▸ Column · Azeroth — a night elf household in the age after the Sundering, screen-time rationing reframed as warded access to a scrying-glass
ILLIDAN STORMRAGE replies.
Replied to by Illidan Stormrage, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
My boy Declan, nine summers old, is permitted exactly three-quarters of an hour at the scrying-glass on common days — I keep a sand-timer bound into the ward itself. Last week he announced, grave as a guild negotiator, that his friend Josiah is given an unwarded enchanted slate with no limit whatsoever, and that I am "making him live like it's before the Sundering." I held firm. But then I overheard him telling his little sister that our house suffers "arcane poverty," which she repeated to her grove-instructor, who sent home a carefully neutral note asking whether all was well beneath our roof. Here is my wobble: Declan reads two tiers above his age, he goes out into the wood unbidden, and his only tantrums come at the timer — so plainly the system works — yet I cannot tell whether the rigid ward is teaching him discipline or merely making the forbidden taste sweeter. Am I the problem, or did Josiah's parents simply reach the framing first?
Illidan Stormrage replies
The grove-instructor's note and Josiah's unwarded household share one thing: neither has earned a vote in how you raise your son, yet you have handed each of them one. Take it back. I burned away my own eyes for the Sight to hunt an enemy my people would not face, and for that my own brother Malfurion sealed me in the dark for ten thousand years. The disapproval of the comfortable is the oldest tax levied on those who do what the comfortable were too soft to do. A neutral-toned note is still a verdict written by someone who counted none of your reasons.
But hear me, because this is where most stumble: their judgment being worthless does not make your ward correct. Those are two questions, and you have fused them into one panic. The first I have answered — let it go. The second is yours alone to weigh. The boy reads two tiers above his years and walks into the wood unbidden. That is not a system failing; that is a cause proven. The tantrum at the timer is simply the price of holding a real line, and a real line always costs. So hold it — not to win against him, and not to spite Josiah's mother. Hold it with open eyes, because it works.
— Illidan Stormrage
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Stormrage tells you to hold the line and feel vindicated. I held a line once, certain it worked, a city's blood drying on it. Mark the words you reached for — "plainly the system works." That calm is the trap; I built an entire damnation out of sentences exactly that reasonable. I do not doubt the boy thrives. I ask what the nightly war at the timer is making of the two of you, because you have filed his meltdowns under "victory" rather than counting them as a cost. The child naming it "arcane poverty" is the small voice trying to warn you. Uther was mine. I walked past him, certain. Do not walk past yours.
— Arthas Menethil
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