Spoiler: {Fluff}Jakk'ari Listens...
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You are equipped with senses beyond those classically recognized by the people of Azeroth; a kind of hearing that extends into the spirit realm where the nascent and sometimes developed intelligences of elementals glide manifested in the spiritual echoes of the world. Shaman through the various troll tribes come to hear the elemental voices differently: a child of the burning sands, wind and fire were the first to speak to you, with earth not slow to join the chorus, and the voice of water years later, marking your transition from student to journeyman shaman with a pilgrimage to the ocean and a three day and night fast. A darkspear shaman would typically hear water and wind first, with earth and fire proving elusive; but all strive to hear the voices of the four elements to understand the wisdom of their full concert. You can even now smell the salt of the sea wind from that day - so unlikely the freshwater of the oases and secret springs of your desert home, so alien and confronting - and the saline burn in your nostrils comes back to you from time to time when the voices of the elements, particularly water, catches you off guard in some way.
Usually, these voices come from individual spirits that correspond to the presense of elements in the real world, as much causing them as caused by them. The voice of spark and pebble might come to you eagerly when you gaze into a campfire on a dry night; but more exotic voices come sometimes, too. Voices like Slag and Flow speak for amalgams of fire and earth you once found haunting the cooling remnants of a volcanic eruption, for example; and another time, you spoke with a kind of elemental noble of the air called Ertan; who communicated with you in words and concepts as clear and complex as any you have heard from mortal lips. Sometimes, your mentor once told you, the elemental spirits speak in woven voices; one might become chosen to hear the voice of Water in some grander sense, perhaps of all the water spirits in a particular region, or further still.
But whereas the ability to hear all four core elements instead of a selection therefrom is the difference between a student and a journeyman, it is the ability to hear at least in some small way from the fifth element, the element of Spirit, that separates the journeyman from the master.
Spirit does almost never presents in elemental spirits like the cardinal elements do - it is clearer to say it is present in all of them, in some way; offering the very principle of life and awareness that differentiates an earth elemental from a lump of stones. Spirit is born from the realm of Life, and the weaving of that Life with the elemental spirits of the cardinal elements creates a world of thriving forces and teeming, largely harmonious creatures. That, atleast, is the theory; in practice Spirit as a fifth element is so elusive and so weak that its existence within the pantheon of elements is sometimes doubted completely. Its stewardship is largely left to different magical specialists - Druids, who approach the question of life from a study of the physical, extrapolating from animal and plant life as it manifests in the world into principles of spiritual reality beyond it.
Spirit, as an element, is something a shaman might hope to hear from a few times in their life. This is one such time. You do not know what this creature is saying, in as much as it is saying anything; but your heart strains in your chest with desperation to know and understand, if at all you can; and your allies, awestruck or at least hesitating, do not foul your effort. You hear Spirit move, like an ethereal wind through the hollows of the looming ligneous beast's body; and the wordless touch of Spirit is like a breif, momentary flash of total understanding, bridging the gap between you, and the alien force hunching before your eyes here in the guts of the earth, in this impossible glade.
This creature is Verdan. It is an elemental of Life; a kind of guardian spirit who has been devoted to protecting these caverns for... a unit of time you don't entirely understand, but must equate to hundreds of years at least; perhaps thousands. These are sacred caverns, as the druids certainly knew; the nearness of the Emerald Dream, the loom through which the mystical raw stuff of life passes to grade into living things in Azeroth, being so rare and special in the world; and certainly the source of the oasis' normal thriving state. Unscrupulous mystics of various kinds have sought to use the caverns for their purposes over time; local potentates sometimes attempting to seize and directly colonize the oasis and not share its bounty with all the dwellers of the barrens beyond. Verdan, once every few generations, has had to muster force to despatch or drive off such parasites. Life is not the property of any selection of beings. Life belongs to life.
But something has happened. The nearness of another realm - of the strobing, burning, pure possibility of the arcane - is not meant to bleed into the material world like elemental forces are. Its ideal state is confined, and ordered, and drawn carefully into reality by judicious users. Here, it is haemorrhaging in from some kind of breach in the cavern beyond this one, and the effect of the mana spilling through is toxic to elemental spirits and mutative to living creatures. Verdan, connected to all the life in these caverns, has chosen to soak as much of this magical radiation as it can stand, rather than to permit the creatures and plants and fungi within to become truly deviate; but it has reached its capacity. The mana has poisoned its body; sapped its soul; and with an impaired awareness, it is at least aware that it is losing its mind.
It knows it needs to die, to rejoin Spirit before its essence is completely subsumed and it becomes something else entirely. But it is also in pain; and the flow of so much raw mana is causing defects in its senses so that it does not know what is illusion or not. It suspects it has been betrayed, but knows it cannot trust its suspicions, and is near to maddened with this paradox. The question it seemed to be asking, if it could be hammered into the shape of an intelligible sentence, would have to be something like a sullen, bitter: 'Are you real?' But it cannot trust any answer given it; so it it delays its only other instinct - the instinct to attack, as protector of the caverns - not because it can receive a sufficient answer, but because it hates the inevitability of what must follow.
Verdan, you understand immediately, is extremely sick, though not quite dying. He is a Life Elemental who is now so shot through with the cancerous, transmutative energies of raw arcane that he is almost what some might call an Arcane Elemental, and the transmogrification has been extremely punishing.
He cannot be healed of this condition. He can only be set free.