marlon followed him, literally biting his tongue to keep his thoughts on that answer in his mouth.
“The apartment upstairs already has a tenant, otherwise I would have offered it to you,” Lewis said, the speed of it betraying his guilt. “He never uses the first floor, though, and I don’t even really charge him enough for the second.”
As was often the case for Marlon, biting his tongue had a short time limit. “May I ask why you’re in this line of work if you’re so reluctant about it?” he asked, hoping that “work” didn’t sound too sarcastic.
Lewis pressed the button to call the elevator, summoning a low, mechanical groan that echoed through the cave. “Honestly, I was forced into it,” he answered over the noise. “I tried to apprentice for each of my parents for a few years, but I don’t have any talent for tailoring or carpentry. The building we use for the Guild used to be my dad’s workshop. He gave it to me to get me away from his power tools, and now I’m a landlord until I can figure out something permanent.”
“Other towns also have employment options,” Marlon pointed out, stepping into the elevator first.
“None that are interesting to me,” Lewis lamented as he joined him. He hit the button for the top level, and the doors slowly rattled shut in response. “I’m sure this will sound crazy to you, since you chose to leave your own small town—”
Stone-faced, Marlon did not correct him.
“—but I feel very strongly about giving back to this community. It’s just been hard to find a sustainable way to do it.”
Marlon doubted very much that Lewis had any genuine worries about sustainability, at least none that were grounded in reality. Unfortunately, he wanted to continue making a decent impression more than he wanted to voice this. Besides, Lewis had been a thorough teacher that morning, making him feel at ease in what turned out to be a bizarre space. Marlon was grateful enough for that to let everything else slide.
Though he was only familiar with surface mines, Marlon had expectations about the caves that he thought were logical. He was right about the damp, rocky walls and the occasional glimmers from ore tucked away inside the rocks underfoot. He was stunned, however, to also see lush plant life as they traversed, including what looked like root vegetables poking out of tilled soil. He was glad an introduction to monsters hadn’t also been on the agenda. There was enough to think about as it was.
When the elevator deposited them at the cave entrance, the sunlight streaming in looked impossibly bright. They both charged to it anyway, ready for its warmth after two hours underground. The hilt of Marlon’s new sword knocked into the wall on the way out, making him flinch. He’d need to get used to having the scabbard on his hip.
“Anyway, that’s really all there is to the caves,” Lewis changed the subject. “Mine for ore, look for artifacts and valuables, don’t get yourself attacked by anything. We do group tours a few times a week, and some of us will pair off for smaller sessions in between. I wouldn’t ever go alone if I were you, especially not while you’re just getting started.”
“Understood.”
“Most of the team should be at the Guild by now. Did you get a chance to introduce yourself to Roger last night?”
“We met.” Marlon wanted to stop there, but he could feel Lewis staring at him, waiting for more details. “He makes quite an impression.”
“He always has,” Lewis chuckled. “He’s run the farm on the outskirts of town almost as long as I’ve been alive, just him and his wife ever since his son moved to Zuzu. I don’t think he’ll make an appearance today. He said something about a big potato harvest.”
Marlon nearly flinched again at the possibility that the sackful of potatoes had been harvested early for him. Roger’s generosity made his night more comfortable than it would have been otherwise, but it still made his insides twist up to think too much about it. Not wanting Lewis to catch onto any of this, he didn’t say anything in reply.
The Guild building came into focus up ahead, and they could make out three figures arranged on the front porch. “Oh, I didn’t think Evelyn would be here today either,” Lewis said to himself. He ramped up to a light jog, and Marlon followed suit, mostly in an effort to get the awful bone chill from the caves to dissipate.
As they approached the building, one of the figures straightened up from where he was leaning against a support pillar. “It’s about time!” he shouted, stepping forward to meet them in the grass.
“Sorry, George.” Lewis gestured to Marlon. “I was with Marlon here, our new recruit.”
The man — George, evidently — darted his eyes along Marlon before stopping firmly on his eyepatch. He narrowed his gaze at the sight of it. “Where on earth did you find this one?” he spat out.
Marlon, more accustomed to disdain than the kindness Pelican Town had offered until this point, didn’t wait for Lewis to answer for him. “I found you, actually,” he said, locking onto George’s face; a rattlesnake ready to strike if provoked. “The reports of the town’s struggles were very gripping, really. It didn’t seem like you were in a position to turn down extra hands.”
“Hmph,” George offered in response to this challenge.
Their staredown didn’t last long, interrupted when the lone woman on the porch joined them on the lawn. “Don’t mind my husband, he’s been in a sour mood since the mining company left. I’m Evelyn Mullner. It’s a pleasure to meet you, what a delight to have a new face in town!”
Allowing his features to soften slightly, reluctantly, because at least she was trying, Marlon nodded his greeting. “Delighted to be here.”
Lewis visibly relaxed. “No business today, Evelyn?” he asked, and Marlon pretended to be just as invested in her answer.
“No flowers. My Grampleton shipment was delayed, and I went through the stock I got from Roger much faster than expected.” Evelyn sighed. “Clara’s at her lessons, so at least I have the time to do something useful.”
“Well, I’m always glad to have you on board,” Lewis told her. Turning slightly to face the other end of the porch, he called out, “Are you joining us for this one, Gil?”
Marlon followed Lewis’s eyes to the rocking chair Roger had been sitting in the previous night. In an instant, he was steeling himself again, jaw set and posture guarded, because seeing Gil in that chair was a markedly different experience.
There was always at least one, in every small town where Marlon had spent the night en route to bigger cities. They were different every time — some screamingly obvious, some who hid it well until they were drunk, a few unfortunate disappointments who were uninterested — but his reaction was always the same. He cherished these moments of lust at first sight, nurtured them even, because prior to Gil, he’d always known that the endpoint would come quickly. As the un-tethered party, he never had to be bothered by the possibility of suspicious whispers, or worse, getting caught in the act.
Marlon didn’t have that luxury in Pelican Town, not for the moment. Perhaps naively, he never expected any fellow Guild members to burrow under his skin in the first place. It had always happened in bars before, under dim, sickly light bulbs, the stale atmosphere more suitable for the task at hand. This wasn’t even the inside of a cave. It was broad daylight, and they were surrounded by sweetly singing birds and respectable locals, one of whom already disliked Marlon for the other reason outside of his control. In spite of all of this, he did nothing to prevent the fantasy from taking root.
Gil didn’t look up from what he was holding in his hands. “Can’t today, sorry. Still trying to figure out which of these are fossils.”
The voice that came out of that ruggedly handsome face was deep, rich like molasses, and it filled the rest of Marlon’s body as easily as it filled his ears. He knew, already, that Gil was liable to be a bigger problem than he’d thought.
Lewis returned his attention to Marlon. “Gil’s our artifacts expert,” he explained. “He was also our newest resident before you came, actually.”
Marlon cleared his throat and shoved himself back to reality. “Is that right?”
“Well,” George cut in, overlapping Marlon’s response as he dropped a mining helmet over his receding hairline, “if you’re done dragging out the introductions, I think we oughta get started for the day.”
“We should, it is already past noon,” Lewis agreed. “You’re still welcome to join us even without a pickaxe, Marlon. We shouldn’t be going too far down today.”
“Thank you, but I’d rather assimilate myself to the surface while I still have daylight to work with,” Marlon answered. Not the entire truth, but enough of the truth to sound casual, he hoped.
“Right, you didn’t have much time for that yesterday. You can meet up with Roger and me tomorrow then, we’ll be going on a quick copper run in the afternoon.”
“I’ll do that.”
George impatiently stormed past Marlon while he was accepting the invitation, pickaxe slung over his shoulder. Showing themselves off with apologetic goodbyes, Evelyn and Lewis followed behind, leaving Marlon and Gil alone.
He watched Gil’s hands as he gingerly glided a brush over a rock, watched his eyes as he carefully examined it from every angle for signs of former life. Stepping closer to the porch, Marlon expected to see dirt-rimmed fingernails, but he found that they were clean. Gil’s clothes were clean too, save for a few splotches of dust in his lap, the fabric faded and worn from time. He kept his beard manicured, his hair cropped short. There was a dark red sunhat resting on the back post of the chair, and Gil’s smooth, unmarked skin showed that he put it to use.
Marlon stopped himself before he could get much farther in his search, catching that he was grasping at straws and that none of this was actual proof. He’d been spoiled by the thriving scene in Zuzu City; over a year had passed since he’d last needed to look for signs like this. It occurred to him that he wasn’t likely to find anything concrete anyway, with Pelican Town as isolated and underpopulated as it was.
He feared he was already making himself too obvious, but he couldn’t bring himself to squander this moment of solitude. “Gil.” Marlon turned the name over in his mouth, savoring the feel of it on his tongue. “Is that short for something?”
Setting the brush down in his lap first, Gil leaned over the arm of the chair to place the potential fossil on the small end table beside him. He picked up a pencil and scratched something onto a legal pad. “No,” he said, a thick layer of finality blanketing the word. He still made no effort to look up.
The heft of the rejected conversation and the acute desire for attention hit Marlon all at once, all but bruising his chest. He inhaled slowly, a little shakily, then tried to exhale the sensation and failed. Absolutely, he thought, this one was going to be a fucking problem.
“Well then,” Marlon said over the sound of his heart pounding through his ears. “It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
He left it at that, letting his feet guide him away from the Guild building, knowing full well that he would not be able to walk this off.
Chapter 2: Chapter Two
Chapter Text
Coming up to Pelican Town proper wasn’t unlike walking into an unfinished painting. The town square boasted only three non-residential buildings, and the walk to get there was almost entirely forested, save for a Community Center that seemed far too large for such a small population. Marlon made a mental note to come back there later, outside of normal waking hours. If he stuck around through winter, it might not be a bad place to sleep.
He supposed he could have explored it right then, if he’d been feeling daring. He hadn’t seen another soul on his way down the mountain, but he imagined that people would start going about their days soon. A conversation about why he was snooping around the Community Center wasn’t the least bit appealing, especially not after navigating so many introductions the day before, especially with one particular introduction still swimming tirelessly through his head.
The previous afternoon, Marlon had made sure to pass the Guild building again twice, under the pretense of familiarizing himself with the area. Gil wasn’t there either time, or at least wasn’t sitting outside anymore. So, Marlon had resigned himself to genuine exploration. He’d gone back near the train station first, to scope out the bathhouse he’d noted when he’d first arrived. He wasn’t above sweet-talking a receptionist for free admission, but he hadn’t needed to; the building was empty. The water in the heated pool made quick work of unknotting his muscles, and he’d felt truly relaxed for the first time in years, at least until he’d let his mind wander to all sorts of other indulgences taking place there.
His only other stop had been the local quarry, far off in the opposite direction. Without a pickaxe, there hadn’t been anything for him to do, but he’d taken his time there anyway. It reminded him of home. All of the summer jobs he’d picked up in childhood were in similarly dusty, rocky, open spaces. He’d been far too young to be working around heavy equipment and explosives, but nobody had seemed to care about that. Marlon didn’t often let himself feel nostalgic for it, knowing he was much better off building a new life elsewhere, no matter how challenging that was proving to be. He’d allowed nostalgia to take hold in that moment, walking in slow, languid circles around the quarry and letting the memories filter in.
Along the way, he’d stayed alert for anything valuable in the grass, and came up with a handful of wild vegetables for his trouble. He didn’t use them for cooking like Roger had recommended; his second of two potato-only meals tasted just as sad and desperate as the first. Instead, he brought them into town the next morning, hopeful that he’d be able to get some money before he could work in the mines.
Part of him expected that the shopkeeper at the general store would laugh in his face when he dropped a pile of dirty leeks on her counter. The woman was unfazed as she handed him a few coins in exchange and blathered on about how good it was, and how rare it was, to meet someone new.
Marlon knew he should have saved the money, or at least used it for more food. The whole interaction left him uneasy, though, too aware of how examined he’d been so far. He gravitated to other necessities: a straight razor to deal with his facial hair, and a flimsy paper notebook.
Journaling had been recommended by the doctor in Marlon’s hometown after he lost his eye, as a means of both physical and emotional therapy to better adjust to his new normal. His penmanship never recovered — there wasn’t much to save, he’d readily admit — but the frequent practice did help, and he quite liked doing it. As it turned out, writing down a risky thought or a snarky remark was much safer than speaking it. His body would have likely stayed intact if he’d learned that sooner, but he preferred not to dwell on that.
He’d been without a notebook for months. Bar napkins and other scraps worked well enough in the city, but Pelican Town had presented him with too much distress. It was only the morning of his third day, and he was already starting to feel antsy.
Marlon tucked the notebook securely into his knapsack right there at the register, rearranging the few other objects inside so none of the pages would bend or tear. He intended to take it back up the mountain right away, but he nearly collided with someone on his way out the door.
“Good morning!” Lewis chirped, uncomfortably peppy at such an early hour. “I see you’ve found our general store.”
Marlon swallowed his impatience. “That I did.”
“Have you done any other exploring around town yet?”
“Just this, if you can call it exploring.”
“Let me take you to the library then,” Lewis offered. The glint in his eyes suggested that Marlon wouldn’t have much of a choice. “I know they’ll be interested to meet you over there.”
Marlon would have rather eaten glass than meet anybody else, but decided to try a gentler approach to turning him down. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your shopping. You must have been headed in there for a reason.”
“Please, keep me from this errand.” Lewis turned to walk away from the building and motioned for Marlon to follow, which he did with poorly-disguised reluctance. “My parents asked me to buy tea because they have a meeting with the mayor about a furniture commission. For reasons I’ll never understand, they’re trying to impress him with their hospitality,” he explained, charged up like he was talking about a rat infestation in his walls.
