Some time later, after making sure that behemoth wasn’t following me, I landed atop the snowy summit of the next-nearest mountain, the place where I’d fought the second ice-throwing lizard. It was as high as I would be able to manage for now—I couldn’t risk the behemoth interrupting me if I played my pipes on its slopes.

Hoping that this would be high enough, I sat and began to play the same sort of music I had earlier: a mercurial, distracted rhythm that moved quickly from theme to theme. Very soon I had drawn an air elemental to myself, and much like yesterday I had to teach it not to push me lest it lose the music that had drawn it in the first place. More joined it as the minutes passed, until once again I was at the center of many elementals playing with patterns and streamers of air.

I played for perhaps twenty minutes, until I noticed one of the mana-forms that began acting differently from the others. It circled me many times, swooped through the manipulated currents of air around me, then alighted on the icy shelf behind me and began to gather snow.

It became a small flurry of wind-captured snowflakes, then slowly began to take shape, becoming an imperfect, blurred imitation of me. As I watched, the form became more refined, until I was looking at an elf-shaped snowstorm.

Slowly, I raised the hand not holding my pipes. The air elemental raised its hand in turn, mirroring me.

I stepped forward, crossing half the distance between us and reaching out to it. Again it mirrored me, moving its snow-filled body forward and reaching out to touch my hand, tickling me with a light puff of cool air.

I relinquished my claim on the air around me, letting go of the envelope that protected me. In a moment, the air elemental had enveloped me, tousling my hair and blanketing my skin, then whistling through the pipes I was holding to create an erratic series of notes. It filled my tortoiseshell sail, pulling it out from my back, then relaxing its hold when it became clear it was going to topple me over.

It returned to its earlier position once its inspection was done, gathering more snow to make another imitation of an elf.

I would have needed [Elemental Telepathy] to communicate with it more directly, like I had with Palefang. But even without it I had more than mere music and gestures—I had the Verse. Even if two creatures don’t share a language, they could reference classes and aspects to share them with one another. It wasn’t a perfect form of communication: even creatures who do share languages can’t agree on whether [Weave] should be called [Order] and [Fray] [Chaos], or whether a [Firedancer] is a [Pyromancer] and the [Fire Magick] skill is really [Pure Fire]. The exact phrasing used in Verse-words wasn’t communicated, only their concepts.

The air elemental dispersed their elven form, then moved back nearly twenty feet, reforming. I followed them, still playing my pipes as other, unintelligent elementals danced around me.

The elemental dispersed again, reforming nearby yet again. Again, I followed them, and we repeated this process several times until they had led me down to the edge of a small, frozen pool that had gathered in a crevice on the mountain’s surface. Once there, they became a gust that brushed away the layer of fine snow that rested atop the icy surface.

Then they began to draw.

Their control of air was so fine that it was seemingly easy for them to pick up huge bunches of snow and pack it into thin lines on the ice. They drew a simplistic triangle first, followed by several more, larger triangles in a line, and I realized that they were drawing mountains.

Then they drew the mists, layers that grew thicker and further apart as they rose, as lines of scattered snow, the last of which was high above any of the mountaintops.

They paused for a moment as if to examine their handicraft, then carefully drew me as an abstract set of lines, one arm raised in greeting, atop one of the peaks. I peered at this diagram. What were they trying to tell me, show me?

“That’s me,” I said, pointing to the strange figure and then pointing to myself.

The air elemental gave a whistle, increasing in pitch. Then they kept drawing—putting another figure like me beneath the lowest lair of mist. They made the same whistle, which I took to be an affirmative.

Were they saying they knew that I’d brought other elves? Or that I belonged in the lowest lair, on the ground?

But they kept drawing, putting another little figure in the layer above it and whistling another affirmative. They did the same for the third space beneath the mists, the one below the one we now stood in, below the mists that shrouded the peaks.

Then they paused. Finally they drew me midair in the fourth layer—the one we now occupied. Except the whistle they made was different now, descending in pitch. They whistled, then scattered the snow they’d used to make the little figure.

“Ah,” I said, realizing what they were trying to communicate. I drew my knife, then stepped into their diagram, moving slowly so as not to disturb the snow they’d already placed. I drew the same small figure they had used to represent me, scratching it into the ice—then I drew a jagged line leading away from it. “[Lightning],” I said.

The elemental whistled in the affirmative—only this time, in their whistle the Verse conveyed meaning. [Lightning].

I drew the same figure in the higher layer, and the same jagged line. Again, the elemental gave me the affirmative. There was only one thing that it could mean.

The skies here were ruled by a storm lord.

Stolen story; please report.

My heart sank. It wasn’t good news. My new friend had likely discerned the purpose of my tortoiseshell sail when they had almost tugged me over, then realized that they needed to warn me against flying too high.

I couldn’t ask them to return with me. Even the slightest chance that they might return to the storm lord with knowledge of our colony was too great a risk. But there were many other things it might tell me, and many things that I could tell it.

I moved across the diagram until I stood above the highest layer of mist that they had drawn. There, I drew a circle before casting a spell to fill it with a soft orb of light. “[Behemoth] [Light],” I said, looking down at the sphere, then up into the sky, trying to make it a question.

The elemental whistled in the affirmative, then reached a snow-filled finger of air down to my light, touched it, and moved the finger above the highest mist-layer in a gentle arc.

