Raksura show respect by threatening to fight each other.

[That's only about half true. Stone gets respect. Most of the time. It's largely because he's bigger than everyone else, though.]

I don't know about your elemental spirits, but mentors where I come from can auger the future, too, and it's usually not what you expect it to be. Like the time when they told me to visit another court in order to get a new consort for our young queen, and instead I was supposed to just run into him on my way home. I'd take whatever was said with a lot of careful thinking.