The sun was going down over the Vale and Mei Lin was sitting on the railing.
Not on the bench. Not against the wall. On the railing. Legs crossed, one hand resting on the wood, posture exactly like the one she used to sit with on a rooftop in Stormwind the first night she'd ever been there, listening to canal spirits that sounded tired and trying not to feel like a river dumped into an ocean.
Same posture. Different bones.
That Pandaren had been a river that had lost its bed. This one had found one.
She ran her thumb along the wood. There were stories in this railing if you knew where to look. A set of four long scratches near the corner where Orion liked to sharpen his claws whenever Kindrra left him alone too long. Kindrra had apologised once. Mei Lin had told her to stop apologising. A black lion marking his territory was the nicest compliment a balcony could get.
A burnt spot near the railing's other end, roughly gnome-sized, where Maxiona's Observer had decisively resolved a difference of opinion with a very large beetle. The guild master had shrugged. The beetle had not got a vote.
Callisaw's sandals by the training courtyard door, lined up with suspicious precision. He only ever wore them indoors, and even then reluctantly. They always looked like they were waiting for a foot that wasn't coming back any time soon.
Morrowfur's herb corner, bundles hanging from the ceiling in the order he'd dried them, smelling like every season at once. She'd tried to understand the system. He had told her it wasn't a system, it was a friendship.
The air under the far lantern still felt heavy where Nycturna had sat the one evening she'd visited. Mei Lin didn't know her well, not yet, but the pressure she left behind was easy to spot. Her quiet stayed, even if she hadn't.
And a faint arcane shimmer by the west archway, like a watermark on the air. Celceta had portalled through that morning, briefly, and left again the same way. Mei Lin had only met her the once. The shimmer was taking its time to fade. A careful mage leaves careful residue.
Her people. All of them, in small evidence. Scratches. Scorch marks. Bundles. Pressure. Shimmer. The balcony was holding them even when they weren't here.
Grandmother used to say, "Water finds the cracks." Mei Lin had always thought she meant it as a healing lesson. A shaman's work, finding the wound and filling it.
She was still learning what that sentence could mean.
Water finds the cracks in the stone. And it also finds the cracks in the people. You find where they need you. You settle in. You stay. And if you're lucky, they find yours too.
She pulled a small water totem from her pack and pressed it into a gap in the railing wood. The totem hummed. The spirits answered, not the sad older spirits that had taken so long to warm to her in Stormwind, not the screaming ones that had begged her to hear them in every broken place since. Just a quiet sound, like rain on jade leaves.
Home had found a new address.
The railing didn't give her an argument. The sun took its time going down.
— Mist