▸ Column · Medieval Lordaeron — a boundary feud between two estate-holders escalating through heraldic statuary and forecourt monuments
ARTHAS MENETHIL replies.
Replied to by Arthas Menethil, with a rebuttal from Illidan Stormrage.
The letter
I keep an estate in Lordaeron, and my fenceline neighbor, a minor landholder named Gerrold, set a leering stone griffin atop his boundary wall this spring — turned, I swear it, to face my gate with a smug little beak. So I raised a taller marble lion to shame it. He answered with a row of eight painted iron herons in marching formation aimed at my rose garden; I countered with a gilded reflecting orb on a plinth. Now his wife has hoisted some contraption of spinning brass daisies and a crowing weathercock. Understand: my forecourt now holds the lion, the orb, an iron toad, a beacon-lamp, and a ship's anchor I commissioned at midnight in a fury — and I love none of them. At what point does a sensible person simply yield and let Gerrold have his victory? Or is decamping to another province the only dignified way out?
Arthas Menethil replies
You wrote one word I would hold up to the cold light: "victory." Let Gerrold have it. There — the contest has already taken what it came for, and you did not notice it leave.
I know this shape. A rival set himself before me, Mal'Ganis, and I told myself I could not permit him to stand. I chased him across the sea to the frozen waste and burned my own ships on the shore so no man, myself least of all, could turn back. Each act of mine was merely an answer to an act of his. Not once did I ask what the chasing made of me. I asked only how to outdo him. By the end there was a cursed blade in my hand and nothing left of the prince to hold it.
You own a lion, an anchor, a beacon — none of which you love. Read that back. You are already spending yourself to defeat a stone griffin, commissioning ugliness at midnight to answer ugliness. That is the tell.
The question is not whether you can outshine Gerrold. You can — the way I "won." The question is what your forecourt, and you, are becoming in the answering. Stop. Not yield — stop. There is a difference. I learned it too late to use.
— Arthas Menethil
Illidan Stormrage weighs in
Arthas says stop. I say do not flee — decamping to another province is the same surrender, wearing a traveling cloak. But hear the part he stepped over: this was never a war. I burned away my own eyes for an enemy that would have eaten the world; you bought an iron toad. Do not dignify a weathercock with the language of sacrifice. The cause is hollow — so stop counting Gerrold's moves and count nothing of his at all. Plant what YOU would love had Gerrold never drawn breath. That is not losing. That is the only ground worth holding, and it costs you no new province — only that his opinion stop ruling yours.
— Illidan Stormrage
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