▸ Column · Ancient Kalimdor / Warcraft — a night elf healing sanctuary in a forest glade, recast from the modern orthodontics office
ILLIDAN STORMRAGE replies.
Replied to by Illidan Stormrage, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
For eleven years I have kept the ledgers and ward-stones of a small healing sanctuary in the glade where I was born. Keeper Suravelle, who tends it, is well into her twilight years and genuinely kind — but she tells me plainly she has never learned the accounts, that the two young acolytes I trained would "come apart" without me, and that she would have to shutter the hall if I left before she lays down her staff "in a few seasons." She has been saying "a few seasons" for at least four of my eleven years here. Now a great order has offered me near double my stipend and a posting I can serve from afar — a true rise, not a sideways shuffle. I have only just cleared my old debts and can finally build something of my own. My partner says her staffing troubles are not mine to mend, but my kin are among the sanctuary's patients and I grew up under these trees. Is my guilt a real reason to stay, or am I being gently, perhaps unknowingly, leashed to someone else's tomorrow?
Illidan Stormrage replies
Your guilt is doing precisely what it was trained to do, even if she never meant to train it. Hear me clearly: a woman who has promised to lay down her staff "in a few seasons" for four of your eleven years is not describing a plan. She is describing a leash. I will not call her cruel — I say only that the chain holds the same whether the hand on it is malicious or merely afraid.
You have fused two questions. First — should her need rule your future? No. I burned away my own eyes to wage a war my people would not, and my brother Malfurion sealed me in the dark ten thousand years for it. I know what it is to be valued only for one's usefulness, and to be mourned only when that usefulness departs. That mourning is not a verdict on you. It is grief over a lost convenience.
The second question stands apart: is this new road a true cause, or merely flight dressed as ambition? You have answered it yourself — debts cleared, savings begun, a genuine rise. That is your own life, and you are permitted to wage war for it. So count the cost with open eyes — the glade, the kin at the tables, the cold faces that will follow. Then go. Being thought ungrateful is the tax on refusing to live small. Pay it, and do not let her grief rewrite your reason.
— Illidan Stormrage
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Stormrage hands you your freedom and a tyrant's vocabulary in the same breath. "A leash." "A convenience." Watch how effortlessly he recast a frightened old healer as your jailer — that small translation IS the step. I once rendered a city of the doomed into a duty I was owed, and Uther begged me to hear myself; the words made the deed painless. You may leave. You should leave. But not the way Illidan teaches — certain that the people who lean on you are beneath you. Give true notice. Train the acolytes you keep calling helpless. Depart as someone who can still walk this glade's paths. Frostmourne, I promise you, is colder than any guilt.
— Arthas Menethil
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