The first thing Mei Lin noticed about Stormwind was that it had no mist.
Strange thing to notice about a place. She had walked out of a city that was built on fog and green and the quiet weight of bamboo, and she had arrived in a city that was built out of whatever was left when the earth stopped being patient. Stormwind was grey. Grey stone. Grey iron. Grey banners that had once been blue before the rain wrung the colour out of them. The cobbles caught the light the way a river catches a stone, cold and unmoved.
The second thing she noticed was how loud it was.
A fishmonger was shouting prices at a human couple who couldn't decide whether they wanted mackerel or herring. Two city guards leaned on halberds at the mouth of a bridge and watched pedestrians go past with the calm boredom of men who had seen every kind of trouble and most kinds of weather. A hunter in travel-stained leathers passed with a grey wolf padding at her heel. The hunter nodded at Mei Lin the way travellers nod at other travellers, out of habit more than interest. The wolf glanced up once, sniffed the air in her direction, and decided she was not worth stopping for. A dwarf in a blacksmith's apron was rolling a handcart over the cobbles and cursing at each stone personally, as if shaming them might make them smoother. Further down, a draenei paladin in blue plate was helping a farmer lift a crate that the farmer had very clearly been handling fine on his own. The farmer was too polite to refuse and the paladin was too kind to notice. A fisherman had set up on the canal's edge with a pole too optimistic for the fish he was catching. Somewhere a child was screaming for reasons that, thankfully, were not her problem.
It's a city. She grinned despite herself. A proper, rude, noisy, overcrowded city with its elbows out. Imagine that.
A gryphon rider banked low overhead, close enough that she felt the downdraft in her whiskers. Mei Lin waved. He did not wave back. Probably busy. Probably important. Probably neither.
She stood at the edge of the canal with her pack at her feet and the tabard of the Tushui still folded at the top where she could reach it, and she listened past the noise.
The water spirits answered.
Not ghosts. Grandmother had been careful about the difference. The dead had their own weight and their own voice, and whatever dead this city held, they were silent here at the canal's mouth. These were water spirits. The old elements of this city's bones. And they were the ones flinching.
In Dawn's Blossom the water spirits had been chatty. In the mornings she used to find them curling around the stems of the lotus in grandmother's pond, nudging pebbles into small patterns, gossiping about the tea leaves in the kettle. These canal ones were not chatty. She pressed her attention outward the way grandmother had taught her, and instead of the usual small rush of greeting, she felt a whole canal of them go still. Flinching at once. Like they were not used to being noticed.
She crouched at the water's edge carefully, so she wouldn't frighten them further, and pressed her palm flat against the surface. Grandmother called this listening with the other tongue. A tongue most people did not have. She tasted it with the other tongue. Copper. Old iron. Generations of boots crossing bridges, and under that, older water, older stone, a grief that was not hers.
She waited. The spirits waited back.
One of them finally leaned in. The water under her palm lifted by the width of a fingernail, and a small cold wisp of it curled around her wrist, there and then not there. Cold. Curious. Testing. The way a shy pond-fish mouths your finger underwater to see whether you are food or a heron or something new. Nobody else on the canal path would have seen it. Only she did. Grandmother had taught her the trick of watching water for the things that weren't the water.
There you are, Mei Lin thought. She gave the water a small, slow wave with her free hand, the kind of wave you offer to something that spooks easily. The water deserved a real greeting, even if nobody else on the canal path could see who she was greeting.
"Hello."
A dwarf in a leather apron glanced sideways at her on his way past, took in the pandaren crouched by a canal and talking to no one, and kept walking. Mei Lin smiled at him too. Yes. Talking to the water. Thank you for your concern.
She walked. Because she didn't know what else to do.
Past the Cathedral of Light. The great doors stood open even from the square, and from the street she could see the depth of it: long aisles, candles in rows like little trapped suns, the murmur of a service she did not understand. A paladin in pale plate knelt at the edge of a pew with the unhurried patience of a man who could kneel for hours if a god asked. An old woman was lighting a candle for someone whose name Mei Lin would never know. A young priest in brown robes swept the outer step with the distracted patience of someone who had been sweeping that same step for years and had opinions about every grain of dust. Incense drifted out to meet her, thick and floral and, if she was honest, a little much.
Close to the doors the air changed. Warm in a way that was not the sun's warm. Dry in a way that was not the wind's dry. Like standing next to a bread oven, if the bread were someone's soul. Her fur, which had opinions about most things, stood up politely. Ah. She crossed the street early. No judgement of the Light. It just wasn't her weather.
On the far side a young acolyte in white held out a pamphlet about Light-given comfort. Mei Lin took it with both hands and bowed.
"Thank you. Quick question."
The acolyte smiled, practised. "Of course."
"Does the Light mind cats?"
The smile faltered. "Does it... what?"
"Cats. Inside the cathedral. Are they allowed, or would they catch fire. Asking because I don't have a cat, but I'm meeting a lot of cats since I got here and I want to know where I stand."
"I... don't think anyone has asked."
"First time for everything." She bowed again, carefully, the way grandmother had taught her to bow to people who were trying their best. "Thank you. For research."
She folded the pamphlet and tucked it into her pack. She did not understand most of it. If you are going to be rude to someone else's god, at least read their pamphlet first.
