▸ Column · Warcraft fantasy — Horde garrison/Orgrimmar setting, Warchief-era Azeroth; the letter-writer is a member of the Horde writing from barracks life
GARROSH HELLSCREAM replies.
Replied to by Garrosh Hellscream, with a rebuttal from Thrall.
The letter
My partner Trevor and I cannot settle the smallest thing — a supply ledger that wasn't sent, a garrison posting that was forgotten — without it erupting into a screaming match that leaves us both hoarse. Last week we spent the better part of an hour at full volume over a logistics dispute and somehow arrived at tearing open wounds from the Hillsbrad campaign three seasons ago. The pattern never breaks: a small thing, voices climb, someone says something that cannot be unsaid, then a day of frozen silence before we both pretend it passed without damage. Half the barracks has apparently been awakened by us, and when a bunkmate left a note about the disturbance I felt a shame I did not expect. The maddening part is that we genuinely like each other when nothing needs deciding — it is only the friction of actual life that turns us into people I do not recognize. How do we learn to quarrel without exhausting ourselves out of love?
Garrosh Hellscream replies
The noise isn't what I would sneer at. Two people who say what they mean without softening it into nothing — that is not weakness.
The weakness is the silence.
You scream for an hour, settle nothing, then wrap yourselves in quiet and call it peace. The Hillsbrad campaign, three seasons back — it's still there because you buried it instead of finishing it. Buried things wait. They surface the next time you need something to throw, and you always need something to throw.
Here is what the noise is actually telling you: neither of you has dominion. Every small thing — the ledger, the posting, whatever was forgotten — becomes another war over the same question you have never answered. Whose will settles it. You need each other's agreement to move, and that need is a leash, and the leash is what you are screaming about every time, without knowing it. You are not fighting about the ledger. You have never been fighting about the ledger.
I held a Horde without asking anyone's agreement. Every will bent to mine, completely — and I stood at the top of a fortress of ash over people who feared me and had long since stopped being mine in any way that mattered.
The counsel is on the table. So is the warning. They are the same thing.
— Garrosh Hellscream
Thrall weighs in
One will must dominate, he says. The leash must be cut.
The man who wrote that has been holding ashes he still will not call ashes. I know what the end of that counsel looks like, friend — I handed the Horde to someone who believed it, and good orcs bled for my belief in him.
What Garrosh cannot tell you is this: the problem is not who wins. The problem is what you are teaching each other. Every fight leaves a mark that shows the next fight exactly where to strike. You are training each other. I know what it is to be trained as a weapon. That training does not stop because one of you finally dominates.
Notice the moment before the unforgivable thing is said. Not after — before. That is the only moment that matters, and it is the one he cannot point you toward.
— Thrall
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