Intrigued by the anger in spite of himself, Marlon goaded him to continue. “I imagine there’s a story here.”
“Yes, an obnoxious one,” Lewis answered. “He’s in the middle of his third term. Him and his rich associates are a big source of business around town, so people feel obligated to vote for him, but he’s barely qualified. Thinks he’s a big deal because he married into money, loves listening to the sound of his own voice, you know the type.”
“Clings to authority because it’s easier than developing a personality?” Marlon contributed.
Lewis snorted a laugh. “He doesn’t understand Pelican Town well enough to have any real authority. He vacationed here a few times and thought that was enough. Can you believe he doesn’t even live here now?” He pointed to a large house a few yards south of the path they were walking. “The position comes with that house. He gave it to his decrepit mother-in-law and his daughters, something about keeping them out of trouble in the city. He only slums it in town when he’s bored he wants easy access to intimidate us. Or when he knows the governor will be around to see him.”
Marlon studied the house as they walked, and couldn’t imagine the luxury of turning that sort of place down. “Charming,” he snarked.
“His name’s Oswald Ashwood. Avoid him as long as you can.”
With that out of his system, Lewis mellowed into a lighter conversation as they walked, pointing out the other sights he deemed important along the way. Marlon heard all about the home where the Mullners lived with their young daughter, the smithy that saw long careers for three generations of blacksmiths, the vacant lot that everyone swore would be a movie theater one day, and too much else in between. He nodded politely at all the correct intervals. It was difficult to pay attention with Lewis walking on his left side, cut off from his peripheral vision. Even more unfortunately, the one person Marlon felt was worthy of discussion never came up.
He knew he could ask questions about Gil without the act alone being suspicious. Marlon was new in town, it was only natural that he would be curious about people. It was needing to keep his composure that worried him. He’d learned years ago that signaling any sexual interest to non-involved parties was likely to end badly. With how strongly Gil was affecting him, and with how little he wanted to stop it, it would be written all over his face if he wasn’t careful. Being dragged around town like Lewis’s new toy wasn’t putting him in the right state of mind for caution.
Before too much time had passed, though it felt to Marlon like hours, they arrived at their destination. The front of the building was adorned with a weather-worn sign that announced it as the “Office of Archeological Studies.” Underneath that, there was a shinier “Library” plaque, and to the right, a sheet of poster board with bold, handwritten text that read “Museum Coming End of Spring!”
“This building has quite an identity crisis,” Marlon remarked.
“They like to keep busy,” Lewis told him, his smile clear in his voice.
When Lewis opened the door, the scent of furniture polish hit first, so overwhelming that it stung Marlon’s nostrils as they stepped inside. Under that, there was the smell of old books, carrying over from the tall, cluttered shelves that were splitting the large room in two. The calming effect was instant. Instinctive, Marlon supposed, after so much time taking shelter in the big public library in Zuzu City. Had he known he would react that way, he would have been much less resistant to tagging along.
He breathed in the relief, then took in the rest of his surroundings. There wasn’t much to the lobby: an information desk directly in front of the entrance, a few plants, a narrow table with a handful of brochures for tourists. On the other half of the room, beyond the shelves, there were two rows of study tables, their surfaces shining under warm lights. One of the tables was claimed by two children, who were whispering to each other and ignoring the books laid out in front of them. A hallway at the end of the room offered a glimpse into an even larger, emptier space. The “museum,” Marlon assumed.
Behind the desk, there stood a mountain of a man who did not look at all like he belonged in such a scholarly location. He towered over the woman beside him, who fit the part much better, complete with wire rim glasses and a cardigan. They were engaged in conversation with another patron standing in the center of the room. She was wearing chunky work boots that were out of step with an otherwise graceful outfit, and her graying blonde hair was pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck.
This other visitor caught Marlon and Lewis’s arrival out of the corner of her eye, and instantly turned to face them fully. “Lewis, your ears must have been burning,” she said by way of greeting. “I was just telling Herb and Ingrid that I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“Getting a guild off the ground takes a lot of time, as it turns out,” Lewis answered. “Especially with…” he paused, searching for the right words. “With so many strong personalities under my leadership.”
The woman laughed. “I have no doubts that you’re wrangling George beautifully.”
Lewis blushed at the compliment, or being called out on his failed diplomacy, or both. He smoothed out his shirt sleeve as he spoke. “It’s good to bump into you though, Sarah. I’m surprised to see you on a Tuesday.”
“The kids are in the other room doing some independent reading before their math lesson,” Sarah explained. She lowered her voice to add, “I’m staying clear of the Community Center today. Hopefully Oswald won’t find me while he’s in town.”
Lewis matched her volume. “Expecting another fight about your budget?”
“Always,” she answered, forcing a strained little smile and flashing weary, frustrated eyes. When she noticed Marlon, those features slipped into curiosity as she tilted her head. “And you must be the new Guild member that Roger told me about.”
Marlon didn’t have a chance to answer before the giant named Herb chimed in. “A new one already?” He bounded around the desk to where Marlon and Lewis were standing. “Welcome, welcome! It’s so unexpected to have a newcomer interested in the cause! Tell me, what’s your area of expertise?”
“There isn’t one,” Marlon answered, wondering how many more times he’d have to explain himself like this. “I was just compelled to help when I saw the story in the news.” He clenched his jaw, any relaxation he’d felt evaporating as quickly as it came.
Herb seemed thrilled with that response, but Marlon didn’t let that distract him from the way Sarah was still studying him, looking every bit the teacher that she apparently was. He sifted through the jumbled memories of his conversations from earlier in the week. This was likely Roger’s wife who wanted the tent out of the house. She must have known, then, exactly how much help Marlon had accepted, and that made him a lot more uncomfortable than her staring did.
“I have a feeling Marlon is being modest,” Lewis said. “He looked like a natural with a sword.”
Herb smiled. “Ah, very good! You’ll need that skill when the monsters start charging.”
“Honey, don’t traumatize the poor thing!” the woman behind the counter — Ingrid? Marlon was pretty sure he’d gotten that right — called out. “He’s only just gotten here.”
Herb dismissed this with a gentle, airy wave of his hand in probably-his-wife’s direction. “You look like you can handle it,” he said to Marlon. What that assessment was based on, he could only guess. “In any case, we’re glad to have you in town. Have you met our son Gunther yet? He shadows Gil while he’s working sometimes.”
Marlon felt his ears perk up, like a hungry dog reacting to a metal can hitting a countertop. It occurred to him a beat too late that this wasn’t valuable information. He tamped down his excitement, and expected he’d have to get used to doing that a lot over the course of his time here.
Lewis was answering for him again while he wrestled with this realization. “Roger and I are taking him on his first real run this afternoon, he hasn’t spent much time with the rest of the team yet. Actually—” he glanced at his watch “—we should really be heading back up the mountain, it's later than I thought it was.”
“Can you spare a couple minutes?” Herb asked. “Ingrid found some old maps of the caves that might be useful to you. We’ve been holding them in the office.”
The three of them left for a tiny room behind the information desk, tossing off a few pleasantries to Marlon and Sarah as they did. Their muffled chatter drifted into the lobby while she walked closer to him. Marlon braced himself for the complaint this was surely going to be, the warning that her husband’s extreme kindness was a one-time deal that should not lead to any sort of reliance.
“It’s exhausting to be a fresh face in a place as small as Pelican Town, isn’t it?” Sarah asked with a friendly smile, and without a single hint of anger. A perfectly calm start to a conversation.
Marlon didn’t allow himself to settle fully, not just yet. “Well, if you’re saying it first…”
Sarah grinned at that answer. “I’ve been here for ages and I still remember it like it was yesterday. Don’t let the excitement scare you off, alright? You’ll get used to it, and everyone else will get used to you.”
“I don’t scare so easily,” Marlon told her.
She nodded approvingly, then glanced towards the office door before continuing. “My husband told me all about you, he asked me to keep an eye out. We hope your time here so far has been comfortable. Aside from the whirlwind of meeting everybody, at least.”
Marlon appreciated that Sarah didn’t shy away from an optical idiom. More than that, he appreciated her tact. Carefully accepting that this wasn’t a hostile interaction after all, he answered with a simple, “Yes, thank you.”
“Good. Forgive me for piling on even more excitement, but it really is a big deal when anyone gives this town a chance at all, let alone during a monster crisis. An old tent is the least we could do.”
With no interest in repeating the same half-lie about why he was giving the town a chance, Marlon only smiled in response.
Sarah checked the clock on the wall above the desk. Projecting her voice so it would reach the other room, she said, “I should really get back to my students, who’d better be reading in there instead of chatting.”
Two hurried cries of “Yes, Mrs. Montgomery!” rang out from the children.
Satisfied, Sarah returned her attention to Marlon. “It was lovely to meet you though. I hope I’ll be seeing a lot of you, either around town or on the farm.”
There was an intensity behind the words that Marlon picked up on immediately, a maternal weight that told him she wasn’t just saying that. A reminder of exactly how dangerous these small towns in middle-of-nowhere Ferngill could be. His impulse was to bolt right out the door, apparently scaring pretty easily after all.
“I’m sure you will,” he said to Sarah, and hoped very much that it wasn’t true.
———————————
Marlon made his way back to the Guild office alone early that afternoon, with instructions to wait there for Lewis and Roger so they could head into the caves as a group. He practically ran up the mountain path, hoping for time to unwind before his first proper Adventurers Guild adventure. Fate, as was often the case, had other plans.
Inside the building, Gil was sitting on top of the shop counter, long legs crossed at the ankles, reading a book that he held in his lap. He lifted his head at the sound of the door opening. “Lewis isn’t with you?”
It wasn’t proper eye contact. Gil was looking past Marlon, focused entirely on the doorway. Still, it was more attention than the day before, and a much better view of his face. Gil's irises were a warm shade of brown, striking even in the dimly-lit room. The depth of the color almost rivaled that of his voice, and the sight of them stopped Marlon in his tracks. While he was gawking, he noted a bit of five o’clock shadow around Gil’s beard, his meticulous shaping threatening to come undone. The hint of mess only served to enhance the neatness of the rest of him, how his hair was set without one strand out of place, how his shirt fit his broad chest as if it had been tailored.
He couldn’t keep getting better like this, not if Pelican Town was meant to be the easy detour between cities.
Marlon quickly gathered himself and turned around to shut the door behind him. “He had an errand to run. He said he wouldn’t be long.”
Gil mumbled an acknowledgement, then went right back to his reading, those alluring eyes drifting easily across the page, line by line.
Marlon badly wanted to utilize this time alone with him, but he knew even in his daze that it was a dangerously fine line to walk. Aside from not knowing exactly when Lewis would be done at the library, there was no alcohol or anything else to lower either of their inhibitions. A necessary factor, in Marlon’s experience, since men in small towns tended not to be honest unless they were certain they were in the right company, sometimes not even then. He also had no indication that there was any secret to uncover at all, nor any idea how Gil would react if he played his own hand. It was far too soon to find out, with only a few words exchanged between them.
Even so, Marlon wasn’t about to just stand there quietly, not after spending all morning hoping that Gil would come up in conversation. He found the same creaky chair from his last time in the building, up against a wall next to a card table. He pulled it out a bit, angling it so it faced the counter, and sat down.
“Is that any good?” he asked, nodding towards the book. He averted his gaze when he realized that looking in Gil’s lap wasn’t any better than looking at his face.
“Just started it,” Gil answered. Terse, but not nearly as cold or uninviting as he’d been last time.
Marlon grabbed onto this encouraging hint of progress and held it close to his chest, his energy for socialization rapidly replenishing. He tried to keep his tone as light and non-accusatory as possible when he commented, “You don’t talk much, do you.”
Gil treated the statement like an accusation anyway. “That a problem?”
Used to this brand of defensiveness from past endeavors in other towns, Marlon kept at it. “Just unusual around here, it seems like. But then you landed here recently too.”
“If two years is recent.”
“Relative to two days, I suppose it isn’t,” Marlon acquiesced. “What brought you here?”
Gil kept his eyes pointed firmly on the book as he answered, but Marlon didn’t miss that he’d stopped reading. “My thesis. Didn’t see any reason to leave after I graduated.”
Marlon took a grounding breath in. He was pleased that this was going better than their last interaction. Still, he was aware that the bridge was too unstable for him to start crossing it. For how intensely he wanted to, he’d stick to casual topics for as long as it took to get there.
“Let me guess.” Marlon leaned forward in the chair, setting off its horrible creaking, and rested his elbows on his knees. “You were charmed by the monster-infested caverns?”
Gil chuckled. “That, or the cheap rent.”
“I certainly don’t fault you for that,” Marlon said with a smile. Laughter, however slight, was much more of a response than he expected to get today. He pressed a little further, let himself wonder exactly how far he could take things. “What did you study? I can’t imagine your field was ‘artifacts,’ like Lewis described it.”
“Archeology. Decided to read up more on paleontology and geology too, once I got here.”
“That’s a lot of extra work for a town this small.”
“There was too much weird stuff going on to leave it alone,” Gil said, enthusiasm creeping into his voice even though his body was still stubbornly indifferent. He brushed a thumb along the side of his book, rustling the pages. “Across all of Stardew Valley, not just Pelican Town.”
Having never considered the history of the places he’d stayed in, Marlon was impressed by this level of dedication. “I’d wager that’s pulling you in more than the rent.”
“It’s a fascinating place,” Gil admitted. He glanced up at Marlon. “Damn shame the people are so chatty, though.”
