The Woman of the Wind

This was originally created for The Elementalist Contest, the prompt being air, but other ratings/reviews would be greatly appreciated!

** Rating is for mild language **

Hi there.  My name’s Zac.  Zac Michaels, actually.

Sorry, I guess I’m not too great at introductions.  I don’t usually have to do them for myself.  I don’t mean to sound cocky or anything, but my name usually goes before me.  If it doesn’t, then it’s usually someone else who’s saying it, not me.  It kinda makes me feel like I’m one of their school projects or something, and they want to show me off to all their friends.  It usually goes something like: “Hey, guys, I want you to meet my pal, Zac,”                    “You mean Zac Michaels? That kid who can mess with air?!”                    “Yep, that’s the one,”          and then I have to do some stupid little thing like move a pile of leaves with a breeze or something.  It’s actually pretty annoying, but I’m getting off topic here – sorry, that kind of happens a lot.

Anyway, I used to think of myself as what most people call an “Elementalist” or “Element Bender” – heck, you probably would too, if you were going to a specialized school for kids with crazy powers like mine (The School for the Development of Unique Skills and Interesting Minds, actually.  Better known as THE School) – but that was all before this story that I’m about to tell you.  So now that you’ve got that background information, enough about me.  The story that I want to tell you is mostly about… well… this girl that I met one day…

So I was outside on one of the practice fields behind my dorm building, and it was getting pretty late, but I couldn’t go back in yet because I was practicing for my practical exam the next morning – something I should have been doing for the last week.  Ummm… Well... Frankly, I was freaking out.  That was since, well, frankly, I was probably going to fail.  Not necessarily because I couldn’t do all the stuff that I needed to be able to do – okay, maybe I couldn’t do all the stuff, but have you ever wondered how difficult it is to lift an entire school bus with nothing but a little gust of wind to help you out?!  Anyway, the point is, the air really hadn’t been working for me lately – especially that night – and I was freaking out because the instructor who would be evaluating this particular exam was probably the nastiest instructor that they could have given me to.  He would likely fail me just for being me and having more natural ability than him, however under-developed it was.

So there I was, freaking out and throwing rocks and tipping benches – all without the use of the air, since it wasn’t cooperating.  I guess I must have looked like a spoiled brat having my little temper tantrum.  I was so busy stomping my feet and yelling that I didn’t even notice her until I turned to throw a rock in the general direction of the dorm building.  When I saw her, I stopped, of course.  She kinda surprised me.  Heck, I was all alone, almost in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden, she was just… there.  I mean, like, right there.  And she was laughing at me, so that did nothing for my temper, and I was about to yell at her to just get lost and find somebody else to laugh at, but I just… couldn’t.  It almost felt like somebody had sucked all of the air out of my lungs, and left me incapable of speech.  The sensation was so strong that I only had time to feel my knees give out before I lost consciousness and hit the ground.

It was only a couple seconds later, I guess, when I was breathing properly again, and she was kneeling beside me with a strangely apologetic smile on her face.  Needless to say, I was properly weirded-out by now, and I didn’t really bother trying to yell at her, or scare her away again.  All I could do was sit there staring at her like an idiot.  Eventually, I managed to ask her who she was.  What she said to that almost made me pass out all over again.

“The question is not who, young Zacary, but what.”  Yeah!  She called me Zacary!  I hate when people call me that!  My Mom’s the only one who can get away with it.  But at the time, that didn’t bother me too much.  I was more than a little rattled when I heard her voice.  It wasn’t so much a voice as it was just kind of a… whisper of the wind, you know?  Yeah, actually, that was exactly it!  It reminded me of what I heard when I was playing with the air.  I mean, when the air cooperates with me, I hear this sort of whispering sound in my ear.  Or, I guess, more of a roaring sound if I’m getting it to do something especially difficult (like trying to lift that damned school bus!)  But this was the first time I’d ever heard real, English words in that voice.  I guess in hindsight, it really made sense that she spoke like that, but like I said, I was kinda freaking out…

“What do you mean?! What are you then?!”  That’s what I said back to her.  Jeez, I bet I sounded like some puberty-stricken eighth-grader.  I turned seventeen this summer, for crying out loud!  You’ve gotta give me a little credit though, she did seem a little bit unnatural.  Or maybe a little bit too natural, like, not human, sorta, you know what I mean?

