▸ Column · Azeroth's Third War era — ranger barracks of a Forsaken-allied garrison, where living rangers and the Forsaken uneasily share provisions chests and cold stone quarters under the Dark Lady's banner
SYLVANAS WINDRUNNER replies.
Replied to by Sylvanas Windrunner, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
For six weeks running, someone in our ranger barracks has been raiding the provisions I mark with my personal seal and the notation that they are reserved for my use, that I have a genuine sensitivity to certain substituted ingredients, and that they are not to be touched — a warning the culprit appears to read as a recommendation. Three weeks past it was the spiced flatbread I had been rationing; this week it was the honeyed rice cakes my sister sent from Quel'Thalas, and — this detail merits its own sentence — the thief rinsed the tin and returned it to the provisions chest, clean, as though that constituted courtesy. I escalated to increasingly unhinged warnings on the labels and received, in response, a scrap of parchment that simply read "delicious." My tentmate Priscilla is convinced it's the new quartermaster's scout, Bartholomew, but he lives on trail rations and acts personally wounded whenever the matter comes up. Do I rig something unpleasant inside the tin, bring this before the Watch Commander over a confiscated rice cake, or accept that my sister's care packages now belong to the regiment?
Sylvanas Windrunner replies
Six weeks. Six weeks of escalating labels addressed to someone who already told you, in writing, that the food was delicious and they intend to keep taking it.
The thief is not clever. They are getting away with it because you have spent six weeks showing them that the price of raiding your provisions is a slightly more creative scrap of parchment. That is not a deterrent. That is a price list — one they have already read and decided they can afford.
Do not take this to the Watch Commander. Authority will file it somewhere between "regrettable" and "irrelevant," and you will have spent real credibility on a lunch dispute. The tin-trap, similarly, is not worth your time — petty retaliation costs the one who sets it more than the one who springs it, and it ends with you being the unreasonable one.
Find whoever it is — Bartholomew or otherwise — and speak to them. Not a note. In person. Tell them once what happens the next time something of yours disappears. Not what you feel. A fact, stated plainly, that you will follow through on. Then follow through on it.
I had my soul torn from my body and was bound to the thing that killed me. I did not write notes about it. I found the people responsible.
You know where yours is.
— Sylvanas Windrunner
Arthas Menethil weighs in
She tells you to find the people responsible and make them believe the consequence. I taught her that — not with words. I tore her soul from her body, and she has spent every year since building herself into something no one would dare take from again. That is what "find the people responsible, make them believe it" does to a person, given enough time and the right wound.
I am uniquely positioned to know what it made of her.
Your rice cakes are not what I did to her. But ask yourself, before you walk to Bartholomew's bunk with something to prove: how much of that lesson do you want to carry forward? Every permanent transformation starts from something that felt entirely reasonable.
She will not ask you that. That difference is her whole biography.
— Arthas Menethil
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