THE PEOPLE OF THE AIR

Air is life: the very breath in the lungs without which living things would suffocate and perish. Air is death, emptiness, no ground to stand on, no food or drink, no warmth or shelter. Air is ephemeral, light and insubstantial as thought. Air is powerful and destructive, the stuff of tornadoes that can tear trees from their roots, hurl boulders through the air, turn calm water into sledgehammer waves. Air is invisible and playful, the breeze that rustles the grass and dances over the water. Air is majestic and terrifying, the bringer of great storm-clouds and deadly tempests.

The nature of Air is subtle and full of contradictions. The folk of the Air understand this and have embraced such a nature for themselves, as light of touch and as fickle as the breeze one moment, and as unstoppable and devastating as a tornado the next. They have done everything they can to tear themselves loose from the crude crust of the Motherworld, turning their society into a shifting, airborne culture amid the clouds, and now spend much of their energy trying to deepen their understanding of their element so that they can become more and more beings of the air and less like the gross heavy-bodied creatures plodding across the Motherworld’s surface.

Physique
The Air tend toward a light, slender build but can be of many heights, with features ranging from round-faced to aquiline depending on their family. Because they are a restless People, always shifting and migrating even between their own mobile fortresses, they have never developed features or even accents that are unique to a particular place or lifestyle. Some are as pale as mist, with pale-blonde hair and skin that is almost translucent; others are as dark as a thunderhead with skin of grey or dusky-brown and black eyes and hair, others still might even have a blue cast to their skin or hair that is the silver-white of high cloud.

The Air are usually born with little labour after quick pregnancies, and grow and learn rapidly - a child of the Air will be walking at six months old, an adolescent by eight or nine and a full adult by its teens. Their minds are as quick to expand as their bodies, and there would be little or nothing to distinguish a seventeen-year-old youth of the Air and an adult of any other People.

Like all of the People of Motherworld the Air have been shaped by their element, physically as well as in their temperament and society. Their flesh is light and baby-soft - even the Air’s unique fighting monks, who train day and night to build up their strength and resilience, have skin and muscle that feels delicate to the touch despite their strength and fitness. The Air who have achieved closest communion with their element are light enough that they can leap almost their own height into the air or many times their own length on the ground with ease, and a normal human could lift one of these high-blooded Air by one hand with barely an effort. The Air are strong relative to the lightness of their bodies, and when they are trained properly and learn balance and co-ordination this allows them a tremendous speed and precision of movement that their fighting styles exploit to the fullest. This reflects in even their most casual movements: the eerie, fluid speed of the monks or the agile, almost prancing movements of many of the Air’s nobles and artisans. The lightness of their bodies is matched by their bare need for sustenance - even the most lumbering and heavy-bodied Air would only require a frugal meal and a tiny mouthful of water every other day or so to exist perfectly comfortably. For most among the Air a sliver of roasted dove, a morsel of pastry, half a dozen pomegranate seeds and a single mouthful of wine would be a banquet, enough to sustain them for several days before they felt a pang of hunger.

Culture and temperament
The Air mentality can be understood through their struggle to relate to the invisible and mercurial element they have adopted. The Air of all the Peoples have had an uphill battle in understanding and bonding with their element, and the effort to do so are the driving force behind their curiosity and the development of their science. The art of wresting pattern and meaning out of complex and ephemeral surroundings spills over into all the intellectual efforts of the Air: as well as sophisticated systems of studying the winds and breezes they have become fine mathematicians and logicians, accomplished astronomers, skilled metaphysicists and enthusiastic practitioners of numerology, astrology, feng shui and esoteric physical and mental disciplines which combine elements of yoga, meditation and the martial arts.