Anyway, so I’m sitting there on the ground freaking out, and all she does is laugh.  Yeah, just one of those tinkling little laughs.  Trust me, I always used to read about a “tinkling little laugh” and never thought that they actually existed until I heard hers.  "Do not worry, Zacary.  I am your friend.  I played with you when you were young and small, and now I watch over you and help you with your schooling.  I will not harm you, quite the contrary, actually.  You are one of the only humans who can really, truly speak to me, Zacary.”  At this point, I believe I continued to stare at her like an idiot, and she gave one of those tinkling little laughs again, “Those who know me tend to call me the Woman of the Wind.  Those who do not, simply call me “Air”.  I prefer, however, to be called Era, for that is how my sisters know me.”

I guess that since the initial shock had started to wear off, I was able to function again, and I started actually seeing her face.  No!  It's not like I was checking her out, or anything!  It was weird, but she kind of felt like a sister to me… I know that’s probably not a good feeling to have towards complete strangers, but I guess I thought it was okay since she didn’t seem like a stranger.  What I’m getting at, though, was that after I actually took the time to see her properly, I kind of started believing that I wasn’t dreaming (besides, that would have been a damn long dream, seeing as I’d been stressing about that exam for a whole week).

She was definitely one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen in my life - I still think so.  She had the longest, palest blonde hair, and was wearing this real simple, long, white robe-kind-of-thing.  Her edges almost seemed to… I dunno… shimmer, I guess.  It kind of gave me the feeling that she just sort of faded into the rest of the air around her, instead of being totally separate from it.

Her eyes… they were this really clear, blue colour – like the sky, which I thought was pretty suitable, considering the sky is kind of what she is.  Those eyes held my interest most out of all the unusual things about her.  She looked not too much older than me, but looking into those ancient pools of knowledge, it was easy to tell that she was older than the world itself, as stupid as that may sound.  It’s really tough to explain, and you’ll never know exactly what I mean unless you see her for yourself, but she was young and infinitely old at the same time… Now that I’m thinking of it, if you do ever see her, don’t tell her I said that, okay?

And so I sat there in that field with my closest friend – one that I’d known all my life, but never actually met face to face – and we talked about… well, just stuff, really.  She told me about how things used to work in the world, and how eventually some people learned how to talk to her and her elemental sisters.  She told me that it was really nice at first, but that those people acted like people normally do and got all conceited.  They thought that it was them making all sorts of cool and powerful things happen in the world around them when really, it was their friends – the elements themselves – who were doing all that stuff.

I apologized for all the horrible things I’d used her for in the past – it sounds really corny now, but it seemed like the right thing to do, and I definitely don’t regret it.  I apologized for things like when I was ten, and I got really mad at my cousin who came to visit.  I knew he was afraid of heights, so I got Air to lift him up into a tree… I feel bad about it now, and I’m glad I got the chance to at least apologize to Era.

Oh, another thing I learned that the reason she hadn’t been cooperating with me lately was because she didn’t understand why I had been trying to get her to do so many crazy things (like lifting up whole damn school buses).  Once she knew that there actually was a reason – namely, me trying to pass my exam – she promised to help me out, and made me promise to not become evil and all that sort of stuff (she really can be old-fashioned sometimes).

And so it was that the next morning I totally aced my exam – even that nasty instructor couldn’t find an excuse to fail me.  It went perfectly, but only because I had Era there with me, helping me, the whole time, but not in her human form, of course.  In my happiness I even told my jerk of an instructor what I knew about Air.  I thought that maybe if he could talk with Era himself, he might find it easier to get her to help him.  Being the idiot that he is, though, he just laughed in my face.

I guess even in this super-developed world, there are still some people who can’t handle the truth.  Era told me that it was okay, though, if most people just went on believing that she was always invisible, and never saw her visible form, the way I got to.  She said that some people don’t deserve the skills and powers that Fate gives them, and that it’s just easier for her and her sisters to ignore them, than for us “good” people to waste our time trying to change them.  Yep, she called me “good” – now that made me feel pretty special!

So now, I’m just focusing on making it through the rest of my training.  I’ll keep pretending that I don’t know anything about Era.  I’ll keep referring to Air as a thing rather than an actual being for the sanity of my instructors (the ones who aren’t jerks).

And then, I’ll try to use my gift of communication with Air to help the world.  Together, we could blow rain clouds to areas suffering from drought, or suffocate house fires, or breathe life back into people who get killed in car accidents… I dunno, those are just some ideas, but they sound worthwhile to me.

And having my best friend with me, I don’t only think it’s possible, I know it’s possible.