She found him chasing a goat up a slope that had no business being a slope.
An old Pandaren in a faded blue coat, a walking stick tapped three times before every step, a beard left in a frost and forgotten. He was shouting "Madam Pemberton, you will return to this path at once," at a goat who did not, as far as Mei Lin could tell, know she was a madam.
Mei Lin headed the goat off at a rock and walked her back down.
"Thank you, elder."
"Do not," he said immediately, "call me elder. I am Shen. Shen is what my mother called me and what you will call me or I will put you down this slope myself."
"Shen. I am Mei Lin. Your goat is very dignified."
"She is not. The other six are worse."
Three proved it. One halfway up a fire geyser ridge. One eating frost lichen on a ledge of blue ice. One wedged between two boulders in a way that suggested she had planned it.
Shen tapped his stick. "You are a shaman. Totem on your belt. Also you smell of weather."
That is the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a week.
They climbed to the first goat. Hot air hissed from the rock. The goat did not care.
"Flame shock on the ridge above her," Shen said. "Not the goat. The ridge. Make the lichen unappetising for the next little while."
"So it's the kind of shock that cooks a fish," Mei Lin said, and set a flame onto the rock. It sank in like a wick taking light. The goat ambled off with the air of one who had finished her meal on her own terms.
The second goat was on the blue ice. Shen pointed with his stick. "Frost shock. Behind her. Close enough that she forgets which way forward is."
"Refreshing," said Mei Lin, and pushed a chill into the ice on the far side. The goat stopped. Looked left. Looked right. Looked confused about her own goatness. Shen hooked her collar and pulled her back.
"You are talking through every one of these," he said.
"I think out loud. Grandmother says my mouth is my first totem."
"Please stop talking."
"You see, that is another kind of shock."
Shen closed his eyes. Tapped the stick three times. Opened them.
The last goat was wedged between the boulders. The stone was older here, veined with something that hummed against Mei Lin's teeth.
"The ground has an answer," Shen said. "Ask for one cracked note. Not a song. One note. Into the boulder on the left."
She planted her palm on the stone. One note. She felt the earth listening the way stone listens, with the whole of itself. She asked. The ground answered. A sharp crack ran through the boulder. The goat startled, scrambled, popped out, and landed in Shen's patient arms.
"Oh," Mei Lin said, quieter than she had said anything all afternoon. "It is not a hit. It is an interruption. The stone stops what is happening."
"That," Shen said, "is the closest thing to wisdom you have said in an hour. Do not ruin it."
"Earth shock," she said, ruining it. "Very grounded. Both meanings. I have been waiting the whole walk up for that one."
Shen sighed the sigh of a man who had once known peace. "If you do not leave my mountain, I will turn you into a goat."
"I've been called a kid."
He closed his eyes. He was, she was almost certain, smiling under the beard.
She went down the mountain with three shocks sitting differently in her chest. Flame for slow work. Frost for the moment between a step and the next one. Earth for when a thing needed to stop before it finished what it was saying.
Including, occasionally, me.
— Mist