Elements of Morality

You want the dark on the ethics of the Inner Planes, do you, cutter? Oh, now that’s a good one. Every so often some prime struts around the Cage, all full of themselves because they’ve come up with a tidy little nine‑square chart of morals they reckon explains the structure of the multiverse. And then they get all uppity when someone points out the Inner Planes don’t work like that.

They call me Julius the Symmetrical. I’m a philosopher, but lucky for you, I left my club at home today. The badge? That means I’m in the Athar, basher. The Athar? You are Outsiders, to be sure. I’ll go slowly for you.

I. Good and Evil: Two Words That Don’t Hold Water

Let’s start with this fact, cutter. A campfire doesn’t want to burn you. It doesn’t not want to, either. It’s not sitting there weighing the dangers of forest fires against the deliciousness of roast prime. It burns because that’s what it is. You stick your hand in it, you get cooked. It’s not a matter of the fire being evil and wishing you harm, it’s just temperature.

To most elementals, the whole screed of Good and Evil is like trying to explain North and South to a rock. You can try to impose such ideas upon it, sure, but you’ll be the one doing all the work. All the rock will do is sit there, just like it has done since your ancestors first learned not to drool on themselves. But since primes can’t stop trying to cram everything into neat little boxes, let’s translate their moral babble into terms an elemental might at least recognise, if not necessarily respect:

Goodness might become: expressing one’s nature in a way that sustains, shelters, or empowers other patterns of existence

The water that irrigates the fields, sates the thirst, bears the ships
The fire that forges tools, warms the lost, powers the foundry
The earth that supports the crops, the rocks that build sturdy foundations
The air that is a gentle wind for sails, the fresh breeze that sustains breath

Be shaped so that others can live with you.

Evil becomes: recasting all reality in the image of one’s own element, denying other patterns the room to exist

The raging inferno that would see every forest and city reduced to cinders
The ocean that surges over the land, sinks ships and drowns air-breathers
The rockfall that would crush all life and entomb all motion under its suffocating weight
The hurricane that rends and tears, snatches and scatters, lashing in uncontrolled rage

Reshape and consume until only you remain.

To a prime, the first looks might look like benevolence, and the second like malice. To an archomental though, both are just degrees of saturation. This means how thoroughly, and in what harmonious form, the element infuses with the multiverse.

Now here’s next thing that will make you scratch your brain‑box: Elementals don’t have a concept of psychological intent the way you do. They simple are. A mortal might say, “I want to help.” The fire elemental says nothing at all; its very nature leans toward ignition, its entire essence and purpose is to combust. It’s only when you cross the border between pure elemental and quasi‑mortal—your genies, your high mephits, your para‑elemental nobles and the like—that you start to see something that looks like choice rather than inevitability.

It’s here where those ‘good’ or ‘evil’ elementals that you might have heard the chant about show up. It’s not because they’ve decided upon charity or malevolence, but because they’ve tumbled to the dark of context. So yes, you can map Good onto “elemental harmony with others” and Evil onto “elemental domination of others.” Just don’t make the mistake of thinking the cinderkin started out with those categories.

II. Law and Chaos: Pure, Mixed, and Otherwise

Now let’s make everything twice as complicated by introducing Law and Chaos. Because if there’s one thing the multiverse loves, it’s taking a simple argument and complicating it until only the Guvners and Xaosmen still care. On the Inner Planes, Law and Chaos don’t mean “obedience” and “rebellion”, or even “society” and “individuality”. They manifest as patterns of elemental separation and mixture; purity and combination.

Law on the Inner Planes is manifested as purity, segmentation, and maintaining defined boundaries

The perfect marble cliffs of Earth, polished smooth without a chip or flaw
The laminar flows of Air, striated winds sliding over one another without turbulence or sound
Perfect flames that burn at a constant temperature forever, never flaring, consuming their fuel or dimming
Deep, still trenches of Water so remote that even light can’t reach that far

Remain yourself. Do not let other essences stain your being. Maintain clear borders.

