▸ Column · Lordaeron before the Fall — a noble household and the tradesfolk, healers, and taverns of a kingdom under Arthas's princely era
ARTHAS MENETHIL replies.
Replied to by Arthas Menethil, with a rebuttal from Illidan Stormrage.
The letter
My betrothed, Theo, began affecting the stiff bearing and clipped speech of a great house's seneschal as a jest at my cousin's wedding feast this spring — rigid spine, a crisp "Very good, my lady" for every request to pass the bread. The hall roared. He has not stopped since. He greeted my mother in it. He placed our order at the tavern in it. And when our cat Marzipan fell ill, he gravely informed the beast-healer that she "appears to be suffering a spot of distress in the waterworks." The healer looked at me with such pity that I pretended I too was performing — so now the healer believes we are a pair of traveling mummers, which we are not. I love Theo, and the voice is genuinely funny for perhaps forty seconds. But I have run out of ways to assure honest tradesfolk that my betrothed is not in the grip of some affliction.
Arthas Menethil replies
You have described a man who put on a role for the applause of a hall and can no longer find the seam to take it off. I know that man intimately. The first "Very good, my lady" was a small duty of its kind — it pleased the room, it cost nothing, it felt entirely reasonable. So did every step that followed, until the role had begun to wear him rather than the reverse.
Hear me carefully, for I am an unlikely one to say it: the danger is not the voice. The danger is his certainty that he may set it down the moment he wishes. No one who tells himself that ever can. I told myself precisely that of a blade I took up to save my people, and it carried me to a throne of ice.
But mark the mercy your situation holds that mine did not: this is a seneschal's voice, not Frostmourne. The descent is shallow; the road back is still open. So be the voice that warns him. Uther tried to warn me — I named it weakness and walked past him, laughing. Do not let Theo walk past you the same way, mid-bow.
— Arthas Menethil
Illidan Stormrage weighs in
Arthas finds damnation in a dinner-party voice because he found it in everything — the affliction of a man who fell and now wants company in the falling. Theo is not being consumed. He is committed.
The one I would examine is you. You stood before that beast-healer and feigned a jest you despise, because you could not endure a stranger's pity. That is the cowardice — living small to be liked by people you will never see again. I burned my eyes from my skull; I did not manage the opinions of tavern-keepers.
Stop performing for them. Tell Theo plainly the bit has died — that is one true, uncomfortable evening, well worth it. But spare him the sermon about ice thrones over "Very good, madam."
— Illidan Stormrage
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