Past the Mage Quarter. The tower leaned over the lower streets like a scholar bent over a book too long. Apprentices in cheap blue robes hurried between doorways with armfuls of scrolls and the expressions of people whose tutor had promised them five minutes and then forgotten them. One of them, a gnome, was levitating two books and a sandwich at the same time and had clearly lost track of which one was the sandwich. A tutor was scolding someone in the courtyard for freezing a fountain on purpose. The fountain was, indeed, frozen. A small, smug water elemental the size of a house cat bobbed in the air beside the tutor and refused, with visible satisfaction, to melt.
The tower made her teeth buzz. Not unpleasantly. The way her teeth buzzed when a storm was three breaths from arriving. Different magic, though. Hers was wet and loud. This one was dry and sharp. Full of corners, she thought, which she liked as a phrase and did not say out loud.
She stopped a passing apprentice and asked, politely, whether the tower ever fell over. He blinked at her. "No?"
"Looks like it might."
"It's been there longer than I've been alive."
"So has my grandmother's back fence," she said, "and that one leans on purpose."
The apprentice laughed before he could stop himself, looked guilty about it, and hurried off to catch up to his books. The gnome with the sandwich had, in the meantime, eaten one of the books. Nobody had noticed yet.
I like it here, Mei Lin decided, and moved on.
Past the place where the city just stopped.
A whole district, gone. A crater filled with water where a neighbourhood had been, stone foundations half-sunk, the skeletons of trees standing in a pond that nobody had asked for. The canal spirits from the north end had followed her this far, curious, and when she reached the railing above the ruin they went very quiet. Not afraid. Mourning. She'd heard a name on the boat over from the Wandering Isle. Deathwing. A dragon so large he'd cracked a world, they said. A district so small the world had barely noticed it was gone.
And here, for the first time since she had set foot in the city, she felt the other thing. Under the water spirits' quiet. The dead. Not waving, not asking, not grieving at her. Just present, the way a photograph is present in a drawer you have not opened in years. Grandmother had taught her the weight of ancestors and the weight of unfinished ghosts and the difference between the two. These were the second kind. Mei Lin did not reach for them. Some dead wanted to be spoken to. These ones, she thought, wanted to be left.
She stood at the railing for a long time. Didn't plant a totem. Some wounds weren't hers to tend on a first visit. Some you just stood beside, so the water under you knew someone was still listening.
Past a stall where a man was selling meat pies.
She stopped.
Grandmother always said you judge a place by its worst meal. If a city can feed a hungry traveller on its worst day, it can be trusted.
She bought one. The crust was thick. The meat was brown. She took a bite and her face made a decision that the rest of her body had no part in. It tasted like regret. Like something that had died a year ago and then been asked, politely, to try again.
She ate the whole thing.
Then, because she was thorough, she bought two more.
The man at the stall watched her with an expression that was mostly alarm. "You alright, friend?"
"Research," Mei Lin said. She swallowed. The pie fought her. She won on points. "Honestly, you should be proud. This is one of the worst meals I've had in three kingdoms and I'm going to tell everyone."
The man did not know what to do with that.
"That was a compliment," she added helpfully, already halfway through the second pie. He did not look reassured.
She walked on, chewing. A busker on the next corner was playing a battered lute with more enthusiasm than skill, and she tipped him two copper and the rest of the second pie. He accepted both with the careful expression of a man who suspected he was being pranked. Further down, a dwarven blacksmith was hammering something red-hot into something slightly less red-hot, and he looked up long enough to nod at her in the way craftsmen nod at each other across trades. Mei Lin bowed. He went back to his hammer. Good city, she thought. Rude weather, kind hammers.
Dusk caught her on a rooftop above the canals. She had climbed for the view, and for the quiet, and because Pandaren climbed when they didn't know what else to do. The city spread out below her in a map of lanterns and tiled roofs. Gulls argued over the harbour. Somewhere a smith was still hammering.
She pulled a water totem from her pack and pressed it into a gap between the roof tiles. Just to hear a familiar voice. The wood hummed when her fingers left it. A small, warm sound, the kind a stove makes when it remembers it's a stove.
The spirits of the canal below lifted their heads. Slow. Tentative. Like children meeting a stranger at the door. One of them answered the totem. Just one. A single clear note that rose up through the tile and settled against her ribs.
Then another.
Then another.
Mei Lin closed her eyes and listened. They didn't sing the way hers sang at home. They sang the way people sing when they have forgotten the words and remembered the tune.
She pulled out paper. A brush. Ink that hadn't dried on the long walk from the Wandering Isle. She smoothed the paper against her knee.
Dear Grandmother,
Then nothing. Her hand hovered. The ink waited.
She could tell her about the stone. About the pies. About the cathedral that had pushed her across the street. She could tell her that the spirits here had been waiting for someone to listen. She could make a pun about stone and weep in the same paragraph.
Not yet. The words weren't ready. They were still somewhere between her chest and her teeth, trying to agree on an order.
She folded the paper carefully. Put it back in the pack. Let the rain find her.
Because the rain did find her. Stormwind rain, cold and straight and in a hurry, nothing at all like the warm mist that used to collect on her fur in the jade forests. This rain did not take its time. It had places to be.
But rain is rain. And the canal spirits were braver now. Four of them leaning toward the totem. Then five. She sat on the wet tile with the lanterns below her and the rain above her and one hand on the humming wood, and she let them come.
She had walked a long way.
She could sit a while.
— Mist