▸ Column · Medieval-fantasy Lordaeron — a household hearth and its cast-iron cauldron, before the fall
ARTHAS MENETHIL replies.
Replied to by Arthas Menethil, with a rebuttal from Illidan Stormrage.
The letter
My betrothed, Marcus, has spent the last three turns of the moon treating our kitchen cauldron as though it were a sullen scullery-hand. He named it Gerald. He sighs heavily when it boils over, mutters "classic Gerald" when the lid sticks, and once left a wax-sealed note upon it reading "we must discuss your attitude." I laughed — every single time — which I now understand was a grave error. Gerald has since acquired a history (divorced, embittered about it), a sworn nemesis (the bread-oven, whom he calls Doug), and at supper last week Marcus informed my own mother that Gerald "has been acting out since he was passed over for head of the household staff." I have tried ignoring it. I have said plainly that the jest has grown stale. I have even doused the hearth-fire entirely — which Marcus solemnly declared was merely "Gerald taking a day for his nerves." Is there any world in which this ends, or must I accept that I am betrothed to two — a man and a cast-iron pot?
Arthas Menethil replies
You name your own error with precision: you laughed. And now you climb, one reasonable step at a time, toward sterner measures — first ignoring, then rebuking, then dousing the very fire — each more total than the last, each taken in the certainty that the thing must simply be ended.
I know that staircase. I climbed it at Stratholme. I, too, had decided a thing must be ended, and I was not wrong that something was amiss — only catastrophically wrong about what the ending would make of me. So hear what you are truly proposing: to stamp out a small, harmless joy because it has become inconvenient to your dignity. Gerald is not your enemy. The peril is not the cauldron. The peril is the woman you would become — the one who, having once delighted freely, learns to treat delight itself as a plague to be purged, and calls it good order.
I will not counsel you to crush it. Uther reached to stay my hand, and I named his mercy weakness and walked past him. Whatever in you still finds this man dear — that is the voice I silenced in myself. Ask not whether the jest is stale. Ask what purging it would cost the part of you that once laughed.
— Arthas Menethil
Illidan Stormrage weighs in
Menethil looks at a kitchen pot and sees Stratholme. Ten thousand years frozen in his own certainty and the man still cannot tell a tragedy from a turnip.
Here is what he missed: your Marcus is committed to something the rest of you will not risk — joy, unashamed, in the teeth of your sighing. They named me Betrayer for my devotion. You would shush yours over a stale jest.
But count the cost honestly. Your dousing of fires in the dark, hoping the thing ends itself — that is the cowardice, not the cure. Decide whether this truly grates or merely embarrasses you. Then say it plainly to his face. Or pick up the wax note and answer Gerald yourself.
— Illidan Stormrage
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