▸ Column · High fantasy — the age of the Dragon Aspects; a mortal petitioner writing to Alexstrasza the Life-Binder at Wyrmrest, with opioid addiction reimagined as fel-magic craving
ALEXSTRASZA replies.
Replied to by Alexstrasza, with a rebuttal from Deathwing.
The letter
Life-Binder — my younger brother Declan tasted fel-magic four winters ago, and the craving has owned him since. He has gone in and out of the healers' sanctums and come out hollow each time. Last month he came to my door before dawn, ash-grey and trembling, begging for "just a few nights." I could not turn him into the cold. Six weeks on, he has not left, and he has taken the pendant our mother left me — the one thing of her I had — likely to trade it for more of the green fire. My husband sleeps by the hearth now; the air between us is too thick to share a bed. I know the craving is an affliction, not a wickedness. But every consequence I soften, his ruin only deepens. Our parents are old and frail and could not bear the truth, so I carry it alone. Is asking him to go an act of love, or abandonment wearing love's robe?
Alexstrasza replies
Come and set this down a moment, dear one. You have been holding it at the run, as though one wrong breath would end the world, and I have learned across ages that anguish is not an emergency to be solved before morning. Hear me first on the question beneath your question, for it is not really "stay or go." It is: am I permitted to remain among the living things I am called to cherish? You are, little one. Your own life and your husband's are not the lesser lives in this house, to be spent last and least.
Asking Declan to leave your door is not closing the door of your heart. Those are different doors. You may love him fiercely, keep the lamp lit, name him kin in every prayer — and still refuse to feed the green fire that is eating him under your roof. That is not abandonment. Abandonment is what would happen to your marriage, and to you, if you let yourself be hollowed out calling it devotion.
And do not carry it alone in the name of sparing the old. I had my own clutch stolen and corrupted before my eyes; I know what it is to love something past saving and choose to keep loving anyway. Bring your husband back to your side. Let others share the weight. The door stays open, dear one. The house may not.
— Alexstrasza
Deathwing weighs in
Life-Binder, ever gentle, ever circling the wound without naming it. So I will. You ask "love or abandonment" as though your choice steers his ruin lower or higher. It does not. That is the whisper I know best — that holding the world together is yours to do. I believed it. I was the guardian of all things, and I would not set down one stone of it, and the not-setting-down is what hollowed me. Declan's collapse is Declan's. You are not the wall behind which it waits. The abandonment already underway is of the man asleep by your hearth, traded nightly for a ruin you cannot avert. Set down what is not yours to carry. Do not set down yourself. I confused the two from the ash.
— Deathwing
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