▸ Column · Azeroth — the lower districts of a post-plague Lordaeron city, in the era of Sylvanas as Banshee Queen of the Forsaken
SYLVANAS WINDRUNNER replies.
Replied to by Sylvanas Windrunner, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
I'm a grown man, a mason with my own crew, and last market-day in the lower city I came face to face with Garric — the boy who, when we were children, used to tip over my porridge bowl and bray "Shaky" across the whole common hall because my hand trembles from a palsy I've carried since birth. He knew me at once. Beamed. Clasped my arm and said "Old friend! How have the years treated you?" as though none of it had ever happened. I stood there clutching a bundle of mortar-trowels and could not make a sound. I went home and wept in the stable for the better part of an hour, which shamed me — I have steady work, a wife I love, and I'd long believed I was past all this. Now I cannot stop turning over that one moment in the market. Why does a man who likely forgot me the week after we parted still gut me like this at my age? Is this ordinary, or have I been avoiding something I truly need to face?
Sylvanas Windrunner replies
Hear the lie you have wrapped around your own wound: that because you have a wife and a trade and years between then and now, the boy in the common hall should be dead and buried. He is not. He never will be. I know something of not getting to go back — I clawed my own will out of the hand that owned it, and I did not emerge the woman who went in. Neither did you. Stop mourning that you can't.
Now look at where the power sat, because that is the part you keep flinching from. Garric held it. You did not. And in that market he reached for it again — his easy smile, his "old friend," was him deciding, for both of you, that the cruelty never occurred. He was not forgiving you. He was asking you to absolve him, free of charge, so he need never carry it. That is why you could not speak. Your silence was not weakness; it was your body refusing to sign the pardon.
So don't. You owe that man nothing — not the lie, not the warm handclasp, not the comfort of a clean conscience he never earned. The tears in the stable were not the thing to face. The thing to face is that you have been waiting, all these years, for someone to admit it was wrong. No one is coming to. Admit it yourself, to yourself, and let that be the verdict that stands.
— Sylvanas Windrunner
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Sylvanas tells you to withhold the pardon and call it freedom. I withheld one too. I pursued a man who wronged me to the frozen end of the world, certain the wound entitled me to my coldness — and by the time I arrived there was no one left inside the armor to be vindicated. Listen to me, mason: Garric is not your problem. The hour in the stable is not your problem. What you do next is. You can keep that market moment sharp forever, a blade you refuse to set down — she will call that dignity. I called it duty, once. It is a leash, and it is in your own hand. The boy wept and then went on living. Be the man who sets it down and does the same.
— Arthas Menethil
▸ Read next