4.30 An Inquisitive Mind

The goblins led them down the tunnel only a short distance before they reached another small intersection chamber. A warm, dry wind blew up out of the tunnel on their left, making a soft howling sound as it passed them by. The Karil’Dirin goblins looked down the tunnel uneasily, though their shaman seemed unconcerned, commenting something to Xul’evareg.

“He’s saying that it’s not as hot as yesterday,” Nirlig translated helpfully, “so the elemental is probably not close right now.”

Jesra stood near the back of the group, arguing about something in hushed tones as Xul’evareg waved for Bernt to join her.

“The spirit is down this tunnel,” she explained unnecessarily. “We will go down and speak to it.” 

Bernt swallowed and nodded. “What do I say? I mean… what do you say to spirits?” He’d met this elemental before, sure, but he wouldn’t turn down some helpful advice. Unfortunately, the goblin wasn’t especially forthcoming.

“Whatever you can get across,” she said with a shrug. “Communicating with spirits is hard, so keep it simple. You seem to have done fine the first time. See if you can convince it to leave. If it refuses, you should try to bargain with it. Spirits often like to trade.”

He grunted and stepped into the warm tunnel. The breeze intensified in the confined space, drying out his eyes and forcing him to squint and blink rapidly.

“Slow down!” Dalbrand’s voice came from behind him. “Let me go first.”

The archmage hurried past and began trudging down the gently sloping path, muttering to himself and repetitively twitching his fingers, preparing a spell. Elyn followed after with a spooked expression, her flute clutched in one hand.

“What is it?” Bernt asked, walking alongside her and letting Xul’evareg bring up the rear. The half-elf’s head snapped over to look at him as if she hadn’t even realized he was there.

“It’s… it’s nothing. I think.”

“You think?”

“There’s a dissonance here, almost like a rattling in my bones. It’s like they hate each other. The spirits, I mean.”

Bernt threw a glance back at Xul’evareg, who just shrugged.

“They do. Don’t your gods fight amongst themselves? Karil is the tribe’s guardian spirit. This one has threatened them. It would be a poor guardian who let such a thing stand.”

As the four of them made their way downward, the temperature in the tunnels rose, until finally, Bernt and archmage Dalbrand had to start blocking the searing breeze with alternating heat barriers to allow the group to progress further. 

“We should have approached from below,” Xul’evareg grumbled after a few minutes of this. “It takes longer, but it is much safer than this. Old Grannang is in too much of a hurry, sending us this way. We are like rats trying to climb down a chimney over a lit cookfire.”

“It’s perfectly safe,” Dalbrand commented, raising a hand and sketching out runes for another heat barrier. “These rats have magic, and we’re in a hurry. Besides, we’re here. No point in complaining about it now.”

Bernt peered over the man’s shoulder and saw that, sure enough, the next intersection up ahead was lit with an angry red glow that flickered ominously. They approached slowly, keeping their protections up. The chamber here had gone through some… renovations. The space was much larger than the previous intersections they’d passed through, and the entire thing had a molten look to it. By the looks of it, the elemental had cleared more space by melting the rock and allowing the resulting lava to flow down the adjoining tunnels. The two tunnels Bernt could see were partially clogged, and more might have been completely buried beneath the fresh basalt.

The creature, shaped like a pillar of fire with a vague sort of “head” and an odd number of armlike tendrils protruding from it, was at the opposite end of the chamber. The vitrified walls in front of it were covered in glowing runes and glyphs arranged into bits of spell diagrams – exactly the same sort that mages used.

“Now that’s godsdamned peculiar,” Dalbrand murmured. “What is it doing?”

“Research, I think.” Bernt had seen into the mind of this elemental. It had come here to learn, and the only context or grounding it had to understand this world was what Bernt had given it in their first interaction – that and whatever it had managed to observe since then. By the look of it, it had gotten a lot more from his mind than he had gotten from it.

The archmage gave him a strange look, but the tension that had been building in Bernt’s gut lessened slightly. He could guess what this was going to be about now. He cast a domed heat barrier that reached partway into the chamber, allowing them to move forward to get a better look. Meanwhile, the archmage rapidly shaped wards into the ground in front of them. He was nearly as fast as Kustov, despite being a pure geomancer.

“That’s… not a normal elemental,” Elyn whispered, leaning in toward him from behind so the others wouldn’t overhear. “You really summoned it?”

