Mei Lin took her armor to a smith in the Valley of the Four Winds on the advice of a grummle who told her, between mouthfuls of turnip stew, "Your chestplate is sad."
It was not the kind of diagnosis she could ignore. Grummles noticed things about weight and carrying. She trusted them.
The smith was a Pandaren as old as the hills behind his forge, bald on top and fur-gone-grey everywhere else, with hands that looked like they had been arguing with metal long enough to lose the argument once or twice. His yard smelled like smoke and river water. A river ran behind the anvil. That alone would have told her what he used to be, if the carved totems along the fence hadn't already said it.
"Set it there," he said, without asking her name.
She set it there. The Alliance-issue chestplate, the battered shoulders, the helm that had caught more dragonfire than it was built for, the bracers, the belt. She laid them out the way grandmother had taught her to lay out ingredients before a meal. Biggest to smallest. The thing you would pick up last at the top.
The old smith walked along the row. Did not touch anything. He leaned close to each piece and listened, the way you listen to a shell held to an ear. The chestplate made him cluck his tongue. The helm made him hum. The bracers made him say, after a long pause, "Yes. Alright."
"Alright?"
"The bracers know who they are. The chestplate has never been asked." He looked up at her. His eyes were one water-coloured and one lightning-coloured. Of course they were. "It was hammered by somebody who was in a hurry. The metal agreed to be a chestplate but it was not introduced to the name of the person it was made for. You have been wearing a polite stranger."
"I hadn't noticed."
"You noticed. Otherwise you would not be here."
Fair.
He did not forge anything new. He did not hammer. He did not reheat. He pulled a low stool up beside the chestplate, sat down with the care of a man who had spent a long time learning how to sit, and put his hands flat on the metal. And then he talked to it.
Mei Lin could not hear the words. They were very quiet, and he was turned away. But she could see the bindings in the steel begin to settle, the way rice settles in a pot when the lid finally goes on. The chestplate exhaled. A small shiver of blue-white light ran along the edges where the plates overlapped. He did the same to the shoulders, the helm, the bracers, the belt. One after the other. He did not rush. The river kept running. He spoke to each piece for exactly the amount of time it wanted to be spoken to, and he stopped the moment it had been enough.
When he was done, he looked tired but not spent. Like a man who had been fishing for a long afternoon in a river he knew well.
"The chestplate knows its name now," he said.
"What is its name?"
"That is between the chestplate and you. I only introduced you."
She pulled the armor back on. It felt different, in a way she did not have words for yet. Not heavier. Not lighter. Just present. The shoulders sat the way grandmother's best pot sat on its rim, settled in a way that said I was made for this kind of fire.
"What do I owe you?"
The old smith looked at her air totem, which she had planted in the corner of his yard the moment she'd walked in without even meaning to. Habit. The wind spirits in it were humming at his own carved totems like shy cousins at a wedding.
"Leave the totem an hour more," he said. "My own have not had company in a while."
She left it for two.
When she picked it up, it was warmer than when she'd set it down, and it hummed the way it hummed after a night in a busy inn. She did not ask what they had talked about. It was between the totems and her.
She walked out of the Valley of the Four Winds with armor that had been introduced to her and totems that had made new friends, and she thought, for the first time since the Obsidian Sanctum, alright. The harder halls. I'm ready to go listen.
— Mist