There is a list, and Mei Lin is working her way down it.
It is a longer list than she had expected. Some old gnome on the Stormwind canal had named the lakes for her one morning between casts, in a cracked sing-song that started in Pandaria and did not stop until it had crossed Northrend and most of the broken country in between. She had nodded politely and then quietly written every word down in the back of her recipe book, because the man fished the canal six days a week and the canal still let him. He had named the patience thing too, and the bait thing, and the "don't talk to fish if you don't want answers" thing, and most of the way she fishes now is his fault.
She started at home. Where else.
The Pandaria water knew her. It had been knowing her since she was small enough to fall in. The spirits in the Jade Forest streams perked up when she planted a small water totem on the bank, the way an aunt perks up when a niece comes through the door without warning. The fish on the gnome's list came up almost embarrassed about how easily they came up. She caught the Valley of the Four Winds fish from a farmer's irrigation ditch while the farmer told her about her tomatoes for forty minutes. She caught the Krasarang Wilds fish in a tide pool while a turtle the size of a tea-table watched her without blinking. The Vale water was the hardest. The fish there did not come up so much as agree to come up, and there is a difference. Grandmother had taught her the difference. She thanked it. She thanked all of them. Grandmother would have approved.
Then she went to the broken places, because that was where she had been planting her totems anyway and she had her rod in her pack regardless.
The water in Twilight Highlands tasted of dragon, the long-settled kind. A dragon had decided this was its lake several centuries ago and had not bothered to leave. The fish there came up dark and sharp at the gills. She pulled the line a finger's-width slower than usual, out of respect. Uldum was sandstone and gold and the lakes were small and the spirits were old and dry-voiced and tickled to be asked. She caught what she needed in an oasis next to a half-buried statue with a face she could not name. Deepholm was the strangest fishing she had ever done. The lake she fished there was barely water, more a held thought of water in stone, and the fish came up grey and patient and refused to die for almost an hour. Vashj'ir did not count, the gnome had said, because the entire zone was a lake, and lakes did not have lakes inside them, and she had not argued because the gnome was older than her and had a knife. She fished Mount Hyjal last in this stretch, on a quiet lake by the tree, near where she had run for Tyrande not that long ago. The water there remembered fire. She did not stay long.
Then she went north.
The Northrend water was the wrong cold. She knew lake-cold from Pandaria. That cold woke you up. Northrend lake-cold was different. It went through her fur and sat down in her bones and got comfortable. The first cast snapped her line. She switched to a heavier hook, planted a small water totem on the bank, and the spirits in the fjord lake leaned in slowly the way old neighbours lean over a fence when a stranger has news. They had not been spoken to in a while. They were polite about it.
After Howling Fjord it became a rhythm. Borean Tundra for a sculpin built like a brick. Dragonblight for a salmon, where she did not look toward the Obsidian Sanctum on the horizon and her totem hummed a little harder. Grizzly Hills for a fish that smelled like bear country before she had even pulled it out. Sholazar Basin where the lakes were warm in a way that did not match the latitude and the spirits had opinions about that, mostly cheerful. Crystalsong Forest where the lake water tasted of arcane and the fish came up with their gills already glittering. The Storm Peaks where she had to stand on her own boot prints to keep them from filling with snow. Icecrown last, because the gnome had warned her: "Save Icecrown for when you have stopped flinching at it."
He had not been wrong.
She fished Icecrown from the edge of a frozen lake while a small healing rain drifted around her shoulders to keep the line from freezing solid between casts. The fish came up dark, blunt, and very old. She told it she was sorry for the trouble. She let it go.
The first list was done.
Then she had started the other one, because of course there was another one. The old gnome had named that one the same afternoon he had named the first one, and she had written it down too. Ocean fish, this time. Coastlines instead of lakes, across all the same continents. Bigger hooks. Different patience.
She is one fish away from the end of that one.
The fish is a winter squid. The winter squid does not, by all accounts, exist in any meaningful sense between months that are warm enough for boots that do not crack. "It comes when the cold comes back," the gnome had said. He had shrugged. The shrug had several winters in it.
So she is waiting.
Squid keep their own calendar. Grandmother would say that is fair. Grandmother would also say that fairness has nothing to do with whether a squid shows up, and both of those things can be true at the same time.
She has put the rod by the door, the bait next to it, the pack laid out for the day the wind turns.
Until then she sits on the Shrine balcony in the evenings and lays the fish-list flat beside her tea and runs a fingertip down it and reads it like a poem. Three continents done. One sea almost done.
Almost.
She knows what that word costs. She has paid the bill before. She is willing to pay it for a squid.
The list will close when the cold comes back.
"Off the squidule," she said out loud, to nobody, and laughed at her own joke for a long time before she folded the list and put it under her teacup so the wind would not take it.
— Mist