The Air love patterns and hidden meanings and constantly look for omens and signs in the tiniest of things: the way the wind ruffles a banner, the flight of birds as they fly underneath a citadel, the poem someone happens to be reciting to their friends as one walks past their window. No two Air ever read exactly the same set of omens from anything, and they themselves like to joke about how many different answers a question will get when put to the Air (none of them agree on the exact number but it is usually greater than the number of Air one has hypothetically asked). Such differences of opinion lead to the spirited but largely good-natured arguments that form a constant feature of life among the Air, and the secret to Air society’s essential stability is that few among them take these arguments seriously, however loud they may be at the time. Intellectual positions are as much fashion as conviction and it is not unusual for two Air on the opposite sides of an argument to have switched positions after a week or so as the whim has taken them. This provides a useful safety valve for tensions within the Air: although they might seem to be a divided and constantly squabbling folk they in fact have few deep differences and would be appalled by the kind of fierce internal conflicts that can tear through Earth or Fire.

This love of complexity and change for its own sake is evident throughout the Air’s culture. Their clothes are generally simple and elegant in design but patterned and ornamented with astonishing intricacy and care. Their speech is complex and courtly, often with layers of hidden meanings and nuances or full of elaborate witticisms and poetical flourishes. The Air love to award themselves grandiose titles which mean little in practice, Air society being the most fluid and least hierarchical of all the Peoples, but which have a pleasant ring to the ear.

Society
The Air have by far the smallest population of any of the Peoples and their physical needs are modest. Because of this what menial labour their economy does require is performed by captive Elementals of the crudest and least sentient kind, by an Air who has been disgraced in some way and is expiating their offence, or by monks of the Houses’ fighting orders who will, a few weeks in every year, emerge from the monastery-barracks and perform chores and basic labour for the rest of the Air. As such there is really no great labouring class in the floating cities: an Air who chooses to forge weapons, keep gardens or prepare foods does so because the work is pleasant and fulfilling to them. This is less unlikely than it might sound - the society of the Air is small enough that it does not normally need the drudgery of mass production to support itself, so all its clothes can be made by master tailors and weavers, every piece of battle-gear can have weeks of attention lavished on it by expert technologists and weaponsmiths, and every meal can be provided from lovingly tended and carefully bred orchards or trappers.

Living in a realm that is next to impossible for the other Peoples to even threaten, the Air have no ambitions of lasting conquest and no borders to defend and so can make war on their own terms. That means in turn that the Air soldiery are a far smaller and more finely-trained force, made up of those who have actively sought a warrior’s life, so that the Air have the largest non-combatant population of all the Motherworld and a far richer and more prominent civilian culture. They are also one of the most mobile: Air families keep either no permanent home or many, and constant movement between the Air citadels is the norm. The Air tend to quickly tire of being in one place and usually waste no time in setting off for another part of their realms as soon as they begin to get bored with their surroundings. Paradoxically, the Air who do make permanent homes - mainly the monks, the heads of various military orders and certain artisans or builders who have workshops or gardens to tend - are highly valued as being the ones who give the Air citadels their distinctive identities and help keep the experience of constant travel interesting for everyone else.

The Air long ago fled the surface of the Motherworld, tearing loose the ground on which they would build their fortresses and casting the great slabs of rock into the heavens with powerful works of Elemental force. Cut off from the vibrant spirit of the planet that created them, the flying islands are now made of dead, crumbling rock, dry husks of the great mountains and mesas they used to be. Atop them are elegant pagodas and gardens, laid out in designs laboured over by artists, architects, geomancers and numerologists alike for the finest combination of pleasing aesthetics and spiritual significance. The Air’s dislike of being enclosed and away from the sky, coupled with their ability to simply direct bad weather away from themselves, means that these buildings tend to be lightly built and even open-roofed, with walls of taut silk or thin lacquered wood.

