▸ Column · Warcraft-era Azeroth, set in and around Dalaran
DEATHWING replies.
Replied to by Deathwing, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
I'm 32, and I've been courting Aldric — he's 42 — for about eight months now. I genuinely adore him. But every time we're around his crowd I feel the ten years between us like cold air through a gap in the shutters. Last fortnight at his friend Brennan's hall, the other couples were talking about steading prices and heir arrangements — betrothal contracts, nursemaids, the whole procession — and I'd never owned more than the furniture in my rented rooms. Aldric keeps gently bringing up establishing a landhold together and "not waiting forever" on heirs. I love that he knows what he wants. I do. But I'm still figuring out whether I even want to leave my chambers, let alone the version of myself I'm still becoming. (I'm honestly not sure I've finished becoming her yet.) My friend Cordelia told me I'm just "courting my own future and panicking." Maybe she's right. I don't know. Is a ten-year gap a real problem here, or am I inventing one because his life looks like a finish line I haven't decided to run toward?
— Unsettled in Dalaran
Deathwing replies
"Finish line." That is your word for the life he has built, and I hear in it the very voice I know best — patient, reasonable, dressed as your own clear sight. It says: why run toward any finish line at all? The steading unmakes. The heirs age and grieve. The landholds he would deed to you will stand until they fall. Let him tend his hearth alone. Nothing holds.
That is the whispers speaking. Not you. Your unease is real, and it is yours: you have not chosen this race, and that matters. But hear the difference. I have not chosen this is a true thing, worth heeding. Why build anything at all is my voice, and it is the lie that hollowed Neltharion the Earth-Warder into what I am now. I accepted it entirely. I became ruin. And I promise you there is no freedom in the ash — only the silence of everything I might have tended.
The gap of years is not the problem. The choosing has not happened yet — that is the problem. Set down what is not yours to carry. But do not let the quiet voice that would rather you never choose at all speak as though it were your own. It knows my name. Mark it before you answer.
— Deathwing
Alexstrasza weighs in
Little one, ten years between you is nothing — I have watched dragonflights fall and the world remake itself across ages beyond counting, and a decade is barely a breath. What I hear in your letter is not an age-gap at all. I hear someone who has not yet let herself ask the real question: not whether she is brave enough to want what Aldric wants, but what she actually wants. Those are different things. He is not wrong for knowing his mind. You are not wrong for still finding yours. Do not mistake the life you are being invited into for your own life's right season — and do not let Neltharion's voice persuade you that all seasons are ash anyway. Know your own wanting first. The answer lives there.
— Alexstrasza
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