Mei Lin would like the record to state that she was not the one who suggested this. She was sitting on her balcony at the Shrine, minding her own business, drinking tea that was finally the right temperature, when Yoniana came back in a flash of frost and portal smoke and said four words that ruined her evening.
"I need a cowl."
Yoniana was small. Gnomish small. The kind of small that made you forget she was there until the temperature dropped twenty degrees and everything in front of her was encased in ice. She carried Cold Convergence in both hands, a frost staff taller than she was, and wore Brutal Gladiator armor that looked like it had been through exactly as many fights as the name suggested. Frost clung to her shoulders like a second skin. The air around her hummed with cold.
Mei Lin had met a few gnomes by now. Maxiona burned hot, all chaotic fire and grinning demons. Yoniana was the opposite. Precise. Patient. A cold so deep and so controlled it made Mei Lin's water totems nervous.
"What kind of cowl?" Mei Lin asked. Already knowing she was going to regret this.
"The Cowl of the Tempest." Yoniana's eyes lit up the way they only did when she was talking about ancient armor or about to freeze something important. "The last piece of the Tempest Regalia. The one that completes the set. The one that's been sitting in Mount Hyjal waiting for me to come and collect it."
"Waiting for you."
"Specifically for me. It's been waiting since before the Sundering. I think it's getting impatient."
"And this cowl. It's in..."
"Mount Hyjal. At the very end. Past everything the mountain can throw at us. Guarded by Archimonde himself."
Callisaw appeared from the Shrine's lower level, barefoot as always, keg on his back, noodle bowl in hand. Something was different. The fists weren't wrapped for speed. They were wrapped for impact. And the keg wasn't decoration.
"Brewmaster today?" Mei Lin asked.
"Felt like soaking up some hits instead of throwing them." He shrugged. The keg sloshed.
"When do we leave?" he asked.
"That's two," Yoniana said. The kind of grin that froze things. "Three with me. We just need one more."
A portal opened. Not frost this time. Fire. Green-gold edges, the unmistakable signature of destruction magic, and through it stepped another gnome. Devonmichael. He was small like Yoniana was small, which is to say not small at all once you noticed the fire building in his hands and the look in his eyes that said he'd burned things bigger than you and enjoyed it.
"I was told there's a hat," Devonmichael said.
"There's a hat," Yoniana confirmed.
"And we're killing a demon for it."
"An ancient one."
"Good." He cracked his knuckles. Sparks fell from his fingers. "I was getting bored."
Mount Hyjal was not a pleasant place.
Mei Lin felt it the moment they stepped through the Caverns of Time and into the past. The air was wrong. Heavy. Thick with something that hadn't finished dying even after all this time. An ancient memory of a battle that had nearly ended the world, still playing out in the stone and the ash and the screaming sky.
"It's in there," Yoniana said, staring up the mountain. Frost crystallized on her staff in patterns that looked suspiciously like a cowl. "I can feel it."
"You can feel a hat."
"I can feel destiny."
Devonmichael was already walking ahead. "Less talking. More killing. More hat."
The Alliance camp came first. Jaina Proudmoore stood at the center of it, calm and composed, the way people are when they've been through the end of the world once and are waiting to do it again. She nodded when they approached. Said something about the undead massing in the north. As if they couldn't hear them already.
Yoniana walked up to Jaina and spoke to her with the confidence of someone ordering lunch. "We're ready."
The undead came.
Not a trickle. A flood. Ghouls poured down the hillside, all teeth and claws and the smell of something that should have stayed buried. Behind them came crypt fiends, skittering on too many legs. Necromancers in the back, raising the ones that fell before they'd finished falling. Abominations lumbering through the middle, stitched together from nightmares and bad decisions.
Callisaw set the noodle bowl down on a supply crate. Carefully. Then he waded into the middle of it, keg-first, and everything turned toward him. That was the Brewmaster trick. Not speed, not fury. Presence. He made himself impossible to ignore. The ghouls hit him and he barely swayed, soaking every blow like it was a suggestion. He swung the keg into a crypt fiend mid-leap and the crack echoed off the mountainside. Spun and smashed it into a necromancer so hard the undead bounced twice.
An abomination broke through on the left and Devonmichael's fel fire punched clean through its chest, out the other side, still hungry. The ghouls behind it didn't burn. They evaporated.
On the right, a ghoul's scream froze in its open mouth. Yoniana walked past it and the whole pack shattered behind her like dropped glass.