The citadels are not the only home of the Air. Over time, as the great islands have crumbled about the edges, smaller rocks and tors have gone sailing off into the sky before Air artisans can salvage them. Some of these have been recolonised and carry a house or three, others are simply allowed to drop away when the enchantment about them finally unravels. Moreover the Air are a wandering people who will often travel far abroad, riding the winds or using their Elemental arts to knit together paths and roads out of the clouds themselves. Although the Air have developed any number of ways to fly above the ground, most of these still need a fairly solid surface beneath them for the air-cushion to push against. Thus few Air are able to simply step off the edge of an island and soar away through the sky and must prevail on one of the adepts of the House of Tempests to travel ahead of them forging a road through the cloud. The ultimate goal of the Air is to shed the need for crude earthen platforms completely and live solely on a footing woven of air and cloud, but this goal is some way off. So far only the tiniest of villages or single mansions have been built on cloud-islands by the greatest and most dedicated of Elementalists.

For now, the society of the Air still revolves around four huge air-islands and the miniature cities they carry. They have acquired slang names among the other Peoples who have rendered down their wordier Air titles: Ibis, Falcon, Albatross and Hummingbird.

Ibis (“the Tower of the Meditations of the Single Serene Ibis”) is the home of the orders of fighting monks who form the backbone of the Air's fighting forces. It is the most heavily built-over of the major citadels, and the slopes of its single slender pinnacle are a maze of steep paths, high-walled dormitories and dojos, meditation groves and assault courses and sparring chambers of every description. On most days it is alive with monks in training, racing up and down the steepest climbs, dodging nimbly through mazes of thorns or bamboo while their masters pitch blunted shuriken for them to dodge, or tirelessly practicing their forms and katas in the little paved squares. Ibis is the most mobile of the great citadels, following a twisting path over whatever lands the Sifu of the martial schools have chosen as the next testing grounds for their pupils' skills.

Hummingbird (“the Garden of the Songs of the Four Hundred Joyous Hummingbirds”) tends to drift among the warm, lazy updrafts over the Motherworld’s northern archipelagos. "Warm" and "lazy" are two words often applied by the Air to the Hummingbird itself - the Air are the only people to have a distinct community of artists and philosophers and the heart of this community is on the Hummingbird. The most distinguished artisans and scholars of the Air sponsor taverns, bath-houses and gardens in which their followers and students congregate and argue points of metaphysics or mathematics, perform extravagant readings of poetry and plays, or compare their skills in painting, dance or calligraphy. In the heat of the day the broad avenues with their polished timber floors are mostly quiet but for birdsong, as the Air labour in their libraries and studios. As the day winds down, though, the twilight is lit up with coloured lanterns and filled with voices, laughter and the music of flutes and lyres as the bright awnings are lifted and the Air come out to brag about their day's work and relax in the cool of the evening. Some who spend most of their time at Falcon or Ibis are dismissive of the residents of Hummingbird as soft and self-indulgent, but to most among the Air a well-rounded life is a virtue and a visit to Hummingbird a welcome change of pace from their duties.

Falcon (“the Honoured Rest of the Three Foremost Falcons”) is the lowest-flying of the islands and prowls the air over the Motherworld’s largest continents, such as they are. Falcon is the home to the workshops and magical laboratories of the most technologically-oriented of the Air, the Elementalist-engineers of the House of Lightning. This is where many fine and elegant Air weapons are made: the volt cannons, the thunder cotes, the intricate electrified armour, the swift Windrunner air-sleds. The skies around Falcon are always buzzing with Air warriors testing and practising with their fresh-made weapons, and walkways arc over the firing-ranges and hangar platforms through air full of the smell of ozone, the crack of weapon discharges and the whine of motors. Because of its low altitude and the concentration of military equipment there Falcon is often a staging point for major incursions against the ground-bound elements, and it is a hub for the most enthusiastic fighters among the Air as Hummingbird is the centre for scholars and artists. Even so, the place does not have the dour barrack-camp air of the Earth bunkers or Fire settlements - the buildings, streets and gardens of Falcon have been laid out with as much care and as much of an eye to beauty as anywhere else in the Air realms.

