Then he turned his attention back to the outside, to in front of him, and began the process to summon the Elemental. A chaotic jumble of flows of Air and Divine power, with token flows of the other seven Spheres to grant the weave the power of High Sorcery. Tarrin charged the weave with a tremendous amount of extra energy, for that would be the magical power the Elemental would use to perform its tasks once it arrived, and he wanted to make sure that it had everything it needed to do what it would need to do. He didn't want it disrupting on them while they were all high in the air. The weave snapped taut when Tarrin pulled at it, suddenly pulling it into its proper alignment, and then he released it to do its work.
This time, now that he had done it before, he could distinctly feel what it was doing. He felt a section of the weave penetrate into something, something beyond his description, and then it held open that breach between where he was and wherever the other side of the breach was. He sensed about that breach, feeling that whatever it was on the other side was decidedly alien, something beyond his world. He felt the weave shudder slightly, and he realized that the animating force that lived on the other side of that breach had been summoned forth. It flowed in from the otherworld and filled the shell of the weave he had constructed before him, an invisible mass of coherent air with defined limits but no set physical form. The weave suddenly shimmered, and then the control of it was pulled away from him as the animating force of the Elemental settled into the mortal form Tarrin had created for it with his Sorcery. He felt a tenuous link form between him and the Elemental, a mental connection that was just light enough to prevent the Cat from trying to reject it, for it was not an invasive form of communion, as Circling was. It was simply a sort of window open between them, a window that allowed it to hear certain thoughts that he wanted it to hear.
"Greetings," Tarrin called audibly. "My name is Tarrin. I'm sorry to draw you out like this, but we need your help. Would you be so kind as to manifest for the ones who can't see you?" he asked politely. He'd learned from the Fire Elemental that treating an Elemental with respect and consideration made it a much more pleasant travelling companion. They weren't very smart, but they were sentient creatures, and they had pride.
Thean and Kimmie gasped when an amorphous mass of what looked like misty vapor appeared in front of Tarrin and Jasana. It was massive, nearly forty spans across, but its boundaries shifted randomly like a cloud being pushed by a stiff wind. Tarrin looked at Jesmind, but her expression had turned decidedly stony.
"By the Mother's milk!" Thean exclaimed. "What is that, Tarrin?"
"This," he said, looking back at Thean, "is an Elemental. An Air Elemental, to be precise."
"It's… big," Kimmie said, looking at it nervously.
"It won't hurt you, Kimmie. The Elemental understands our need, and it's agreed to help us. It wouldn't be here if it wasn't here of its own will."
"Will? It's sentient?" Thean asked.
"Very," Tarrin replied. "What you see before you is a shell of magic that I created for it, so it could enter our world and animate the shell. The way it works is that the magic of the weave goes to where the Elementals live and more or less calls out, looking for an Elemental willing to serve. This one responded. And next time I summon an Air Elemental, it will be this Elemental. Once summoned, an Elemental will always respond to the same Sorcerer who first summoned it. So it behooves us to treat them properly," he smiled. "If I mistreat the Elemental, it's going to be rightly mad at me the next time I summon it to help me."
"Very wise," Thean chuckled. "What if it dies?"
"Nothing on Sennadar can hurt it, Thean," Tarrin said mildly. "The worst it can do is disrupt the magical matrix the Elemental animates. If the Elemental is attacked and destroyed, it only destroys the shell I've created. The animating force will go back to where it came from unharmed. That's why Sorcerers often summoned Elementals to fight for them back in the old days," he reasoned. "Elementals don't have any compunction about attacking at a Sorcerer's command, because they know that they can't really be hurt. If could really get hurt, I'd never ask it to do something like that."
The Elemental, which could understand everything they all said, seemed to warm considerably to Tarrin at that remark. It was their first meeting, after all, and the Elemental wanted to get a good sense of the Sorcerer it had opted to serve.
"Anyway, we're wasting time. The Elemental is going to carry us to Suld."
"How is it going to carry us?" Jesmind asked curiously, looking up at it.
"For it, it'll be easy," Tarrin told her. "It's going to carry us inside it. We'll simply float along as it flies to Suld."
"Won't we suffocate?" Kimmie asked.
"It's made of air, Kimmie," Tarrin chided her. "We won't suffocate."
"Oh. Alright then, Tarrin, what do we do?" Kimmie asked.
"All of you, come over here," Tarrin waved with a paw. He reached down and picked up Jasana, who was staring up at the Elemental with wonder in her eyes, and the others came up beside him, all three holding a pack. "Alright now, we're ready," he told the Elemental. "For all our sakes, please be gentle. None of us has done this before."
That seemed to amuse the Elemental, whom, he realized, had a capricious nature much like Sarraya.
Jesmind grabbed hold of his free paw, and he squeezed it reassuringly as the misty nature of the Elemental dissolved back into invisibility, and then Tarrin felt it move. The air suddenly swirled around them, like wind, and then it simply pulled at them. It was a gentle force, delicate and almost tickling, but Tarrin felt the Elemental envelop the five of them and lift them off the ground. He could still feel gravity pulling at him from below, but it was as if the air itself supported him in a gentle, comforting, almost feathery embrace. Kimmie gasped as Tarrin laughed, and the grip on his paw from his mate suddenly became crushing as the ground suddenly whisked away from them with such speed that it made Tarrin flinch.
"Ohhhhhhhh, MYYYYY GOOOOOOODS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Jesmind screamed as the Elemental whisked them high into the sky in a matter of a heartbeat, then turned and flew towards Suld, just south of west, at a speed that almost seemed to be impossible. The ground literally blurred beneath them as the Elemental accelerated to a speed that the Fire Elemental could never hope to achieve even as it continued to ascend, the speed of the winds at the center of a hurricane or tornado, speed that seemed almost unreal. But the air did not move, and they all floated within the center of the Elemental as if they were standing in a meadow on a warm, sunny spring morning, giving it a surreal quality. As fast as they were obviously going, there should have been wind whipping at them, but there was not, because they were carried safely within the form of the Elemental. The dark clouds got closer and closer to them, and even Tarrin flinched as the Elemental barrelled right into them. None of them had ever been so close to the clouds before, and though they all knew that clouds were just fog high in the sky, it still gave all of them a moment of anxiety. After all, they didn't absolutely know if clouds were solid or not. They became surrounded by dark, murky gray mists, like the thickest fog, a murky gray that became progressively lighter and lighter as the moments passsed. And then they burst out from the cloud into a clear sky, a sky stained with the rosy hues of sunrise, and the clouds to the east were a similar pink as the sun climbed over them. The visage below was one of wispy gray continuity, the tops of the heavy clouds climbing out from the mass in little knobs and protrusions and waves. The tops of the clouds were nowhere near as flat and featureless as the bottoms of them.