Dear Grandmother,
They have a king with a tail. He stood when I came in, and I did not know where to put my hands.
I have to back up.
Uldum is a desert. Sand the colour of old honey, a sun that lays its hand on your shoulders and does not lift it, and a river running through the middle of all of it like the world remembered, late, that something needed to drink. My fur is doing things in this heat I would rather not write down.
But I did not write to complain about the weather. I wrote to tell you about the Tol'vir.
Grandmother, they are cat-people. I do not know how else to put it the first time. They walk on two legs and they are tall, taller than the tauren even, and their faces are lion-shaped, broad nose and small round ears set high on the head. Sand-coloured skin, or stone-coloured, depending on the light. Most have a tail, long and slow-moving, and they use it the way you used your sleeves at the tea table, a small extra punctuation when a sentence is finishing. They wear linen and gold, white folds and bright at the wrist and the throat. They have bearing. They stand inside themselves.
They were made by the Titans, the same hands that shaped the great stone places I have been walking through since I left Pandaria. The earth here knows them. I felt it the moment I stepped onto the road into the city.
Ramkahen is the city. White walls, red banners, water in narrow channels through the streets so the sound of it is everywhere. I was brought into the throne room without much ceremony. King Phaoris sits in a hall that does not try to overwhelm you. Grandmother, a king stood for me.
He said, "I welcome you to Ramkahen." Just that. He let the welcome sit long enough to mean it. Then he asked what I had seen on the road, and he listened the way you listen, with the whole of him. They use language carefully here. Every word seems to be picked up first and turned over to see if it is the right one.
Near the end, he made a dry joke about being a king of cats and the desert being his litterbox. I laughed before I could think. He almost smiled. He is a person. I do not know why that surprised me, but I want to be honest about it.
Here is the harder part of the letter.
The Tol'vir are at war with themselves. There is another tribe, the Neferset, who took a bargain from the wrong hands and turned. Same faces. Same Titan-make under their feet. The line between them is a wound, and the city I sat in this afternoon is bleeding from it slowly. Phaoris carries that. He sits as though something heavy is pressing on the back of his neck and he has decided not to mention it.
A people split against themselves. I do not know a worse sentence in any language.
I keep thinking of the elements. Water does not war with itself. Storm answers storm. The earth holds the earth. But people, even people made by hands that meant them well, can still be turned. I do not have anything wise to say about that yet.
A sun priest outside the city stopped me on the way in. Sun Priest Asaris, with a voice like a bell used gently for a long time. We spoke for two breaths about the river. I want to go back and sit longer.
The work here is heavier than it looks from the road, and I am keeping my shield where I can reach it.
Yours in honey-coloured sand and one quiet bow,
— Mist
P.S. The king's tail moved while he was thinking. Slow, the way you stir tea when you are about to say something you mean. That is the detail I cannot put down. It was the moment I stopped seeing a king and started seeing him.