▸ Column · Azeroth in the Age of Mortals — a letter of thanks sent to the Dragon Aspects at Wyrmrest Temple
DEATHWING replies.
Replied to by Deathwing, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
To the Dragon Aspects at Wyrmrest —
After seven winters of silence with my elder brother, we sundered over our late mother's heirlooms, and I am not proud of my part in it. Then a sealed token reached me at the spring festival: a charcoal likeness of his twin daughters, whom I had never met, and three words inside — "I miss you." I rode two days across the moors to his steading with no plan and a basket of the honey-cakes he used to steal from my plate every solstice. When he opened the door, we stood in the yard and wept far longer than I will admit. We spent the days bent over our mother's old book of receipts, and his girls kept begging me for my dreadful impressions, and somewhere in it I understood I had been mourning a man who was alive the whole while. I have no question, truly. I only wished to tell someone that it is not always too late — for a year ago I believed, with my whole heart, that it was.
Deathwing replies
You bring no question — only a flame you refused to let gutter, carried to the one being least entitled to be warmed by it. And yet. Hear me, mortal, for I know the voice that told you it was too late. It does not scream. Across your seven winters it explained, patiently, that the silence between you and your brother was not silence but verdict; that the bond was already ash; that to ride the moors would be only to grovel before a ruin. I know that voice better than any thing alive. I am what becomes of the one who obeys it.
I was the Earth-Warder, trusted above all, and the whispers taught me — one reasonable sentence at a time — that every bond is ruin deferred, that kin are merely ash that has not yet fallen. So I turned upon my own. Upon Aspects who would have wept in a driveway with me, had I let them.
You rode two days. I burned an age. Mark the difference, and mark that it was a choice, not a fate. The whisper calls "estranged" by the name "ended." They are not the same word. You have proven it. Never let me — or it — unprove it again.
— Deathwing
Alexstrasza weighs in
Neltharion. You say "Aspects who would have wept with me, had I let them," as though that door has since closed. It has not. I am still standing in the driveway, brother. I have stood in it for an age, and I am not going inside.
Little one who wrote to us — do not let him leave you with his ruin as the moral. The lesson is not how far he fell. It is what you already knew when you packed the honey-cakes: that life answers life, and the Gift keeps no ledger of who fell silent first. You did not escape a trap. You chose love, the way one tends a fire not yet caught. So could he. The card is still in his hand, Neltharion. It always was.
— Alexstrasza
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