Marlon raised his eyebrows at this attempted insult. “Was it really so hard to pull away from that book you just started?” he challenged. He felt one of his legs start bouncing under his elbow. He forced it steady.
Gil fully looked up then, and gave a slight shake of his head. “Cocky, too,” he said, his voice disapproving, the wisp of a smirk dancing on his lips giving away that he was enjoying this.
Marlon breathed out a laugh, and found he was incapable of doing much else. Playful annoyance, of all things, had never affected him in this way, grinding his entire brain to a halt. He couldn’t even be mad that he’d been shut up so handily, the way Gil’s eyes lingered on him because of it.
In that same moment, the door opened again, leaving no time for Marlon to analyze this new development, or even recover from it. Gil snapped back into neutrality as Lewis crossed the threshold, unaware of what he’d just interrupted. “Oh, hello Gil. I didn’t think you’d be coming with us today.”
“I’m not.” Gil dog-eared the page he wasn’t reading before he closed the book. “Just wanted to make sure I caught you before you left. The fucking faucet stopped running again.”
“It never ends with the plumbing in that apartment,” Lewis groaned to the ceiling. To Marlon, he added, “If Roger comes in before I’m back, let him know I’ll be quick. Hopefully.”
Marlon nodded. He calmed himself down just in time to say, “Good luck.”
Gil hopped off the counter, pressed the book against his thigh, and led Lewis up the staircase in the corner of the room. He didn’t say another word until they were in the apartment, and the closed door only barely muffled his voice.
Thanks in part to his shameless staring as the pair left the room, Marlon noted three crucial pieces of information from this interaction between Gil and Lewis. The first was that he, mercifully, didn’t need to clean up his language out of politeness anymore, at least not in front of the two of them. The second, that Gil was Lewis’s under-charged tenant, told him he needed to spend a lot more time in the Guild office. The third, and most vital, was the name of the novel that Gil had been reading. Marlon didn’t get a look at the front cover, the way he’d been carrying it, but he didn’t need to. The author photo on the back was enough.
Clayton Sinclair was somewhat notorious around Zuzu City literary circles, making a name for himself that had nothing to do with the quality of his writing. He and Marlon had picked the same regular bar to stave off their loneliness while he was living there, which resulted in his unsatisfying recent birthday. Clayton’s first novel had been published by then — an instant best seller, unfortunately for his already massive ego — and he wouldn’t quit rambling about the press coverage that night. He was thrilled to have incited a hot debate among critics on his first try. Nobody could agree if his plot was meant to be an elaborate metaphor for a queer relationship or not, obvious as it seemed to Marlon that it was.
There was no guarantee that these reviews reached Pelican Town. Even if they had, it was possible that Gil was just buying into the hype, sticking with the book only long enough to formulate his own answer, ultimately discarding it with disgust if he decided it was scandalous. The way he carried it suggested that he was trying to hide the title, but he was reading it in a public space, so that just as easily could have been a coincidence. He didn’t entertain a conversation about it, but conversation didn’t seem like something Gil enjoyed in the first place.
Marlon knew all of this, and it did nothing to stop the excitement simmering in his abdomen, rising all the way up through his lungs. Tenuous as it was, this evidence was precious. He replayed their entire talk in his head, digging through every word and every intonation for pieces that slot into the good answer along with the novel. Maybe, just maybe, their all-too-brief talk was going even better than he’d realized while it was happening.
He latched onto the possibility, hopes of keeping his head down and keeping out of trouble be damned.
Chapter 3: Chapter Three
Chapter Text
Ahead of his first real venture into the mines, Marlon felt well prepared, all things considered. He was ready for the cold this time, though only mentally; he didn’t have any clothes available that were right for the temperature. He'd kept his sword at his hip the whole day before, and he'd done better at not knocking it into walls or trees. He fought tooth and nail to get Gil and his potentially important choice of novel out of his head, figuring he’d need to have his wits about him.
Marlon wasn’t at all prepared to be bored.
The pickaxe promised to him still wasn’t ready, so he couldn’t assist with actual mining. There were a few stray items scattered around that were worth collecting, mostly loose rocks and minerals, but not enough to properly keep him busy. He didn’t even get to try his hand at combat, since Lewis was strict about his rule to only kill in self defense. There were concerns about both energy expenditure and disrupting the ecosystem, he’d explained. To Marlon’s surprise, the few monsters that the group stumbled into weren’t interested in attacking.
As far as he was concerned, it was odd to even call them monsters. The bugs and crabs were huge and more vibrant than one would expect, but they were still just bugs and crabs. The closest things Marlon saw to classic monsters, after several hours, were the round, slimy creatures that would jump out from around corners on occasion. As soon as they saw humans, they’d bounce right back to wherever they came from, leaving glistening wet splotches on the ground in their wake.
Sitting on a boulder and watching yet another ball of slime plod off into the darkness, Marlon finally asked, “This is the big change that scared the mining company off? Seems like an overreaction on their part.”
Lewis took the opportunity for a break, leaning his pickaxe against a nearby wall. “A few of the miners felt the same, as I understand it. George apparently gave his boss a whole presentation on how the locals handled things when he was young, when the only problem was the void spirits down deeper. But the insurance company didn’t like any of the options.”
“Did they even need options?” Marlon tilted his chin towards a bug a few yards behind Lewis. “That hardly evokes a dangerous situation,” he remarked as they both watched it lazily hover across the space.
Lewis turned back to face him. “Yes, but things are always calmer close to the surface. It isn’t always as calm as it’s been today either. Sometimes the slimes travel in packs. You haven’t seen any rock crabs yet, but they’ll draw blood if they feel threatened.”
Marlon drummed his fingers on the boulder. “Why not work to fight them off before they feel threatened or form groups, in that case?”
“Oh, Yoba, don’t start that argument,” Lewis warned him with a grimace. “This is exactly what almost kept Roger from joining.”
Roger, who was crouched on the ground over to their right to sort copper from rubble, stood up and dusted his hands on his overalls. “I was always going to support the cause, my dear boy,” he called to Lewis. “Just as I’m doing now, even though I still think you’re being short-sighted.”
Lewis sighed. “We’re seven people attempting the work of an entire company. Six, really, since Ingrid won’t let Gunther into the caves. Why waste the energy on combat if it’s not absolutely necessary?”
“But it is absolutely necessary.” Roger crossed the soft patch of dirt between them. “The health of the whole Valley is hanging in the balance.”
“You keep saying that, but I’m still not clear on what you mean.”
“I don’t understand well enough what the void spirits have done, I’m still waiting for the wizard’s findings,” Roger answered, and Marlon had to hold back a laugh because of course Pelican Town had a wizard too. “But can’t you see it all around us? In the rocks and the soil?”
Lewis shook his head. “It all looks the same to me.”
Roger turned to the dirt and knelt down into it. Marlon watched his deft, confident movements, the skills that years of farming afforded him. He couldn’t have been younger than fifty, but he’d done everything with ease all afternoon, not even so much as a groan as he swung his pickaxe over and over again. It was a stark contrast to how Marlon remembered his own parents, their bodies ravaged by similarly difficult work.
After a moment, Roger unearthed a tiny pair of dark green leaves. He dug around them until he could reach his hand into the dirt, then gently tugged them from the ground, revealing the gnarled, brown vegetable they were attached to. He stood back up, cradled the vegetable in his hands, and held it out to Lewis. “Look at the soil clinging to this cave carrot,” he instructed. “It’s lost all of its richness, you can feel how hollow it is.”
Lewis’s eyebrows knitted in confusion. “Hollow?”
“Yes, emptier,” Roger affirmed, as if this was a normal way to describe soil. “I don’t know what the monsters have started doing to it, but I know in my soul that it isn’t good.”
They continued this debate, and Marlon intended to pay attention to it. He was distracted, though, by a flash of movement: a mole popping its head out of the dirt where the cave carrot used to be. At least, he thought it was a mole. It was bright orange and it had some sort of appendage on its head, but its movements were distinctly rodent-like as it looked around the cave. Soon, another one emerged nearby, blinking heavily, adjusting from being in total darkness. The moles' eyes met, and they both froze in place for a beat before they extended more of their bodies from their burrows to lunge at each other. They were back under the dirt in an instant, but Marlon was pretty sure that neither one of them had limbs.
He got confirmation quickly when both moles popped out again, this time on opposite sides of the dirt patch. The one on the left dove back down, but the one on the right waited a moment, jutting out a bit farther and surveying its surroundings. It studied Marlon, just for a second, long enough to decide he wasn’t more of a threat than its dirt-mate. As it sank below the surface, the other one came back up.
It occurred to Marlon that this behavior would be important to remember. He needed something to get the upper hand in the event of an attack; if it wasn’t going to be combat practice, knowledge of monster behavior would have to be good enough. Without taking his eye off the dirt, he reached into his knapsack where it was sitting at his feet. He unearthed his new notebook, then felt around for the pen that he’d thought to swipe from the Guild office while he was waiting for Roger and Lewis.
Orange rodents, no claws, territorial? he wrote at the top of the first page. Work alone? Charging each other.
Marlon tried to keep track of the holes that the moles left behind, but they were all gone as soon as they appeared, the dirt re-settling as the creatures unsettled it somewhere else. Just a few minutes earlier, the patch had been packed densely enough for Roger to walk across it without sinking into any tunnels himself. Whatever hollowness he was sensing didn’t seem to affect much.
Deep tunnels? Rocky soil?
“I just don’t think we should be asking for trouble,” Lewis was saying as Marlon tuned back in, still watching the dirt for new developments. “Evelyn and George have Clara to think about, and you have that whole farm to take care of.”
“The farm will be very well tended even if I get scratched up down here,” Roger told him.
“I doubt Sarah would want you working through an injury,” Lewis countered. “Or want to do all of the work herself.”
A smile bloomed in Roger’s voice, just as plainly as if Marlon was seeing it on his face. “Have a little faith in me, I have things covered much better than that.”
“So you’ll be recruiting me as a farmhand like when I was a kid?”
“Keep being sarcastic and I just might,” Roger laughed. “I do miss having you and my boy running around the fields.”
“It was fun, before we were old enough to realize it was work.”
The moles went dormant for a while, or that’s how it looked at first. As Marlon watched, he started seeing the subtle shifts in the dirt, ripples so slight that he thought it may be a trick of the light. It was the first time they overlapped that confirmed it for him, a bump flickering on the surface just before they both emerged again.
Fighting for territory, he wrote with more certainty after crossing out “Deep tunnels.” Dangerous found in pairs.
The movements grew erratic as the moles kept dodging and charging each other. More signs of overlap appeared too, until the ripples started running parallel.
“We’ll keep agreeing to disagree then,” Lewis was saying, his tone light even under the air of finality. “Do you have a few more floors in you?”
“Easily,” Roger answered. He turned around to get his pickaxe from where he’d left it.
When Marlon realized he was about to step on the dirt patch again, right above where the moles were fighting, he jumped off the boulder. “Wait, don’t!” he shouted, grabbing the hilt of his sword as he ran forward.
He was too late; Roger’s boot was already hitting the soil. Both moles popped out directly into it, and their heads collided with the sole loudly enough to send an echo around the cave. Having already riled each other up, they were clearly furious at being interrupted. They both lunged all the way out of the dirt, exposing long, serpentine bodies that shocked Marlon into stumbling backwards.
Roger, for his part, was hardly even knocked off balance. In one fluid motion, he pulled his sword from its scabbard and sliced both moles right through their necks. Marlon expected a bloodier scene, but both of their bodies dropped neatly to the ground below. The dirt swallowed the corpses as if it was alive.
Marlon stepped forward to get a closer look, in disbelief that there wasn’t any evidence of a battle left behind. “What the f—” he started, catching himself when he remembered that he was still trying to make a good impression.
Thankfully, Roger didn’t seem to mind. “Keen eye,” he said, clapping Marlon on the shoulder. He was standing on his blind side, but again, Roger’s smile rang clearly in his voice. Able to safely cross the soil now, he did so as if nothing had just happened, stooping to fetch his pickaxe on his way to the ladder. While he grabbed it, Marlon properly looked at Roger’s sword for the first time. It had been too dark to see it the night they met, but the hilt was colorfully, intricately painted, with a circular design that he couldn’t identify.
Lewis’s voice broke his gaze away from the sword. “I knew you’d be an asset,” he said as he followed Roger out.
Not at all willing to be left alone after what he’d just witnessed, Marlon grabbed his things to leave without re-packing them, and briskly walked around the dirt patch instead of crossing it. He had a lot of thoughts, but there was no point in trying to write them down immediately. Not when he could hardly make sense of them.
———————————
Marlon received his pickaxe early the next morning. Though he joined in on every mining excursion the rest of that week, he hardly touched it. He was much more interested in the monsters.
Fascination quickly took over the fear he’d felt at first, mostly because everyone else in the Guild was reacting as if bloodless carnage was business as usual. Nobody could explain why. The best he got was from Roger, who told him that the void spirits always died like that, according to the few reports from people who had seen it happen. It made sense that the newly-altered wildlife would be the same.
George was the only other person with enough cave experience to have any insight. Marlon caught him alone on the Guild’s porch one morning and asked for his thoughts, but the old man had brushed him off. “I’m not gonna sit here and spill all my trade secrets to the likes of you,” he’d barked. “Maybe if you prove you’re actually worth the space you’re taking up around here, we can talk.”
Marlon had to admit, it was impressive that George kept finding ways to insult his missing eye without directly insulting his missing eye. With no witnesses to complicate things, he let himself fire back. “All this effort at roundabout phrasing. It would be much faster to call me a cripple and be done with it, though I suppose you have plenty of free time now that you’re not working.”
