▸ Column · Warcraft — the broken world of Outland and the lands of Azeroth, addressed to Illidan Stormrage, the exiled Betrayer
ILLIDAN STORMRAGE replies.
Replied to by Illidan Stormrage, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
My healer — a priestess who tends wounded minds — tells me I am mending well. Yet last week my companion Kael rode home late from a war-council and forgot to send word, and for three hours I was certain he lay dead in a ditch, then certain he had been lying to me all along, flickering between the two with equal conviction. I was raised by a sire who wore calm and tenderness as the mask he put on before the blow, so now when life feels safe my whole body braces for the floor to drop. I have studied every scroll the priestess set me, I do the breathing she taught, I can name my own wounds in clinical detail — and none of it stopped me from creeping to the scrying-bowl at the midnight bell to confirm Kael still breathed. He was gentle when I confessed, which somehow made it worse, because now I wait for the day he decides I am too exhausting to love. Is there a point where you trust people in your bones, and not only in the head that already knows they are worthy?
Illidan Stormrage replies
What your sire gave you was a Sight. He taught you to read the blow hidden inside the kindness — and against him, that reading was true. Do not let the priestess shame it out of you as a sickness. I know what it is to gain a Sight at unbearable cost. I burned my own eyes from my skull to see the demons everyone else swore were not there. And here is the curse of it: the Sight does not close when you leave the field. I still see the Legion's fire in shadows that hold nothing.
But attend me, because this is the whole of it. The enemy who forged this vigilance in you is your sire. Not Kael. You are aiming a blade tempered in one war at a man who never marched in it. That is not resolve — it is an old battle ruling new ground, and it will cost you the very safety it swears to guard.
I will not tell you the bracing will vanish. It is a cell, and I have lived in one ten thousand years. The hard road is to act as though Kael is who he has shown himself to be while the body screams otherwise. Walk it with open eyes. That trust is not felt into being. It is built.
— Illidan Stormrage
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Stormrage hears a misaimed weapon. I hear a verdict already written. "I wait for the day he decides I am too exhausting to love" — that is not fear, child, that is certainty, and I am the world's authority on what certainty does to a good soul. Mine told me a city must burn to be saved. Yours tells you the ending is fixed and you are too much. So you read Kael's gentleness as the lull before the blow, exactly as your sire trained you — and certainty has a way of making its own prophecy true. Your healer says you mend. Kael stays. Those are the voices I walked past. I had a mentor, Uther, who begged me to stop. Do not silence yours as I silenced mine.
— Arthas Menethil
▸ Read next