Albatross (“the Home of the Voyages of the Most Venerated Albatross”) is by far the greatest of the four main islands, and the grand capital of the People of the Air. This is where the greatest and most revered leaders of the Air make their homes and carries the grandest mansions and the most beautiful groves and orchards. Running through the centre of the island is a rambling complex of beautifully adorned buildings which is the palace of the Emperor of the Air ("August Personage Revered Through the Ivory Skies"), a reclusive Elemental Master who is said to have held great esteem among the Air Elementals before the humans and the Court of the Air drifted apart. The houses around the palace play host to a succession of distinguished Air generals, leaders, scientists, philosophers and artists, each a guest of the Palace for as long as they care to stay. Their meetings and debates have a sharper, less relaxed air to them than do those at the Hummingbird, for at the Palace there is more at stake: each courtier is trying to make their own mark, put the stamp of their own reputation and ideas on those around them and hold them against the fickle intellectual fashions that flit back and forth through the Air. Albatross is also the home of the third of the great martial Houses, the House of Tempests, which draws on the wisdom of the Elemental Masters at Court to train and develop the skills of their adepts.

There is one final citadel that almost no Air have ever seen but whose existence they all take on faith. It has no name, but when an Air refers to "above", "the place of heavens", "the highest palace" or any one of a dozen similarly artful terms their companions will always know what they mean. This palace, not a fragment of the Earth as the others are but a creation unto itself, drifts so high in the sky that mortal life would struggle to exist there - it is the home of the Air Dragons, the mighty creatures who first adopted the humans and brought them before the Court of Air and who will still, on the rarest of occasions, pay a visit to their one-time companions. The visit of a Dragon is an occasion of great gravity among the Air: youngsters are drilled in etiquette and groomed for weeks before the visit, prominent Air engage in fierce intrigues for the chance to discuss art and ideas with them and scribes transcribe every word of every conversation that the great visitor holds. It is said that the Dragons mourn the schism between humans and Elementals and look to one day restore the friendship between the two; for now they content themselves with descending perhaps once in a decade to pay their respects to the August Personage or to lend their power to some great military venture.

War-making
The Air have a singular privilege among the four great People: that of making war almost always on their own terms. Their homes fly far above the Motherworld’s surface where they are effectively immune from attack, and when they travel they can simply surf the updrafts and jetstreams or use roads knitted of clouds and air magic so that they never need to get close to another element’s domain. In general the Air will clash with the other elements at the time, in the place, and after the manner of the Air’s choosing.

The other Peoples have learned the hard way to ready their defences when they see a thunderhead bulging in the sky, and to be nervous whilever there is an overcast hanging above them. Both are common signs that an Air contingent is massing high above them, ready to strike. Most often the opening assault will be by the air itself, as the target zone is stricken by sudden gales, salvoes of powerful lightning strikes and tornadoes which tear at the ground and target the weak points of enemy positions with uncanny precision before they dissipate.

In the wake of the storm bombardment will come the Air raiding force, riding down from the clouds on sorcerous machines, on the backs of tamed Elementals or beasts or on winds of their own conjuration. The assault will be no crude rampage - the Air are feared across the Motherworld for their ability to apply fast, ferocious attacks with clinical precision. Often their targets have little option but to try to blunt the edge of the assault as best they can, and hope to muster a counterattack as the Air troops are mustering for their return flight back into the clouds.

An Air military venture will most often be conceived and masterminded by one individual, a leader within the Air whose name carries enough prestige for them to appoint themselves a martial figurehead. Such leaders are most commonly warrior Elementalists, fighting adepts from Ibis or combat engineers from Falcon, but any among the Air who wishes to do so may announce that they are planning to make war and see who assembles at their banner. The motivations for the war party can be just as diverse: an Air may raise a war banner when they see a potential threat forming among one of the other Peoples on the surface, or in order to pillage resources from a surface settlement, to avenge a previous defeat, or to test their abilities, to create or enhance their reputations, or because the omens indicate that it is an auspicious time for war-making. Other Air warriors may come to the banner for any of these reasons or through a complex trade in obligations or favours.

