Mei Lin had healed Ikmin from the second row for months. She had never held him up by the sternum with her own water and a mouthful of bad language. Today was the first day for both.
Chromie met them at the spiral of portals in the Caverns of Time. A bronze dragon in gnome shape, robes too long, sleeves knotted back at the elbow, already weary of the day before the day had finished. She had the posture of someone who had watched the same story a thousand times and was making sure it ran right on the thousand and first.
"Stratholme," she said. "You know the year. The Infinite Dragonflight is back to muddle the set. I want this ending the way it ended. Heavy, but clean."
Mei Lin nodded. Ikmin adjusted the strap on his shield.
He dismounted at the portal ring. She had seen the mount before at the stable block in Stormwind and had not, until now, watched him come off it. A Pureblood Fire Hawk, wings the colour of a banked forge, talons the colour of an anvil pulled out of the fire before it had been let cool. The bird settled onto the platform and folded its wings the way a grandmother folds a tea towel. Ikmin patted its neck once, quietly, and turned to her.
He did not speak. He rarely did. Red-gold plate, a winged helm under his arm, a mace at his hip whose head had a word beaten into it she could not read at this distance. A shield the size of a door. Light humming off him in a low gold note that was not a flash. He had a darker set she had seen him in before, black plate and red spikes that read more like stormcloud than sunset. Today he wore the sunset. Walking into Stratholme in the colour of a sunrise felt like a decision.
He nodded once. She understood the whole of the nod.
Chromie pressed a satchel into her hand before they went. Inside, eight small glass vials with a label nobody would have written if they had spent a single night in the city. Stratholme Holy Water. Copper-bright, low on blessing, high on intent. Mei Lin turned one over in her palm, read the label twice to make sure, and looked up at the bronze gnome with her mouth already open.
"Save it, Mist," Chromie said, before she could. "Every shaman says the same line the first time. The plague takes him, you break one of those on him. Works on the infection, does not work on sarcasm. Try not to need more than eight."
"A shaman," Mei Lin said anyway, "carrying holy water. Into Stratholme. In a satchel the Bronze Dragonflight packed. The names are writing themselves and I am being made to carry them."
"The names write themselves. Save the jokes for the paladin."
She did not quite save them.
The portal opened. They stepped through.
Stratholme before the burn.
The streets ran cold at her ankles the way only doomed streets run. Lanterns still lit. Vendor carts still half-loaded. A dog somewhere barking at nothing and everything. Up the boulevard a tall man in white and silver stood with his head bent toward an older paladin who was saying the wrong word for a thing the prince had already decided to do. The prince did not look like a villain yet. That was the worst part of the whole street. He looked like a man who had not been sleeping.
Mei Lin had read this story in a book on the bench above the Stormwind canals. Reading a thing and walking past it on cobbles were different rooms of the same house.
Ikmin walked in front of her without being asked. Consecration bloomed under his boots in a wide circle of pale gold, the way a table gets a circle of light from a steady candle. The first of the infected came out of a doorway at a gait that was not quite running anymore.
He took it on the shield.
She had not asked him to. She never needed to. The blow rang off the rim and he pivoted and hammered the thing into the cobbles in one motion. Before the next one had reached them she had planted a Healing Stream Totem at the foot of a lantern post and called the water spirits in. They came. Even here. Even in a street that was about to be set on fire. Grandmother had been right again, as she kept being.
Two more came from the alley. Mei Lin caught one with a Lightning Bolt that opened its chest like a tent flap. Ikmin threw his shield at the other. It curved through the air on a line only the Light understood, caught the thing square in the forehead, and came back to his hand.
She filed that for later.
They worked up the boulevard after the prince.
The rhythm settled fast. He stood. She kept him standing. He stepped between her and anything with intent. She planted Earth Shield on him after the second engagement, stones orbiting his shoulders the way grandmother had taught her to orbit stones on Shao-lin, and his plate took the next two swings like the blows had been landed on a wall.
Meathook was waiting in the square.
A butcher's nightmare, three men deep in the chest, hooks on chains at his belt and a cleaver in each hand. He roared once when he saw them and charged across the open. Ikmin set his feet and let him come.
The collision was loud.
She cast through it. Chain Heal on the sound of the hit. Lightning Bolt into the cleaver arm when it lifted. Ikmin turned inside the next swing and took the flat of the cleaver on his shield and did not move. Light flashed from his palm. Word of Glory, the gold going into his own chest where the cleaver had clipped him, and the cut closed while he was still moving.
Meathook folded with one of his own hooks still in his belt.
Ikmin pulled the hook free, set it on a barrel, and moved on without comment.
The first plague-boil took him three streets later.