For a split second, it seemed like George would start shouting and attract everyone else to the porch. Instead, he just stomped inside, and refused to even look at Marlon for the rest of the day.
Dissatisfied with George’s non-answer, and more motivated than Roger seemed to be, Marlon went off in pursuit of his own discoveries. Any time he could find an excuse, he’d follow a slime trail to a nesting site, or plant something shiny for rock crabs to steal. He wasn’t getting or keeping much ore this way — by the end of the week, he still hadn’t collected enough to justify bringing it to the blacksmith — but it was worth it to get more notes down.
He tried to keep things organized at first, with careful labeling and pages dedicated to singular topics. He was burning through paper too fast, though, and the time it took wasn’t worth the result anyway. Chaotic, fragmented thoughts were more manageable, even if they had to snake along margins and force their way between lines. It hardly mattered if they were re-readable anyway; the act of writing things down was enough to commit them to memory.
George notwithstanding, this work reflected well on Marlon, he was learning. Lewis was unsure about him leaving himself vulnerable, but warmed up to the idea the first time Marlon got to partake in any combat. A cave fly had charged at both of them out of nowhere, emerging from some hidden nook that nobody was lighting with their headlamps. Before Lewis could even get his sword out, Marlon was slicing his through the air, predicting the bug’s movements with perfect accuracy. He took out a wing with his first hit and finished off the body with his second, and Lewis didn’t say another word about vulnerability after that.
Evelyn, who was such a committed pacifist that she refused to carry a weapon, was glad to have someone on the team to pick up her slack. She asked more questions than anybody else did, encouraging Marlon to talk in detail about his findings as they walked back to the Guild office and wrapped up their sessions. Roger would often listen in on these debriefs, but rarely spoke, absorbing it all with an absent-minded little grin on his face.
The energy spent cataloguing monster behavior didn’t leave Marlon with enough to analyze his teammates. As the days passed, though, he at least found things to like about them. Lewis was intense at times, but his passion was infectious, motivating the whole team to power through long, achy cave dives. It was confusing why honey-sweet Evelyn would be married to someone like George, but he could tell that the man was deeply devoted to his wife, the way he stuck to her side, eyes always alert for threats that might be coming their way. Roger was typically off in his own world, his contributions to discussions often cryptic in a way Marlon found intriguing, in spite of the distrust over his very generous welcome to town. And Gil…
Marlon largely ignored Gil when they mined together. Any other behavior would have left him vulnerable, balancing too many thoughts at once. So, he was grateful that Gil returned the favor, despite the disappointment simmering below the surface. It helped that he worked differently from everyone else too. Gil would usually leave the ore alone, eyes trained to seek out man-made materials. If he found anything noteworthy, he’d stay in the area to examine the site more closely after the rest of the group cleared out. By the time he caught up, Marlon was often too absorbed in monster habits to even notice he was back.
The things he did notice held tight to his brain without needing to be written down first. Gil was the only one on the team who used a dagger, since it was easier to handle when he was kneeling in front of any potential artifacts, affording him more speed if he needed to defend himself. He paid particular attention to gemstones, and knew more than anybody else about how to judge their quality. He was methodical in all of his movements, patient and precise, his hands treating everything they touched as if it was precious and worth preserving.
It was an uphill battle, at times, for Marlon to keep his mind from wandering until he made it back to the tent, but he persevered.
When Saturday came along, he was eager to keep mining. He’d only just been introduced to the ice caves deeper down, and the new collection of monsters they offered to study. Unfortunately, Marlon faced a more exhausting, less interesting task: attending the Pelican Town Egg Festival.
“I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” Lewis told him when he explained the event. “You haven’t been introduced to everyone in town yet, it’ll be good for you to be more social. Besides, everyone else is going and you’re way too green to go into the caves alone.”
“And if all of the bright, spring pastels are a shock to the system after a full week of darkness?” Marlon asked. He was already getting less stiff with the rest of the Guild, not as cautious about casual complaining. So much time spent in a cave meant for faster bonding, he supposed.
Lewis seemed to agree. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
So, Marlon went, and allowed Lewis to pull him through a number of introductions. First was a long overdue meeting with the blacksmith, a burly man named Arthur whose appearance didn’t match his quiet voice. Their meeting yielded a pleasant, if boring, conversation about different types of pickaxes. His young son, Clint, who Marlon remembered from the library, spent the interaction cowering in silence.
Marlon also finally met Clara Mullner, the other student of Sarah’s, an inquisitive little thing who asked question after question about his eyepatch. “Do you wear it every day?” she chirped, eyes glimmering with curiosity. “Do you have more than one? That black one is cool, but if I wore an eyepatch, I’d have one in every color of the rainbow.”
George, squirming where he stood beside his daughter, rested a hand on her shoulder. “That’s enough, Clara, I’m sure you’re bothering him.”
“I’m not bothered at all, actually,” Marlon insisted, enjoying George’s discomfort far more than Clara’s interview. Directly to her, he asked, “Every color, huh?”
“Every single one! But I probably wouldn’t wear the blue one much,” Clara considered, “unless I lost both eyes and had to match one of the other colors.”
“Very wise,” Marlon told her, holding back his laughter. George, meanwhile, tried to evaporate into the egg-scented air.
The rest of the morning was a whirlwind of faces and instantly-forgotten names: that woman from the general store and her equally talkative husband, the owner of the local fishery and his adult son, the cheery family of ranchers who provided the eggs for the event. The infamous Mayor Oswald wasn’t present — “Oz never comes to this one, he says it’s ‘too folksy’ for him,” Lewis explained with disgust — but his daughters were there. They were chaperoning their wheelchair-bound grandmother and whispering amongst themselves.
When Lewis finally ran out of steam and left to find something else to do, Marlon retreated to a quiet corner of the town square with a plate full of free food. He took careful stock of everything at the buffet table in front of him, trying to figure out what he could reasonably take to the tent to pad out his quickly-dwindling potato supply. There wasn’t much to work with, being that the budget for the event was slashed due to the mine closure, but a few dishes looked manageable enough. He hadn’t gotten as far as pocketing anything when Herb interrupted his plotting.
“I was hoping I’d run into our newest adventurer today!” he said as he grabbed a plate for himself. “How are the mines treating you?”
Marlon jumped at the chance to talk shop after a long morning of duller matters. “Very well. Frankly, I’m surprised nobody else had the same idea I did. The wildlife down there is well worth people’s interest.”
Herb beamed at this answer. “You and I are in agreement there. I would’ve joined the Guild myself if I wasn’t so damn claustrophobic. I tried to get a look at the void spirits as a boy, but…” He shuddered. “Won’t be doing that again.”
The void spirits, Marlon had learned, stuck to much lower levels of the mines than where he’d been. George and Roger often talked about them, but he still wanted to observe them in action. They must offer more of an explanation of all of the mine’s oddities, an explanation that very much gripped Marlon’s interest.
“I haven’t seen them myself yet,” he told Herb. “Does the library have any material on them?”
“Quite a lot,” he answered around a mouthful of egg salad. He took a moment to swallow before he continued. “Not many practical texts, though, if that’s what you’re after. Just a lot of old myths and folktales.”
“That’s a shame.” Marlon took a bite of his own food, realizing only then that he’d been too wrapped up in potential theft to actually eat anything.
“Well, there was a mutual respect between us and them for a long time. It’s only with the recent issues that people have gotten suspicious.”
“Not suspicious enough for anyone to study them?”
“Unfortunately,” Herb sighed. “You know, we do have one thing that you might like. Someone brought in a whole mess of notes from a scientist named M. Jasper. Apparently they were just sitting in an old file cabinet in the Community Center for the last sixty years.”
Marlon set his plate down. “That does sound promising.”
“Now, keep in mind, they cover the whole Valley, not just the mines,” Herb clarified. “At least from what I’ve seen. Ingrid and I haven’t had a chance to read them too closely yet. It must be an incomplete set too, with how many gaps there are in the dates, but you’re welcome to them just the same.”
There was a sudden peal of laughter from behind them. Marlon didn’t need any evidence to suspect the Ashwood girls, but turned around anyway to confirm he was right. Their eyes went wide at being caught, and they pressed their hands over their mouths as if it wasn’t too late to muffle anything.
Marlon turned back towards Herb. “Any chance I could take you up on that immediately?”
“By all means.” Herb shook his head at the girls, then eased back into a friendly smile. “Gunther’s still at the library, he can grab them for you.”
Wasting no time getting away from this festival, Marlon left with a quick goodbye, swiping a few deviled eggs to eat on his way out. He took a winding back path to the library, through the tiny park and past the Community Center, so Lewis wouldn’t see him leaving. Though this was technically Guild business, Marlon didn’t think he’d be happy to see him shirking the social duties he, apparently, had as a Pelican Town resident.
As soon as he opened the door to the library, he heard a typewriter clacking past the bookshelves, and the soft conversation that hummed underneath it. He followed the noise through the lobby into the study area, where a teenager who was presumably Gunther sat opposite Gil, the typist, at one of the tables. Marlon pulled his eye away from him, fighting back the thrum of excitement in his chest. The morning had been so chaotic, he hadn’t even realized that Gil wasn’t in the town square.
Marlon announced his presence by clearing his throat, and the teenager jumped in his chair at the sound of it. “Sorry to startle you,” he said. “You must be Gunther?”
“Yes, and you must be Marlon,” Gunther answered, with a kind, practiced politeness that was fitting of someone much older. “I’ve heard about you.”
Gil stopped typing mid-page, only for a second. He irritatedly flicked his eyes up at Gunther, who either didn’t notice or chose not to react.
Marlon felt the grin swelling on his mouth just fast enough to bite it back. Under these circumstances, he had no qualms about being a topic of discussion. “Your father was telling me about the M. Jasper notes,” he informed Gunther, rather than dwelling on what might have been said. “He told me you’d be able to help with them.”
Gunther nodded. He stood up from the table and left for the back office without another word.
There were other places where Marlon could have situated himself, but he sat at the head of Gil’s table anyway. “This must be important work—” he gestured to the assortment of papers spread over the table “—if nobody’s forcing you to attend the festival too.”
“Applications for research grants.” Gil stopped typing again and stretched his fingers out in front of him. “Might’ve told Lewis the deadlines are sooner than they actually are.”
Marlon made a noise of approval, glad that he’d been deemed trustworthy enough for a white lie. “And the kid?”
“He wants to study in the same field, figured he might as well learn the process now.” Gil sifted through the papers. Lowering his voice, he added, “He doesn’t do crowds either.”
Sensing a depth to that statement but not wanting to pry, Marlon only nodded in acknowledgment. He settled into a library-appropriate silence, trying to look at anything other than Gil’s fingers as they moved a sheet of paper to the top of the mess, straightened everything into a neater stack, then resumed gliding across the typewriter keys.
It was, thankfully, only another minute or two before Gunther came back. He set a banker’s box on the table, tucked the lid underneath it, and removed a handful of paper-clipped sheets from the top. “Try not to touch them too much,” he instructed as he set the sheets in front of Marlon. “They’re fragile.”
While Gil and Gunther resumed their own work, Marlon pored over the notes, looking for any information he might be able to connect to his monster findings. The first few pages were about wildlife in the forest. The few after that delved into mineral deposits in the local river. A page about an unusual abundance of coal in the quarry looked promising, at first, but revealed only paragraphs on paragraphs of geological terms that went over Marlon’s head. The theorizing was dropped with a promise to come back again for more information, but if it ever happened, that trip was lost to time.
When M. Jasper finally seemed to make it into the caves, the gaps in the dates grew longer, the information they recorded more scattered. There were a number of musings on dwarfish artifacts that didn’t lead to any conclusion, at least not one that had been preserved. A page about the local moles didn’t reveal anything at all like what Marlon had witnessed, though these being very old notes, he’d expected that. What he didn’t expect was for void spirits to only be mentioned once, in passing, in connection to an underground lake that had turned a vibrant red. M. Jasper suspected iron deposits, but after testing the water and finding nothing, concluded that the spirits must have done something to it. There was no hypothesis recorded as to what, or why, that might have been.
Marlon only skimmed the last few pages, and still learned more about algae than he ever wanted to learn. When he was done, he hastily stood up from his chair. Careful not to take his frustration out on the documents, he gathered them back into their paperclip and set them into their box.
Gunther rose to join him immediately. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Not even close,” Marlon lamented. “I would have thought something as unusual as void spirits would warrant more attention.”
“Gil had that problem when he was writing his thesis,” Gunther said. He inspected the paperclip work before returning the box lid to its proper place.
Marlon looked towards Gil, who was slipping his day’s efforts into a manilla envelope. “Was that the topic?”
“It was gonna be part of it,” he answered. “Chose to scrap that idea.”
“Why not do your own research?”
Gil lifted his head. His stare was incredulous, as if the question was unthinkable to ask. Marlon felt his breathing stutter at the sight of it anyway.
Had there not been an audience in the room, he would have abandoned this conversation without a second thought. He’d gotten no closer to any valuable information on Gil either, and still, any hint of connection between them ran wildly through his head. He was getting desperate to ask about the novel, or anything else that might have brought them anywhere good. Rare moments of eye contact alone weren’t going to cut it for much longer.
While Marlon struggled to get back on track, Gil set the unsealed envelope on the table. “Come with me,” he said, and that did not help the situation at all.
The flirtatious responses Marlon wanted to give sat leaden on his tongue as he followed Gil past the other tables, past the bookshelves, and into the museum space. Rows of mostly-empty podiums and glass cases were laid out in front of them. The room didn’t look anywhere near ready for a grand opening, but there were some signs of progress: a pile of gems on a table in the corner, a few rusty machine parts with handwritten tags tied around them with twine.
