The Quiet Wind

I. The stones at Windsong

When Ilaeth Galewhisper was small, the standing stones at Windsong sang.

You had to work for it. You lay in the long grass by the lake with your ear pressed to the cold foot of the tallest stone, and you waited for the gusts off the water to come round from the east, and then you heard it: one long note, half breath and half voice, like someone humming in the next room. Her grandmother Nerith said every Skyborne child heard the stones once and most of them forgot. Ilaeth heard them every day until she was eleven. On the morning she turned twelve she lay in the grass for an hour and heard nothing at all.

She was grown now, and nobody heard them.

The wind spirits had not left the way armies leave, with horns and banners. They went the way warmth goes out of a room. One season the gusts over the Shen'dar Highlands still carried voices, and the next they carried weather. The elders at the Shrine of Akir sang the old calls and the air did not answer. Then the pylons began to fail.

Ilaeth was in Falaath the morning the south terrace went. She heard it before she saw it, a long grinding groan from under the village, and then the orchard wall at the terrace's edge leaned outward, very slowly, as if it were thinking about it. The trees went with it. The terrace slid away from the isle in one piece and dropped into the grey below, and for a moment you could see straight down through the gap into Skywall, cloud on cloud, all the way to nothing.

Nobody screamed. That was what she remembered afterwards. The Skyborne of Falaath stood at the new edge of their village and looked down into the hole where their neighbours' orchard had been, and nobody said a word, because everyone was listening for the wind to catch it, and the wind did not.

Her brother came home that night in blue and gold.

Vaelor was four years older, and he had always been the one who took things apart. When he was nine he took apart their mother's loom to see how the shuttle knew where to go. When he was nineteen he walked to the Rohashi Spires and asked the High Order to teach him what their ancestors had known in Eldre'Thalas, before the exile and before the pact. Now he stood in the doorway of their grandmother's house in Shen'dar with a small blue light turning slowly above his palm.

"They're not coming back, Ila."

"You don't know that."

"I know what I can measure." He closed his hand and the light went out. "The pylons drew on the spirits. Now they draw on nothing. The High Order can make them draw on something else."

"On that." She nodded at his hand. "On the thing our people left behind."

"On the thing we stopped using because the wind was kinder. It isn't kind any more. It isn't anything." He sat down across from her, and for a moment he looked like her brother again and not like a man in borrowed robes. "We trusted one patron with everything we had, and it left without a word. I won't let the isle do that again."

"The wind isn't a patron. It's family."

"Family that walked out."

Nerith had sat by the fire through all of this, mending a net that did not need mending. She did not look up.

"Your great-grandmothers," she said, "left Eldre'Thalas because they could not stop having this argument either. You might at least come up with a new one."

Neither of them laughed. In the spring Vaelor took the High Order's oath at the Spires, and Ilaeth walked to the Sanctum of Storms and asked the Windshapers to teach her to listen.

II. Valanaar

The Valanaar skydocks hung off the western cliffs on cables as thick as a tauren's arm, and on the day the first ships went down to Azeroth they were busier than Ilaeth had ever seen them.

Two ships waited at two piers. The Windshapers' ship was bound for the Horde, whose shaman had spoken with the elements for longer than anyone on the isle could remember, and who might know where elements went when they went away. The High Order's ship was bound for the Alliance, and for the mages of Stormwind and Dalaran, who had kept the arcane alive while the shen'dorei let it go. Between the piers the Galestriders, the long-legged cranes the Skyborne had always ridden, shifted from foot to foot in their pens, unsettled by the crowd.

Vaelor found her at the end of the Windshapers' pier. He had a satchel over one shoulder and a brass instrument in his hand, a flat disc with a needle that swung and steadied and swung again.

"It points along the ley lines," he said. "The strong ones. When you stand on one, it holds still." He pressed it into her hand. "In case you need to find a mage in a hurry."