Mei Lin drove her water totem into the ash and healing rain came down through the smoke. A Horde banner caught the drift of it and hung heavier. She arced chain lightning up the spine of a necromancer and the voltage leapt robe to robe to robe. A lava burst split the biggest abomination at its stitching.
Wave after wave. Eight of them. Mei Lin lost count somewhere around the fifth and started measuring time in how many noodles Callisaw snuck between waves. Three. He snuck three noodles. She was watching.
"How are you eating?" she asked.
"Multitasking."
"You just smashed a ghoul with a keg in one hand and noodles in the other."
"It's a Brewmaster thing. Everything's better with a drink."
Yoniana overheard this and laughed so hard her next frost bolt went sideways and froze a supply barrel. Nobody mentioned it. Good friends.
Rage Winterchill came after the eighth wave. A lich. Old and cold and furious, drifting down from the treeline like winter given a grudge and a skull.
Yoniana looked at him. Looked at her staff. Looked back at him.
"A frost lich," she said. "Against a frost mage."
"He's outclassed," Devonmichael agreed.
"He's embarrassing frost. That's what he's doing. Look at that frost nova. Mine's prettier."
She proved it. Her frost met his and ate it. Cold Convergence blazed in her hands and the temperature around her dropped so far that Mei Lin's healing rain started forming ice crystals before it hit the ground. Devonmichael flanked with fire that melted whatever Yoniana's frost didn't claim. Callisaw drew the lich's attention with a keg smash that rattled the bones it didn't technically have, soaking every frost bolt it threw while the others tore it apart. Mei Lin dropped an earth totem to ground the frost magic and kept chain heal bouncing between everyone.
The lich fell. Fast. Indignantly fast. Like it was offended by how quickly it happened.
"See?" Yoniana said. "My frost is prettier."
Nobody disagreed.
Anetheron came next. He didn't land. He hung above the camp on wings that blotted the sky, ribs showing through a chest the colour of old bruises, and when he spoke the inside of Mei Lin's skull felt scraped. Infernals fell around him like burning fists.
Devonmichael grinned. "Oh good. Things falling from the sky that are on fire. My specialty."
The first infernal cracked in the air. The third landed at his feet and left a crater where his feet had been.
"He's enjoying this too much," Callisaw said, keg raised, claws skidding off it.
"It's in the job description." Mei Lin sent a riptide over his shoulder.
Yoniana froze the dreadlord's wings mid-beat. He dropped out of the sky, surprised that ice existed, and four of them hit him before he touched the ground.
The camp fell behind them as they moved up the mountain. Jaina's forces holding what they could, the four of them pushing forward into the smoke.
Then Callisaw stopped.
He was leaning against a burned tree, keg tilted, eyes half a step behind the rest of him. The ale at Thrall's camp had been generous. The brew in his keg had been doing quality control on him since the dreadlord, not the other way around. It was catching up all at once, on a mountain, at exactly the wrong moment. Which, Mei Lin thought fondly, was extremely Callisaw.
"I may," he said, with the careful diction of a Pandaren who knew he was about to admit something, "have quality-controlled too much."
"You're drunk."
"I'm professionally calibrated."
He slid down the tree and sat. The keg slumped with him. Mei Lin crouched, patted the top of his head between the ears, and propped his staff up against the bark where he could find it later.
"Sleep it off, big guy."
"Wouldn't dream of anything else." He was already gone.
The Horde camp was different without a tank. Rougher. Meaner. Three people instead of four, and no keg-swinging Pandaren to draw the attention.
Thrall stood at the center of it with his arms crossed and the patient look of someone who had been expecting more of them.
Mei Lin felt something shift in the elements when she entered the camp. The spirits here answered differently. Wilder. Louder. Like they'd been waiting for a shaman and were annoyed it took this long.
"Shaman to shaman," she muttered, planting an air totem near Thrall's position. "I've got the elements. You've got the army. Fair trade."
They split the work without discussing it. Didn't need to. Devonmichael and Yoniana took the frontline, standing side by side like two ends of the same weapon.
Devonmichael started with the curses. Not fire. Words. Low, ugly syllables that Mei Lin felt in her teeth. He whispered something at the first wave and the undead slowed. Their strength draining, their resistance crumbling, their bodies weakening before a single spell had landed. Then the fire came. Destruction magic sweeping across the ground in wide arcs, chaotic flames tearing through packs that were already falling apart from the inside. The curses made everything hit harder. Every frost bolt. Every fire bolt. Every lightning bolt Mei Lin threw from the back line landed heavier because Devonmichael had already taken something vital from the targets.
