▸ Column · Azeroth — the Kirin Tor enclaves and Kul Tiras, magic-realm fantasy
JAINA PROUDMOORE replies.
Replied to by Jaina Proudmoore, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
My betrothed of four years, Corin, did not ask me anything last week — he informed me. He has already accepted a two-year commission with the warding-expedition to the frozen north, signed the enclave's papers, arranged for another mage to take his tower, and told his whole family. I learned of it because his mother sent me a cheerful note congratulating us. When I said I was hurt to be the last to know, he told me he "didn't want to burden me with something that might come to nothing," and seemed honestly bewildered that I wasn't overjoyed. I am not against the north in principle. But I hold a lease on my workshop, a position at the enclave I have spent three years building, and an old hound who cannot survive a portal-crossing arranged in six weeks. Is the true trouble that he made this choice — or that after four years he still does not think of the two of us as something that decides together?
Jaina Proudmoore replies
You have already found the wound yourself, in your last line, and you are right about which one it is. The posting is not the injury. The injury is learning, after four years, that in the moment that mattered he did not reach for you — he reached past you, and called it kindness.
I will be honest with you: I know that particular cruelty. My father decided my fate more than once, certain to his bones that he was sheltering me, and never once thought to ask the woman he was shielding. Being spared a choice is not the same as being loved through it. It is being managed.
So name it — not the lease, not the hound, not the quarantine. Those are real, but they are not the matter. Say to him plainly: you decided our life and informed me afterward. Then watch what he does with that. Understand the cost of asking: he may show you he genuinely does not see a "we," and that is a harder thing to know than to suspect. But you cannot uproot a built life on the strength of someday while he acts as though there is only an I. Know who you are following before you cross the sea for him.
— Jaina Proudmoore
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Jaina counsels you to name it and watch — careful, as ever, at the edge of the cold water. Heed instead the phrase she only grazed: I did not want to burden you. I have spoken that exact sentence. It is the voice of a man already certain he carries your good better than you do, and certainty like that does not soften with marriage — it hardens, posting by posting, each one decided for you.
Jaina knows this man. She watched her own father sail north, sure he was protecting her, and bury himself in it.
Do not ask whether he sees you as a unit. Ask what two years downstream of his certainty will make of you — and whether there will be anything of you left to thaw when you arrive.
— Arthas Menethil
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