The water spirits found her first. They always do with the quiet ones, the ones born near rivers, raised on the sound of rain against jade leaves. In **Dawn's Blossom**, a grandmother taught a girl to listen. To let the spirits move through her hands. To be patient. To be still.
Her grandmother taught her the old ways. How to call the water spirits into a totem and let them sing, washing calm over the wounded like cool rain. How to call water that rushed over torn flesh and broken bone, moving from one ally to the next until every one of them could stand again. How to place a mana totem in the earth and feel the spirits pour energy back into those who had given everything they had. How to call upon the earth itself to shield an ally, stones orbiting around them, absorbing every blow and mending bone with each impact. And riptide. That was grandmother's favourite. A quick surge of water that rushed over torn flesh and clung to the wounded, keeping them whole long after her hands moved on. Like a river remembering where it needed to flow.
"Water does not force. It finds the wound. It fills the crack. It mends what fire and earth cannot."
But there was one thing her grandmother taught her only once. She made Mei Lin sit in silence for a full day before she would speak of it. Ancestral Vision, the art of reaching beyond the veil, past the living waters, into the realm of the ancestors themselves. To find a spirit that had already begun its journey and call it back.
"This is not healing. This is asking the ancestors to return what they have taken. You do not demand. You do not command. You kneel, and you ask, and you hope they listen."
Mei Lin was good at it. She just wasn't built for still.
The first time she called {storm}lightning around herself, crackling arcs dancing across her fur, her grandmother just sighed. When she bound flame to her weapon and the blade glowed with molten heat, her grandmother sighed louder. And when the wind itself answered her call, howling around her fists with a fury that wasn't hers to tame, her grandmother finally said: "You were always more storm than stream, child."{/storm}
The first time she heard thunder speak, she answered back. The first time lightning reached down from the sky, she reached up. The water spirits never left her. They never do. But the storm had found her, and it had a lot to say.