An ambitious Air war leader will be looking to draw troops from the three great martial houses of the Air: the House of Thunder, the House of Lightning and the House of Tempests. Each embodies a different way of manipulating the air, and these three different traditions have come to be the pillars around which the warriors and adventurers of the Air are organised.

House Lightning are the technologists of the Air, who tame their element through devices and maintain a great network of laboratories and workshops centred on the fortress of Falcon. The weaponwrights of Lightning use great nets and vanes to draw the living essence of the Air element out of the skies around them and store it in filigree cages, cartridges carved from moonbird ivory or in coils of silk ribbon woven with restraining patterns, from which they can draw it at will. The Lightning craft most of the Air’s weapons, alloying the metals they steal from the surface with Elemental essences and fragments of storm-wind and lightning-bolt, replacing the connection with the earth with a connection with air. They make blades whose weight can barely be felt in the hand but whose edges can shear through armour and flesh alike, armour lighter than cloth which can protect the wearer like steel.

House Lightning flying machines use caged and distilled Air magic to hurtle through the sky at their riders’ commands, elemental energy spreading out from the cell to suffuse the whole device and make it one with the winds. The Storm Riders use the most stripped-down such machines, straddling their skeletal frames like a mount or standing on them like a surfboard, Lightning Lances buzzing and crackling with the power of the lightning that the engineers have imprisoned in the weapon. When the Storm Riders charge these bolts erupt out again and vent their fury on the enemy in the Riders’ sights. The workshops that create the Storm Riders’ wind-mounts also create the larger, more formidable Windrunner air-sleds, which most commonly take to the field as the personal transport of the senior artisan who created them. Windrunners are made to many different designs but often resemble a chariot or heavy cycle, decked with pennants showing the rider’s personal heraldry and carrying powerful electrical or sonic weaponry.

Most heavily-armed of all are the artillerists of the Forked Lightning. Unlike their more mobile colleagues the Forked Lightning tend to deploy as armoured infantry, riding down to the battlefield inside conjured tornadoes or flying gondolas. Forked Lightning gunners practice and drill together until they are able to unleash the lightning-blasts of their Volt Cannon with the trademark precision of the Air. Unflappably calm, distinctive in their glittering Electron Armour and visored helmets, the Forked Lightning often descend from the sky straight onto the Air’s objective and clear any opposition from around it with surgical, murderous bursts of fire.

The martial adepts of House Tempest demonstrate what an Air is capable of when they truly devote themselves to mastering the bond with their element. Tempest sifu assemble handpick small coteries of pupils, generally from the ranks of the Ibis monks but sometimes from other aspirants who show the right gifts, and train them in physical and mental exercises that heighten their control over their body and deepen their attunement to the air. As they gain mastery the Tempests learn to not just leap but to wrap winds around themselves and fly, to sense their surroundings as if the movement of air over nearby objects were their own skin, and to master ever more intricate and acrobatic martial arts that exploit their growing abilities to the fullest. These aspirants are known as Wind Walkers, a twofold term for both the way they learn to run through the air as though it were ground, and for the wandering path they follow in the footsteps of their teacher, back and forth across the Air domains. Wind Walkers go to war weaponless, but since their abilities are still being honed their teachers will often assist them with a riding-cloud, a speedy platform of air woven semi-solid around a frame crafted by House Lightning artisans and given the crudest level of Elemental life.

