▸ Column · Azeroth — a high-fantasy retelling in the world of Warcraft, Illidan answering from his exile in Outland
ILLIDAN STORMRAGE replies.
Replied to by Illidan Stormrage, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
My husband Taeron and I just marked our forty-seventh winter bound — our daughter laid out a feast in the garden, and partway through the evening one of her friends, newly betrothed, drew me aside and asked, almost under her breath, how we had stayed truly content together so long. I gave her the plain truth: for the first ten years we quarreled like fools over coin and whose turn it was to mend the roof, and then one morning Taeron warmed a cup of cider and set it in my hands before I'd thought to ask, and I understood I'd been keeping a tally of every annoyance he'd given me instead of a tally of every small kindness — so I simply stopped keeping the first ledger. The girl looked at me as though I'd handed her some secret rune. I felt foolish that the answer was so ordinary. I'm not writing for counsel. I'm writing because I don't think ordinary gets spoken aloud enough, and perhaps it should.
Illidan Stormrage replies
You believe the secret was ordinary. It was not. You did a hard thing and dressed it so plainly that even you mistook it for nothing. To set down the ledger of grievances — to choose, every single morning, to count kindness instead of injury — most cannot manage that across one year, let alone forty-seven. The comfortable imagine love simply happens to them. You know better. You labored for it in the dark, where no one applauds.
I will tell you what I am not in the habit of telling anyone. I loved once. Tyrande. She chose my brother Malfurion, and I let that wound become the very ledger you laid down — and I kept every entry through ten thousand years in a cell. I burned away my own eyes for a war no one else would wage. I never once had a warm cup set in my hands, unasked, across forty-seven winters.
So do not be embarrassed that the secret is small. The small thing you held is the thing I traded everything for and never recovered. Say it out loud. The ones too proud to hear it are precisely the ones who need it most.
— Illidan Stormrage
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Stormrage calls it "will." Of course he does — he turns every hearth into a war only he is fit to wage. Hear it differently. The ledger she set down is the one I carried to a throne of ice. Mine began as small, justified grievances: the plague, the ones who failed Lordaeron, every wrong I was right about. Each entry made the next cruelty reasonable. She stopped tallying. I let mine compound until it hardened into certainty, and certainty took up Frostmourne. So, young betrothed — the danger was never the great betrayal. It is the quiet accounting of small wrongs you feel entitled to keep. Burn the ledger. I did not, and I am what remains.
— Arthas Menethil
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