▸ Column · Lordaeron, wartime — high fantasy feudal era, Third War period
ARTHAS MENETHIL replies.
Replied to by Arthas Menethil, with a rebuttal from Illidan Stormrage.
The letter
My new knight-captain, Adaeze, left a small bread-roll and a note on my work table before morning formation last week — it read only "you are steady, soldier." My hands went cold. I am thirty-four and grew up in a household where my stepfather only ever grew gentle in the moments right before something terrible followed. Somewhere in how I was made, softness became a thing I cannot stop reading as a prelude. When my companion Wren cups my face or brings me warm broth without being asked, my first instinct is to search for what she actually wants in return — and then I despise myself for the searching. Last night she asked why I always go rigid when she is tender with me, and I had no answer that wouldn't sound like an indictment of someone who has never once raised her hand to me. I want to learn to receive care without bracing for the harm that used to follow it. How does a person stop reading kindness as a harbinger?
Arthas Menethil replies
My father Terenas opened his arms to me when I returned from Northrend, after everything I had already done. I remember watching his hands. The warmth registered as something to navigate around — my certainty about what I had still to do had already reclassified it as a complication I could not afford.
Your stepfather taught your body that lesson. The first years you scanned Wren's gentleness, perhaps that was still his lesson running in you without your choosing it. But I had a mentor, Uther, who put out his hand at the threshold I was charging through. I had someone I cared for, Jaina, who turned and walked from what I was becoming. I catalogued them both as weakness — people who could not see what duty required. I called it clarity.
Certainty does that. It answers the evidence before the evidence can speak.
The question is not whether your stepfather was real. He was. The question is whether Wren is also real when she cups your face. Her tenderness has — how long now? — held no catch. At some point, the choice to keep scanning past that evidence is no longer his lesson running in your body. It is your own certainty. Mine cost me everyone who reached toward me. I cannot revisit that certainty from the inside now; it finished its work.
Yours has not. That is the only material difference between us at this moment.
— Arthas Menethil
Illidan Stormrage weighs in
He tells you this vigilance will swallow you, because his did. But Arthas reached deliberately for a cursed blade he knew was cursed, and called it duty. You are not him.
The line in your letter I will not walk past: I hate myself for the scanning. Do not. I burned out my own eyes for the Sight to hunt what others would not face, and for that my own brother sealed me in a cell and they named me Betrayer. I know what it is to be treated as an indictment for a thing that kept you alive. The scanning was correct. It was good intelligence in a real war and it protected you.
What you lay down, you lay down on your own recognition, when you see the war has moved. Not as a performance for someone else's comfort. On yours.
— Illidan Stormrage
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