Grandmother used to say that the quickest way to understand what a mountain is for is to climb one that is still bleeding.
Mei Lin had not known what she meant. She had assumed it was one of the ones she was meant to sit with for ten years. Then a leaf arrived on the balcony railing, sealed with crushed mint, and the mountain in question turned out to have a name.
She had been here before. Not this one. The other one. The older mountain, the one the bronze dragons kept folded inside a cavern, where Archimonde still climbed and an elder tree still burned and two gnomes had carried her through the ash. That Hyjal had ended inside her head in a silence she'd only just started being able to hear around.
This Hyjal was different.
It was above ground, for one. It had weather. It had druids, far more druids than seemed wise in one place, walking the slopes with seedlings in their hands and ash in their fur. It had Cenarion Circle banners hung from bent trees that were already leafing out again. And at the centre of it, rising from a cradle of burnt stone, a tree. Not the old one. A new one. Nordrassil, still unfinished. Still missing the crown. A young World Tree with a sky-shaped hole in the top of itself where the canopy should have been.
She stood at the base of it for a long time before she remembered to breathe.
A night elf found her there. Found was the word. Mei Lin had not been hiding, but she had been still long enough that the druid had to decide whether to interrupt. She'd settled it by sitting down on a stone and waiting to be spoken to.
"You're the Pandaren who walked Archimonde's hill," the druid said, eventually.
"I'm a Pandaren who did a thing at Hyjal, yes."
"The elements have been talking about you up here. You were loud enough that the mountain noticed in two directions at once."
Mei Lin thought about that. About the summit. About the silence after. She did not know what to say to the idea of being loud in both versions of the same mountain, so she went with, "Sorry."
The druid laughed. First real laugh she'd heard all week. "Good shaman manners. Come with me. If you're here, you're working."
Working meant a week of errands that did not feel like errands.
A basket of saplings carried up a slope where the heat still came through the stone. A cairn rebuilt for a druid who had been too injured to rebuild it herself. A fight against fire elementals that had crawled up out of a vent and refused to leave, where Mei Lin planted a water totem between them and the young roots and let the spirits argue it out. They won. The elementals sank back into the stone looking offended.
She met an ancient in a grove who had grown a new arm to replace the one the Firelands had taken. He showed her the new bark the way somebody shows off a new haircut. She told him it suited him. He made a noise that she thought was laughter, and was possibly going to take a thousand years to finish.
She helped light a beacon for a wildgod whose name she could not pronounce and whose presence she could feel in her teeth before she could see it. Hawk-shaped. Ancient. Not angry. Tired, in the way of things that had been tired for longer than she had been a person. She planted a fire totem next to the beacon and asked the flame spirits to behave. They did, mostly. One of them argued.
She spent an afternoon next to a druid who was reading a book to a tree. The tree seemed to be following along. She did not ask.
The days piled up into a week and then into something close to two. Nobody made her sign anything. Nobody gave her a medal. The druids were not a medal kind of people. They accepted help the way a river accepted a bucket, briefly, and went on running.
On her last morning, the night elf druid who'd found her at the foot of the tree walked her back down to the south road and stood with her while she waited for the wyvern.
"You know what surprised me," the druid said.
"What."
"You didn't try to tell anyone you'd been here before."
Mei Lin looked back at Nordrassil. The young tree was catching the morning light on its missing crown, holding the sun the way a cup holds water when the cup is not quite full yet. She thought about the summit. About Archimonde. About a smaller mountain full of worse sound, kept inside a cave.
"The one I walked," she said carefully, "already happened. You're growing a new one. I'd have to be a very rude guest to compare them."
The druid nodded. Long and slow. Druid-speed. "That is exactly the right answer."
"I have a lot of wrong ones. Statistically, one of them was going to be correct."
The wyvern carried her south along the Kalimdor coast. The mountain shrank behind her. Not in the way it shrank when she'd left the cavern. That one had shrunk the way a wound shrinks when you've finally looked away from it. Nordrassil shrank the way a candle shrinks when you've lit it and walked into the next room knowing it was still there.
She pulled her notebook out against her knee and wrote:
Two Hyjals. One I fought. One I watered. The second one was harder.
Grandmother would understand that sentence the moment she read it. The rest of the continent was going to take a while.
Mei Lin closed the book.
Ahead, the coast curved into green again, and the mist started to come back in off the sea, and for the first time in a long time the mountain behind her was quieter than she was.
— Mist
Achievement Unlocked
Coming Down the Mountain