Grandmother used to say the quickest way to understand a mountain was to climb one still bleeding. Mei Lin had never known what she meant. Then a leaf arrived on the balcony railing, sealed with crushed mint, and the mountain in question turned out to have a name.
She had been here before. Not this one. The other one, the version the bronze dragons kept folded inside a cavern, where Archimonde still climbed a tree that was still on fire and two gnomes had carried her through the ash. That Hyjal had ended in a silence she was only now starting to hear around.
This Hyjal was above ground. It had weather. It had druids, far more druids than seemed wise in one place, walking the slopes with seedlings in their hands and ash in their fur. Cenarion Circle banners on bent trees that were already leafing out. And at the centre of it, a young World Tree with a sky-shaped hole in the top of itself where the canopy should have been. Nordrassil. Growing back.
She stood at the base of it for a long time. Then she remembered to breathe. Mystics held their breath in front of trees. She was not a mystic. She had a reputation, and most of it involved cork jokes.
A night elf druid found her there.
"You're the Pandaren who walked Archimonde's hill," she said.
"I'm a Pandaren who did a thing at Hyjal, yes."
"The elements have been talking about you. You were loud enough that the mountain noticed in two directions at once."
"Sorry."
The druid laughed. "Good shaman manners. Come with me. If you're here, you're working."
Working was a week of errands that did not feel like errands.
A basket of saplings carried up a slope where the heat still came through the stone. A cairn rebuilt for a druid who had been too injured to rebuild it herself. Fire elementals climbing out of a vent and refusing to leave, where she unstrapped the shield off her back and brought it up on her arm for the first time that morning, planted a water totem between them and the roots, and let the argument settle itself. It settled in her favour. The elementals sank back into the stone looking affronted. The shield went back across her shoulders before she walked on.
She met an ancient in a grove who had grown a new arm to replace one the Firelands had taken. He showed her the new bark the way somebody shows off a new haircut. She told him it suited him. He was still arriving at what to do with that when she left the grove an hour later.
She helped light a beacon for a wildgod whose name she could not pronounce and whose presence she felt in her teeth before she saw it. Hawk-shaped. Ancient. Tired in the way of things that had been tired for longer than she'd been a person.
She spent an afternoon next to a druid who was reading a book to a tree. The tree seemed to be following along. She did not ask.
The days piled up into a week and then into something close to two. Nobody gave her a medal. The druids were not a medal kind of people. They accepted help the way a river accepts a bucket, and went on running.
On her last morning the druid who had found her walked her down to the south road and waited with her for the wyvern.
"You know what surprised me," the druid said.
"What."
"You didn't try to tell anyone you'd been here before."
Mei Lin looked back at Nordrassil. The young tree was catching the morning light on its missing crown.
"The one I walked already happened," she said. "You're growing a new one. I'd be a very rude guest if I tried to compare them."
The druid nodded, slowly. "That is exactly the right answer."
"I have a lot of wrong ones. Statistically one of them was going to be correct."
The wyvern carried her south along the Kalimdor coast. The mountain shrank behind her. She pulled her notebook out against her knee and wrote:
Two Hyjals. One I fought. One I watered. The second one was harder.
Grandmother would understand that sentence the moment she read it. The rest of the continent was going to take a while.
Ahead, the coast curved into green, and the mist came back in off the sea, and for the first time in a long time the mountain behind her was quieter than she was.
— Mist
Achievement Unlocked
Coming Down the Mountain