The leaf was on the railing when she came back from the market.
Flat. Wide. Mountain-grown. Pressed thin. Sealed at the fold with a smear of something green that turned out, when she sniffed at it, to be crushed mint. Mei Lin had not been expecting mail, and certainly not the kind that might wilt if she took too long to read it.
She stood there with her groceries in one arm and the leaf in the other and tried to remember who she knew who would send her a letter on a plant.
Nobody she knew well. She knew a druid who sometimes left herbs drying on her balcony, but he hadn't been up the stairs in a while, and this wasn't his hand. It was a Cenarion Circle hand, careful and old. A courier had come and gone.
She unfolded it.
Fire still walks the north face. We need hands that can carry saplings. Hands that can carry water. Hands that can listen.
Any.
All.
— Matoclaw
Mei Lin read it twice.
She did not know Matoclaw. Not personally. Somebody in the market had said the name, once, with the kind of pause that meant you listen when she asks. And her own water spirits had been twitchy for a while. Nothing loud. The kind of twitch that goes through a cup of tea when somebody slams a door three streets away.
The north face was Mount Hyjal. Everybody knew that too.
She set the leaf down on the table beside the pot. Weighted it with a small stone so the wind wouldn't take it. Then she went and stood at the railing and looked north for a while, not because she could see the mountain from here, and not because she expected it to look back.
Just to let it know she was thinking about it.
She packed after dinner.
Not much. The warm coat, because a mountain is a mountain. A notebook with a clean spine. A small pack of dried plums grandmother had sent months ago, kept for the right road. Her pickaxe, wrapped in oiled leather. The little herb knife, sharpened, because grandmother had told her once that you do not dishonour a plant with a dull blade, and she had never let that go.
And the totems. Water, earth, air, fire. Every piece of home she could carry.
At the door she looked back at the balcony. It looked like a balcony. She realised, with a small tired smile, that there were more ways to leave home now than there used to be, because there were more homes.
"One ask," she said, to nobody. "I can do one ask."
Her water totem on the railing hummed, quietly, in a key she did not recognise yet.
— Mist