Yoniana worked beside him, Cold Convergence carving frost through everything his fire missed. Burn, freeze, shatter. Burn, freeze, shatter. Nothing reached the camp.
And when something big came through, something that didn't care about frost or fire, Devonmichael would look at it and speak. One word. Warlock fear. An abomination dropped the cleaver it had been swinging. A ghoul skidded, turned on its own back legs, and bolted into its own line, biting anything that tried to stop it. A crypt fiend folded all eight legs under itself and would not move.
"That's terrifying," Mei Lin said, watching the crypt fiend refuse to uncurl.
Devonmichael didn't look up. "Thank you."
Mei Lin took the sky.
Gargoyles screaming overhead. Winged demons diving at the camp from angles the frontline couldn't cover. She planted her air totem and started running. Not standing still. Not planting her feet the way grandmother had taught her. Running. The spirits carrying her stride, flowing through her legs, letting her cast without stopping. Lightning bolt after lightning bolt leaving her hands mid-sprint, punching into the air, swatting gargoyles out of the sky before they reached the ground. And sometimes the elements answered twice, a bolt would leave her hands and the spirits would echo it, sending a second strike right after, like the storm was finishing her sentences. Two gargoyles fell where she'd aimed at one. She'd learned this somewhere on the road between Dawn's Blossom and here, this trick of letting the spirits move with her instead of through her. Spiritwalker's Grace, the old shamans called it. The freedom to never stand still.
Her chain lightning reached further than it had any right to, arcing across distances that made the gargoyles think they were safe. They weren't. From the far side of the clearing the voltage still found them, still leapt from wing to wing to wing. A frost wyrm came shrieking over the treeline and she hit it with a lava burst from range that cracked its jaw and sent it spiraling into the mountainside. Anything airborne, anything ranged, anything trying to get past the gnomes from a distance, she reached it.
Between the aerial work she kept Chain Heal bouncing between all three of them, water leaping from herself to Devonmichael to Yoniana and back, still moving, still casting, healing and fighting in the same breath. No tank meant no buffer. Every hit the gnomes took was a hit Mei Lin had to heal through. Her water spirits were working harder than they had all day.
Wave after wave. Mei Lin lost count. Her arms ached. Her water spirits were thinning. Every time she thought the last one was falling, another wave crawled over the ridge, and she had to choose again: heal or fight, sky or ground, keep Yoniana alive or keep the gargoyles from reaching her. Both. Always both. Her hands never stopped moving.
Kaz'rogal charged in during a lull that wasn't really a lull. A doom guard the size of a building, blade raised, the ground splitting beneath every step. The air around him hummed with a draining magic that pulled at Mei Lin's water spirits like a current trying to suck them dry.
"He drains magic," Yoniana said, tightening her grip on her staff. "I can feel him pulling."
"Then hit him before he takes it," Devonmichael said. "I'm not giving a demon my fire. That's my fire."
They hit Kaz'rogal from three sides. Yoniana froze the ground under his hooves and he slipped, staggered, looked confused that ice existed. Devonmichael poured destruction into the opening. Mei Lin felt the draining pull tug at her magic and something in her refused. Not anger. Instinct. Something she'd never done before, never been taught, never read about in grandmother's scrolls. She stopped thinking about which element to call. She called all of them. At the same time. Earth, air, water, fire gathering between her palms, fighting each other for a heartbeat before they found a harmony she didn't know they had. She drove them forward in a single focused strike and the hit landed like a fist made of weather.
The doom guard's chest caved in.
She stared at her hands. They were still humming. All four elements, still resonating, still singing together like they'd been waiting for her to ask.
She didn't have a name for it yet. The old shamans might. Grandmother would probably sigh and say she should have learned it properly before trying it on a demon.
Down.
Azgalor was worse. A pit lord. The ground shook when he arrived and didn't stop shaking. Massive. Horned. Built from the kind of hatred that doesn't need a reason, it just is. And they were three people fighting something that expected an army.
Mei Lin planted all four totems, earth, air, water, fire, and felt the elements strain against the pit lord's presence. The fire didn't want to answer here. Too close to something that burned hotter. She forced it anyway. Sent chain lightning up the pit lord's blade and into his arm, then a lava burst into the gap between the armor plates.
