"Oh, will we have advantages innately in that respect? Because of our different natures?"

"At this point I would be more surprised if you didn't." Super-hearing. "If so you'll find yourself more able to get spirits and Others to listen, less able to use magical disguise, and more resistant to possession. Which will hopefully never come up. You'd be generally more present, and that has probably more effects than I can remember off the top of my head."

"I suppose we will have to encounter them as they come up. Thank you. How and when should we conduct the ritual to make the Ice safer?"

"We could do it any time.
We'll be ludicrously underprepared no matter what, but if you have an implement in mind you may as well do that first. Might need it. And we should sleep beforehand—or at least I should; you should if Eldar even need sleep—because the ritual sometimes takes days depending on who or what disapproves."

"We sleep occasionally. Thank you. What do you mean by ludicrously underprepared?"

"We'll be affecting a wide area. Any Others in it or even nearby can try to stop the ritual if they want to. There shouldn't be many, but if we end up facing a serious fight we won't have the resources to do much more than hold them off, get out, and maybe try again later."

"Do ordinary weapons not help in the fight? Can we not ask non-practitioners to defend us?"

"Depends what we're up against. An uninhabited wasteland like this, we'd be talking about elementals and not much else. No spirits of abstract principles, no monsters. To someone who hasn't awakened, it would look like ordinary landscape movement, maybe more of it than normal. They wouldn't be able to help much.

If we're lucky enough, nothing we can't beat will fight us for it. I wish I had something more sure."

"And weapons? Will anything we have work? Does armor help?"

"Might help. Many elementals do have bodies that can be attacked. They're more effectively fought symbolically. Heat for a cold elemental, stone for a wind one. You'd be better off stabbing a rain spirit with an umbrella than a sword."

He frowns. "What's an umbrella?"

Umbrella.

"It might not mean the same thing if you don't have those here. But you see the idea, opposing Others with their opposites? That's a general rule, not just for fighting and not just for elementals."

"I think I do see the idea, yes. I'm unclear what winning or losing a symbolic fight looks like. Would singing weather songs work?"

"It looks like a regular fight, just with different weapons. Very different weapons.

If you have songs that control the weather, it could make it very unpleasant for an opposing elemental and probably drive off a lot of potential challengers. Definitely a good idea."

"We have those. Pretty mild ones, but still. And lots of songs for heat, since we'll need them on the Ice."

"Maybe non-practitioners can help after all. We'd have a lot of explaining to do and would have to hide any magic, but those songs sound immensely useful."

"We can also sing them ourselves, unless you anticipate being badly outnumbered. But yes, I can certainly ask people to come sing their best weather-songs for us without explaining why."

"You guys have almost scary amounts of latitude to ask for random things.

There'll be more objecting Others than there are of us, but it'll be one at a time. Whether it's worth recruiting more people probably depends on how long you could keep it up and how much benefit there is from more people singing."

"Would your King not be able to order people to play a weather song? It's a war, we have to give our leadership the latitude to actually fight it."

"We do technically have a Queen, but the monarchy's mostly just ceremonial. If she needed someone's rose and couldn't explain why, the person could just say no. Probably wouldn't, but could.

If weather songs were a thing in my world, the people running a war would make sure some people in the army knew them, like they do with the practice. Them they can order."

"We're sort of all in the army. Because of what a mess things turned out to be."

"All in the army. Okay.

That doesn't sound like it would be an obvious consequence of any part of this mess, but army does fit better as an analogy than country."

"When a country collectively decides to pack up and fight a war, how do you govern it? Commanding it at least gives us a hope of winning."

"When a country collectively decides, less than all of the population packs up and fights. But if the only people who came with you are the combatants, it explains the difference."

"No, everyone came with us. We'll probably try settling them somewhere away from the fighting, if we can, and it''s not like there'll be any more children born, so -"