It erupted out of a grain barrel against a shopfront and splashed him to the knee. The plague in it found a gap in the leather straps behind his greave and went in, and she watched his face change the way a lantern changes when the wick is wrong. His shoulders rolled forward. The Light on his plate guttered down to a brown hum. His mace arm slowed.
Mei Lin already had the vial in her teeth. She uncorked it, stepped in past his shield, and broke the whole of it square across his breastplate.
"Holy water," she said. "On a paladin. From a shaman. You are the holy. I am the water. Somebody bottled both of us and put a straight label on it. I would like to know who."
The plague came out of him the way dust comes off a rug that has finally been beaten. He coughed once, straightened, and hit the next infected thing so hard the sound reached the end of the street before the body did.
"I am going to write grandmother about this," Mei Lin said, to nobody, to her own cobbles. "A shaman. Throwing holy water. On a paladin. She taught me the whole of the old ways and not one of them covered this."
Ikmin almost smiled. She counted it.
It happened three more times before the night was out.
Once in an alley behind the cathedral, where a boil cracked open on a rafter and caught him across the collar. She had a vial on his gorget before he had finished the swing, and he did not miss the swing. A second thing went over on top of the first.
Once in the hall where Salramm the Fleshcrafter was stitching things together that did not want to be stitched. The necromancer's curse crawled across the floor in a dark seam and found Ikmin's boots. She threw him a vial in a clean arc. He caught it left-handed without looking, broke it on his gorget, and went on hammering the necromancer into the table he had been working at. The Light came back up on his plate before the table had finished giving.
"That's three," she called after him, because somebody had to keep count.
"Don't," he said. First word he had used in two fights.
Once on a stair when the Infinite Dragonflight broke out of a seam in the moment and Chrono-Lord Epoch dragged him through a half-second that was not for living people. That one the vial could not reach. Mei Lin planted a Water Totem at the stair where he had been and called the old words under her breath. The bronze air thinned. The Light came back on in his plate as if it had never gone out.
By the end of that corridor she had used three vials and had five left. A shaman with most of a satchel of holy water and a paladin stitched back together by her water-arm every second street. Mei Lin was having the time of her life and was not going to write that part to grandmother honestly.
Mal'Ganis was waiting at the end.
A dreadlord at the far end of a long red room, wings folded at his back the colour of old blood, eyes that had been made to look pleased about everyone else's grief. He turned and smiled the way a knife smiles. The air in the room went wrong along the same seam Iso'rath had gone wrong, and her water spirits sat up at attention without being asked.
Ikmin stepped forward once. Just once. Placed himself between her and the dreadlord without a word, the way he had placed himself between her and every other thing in the city.
She set a Fire Totem at her right and a Healing Stream Totem at her left and let the Light do the work. It did. Avenger's Shield off his arm, a wheeling disc of gold that hit Mal'Ganis in the chest and rebounded into two lesser things behind him. A second Consecration bloomed under his boots. His mace came down in a long steady arc, over and over, no flourish, no shout, just the work. Light on Light on Light.
Mei Lin threaded Chain Lightning through the dreadlord's ribs between his swings and kept Chain Heal jumping from him to her to him again. When Mal'Ganis opened his wings for a killing breath, Ikmin raised his shield and the breath broke around him and left him standing.
The dreadlord vanished in a shred of shadow, the way his kind do. Not dead. Moved. Elsewhere. The prince would find him again on colder ground later, in a story everyone had read.
The room went quiet.
Chromie was waiting at the time-door.
She looked at them, the two of them, plate caked with plague-grease and robes smeared with ash. She did not thank them. The Bronze Dragonflight does not thank. She nodded, which was the same thing.
Ikmin mounted the Fire Hawk. The bird crouched, spread, lifted. Flame trailed off the tips of its wings in a long bright line, and for a breath the air above the portal ring was warm the way Uldum had been warm in the middle of the day.
He nodded once down at her from the saddle.
"Good run, Mist," he said.
Four words. A whole evening's worth.
Mei Lin bowed the polite amount.
She walked back toward the stable at her own pace. Her water spirits were quiet in her ribs, the quiet of work done well, not the quiet of work done hard. Three empty vials at the bottom of the satchel, five full ones still rattling in the top. A shaman walking out of Stratholme with holy water left over. Grandmother would hear about this one. Grandmother would take her time writing back.
Walls come in different weather.
Callisaw's was wind. Ikmin's was Light. Hers was water. She was starting to notice she kept finding people built to stand in front of her. She was not sure what that said about her yet. She thought it might be a good thing.
She thought of the prince walking the burnt streets under his own decision. She thought of a paladin in red and gold standing behind the prince the whole way, and not breaking, and coming back when the plague took him, and coming back again. A city that had broken a man. A man who did not break in it.
She filed the joke for the letter too.
— Mist