At a cursory glance, I catch nine humans bumbling around. Some are shouting instructions (voices vibrating through the surrounding air, bouncing off the towering mountains), some are gathering equipment (bodily movements causing ripples like a stone cast into water), some are lightly tapping the metallic structure and backing away quickly (with a sudden rush of fear through their forms, curling like ice in the stomach and releasing with a whoosh through the skin as they realize they’ve not put themselves in danger).

It takes me an extra moment to pinpoint a tenth human; he’s reaching inside the structure, shuddering at the sudden brush of wind that shoots through the space. He curls into himself for a moment before blinking, shakes himself just a bit, and resumes crawling forward. I withdraw from the space; the inner workings of the structure are unstable at best, and I’ve gotten myself a rather impressive litany of experience with making humans panic. This crawling guy feels steady to the brush, but it never takes the most grounded ones long to freak out when they feel wind and air meandering casually through a wreck.

Knowing that is probably reason enough for me being the Wind of the Arctic of all places, but I digress. Humans!

Such idiots, I really do feel badly for them. Humans are not made to withstand… anything, and yet they insist on pushing the limits of their environment, something much more vast and powerful than they’ll ever truly wrap their heads around.

Perhaps that is why they don’t respect it. If they knew all the powers of the natural world- the deep oceans beyond their reach, the bottoms of volcanoes beyond their technology, the very ground beneath their feet that trembles at their touch- humans would kneel. Again, reasons for a powerful being such as myself given the task of ruling a place with no life while my gentler siblings watch over all the delicate places of hearts beating and brains ticking.

Brains that don’t tick hard enough, clearly. I reach down and brush long tendrils of myself along the rocky ground, sensing earth twitching and groaning beneath even my feather-light touch. The humans feel nothing; the explorer that ventured inside the structure shrugs it off when an icicle clatters to the ground an inch from his face.

The human setting up their ingenious pieces of scrap-metal and radio waves has resorted to kicking the thing, finally making the screen fritz with static before it settles into something I assume is legible, since I never had an interest in human reading. Though, if I could understand exactly what this human’s face pale with horror, I may have to teach myself soon.

For all their screaming, all the human’s frantic efforts result in speeding up the process, and I help myself to the spoils, gleefully throwing myself into the structure and finally witnessing the explorer’s face for myself as he realizes what’s happening. I haphazardly clang into every support beam I can find (while doing the wind equivalent of face-planting for good measure) before finally whipping myself around like a cape and torpedo/pile-driving myself into the ground. I remember to catapult a fragment of myself back into the structure to scan the area-

His face is priceless. If I had tear ducts, I’d be sobbing.

Beneath me, Mother Earth shrieks. I grimace and send an apology her way; having something sink into you does not sound fun, and the number of times she’s had to deal with it makes me feel just a bit sorry for how many times I’ve caused it.

But not sorry enough to stop myself from sending that little fragment outside to watch as the humans run around like chickens with their heads cut off, racing for their vehicles even as they themselves are dragged under, no hope of escape in sight. Not a single one of them goes with a look of resignation on their faces, and I feel the power rush through me.

Finally, all the humans plummet beneath the surface. The structure, which I’ll mourn, falls as well, crushing a few humans on the way down.

I sigh out a breath and wonder if a butterfly is carrying a hurricane to somewhere in the Pacific. I give myself a moment more of feeling whole, before I suck myself in as small as I can compress myself and let my power explode, sending a blast of air across the Arctic.