and i will learn to love the skies i’m under
Her parents tell her to follow her dreams. She’s beginning to wish they’d given her more practical advice.
At first she dares to think it will be easy. The other races of the world have grand museums—the Ironforge Hall of Explorers is famous—but surely the combined might of the Horde and the knowledge of the blood elves can easily outclass a bunch of greedy dwarves. Surely she will gather the friends and allies she needs to make her dream a reality. Surely it will not take her years, decades, before she stands at the threshold of a museum fit to hold the wisdom of ages.
Her confidence lasts only as long as it takes her to learn Thalassian, and then she can hear what Lady Annara Goldleaf’s guests whisper when they think she does not hear. Silly cow. Naïve girl. That’s a girl? I couldn’t tell. Honestly, I’m amazed she can even read. Imagine, something like her as a scholar? Ridiculous.
(Annara (friend, aunt, almost a mother, who has never once mispronounced her name) takes that particular guest aside. He leaves their gathering later, ears drooping.)
Joining the Reliquary, even on a temporary basis, helps. She thinks she’ll never not be wary of Brightblade and the High Examiner downright makes her want to hide, but her fellow archaeologists respect her. (Even if it takes a while. Even if she has to be twice as good. Even if they don’t seem to believe she’s as respectable a scholar as some of the mages until the day her successful translation prevents a spirit from eating one of the diggers.) And so she digs, and works, and writes, and treks across Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms and even far-flung Pandaria and Draenor—and none of it brings her closer to her goal.
“Follow your heart, my daughter. It will lead you to great things.”
(that is wonderful advice, mama, but hearts alone do not build walls)
No, what she needs and does not have and probably will not have for as long as she keeps traveling is money. She knows who has it, and she knows what induces them to give it away, but she cannot (will not) beg for it. Nor will she ask Annara—the woman has done enough and more than enough for the small Tauren she met on the zeppelin to Brill (and besides Pa’una is pretty sure it would take more money than she has anyway).
The Goldblooms tell her it will be easy. Take a year, two years, ten years off from your adventures, focus on your writing. When you are well-known, when all Quel’thalas sees you as a scholar of renown, the gold will pour in. She knows they are right…but. But.
She thunders across the plains, wind ruffling her fur and her great stone cat racing by her side.
She kneels in a ruined temple, or by a half-buried skull, or in front of what might have once been someone’s bed or chair or table, and begins to document each of its properties in ink and photographs.
She sets up camp in a desert or a rainforest or high in snow-capped mountains, and though she is the only Tauren in a group of sin’dorei and Forsaken she knows she is welcome (even when she is alone she is never lonely).
She sings the ancient words of her people and the spirits of the earth rise up to answer.
She does not want to stop.
(there will be time enough later)
