Mei Lin was inside the inn when she saw him.
Through the window, on the balcony. A treant, walking slowly among the other treants that paced the upper terrace of the Shrine of Seven Stars. Except this one moved differently. The others drifted the way trees do, rooted even in motion, following paths worn into the stone by years of quiet wandering. This one walked with them. Matching their pace. Swaying when they swayed. Like he'd learned their rhythm and joined the procession without asking permission.
She'd heard his name in passing. Morrowfur. One of the newer faces in the guild.
Mei Lin set down her tea and walked outside.
He saw her coming. The treant turned, and one great bark-covered arm lifted in a slow wave. Not a greeting, exactly. More like an acknowledgment. The kind of wave that says I noticed you noticing me. He shifted back to his Worgen form as she reached the railing, fur replacing bark, moss giving way to something warm and grey. He smelled like herbs and damp earth and something green that didn't have a name.
"You walk with the treants every day?" Mei Lin asked, settling onto the railing beside him.
He glanced at her. Nodded once. Went back to watching the procession. Most people would have filled the silence. He let it breathe.
She liked that. She also immediately wanted to ruin it.
"So you're a druid," she said, tilting her head. "Does that mean you can hear what they're saying? Because that one on the left looks like it's judging me."
A pause. Then, very quietly: "It is."
Mei Lin grinned. This was going to be a good friendship.
They talked. Not about anything heavy at first. The weather over the Vale. The quality of tea in the lower market. Whether the mist that rolled through the Shrine at dawn was natural or something the Pandaren conjured on purpose to make the place look more mystical. Morrowfur thought it was natural. Mei Lin thought the Pandaren were absolutely doing it on purpose because her people were nothing if not theatrical.
"We invented the slow-pour tea ceremony," she said, gesturing broadly. "You think we're above atmospheric fog? We're a whole production."
He laughed at that. Quiet. More of a rumble in his chest than a sound.
She asked him about the trees. He told her each one had a rhythm, a way of growing that was as unique as a voice. He could feel them reaching. Roots beneath stone, branches toward light. He walked with them every day the way she planted totems, to listen. To stay connected.
"That's actually beautiful," Mei Lin said. Then, because she couldn't help herself: "I talk to my totems too. They never answer. I think they're embarrassed by me."
"They might be," he said. She couldn't tell if he was joking. She chose to believe he was.
He was quiet in the way some people are loud. Not shy. Not guarded. Just... settled. Like he'd already said everything he needed to say a long time ago and was happy to sit with whatever came next.
The conversation drifted, the way good conversations do. He mentioned Gilneas. Not all of it, not at once, but enough. The walls. The curse. The way the world broke open and he walked through the crack instead of running from it. He didn't talk about it like a tragedy. He talked about it the way Mei Lin talked about lightning, like something that found him before he was ready, and turned out to be exactly what he needed.
The Cenarion Circle had taken him in after. Druids who recognized something in the way he moved through the wilds, the way the earth answered his footsteps. He'd been wandering ever since. Collecting herbs, tending wounded lands, trading stories for meals. Not seeking glory. Just... balance.
Mei Lin understood that more than she expected to. *A shaman who planted totems in broken earth until the screaming stopped. A druid who walked with trees until the roots remembered how to grow.* Different elements. Same instinct.
Later, Nycturna joined them. A Draenei priestess with a clouded left eye and the kind of calm that made the air around her feel heavier, like gravity worked differently in her presence. She didn't say much. She listened. But the way she listened made you want to say things you hadn't planned on saying, like the truth was a loose thread and she just had to be nearby for it to start unraveling.
Mei Lin found herself talking about grandmother. About Dawn's Blossom and the sound of rain against jade leaves. About learning to be still and failing at it spectacularly. She hadn't meant to. The words just came out, the way water finds the cracks.
"She sounds patient," Nycturna said softly.
"She raised me," Mei Lin said. "Patient doesn't begin to cover it. I once set a healing totem on fire. A healing totem. She didn't even raise her voice. She just said, 'Well, that's certainly one approach.'"
*Morrowfur smiled at that. Small. Like he understood what it meant to have someone who saw you clearly and stayed anyway.*
Two people she hadn't known this morning. Already felt like they'd been here for longer.
Then it happened.
Morrowfur shifted into tree form to tend one of the potted plants. A great, gentle treant, bark-skinned and mossy, reaching toward the smaller tree with something that looked like tenderness. Beautiful. Sacred, even.
And then he picked up a book.
Mei Lin stared. A tree. Holding a book. A book made of paper. Paper made from...
"Is that..." she started.
Nycturna saw it at the same time. The priestess pressed a hand over her mouth.
"That's a dead tree," Mei Lin said. "You're a tree. Holding a dead tree. That's... that's basically holding grandpa."
The silence lasted four full seconds.
Morrowfur looked down at the book. Looked at his own bark-covered hands. Looked back at the book.
He put it down very carefully.
"I mean, it could be a cousin," Mei Lin added helpfully. "We don't know the family tree." She paused, letting it land. "Get it? Family tree?"
Nycturna lost it. The calm Draenei priestess with the clouded left eye laughed so hard she had to lean against the railing. The kind of laugh that starts silent and then breaks open like a dam. Mei Lin had never heard her laugh before. She decided immediately that she wanted to hear it again.
Morrowfur shifted back to his Worgen form and sat down on the stone with the look of someone whose entire worldview had just been rearranged by a bad pun.
"I can never unsee that," he said.
"Wooden you know it," Mei Lin said, because she had never once in her life known when to stop.
"Please."
"I'm just saying, you really need to leaf that habit behind."
"I will walk away."
"You're bark-ing up the wrong tree if you think I'm done."
*Nycturna had stopped laughing and started wheezing.* Mei Lin considered this a personal achievement.
"I hate you," Morrowfur said. But his tail was wagging.
They sat there for a long time after that. The three of them. A shaman who hit things with lightning and healed the cracks after. A druid who walked with trees and would never look at a book the same way again. A priestess who drew truth out of people just by sitting nearby.
No one fought anything. No one saved the world. They just talked until the mist rolled in and the lanterns in the Shrine flickered gold and the tea went cold and nobody cared.
Sometimes the best stories don't have a villain. Sometimes they just have a balcony, three people, and a joke that can't be unheard.
Grandmother would say something wise about that. Something about how the strongest bonds are forged in laughter, not in fire.
Mei Lin would agree. But she'd also point out that grandmother has never seen a tree hold a dead tree. That changes a person.
*— Mist*