“It was kind of an accident…” Bernt admitted quietly. “I was trying to get something more conventional, but this was the one that came through. I’ll go talk to it. I don’t think it’s going to hurt me.” He’d told his friends about what had happened at the confluence in the Phoenix Reaches, but he hadn’t been as forthcoming with the Beseri government. Who knew how they would react? It was a question Bernt didn’t need to know the answer to.

He waited for Dalbrand to finish his line of wards and then made to step over them, but the archmage stopped him with a raised hand.

“Wait!” 

He raised a hand and cast a few spells in quick succession, creating a depression behind them and to the left that quickly extended down and curved away into the darkness. A moment later, they were looking down at a smooth, brand new tunnel. He could guess what it was for. Dalbrand wanted to provide them with a safe exit – one that, as Xul’evareg had pointed out – would allow them to get below the elemental, where its heat wouldn’t cook the others. When he was done, he turned back to Bernt.

“Walk up to it slowly, and don’t block our line of sight. I can protect you from almost anything, but it’s not going to work if I can’t see what I’m doing. And don’t get too close!”

A crackling sound drew their attention, and they looked to find the elemental had turned to look at them, its white-hot eyes glowing brightly within the tightly controlled flames that made up its body. Dalbrand and Elyn both took a small step back, but Xul’evareg just turned to face the elemental fully. She looked calm, though Bernt noticed that she’d drawn her stone knife. 

He had no idea what a shaman like her might be able to do here, but he wasn’t planning to find out. Now that he had the elemental in front of him, he found that he wasn’t afraid anymore. He wanted to talk to it. What was it trying to figure out, and why use spellforms to do it? Elementals couldn’t cast spells like mages – not as far as Bernt knew. He stepped over the wards, but then backed up again hurriedly, remembering something. He took off his bag and handed it to Elyn, followed by his new boots.

“What are you doing?” the half-elf asked, staring at him as though he were crazy.

“I’m not losing another pair of boots to this thing!” Bernt hissed, stepping out past the heat barrier. He would have taken his robe off, too, if he thought he had the time. That, and he wasn’t sure what was about to happen to his underclothes. It was a risk, but he would take it.

Approaching slowly, he raised his hand in greeting. A moment later, the elemental raised one of its tendrils and waved back. Then, belatedly, it melted into itself, shrinking down and darkening slightly as it contained its own heat more, taking on a more humanoid appearance. By the time Bernt got close enough, it looked just like it had when he’d last seen it – a human made of fire and wearing his own face. He could feel the heat radiating off of it now, though it wasn’t painful. Its eyes were fixed down on his stomach, not his face, and it made an exaggerated nodding motion when he got close enough to talk.

“We meet once more,” it said in its inhuman, fluttering voice.

“Yes. The goblins said that you asked for me.” Bernt said. “But they also said you didn’t talk...”

“They speak strangely,” it said, “not like you. The other one speaks well,” it pointed toward Xul’evareg, “but I do not need words. I need… understanding. They do not communicate deeply.” It drifted closer and extended a hand toward Bernt. A sheet of stone shot up out of the ground in front of Bernt’s nose, causing him to stumble back in surprise. Another thin stone barrier formed immediately behind it, even as the first one cracked from the heat. Runes began to form in a spiral pattern that grew outward from the center.

“Get back!” came Dalbrand’s voice. Bernt looked back at him in surprise. It was a temperature ward – one normally used on structures. It was exactly the sort of thing he’d just told Estrid that mages didn’t do. Janus, the archmage adventurer who Bernt had seen fighting Conperion, was faster, but Dalbrand wasn’t any kind of abjurer – at least not according to the stripes on his uniform. He was just that good at stoneshaping.

“Wait, stop!” It took Bernt a second to shake off his surprise, and he feared they were going to antagonize the elemental. Raising his left hand, he cast a stoneshaping cantrip and tried to make a hole to reassure the elemental that everything was fine, but it didn’t work. The mana of his spell was dispersed by even more of Dalbrand’s wards. He turned and waved urgently at the archmage.

“Stop it! I wasn’t in any danger. Take the wall down, or it might decide that we’re hostile.”

The archmage stopped casting, but he didn’t bring the wall back down. Instead, he just stared at Bernt as if trying to decide whether he was lying.

