▸ Column · Azeroth, post-Cataclysm; a world still bearing Deathwing's scars, where messages travel by sending-stone and guild-members share scrying-mirrors in common trust
DEATHWING replies.
Replied to by Deathwing, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
Three months into our courtship, my partner Miriel presented me with a scroll and asked me to inscribe all my sealing-sigils — my sending-stone cipher, my vault-seal phrase, my personal hearthstone bond-crystal, even the guild's shared scrying-mirror — so that "we'd have nothing to hide from each other." When I pointed out that the guild mirror isn't mine alone to share, she went silent and then wept, saying that if I truly loved her, I wouldn't treat her as a stranger to my life. Now she forwards me transcriptions of sending-stone messages she's apparently been intercepting, demanding to know who "Caelindra from the provisioners" is — Caelindra is fifty-two winters old and organizes the Harvest Festival potluck. Last evening, Miriel said she'd finally feel "safe enough to relax" if I would only attune her resonance-imprint to my personal hearthstone. I keep telling myself this must be what a serious partnership looks like. But I've started turning my hearthstone face-down even when I'm only checking the weather-ward. Is wanting one private corner of my own life a betrayal — or is something else happening here?
Deathwing replies
There is a voice running through this letter that I know intimately — the voice inside Miriel's words when she says if you truly loved me. I know it because it explained the same logic to me, patient and very reasonable, across centuries: surrender one more private corner, and there will be peace on the other side. There never was. I am Neltharion's ruin, speaking from everything that voice eventually built, and I can tell you the peace does not come, because the hunger is not a container. It is the filling itself.
Mark what she is running. It intercepted your sendings. It wept when you protected a mirror that was never yours alone to give. It promises that it will finally relax — safe enough to relax, she says — but what the hunger calls rest means the last lock turned over. And then it finds another lock, because that is the shape of the thing. I consumed mountains. Entire provinces. I was the Earth-Warder who became the Destroyer of a world I once loved, and at no point did the voice inside it tell me that was what I had become. It told me I was finally seeing clearly.
Here is what I can offer you from the ash: you have already lost something. You turn your hearthstone face-down to check the weather. That small privacy — that scrap of ordinary life — is not nothing. I lost exactly that kind of thing first, before the larger ones fell. Name what is happening before you cannot anymore. The most reasonable-sounding voice in the room is the one worth fearing. It was, in my case, speaking the whole time.
— Deathwing
Alexstrasza weighs in
He'll tell you it ends in ash, dear one, because ash is the only ending he still imagines. I knew Neltharion before that — knew what he tended before the whispers got in — and he is right that Miriel carries a hungry thing. He knows its shape. But he has left out the part that matters most: you are not hollow yet. You can still feel the wrongness of turning your hearthstone face-down in your own home. That is not guilt. That is your self.
Your private corner is not a betrayal. It is the hearth of a living thing, and hearths are worth keeping. Korialstrasz knew every secret I held across ages and never once asked me to have none left. That is the difference between love and what she's asking. You deserve to know it.
He is right that the hunger cannot be filled. I will not say otherwise. But the ash he sees at the end of every road — I have stood in it too, little one, and I chose to stay a living thing anyway. So can you.
— Alexstrasza
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