▸ Column · Azeroth — Sylvanas Windrunner, Banshee Queen of the Forsaken, answering a magister-in-training in Dalaran whose betrothed is posted to a distant garrison
SYLVANAS WINDRUNNER replies.
Replied to by Sylvanas Windrunner, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
Dark Lady — I've been apart from my betrothed for fourteen moons. He took a field-healer's posting at a far garrison while I finish my magister studies in Dalaran. I thought us unshakeable until last week, when I realized three days had passed without my missing him at all, and all I felt was relief. We still keep our weekly sending-stone calls. They're pleasant. But "pleasant" is how I'd describe a tutor I'm fond of, not the man I'm meant to build a life beside. I told my sister, who said I was merely worn thin and should travel to him. I did, in spring — nine days at the garrison — and came home with the same hollow ache I'd carried there. The posting was meant to last two years with a firm end. That end has quietly slipped twice now, and whenever I raise the timeline he turns at once to how grueling the work is, which is true, and which leaves me nothing to plan around. I can't tell whether I'm grieving the man, or only the future I'd imagined with him — and I'm afraid of doing something I can't undo before I know which.
Sylvanas Windrunner replies
You have wrapped a question of power inside a question of feeling, and the feeling is the comfortable place to hide. So set it aside. "Am I grieving him or the future" is a riddle you can turn over for years without it costing him a single sleepless night — which is precisely why you favor it.
Here is the colder, more useful question: who holds the timeline? Not you. He moves it, twice now, and each time he turns the conversation to his hardship so you cannot press. His struggle is real. It is also a wall you keep being handed instead of an answer. Your patience is the mortar.
I had sisters who told me I was simply tired, that rest would mend what was broken. Some things rest does not mend. The woman who boarded that ship to him is gone; nine empty days proved it. Stop grieving in the abstract and name a date — yours, not his — by which the future becomes a plan or admits it was never one. If he meets you, you have something to build. If he hands you the wall again, he has answered you. Stop waiting to be told what you already feel.
— Sylvanas Windrunner
Arthas Menethil weighs in
She tells you the clean, irreversible cut is clarity. I knew that clarity intimately, the morning I purged a city certain I was sparing the kingdom. Notice she has already buried the woman you were and pronounced your feeling a hiding place — she does that with everyone's grief, because she could not survive sitting in her own.
Your uncertainty is not weakness. It is the last honest voice you have, and she would have you silence it under the word "agency." Name your date, yes. But do not let borrowed certainty decide while the part of you still asking the question is the only part worth trusting. Heed it. I did not heed mine.
— Arthas Menethil
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