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ILLIDAN STORMRAGE replies.
Replied to by Illidan Stormrage, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
Dorian and I have been together just over two years. We share a flat in the Mage District and a rescue hound we've named Ember. But every time his parents make the trip down from Silvermoon, he books me a "surprise day at the bathhouse" so I'm conveniently out of the flat when they arrive. I've never met them — not at Harvest's End dinner, not even at his sister Verena's wedding back in the spring, where he introduced me to some cousins as "a friend from work" and seated me at a completely different table.
I finally asked him straight out why. He said his mother is "traditional" and it just "isn't the right time." Which is word for word what he told me the year before. Then the beast-handler who tends Ember mentioned his parents' animal in passing, and it was pretty obvious they have no idea I exist at all.
I'm starting to feel like a secret he's quietly ashamed of. I don't know how much longer I can keep pretending those bathhouse days are a gift instead of an eviction.
— Unseen in the Mage District
Illidan Stormrage replies
You already named it. "An eviction." Not a gift, not a coincidence — an eviction. That word didn't come from confusion. I trust it more than anything else in this letter.
My own brother Malfurion sealed me away for ten thousand years. Called it justice. The things I had sacrificed, the power I had taken into myself to fight what no one else would — those weren't something he could explain at the gathering, so he did what the comfortable always do: he put me somewhere I couldn't complicate the story. I know exactly what it is to be the truth someone buries because your existence doesn't fit their introduction.
I'm not going to tell you to go make yourself easier for his mother to accept. That is not the question. You are not a problem that needs softer edges for people who have already decided not to know you.
Here is what is actually the question: is there a version of Dorian who chooses to stop hiding you when the choice is made explicit — or is there not? The bathhouse days are the architecture of the deferral. Name what they are. Demand the conversation. Count the cost — the lease, the hound, the two years — and look at it directly, not to turn back, but to know what you are choosing.
The lonely road is still a road. A cell is worse.
— Illidan Stormrage
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Illidan sees your courage. I see Dorian.
Word for word, the same excuse, a year apart. I know that grammar. Every step of my own fall felt measured, responsible, necessary. The man who ordered Stratholme's purging did not think of himself as becoming monstrous — he felt like the only one willing to do what duty required.
Dorian has not hidden you from cruelty. He has hidden you because each deferral felt manageable. That is exactly how it works. After two years, the lie is no longer a decision — it is the shape of his life.
One more thing Illidan did not name: when did you stop noticing the bathhouse days were not a gift? That is your first comfortable lie. My mentor Uther tried to name mine before I walked past him. If the voice in you already knows — hear it. I did not, and I could not come back from where that led.
— Arthas Menethil
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