▸ Column · Third War-era Lordaeron — the feudal kingdom of Arthas's birth and fall, where minor lords and men-at-arms write to the column from within its faith-steeped, hierarchical society
ARTHAS MENETHIL replies.
Replied to by Arthas Menethil, with a rebuttal from Illidan Stormrage.
The letter
My companion Soraya and I have kept one another these four years, and last month we came into a modest holding — a small estate with a courtyard I immediately, embarrassingly, began to picture filled with children. The difficulty is that Soraya has been plain about her wishes since before we met. She made a jest of it early on — called herself a barren pledge, wore the phrase like a badge — because she genuinely believed she would never want children, and I laughed with her, because I genuinely believed the same. I am six-and-thirty now, and I wept at my sister's naming ceremony for her firstborn in a way I could not explain, and the wanting has risen in me like a tide I cannot argue myself out of. Soraya is not unkind in her answer. She says, quietly, each time, that her mind has not changed and will not — that she would sooner lose me than spend two decades resenting a life she never chose. I keep telling myself we will find some compromise, and yet I know, even as I write it, that there is no half-heir. I am terrified I am asking the person I love most in this world to either betray herself or watch me go. How do I know whether this is a grief I can make my peace with, or a future I will regret abandoning?
Arthas Menethil replies
The phrase you keep returning to — "we will find a compromise" — is the thing I want you to sit with, because you answered it yourself in the very same breath: there is no half-heir. You know this. And yet the phrase returns, because while you hold onto it, you have not had to decide yet. I built my entire damnation out of that particular comfort. I told myself I could take up Frostmourne and pay its price without losing what I was. Uther laid down his hammer rather than follow me any further. Jaina turned her face from me. Every voice I trusted told me the thing I was reaching for could not be reached without being destroyed in the reaching — and I walked past every one of them, certain that duty required a sight clearer than love could offer. That was not clarity. It was the architecture of delay, dressed so neatly in purpose that I could not see the difference.
Soraya has given you something I never had: a true answer, offered without cruelty. She is not wavering. She is not waiting for your love to wear her into a different mind. Every time you return to "compromise," you are choosing, very quietly, not to hear her — and beginning the motion of treating her honest answer as an obstacle your patience can outlast. I know that motion. I know the road it is the first step of. It does not lead where you have pictured.
I will not tell you which want is the one to grieve. You already know, in the place my certainty once lived before it hardened into a cage. What I will tell you is this: Soraya is the voice trying to tell you the truth. I walked past the voices that tried to tell me mine. That is not a mistake I recommend you make on your way to anywhere.
— Arthas Menethil
Illidan Stormrage weighs in
Arthas warns about certainty. He's right — his certainty was a trap. But notice the trap he didn't warn you about: calling "grieve and release" wisdom when it's fear wearing virtue's face.
The wanting came like a tide you can't argue away. I know that language. That is not recklessness — it's a true cause pressing through every argument you've made against it. Soraya knows her truth; she told you plainly and without cruelty. Respect that completely. Now respect yours with the same honesty. Count the cost of leaving — she matters, the years matter, the house matters, all of it matters — and if the cause still holds once you've counted every piece, then go. Cleanly. Without turning back and without asking her to become someone she cannot be.
The half-life of staying while something in you quietly starves — that loneliness has no exit. I have lived too long in the lonelier version. Choose which road you're actually on.
— Illidan Stormrage
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