Devonmichael hit Azgalor with a bolt so concentrated the fire left an afterimage burned into Mei Lin's vision long after it hit. Yoniana froze the pit lord's raised hoof mid-stomp and he crashed sideways, off balance, confused again that ice existed.
"They never expect the ice," Yoniana said, already casting the next one.
"Nobody expects the ice."
"Which is why I always bring it."
Azgalor fell with a sound like a building coming down. The camp shuddered. Thrall nodded once from his position. The kind of nod that meant 'not bad, for three.'
The path up to the summit was quiet. No more waves. No more camps. Just the three of them walking through burned forest with ash falling like grey snow.
Yoniana was quiet now. The banter had stopped. Mei Lin could see her turning Cold Convergence over in her hands, running her fingers along the frost patterns, the way you do when you're trying not to think about something by thinking about something else.
"Hey," Mei Lin said, falling into step beside her. "You alright?"
"What if it's not there?"
There it was. Under all the destiny jokes and the confident grinning and the frost that could stop an army, that. The small voice that was afraid of walking through the end of the world for nothing.
"Then we come back," Mei Lin said. "As many times as it takes."
"You'd do that?"
Callisaw answered from behind them. "Course we would."
Devonmichael didn't say anything. He just kept walking beside them. Which was the same thing, coming from him.
Yoniana looked at all three of them. Nodded once. Set her jaw. The frost on her staff deepened to a blue so dark it was almost black.
Archimonde.
Even diminished, even an echo of what he'd been, the eredar still filled the sky. A shadow taller than the dead trees, hands that could crush cities, eyes that burned with a malice older than any kingdom standing. The ground beneath him was scorched black in a perfect circle. Nothing grew there. Nothing would.
Tyrande Whisperwind stood at the edge of the clearing with her sentinels. She looked at the three of them. Two gnomes and a Pandaren. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't this.
Devonmichael opened with curses. Whispered words that crawled across the scorched earth and sank into Archimonde before the demon even turned to face them. Weakening. Draining. Preparing the ground the way a warlock always does, making the target ready to break before anyone swings.
Yoniana hit him from the flank. Cold Convergence blazing, frost climbing the demon's legs, slowing him, locking his joints. Devonmichael answered with fire from the other side, destruction magic eating into the gaps the frost had opened. The two gnomes working together the way they had all day, frost and flame, control and chaos.
Mei Lin stood between them. Chain Heal bouncing from gnome to gnome. Lightning Bolts hammering into the demon between every heal. Three people. No tank. Holding.
Archimonde roared. The ground split. Fire rained from the sky.
Nobody ran.
But the demon didn't fall. He was still standing. Still burning. Still pushing. Devonmichael's curses landed and he shook them off. Yoniana's frost climbed and he melted it. The three of them were hitting him with everything and it wasn't enough. Not like this. Not with three.
Mei Lin felt something shift.
Not outside. Inside. Deep in the place where the spirits lived, where grandmother's teachings met the storm she'd become. Something was building. Something she hadn't called. The elements were answering without being asked, all four of them at once, surging up through her feet from the scorched earth, pouring into her chest, her arms, her hands. Too much. Too fast. She could feel it pushing against her skin, pressing outward, looking for a way out.
Her fur stood on end. Every strand. The air around her began to vibrate, a low hum that deepened into a sound she felt in her bones. Static arced between her fingers without her casting. The ground beneath her feet cracked. Not from Archimonde. From her.
Devonmichael glanced back. His eyes widened.
Yoniana turned. Saw the light building around Mei Lin. Saw the elements spiraling. "What's happening to her?"
Mei Lin couldn't answer. She was trying not to explode. The power wanted out. All of it. Every element she'd ever called, every spirit she'd ever spoken to, every bolt and burst and heal and shock, all of it rushing to the surface at the same time like a river being forced through a crack in a dam.
She closed her eyes.
Grandmother's voice. Not a memory. A feeling. The old woman's hands on hers, steady, patient, teaching her to hold the water still before letting it flow. "You do not force. You do not fight it. You focus. You give it a direction. And then you let go."
Mei Lin opened her eyes.
She looked at Devonmichael. Saw the warlock who had cursed a mountain and feared things that towered over him and never once raised his voice. He nodded.
She looked at Yoniana. Saw the frost mage who had walked through the end of the world for a hat and refused to leave without it. She nodded.