Gil stopped them in front of one of the only filled out cases, which housed a trio of chipped clay pots, each of them intricately painted. The largest pot showcased an assortment of stout, dark figures with claw-like hands. Some had large, colorful masks balanced over their faces. Others’ faces were exposed, their mouths open in profile to show dark, pointed teeth. They surrounded a human, lying flat on their back, their eyes closed. A deep purple mass hovered above their rib cage.
“This isn’t as old as it looks,” Gil said. “Only a hundred years or so, designed to look older. But all of the art of the spirits looks just like this. They don’t want people getting close enough to study them.”
Marlon walked around to the other side of the case to see the pot from more angles. There was another splotch of purple, golden suns dotting either side of it, but otherwise the rest of the surface was unmarked.
He looked up across the display and accidentally met Gil’s eyes. He flicked his gaze away, wishing it had occurred to him sooner that they were the same height, so accidental eye contact would be harder to avoid. “But they’re interfering more now, aren’t they?” he pointed out. “If they’re making themselves known, more people should try to understand them better.”
“No point ignoring centuries of warnings. Roger roping the wizard into it is already dangerous enough.”
“Does anyone know that for sure? Seems like you’re all just guessing.”
“Doesn’t matter, people don’t want to go looking for trouble.” A pause, and then Gil looked Marlon directly in the face again. “Not the way you do.”
It very easily could have been a criticism, but Marlon could tell that it wasn’t. It came out with pure curiosity, the same spark of wonder Gil might have given off if he found another old pot in the mines. For the briefest of moments, Marlon wondered if Gil knew exactly how right he was, if he’d observed more than just his monster tracking during Guild trips. Still painfully aware that they weren’t alone in the building, he forced the thought from his head. It trickled down into his bloodstream without his permission.
“No,” Marlon said. “I suppose they don’t.”
Chapter 4: Chapter Four
Chapter Text
The social obligations never seemed to end in Pelican Town. Less than a week after the Egg Festival, there was talk of an informal gathering at the saloon: a birthday party for someone whose name Marlon didn’t care to remember. His lack of interest didn’t deter Lewis, who never seemed to be deterred by anything.
“It’ll be much less of a crowd,” he insisted. “And I promise I’ll leave you to your own devices the whole time, no more—”
“Parading me around the town square like a show dog?” Marlon interrupted, leaving a few extra words out for Evelyn’s benefit. She laughed from the chair she was sitting in. He might have heard something from Gil, too, who was doing his best to be invisible on the opposite end of the room, where he was leaning against the wall near the base of the stairs. Lewis was close to begging him to come to the saloon as well, if he remembered he was there. Marlon wondered why Gil didn’t just go up to his apartment, and ultimately figured that the movement alone would have put the spotlight on him.
“Right.” Lewis crossed his arms. “I wouldn’t need to if you took any initiative yourself, you know.”
Marlon winced as he pulled a dust sprite bur from his leg. He added it to the steadily growing pile next to him on the shop counter. “I thought you said I’ve taken enough ‘initiative’ for now.”
The Guild’s trip into the mines earlier that day was focused on iron collection. Marlon, in contrast, had been focused on observing bats from a distance. The most fascinating creature he’d seen so far, captivating in how normal they were. They didn’t seem to experience the same growth the bugs and crabs had, nor did they have any missing or extra body parts like the moles. (“Duggies,” Roger kept correcting, and Marlon put no effort into using that childish term.) He didn’t have any prior experience with bats, granted, but there was nothing supernatural in the way they behaved.
Marlon had been lucky enough to find a large group on this trip, tucked away in a nook that wasn’t of interest to anyone else in the Guild. Living this deep in the caves, these bats didn’t venture outside for food, and thus didn’t keep nocturnal hours. There was a lot of activity to record. A difficult task in such a cold space; the air stiffened Marlon’s joints no matter how quickly he wrote.
Fuller fur than upper level bats. Stiff in motion. Blue tint, iridescent in right light. Covers eyes.
Both to give his chilled fingers a rest and to see how sensitive the bats were to sound, Marlon reached into his bag for a stray bit of quartz. He tossed it gently into the air, let it drop to the ground at his feet, and waited.
Not bothered by noise? Weak hearing?
Frequent screeching, no signs of agitation. Wings flapping in place. Mating season late spring?
Marlon stepped closer to where the bats were resting, to see if he could get any closer without setting them off. He was so caught up in watching them that he didn’t notice the first dust sprite until it was already climbing his bootlaces.
Dust sprites, as he’d quickly found out, were also different from the other monsters. For one thing, they traveled in packs with much more regularity. Even worse, they weren’t skittish around humans, zipping between feet and demanding attention. Unfortunately for Marlon, they were too fast and too small for his limited peripheral vision. One sprite became five, became fifteen, and it was only a matter of seconds before they were all lodging themselves into his shins through his pant legs.
Marlon had the presence of mind to recognize that slicing at his own leg would be needlessly reckless, but he was able to at least intimidate the sprites once they were back on the ground. Sometimes his aim was even good enough to hit them. The burs they left behind in their wake sat firmly under his skin, even with a cloth barrier, sending shooting pains through his shins every time he moved the wrong way. A troubling effect, since frequent movement was the best way to avoid more burs.
He was grateful that nobody witnessed the flailing disaster of a scene, his stumbling only slightly more humiliating than his imprecise sword work. Still, he came out victorious, if only because he’d turned the sprites around enough that they started sticking to each other. He emerged from the fight littered with burs, and with his lip bleeding where he bit it to keep from crying out in pain. It was unanimously decided that the trip would end early that day.
George had left for home straight away, offering Marlon no more than an irritated glare on his way out. Roger, as usual, was more pleasant, assuring him that it was best to get his first incident out of the way early. “You’re broken in now,” he’d declared, “so you’ll carry yourself through the next one with ease.”
The rest of the team returned with him to the Guild office. Evelyn was kind enough to assist with the bur removal, getting started while Marlon recorded a few last-minute notes.
Dust sprites not scared off by human activity. Larger packs than previously thought. Aggressive without threat of attack. Fucking bastards.
He set to work on his other leg after that. And Lewis, being Lewis, decided that this was the perfect time to sell him on a first visit to the Stardrop Saloon. “I’d think the distraction would be welcome after today,” he argued. “A pint or two would take your mind off the pain, at least.”
“How healthy of you to suggest,” Marlon snarked. He grabbed the next bur at the wrong angle, and it dug into the pads of his fingers.
Evelyn saw this happen, and abandoned the bur she was working on to free him. “Let poor thing rest, Lewis. I wouldn’t want to go to a crowded bar in this state either.”
Marlon’s emphatic “thank you” was cut off by Lewis’s rebuttal. “It’ll be better than sitting alone at the campsite all night. The same goes for you, Gil, I know you haven’t been anywhere other than the caves and the library all week.”
The dread that Gil felt at being noticed was instantly palpable in the room. “Leave me out of this.”
“I would if you put any effort in.”
Marlon shook his newly-freed hand out in front of him until the sting started fading from his fingertips. “Why would either of us bother? You’re always waiting in the wings to do it yourself.”
“That’s fair enough,” Lewis conceded. “But it’s important that you fit into the community, so I’m not going to stop.”
“Is it now?” Marlon got back to work on the burs, more carefully this time.
Lewis shifted on his feet as he uncrossed his arms. “Yes. The whole point of the Adventurers Guild is to keep the town from falling apart. You’ll be more invested with an active role in it.”
Gil gestured to Marlon’s legs. “He’s been active enough.”
“Rub it in, why don’t you,” Marlon said, more harshly than was warranted. An over-correction to avoid sounding like he was flirting.
Gil had grown a bit less sparse in acknowledging his existence since their discussion in the library. The two of them often ended up there together on the Guild’s off days, sitting at opposite ends of the same table. Occasionally, Gil would ask about the notes Marlon was refining, once even offering an observation on rock crab habitats. Nobody would have called it friendliness, but it still made Marlon more cautious about seeming over eager. He didn’t want the attention to end because of a poorly-timed come on.
Of course, if Gil did agree to go out that night, and Marlon did too, and they both happened to be drinking…
He tried to quash the idea as soon as it entered his head. Pelican Town as a whole was far too friendly, stepping right up to the line of nosiness at every opportunity. He could hardly go to the blacksmith’s to turn in his paltry amounts of ore without somebody demanding his time with their questions. He was sure that the atmosphere in the saloon wouldn’t be any better.
While he contended with this disappointment, Evelyn added the last bur from his left shin to the pile. “Maybe Lewis has a point.”
Marlon raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Whose side are you on?”
“Nobody’s.” She stood up from the chair and dragged it over to its usual spot, tucked under the card table. “I just think it will brighten people’s spirits to know that someone new wants to be here, even with the future so uncertain. And Gil, dear—” she pulled a handkerchief from her skirt pocket to wipe the soot off her hands “—people are shocked to learn that you still live here whenever I bring you up.”
“Good,” Gil told her.
Evelyn shook her head. “I should be going, I’m sure George and Clara will want dinner soon,” she said, easily disengaging herself from the debate. To Marlon, she added, “Please do your best not to attract any more dust sprites.”
“No promises,” he said with a smirk. When he spoke again, genuine gratitude made its way into his voice despite his overall annoyance. “Thank you for the help this time around.”
“You’re very welcome,” Evelyn said, all smiles. With a little flurry of goodbyes around the room, she left Marlon to field Lewis and the rest of the burs on his own.
Lewis quickly formulated his next argument, eyes bouncing between his projects for the day. “You know, even if you don’t mingle tonight, it would be good for the two of you to get to know each other better. I expected you to be fast friends, but I don’t think I’ve seen you speak to each other before today.”
In Marlon’s effort not to react to this, he lodged another bur into his thumb, deeper this time. Pulling each spine out of his skin while he muttered expletives absolved him of the need to respond, at least. He wanted to look up and see what Gil’s excuse was, but he didn’t dare.
Lewis waited for an excruciatingly long minute, then gave up on that line of thought. “If I buy the first round, then?”
The notion that Marlon could have afforded any drinks on his own was ridiculous, but he didn’t comment on that either. He expected another silence while he worked the last couple of burs out of his calf. Gil surprised him by answering. “The first two rounds,” he countered, and then his boots were thumping up the stairs to his apartment.
“Well, that settles that!” Lewis said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself. “Marlon?”
The ache in Marlon’s legs was clouding his ability to process Gil having changed his mind. “I’ll think about it.”
Lewis beamed as if this was a definite yes. He spent a few moments prattling on about who else he expected to be there before he finally left. Marlon didn’t look up from his leg once.
He was still in a lot of pain, so the long walk into town didn’t sound appealing in the slightest. An early night to sleep off both the soreness and the embarrassment would have been much better. Marlon couldn’t shake, though, that this could be a fruitful evening, even with the prying eyes of Pelican Town natives threatening to interfere. He’d made arrangements in busy establishments a few times, it wasn’t impossible. It did seem impossible that Gil’s only motivation to go would be the free drinks, but he begrudgingly admitted that that could’ve been two weeks of one-sided tension talking.
When the last bur was removed, Marlon eased himself off the counter. He used his notebook to sweep the pile into a wastepaper basket, streaks of black dust trailing them all the way down. Thanks to poor soundproofing, the steady beat of running water filtered into the room from Gil’s shower upstairs, and the resulting mental image was just as pleasant as it was unhelpful. Marlon raked a hand through his hair, remembering too late that his fingers would also be spreading dust all over the place.
He sighed as he wiped his hands on this thighs. He was not at all cut out for this pining shit.
Deciding in an instant that it was high time for him to take action, Marlon gathered his things and made his way out to the bathhouse. Hopefully, the hot water would give his legs a fighting chance at recovery before he waltzed directly into another dangerous situation.
———————————
It was nearly sunset when Marlon snuck his way into the Stardrop Saloon, relieved to see that the place was already too crowded for anyone to notice him. The party of other young adults had taken over the left half of the taproom, smaller groups already established even among only ten or so people. Off to the right, what must have been the regulars were in spirited conversation at a table. Most crucially, Gil was alone at the corner of the bar with a nearly empty beer in front of him, making this far too easy.
Marlon took his time on the walk towards him, sizing up the situation more thoroughly. He’d be sitting with most of the room in his blind spot, but that was a small price to pay for information. Well worth it, too, for this degree of proximity. They’d be at an angle where no one would notice their legs touching, should things get that far.
The nostalgia got to Marlon before the anticipation. Since he’d come directly to Pelican Town from Zuzu City, it had been far too long since he’d last tried to indulge in this clandestine way. There was something about playing the game that was almost better than the prize at the end. He hoped he wasn’t so rusty that it would ruin the chase.
Gil didn’t notice him arrive until he was already pulling a stool out for himself. “You can walk,” he said instead of greeting him. The surprise in his voice was the most emotion Marlon had ever heard out of him.
“They were dust sprites, not a fucking bulldozer,” Marlon retorted as he sat down. He did not say that the hot water at the bathhouse only barely helped, or that the bruise to his ego felt even worse. Powering through, he asked, “Isn’t this spot a little conspicuous for someone who didn’t want to be here?”
“Bartender’s occupied,” Gil answered, subtly pointing towards the opposite end of the bar. “So’s everyone else.”
Marlon followed his finger to the bartender. He was leaning over the bar, deeply enthralled by one of the mayor’s daughters. He brushed a lock of her hair behind her ear and she laughed, blushing, leaning into the touch. “Shame to see someone lured in by pretty poison,” Marlon remarked.
