The question was asked innocently enough.

"Hey Lori, can you fly?" Rian asked over breakfast.

Lori sighed. "Why do people keep asking that? No, Whisperers can't fly. We leave flying to Mentalists, Horotracts, bugs, kites and hot air sacks." No matter how much she had tried when she'd first started…

"Yes, but that's regular, normal wizards," Rian pointed out. "You're a Binder now."

Lori blinked. Her eyes slowly widened.

"I take it back, I take it back, I don't need to know if you can fly!" Rian said frantically as Lori stood in the middle of a rising wind.

"Well, I do," Lori said as she finished tucking her shirt into her trousers so they wouldn't billow upwards in the air. Really, there was no other option for a Whisperer-turned-Dungeon Binder trying to fly without Mentalism. Lightwisps, darkwisps, firewisps and lightningwisps were essentially immaterial, waterwisps would make this swimming, and earthwisps… while they would certainly lift her up, that would simply be a form of standing.

To fly, to defy the force of the world pulling her downwards, she needed to be untethered. Until she could learn to lift herself with her own thoughts or redefine which way was 'down' for her, that meant airwisps.

And moving anything with air and airwisps meant moving large volumes of air against her surface area.

…well, not really. After all, there were to ways to move something with airwisps: either have the air push the thing one wants to move, as in the case of sails, or have air be pushed from the thing one wishes moved. The problem with the latter was it required shapes and features human bodies didn't really have. It was all well and good for stories to say that a Whisperer 'made their feet light as air' or 'stepped on the air as if it were solid', but neither were actually possible. Air was air: loose, variable density, compressible, and prone to moving about. The only way to solidify so it could be stepped on was to compress the air such that it actually did become solid, leaving you with an ice-like chunk of solid air—

Oh.

She'd have to remember that for later.

Pushing air from her body was… not possible. A binding of airwisps that propelled the air was not actually physically connected to her body, and would have no means of transferring the force of that propulsion to her physically. If she bound the airwisps to her skin, as she bound the waterwisps she used to propel Lori's Boat to bone, it would greatly limit the angles at which that air could be propelled. Not to mention putting her at risk of tearing her skin off as force sufficient to lift a human body were directed laterally on where the airwisps were bound. Attaching the binding to her clothes had even more problems, not the least of which is her clothes had no wisps she could attach them to. As woven plant fiber, she'd need Deadspeaking to affect them…

So, she was left with the other alternative. Instead of pushing with air, she had to be pushed by air. The binding was simple enough. Airwisps were blasting air upwards with great force as if a dragon or storm neared, shaped into a cylinder five paces wide about knee-high from the ground so that the air wouldn't go every which way at random. The initial test had sent every speck of dust hurtling into the air, and it hadn't had the decency to go straight up, spreading into a cloud all around. However, as the binding kept blowing, and with the wind from another binding that blew the dust away, the air was cleared, leaving a surface more or less scoured of loose dust and dirt.

The binding had been mildly displaced when she'd walked into it, of course. After all, her legs were solid, not air, and so the binding had nothing to work with where she was standing. Thankfully, the minute airwisps in her body were also unaffected, a body's natural resistance to binding protecting her in that regard.

"Look, have you thought about what could happen if you get pushed out of the wind?" Rian said frantically, voice raised to be heard over the rushing wind. "I mean, you'd fall on your face onto the ground! And we can't even put bedrolls and things to cushion it because the wind would send it flying!"

"I've bound the airwisps to create a wall of air pushing everything towards the center," Lori said, face perfectly straight as she began doing just that, her voice amplified by a binding.

"That won't help once you get to the top!" Rian pointed out.

"Obviously, I will not raise myself above the level of the wall," Lori said as she tentatively spread her arms. "The air isn't even lifting me yet, I obviously need to increase the force exerted by the binding."

Rian sighed. Loudly. "Of course it's not enough, you're standing up straight! The air's just going around you. If you bend over so it can push on your front, you'd feel more force."

Oh! Rian was right. She tentatively raised her arms, and they were nearly blown upward at the force of the wind catching them and pushing them upward. She forced them down, held them out to her sides. Yes, it definitely felt that something was pushing her up. Tentatively, she leaned forward, and what had been a mildly annoying wind over her body suddenly became a powerful force that made her bounce back to standing straight, then overcompensate by leaning back, only to be pushed straight again.

Lori tilted her head curiously, her dark hair pushed upwards tickling her scalp strangely. Then, arms still spread, she slowly leaned forward. She could feel the air pushing hard against her body, and she was amused to note that she didn't even have to try to keep her balance. The air was managing to hold her up. She kept leaning forward, ignoring how Rian seemed poised to start running for some reason, making all sorts of funny sounds…

Frowning, she concentrated and altered the binding to increase the force of the wind. The wind continued to push her up, such that she was standing almost diagonally to the ground, her legs almost outstretched…

Lori increased the forced of the wind one last time, then grinned as her toes lifted off the ground. She laughed, the sound stolen away by the roar around her, as she hesitantly began to straighten her body, hovering facedown with her limbs outstretched, her hair steaming upward…

And then the binding ran out of imbuement.

There was a thump and a crack as she fell face-first into the hard packed dirt.

"Ow…"

"You broke your nose doing what?" Shanalorre said incredulously.

"Flying," Lori said, wincing at the pain as she focused on breathing though her mouth.

There was very long silence as Shanalorre bit at her lip. Eventually she said, "You, ah, know only Mentalists and—"

"I know!"