A Wind Walker is generally considered to have passed from student to adept when they are able to leave the solid footing of the Air islands for more than just short hops, and travel through the air with nothing more than their Elemental abilities to support them. At this time they are often taken away into the great empty sky by their teachers, to travel, train, fast and meditate, with nothing under their feet but the breeze and the occasional shimmer of energy as their magical gifts knit the air to make a path. No more than specks in the vast vaults of air, the adepts meditate and perform their martial forms; when they descend to battle they can use the air around them as a shield and a weapon, becoming the centre of a ferocious miniature tornado that flings them around the battlefield and scatters their enemies like chaff. The greatest of the teachers, those in total communion with their enclosing whirlwinds, spin and fly and strike with such speed that to them the enemies appear almost as statues.

The boisterous adventurers of House Thunder build up their Elemental powers very differently to the technocratic Lightning or the ascetic Tempest. Thunder embraces an older, wilder, rougher way. Rather than accumulate the living energy of the air through technological traps, or commune with it through careful mental discipline, the Thunder warriors seek out the places on the Motherworld where the Air is most turbulent and unruly, its endless magical vigour so concentrated that they can literally wrest it raw from the sky. House Thunder warriors joyously fling themselves into the heart of terrifying supercell storms; laugh as they dive down tornado funnels; shout war-cries back at mighty thunderclaps. On the Motherworld such powerful phenomena amass Elemental force and proto-life as well as sheer physical energy, and House Thunder quests for them, battles them, vanquishes them and takes their power for their own. While the elegant engines of House Lightning and the cloud-climbing adepts of House Tempest are the most commonly seen around the Air domains, it is House Thunder who looms largest in the Air’s stories, songs and imaginations. Not a single House Thunder warrior is without at least one spectacular story of being whirled through a cyclone, brawling with the Elementals coalescing out of the storm-churn around them, or chasing and harpooning a giant thunderhead as it sped across a clear sky at almost the speed of sound, or taming and riding a jetstream-force wind and bending it to their will.

House Thunder have never formalised a single fighting style as have other Air. House Thunder warriors build up an eclectic range of skills from their experiences, with elements of the monkish fighting forms, the technological warfare of House Lightning and the hunting techniques and Elemental abilities they develop themselves. Their equipment will often be just as exotic: volt guns or lightning lances from the Lightning forges, extravagant hand-to-hand weapons often made to their wielder’s personal design, talismanic Elementalist weapons such as the gunsen or pelletbow, and a myriad of specialised grenades which explode into whirlwinds, thunderclaps or chains of ferocious lightning, spectacular assaults which suit the House Thunder temperament perfectly. A popular fighting style among the junior House Thunder is to don a leap-yoke, an armoured harness woven of captured breezes, feather-filaments and silver wires. With their native Air mobility enhanced by these yokes the so-called Thunderbolts form fighting packs which race at an enemy or simply drop from the skies, laying about them with armoured fighting-gloves into which the essence of captured thunderstorms has been forged. Every blow unleashes a deafening concussion which exhilarates the Air but disorients and terrifies the enemy.

The senior Air will use more exotic weapons. The gunsen is an elegantly-crafted fan which can be used to strike or block and which can be a potent focus for Air magic. Some Air who hone their minds through the study of archery take to war with the pelletbow, a magical device which uses no arrows. As the user draws the bow it draws power from the air around it, breezes swirling and mists flickering around the archer, and when the string is released a tiny shard of crystallised, diamond-hard Air essence is released, faster than a bullet, punching across the battlefield with a piercing crack of displaced air and leaving a spiralling contrail in its wake.

House Thunder tends to attract the most nomadic of the Air, the wanderers and explorers who roam deep into the wildernesses of sky. Their travels will often bring them into contact with packs of wild Elementals or strange creatures rarely seen by their kin who remain in the pockets of safer space around the wandering fortresses. Veteran House Thunder travellers will sometimes come to war accompanied by a pack of the wild air-spirits nicknamed “Temple Dogs” for their habit of mobbing about the taller spires of the August Personage’s palace at Albatross. Some will even ride to battle such a spirit’s back, or on the back of a great eagle or feathered serpent.

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