The leaf was doing its best.
A dry cedar leaf, cupped like a little boat, floating down a slow stream a morning's walk north of Dawn's Blossom. Mei Lin had been following it for an hour. Not chasing. Accompanying. She had come up into the forest with a rice ball in her sash and a question in her chest and no plan beyond see what the lightning does when nobody is asking it to do anything.
She steadied her breath. Lifted a finger.
A small lightning bolt arced into the boat. White and precise. The leaf jumped. Something in her ribs pulled taut, the small warm cost of the cast, familiar as the tug of a bucket on the way up from a well.
Second bolt at another leaf. Same arc. Same small pull.
Third bolt.
There was no cost.
She stood very still with her finger still out, waiting for the tug to arrive late. It did not arrive. The bolt had left her hand clean. Like she had reached for a cup of tea and found that someone had already poured it.
"Oh," she said to nobody. Then, cautiously, in case the stream was listening, "Thank you?"
She tried again. Fourth bolt. Cost. Fifth. Cost. Sixth went wide because she was trying too hard, and it hit a mossy stone, which hissed at her in a way stones are not supposed to hiss.
"Sorry," she told the stone.
Seventh. No cost. Clean. Free. She looked down at her own hand like it might explain itself. It did not.
She sat down cross-legged in the mud. Watched a water strider pick its way across the current with the patience of a tax collector.
Grandmother had not named this. She had not. But she had said once, on a porch where the rain was drumming on the tiles and Mei Lin was maybe seven and frustrated about something a seven-year-old shaman gets frustrated about, "Some spells will come free. Not often. Don't chase them. Let them choose you."
Mei Lin had nodded very seriously at the time, the way children do when they are saving an instruction for later, and she had filed it under grandmother being philosophical. She had not thought grandmother meant it literally.
She lay down on her back in the moss. Put her hands on her belly. Looked at the canopy. Tried, with some effort, to care about nothing in particular. The cat-like trick of pretending not to want something so the something comes to you.
She lifted a finger at the sky. Lazy. Uninterested.
It came free.
She laughed, loud enough to startle a bird out of a nearby tree, and let her arm drop back to the moss. Alright. She would not chase it. The storm would choose when it wanted to be generous. She was just the pandaren it chose near.
— Mist