The Scarab at Runestone Falithas

The scarab was fat with something that wasn’t its own. That was the first thing anyone would have noticed, if anyone had been watching besides the chronicler. An Engorged Scarab, the elves of Eversong call them, which is a polite word for a beetle that has been drinking from the wrong well. It found Laotou three minutes past the gates of Silvermoon City, opened something it should not have been able to open, and the monk bled out on the gold road under the gold leaves.

So the evening began with a corpse. Most good stories do.

The chronicler would like to say the Pandaren rose with a vow of vengeance. Laotou rose the way healers always rise, mildly embarrassed, brushing leaves off the robe, and went back to work. There is a particular humility in a monk who keeps everyone else alive and then loses an argument with an insect. Laotou did not dwell on it. Pandaren rarely dwell. They save that for tea.

The work was the Lightbloom. Last time the monk left it untrimmed and curious, a garden that had started to get ideas. This time Laotou went to Runestone Falithas, where the old stones still hum with whatever the magisters poured into them long ago, and dealt with it properly. The Curious Cultivation was looked into. The Lightbloom was trimmed. And then someone asked the harder question, the one nobody in Eversong likes to say aloud, and the monk went Seeking Truth and found some.

Truth, in Quel’Thalas, is always more expensive than it looks. This one paid well and frightened people. Silvermoon Must Know, the message went, and so a runner’s work was done, and Silvermoon was told. Whether Silvermoon wanted to know is another matter. The chronicler has never met a court that thanked the messenger.

Somewhere between the runestone and the telling, Laotou grew. Not taller. Pandaren have no need to be taller. But steadier, the way a river is steadier after the spring floods have cut its bed a little deeper. The beetle had been a reminder. The runestone had been the answer to it.

The forest paid in kind, as forests do when they are frightened. A Belt of Herbicide, which is the most honest name for a garment the chronicler has ever written down. A Ring of Overgrowth for the other hand, as if to keep the scales level. Bracers off some drowned Dawnlit corsair, tarnished, and still better than the monk’s own.

Then the road ran down to the Elrendar River and out to the Solaarian Sunbath, and the trouble changed color. A Wayward Magister had gone looking where magisters should not look. There was an Appeal to the Void, and a Rational Explanation offered to cover it up, and neither satisfied anyone, least of all the chronicler. When the void comes up in polite elven conversation, it is never rational. Laotou heard both out and settled both, and came away with Umbric’s Channeling Focus hung at the belt. A strange thing for a healer to carry. Stranger to carry it without asking where it came from.

There was the First to Know, a Chance Meeting that was nothing of the kind, and a Ransacked Lab that someone had gone through in a hurry and with purpose. The chronicler notes that nothing in a ransacked lab is ever missing by accident.

In between, because the season insists, Laotou found another candy bucket and was treated like a hero for it. Hallow’s End does not care what is stirring in the woods.

By the end of it the monk was some three hundred gold heavier and wearing a Serpentine Talisman in place of a finer chain from Eversong, for reasons known only to Laotou. Every monk keeps a few.

And three letters were waiting at the end, all with the same name on them. The Battle for Tranquillien. The Traitors of Tranquillien. The Heart of Tranquillien. A town that sounds like peace has asked for a fighter, a judge, and a healer, all at once.

Laotou is all three, on a good night. The scarabs are still out there, too.