She gave him what she had brought: a long grey feather from the grass at the foot of the Windsong stone, tied with a thread from Nerith's net. He turned it over and did not ask what it was for.

They spoke in Darnassian, as they always had at home. Down in the world below, the orcs would hear it as birdsong, and so would the humans. Of everything the isle had given them, it was the one thing that would still belong only to them.

"If you find them," he said, "tell me."

"If you find a way to hold the isle up without them, tell me."

Both of them meant it.

III. Below

Kalimdor was too big and the sky over it was too empty, and the first thing Ilaeth did when her feet touched it was look for the wind.

There was plenty of it. It came off the plains of Mulgore and pushed the long grass flat and set the totems of Thunder Bluff creaking on their poles. It smelled of earth and smoke and animals. It was ordinary wind, wild and unthinking, and it had nothing to say to her. The tauren who met the ship were kind and very large and very patient, and their shaman listened gravely while she explained what had happened to her people. Then he said that the elements of Kalimdor had been troubled in a dozen ways for years, and none of their troubles sounded like hers.

She learned the land the way the Windshapers had taught her, by going to its edges. On her fourth day she walked to the rim of a mesa, where the cliff fell away for a long drop, and stepped off.

Every Skyborne can do this. It is the oldest thing they know. You step out and spread your arms, and the air takes you, and you drift down in a long slow line, the way a leaf comes down on a still afternoon. The elders said it was the last trace of the pact in their bodies, a habit the spirits had left in their blood. Ilaeth had wondered all the way down from Valanaar whether it would still work in a world where no spirit had ever known her name.

It worked. The air held her the whole way down to the plain, and she landed in the grass laughing and crying at once, and a startled kodo looked at her and went back to eating.

She found the first convergence by accident, a week later, on the road south.

The Windshapers knew there were places in the world where the elements gathered and pressed close, the way water gathers in a hollow. In such places, they said, a Windshaper's blessing ran longer and stronger than anywhere else. She had never stood in one. When she did, on a bare rise near the Mulgore hills, she knew it before she understood it. The hair on her arms rose, her blood ran quick, and the air around her felt thick and crowded and full.

Under all of that, far away and so faint she thought for a long moment that she was inventing it, she heard a single note, half breath and half song, like someone humming in the next room.

It came from the south-west.

IV. The Valley of Bones

On the other side of the world, in a library in Stormwind, Vaelor Galewhisper could not make the ley lines behave.

The High Order had taught him to rest on them the way a tired swimmer floats: to lie still on a line of old power and let it fill him up again. On the isle a short rest had always been enough. Down here the strong lines refilled him faster than he had ever known, and they ran in long straight seams across the Eastern Kingdoms exactly where Stormwind's maps said they should. He spent a month charting them. Then he went down to the harbour and paid a captain to take him across the sea, because every line he drew in Kalimdor bent the same way, towards a blank space in the mountains where the maps had nothing at all.

The tauren who took Ilaeth south was a scout named Hakan Dawnhoof, and he had his own reasons for going.

"The centaur are moving," he said on the second night, over a small fire at the grey edge of Desolace. "The Magram. They come down out of the hills, raid, and go back again. This year they came down and kept going, into the mountains, into the place nobody goes." He poked the fire. "My elders want to know why. I would also like to know why."

Desolace was everything Mulgore was not. The ground was bare and cracked, the sky hung low, and the bones of things too big to have names lay half sunk in the dust. The Magram watched them from the ridges and did not come closer. One morning a band of quilboar crossed their path, squealing, and fled when Hakan stood up.

The note was louder now. She heard it in the evenings, when the wind dropped. It came from the south, from the mouth of a narrow valley walled with grey stone and floored with the white ribs of something that had died there long ago.

"The Valley of Bones," Hakan said. "On the other side, they say, there is nothing."

There was not nothing. There was a man in blue and gold sitting on a rock at the valley's mouth, with a map across his knees and his chin in his hand, looking extremely tired.

Ilaeth stopped walking.