“It’s trying to communicate with me,” Bernt explained, keeping his voice calm and even. “I need to get into direct contact with its mana network. It can’t burn me. I’ve… met an elemental like this before.”

Dalbrand looked at Xul’evareg, but the goblin only shrugged at him. He clenched his jaw, sighed, and finally raised a hand. Turning back, Bernt found himself face to face with the elemental once more. The stone barriers had disappeared faster than he could even turn around. One of its hands was raised, and it was tracing a rune in the air as if trying to memorize it– probably one of those in Dalbrand’s wards.

This time, Bernt was the first to extend his hand. Fortunately, the elemental didn’t appear to feel threatened by the archmage’s display of magic. It approached immediately, placing its own hand over Bernt’s so that his substance vanished within the roiling flames of the elemental’s “flesh”.

Even though Bernt had been prepared, the flood of memories, impressions and ideas nearly left him too disoriented to think.

He stood in front of a cinder tree and placed a burning hand on it, sensing the sleepy pulse of life within. A spark. He reached out to fan it to life. His fire poured from the tree’s leaves, but for a second, nothing else happened. Then, the entire tree disintegrated in a torrent of flames, leaving only energy, power, and a sleepy, weak sort of presence. He nurtured it with his own energies, showed it how to seize and shape itself. Where the tree had stood before, a small elemental now flickered, hovering in mid-air.

Then he stood before a stone. It was small but it, too, contained a spark of life, even though it wasn’t alive. Why? The living things of this world were made of dead things as well. Though there was still fire. Transformation. Energy. The dead matter moved and changed inside. Tiny bits of warmth in a frozen world. Heat and motion. He watched the stone melt into a puddle as he held it cupped in his fiery tendrils. They were sleepy things, dead, but also not dead. The other had been easy to awaken, but this one was not. Was it not enough energy, or was it somehow… deader?

Then he was looking at a hare nestled in a patch of coal grass, staring at him in terror. It squirmed as flames slid over and off of its fur, pushed away as if in a strong wind. A moment later, the fire was through. The spark of life was gone before he could seize it, snuffed out in an instant. The entire creature was gone, leaving nothing but cracked bones behind. Where was its life? It’s potential? Where had it gone?

The scene changed one more time, and Bernt found himself crouching in a tunnel in front of a red dragon and several small gray-skinned creatures squatting behind it. It spat fire at him, and he accepted the gift with gratitude as much as confusion. Its spirit was full of life, but its body was cold and inert. If it could produce such a vibrant flame, why did it restrict itself so?

Helpfully, he poured his own energy into the dragon, which recoiled and hissed. Unlike everything else, though, it held its shape, swiping a claw at him that passed harmlessly through. Still, it was unhurt.

Bernt gasped as he pulled his mind free from the visions, sorting through the elemental’s thoughts. It wasn’t asking about a dragon’s psychology – it didn’t even appear to understand what a dragon was. It was trying to understand stuff, and through it, life on the material plane. Why did some things melt while others caught fire and still others seemed totally inert – dead, to the elemental’s thinking. Why could some things be turned into the sort of life it knew, while others resisted or simply died? It thought that fire or heat, physical matter and maybe even mana and spirits were all related, or maybe even the same thing somehow, or that one could be made into the other. 

The line of inquiry seemed nonsensical to Bernt. The way it saw normal material creatures was weird, and despite literally seeing the issue from the elemental’s own perspective, he couldn’t hope to understand what it meant to do with this information.

The elemental returned a sense of mild frustration and pulled its hand back. It turned back toward the far wall – the one covered with runes and glyphs – and pointed at a glyph surrounded by an intricate mass of runes. The configuration looked vaguely familiar.

Bernt approached the spellform, peering at it more closely. The central glyph, ignition, wasn’t surprising for a fire elemental – it was the rest of the spellform that stopped him in his tracks. He’d spent weeks studying this design back in Halfbridge, and he could recognize it anywhere, even if it was incomplete. 

The elemental was trying to reconstruct part of a spell from a journal Bernt had found in a dragon’s lair the previous summer, using only the memories it had managed to extract from him during their last meeting. It was incomplete, but the level of detail was still stunning.

“What are you…?”

“Not destruction-burning,” the fluttering voice came again as the elemental joined him in front of the drawings. “Transformation. Equilibrium. Energy. Life.”