The night before Hyjal, Mei Lin could not sleep.
She had tried. Tea helped for an hour, rice helped for twenty minutes, and the breathing exercises Callisaw had taught her helped until she caught herself counting the breaths instead of feeling them, at which point she gave up and went out to the balcony in her sleep robe with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders.
The Vale was cold. Not Stormwind-cold, not the frost that Yoniana had brought with her through the tear in the air two evenings ago. The Vale's cold was thin and clean. The kind of cold that made the bamboo above the balcony creak gently and the mist lift off the lanterns in small shy pulls.
She pulled a water totem from her pack. Not the old one. The old one was packed for the morning, already cased in oiled cloth for travel. This was the one grandmother had carved for her when she was eleven, from a branch of the lotus tree behind the tea hut. Pale wood, darker along one edge where a cub-sized hand had held it for too many years. The base was worn smooth. The grain near the tip had pulled itself into a curve that was not a face and yet, if you looked at it in the right light, was almost a face.
She pressed it into the gap between the railing slats.
Waited for the hum.
She had been doing this since she was a child. Press the totem. Feel the small warm note in her ribs as the spirits answered. Sometimes it was loud, the way a pond answers a dropped stone. Sometimes it was a thread, barely there, the way a cat acknowledges you from across a room. But it was always there. Grandmother had taught her to trust the hum the way other people trusted breath. You plant the wood. The spirits come. They always do.
Nothing.
Mei Lin took her hand off. Put her hand back on. Pressed her palm flat against the top of the totem.
Still nothing.
Not cold. Not refusing. Quiet. The way a lute is quiet when you haven't plucked it yet, except she had plucked it. She had plucked it three times in a row.
She took it out of the railing. Inspected it. The wood was fine. The grain was fine. The carving grandmother had made along the base, four small strokes that meant listening in old Pandaren, were all intact. She put it back.
Still nothing.
She sat down. Pulled the blanket tighter. Crossed her legs on the cold stone.
It felt like her breath was missing. Not hers. Theirs. The water spirits were her oldest company. They were the first voice she had ever heard that was not a person's. They had murmured around her in her grandmother's pond before she could walk. They had mended her when she fell off the dawn tea cart at age seven. They had answered when she called at the Stormwind canal and at the Black Temple and at Molten Core, even when they had to force themselves through fel-rot or through heat that wanted to unmake them.
She did not know how to be alone without them.
Somewhere below, in the Shrine's lower courtyard, a bronze bell chimed once. The night monks ringing the second watch. Four short pulses. The last one hung in the air for a long time before it gave up.
Mei Lin listened to the bell fade. Then she listened past it.
Nothing.
She tried speaking to them. She felt a little foolish, sitting on a balcony at two in the morning talking to a piece of wood, but foolish was better than the alternative of sitting on a balcony not talking to a piece of wood.
"Hello."
The totem did not answer.
"Is it me?"
The totem did not answer.
"Is it Hyjal?"
Something moved, far underneath her, in a direction she did not have a word for. Not toward her. Not away from her. Just a small slow turning, the way a fish rolls once in a deep pond and settles again.
She kept her hand on the totem. The grain warmed under her palm. Not from the spirits. From her body heat, after long enough.
The sky went from black to the grey that came before colour. The bamboo stopped creaking. A Shrine cat, orange and rude, crossed the balcony without acknowledging her and sat on her blanket for a full minute before deciding the cold stone suited him better. He left.
First light touched the Vale in a single pale stripe along the eastern rim. The lanterns along the lower stairway guttered and went out one by one, the way they did when the lantern boys came past with their poles.
Mei Lin had not moved.
Her legs were numb. The tips of her ears were cold. Her eyes were the kind of dry that meant she had been awake too long. She was about to stand, admit defeat, pack the totem for the journey, and accept that tonight was a night when the spirits had chosen somebody else to sit with.
Then.
"Not yet."
Two words.
Quiet. Together. From the totem, or from inside her ribs, or from the same place the two usually met. She did not mishear it. She was a shaman. She knew the difference between a thought and a visit.
The totem gave one small pulse under her palm. Just one. Then it went quiet again.
Mei Lin sat very still.
She did not know what not yet meant. She did not know if it was an answer or an instruction or the start of a longer sentence that would arrive later. She did not know if it was about Hyjal or about the armor she would find there or about some muscle of hers that was not ready to be used yet.
She reached into her pack for her notebook anyway. Opened it to the back, where she kept the things she did not understand. The page with the corrupted-water notes from the Black Temple. The page with the question marks next to the word Ghost Wolf. The page with the careful drawing of a drake's wing, labeled how?
She turned to a fresh page. Took her brush. Dipped it once.
Wrote: Not yet.
Put the brush down.
She pulled the totem out of the railing and held it against her chest for a moment, both hands, the way you hold a thing you are apologising to without being entirely sure what for. Then she wrapped it in the edge of her blanket and stood.
Her legs complained. The bell below rang again, three pulses now, the third watch. The Shrine was waking. Somewhere down a corridor, Callisaw was already in the training courtyard with the sound of his bare feet on stone, unhurried, the way he always was in the hour before a fight.
Hyjal was five hours away.
Mei Lin pressed her forehead against the totem once. Whispered, very quietly, the way grandmother had taught her to whisper to things that had been kind to her for a long time.
"Take your time."
Then she went to pack.
— Mist