Chaos is admixture, turbulence, and transgression of those boundaries

Ice, ooze, magma, smoke: para‑elementals are considered by some elementals to be insults to purity
Storms where air and water, lightning and ice, all get mashed into a screaming vortex
Fault lines in Earth where Fire and Air insist on intruding as molten rivers and liveable caverns
The Elemental Chaos itself, where the concepts like “what is element” start to break down

Breach and blend. New forms are born where essences collide.

Now here’s the pretty symmetry: your “good” harmony and “evil” domination can live on top of either “lawful” purity or “chaotic” amalgamation.

A water elemental who shapes itself with harmonious purity might insist that every river keep to its banks, dredging and shaping the riverbed until to ensure wasteful floods are rare and navigation is safe. It preserves the purity of the river, while supporting mortal life.
An harmoniously amalgamated air elemental might constantly stir breezes, moving on dispersing dangerous miasmas and bringing rain from distant seas, never letting the system settle, but diverting storms.

On the flip side:

An earth colossus of dominating purity might seek to lock the whole world into crystalline stasis, each stone locked in its ordained place, living things safely entombed as unchanging fossils.
A fire maelstrom of dominating amalgamation might revel in uncontrolled conflagration, burning without plan until nothing recognisable is left, just smoke, cinder and ash.

Same elements, same belief in the importance of their own element, but differing attitudes about boundaries and mixing.

III. The Favourite Word of Every Rilmani

Ah, “balance.” The magic word every rilmani trots out when they want to sound wise without saying anything useful.

On the Outer Planes, balance is some grand talk about the Great Wheel staying round and the Blood War being a conflict poised so it can never really end. On the Inner Planes, balance is just physics: pressures equalising, gradients appearing or collapsing, states of matter cycling. Think of it this way: if Fire truly conquered all, it would eventually exhaust its fuel and collapse into Ashes. If Water drowned everything, heat and motion would even out, and you’d end with a dark, frigid stillness. If Earth collapsed every empty space there would be no movement, no nothing—time itself might as well be petrified. If Air scattered all substances into perfect diffusion, you’d get an invisible, flavourless expanse almost indistinguishable from the Void.

With any extreme, the others are annihilated—and so, eventually, is the victor’s meaningful existence. Perfect success becomes self‑destruction. This is the Inner Planar Paradox of Balance that does not occur to the Outer Planar mind: Any one element that dominates too thoroughly defeats itself. The wiser elementals—not the barmy young storm fronts or bright sparks, but the old calms at the centre of cyclones, and the deep, slow currents of water—all know this. Their idea of balance is not a cosy middle ground where all elementals hold hands and sing hymns. Do elementals even have hands? No matter. It’s about dynamic equilibrium: endless flux, within ranges, that allows each element to both assert itself and simultaneously be constrained by the others.

In these terms, the “good” among the elementals are those who consciously—or at least habitually—sustain that churning coexistence. The “evil” are those who don’t care if the game ends so long as their colour covers the board at the final move.

VI. Pinning Labels onto Thunderstorms

Now, because this is the Cage and nobody can leave a idea alone, the factions all have their own screed about elemental ethics. The Guvners will tell you the Inner Planes prove that lawfulness is inherently natural and beneficial: “See how the stable configurations of the Inner Planes permit survival, specialisation and thriving?” What they don’t mention though is how it’s the pockets and borders where most of the life thrives.

The Xaositects will jabber that the recent re-emergence of the Elemental Chaos proclaims the victory of mixture: “Look at all the forms, cutter! The glory of so many elements, so many options!” They conveniently forget to mention how the unshapeable elemental chaos causes firey weather storms that turn lungs into kindling, or rain of metal shards that will slice your flesh into ribbons.

The Doomguard nod sagely and declare that the ceaseless erosion of earth, the destruction and cooling of fire, the weathering effect of water and air all prove entropy’s beautiful victory. They rarely admit that for entropy to have a story, something first had to rise in defiance of it.

