Elemental

A Tale of Metamorphosis

Once upon a time, a boulder stood blocking the entrance to a cave in which there lived a sad young man. Day after day, the boulder watched the young man pace and sigh, heard him sing a mournful tune and speak in his sleep about places far away. The boulder came to love him. Worse, it understood how it caused his sorrow by keeping him prisoner, but it could only move aside at the command of the Faerie who visited to bring food. The man grew paler and weaker, and ever lonelier. The boulder’s heart was moved. Despairing, it tried to beg the Faerie to set him free, but all it could do was rumble the earth. One day, the Faerie struck the man, blaming him for the earthquakes. The boulder could abide it no longer. In its rage, it shook the cave, burying man and Faerie under a ton of rubble. Grieving and without purpose, it remembered the man’s dreams of faraway lands and vowed to return his body there. Its heart transformed fully from stone to flesh. With that, the man who was a boulder carried his lost love back through the Hedge to stand sentinel for the courts of the Lost.

The Elemental is a force of nature, but more than that, he commands nature. Fire has no volition of its own; it burns indiscriminately, devouring fuel because it has no other purpose. With the indomitable will of a changeling to guide it, it becomes something greater. He is vaster in spirit than mere humans could ever understand. Nothing can contain him or deter him from his course. If no place exists for him, he carves one out. If he overwhelms, it’s only because he can’t remember how to tone it down. And if he’s self-aggrandizing, it’s only because he sees himself reflected in all the world’s most magnificent miracles.

Other changelings point the Elementals in a direction and watch the fireworks. The results may be unpredictable, but something will definitely happen. Even the gentler Sprites display the seeming’s characteristic relentlessness, though they may wear down obstacles little by little rather than tearing them apart all at once. They do more than they think, and shun being anything but themselves. Elementals identify with their specific natures more than most, and even two with the same elemental association can differ wildly in approach and temperament. They have a strange relationship with change — some find their moods swinging with the weather or the moon’s phase, fluid like water or mercurial like flame; some have trouble quitting habits and detest uncertainty, immovable like stone or unbending like steel. Other Lost may call them incorrigible, but the Torrents listen to their gut intuition because to do otherwise is to deny who they are.

The Gentry transformed an Elemental into something completely alien. Often it was some manifestation of the classical elements, like a bonfire or a storm, but it also could have been an inanimate object, a living plant, or a clockwork automaton. It warped the way he thought and perceived, and now that he’s returned, it’s hard to bend his mind back into its former shape. He’s transcendent and yet more single-minded. He understands function better than form, and purpose better than reason. It’s difficult to consider the consequences of his actions beyond the immediate, and he doesn’t care to. He lives moment to moment, trying to recapture the heady purity of what he was in Arcadia without the shackles. All this makes him the odd man out. He may dearly wish to tune in to his motley’s wavelength, but the wind’s howling speaks his language more clearly, and he fears — yet secretly hopes — that one day he’ll forget how to speak anything else.

Once

You were a mighty phenomenon or a work of art chained to the will of your Keeper, possessed of wondrous new senses and sensations but bound to perform your duty. As fire, you longed to burn bright and hot, consuming all and reaching up to the heavens, but you could not escape the confines of your lantern, nor keep from guttering when the oil ran out. As a marble sculpture, you were unbreakable and alluring but immobile and exposed, put on display for gawking fae creatures with no respite for privacy. As a stiff breeze, you soared above the earth and touched everything with unseen fingers, but your Keeper breathed you in and kept you locked away inside her until she needed you to fill the sails of her ship. You could be what you were only how and when the Gentry allowed it.

When your desperation reached its peak, you remembered a time before your servitude, when the force of your own will meant something. You erupted from your glass cage and reveled in your fearless conflagration, blazing a trail back through the Hedge. You tore yourself free from your pedestal and fled, untouched by thorns sharp enough to rend flesh. You gusted forth until you capsized the boat and formed a great tornado to tear all the barriers between you and home to pieces.

Now

The only purpose that matters is the one you give yourself, and the only limitations you tolerate are those you decide are worth accepting. Everywhere you go, mindless fragments of your gestalt await your bidding, and you are only too glad to oblige. You take every opportunity to unleash everything you have, because that’s when you feel the most like you. And the world is filled with you — the wide, wild ocean and the rivers that sustain life itself, or the endless sands that fill the deserts and the sunny beaches humanity adores, are under your power. You wield them as your heart demands, because planning just gets in the way, and nature acts as it will. Your friends know that when danger calls for unrelenting persistence and maybe a lightning strike that shorts out a city block, you’re the one to call.

Tales

His flower shop is the neighborhood’s pride and joy, and his garden grows fresher produce than any farmer’s market. Kids dare each other to sneak into his private greenhouse at night, but none has ever successfully stolen a glance at his secret crop. Every October, he takes a long trip to meet with unknown associates, and tells no one where he goes. But the kids say that right before he leaves, they can swear they hear tiny voices in the greenhouse pleading for help. They don’t sound human.

She’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but she used to be. She remembers a time when everyone would come to her for advice. Now she’s constantly distracted by the whispering of the grass and the call of the fields, and she hates birds. The smallest threat to her friends or her home swiftly learns the meaning of true terror. She insists on returning to the Hedge to find her lost Icon, and nothing her motley says can convince her to stay away. She’s certain that if she can get it back, she’ll be able to think straight again. Then maybe she can help her fellow Lost reclaim the bits they’re missing, too.

He drives a white Cadillac and keeps people at arm’s length. He seeks out the deluded, the deceived, and the gullible to expose the harsh truth to them in no uncertain terms. He opens their eyes to the cruelty of those who fooled them and gives them what they need to reinvent their lives as they see fit. He takes none into his confidence unless they first melt his frozen heart with acts of true kindness or friendship. To his enemies he is the winter wind, cutting them down with honesty as sharp as icicles, but his allies see the side of him that walks gently enough to leave no footprints in the radiant snow.

You mean to turn the kid away, just as you’ve done every other day, but today you open the door instead. In his simple smile and dismissive glance you see that he knew you would, all along. He breezes past you. He said you couldn’t hold out forever, and he was right.

Nicknames: Sprites, Torrents, the Unbound

Blessing: Gain an additional dot of one Resistance Attribute at character creation. As long as your character touches or is surrounded by his element, he may use it to take mundane actions at a distance of up to three yards (meters) away; these actions use his usual traits. This includes unarmed attacks, but not attacks with weapons. This ability costs a point of Glamour per action if he has fewer than half his maximum Willpower points remaining.

Curse: In addition to your character’s other breaking points, he risks Clarity damage with a dice pool equal to half his Wyrd (rounded up) whenever someone browbeats, coerces, or forces him to act against his will.

Regalia: Sword

Would you ask the rain to apologize for wetting you while it slakes your thirst?