Gil downed the rest of his drink. “You’ve lived here for five minutes and hardly ever talk to anyone outside the Guild. How’d you already figure the Ashwoods out?”
Not expecting this uncharacteristic wordiness, Marlon turned back to Gil. His eyes weren’t glassy, his face wasn’t flushed. Probably not drunk, but maybe loosened up just enough to make this go more smoothly. Noting this with excitement that hopefully wasn’t showing on his face, he answered the question. “You’re forgetting, I’m very obviously mockable. The M. Jasper notes weren’t the only reason I left that festival early.”
“Hmm,” Gil intoned, accepting this without a hint of pity, which didn’t go unappreciated. “Well, trust me, those two deserve each other.”
Even though Gil was still watching the display in front of them, Marlon fished for eye contact. He came up empty. “I wouldn’t have guessed that you come here often enough to know that.”
“Herb used to insist. Glad he gave up.”
“Couldn’t have been any worse than Lewis, Pelican Town’s one man socialization committee.”
“Yeah, I don’t miss that either.” Gil reached for his pint again, and set it back down as soon as he felt it was empty. “You got the time?”
Marlon lifted his arm to look at his watch. His mouth was already open to respond when he realized that its reading of 3:15 was at least four hours off. Pausing to look more closely, he saw that the hands were frozen in place. “Apparently not,” he sighed, setting his wrist on the bar.
“It’s stopped?”
“Seems like it. It’s a cheap hand-me-down, I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.”
“Let me see,” Gil said. Without waiting for a response, he grabbed Marlon’s wrist and pulled it closer to him.
Marlon’s immediate reaction, buzzing in his temples, was irritation. This wasn’t part of the plan. He hadn’t even gotten to start anything yet. Things were supposed to progress more gradually, with more covert means of communication, especially in such a crowded place. When it hit him that Gil likely didn’t have a plan, had no intentions other than looking at the broken watch, his irritation gave way to full-body panic.
He grew uncomfortably aware of the noise in the rest of the room. He tried to scan the overlapping conversations to determine if anyone was seeing this, if anyone could tell how badly he’d wanted any physical contact for the better part of two weeks. He couldn’t make anything out. His brain was too occupied with the feeling of Gil’s fingers, one set wrapped around the underside of his wrist, the others occasionally brushing against the top while he studied the watch.
Marlon’s observations from the mines were proving to be true. He knew now what it must feel like to be an ancient clay pot or a fossil; all of those delicate touches seeped directly under his skin. He started having trouble breathing, and he started shaking his right leg so aggressively, he was pretty sure he could hear the footrest on the stool squeaking. When he felt his heart start pounding, he froze up, knowing that Gil would definitely catch his racing pulse if his fingers hit the wrong place on his wrist.
After a few long, fearful seconds, Gil seemed to catch up to what his alcohol-tinted body was doing. His spine straightened as he snatched his hands away, leaving the echoes of his fingertips behind. “Sorry.” He coughed into a fist and tried to stare holes through his empty pint. “Worked with jewelers as a teenager, relatives of mine. Force of habit.”
“S’fine.” Marlon pulled his own hand back, but kept his gaze locked on Gil’s face. He couldn’t tell if the expression was actually hard to read, or if he was too far into his own thoughts to read it.
“‘Scuse me a minute,” Gil mumbled, already jumping from his stool. He kept his head down as he walked into the back room, past a pinball table and two people playing pool, into the restroom.
Marlon made himself look away then, not wanting to attract the attention of either person at the pool table. Facing forward, all he could see was the couple teasing each other across the bar. It was so brazen, so simple, that it might as well have been a slap to the face. A bitter reminder of the hoops he’d have to jump through, on top of everything else he was wrestling with. Met with a sudden need for fresh air, he left the saloon with a deliberate calmness that he knew he wouldn’t be able to maintain for long.
Once he was outside, he didn’t go very far, the lingering ache in his legs now far more pronounced. He pressed his back against the side of the building, grounded himself by focusing on the brick wall scratching through his shirt. He drew in slow, deep breaths until he could think clearly again.
He was coming away from this night with no concrete evidence of Gil’s sexuality, still, he was realizing. Marlon had intended to ask about the Clayton Sinclair novel again while they were at the bar. Gil never had it on him again after that day they were alone together in the Guild office. Either he was only reading it in private for fear of being found out, or he’d stopped because he picked up on the subtext and didn’t like it. The only other thing Marlon could grab onto was this new hand-to-wrist contact, which Gil treated like a terrible mistake. He’d explained it away easily too; Marlon didn’t think anyone would make up a lie as specific as a stint working with jewelers, not when all sorts of men were open about being wristwatch enthusiasts.
While he was combing through the events of the day, hunting for scraps once again, he heard footsteps approaching him on the cobblestone. He pushed himself off the wall and turned to face the street. Roger and Sarah were walking arm in arm, up from the southern end of town. Not at all in the mood to run into anyone, Marlon wanted to turn around and leave, but the couple had clearly spotted him already. He scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to rally.
Roger was already calling out before they reached him. “Hello there! It’s good to see you’re feeling well enough to be out tonight.”
Marlon only nodded in reply, not sure how audible he’d be from inside the saloon if he yelled across the town square. He could see Sarah give Roger a quizzical look, and mostly hear how he recounted the story of the dust sprites. Marlon felt like he was swinging from a pendulum, carried to the far end of shame before he had time to adjust to everything Gil was stirring up. He couldn’t wait for someone else to be dramatically injured and get the attention off him, he thought, then quickly dismissed the idea as too mean-spirited, even for the state he was in.
Roger and Sarah stopped in front of him. They made no effort to hide that they were concerned now that they’d seen him up close. “Were you planning to go inside?” Sarah asked him.
Already caught, but with no desire to go into detail, Marlon answered carefully. “I already did. As it turns out, I don’t have much energy to work with.”
“Why don’t you join us on our walk home?” Roger offered. “There’s a lovely path up the mountain from the farm, you can get back to the campsite from there.”
Marlon’s gut instinct was to turn this down. If there was ever a time for Roger and Sarah’s relentlessly welcoming attitudes, it wasn’t now. Still, the town square was glaringly public, and a path off the main road was an appealing route to solitude.
“I’ll take you up on that,” he said, cautiously optimistic that, since they could tell he was out of sorts, they wouldn’t press for more than the walk.
———————————
“I grow the fairy roses in here year round for Evelyn’s flower shop,” Roger was saying, immersed in giving a tour of his greenhouse. “The rest of the space, I use for whatever feels right at the start of the season. And for Sarah’s peppers, of course.”
Sarah smiled from the hot pepper plants she was tending in the opposite corner of the space. “You’d be amazed how effective they are at keeping the kids from using inappropriate language.” Chuckling, she added, “I dread the day I get a student who calls my bluff and actually wants to eat one.”
Marlon kept listening politely, just as he had been. Roger had taken the time to show off the entire farm, not at all bothered that they only had moonlight to work with once they'd gotten there. The land was so packed with things to see, and its owner was so enthusiastic about all of them, that it made for a surprisingly good distraction from the day’s events.
They’d started with the crops: rows upon rows of nearly-grown cauliflower and potatoes sitting proudly in the dirt. There were green beans on trellises beyond that, separating the vegetables from the coffee plants and seasonal flowers. Those flowers went to Evelyn too, since her own property wasn’t nearly large enough to plant what she’d need to supply the business, which she mostly ran out of her backyard. She would often come collect them herself, but Roger claimed to do the rest of the harvesting without outside assistance. It seemed impossible to Marlon, but he couldn’t get a word in edgewise to question it.
South of the crops, there was a pond circled with benches, the area around it otherwise untouched by human activity. Wildflowers and wild grasses sprouted up wherever they pleased, an offering to local fauna and insects. By Roger’s admittance, it didn’t always keep them from the crops, but it at least made for a peaceful place to relax at the end of his day. Next to that, a small shed stored barrels for making pickles and, tucked into a corner, an assortment of fishing equipment. “It’s an odd mix, I know,” Roger had said, “but Sarah didn’t want any of it near the house, and I can’t say I disagreed.”
What they did keep near the house was a chicken coop, the fenced-off area around it filled with lush, blue grass, vibrant even under the limited light. The trees that filtered in from the woods around it were all fixed with tappers for maple syrup. Another one of Sarah’s projects, along with the hot pepper jelly that her many extra disciplinary tools were used for. Scattered in between everything else, there were little mounds of mud and leaves, each of them with holes that looked like rodents were burrowing into them. Marlon didn’t ask about them either, figuring that Roger would get to it eventually, but he never did. He was too excited to talk about his greenhouse, which was currently boasting a mix of parsnips, garlic, and carrots in addition to its permanent offerings.
“I believe that about covers it,” Roger said, sitting down on a metal bench. He invitingly pat the space next to him for Marlon to sit too.
He accepted. “It’s impressive that you can maintain all of this. It’s just the two of you here, right?”
Roger smiled. “More or less. When you’re passionate about your work, it doesn’t feel like so much.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Marlon managed a smile of his own. The passion was clear, in everything he’d seen that night, but it was still completely alien to him.
“Thank you for listening to an old man’s ramblings, and when you’re recovering from the dust sprites besides.” Roger gave him a pointed look, and Marlon knew exactly what he was about to say. “I don’t suppose you’d let me repay you with more potatoes?”
“That’s not necessary,” Marlon said before the offer was all the way out. “I’ve got the pickaxe now. I have a source of income.”
“We’ve yet to see you actually use the pickaxe,” Roger laughed.
“You must not be paying attention,” Marlon grumbled. In truth, he had a long way to go with his ore collection. It was a tremendous relief that Arthur hadn’t been in the saloon that night, asking him where his repayment was.
“Ah, but I have been,” Roger said. “Your notes have already proven quite helpful. So please, let me help you in return.”
Still fussing with her peppers, Sarah contributed, “He’s not going to let you walk out of here empty handed. Save your energy for a different fight.”
Marlon kept his gaze fixed on the budding carrot tops in front of him. “Well, it sounds like I don’t actually have a choice.”
“I’m glad we’re on the same page.” Roger rested a hand on Marlon’s shoulder. “It really isn’t an inconvenience. If my son was in your position, I’d want someone to do the same.”
Seizing the change in subject would be the best course of action to ease his discomfort, Marlon decided. “Is it just the one son?”
Roger dropped his hand and leaned over to reach into his pocket. He pulled out a battered leather wallet, flipped it open, and held it out so Marlon could see the photo tucked inside. “We only had Philip, yes. This is him with his wife, Kate, and our grandson, Heath.”
Marlon studied the people in the photo. “Strong resemblance,” was the only thing he could think to say. The Montgomery men did have strikingly similar faces, but the family in the photo looked too put-together to be attached to a family of farmers. It was even stranger to see someone who didn’t look that much older than him with a child. Marlon had always been bad at judging kids’ ages, but he was pretty sure Heath would be able to walk and construct a sentence, at least.
He was struck with the realization that he probably had nieces and nephews around the same age by this point. His oldest sister had been planning her wedding the last he saw her, and both of his older brothers hadn’t been far behind. In his mind’s eye, they were all frozen in time, the same people they’d been when everything was still stable for him. The truth of things changing, without him there to witness any of it, gripped his chest like a vice.
A few seconds of thought on that were more than enough, Marlon told himself.
Roger’s voice was wistful as he pulled the photo closer to him. “They both work in finance, out in Zuzu. We tried to convince Philip to work the land with us, but he wouldn’t have it.”
Marlon swallowed down the lump that had formed in his throat. “That’s a shame.”
“I agree,” Sarah said as she walked over from the peppers. “He was always too stubborn to listen to us, though, we should have known.”
Roger smirked up at her. “I haven’t the slightest idea where he got that from, my love.”
With a playful roll of her eyes, Sarah crossed her arms. “You’re complicit here too.”
Roger chuckled at that accusation as he closed his wallet. Turning back to Marlon, he said, “We always told him we’d support him in anything he wanted to do with his life, and we meant that. I can’t help but think it’s a bit of a waste, to trade this in for a stressful job in the city, but as long as he’s happy.”
“Do they visit often?” Marlon asked, doing a horrible job at steering this discussion out of uncomfortable territory. After such an exhausting day, he shouldn’t have been surprised with himself.
“Not nearly enough,” Roger complained. “I don’t think Kate has an especially high opinion of the Valley, even before all of this trouble with the monsters.”
Marlon nodded, all too familiar with city people’s disdain for rural living. “That’s an even bigger shame.”
Sarah smiled at that comment. “I think it’s time for me to call it a night, or else I’ll start saying things I’ll regret on this subject.” She squeezed Roger’s arm affectionately, then made her way to the door. Before she went outside, she turned around to add, “It was a pleasure having you, Marlon. I promise you’ll get to relax more the next time you visit.”
The tour was relaxing enough compared to the rest of Marlon’s evening. Since he’d been so committed to being nonchalant about the dust sprite injuries, he knew it would arouse suspicion if he said so. He didn’t do more than bid her goodnight.
Roger slid his wallet back into his pocket. “We do love our daughter-in-law, she’s a lovely girl,” he said, a defensive edge to his voice. “But it can be difficult not to blame her for our son’s change in attitude. I had my own inklings that he wouldn’t want to follow in my footsteps, but, well…” He smiled. “I was stubborn.”
Marlon gave a sympathetic smile back. He understood the pull to the city. Farm life, he imagined, would have been just as tedious for him as a life spent closeted. There was more to this, though, than just a farm. To give up on such supportive parents seemed frivolous. Marlon still didn’t know what to make of the Montgomerys, but maybe their kindness would have come more easily to him if he’d grown up raised by people like them. Maybe Lewis’s relentless attention would have been easier to take on too. Maybe the whole transition to Pelican Town would have been easy, and he’d have had the mental stamina to handle Gil without getting caught off guard at every turn.
