The dwarves had a name for it and would not say it twice.
Mei Lin was on the ridge above the Maw of Madness with two Earthen Ring shamans when the ground in the cleft below started pulsing. A wet beat, the way a chest beats if you put your ear to it. Grandmother had taught her the earth has a heartbeat too, slow and old, but this was faster, sicker, and it was coming from a thing on the floor of the pass the size of a small hill. Grey-pink and veined, a maw at one end and more maws further down. Around it the shale had gone soft the way bread goes soft when something has been sweating on it.
The older one, a tauren with horns gone the colour of old bone, steady eyes, said "That's Iso'rath. There's a sister of ours inside. We cannot reach her from out here."
Mei Lin did not need to be asked twice.
She does not remember if she was thrown or pulled. The world went from cold ridge wind to thick warm pressure between two breaths, and then she was inside.
The light in there was the worst part. Greenish, coming from inside the walls themselves, the way a bruise comes from inside skin. Her boot came down on the floor with a sound like striking damp meat. The air tasted of copper and old eggs and a third thing she had no word for.
The water in her was wrong here. Her oldest spirits, the ones that had murmured in her grandmother's pond before she could walk, were still with her, but they were holding their hands over their mouths. The storm in her ribs was a flat note. She put her palm on her own chest to make sure her own heartbeat was still hers. It was, just barely.
A thing the size of a dog detached itself from the wall and came at her on too many joints. She brought the shield up into its face and called lightning through the wet floor into the soles of its feet. The whole inside of the place flinched at her once, like a body pulling away from a needle. Two more came. She killed them the same way and called a Riptide onto her own forearm where one had got a tooth in. The water came reluctantly. It came.
Then she heard the singing. A low, steady shaman-song, the note you hold to keep the water spirits from scattering when the ground is bad under you. She had heard grandmother hold that note over a sick foal once for an entire night.
She followed it.
Earthcaller Yevaa was sitting cross-legged in a hollow the maw had not yet decided what to do with. Tall even sitting, blue-violet at the skin, horns sweeping back from her brow, hooves tucked under her, tail wrapped around one hoof for warmth she was not getting. Her armour was Earthen Ring grey-green, torn along one shoulder. Around her stood a tight ring of palm-height totems, the kind a shaman carries for emergencies. She was holding the song with her chest, and Mei Lin could see her ribs work it.
The draenei opened her eyes. Glacier-melt blue, and they did not waste a moment being surprised.
"You came in," she said, voice rough from the singing. "You did not have to."
"I'm a shaman. I had to."
"That is what I told myself the day I came in."
Mei Lin sat down across from her, inside the ring. She did not plant one of her own. The ring was already holding.
"Are you hurt?"
"Not in a way you can mend."
She did not push.
Yevaa looked at her for a long moment. "This thing thinks. I want you to know that, when you go back out. It thinks the way a fever thinks. It is waiting for something it does not have a name for."
Mei Lin felt the wrongness press in along the back of her neck and made herself not look for the source of it. The source was the room.
The draenei touched the back of Mei Lin's wrist with two fingers. The cold of her skin was a relief in here. "Sister. The water has not gone anywhere. It is behind a door because what is in here is louder. When you go back out, the door opens. I thought I had lost it the first hour. I was wrong."
Mei Lin swallowed harder than she meant to. "I felt them go quiet."
"I know. I felt yours come in."
She had not expected that to land where it did. She put her free hand flat on the wet ground between them. Yevaa's small ring of totems hummed back, not at the ground, at her.
She helped Yevaa up. The draenei was lighter than she should have been. They walked back through the corridor Mei Lin had cut on the way in, killing two more between them. Yevaa's lightning was thinner than her own, but it came when called, which was the only test that mattered down here.
The maw spat them, or let them go. She was not interested in the difference.
The older tauren wrapped Yevaa in blankets and put a bowl of something hot in her hands without speaking. Yevaa caught Mei Lin's sleeve before the room thinned out. "The door is open again."
She pressed her palm to her chest. The water was there. Lightning along her collarbones, low and steady. The grandmother-pond hum behind her ribs.
"Yes."
"Good. Then go and sleep, sister. Sleep where the wind reaches."
She walked out into the cold Highlands evening carrying a soberer knowledge under her sternum. The elements could be made to go quiet. A sister of hers had sat inside that quiet for two days holding a low note until somebody came to hold the other end of it.
She walked all the way back to her cot before she let her hand shake.
— Mist