Dear Grandmother,
I am writing this on a slate ledge above a wind that has, as a Wildhammer warned me it would, taken some of the fur off my forearms. The Twilight Highlands are exactly as advertised. I am wearing two coats and considering a third.
But the coats are not what I wanted to write about.
I sat by a fire tonight with two people, and I want to tell you about them properly, because I have been turning the evening over for the last hour and I think it matters more than I knew at the time.
Her name is Mokva. She is a tauren. Grandmother, you have seen drawings of them, but the drawings do not prepare you. She is taller than the dwarves I have been working with by half a person. Russet fur down her shoulders, a white blaze between her horns, hooves she sets down carefully on stone. She wears a totem at her belt that smells of cedar and something burnt. When she laughs, it is low enough to feel in the bench under you. She laughed twice tonight. I tried to be funny three times. She is generous.
The other was an orc. Grandmother, an orc. His name is Garruk. Green like wet moss after rain, broad enough that I would not bet on the bench he was sitting on, two short tusks that move when he talks and one ear notched from something he did not explain. He carries a hammer. He uses the head of it to anchor totems into ground that does not want to take them, which is most of the ground up here. He has hands like you would expect for someone built that way, and he sets a totem down with the same care you used when you set the kettle on the cracked tile. I noticed. He noticed me noticing.
We were all there for the same reason. The Highlands are screaming, in the way you taught me to listen for. The earth has been broken open and held that way too long. There is a shaman order up here that has gathered to answer it. They wear grey-green and they call themselves the Earthen Ring, and they do not care which side of any line you came from before you put on the colours. The elements do not care. So they do not care.
I was invited to sit with them this evening, after a day's work. I went, on the assumption that sitting was sitting and tea was tea. I did not realise until I was halfway through my bowl that I was sharing fire with people my Stormwind companions would have called enemies on principle. I did not realise because the principle was not in the room.
Mokva asked me about my totems. I showed her the water totem. She told me hers were the same shape but bound differently, that her people braided horsehair into the carving so the wind had something to pull on. She showed me. I asked if I could put my palm on it and she said yes. Grandmother, the spirits in her totem leaned toward mine like they had been hoping. I have never felt that before. Not with another shaman. Not outside Pandaria.
Garruk asked me what my grandmother had taught me first. He asked it like the answer would matter to him. I told him: water finds the cracks. He sat with that. Then he said his teacher had told him the same thing in a different language, that the earth holds and water moves and a shaman is the place where holding and moving agree. I did not have anything to add to that. So I did not. We just sat with it for a while.
I keep coming back to a thing I have to tell you straight, grandmother, because if I do not, the letter will be polite and useless.
I was raised to be careful with these people. The city I came to first taught me a great deal about who its enemies were, and the lessons stuck without my asking. I have stood across a battlefield from orcs. I have heard tauren in the distance and assumed the worst about the distance. I am being honest with you. I am.
And tonight I sat between two of them and the only line in the room was the one between fire and dark. They were on my side of it. I was on theirs. Our totems were touching. Nobody asked anybody to apologise for being in the wrong colours. Nobody had time. The Highlands are too loud. The work is too heavy. The water does not know whose tabard it is washing. The storm does not check.
I think you would be furious if I had refused to sit. I think that is the part you taught me without saying it out loud. Respect is not a faction. You said that to me once about a fisherman from a village we were supposed to dislike, and I remembered it tonight and could not put it down.
There is a thing I want to say but I do not know how to write it cleanly, so I will just say it. I felt at home, grandmother. Not the home of Dawn's Blossom. A different home. The one where shamans are shamans first and the rest comes after. I did not know that home existed. I have been walking in only one of my colours so long I had stopped noticing the other was missing.
I will keep the tabard. Maxiona gave it to me and I love it and I will not put it down. But I think I have a second cloth on me now too, grey-green and quiet, that I did not have to ask permission to wear. The elements handed it to me through Mokva's totem leaning toward mine.
I would like you to meet them one day. I think you would put the kettle on and ask Mokva about the horsehair binding for an hour. I think you would tell Garruk his hands were honest. I think you would tell me, after, I told you so, in that way you have, where you do not have to say the words because your face does the work for you.
For now I am going back to the fire. They have saved me a place. The wind is awful and the tea will be terrible and I would not be anywhere else tonight.
Yours in two colours and one element,
— Mist
P.S. Mokva ate three bowls of dwarf stew without comment and then asked if there was more. I think you would like her on principle.