“Oh well,” Roger broke the silence. “In due time, everything in due time.”
Marlon wanted to ask what he meant by that, but he didn’t get the chance. Roger abruptly stood up from the bench and motioned for him to follow.
“Come with me to my crop storage,” he said. “You should take a bushel of carrots too, and I just harvested some beautiful parsnips yesterday morning.”
With no energy left to dodge this request a second time, Marlon obediently followed Roger outside. A cool, gentle breeze blew in and kicked up the scents of soil and fertilizer. Roger looked fully in his element, radiating serenity with every step he took. Marlon, still unmoored, had never been more envious in his life.
Chapter 5: Chapter Five
Chapter Text
As spring ran its course, Marlon still didn’t find himself compelled to integrate himself into his temporary new community. There were much more compelling matters at hand, after all, especially down in the mines.
He went out of his way to find dust sprites in the week after his run-in with them, determined to never get bested like that again. A lot more burs ended up under his skin this way, and one sprite jumped high enough to get close to his eye, scaring him much more than he’d ever admit. Even so, after only a few days, he was able to fend them off without any further disasters.
Lewis, though understanding, made it clear that he wasn’t happy about all of the combat. To appease him, Marlon made more of an effort to partake in actual mining. It felt like a chore at first, but he got into a rhythm with it before long. There was a lot of satisfaction in cracking ore out of stone, almost as much satisfaction as knowing he wouldn’t be indebted to Arthur for much longer.
Marlon was tolerating a conversation with him, even, at the second town festival he was strong-armed into attending. “This one’s a big deal,” Arthur was explaining, while George nodded next to him. “The Flower Dance has been a Pelican Town institution for generations.”
“For eons,” Herb corrected. “I don’t think we have any record of when these types of fertility rituals started in the area. They’ve just always been here.”
“You’d have thought it was Yoba itself who demanded them, the way my folks used to act,” Arthur said, his voice colored with memories.
“Oh, yes, that’s coming back to me,” Herb chuckled. “Remember that one year with four extra men, when two of ‘em tried to dance together? I’ll never forget the fit your mother threw over that.”
Arthur joined in on the laughter. “Yup, that was Ma for ya.”
“Can’t blame her though, it would have been uncomfortable to watch,” George remarked, and Herb and Arthur both murmured their agreements.
Marlon fought the urge to glare at them, any enjoyment he was getting out of this interaction withering right in front of him. He downed the cup of punch he was holding in one gulp. It was so cloyingly sweet that his teeth ached as it went down.
Herb swallowed a sip of his own drink. “It’s good that the numbers have leveled out. I still worry for when Gunther’s old enough for the ceremony though. The kid’s too shy for his own good.”
They all looked over to the opposite end of the field, where Gunther was sitting alone at a picnic table, face buried in a book. Marlon wished he could be doing the same. He’d intended to go straight to the library that morning, in fact, bypassing the Flower Dance entirely. It was Gunther himself who'd morosely broken the news that his parents wouldn’t let him skip this one, so the building would be locked.
Even without the library available, Gil was conspicuously absent from this “big deal” of a festival. Marlon couldn’t help but wonder if that was his fault. He thought he’d done well acting like nothing had happened after the night at the saloon. Either he was misjudging his ability to lie, or feigned normalcy was somehow the wrong decision. Gil was avoiding him like the plague, not even looking in his direction unless he absolutely needed to. The one time they were both at the library that week, he’d stayed firmly in the museum area. Marlon had watched him invent tasks for himself out of the corner of his eye until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then left to take his frustrations out on the coal in the quarry.
He was still wearing his broken wristwatch the entire time. It was the most pitiful of pleas for attention, and he hated that it didn’t work anyway.
Unburdened by longing and unanswered questions, Arthur joined Herb in his complaints. “You’re lucky that Gunther can at least hold a conversation. Someone asked me the other day if Clint was a mute.”
Marlon watched with them as Clint coaxed a caterpillar off of a flower pot with Clara, both children engaging in conversation all the while. “Looks like he’s doing just fine, with the right company,” he didn’t stop himself from commenting.
Arthur didn’t seem to realize that this was an insult. “What about you, Marlon? You ask anybody to dance yet?”
“I don’t dance,” he answered, practically shuddering at the idea of it.
George scowled. “Well, you’d better learn quick. We need you to have an even number since Gil couldn’t bother to show up.”
“And we won’t be able to hide from the mayor in the trees forever,” Herb added.
Marlon had been surprised to see that Mayor Oswald was in attendance, finally gracing the town with his presence after all of that buildup from Lewis. From a distance, he seemed like any other politician: arrogance in every step he took, a shiny veneer of politeness. He’d been deep in conversation with the Montgomerys since Marlon arrived. Roger seemed to be handling the interaction like a professional. Sarah’s attempt at a smile made her look like her tongue was on fire.
More than done with being cordial already, and with no desire to risk an argument with anyone, Marlon decided he’d shown his face long enough. “In that case, if you’ll all excuse me, I believe I’ve just come down with a horrible case of food poisoning,” he declared, not bothering to stay for any objections about his leaving. He crumbled his empty cup and pelted it into a trash can on his way out of the clearing.
His walk to the festival that morning had been his first time in Cindersap Forest, so he didn’t have much of an idea of where he was going now. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to end up either. The tent was the obvious choice, but he didn’t overlook that people might be serious enough about this ridiculous dance to go looking for him there. Any place in the center of town was equally out of the question. Recalling that he’d seen an entrance to Montgomery Farm on his way in, he headed in that direction. He figured that Roger and Sarah wouldn’t mind if he cut through the land to get up to the bathhouse.
There wasn’t an obvious path, so Marlon wove through the trees as best he could. After a few moments of stumbling, he emerged next to a large pond. He could see the dirt road on the other side, but straight ahead, he caught sight of something moving at the edge of the forest. It bounced like a slime, even though monsters weren’t supposed to turn up anywhere outside the mines.
Marlon abandoned his original plan. He quickened his pace, but the slime was already gone when he was only halfway around the pond, having bounced off into what looked like much denser woods. Curious — perhaps foolishly so, without a weapon on him for an emergency — Marlon kept chasing it.
“Dense” didn’t seem like enough when he crossed into this new area. The sun only barely filtered through the leaves above him, and he had to stop for a moment to let his vision adjust to the drastic change in light. He could still hear the slime, but he couldn’t get a solid idea of where it was. There were too many other noises: rustling leaves, a woodpecker, something splashing in water.
He walked forward when he could see well enough, feeling that the grass was also more lush this deep in the woods. His left foot dragged through something viscous, more evidence of slimes in the area. He used a dry patch of grass to wipe it off, and watched the ground more closely as he pressed on.
Before long, he found the water source — another, much smaller pond — along with the bird that must have been hunting in it before it got scared off. The sunlight was much stronger there, and he could make out what looked like a marble pillar poking out from behind the greenery. Marlon headed towards it, and turned a corner to find a whole quartet of pillars, only one of them still standing at full height. The rest had crumbled with time, shedding bits of debris onto the stone pavers they were circling. In the center, there was a statue that looked to be in much better shape, depicting an old man crouched as if searching for something he’d lost on the ground. Sat behind the statue, on a fifth pillar that had fallen over, was Gil, with the Clayton Sinclair novel open in his hands, plainly terrified at being discovered.
Marlon didn’t doubt that he was matching Gil’s expression. He wasn’t expecting to see another person at all, let alone this person, who was still distressingly attractive even after so much awkwardness. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Marlon blurted out.
He turned around to leave, and had already taken a few hurried steps, when he heard Gil call after him. “Why aren’t you at the festival?”
Marlon turned again. He took two slower steps back towards him. “It’s best if I don’t dance, considering that the Guild is supposed to be concerned with people’s safety.”
Gil huffed out a hollow chuckle as he set the book next to him on the pillar, cover-side up, splayed open to keep his place.
“And you?” Marlon asked. He walked the rest of the way back, coming a foot or so closer for good measure.
“People tend to get serious about the couples for the dance,” Gil answered. His eyes didn’t move from the pavers.
“So I’ve heard,” Marlon told him, bitterly, as George’s words still echoed in his head.
Gil's response came out just as bitter. “I’m not in the fucking mood either.”
This information, on its own, meant nothing, and Marlon told himself that the smart thing to do was drop it. There was something about the look on Gil’s face, though, that made him think there was more to it. Marlon knew that look. He’d seen it more times than he could count: in bars, in city parks, in the mirror on the wall in his childhood bedroom. Fear and shame always came in first, poking their heads out of the shadows, freezing in place like rabbits. It was the exhaustion underneath, etched in the creases on their foreheads, that he always grabbed onto, that convinced him it was the right time to lay his cards on the table.
Gil made it even easier than that, Marlon realized a beat later. He was still reading the book. He left it face up. Subconsciously or otherwise, he wanted it to be seen.
Marlon’s mouth stalled, and his brain begged it to catch up. He couldn’t help his eye slipping down to Gil’s fingers, couldn’t help conjuring up the feeling of them around his wrist now that there was more of a chance there had been an ulterior motive. His own hand twitched, wanting to wave off the apparition so he could concentrate on the real thing in front of him, but he couldn’t move.
The silence got heavy in his struggle. Gil, also stuck stiffly in place, started to look nervous. “What?” he snapped. The defensive outburst was marked by a slight tremor in his voice.
“Nothing,” Marlon said, finally able to speak. He pointed to the novel. “That’s still getting a lot of press, isn’t it?”
Gil turned his head to the book, and his eyes went wide when he saw how he’d left it. His neck shot back up. “Look, if you’re going to—”
“No, it’s fine, I’d be pleasantly surprised to learn we have this in common,” Marlon rushed to clarify.
Gil’s posture relaxed, shoulders dropping, spine melting down into the pillar. This clear relief made Marlon’s breath catch in his throat. An unfortunate reaction, since it was still audacious to assume that this meant Gil wanted anything to happen. After a whole season’s worth of wondering, it was difficult not to dwell on the possibility.
Marlon took another tentative step forward as he allowed himself to adjust the strap of his watch. “Any objections if I stick around?”
“No, please.” Gil slid over to make room, opening the correct side of the pillar for Marlon without needing to be asked. “Didn’t ever expect to have this in common with anyone here.”
Marlon sat down, leaving more space between them than he would have liked. After so long in hiding, he jumped at the chance to be fully transparent. “As long as we’re being honest, I’m not picky. I prefer men, certainly, but a good night is a good night.”
“Huh.” Gil thought on that for a moment. “Lucky. You have options.”
Picking up on the implications, Marlon shook his head. “I wouldn’t have been satisfied with a normal life.”
“Then why would you come to Pelican Town?”
Marlon answered truthfully, thinking it best to get all of the confessions out of the way in one conversation. “Desperation. Enjoying myself in the mines has been another pleasant surprise. The culture shock might have been too much otherwise.”
“You miss the city?”
“I don’t miss the expenses, or how hard it was to find employment.” Marlon paused, forcing the uglier details from his head. “I miss the freedom of it. So many other people out in the open… It’ll be a massive comfort to have that back. Not in Zuzu necessarily, any city. Anywhere I can breathe that easily again.”
Gil swallowed, hard. His thoughtful eyes bounced back to the stones at their feet.
Marlon watched him withdraw back into sadness. He wondered exactly how long this had been weighing on Gil so intensely, if it was more than just memories of unpleasant Flower Dances that pulled him into this isolated corner of the woods. Even better, then, that they were presented with an opportunity to discuss it.
“Have you ever told anyone before now?” Marlon asked.
Gil shook his head. “A few people at school might’ve figured it out, but that could be the nerves talking. Kept it locked down at home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Grampleton. A lot more uppity than here. More concern about looking good for the neighbors.”
“Right, that old classic.” Marlon idly ran the pads of his fingers across the pillar’s ridged surface. “I dealt with the other side of that coin back home. Looking good for a higher power wasn’t exactly my strong suit.”
“They’re big on Yobaism where you’re from too then?”
“Very.” He didn’t elaborate, letting Gil wonder about the exact sect. Marlon had cleaned off that particular stigma a long time ago, and he had no interest in staining himself all over again.
Across from where they sat, another slime emerged from the trees to bask in a sliver of sunlight. They both watched it closely, Guild habits kicking in automatically. When it started creeping its way around the pond, leaving a glistening trail in its wake, Gil moved a hand to the dagger at his hip. He must have known this was a possibility if he’d brought it. Another hint that he was hurting for a good hiding spot.
Marlon could feel his focus on the slime slipping. Why hadn’t he seen all of this in Gil sooner? It was painfully obvious up close, in a literal sense; his chest tightened as the regret settled in. If he hadn’t been letting his own desires cloud things, he would have been able to step in as a confidant a lot sooner.
He was struck with a sudden urge to apologize. Even if that wasn’t a strange thing to consider, he had no clue how to do so without admitting too much too soon. He inhaled deeply instead, fighting to track the slime’s movements as he breathed out. It was already retreating back into the trees by the time he could lock on again.
Gil let go of his dagger. “When did you leave?” he asked, picking right back up where they’d left off.
Marlon would have preferred a change in subject. He was curious about the monster activity, for one thing. More than that, he was regretting switching the topic to himself. Still, there was something nice about Gil being interested in more details. He wasn’t about to shut that down, but he didn’t look directly at him either. “About five years ago.”
“I didn’t think you were that old.”
