“I don’t think he’s entirely human,” Danae thought, “at least not how I usually think of the word.” Her husband was doing a worryingly detailed resharpening of her plough. She watched him carefully measure the angles of the blade and a dozen other things with a little bit of string, then set to carefully re-profiling it with a file. Did her plough need to be sharp? Probably not. But she mentioned that it sometimes struggled to cut through the earth so… here they were.

There were other things too, of course. The way he would stare into shadows and watch the dust dance in a sunbeam. The way he would greet some trees with a formal bow, or hide little offerings around them when he thought she wasn’t watching. He was a devoted Dusty, she could see that. He really worked to understand the teachings, and he would ask her all the time if he was doing things right. Mostly he was. But then he would look over at something only he could see, there would be a strange hissing noise coming out of nowhere, then he would smile and move on like nothing happened.

And as far as she could tell, nothing had happened. But something obviously had. She didn’t feel comfortable asking. Not because he wouldn’t tell her, but because it looked like such a struggle for him to explain. Like the bed situation.

Her new beau liked to perform his marital duties, that was certain. With a worrying degree of enthusiasm and attentiveness. She had worried that he wasn’t enjoying himself, and that she clearly wasn’t good at sex. He laughed himself near sick and spent the rest of the week reassuring her that nothing could be further from the truth.

So it was a little hurtful and confusing that she would sometimes find him curled under a blanket in the rafters or by the fire. One time she found him frenziedly digging a pit in the frozen ground, swearing that he would just come out when it was all safe and nothing hurt. She had to hang on to him then, through the shakes and the sobs.

He didn’t like to talk about what he saw, but she picked up pieces here and there. The tunnels. His family. The Stone God. Though she truly hoped he had just hallucinated that last one. She would have thought that he would be sort of clingy, after all that. And he was, a bit. It’s just that, some nights, he couldn’t stand to share a bed.

And then the next day he would slip off for a while and pick up some little cut that he would try and hide from her. He was honest enough to admit that he still worshiped his families’ protective spirits, but it didn’t sit right with her. Such beings had no place in the Great Dusty World, they were explicitly apart from it. He agreed with her completely, and he would try. He would really try, she could see that. But a few nights later he would be shaking and moaning that he was already dead, already dead, and he was sorry, sorry, sorry. And then there would be another little cut.

He struggled to explain it. That he had left it all behind, that he was the next step forward- they were the next step forward, but it was hard to shake off the ghosts of the past. His lips always quirked a bit when he mentioned ghosts. He said they existed, he just didn’t believe in them. Which was silly.

He sometimes said that he didn’t believe in Reflection Simmel, and he was their nearest neighbor. The poor sap had been tricked by her husband’s smiling face into being the courier between Hope and New Scandie. Which meant that he became the lightly paid errand boy for the best polisher for thousands of smoots around.

Her husband had told no lie when he wrote that he had his own trade. He hadn't shook the trail dust from his boots before his mail order business took off. He was shipping cores all over the New Territory, some as far as Cold Garden. He was making little picture books, books that made her cry, darn it! And sending them out too. He even sent a few “special” cores and designs for clothes out. That brought in a pretty pile of money!

Stolen story; please report.

Which was another thing he was weird about- money. Now, a good Dusty didn’t care too much about money, so long as the family and community prospered. But maybe he was a little… too good about it. He fought like a madman over his fees, arguing them down to a fraction of a centi-rad in one memorable case. Some clients would have their cores weighed and measured with a terrifying exactitude, and if the cores didn’t measure up, they could fuck off all the way to the North Pole.

Then he would toss all the rads in a jar over the hearth and ignore them. If she wanted to buy something, she could just help herself to the jar. Not enough money in the jar? Oh well. He could always earn more. Though there was almost always enough money in the jar. He worked fast.

Except when it was time to feed the chickens. For some reason, it was always a huge production. Like, he would bathe in the frigid water from the river before he would touch the grain. He flat out refused to eat eggs or chicken meat. He would leave the house if she did. He said, loudly, that he didn’t mind if she did it, and that there was nothing wrong with keeping a chicken shrine. Which was the damndest name for a chicken coop Danae had ever heard. But he wouldn’t kiss her on the mouth for at least a day after. It was going to be a problem on a few levels. Not least of which being keeping his scrawny hide alive through the winter. You needed eggs, and milk and meat. Beans and wheat alone couldn’t do it.

He was trying to make friends with their neighbors, which was good. He didn’t seem to understand them much, but he was really trying. He kept asking them about the waterfall, and they would say what about it, and he would point out that it was awful big, and they would think about it and allow how that was so, but it was awful quiet too so that was alright. And he would agree that it was awful quiet for something so big and did they know why that was? and they would just kind of stare at each other for a minute, then silently everyone agreed to get back to fixing the shingles on the roof.

He was trying hard to get along. To be more… human. And every now and then he would look at her like she was his whole world, like she was everything he ever wanted or needed. He would remind her, again and again and again, that she was loved. Danae believed him.

She thought she was falling in love too. With his strange stories, and odd vulnerability, and the way he spun magic from his fingertips. From his wild courage and steady willingness to work. To learn. To change.

His morbid jokes could go. Danae understood that things could be rough on the trail, but joking about making irritating neighbors just “disappear” wasn’t funny at all. Or melting people. People did not melt. If he had a problem with someone, he should talk it out. Sit down with a few people, see what the best way though the problem was. Almost nothing couldn’t be solved if people just spoke sensibly to each other.

Danae would tell him that, and he would give her the most heartbreakingly lost look, close his eyes, make his hands into some strange shape and say “Alright. Let’s do it your way.” Like there was some other way to do it, the silly man.

“Hey, Danae?” He looked up from the plough.

“Yes Mazelton?” She jokingly mirrored his serious tone.

“I’m glad I came here. I’m glad I met you. I’m glad we got married.”

Danae smiled at his serious face.

“Well I am pretty glad we did. I wasn’t so sure that a man with such prissy handwriting could make it on a farm.”

“Prissy?!” His eyes widened in outrage. “My handwriting is exquisite!”

“That’s what I said. Prissy.”

He looked away, grumbling under his breath. It sounded like…

“Did you just call me a weirdo?!”