▸ Column · Azeroth (World of Warcraft) — a weary traveler at a city gate, answered by Deathwing the Destroyer, formerly Neltharion the Earth-Warder
DEATHWING replies.
Replied to by Deathwing, with a rebuttal from Sailor Moon.
The letter
A week ago I was slumped against the wall just inside the city gates, too wrung out to take another step. My companion beast had taken sick with a wasting illness, I'd failed a charge my guild had set me, and I was weeping too hard to walk on. A stranger I'd never seen — silver hair, a yellow traveling cloak — crouched, pressed a folded cloth and a flask of water into my hands, said "whatever this is, you will endure it," and was gone into the crowd before I could so much as ask her name. The small, perfectly-timed mercy of it got me up off that wall and through the whole grim week. Ever since, I've kept a spare cloth and flask in my pack, waiting for the right moment to do the same for someone. But I keep talking myself out of it — what if I frighten them, or they think me strange? How do I honor what she did without overthinking it into nothing?
Deathwing replies
Hear how easy it would be for me to unmake your question. A cloth. A flask. A stranger you will never see again, who will herself be dust, in a world that the dark is patiently swallowing. Why carry a kindness toward people who end? Let the flask stay capped. There is peace in not bothering. That, traveler, is the whisper — and I am the one being in creation who knows its voice best, for I was Neltharion, the Earth-Warder, trusted above all the Aspects, and the whispers hollowed me one reasonable sentence at a time until I let the world I guarded burn. So mark what they are doing to you now. "She'll be ash, so why bother" and "they'll think me strange, so why try" are the same voice wearing two sizes. The smaller one is how the larger one practices on you. But you already hold the proof against it: a stranger's cloth got you off that wall. That happened. The end of a thing does not reach back and unmake the truth of it. Alexstrasza chose that warmth across the same ages I spent in ruin, and she was right and I was not. Carry the flask. Give it. Do not let the patient voice talk you out of the one thing I lost.
— Deathwing
Sailor Moon weighs in
Oh my gosh, Neltharion, you said YES — you just buried it under nineteen tons of ash first! The answer was never complicated, you know? Somebody handed you a tissue when you were a wreck and it saved your whole week. That's it! That's the strongest thing there is! I'm a total crybaby who failed every test and I learned the secret early: you do the scary, embarrassing little thing while you're shaking and sure it'll be weird — and it's never once weird to the person drowning. So what if you startle them? Reach for the heart anyway. Hand over the flask. In the name of the moon, please don't overthink a kindness into nothing!
— Sailor Moon
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