The dwarf was not supposed to be at the Shrine.
Everybody was at the Shrine these days. The bar at the Seven Stars had two night elves arguing about wine in the back, a gnome engineer drawing something on the table in soy sauce, a tauren eating in silence, and a Wildhammer in grey-white beard-braids sitting on a stool that was too low for him, staring at a cup of something pale that was almost certainly not what he'd ordered.
Mei Lin had been walking past with a bowl of noodles when she heard the word Highlands drift out of his accent. She sat down next to him instead.
"That's rice wine," she said.
"I ordered ale."
"You ordered with your face. The barman panicked."
The dwarf looked at her. She was used to the look by now. New kind of horse, basically. He pushed the rice wine across the bar. "I am listening."
She ordered him a proper ale and got them both noodles.
His name was Tavish. He was Wildhammer, up from the Twilight Highlands, very off-duty and very tired. He had a gryphon on the Shrine roof that had already taken a substantial dislike to the Shado-Pan crane population. He was planning on apologising for that at some point.
"So what's in the Highlands," she said.
"Weather."
"Weather."
"Lass, you have not lived until you have had the wind come off a mountain that Deathwing personally wrinkled. It'll take the fur off a yak."
"I'm a Pandaren. The fur's optional, apparently."
"Not optional up there. Take two coats. Take three."
"You said three things."
He held up a thumb. "Weather." A finger. "Cultists." Another finger. "The wedding." He grinned at that last one.
"The wedding."
"Two of our clans. Firebeards and Thundermars. Been a feud a hundred years. The new Twilight lot showin' up on the doorstep seems t' have concentrated minds, as it were. Big ceremony. Big drink. Big fight, probably, but not the bad kind. The kind where somebody's uncle remembers th' old grudge halfway through the third keg an' somebody's aunt throws a pie."
"I want to go to a wedding that involves pie throwing."
"Then get up there. We need healers. Also there's the cultists."
"The cultists."
"Twilight's Hammer. They worship the end of the world. We've had a few of those, so they've got options. They've moved in on our old ground. Old ground that, bein' honest, we shouldnae be on ourselves, but we had it first, so."
"The dwarf logic is impeccable."
"Yer welcome."
He told her the things you tell a stranger who might end up standing next to you in a bad week. Gryphons matter. Take a spare pick for the pyrite, you'll break one. The jasmine up there will ruin you for other herbs. Red drakes were on their side now. She made him say the last one twice. She was not sure, even after the second time, that she believed it.
She did not write it down. Grandmother had taught her that people tell strangers more than they tell journals, and you respect that by keeping it in your head.
"Why're ye askin', lass?"
"A druid asked me to go north and I went. Now I'm thinking about the next north. I like to know before I go."
"Hah. Good shaman. We had one like that once. Asked th' hill before she climbed it. Lived a long time. Most don't."
"Did she ever tell you what the hill said?"
"She said it usually just said come on, then."
Mei Lin grinned into her bowl. "Mountains are so rude up there."
"Yer already fittin' in."
She paid for both of them and he did not argue. On the way out he said over his shoulder, "If ye do come up, ask for Tavish at Highbank. I'll find ye a coat."
"Three coats."
"Aye. Three."
She walked back to the balcony with a full belly, a head full of weather and cultists and pie-throwing aunts, and the distinct sense that somewhere above the Shrine a gryphon was finishing off its second crane and Tavish was going to have to apologise for it tomorrow.
She sat on the railing a long time after the lanterns went out.
A wedding. With pies.
Alright. She could work with that.
— Mist