Dear Grandmother,
I wrote you from Stormwind once and told you everything was stone. Even the people, I think. I want to tell you about the people I found between the stones. It turns out there are more of them than I expected.
I'll go one by one. If I try to say it all at once, the letter will tip over.
Maxiona first, because she's why any of this exists. A gnome who runs our guild like a very cheerful stove, everything warm, everything decided. She found me on a bench, grandmother. That's still the part I keep coming back to. I was listening to spirits that sounded tired and I didn't know what to do next, and a small green-haired woman with a floating demon for a shadow sat down and asked me what I was hearing. She asked. Then she gave me a tabard and a family before I had finished deciding I needed either. Her fire is chaos. Her heart is not.
Callisaw makes terrible tea. He also stands between every bad thing and everyone he cares about, and he does it without ever looking like he's being brave. He took a demon's wrath across his shoulders once to spare her. He did not flinch. He did not tell me about it after. He just let the fur grow back and went on making bad tea. Grandmother, he's a wall. Walls don't need glory. I've finally learned what that sentence means.
Morrowfur smells like you. Herbs, damp earth, something green I can't name. He walks with treants in the mornings and has a corner of my balcony that's hung with every bundle of dried things you taught me the names of. He doesn't talk much. When he does, I pay attention. He went quiet once, the day I told him the book he was carrying used to be a cousin. Pun. You would have liked it. He did not.
Nycturna I've only met the once. A clouded left eye, a quiet that settles a whole room without her asking it to, the kind of listening that feels like it has weight. I do not know her well yet, but I want to. She laughed at one of my puns and it started silent and then broke open, and I have been thinking about that laugh longer than is probably reasonable.
Kindrra has a black lion named after the best hunter in the sky and she feeds him dried fish that tastes like someone was lying to it. She shares the fish. It is still terrible. I eat it anyway, because a friend's bad fish is still a friend's fish, and you taught me that. She nocks an arrow before I have finished identifying the target. She started a war with me over a cork joke and came out laughing. I'd pick her again. Every time.
Celceta has careful hands. That's the first thing I noticed. Arcane that doesn't sit still, pathways that argue with her, and she holds it the way you hold a cup of water at the end of a long day, steadily, because if you let it go it's gone. I am still learning her, grandmother. She is precise and quiet and I do not claim to know her yet. But her portals are very tidy, and I respect a tidy portal.
Yoniana is destiny with a staff bigger than she is. Grandmother, I am not making this up. She rides a bear around the courtyard just so more people will notice. She speaks so fast she considers small talk an obstacle. She wanted a hat. She walked through the end of the world for the hat. She got the hat. You would disapprove of her recklessness and approve of her conviction in exactly equal measure. That is a mathematically elegant friendship.
Devonmichael doesn't say much. When he does, he means it. He cracks his knuckles and sparks fall out like small apologies for how much fire he's capable of. The closest thing I have ever had to a compliment from him is "not bad", and I will be dining out on it for the rest of my life.
They're loud, grandmother. Louder than thunder.
But I'd stand in front of a dragon for every one of them.
I already have.
That's the promise I made the night of the Obsidian Sanctum, the one you pretended not to worry about when I wrote you. I haven't broken it yet. I don't plan to.
There's a thing I haven't told you, though. I want to tell you now, while the rain is quiet and my hands are still.
I was afraid, at the end of Mount Hyjal. Not of the demon, if that makes sense. Of the power. All four of them answered me at the same time. Not one at a time, the way you taught me. Not in a sequence. All at once. The earth and the air and the water and the fire, all agreeing for the first time in my whole life. I could feel them pushing out through my skin looking for a way to be useful, and for a breath I didn't know if I could hold them. I thought I might come apart on the spot.
I held them because two gnomes were counting on me, and because a monk was sleeping under a tree somewhere with a noodle bowl on his chest, and because I'd made a promise back in a dragon's hall years ago and I hadn't come this far to break it now.
You always said I was more storm than stream. I'm writing this to tell you I think I'm both now. I don't think the argument between them is over. I think I've just learned how to sit in the middle of the argument and keep a clear head. That's what you were teaching me without saying so. I see it now.
Thank you, grandmother.
I've been cooking. A whole pot, most nights, on the balcony, with whatever I can find. Callisaw came up the other evening and ate three bowls of noodles in a row without saying a word. He set the bowl down, nodded once, and left. I have decided to take that as the highest review I have ever received.
I have been thinking about you. Every time it rains here. The rain falls straight down in the lowlands, always in a hurry, but up here on the balcony it slows. Like it remembers itself. Like it knows what it used to be when it fell on jade leaves in Dawn's Blossom. Almost. Not quite. But almost.
Almost is a currency. I've been spending it carefully. There is still some left.
Tell the pond I say hello.
Tell yourself I say thank you, in the language you taught me, water finding the cracks.
Yours in rain and bad decisions,
— Mist
P.S. The warlock called my noodles "not bad". I'm having it carved into stone.
P.P.S. The rain here falls on a balcony I call mine now. It sounds almost like home. Almost. But almost is enough.