“[Behemoth] [Light] [Weave] [Time],” I said, drawing the same arc. When the path of my hand reached the upper mist layer, bringing the arc of their sun to its conclusion at the horizon, I said: “[Dark] [Time].”

The elemental paused, seeming to consider this. It was likely trying to interpret what I’d said: [Dark] could mean both the absence of light as well as anything that was hidden. But some aspects, like [Melee], didn’t find easy homes in language: [Melee] meant both a close-quarters attack and the weapons that were used for that purpose.

Combined with the fact that I had likely used the names of aspects that this elemental had never encountered, it was probably taking some time just to figure out what I’d said.

Slowly, it indicated the snow-drawn sun. [Behemoth] [Light] [Weave] [Time], it said, whistling the affirmative. Then it gestured to the layers of mist in sequence, starting from the uppermost to the bottom. [Air] [Water] [Mana] [Weave] [Time].

I blinked. The mists were changing with the course of the sun, something we’d more or less put together already. I pointed to the layer of mist that was on level with the colony’s cave. “[Change],” I said.

The elemental whistled the affirmative.

I frowned. How to get it to understand that I was asking it questions when it had no reason to understand the tone of my voice?

I moved off the diagram, then moved far away from it—almost twenty five meters to the other end of the pool. Then I cleared the snow from the ice and drew another set of different mountains, and another sun which I lit with a magically conjured orb of light.

I didn’t want to tell it the [World] aspect. It might report everything it saw of me to our local storm lord. Whether a storm lord would know of the [World] aspect or not, I couldn’t say, but knowledge of the [World] aspect was not something I wanted to share with an unknown entity, given that it was probably the most powerful aspect I’d ever seen. Sharing knowledge of it was like sharing knowledge of the [Primeval Champion] class.

But [Plural] would likely suffice to convey my meaning. “[Plural] [Behemoth] [Light],” I said, indicating my second sun. I drew another little figure representing myself, then pointed to it, then my chest. “[Warp],” I said. “[Change] [Earth], [Change] [Air], [Change] [Behemoth] [Light]—[Warp]....” And I ran over to the first diagram, pointing to the figure that represented me on the mountaintop. “[Warp],” I repeated.

Then, hoping that an air elemental would understand now that I’d come from another world, I gestured to myself and said: “[Dark] [Mind]. [Change] [Mind] [Light].”

The elemental was quiet for a time. Finally the wind around me whistled. The snow-filled air spiralled around the orb of light that I’d used to denote our old sun. [Plural] [Behemoth] [Light].

I took it for a question, and played the affirmative on my pipes, a set of notes rising in pitch.

After that, using reference to the aspects we’d already established, gestures, and more diagrams, the elemental communicated quite clearly with me. The mists—[Air] [Water] [Mana], as it were, kept regular time. When the sun was in the sky, the uppermost layer turned white. When night came, the uppermost layer turned red. The layers below all changed a set time after the layer above them, an interval which went down as one descended through the layers and the distance between them decreased.

Despite the fact that I’d seen a deeper, sixth layer earlier that day, the air elemental knew nothing of it—which made sense, I supposed. They were not often found in the deepest of ravines, air elementals.

The mist layers never dispersed, and they stretched very, very far—possibly the whole of the world. It seemed unbelievable to me. I didn’t even know what sort of implications this would have, but I was fairly sure it should have drastically affected the world’s overall temperature. I knew that most worlds accessed through the River of Realms just so happened to feature climates that were precisely balanced to favor life, a fact which led to all sorts of theories about the River itself… but I’d never heard of a world like this one, before.

Storm lords were everywhere, each managing their own territories, often coming into clashes with one another but almost never fighting to the death. Intelligent elementals were not their subjects, but could be called upon to pay a toll of keys if they were found passing through their aerial territory.

The elemental knew of other intelligent life: other air elementals, the storm lords and their emissaries, and bird that it drew for me, a creature they had met many, many thousands of days ago that had used [Elemental Telepathy] to communicate with them. It drew other creatures that it had heard of, but not met—a tortoise, a serpent, and a strange bundle of tendrils whose form I didn’t recognize.

They knew that the mountain peaks that stretched out around us grew taller in one direction and shorter in the other, and that the nearby mist-piercing tusk was the tallest of them. They also knew that massive ravines, such as the one that led to the swamp, were ubiquitous among these mountains. They had seen a sea before, water stretching as far as sight allowed, and they had seen a volcano before, a mountain spewing a plume of smoke as high as the sky, a force that had killed many air elementals—but that was far from here, not these mountains.

They were firm in making it clear that siphoning [Air] aspects was, in a sense, illegal: the storm lord would not be pleased if he learned of this, and my [Air] aspects, they indicated, had come from the death of other beings, which was permissible. Whether they believed this, or were simply indicating what my story should be now that I knew the law, I couldn’t say. But they were clear in indicating that they wanted me to retain my [Life]—and so my air aspects had not been siphoned, but hunted for.

Eventually I indicated that I needed to leave. I told them that I would return in a day’s time, at the current hour, and play them more music but also bring [Elemental Telepathy]. They indicated that they would go and tell other intelligent elementals they had met me: that many would like to hear the music. I gave no objection to this.

As I left, they didn’t follow me. I had a feeling they knew why I didn’t want them to: they hadn’t asked me if there were more of me, or where I lived. They understood, I think, that I had heeded their very first warning.

And I had. I was a master of lighting, after all—I knew to be afraid of a storm lord.