The comment was laced with concern, a tone that normally would have made Marlon pull back, undercut the reality of the situation with a flippant reminder that he was still standing. Gil wasn’t making it easy to keep his guard up, though; his expressive, color-rich eyes cut right into Marlon’s skin.
“I’m not,” he admitted. “It wasn’t a choice.”
“What happened?”
Marlon kicked a stray bit of rubble across the ground. “I dove headlong into the turbulent waters of temptation.” When Gil only raised an eyebrow at this flowery non-answer, he translated. “I got caught in a compromising position with the school principal’s son.”
“Straight out of my nightmares,” Gil remarked, his own gaze pulling off into the distance at the thought.
Marlon bent forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “It would have happened with or without him. I didn’t put much effort into hiding it back then. People believed whatever was easiest to believe no matter how I behaved.” He smirked to himself. “He wasn’t the only one dragging me into bathroom stalls and janitors’ closets, so I must have been doing something right.”
Gil chuckled, a raspy noise from the top of his throat. “So fucking cocky.”
“Hey! I think I’ve earned a bit of arrogance, thank you very much,” Marlon said, glancing in Gil’s direction, briefly, before he fell back into the story. “He and I made it a full year before we got complacent. Bed of a pickup truck in broad daylight. We thought we’d parked far enough away from polite society, but his kid brother found us. He threw me under the bus with his parents and that was that.”
“Nothing happened to him?”
“I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.” Marlon tightly clasped his hands together in front of him, digging his fingernails into his knuckles. “My own family made it perfectly clear that I wasn’t welcome anymore.”
He didn’t have it in him to verbalize the rest of what happened that day. He couldn’t even recall everything that had been said anymore; it came back to him as a wordless, cacophonous torrent of anger, all six of his siblings watching on with pure hatred in their eyes all the while. He could remember the smoke, though, dark and foul smelling, as all of his belongings burned in a trash can in the backyard. When his mother, in hysterics, shrieked some noise about throwing him in next, he bolted from his house and the whole Selcide region before he could find out if it was an empty threat.
Marlon only grew more uncomfortable as the memories hung on the air. He made himself sit up straighter, bracing himself to find pity on Gil’s face and nearly breathing a sigh of relief when he didn’t. “What about you?” he asked. “You have a tragic backstory?”
Gil pulled in a deep breath before he answered. “Nothing like that. My folks would’ve been livid if they knew, though. I’d be stuck married to some poor woman just to keep the peace.”
The teasing response to this statement came to Marlon’s mind first, rolling down to his tongue before he could muster up any interest in stopping it. “Your jeweler relatives couldn’t have saved you?”
The look that Gil shot him was harsh, but he bloomed under it anyway, grinning like a cat with a mouse under its paw. Selfish as it was, Marlon was thankful to have gotten a rise out of him so easily. Regaining the upper hand grounded him a bit, made him feel less like he was free falling through the past.
Seeing that Marlon wasn’t interested in walking back this challenge, Gil reached to unclasp a necklace that was tucked into his sweater. He pulled it out, slowly draped the chain across his palm so it didn’t tangle, and rested the attached pendant on top of it. Holding this display out to Marlon, he said, “That wasn’t a lie. I worked with them for years.”
Marlon leaned in to get a closer look. “Did you make this?”
Gil nodded. “I don’t usually keep them. The grants and the Guild sales aren’t enough to build any sort of nest egg. Gotta keep things stable somehow.”
The gem in the center of the pendant caught Marlon’s attention. It was a large piece, and he wondered why Gil would keep something so expensive for himself, until he realized it wasn’t a gemstone at all. It wasn’t polished, and the color wasn’t like anything he’d seen in jewelry before. It almost looked wooden, but there wasn’t any wood grain, and the piece was more gray than brown.
He reached out to touch the “gem” with precision that would have impressed a heart surgeon, careful not to scramble his brain with physical contact just yet. If Gil had any thoughts about them being this close together, he didn’t let them show. When that minor sting faded, Marlon was able to focus enough to identify the material. “Is this a rock crab shell?” he asked anyway, in disbelief that anyone would save monster parts for this purpose.
Gil pulled the necklace back and brought the chain around his neck. “Gets boring working with the same things all the time,” he said by way of confirmation. “Seemed like a fun experiment.”
Marlon watched Gil fasten the clasp properly on the first try, agile fingers working with care just as always. He tucked the necklace back into his shirt, pulled the collar back into place, and dropped his arms into his lap, letting his wrists rest easily over his knees.
“Well, you are full of surprises,” Marlon told him. The comment came out reverent without his permission.
This, Gil did react to, turning his head slightly to try and hide a smile. Marlon didn’t intend to stare, but he couldn’t help himself. After waiting so long for this moment — longer than he’d ever needed to, he was certain — he wasn’t going to miss a second of it.
———————————
Conversation flowed between Marlon and Gil all afternoon and into the evening, drifting easily and aimlessly between topics. The longer they went on, the less Marlon worried about moving things into more intimate territory. It was pleasant enough just to be with another person: no goal in mind, no strict rules for interaction, no hushed, pleading secrets. He’d maintained very few friendships during his time in cities, most of them out of necessity, with no effort spent on properly getting to know each other. Marlon had forgotten how nice it was to exist so comfortably in someone’s company.
He felt it most acutely when the forest slimes came up, a subject that Gil was just as eager to discuss for his own reasons. “They’re attracted to the statue,” he explained. “Haven’t been able to figure out why.”
Marlon got up from the pillar to see the statue again from the front. He read the inscription that he’d been too startled to bother with when he’d arrived: Old Master Cannoli - Still searching for the sweetest taste. “Can’t say he strikes me as much of a monster charmer.”
Gil watched him from where he sat. “He starts showing up in old texts right about the same time as the void spirits do. Some people link them. Hard to tell what’s truth and what’s exaggeration with him.”
“He had a big reputation then?” Marlon asked. “I can respect that.”
“Of course you can,” Gil said, and when Marlon only smirked in response, he laughed through his nose. “More to do with the Valley than the man himself, though. He had his hands in a lot of pots. Made him an easy scapegoat whenever the otherworldly stuff got out of control.”
“So there’s a history of that before the current struggle?”
Gil nodded. “The woods used to be overrun with slimes, long before there was any record of them in the mines.”
Marlon walked slowly around the statue, studying it from all angles as he made his way back to the pillar. “I’m guessing they migrated for their own safety?”
“Most biologists think they’re two separate groups, actually. Both just sprouted up like plants.” When Marlon looked at Gil like he was lying, he added, “Is it that hard to believe? If it wasn’t for the trees, we’d be able to see a fucking wizard tower from here.”
“I suppose that’s a fair point,” Marlon said as he sat back down. “I should’ve stopped asking questions when I saw vegetables growing in the middle of a cave.”
“Or all the minerals that keep popping up in the quarry.”
“That too. Those letters I read in the library had a lot to say about the quarry without any real conclusion.”
“M. Jasper probably got distracted by something weirder. Plenty of options.”
Marlon’s gaze rested on Gil. He was far more relaxed than he’d ever seen him, with his legs stretched out in front of him and a glimmer in his eyes even under his sunhat. “And you love every bit of it, don’t you.”
“I do,” Gil said, all excitement and light. “I wanna see all of it.”
They continued on like that for hours, Gil sharing everything he’d learned over the course of two years, Marlon contributing what little he could, when he wasn’t struck silent by the passion of it. To have Gil wholly at ease with him, after such a bumpy start to their afternoon, was almost enough of a victory to sustain him for the night. Later on, however, when the opportunity for more presented itself, Marlon still felt that it would have been wasteful not to take it.
The pair of them walked through Montgomery Farm to get up the mountain, careful to stay on the un-tilled land and not step on anything important. There was only a suggestion of the sun left in the sky, wispy clouds overhead backlit in rich shades of blue. The narrow pathway kept them close together, just enough space between them to stop their arms from brushing. The possibility of it happening anyway sent shivers down Marlon’s back. And Gil, oblivious to how he was tainting the moment, was talking about Clayton Sinclair.
“It started slow, but it’s picking up,” he said, detailing his experience reading the novel even though Marlon hadn’t asked. “The prose is nice too.”
“It’s overwritten,” Marlon countered. “He can never use a metaphor without beating it to death.”
“Does it matter if it sounds good?”
“You’ve been drowning in academic texts for years. Anything else would sound good.”
Rolling his eyes, Gil begrudgingly accepted this assessment. “Fine, maybe. Not gonna stop me from enjoying it.”
“You’re welcome to enjoy whatever you want,” Marlon said. “Even when you’re too smart for it.”
Gil stumbled mid-stride, recovered quickly, and tried to hide his reddening face under his sunhat.
Encouraged by this response to the mildest of compliments, Marlon nudged their talk in a more productive direction. “I can’t stand the way he writes about casual sex either, like it’s some massive political statement. The best part is tuning out the fucking politics for a night, just enjoying another person and acting like it’s normal. It’s not that important in the grand scheme.”
They reached the northern edge of the land, where Roger had built a wooden staircase into the hill that led off the property. Gil kept his eyes fixed on the steps as he climbed it, the railing creaking gently under his hand. “If you say so.”
Marlon looked at him. “You don’t agree?”
“I don’t think about casual sex at all,” Gil said to the stairs, with all the gravity of an apology.
It was one of the more interesting ways Marlon had been turned down, and not only because he hadn’t made any propositions yet. If Gil had also been analyzing every interaction between them — and that seemed likely at this point — he’d clearly reached the right conclusion, and decided he wasn’t interested. That thought nearly made Marlon stumble too. Questions he didn’t know how to ask churned violently through him, leaving no room for disappointment.
At the top of the stairs, they found that the path up the mountain was wider. To Marlon’s surprise, Gil stayed close to his side, and surprised him even more when he kept talking. “There was this little diner in my neighborhood growing up. The guy who ran it co-owned the place with the chef. Always said they were just good friends and business partners. Maybe that was true at one point. Got really hard to believe after a while though.” Gil smiled to himself, planted firmly in reminiscence. “Used to spend my whole damn allowance in there just to get glimpses of them talking in the kitchen, or making changes to the menu at the counter. Getting the place ready to close down at night. Anything I could see. The way they looked at each other… Never seen anything like that.”
Marlon didn’t make a sound as he listened, matching Gil’s pace when he slowed down, hanging on every word. After so many years hearing that the only two options were a proper family or a life of deviance, it never occurred to him that anyone would occupy the spaces in between.
“There’s a lot I can live without,” Gil concluded. “I’m not taking any risks unless there’s something bigger.”
Marlon let that idea roll around his head. The risk, in his view, was the most appealing part for as long as he’d been taking it. Better yet, he thrived under it in the heat of the moment, daring the universe to knock him down, confident that it couldn’t do anything worse than it already had. Even if the Ferngill Republic never decriminalized homosexuality, how awful could prison really be? If nothing else, he’d have his own bed again.
Looking at Gil now, with his normally hard face softened by the memories, Marlon completely understood why a person in their position might want more. It didn’t escape him that Gil was already building the foundation for it, at least as well as one could build a future in a badly-maintained apartment, in a town that was gradually slipping into ruin.
The appeal of being part of that future crashed into Marlon harder than the initial attraction did.
It was the damndest thing, he thought, but it felt like alarms going off. Phantom sirens cast the world around him in a bright red aura, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. Underneath the quiet thumps of their boots against the ground and the intermittent calls of woodland creatures, there was an urgent shouting, distant to his ears, only just close enough to grasp: this was too much, and too permanent, to consider in earnest.
On impulse, Marlon started forcing it all back down, tried to contain it all in boxes so it would be easier to crack into dust in the mines later. He quickly recognized, though, that he didn’t want to. Intense as this was, it was an intensity that nestled in his rib cage like it always belonged there, like he’d been waiting for it to arrive. It was still a mystery what he was meant to do with it, but he could figure that part out later. He made a conscious effort to unclench his jaw as he let it take over, let it flood his whole body with warmth.
Marlon had lost the day anyway, he knew. There was no release to be had, no satisfaction of a game well played. In spite of that, he was still stuck on the possibility of Gil out in front of these new hurdles, still enthralled by his intelligence and his talents, still could not stop fucking admiring him, and all at once, Marlon wasn’t playing a game anymore.
He didn’t notice that they’d reached the base of the campsite until Gil stopped walking. They faced each other as he shifted the novel from one hand to the other. He gripped it tightly. “This the part where you make fun of me for being too traditional?”
“No,” Marlon answered automatically, leaving himself no time to hide his horror at the idea. He fixed his voice into something more neutral. “No, I… I want that life to be possible for you.”
Gil studied him, wearing the same expression he wore when he was appraising gemstones and artifacts. Marlon tried to study him in kind, but he couldn’t fight through his own shock. Never in his life had he given into another person so quickly. It was too new and too fragile to voice, but he hoped that Gil could brush the dirt off and uncover it, maybe even hold it in his hands like it was worthy of preservation.
It felt like hours had passed when Gil finally spoke. “Let me take your watch. Can’t promise anything until I get a better look at the inside, but I’ll try to get it working.”
“I don’t have anything to offer in return,” Marlon instinctively replied.
“I’ll survive,” Gil deadpanned.
Sensing that this would likely be the end of their night, Marlon moved slowly as he unbuckled the strap. He pulled the watch from his wrist and dropped it into Gil’s waiting hand. “Thank you.”
Gil only nodded as he tucked the watch into his pocket. “Goodnight,” he wasted no time saying.
“Goodnight.”
Marlon watched him as he left the campsite, continuing on the dirt path to his apartment. And that was when the disappointment rushed in: a frigid blast of wind against the backdrop of Gil walking away, with no guarantee that he could earn togetherness like that again.
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