The morning after Hyjal, Mei Lin took her tea out to the balcony and sat with both hands wrapped around the cup because her fingers were not, yet, entirely hers.
Her fur still smelled faintly of ozone. She had washed twice. The smell was not on the fur. It was under it, in the place where the storm had lived yesterday and had not, quite, finished moving out.
She lifted one finger above the tea.
Just to see.
Just to check.
For one breath the cup felt too close to her skin, like a pond too close to a live wire. The water in it went alert. Not boiling. Not freezing. Listening. The way a pot listens when the fire underneath it is deciding what kind of heat to be. She could feel the voltage in her knuckle wanting to pour out of her without being asked, and the water in the cup already leaning in to meet it halfway.
She lowered the finger.
The tea did not freeze. Did not boil. Did not arc. A little steam, a little jasmine, a little of the bamboo smell that always caught in the leaves when the Shrine pantry-keepers dried them too near the courtyard. Good. Right. She was not the storm this morning. She was a Pandaren with cold toes and a warm cup and a cousin of a headache.
She thought about the first time. The Nightfall. The fight that kept going after there was nothing left of her to fight with, the moment the storm took her shape because there was no other shape left to take. She thought about yesterday. The eredar. The four elements agreeing all at once, all four of them pulling in the same direction for the first time in her life, and the spirits choosing her as the shape they poured through.
Twice.
Not a thing you call every week. Not a thing you call for goats. A door the storm opens twice in a life if you are lucky, and she had gone through it both times still standing on the other side, which was two more times than most of the old shamans in grandmother's stories had managed.
She was going to be very careful about asking for a third.
Grandmother had a saying for mornings like this. You do not knock on the sky twice in a month. The sky remembers.
Mei Lin drank her tea.
The storm could take the rest of the week off.
— Mist