▸ Column · Post-Third War Azeroth; Forsaken vanguard, Undercity era
SYLVANAS WINDRUNNER replies.
Replied to by Sylvanas Windrunner, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
My new commanding officer, Robert — recently assigned to our vanguard detachment — is the most careful commander I've served under, and that is the problem. Last week he noticed I hadn't stood down from patrol rotation in three days and quietly rerouted my assignments, tucking a note into my missive roll: "The dead can still break. Rest." I had to retreat to a supply alcove because I could not stop shaking. I grew up with a father who gave you things right before he took something worse, so any gift without an obvious ledger still reads to me as a trap being laid. When Robert found me I snapped that I didn't need coddling, and the look on his face made me feel like the monster my family always said I would become. I am over thirty years dead and I still cannot let a decent person be decent to me without bracing for what follows. How do I stop making someone who has given me no cause pay for what someone else did?
Sylvanas Windrunner replies
The question you asked — "how do I stop making someone who has given me no cause pay for what someone else did" — is the wrong one, and the wrong question keeps you walking circles. Robert has cost you nothing. The man who trained your body to flinch at gifts has cost you everything, and he is still running you. That is the part that should make you furious.
I know what it is to be run by someone else's will after they are done with you. The Lich King had written himself into the machinery before he was finished with me — he didn't need to be in the room to give the order. I spent years asking, every time something moved in me: whose impulse is this? Mine, or his? That question gave me back myself.
So ask it. Your body braced for that note before you'd read it. Whose intelligence was running? Your father's — against a man he has never met, in a situation he has no standing to judge. You are letting a dead authority govern your present, and you have not yet decided you're allowed to revoke his commission.
The monster he told you you'd become: a lie he needed you to believe so you would never collect your own evidence. Robert's face when you snapped at him — people who are setting traps don't look like that when you push back. They look satisfied.
I am not counseling open gates — I am the last who would. Stop letting him run this. That commission was never his to give.
— Sylvanas Windrunner
Arthas Menethil weighs in
She is right about the father. She isn't wrong.
What she didn't name is the phrase you couldn't set down: "the monster I was always told I'd become." I know that specific horror — not from being warned of it, but from the inside, one reasonable, armored step at a time.
You did not become a monster by flinching at a note. You built something toward one when you watched a decent man's face fall and decided you must be the problem he cannot fix. That certainty is its own kind of coldness. I know its texture intimately.
I know what a gift that is actually a trap looks like. I have given them. That note was not one.
— Arthas Menethil
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