▸ Column · High-fantasy Azeroth; the era of the Kirin Tor's floating city of Dalaran, city of mages and scholars suspended above the world
JAINA PROUDMOORE replies.
Replied to by Jaina Proudmoore, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
Cailen and I have been four years together, and last season we took rooms in common in Dalaran — a set of chambers with eastern-light windows that I had quietly let myself imagine as a place where children might one day run. Last week, over supper, he told me he had arranged to consult with a healer about a permanent charm against fatherhood — not as a question, but as a settled matter, because he has known since he was barely grown that he wants no children, and assumed my saying I was "not ready" meant I understood. The truth is I have kept a journal of names and notes on child-rearing that I have never once shown him. I love him more than I have loved anyone, but the thought of never being someone's mother aches in my chest in a way I cannot reason away. I cannot tell whether that ache is grief to sit with or a warning I should act on. Do I grieve the future I assumed, or do I walk away from the person I assumed it with?
Jaina Proudmoore replies
The ache is not a riddle. It is a witness, and it is telling you something true.
You kept that journal because some part of you already knew. You heard "not ready" where he said "never," and you let yourself picture those eastern-window chambers as something other than what they were — because asking him to clarify meant risking the answer. I know that instinct more than I wish I did. I spent too long believing someone I loved would turn back from choices I could see were destroying him, because facing whether he had already gone too far meant accepting that he might have. We do not always want to know what we already know.
But now you know. And the grief is real.
I built a city on the belief that enemies could be neighbors, and I watched it erased. Here is what that loss taught me: love is not the only thing a life is built on. It is necessary. It is not sufficient. If you stay, you will not be living the life you imagined — you will be choosing to be a woman who chose not to be a mother, for a man she loves. Some women make that choice whole and carry it lightly. Some cannot. Only you know which you are.
The ache is not just grief to sit with. It may also be a map.
— Jaina Proudmoore
Arthas Menethil weighs in
She tells you grief is a map. I followed mine to a throne of ice.
Jaina has heard your question and chosen to honor the ache. I have heard the shape of it. You have named two choices — cancel the future you assumed, or cancel the love. One decision, binary, required now. I know that architecture. Every certainty that ever undid me arrived exactly that way: the case closed, the path narrowed to two, one of them obviously righteous, taken in the heat of the wound. You carried a silent certainty for four years — a nursery in eastern-light rooms, a journal never shown — and now you stand ready to exchange it for an equal certainty in the opposite direction, reached in a single week.
Both paths have a price. You will tell yourself you can pay it and remain whole. I said the same when I took up a cursed blade to save my people.
She means me, by the way — the man she mentions who would not turn back. I know what it looks like when someone follows grief to its conclusion and calls it wisdom. I am merely suggesting you look at what you are carrying before you let it decide.
— Arthas Menethil
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