Behold! A perfectly ordinary wetland. Grass, trees, boggy knee-deep water, pond scum, mud, fog, everything a person could possibly want in their swamp.
OH THANK THE EMPEROR, a cute preindustrial - what is that SMELL.
Right. A cute little preindustrial village. He's smelled worse. For instance, dead bodies!
Does the cute little preindustrial village have anyone prepared to trade him food and language lessons for song, poetry, or manual labor?
SUCCESS. He will chop ALL THE FIREWOOD.
He is very grateful to the five-year-old's babbling, with luck he'll pick up a few words here and there.
This seems broadly acceptable to Durante, but he's going to do it in the direction of the five-year-old's father, and he's not going to do it until after he's chopped all the firewood.
NO. Do not eat Durante's leg. Eating his leg is BAD. You will stop eating Durante's leg IMMEDIATELY (this is also the voice he uses on new recruits) because he is supposed to CHOP FIREWOOD. And then you can explain what an elemental is.
(Though, frankly, he has a guess.)
"Oh. I'm sorry to hear that."
Pause.
"Someone should do something about the elementals."
"Yeah! Once they're caught they're useful. Liiiiiiike dogs! If you find a stray dog it bites but if you have a dog it'll let you pet it and stuff... I want a dog... we had a dog but it died... you should get me a dog, you should go chop more firewood till you can get a puppy from the smith's dog! I have good ideas. I want to sit on your shoulders and eat your monster spines."
... Okay, it's not as if the elemental talked to him, but he still feels really uncomfortable about that idea as applied to anything human-shaped.
"I need to try to fix the world, so I can't spend all my time chopping you enough firewood for a puppy. I am sorry."
And the kid will NOT be allowed to sit on his shoulders if it will get him his spines eaten.
"You can sit on my shoulders if you want to, but you cannot also try to eat me. People don't do nice things for you if you bite them." This is an important life lesson that everyone needs to learn eventually.
"Since I do not have a tail, you can eat my tail. If you try to eat anything I do have, I will object."
"That was because you bit my leg. I do have a leg, even if I have no spines."
Then Durante will finish up the work, and then, as promised, put the child on his shoulders and RUN RUN RUN him back to his father going ROAR until he gets there, when he will explain as politely as he can with a five-year-old's vocabulary that the work is done.
Excellent!
Can he get some idea of where the big cities (if there are any) are from here, or what the local political situation is? He's sure they can tell, but he's from a very long way away.
Great! Do they know where Wuld is or how far away it is or what its government (if any) is like?