The cliffs above Uldum swallowed sound. Mei Lin stood at the great doors with four others at her back, looking up at carvings that ran higher than the eye could follow. Hawk-headed shapes, sun-discs, pillars in a script her eye refused to settle on, written for readers with longer lives than hers.
"This is older than anything we've walked into," the warrior at her left said. Quietly. Like the room was listening.
Mei Lin touched two fingers to the first pillar, the way she greeted any new place. Usually the spirits answered. Here, they went still, the way a child goes quiet in a temple. The water in her ribs sat down and folded its hands.
She unhooked her shield, settled her dagger, and led them in.
Temple Guardian Anhuur waited on a raised dais, twin serpents at his feet, eyes that caught the light and gave it back changed. He spoke once in the language of the pillars, named them intruders, and gave them no second chance.
The serpents struck first. Mei Lin braced behind her shield and the first coil rang against the rim like a bell struck wrong. Lightning forked from her free hand into the second snake's jaw. The warrior closed on Anhuur, the priestess threw a barrier across them.
The guardian's chest opened with light. A pillar of pale gold, holy, patient, reknitting his wounds faster than they could open new ones. She felt the structure of it from across the chamber. He had been built to mend, and the room let him mend. The two stone levers at the chamber's edges were the answer. Both came down. The light snuffed like a wick, and he fell with the dignity of something that had done its job for ten thousand years.
The priestess looked up at the ceiling and made a small gesture, somewhere between a prayer and an apology. Mei Lin understood it.
"He was a watchman," the priestess said.
"He still is," Mei Lin said. "We just stepped past him."
They went deeper. Past a sandstorm that knit itself into a beast and came apart under their hands. Past a hall where the floor was a star map and the stars moved when she wasn't looking at them.
And then the central chamber.
The room with the device.
She had thought she had a measure for big. This room rewrote it.
It was a planetarium, and the planets in it were Azeroth's, and they moved. A miniature world turning in the air, oceans and continents and a thin band of cloud, four constructs ringed around it like ministers around a sleeping king. Magic. Life. Destruction. Sun. The room hummed with a low note she felt in her teeth.
She stopped walking. All of them did.
The device that could unmake everything she had ever loved and remake it from the same clay. The hall existed to keep this room safe. The watchers existed to keep it held. And five travellers had walked in and were looking at it.
She felt small, in a way she had not felt since grandmother first showed her the Great Sea.
"We shouldn't be here," she said.
"We have to be," the warrior answered. "If we aren't, the wrong people will be."
It was a small comfort. She took it.
They fought the watchers in the order the room dictated. Isiset split into mirror-selves and she chained lightning between them, the arcs jumping cleanly because the constructs were built to receive elemental weight. She kept chain heal bouncing between her companions and her shield up against pulses meant to flatten armies. The watchers did their work without rancour, and the absence was harder to fight than hatred.
When the last platform went dark, the planet at the center of the room kept turning. It turned to a schedule older than memory.
The path opened, and Rajh was waiting at the top.
A sun-disc set into the ceiling above him, gold beaten thin enough to glow, and his shoulders held the same fire the disc fed on. He decided they were what the watchers had said, and the room got hotter all at once.
Mei Lin drove her shield forward and the first wave of sun-fire broke against the rim, heat through the metal. The warrior took the front, the rogue circled, and she held healing rain open across all of them. The water spirits answered louder here, finally.
Rajh pulsed. The light from his chest reached for the disc above to drink. He was recharging. They had to break him faster than the room could fill him.
She raised her hand and called for Heroism.
It came different here. A great bell tolling once in a tower nobody had visited in a century, and every spirit in the room raising its head to listen. The warrior's swing fell heavier. The rogue found seams the rogue had not seen. Mei Lin's lightning threaded longer than it had any right to, voltage running through Rajh's plates and finding the molten core under them.
The construct staggered. The disc dimmed for a breath, and the breath was enough. She drove a lava burst into the gap her storm had opened. Rajh folded onto one knee, then onto two, sun-fire guttering. His eyes went to the disc above him, still waiting for the room to refill him.
The room did not.
They walked out the way they had come in. Past the dark constructs, past the planet still turning, past the empty dais where Anhuur had judged them. The priestess's lips were moving in a prayer that could have been for the watchers or for them. Mei Lin did not ask.
The desert wind hit her face at the threshold and her water spirits exhaled. They had been holding their breath the whole time. She had not realized.
She sat outside the great doors a long while, watching the sun go down over the cliffs, thinking about a room that could end the world, the patient watchmen built to keep it safe, and the storm in her ribs that had gone quiet in there without being asked.
She would write grandmother tonight. About the planet turning quietly in the air, and how her spirits had hushed in the presence of something they had no language for. Grandmother had taught her, early, that the greatest power in the world rarely raised its voice.
The desert went dark. Mei Lin stood and went to find tea.
— Mist