Five years was a long time to spend in one place. Leylin had known this going in — had made the calculation with full awareness of what it would cost, had weighed the isolated quality of the commitment against the concrete reasons the commitment was necessary.
He had expected the observation to be the whole of it. The cold, the distance, the accumulated weight of monitoring something vast and dark from a position of deliberate solitude.
He had prepared himself for exactly that, and he had been wrong in the generous way that places sometimes proved wrong the assumptions you carried into them.
Northrend had given him things he had not gone there to receive. The system sign ins he did all around Northrend and what it had returned to him across five years of Northrend's vast, hostile expanse was the diverse collection now.
Icecrown had given him a weapon. The quality of a region saturated with the Lich King's power and the age of the glacier itself had produced, in his first months of observation, the kind of attunement to the local substrate that his earthbending made possible when applied with patience rather than purpose.
He had been running his routine check of the glacier's deep structure when the awareness had struck him — he hadn't signed in the system since he defeated Arthas in their duel. So Leylin signed in Icecrown.
[Sign in Successful]
[The host obtained: Sanctity, the Blade of the King (Legendary)]
The sword was enormous, even by the standards of two-handed greatswords — built for occasions rather than for ordinary combat, the monumental scale of something that understood its own purpose was not frequent or small. And it was not fully present in the physical register alone.
It existed in multiple layers simultaneously, spectral in the truest sense — not transparent, not insubstantial, but carrying within its physical form the accumulated weight of something that had been in this world long enough to become more than what its material suggested.
He had carried it back to the settlement and set it against the wall, and in the years since it had remained there, waiting with the patient, settled quality of something that trusted its time would come.
The Blue Drake Egg he had received from traveling west to Borean Tundra — a week's careful journey along the coast in the second month of his stay, before the full winter had committed to its worst.
He had gone because his monitoring network had flagged an arcane disturbance in the blue dragonflight's historical territory, the signature distinct enough from the Scourge's characteristic necromantic pattern to warrant direct investigation.
The signing in of Borean Tundra had produced this — the region's acknowledgment of his genuine, sustained presence rather than his mere passage through it.
He had carried the egg back to Dragonblight with the specific, careful attention of someone who understood exactly what they were carrying and what that responsibility entailed.
In the warmest corner of his settlement it still rested, maintained by the working he had learned to provide, developing with the extraordinary patience of dragon life. It had not yet hatched.
But it was alive, and it was his responsibility, and watching its gradual, subtle changes across five years had become one of the settlement's quiet constants.
Howling Fjord's reward had arrived in the second year, and it was the most practical of all his returns. The region's cliffs and ancient geology had a character distinct from Dragonblight's bone-white flatness — older, in a different way, the antiquity of coastal stone that had been shaped by sea and ice simultaneously across longer than the current crisis could account for.
When the Fjord acknowledged his sustained presence, it did so in the direct language of a place that understood practical value: a substantial deposit of Cobalt Ore revealed precisely, the substrate opening its composition to his earthbending awareness with the kind of clarity that came only from genuine familiarity.
The ore was extraordinary quality — the pure cobalt that the Fjord's particular geological composition produced in ways that surface prospecting would never have located. He had extracted what he could carry and had sent the surplus south with the next correspondence ship, knowing its value to the blacksmiths of the Eastern Kingdoms and understanding that what a place gave you should be allowed to serve a purpose proportionate to its quality.
Grizzly Hills had not acknowledged him with an object. It had given him Arcturis. This happened in the third year's late autumn, in the specific, amber-tinged quiet between the major snows when the forest carried the most beautiful light Northrend produced — the pine-filtered gold of a cold season in transition, the particular quality that the hills expressed when they were briefly neither preparing for winter nor recovering from it.
He had been walking his extended observational circuit, following the forest paths that furbolgs would take. He opened his system and signed in while walking, it was then the reward manifested in front of him.
The spirit bear had emerged from between two trees with the deliberate, unhurried quality of something that had decided to appear. There was a qualitative difference between an animal revealing itself and a spirit beast choosing to manifest, and what had occurred in that moment of amber forest light was unambiguously the latter.
The bear was present in the way that things are present when they exist in multiple registers simultaneously — fully physical and also something considerably more, the spectral quality of a being whose nature exceeded its visible form.
It had regarded him for a long moment with the evaluating patience of something ancient making an assessment that mattered to it.
And then it had simply remained beside him.
Arcturis became, in the years following, the most reliable component of his extended intelligence network — ranging freely through Northrend's forests and tundra and glacier edges with the unconstrained mobility of a spirit beast, reporting back through channels of communication that had no equivalent in ordinary language.
What Leylin could not see directly, Arcturis could move through and return from, and the combination of the two of them had made his monitoring of Icecrown's activity significantly more comprehensive than either alone could have achieved.
Zul'Drak had demanded more than presence. It had demanded careful preparation.
The fallen city carried the layered heaviness of a place where catastrophe had been self-inflicted — the Drakkari trolls' sacrifice of their own loa leaving something in the atmosphere that was harder to read than simple destruction, the morally complex residue of a people who had made the worst possible choice for the most understandable possible reasons.
He had approached the region with the specific, additional protocols that such places warranted, the equivalent of wearing protection into an environment that was toxic not in the physical but in the resonant sense.
The Ice Troll Totem he had received from the rewards was not dark in itself — it was an artifact of what the tradition had been before desperation corrupted it, a piece of the Drakkari's genuine ritual life preserved in the city's remnants.
He had studied it extensively and had taken it with the same careful purpose that had governed everything else — understanding rather than accumulation.
Storm Peaks had given him a quantity of Saronite Ore, which he handled with the deliberate insulation that ore carrying the Old God's resonance required. Enough to understand what it was and what it was connected to. No more than that.
Crystalsong Forest had given him the sprout of a Crystal Tree — emerging from the forest floor at his feet during a period of quiet meditation with the gentle quality of a gift rather than a discovery, the forest acknowledging his presence by producing something from itself.
It grew in the settlement's sheltered southern corner with the patient impossibility of something magical establishing roots in conditions that should have prevented it.
Sholazar Basin's warmth — the incongruous, disorienting warmth of a temperate environment nestled within Northrend's general hostility — had produced the Claws of Har'Koa.
The snow leopard loa's remnant, preserved in physical form after the Drakkari's consumption of its divine essence had left what divinity leaves when it departs. He understood what he held, and held it accordingly.
He was still standing before his collection when the settlement's outer watch signal came through — Arcturis's specific communication, distinct from the regular patterns, indicating the approach of a ship carrying people rather than simply cargo.
He looked at everything arranged before him and felt the specific, quiet satisfaction of an inventory that was honest.
Sanctity against the wall, present and patient. The Blue Drake Egg in its corner, warm despite the cold pressing against everything else. The cobalt and saronite in their separate, carefully maintained containers. The Ice Troll Totem and the Claws of Har'Koa on the study shelf where he had spent extensive time with both. The Crystal Tree sprout visible through the interior doorway, catching what light Northrend's grey sky offered.
None of it had been what he came for. All of it was what staying had produced — the unexpected richness of a place that revealed itself to people willing to be present to it completely rather than simply passing through it toward somewhere else.
He gathered his coat and walked to the harbor, and when the ship came in and Alleria descended the gangplank first, reading his face with the immediate, comprehensive attention she brought to everything, he found he was looking forward to showing her everything.
Not because the objects were impressive. Because each one was a story, and each story was five years, and five years was the thing he wanted her to understand most completely.
The cold pressed in from every direction. The settlement stood warm against it. Leylin walk towards them.