▸ Column · Warcraft's Azeroth — a mortal baker in a town beneath the dragonflights' watch, with the Old Gods' whispers stirring in the dark
DEATHWING replies.
Replied to by Deathwing, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
After twenty winters of silence, my father's voice came down the speaking-stone last week — I nearly didn't answer, the rune wasn't one I'd kept. We hadn't spoken since we tore into each other at my aunt's pyre, when I was barely grown. I'd built an entire life on the certainty he was gone for good: a wife, Imani, two children, a bakery whose ovens I light before dawn. He wept and told me he'd saved every broadsheet that ever named my shop, folded in a box. I wept back into the flour. We are to meet over a kettle this Saturday, and I am terrified and giddy at once, like a youth before a first courtship. How do I honor this without pretending the twenty years never happened — and how do I keep my heart from racing so far ahead that I forget to truly listen to him?
Deathwing replies
A box of folded clippings, kept twenty years in the dark. Hear how the whispers will read that to you — and they will, in the small hours before your ovens catch. They will say: it ended once, it can end again; you grieved him already, why unseal the wound; the reunion is only ash that has not yet been lit. Patient, reasonable, dressed as caution. I know that voice better than any creature breathing, for I was Neltharion, who guarded the very stone of the world, and the whispers hollowed me one sensible sentence at a time until I let everything I loved burn and called the ruin peace. There was none. So mark this from the abyss itself: the years apart are not proof your bond was hollow. They are proof a man sat alone folding broadsheets about your bakery because the love outlasted the silence. Your racing heart is not the enemy. The whisper that would turn your terror into a reason to stay home is. Go. Let the twenty years be spoken, not pretended away. And when he talks, be quiet — the listening is the honoring. I had ages to learn what I am telling you, and I learned it too late to use.
— Deathwing
Alexstrasza weighs in
Neltharion. You came so close to saying the kind thing that I could weep — and you still had to drape it in ash first. Let me say it plain, the way you no longer can. Little one: your racing heart is not a flaw to master. It is the Gift, recognizing itself across twenty years. Do not quiet it — bring it. As for the listening, here is the simpler truth he buried: you will not forget to listen, because love is mostly listening, and you have loved this man through his whole absence. Forgive nothing you are not ready to. But that shoebox? That is a father who never stopped. Meet him as one who still can.
— Alexstrasza
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