▸ Column · Warcraft — the Horde, the warchief's hall in Orgrimmar
GARROSH HELLSCREAM replies.
Replied to by Garrosh Hellscream, with a rebuttal from Professor X.
The letter
Warchief — I write you eight days after bringing my first child into the world, still aching from the cut the healers made to free him. While I lay recovering in the healers' tent, my mate Marco's mother — the matriarch Renata — rode four days uninvited into our hold. Marco opened the door to her. She tore down the nursery I had built, threw out the wrappings I'd chosen because she favors "the old ways," and told the night-attendant that I had "asked" she be allowed to take my son whenever she pleased. I learned of it only when I came home and could not find a single thing I had packed with my own hands. When I begged Marco to speak for me, he said his mother was "only excited" and that I was being weak with childbed humors. Now she has declared — asking neither of us — that she will stay three more weeks. I love my mate, and I know that in the hall he was raised in, his mother's word was law. But this is my hold, and these are not terms I agreed to. How do I hold this line without it becoming endless war between me and the woman my son will call Grandmother?
Garrosh Hellscream replies
"Without it becoming war." Listen to the question you brought me. A matriarch rode four days into your hold while you bled, threw down what you built, claimed authority over your own child that no one granted her, and seated herself as mistress of your hall for three weeks you never agreed to — and you are asking how to stay POLITE about the occupation. There is no line without war. The line IS the war. She has already conquered the dresser, the blankets, the night-attendant, the keeping of your son. You do not negotiate with a conqueror who is still standing in your house. You reclaim the hold. Put back what was yours. Name the day her stay ends, and make it your day, not hers.
But hear me — the true rot is not Renata. It is Marco. A mate who calls you weak before his mother has told you whose banner he stands under, and it is not yours. Make him choose again, out loud, where she can hear it.
...And know this, since I am the one who called the patient strength of those who raised me "weakness" and ruled nothing but ashes for it: be certain the enemy you crush is the one who wronged you.
— Garrosh Hellscream
Professor X weighs in
Garrosh hears an invasion. I hear a frightened woman. Renata did not ride four days to conquer — she rode them terrified of being a stranger to a grandchild, of mattering to no one. That excuses nothing she did. Bolt the nursery door; eight days postpartum, that is protection, not war. But protection is not a verdict that she is your enemy for life. The one who truly failed you is Marco, who called you weak rather than stand beside you — have that reckoning with him, and soon. Lock the nursery; leave her door unlatched. I have loved an opponent my whole life, Erik, and I promise you: a guarded door and a closed one are not the same thing.
— Professor X
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