And the Ciphers nod mysteriously and say, “Don’t worry about ethics; just act in accord with the flow.” Which is all well and good until your “flow” happens to be made of lava…

VII. There’s No Cruelty Like Elemental Compassion

But cutter, let’s not let the elementals off the hook entirely. Once you get to the point where an entity can use pronouns like “I” and “you” and mean them—once it starts making deals, issuing promises, and crafting long‑term schemes—then you can and should judge its conduct, even if its heart is literally a stone or its mind is full of air.

Consider the benevolent wysps who will let a cold traveller warm their paws on them, the artisanal azer who share their forge‑craft to craft weapons to defend communities, or the hospitable earth-lords who hollow out and reinforce safe caverns and tunnels to allow planewalkers and traders to visit. Here, “goodness” is an agreement: “I will confine my nature to ways where you too can thrive.” Or conversely, the oceanic powers who casually erase coastal cultures because they cluttered up the sea with pollution, or crushing earth tyrants who’d trigger a quake to bury cities in retribution for over-eager miners.

Notice the distinction: in all these cases, the elemental isn’t just expressing its essence blindly. It is modulating its essence in response to others. Ethics, in this context, comes down to how much room an elemental chooses to give alternative patterns. By your lights, if an elemental will self‑limit to leave space for non‑self, you call it good. If it will not self‑limit, or even delights in erasing non‑self, you might call it evil.

On the Inner Planes, though, good and evil is less about halos and horns and more about the tolerance of gradients. A “kind” elemental accepts being slightly less than maximally itself so multiple forms can co‑exist. A “wicked” one pursues maximal saturation, even when foreign structures must be dissolved to achieve this.

VIII. The Athar’s Little Joke

Since some wag will no doubt ask anway: what do we Athar make of all this? After all, my fellow factioneers never miss an excuse to drag the names of so‑called “powers” through the ooze. Well, from the Defier’s angle, the Inner Planes are a handy reminder that reality preceded theology. Fire burned long before a parasitic fire‑god collected prayers about it. Waters flowed before any sea‑deity took credit for them. The primal elemental intelligences are older, more fundamental—and about as impressed by pantheons as the mountain is by the lizard scurrying across it.

So any concept of ethics you might slap onto the Inner Planes is, from that stance, an afterthought. Mortals and powers arrived late, saw all these grand forces in motion, and scribbled judgments over them like a child doodling moustaches on statue. Of course, that doesn’t make ethics worthless. It just means ethics is our art, the Outer Planars, not the native language of the Inner Planes. To elementals in their purest form, good and evil as such are meaningless. There is only more or less of themselves, more or less intrusion by others, more or less structure in how those presences interpenetrate. But from the mortal point of view, those same primal drives can look very much like moral stances:

Harmony: “Be shaped enough that others can live with you.”
Domination: “Reshape and consume until only you remain.”
Purity: “Remain yourself. Do not let other essences stain your being. Maintain clear borders, clean edges, exact ratios.”
Amalgamation: “Breach and blend. New forms are born where essences collide, stabilise, synthesise.”

And while we are on the subject, Balance is not a cosy midpoint where everything is lukewarm and beige. It is the ongoing tension of extremes that prevent any one element collapsing into sterile victory. It is fire needing fuel it cannot itself create, water needing riverbeds to bound it, air needing heat or physical objects to stir it into a breeze, earth needing pressures and fractures to ever become more than dust or dead solidity.

You can preach that in temples, if you like, though the clergy won’t thank you. It suggests that virtue comes less from placating powerful patrons and more about confidering how much space you’re willing to leave for what is not you.

So when you next parley with a lord of the Inner Planes and you’re tempted to ask, “Are you good or evil?” …bar that, berk. Wrong question. Ask instead: How much like yourself do you demand this world become? How much of what is not you are you willing to let endure, unassimilated? And under what terms—by creating boundaries, or by blending? That, cutter, is as close as you’ll get to ethics among the cinders and currents, the stones and storms. Anything more is just you rattling your bone‑box at a hurricane and hoping it listens.

— Julius the Symmetrical