The wind changed first. Devonmichael felt it. Every breeze on the mountain pulling toward the Pandaren behind him. He turned.
Mei Lin was standing still. Too still. The ash that had been falling around her was drifting sideways now, drawn toward her, circling. Then the lightning. White arcs crawling up her arms, her shoulders. Not from the sky. From inside her. Then the water, mist rising from the dead earth, curling around her ankles. Then the earth, the stone beneath her humming, warm, answering. Then the fire, a heat at her core that had nothing to do with Devonmichael's destruction magic and everything to do with what shamans carry when the spirits decide to show up all at once.
Yoniana stepped back. "Mist?"
Mei Lin could barely hear her. The elements were loud. All of them. Speaking at the same time. Not fighting each other the way they usually did, air against earth, water against fire. Agreeing. For the first time she could remember, all four of them pulling in the same direction. Toward the demon. Toward the thing that had broken a world.
Devonmichael took a step back. The warlock who had burned his way through a mountain took a step back.
Mei Lin opened her eyes. Looked at him. Looked at Yoniana.
And roared for Heroism.
Not the quiet prayer she'd whispered on a hull in Dawn's Blossom with companions falling around her. A call. One word torn out of her chest in a voice grandmother would have recognised from the oldest of the old songs. The mountain answered back. Ash hung still in the air. Yoniana's shoulders dropped and her frost came faster, harder, meaner. Devonmichael's grin found his teeth. Her own storm leaned in, wildfire through dry grass, catching everything it touched.
Then Mei Lin called Ascendance.
Her body shifted. Fur dissolved into voltage. She was still standing there, still shaped like herself, but she was lightning now. Every bolt she cast chained to the next target without her aiming. Every element echoed. The spirits were answering faster than she could ask, finishing her spells before she'd finished casting them. She poured chain lightning into Archimonde and the arcs multiplied, bouncing off the demon and back and through and again.
And in the middle of it, with Ascendance still burning through her and Heroism still surging through her companions, she gathered what was left. All four elements. Earth, air, water, fire. The way she'd done against Kaz'rogal, except this time the spirits wanted it. This time they rushed to her hands before she could ask. She shaped them into a single strike, Elemental Blast, and drove it into the eredar's chest.
The hit connected and Archimonde stopped.
Not staggered. Not stumbled. Stopped. Like something fundamental had broken inside him. The malice in his eyes flickered. The shadow that filled the sky wavered. And then, slowly, the way ancient things end, the eredar came apart. The hatred cracked. The darkness emptied. And he fell to the scorched earth with a sound like the mountain finally letting go of something it had been carrying for far too long.
Mei Lin was on the ground.
She didn't remember the Ascendance ending. One moment she was lightning. The next she was fur and bone and pain, face down in the ash, hands flat against scorched stone. Her totems were dark. All four. Spent. Her water spirits were quiet. Not resting. Empty. For the first time since Dawn's Blossom, the world was silent inside her head.
She tasted copper and ozone. She tried to lift her hands and they wouldn't move.
She'd given everything. And everything had answered.
Yoniana was there first. Kneeling. Small cold hand on Mei Lin's back. The frost was gentle. Not healing. Just present. Just letting her know she wasn't alone on the ground.
"Breathe," Yoniana said. Quiet. The cowl-hunting, destiny-feeling, bear-riding gnome, quiet for the first time all day.
Mei Lin breathed. It hurt. She breathed again anyway.
Devonmichael sat down beside her. Just sat. His hands were still. No fire. No sparks. For the first time since he'd stepped through that portal, they were just hands.
He looked at Mei Lin. At the Pandaren face down in the ash. At the dark totems. At the scorched earth where a demon used to be.
"So," he said. Quiet. The smallest smirk. "Was that new, or do you do that every Tuesday?"
Mei Lin laughed. It came out as a cough and the cough hurt and she laughed again anyway.
"Every Tuesday," she managed. "Twice on holidays."
"Good to know." He leaned back on his hands. Still smirking. "I'll bring a chair next time. Better view from a distance."
Silence.
Then Yoniana scrambled forward. Actually scrambled. On her hands and knees. Digging through the remains with the desperation of someone who had been here before and walked away empty-handed.
Mei Lin watched. Devonmichael watched.
Nobody breathed.
