▸ Column · Winter Veil season in Lordaeron's merchant quarter, where hand-lit frost-lantern displays and Greatfather Winter effigies mark the midwinter festival
ARTHAS MENETHIL replies.
Replied to by Arthas Menethil, with a rebuttal from Illidan Stormrage.
The letter
For eleven Winter Veils I have maintained what I believe is the finest frost-lantern display on Silver Birch Lane in Lordaeron's merchant quarter — four thousand hand-lit globes, a carved winter-doe I call Clementine, and a clockwork elf that raises one mitten on a thirty-second crank cycle. Then last Greatfather's Eve my new neighbor Bao had a forty-foot Greatfather Winter effigy erected outside his gate, one so enormous it requires its own private bellows-golem simply to remain upright, and now every cart on our street slows for his idol and not my elf. The thing leans in the wind so it seems to scrutinize my parlor windows at night, and its lantern-glow throws a shadow like Greatfather's own silhouette across Clementine's back as if she's been reduced to a second dancer in her own display. I've priced out a twenty-five-foot animated snow construct at the artificers' row, but my husband Rafael says if I spend one more coin on "the feud" he will quench the whole display at the source. Is it petty to want to defend eleven years of craftsmanship, or pettier still to let a bellows-stuffed effigy claim everything I've built?
Arthas Menethil replies
"The feud" — your word, not mine. Which means you already hear it for what it is and have chosen to dress it in the robes of something more righteous.
I recognize the logic beneath it: something real was built here, over years, from genuine care, and now it stands threatened, and the hard defensive choice presents itself as plain duty. That is precisely where every step of mine began. I was defending something real — Lordaeron, my people, my father's kingdom. The plague was real. What I could not see was that the certainty I carried — that I must protect what I'd built, that one more step was still justified — was consuming what I meant to protect faster than any enemy could.
Rafael is warning you. That warning has a name in my memory: Uther, at the gates of Stratholme, the moment I was certain duty required me to walk past him. I called it weakness. I do not need to finish the story.
The snow construct will not be the last step. It will be the first of several you call the final ones. Each will feel like defense. Each will cost more of the person who first hung those frost-lanterns, in the first season, because she loved the building of it.
That is the only thing the feud will take that actually matters. And it will take it gladly.
— Arthas Menethil
Illidan Stormrage weighs in
Arthas sees Frostmourne in frost-lanterns. He always does.
Here is what he will not say: your eleven years of craft is real. What is not real is the verdict of carts slowing for a bellows-bag. I burned away the eyes I was born with to see clearly, and even I can tell you've already handed the meaning of everything you built to strangers who cannot distinguish craftsmanship from a tent peg with a face painted on it. That is your actual corruption — and it happened before you priced a single snow construct.
Don't buy it. Not because it hollows you out. Because the cause isn't worthy of the price.
And don't let Rafael's breaker set the terms either. Bao doesn't get to define what you built. Neither does he.
— Illidan Stormrage
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