A river spirit might play in the waters and eject pollution and trash to the banks if there is any, but a very old and powerful river spirit could cause flooding. A wind spirit would spread leaves and seeds everywhere. A tree spirit would make trees grow faster and be healthier. A fire or warmth spirit... Could be trouble.

"Flooding would be trouble too."

Tail-shrug. You don't have to be a Draak to kill a spirit. Attacking whatever it's affecting hurts it.

"I admit I'm not clear on how to attack wind or a body of water."

I could show you a memory that might make it clearer?

"Please do."

Here is her memory of fighting a wind spirit! It leaves a faint visible outline, a distortion in the air, and seems to affect only an area about fifty feet across at once, and while it's fast it's a bit predictable and Bloom charges through it, breathing fire. Eventually it wanders away, slightly diminished.

I have never had cause to hurt a water spirit, but that wind spirit was chaos for the birds I liked so I drove it away. Wind spirits are the fastest spirits. Water cannons like on those fire-fighting machines would have hurt it too. And a thick cloud of dust would have slowed it down.

"All right. Some of them sound beneficial, but it's not something we're used to working with..."

Some of them can be useful and beneficial, yes. I don't think spirits will come here soon.

I notice that I keep not thinking of things you might like to know until later. I'm not sure what to do about that.

"So far it hasn't been a serious problem. I'm trying to think of ways to be more exhaustive but don't have any obvious ideas."

While the topic is fresh in my mind: I had been assuming you already knew this but perhaps you do not - Enkindled beings are slightly smarter. The effect is significant in animals but would be very slight in Amentans, considering how intelligent you already are. Even the one who gained the magic of cold - I would not be surprised if he failed to notice.

"We did have word on that already and have been offering IQ tests to your patients. They're getting smarter by an average of three quarters of a point if you abstract out the noise."

It's a shame Draak can't be Enkindled without ruining their ability to do freeform magic. I would like to be smarter.

"How does Enkindling affect that?"

Draak have natural magic inside us. Our very breath is magical. It's extremely complex and elegant. I think that if I were two hundred times better at Enkindling, I might be able to turn someone into a Draak... At least in spirit. If we did not have such magic, it would be impossible for something so large and heavy to fly. Enkindling presses magical patterns into a new and self-sustaining configuration, which twists and bends the magic Draak have. Or did you mean why does it affect intelligence? That I am not quite sure of. Perhaps the same thing that allows spirits to think.

"I meant the first but the second thing is also interesting to know."

Seeker thinks we were designed by the Onesong. Or by someone. How would evolution have produced such a complex inner spirit for us but not done so for any of the other animals around?

"Without your home planet to check for fossil records I don't know that our greens are likely to come to a very educated guess."

It's a bad idea to go explore a bear's cave except with great caution. We don't know if there is one, or a thousand, or no bears in our old cave in this metaphor.

"And the information doesn't seem urgent enough to begin an unusually dangerous archaeology project."

Your kind would probably be better at talking to the humans than mine was. But yes.

"It does seem like something we'd want to do eventually, but with the utmost caution and not before we're generally well-established in the galaxy."

She gives a vaguely agreeing tail-gesture. 

Incidentally, the complex spirit is why I think artificially-made Draak eggs would just die. It's an unnerving idea. However, thinking about it more, it does not seem entirely out of the question for... Hybrid children of one kind or another to be possible, though I would not know where to begin such a thing and don't personally even want to try.

"I'm sure someone would be interested in the idea, though perhaps fewer than if we were more similar species."

I read a story mentioning the idea. I think for many Draak, the spirit and mind would be more important than the body. An Amentan who could see the world as we do would be more Draak than an uncanny being in a Draak body but cut off from the Song.