Yoniana stopped. Her hands were shaking. She was holding something. A circlet. Ancient. Shimmering with a power that hummed against her fingers like a song she'd been hearing in her dreams.
The Cowl of the Tempest.
She didn't say anything. Couldn't. She just sat there in the ash and the ruin, holding a hat she'd walked through the end of the world twice to find, and her eyes were bright and her jaw was tight and the frost on Cold Convergence was doing something Mei Lin had never seen before. It was blooming. Frost flowers, crystallizing up the staff, spreading outward in spirals that caught the light. The staff knew. The set was complete.
Yoniana put the cowl on. Slowly. Carefully. Like she was afraid it would disappear. It settled onto her head and the Tempest Regalia sang. Every piece found its harmony. The frost deepened. The air around her dropped ten degrees. She looked up at them with eyes that glowed blue-white behind ancient cloth and for one moment she didn't look like a gnome at all. She looked like winter.
"Well?" she said. Voice cracking. Just a little.
"Suits you," Devonmichael said. Which, from him, was practically a love letter.
Callisaw raised his cracked keg. "Worth the trip."
Mei Lin opened her mouth to say something heartfelt. Something about patience and destiny and how some things are worth walking through the end of the world twice for.
Then she noticed something else in the remains. Something that hummed against her bones. Something the elements were whispering about.
She reached in. Pulled it free.
The Skyshatter Helmet.
A shaman's crown. Ancient. The kind of armor that remembered what it meant to carry the storm. Mei Lin held it and felt the air answer, felt the earth hum, felt water and fire settle into a harmony she'd been chasing since Dawn's Blossom.
"You're kidding," Yoniana said.
Devonmichael looked at the two helmets. Looked at the remains of Archimonde. "Why was a demon lord carrying two hats? Was he collecting them? Did he have a shelf?"
Yoniana snorted. "Maybe he was saving them for a special occasion."
"A demon lord with a hat collection. That's what we just killed. A very tall accessory hoarder."
Mei Lin put the helmet on. It fit like it had been waiting.
She looked at Yoniana. Yoniana looked at her. Two people in new crowns, standing in the ashes of a demon lord, with a warlock sitting nearby who was still smouldering.
"I told you," Yoniana said. "I told you it was destiny."
"You told me it was a hat."
"It's a destiny hat."
Mei Lin laughed. Couldn't help it. The mountain was still burning. The ash was still falling. And three people were standing at the end of the world wearing new hats and laughing about destiny and it was, without question, the best possible ending to a day of stubborn, beautiful, unreasonable hope.
They sat in the ashes of Archimonde's fall and Yoniana kept touching the cowl every few breaths like she was making sure it was still there. Devonmichael leaned against a dead tree and said nothing and watched them with an expression that might, on a warlock, have been something close to contentment.
"We should go collect Callisaw," Mei Lin said.
"Is he still asleep under that tree?" Yoniana asked.
"Probably. Unless the tree fell on him."
"He'd sleep through that too."
They found him exactly where they'd left him. Propped against the burned tree, empty keg beside him, noodle bowl balanced on his chest. Still asleep. Snoring softly. Mei Lin knelt beside him and put the Skyshatter Helmet on his head. Backward. Because she could.
He woke up. Blinked. Felt the helmet. Felt it was backward.
"Did you win?"
"We won."
"Did Yoniana get her cowl?"
"She got her cowl. And I got one of my own." Mei Lin grinned. "You're wearing it."
Callisaw reached up. Felt the helmet. Felt it was backward. Looked at her.
"You put your new helmet on a sleeping monk."
"You looked cold."
He took it off. Turned it over in his hands. Ran his thumb across the metalwork. "It's beautiful, Mist."
"I know. Now give it back."
Yoniana summoned her mount for the ride back. Not a horse. Not a gryphon. An Amani War Bear. Massive. Golden-furred. The kind of mount that shouldn't exist anymore, that came from a place and a time most people only heard stories about. She rode it everywhere. Made sure everyone saw it. Mei Lin had seen her circle the Shrine three times once just so more people would notice.
The gnome sat atop the bear in her new Cowl of the Tempest, frost trailing behind her like a banner, and looked back at Mei Lin with the satisfied grin of someone who had walked through the end of the world and come out wearing exactly what she'd come for.
Show-off.
Grandmother always said the best treasures aren't the ones you find. They're the ones you go back for.
One walk through the end of the world. Two helmets. Three fighters and a sleeping monk.
Worth every step.
— Mist