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. A Lightning Bolt from her free hand forked into the second snake's jaw and pinned it writhing against the dais. The warrior closed on the guardian. The priestess threw a barrier across all of them.
Then Anhuur's chest opened with light. A pillar of pale gold rose out of him to the ceiling, holy, patient, reknitting his wounds faster than they could open. She felt the shape of it across the chamber. He had been built to mend, and the room was letting him mend.
Two stone levers at the chamber's edges. One each.
"Levers," she called, and the warrior was already moving before her voice arrived. She went left. He went right. The healing pillar held him in its glow, his wounds knitting even as he ran, every stride paid for and returned. She hit her lever with her shoulder. He hit his a breath later. The light snuffed like a wick between two damp fingers.
Anhuur fell with the dignity of something that had done its job since before her grandmother's grandmother had known water's name.
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.
The next hall filled with sand before it filled with shape. Earthrager Ptah rose out of the floor like someone had asked the desert to stand up and it had stood, a skeleton of riverbed and sandstone walking on four legs. Halfway through the fight he unravelled. The whole construct came apart into a spinning wall of grit that ate the light and stung skin through cloth. The rogue went flat. The priestess cast herself a lee. Mei Lin drove an earth totem down at her boots and the spirits in it held a small patch of floor steady while the storm chewed around them. Ptah re-formed thirty paces away with the warrior already on him, and they put him back under the sand he had climbed out of.
Then the hall where the floor was a star map.
Anraphet stood at the centre of it, older than most of the words she knew for old. Maintenance, the priestess whispered. Woken to clean up. His stance widened and the room went quiet in a way that was not peaceful. A cone of pale destruction gathered in his chest, aimed at nothing and everything. Mei Lin's water spirits had nothing to say about it. She stopped listening and moved. They all moved. Kept moving. A single pulse from that stance, she felt in her ribs, would end the conversation for good. They broke him before it reached them. The stars in the floor kept turning as if the whole fight had been a rumour.
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 planet in it was Azeroth, and it turned. A miniature world the size of a watermelon hung in the centre of the air, oceans and continents and a thin white 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 and in the roots of her molars.
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. She did not touch the little world. The urge to was there, low in her palm, and she did not trust her palm with it. She closed her fingers on the grip of her shield instead.
"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 herself into three on the first circle of the planet. Three identical constructs, three staff-points, three arcs of cold arcane light that found their own reflections across the floor. Mei Lin planted an air totem and called Chain Lightning, the arcs jumping from one Isiset to the next to the next along the seam between their magics, because the constructs were built to receive elemental weight and did not know to dodge. The real one broke first. The reflections went out like lamps.
Ammunae was Life, and Life fought dirty. Seed-pods rose out of the cracks in the floor and unfolded into saplings that walked. The priestess burned them as they stood up. Mei Lin kept Healing Rain open over her companions and threaded Lightning Bolts at the parent when the seeds let her.
Setesh was Destruction, and Destruction opened doors. Void-black portals spat shadow-shapes out of nowhere onto the floor behind them, and she had to turn her back on the construct to keep her people alive. Riptide on the rogue when a shadow clawed him off his line. Chain Heal bouncing between all four of them when a bolt of black fire found the priestess's barrier and tore it in half. She did not stop moving. Her boots knew the room before her eyes did.
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. She could feel the heat through the metal, through the leather strap, into the pad of her palm. Healing Rain went up over all five of them and stayed up. The rogue took the flank. The warrior took the front. Mei Lin's back was to the pillar and her water spirits were singing something small and desperate and real, the first time they had sung in the whole hall.
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.
Then she saw the warrior go down to one knee under a sun-lance meant to split him lengthways.
Mei Lin made a choice.
She turned her shield full to the lance and took it on the rim in his place. The heat went through the metal into her arm and her fur smelled wrong all the way up to her shoulder. She did not drop the shield. She planted a water totem over him instead of following her own recovery. The totem pulsed. He stood. The warrior's next swing landed heavier than his last.
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 her own strength, 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.
Mei Lin pulled the flower out of her bun, shook the dust out of her hair, and pinned it back the way grandmother had shown her the first time. Flower above the left ear, knot a finger's breadth off centre. A small thing she had never missed doing in the whole of the last season and had needed to do tonight.
"A room that could end the world," she said, to the cliffs. "And it was the size of a watermelon."
She stood up. Her knees reminded her she had been crouched behind a shield for most of a day. The desert went dark. Mei Lin went to find tea.
— Mist