"Of course," she said in Darnassian. "Of course it's you."

Vaelor looked up. For a moment he did not move at all. Then he held up the grey feather, still tied with Nerith's thread, as though she might not believe it was him without it.

"The lines all bend here," he said. "Every one of them. What are you doing here?"

"The wind is calling from here."

Hakan looked from one of them to the other, heard birdsong, and decided it was not his business.

V. Shen'dralas

The valley on the far side of the bones was green.

It had no right to be. It sat in a cup of mountains that should have kept out every drop of rain, and it was full of grass and old trees and the sound of running water. On its northern slope the mountain had been cut into terraces. Under the western cliff a ragged band of centaur had made a camp, and from the look of them they had left their own clans behind. In the middle of everything, on a low rise, stood a round building inside a wall, white stone gone grey, with a long stair running up from it to the north.

Ilaeth knew the shape before they were halfway across the valley. She had grown up in the shadow of it.

"The Sanctum of Storms," she said.

"No," said Vaelor. "But whoever built this had seen the Sanctum, or the Sanctum's builders had seen this." He was walking faster now. "Look at the knotwork on the gate. That's Eldre'Thalas. That's the old school."

Inside the wall was a court, and in the court a pool, round and still and very clear. Around its rim, worn almost smooth, ran a line of writing. Vaelor knelt and traced it with his fingers, muttering, and Ilaeth stood behind him with her heart going like a drum, because the note was not far away any more. It was here. It was in the stone.

"It's Darnassian," Vaelor said. "Old Darnassian, the court kind. It's a list." He moved round the rim. "Names. A lot of names. And then a line I can't..." He stopped.

"Read it."

"'We who stayed,'" he said slowly, "'keep the other half.'"

Neither of them spoke for a while. The centaur shifted at the far end of the valley. Hakan sat down on the steps to wait, with the air of someone who has waited for elves before.

"The other half of what?" Ilaeth said at last.

"I don't know." Vaelor sat back on his heels. "When our people fled Eldre'Thalas, they made a pact with the wind. Everyone knows that. What if they weren't the only ones who left? What if some of them made a different bargain, with something else, and stayed, and hid?" He looked up at the round wall, the long stair, the green impossible valley. "What if the pact had two halves, and we only ever knew about ours?"

"That's a lot of what-ifs for a man who only trusts what he can measure."

"I'm measuring," he said. "The lines don't just bend here, Ila. They end here. All of them. They run into this pool and stop, like rivers into a lake."

She knelt beside him. She did not know what she was going to do until she did it. She put her hand flat on the cold stone rim, the way she used to put her ear to the foot of the Windsong stone, and she listened.

After a moment Vaelor put his hand down beside hers. A small blue light woke under his palm and sank into the stone.

The water moved.

There was no wind in the court. The walls were high and the air was still. But the whole surface of the pool shivered, as if something had breathed across it, and from somewhere under their hands rose one long note, half breath and half voice. It was the song of the stones at Windsong, the one she had stopped hearing on her twelfth birthday, and it went on for as long as both their hands were on the stone.

When Vaelor lifted his hand, it stopped.

When he put it back, it began again.

They did not find the wind spirits in Shen'dralas. Whatever had answered them in the pool would not answer questions, and the writing on the rim gave them only names they did not know and one line they could not stop reading. The centaur in the valley would not speak to them. Hakan went home to his elders with a story he said nobody would believe, and he was wrong: a great many people in Mulgore believed it, and some of them started walking.

That night, by Hakan's fire at the mouth of the Valley of Bones, Ilaeth and Vaelor Galewhisper wrote a letter together, in Darnassian, in two hands. They tied it to the leg of a Galestrider and sent it home to Zephras Isle, to their grandmother's house in Shen'dar, to be read aloud at the Shrine of Akir and in the halls of the Rohashi Spires on the same night.

Something down here still remembers us. It only answers when we come to it together.
Tell the High Order. Tell the Windshapers. Hold on.

The end