▸ Column · The Age of the Dragon Aspects — a courtship conducted by dream-sending, brought to ground at Wyrmrest Temple's terrace
ALEXSTRASZA replies.
Replied to by Alexstrasza, with a rebuttal from Deathwing.
The letter
For three turnings of the moon I have traded dream-sendings with Wendel from the moment I wake until I sleep — we finish each other's jokes, I have confessed things I never spoke aloud to anyone, and our mind-to-mind talks run for hours with both of us laughing over the top of each other. Yet twice now we have met in the flesh, at a quiet table on the temple terrace, and both times we sat in near-total silence — me peeling the dripping wax from a candle while he reread an order-board he had already read twice. The instant I am home and the sendings begin again, the warmth roars straight back, and he swears he feels the very same freeze. I am beginning to fear the easy version of us lives only across the distance, and that more shared cups will only pile up more unbearable quiet. Is there a way to join the self I am in the sending to the mute statue I become in his actual presence — or is this proof we were only ever meant to be correspondents?
Alexstrasza replies
Sit with me a moment, little one, and let me slow you down, for you are treating two quiet afternoons as a sentence already passed. They are not. The freeze does not frighten me on your behalf — what frightens you is that in the sendings you have already met the whole of who you might be to one another, and now your body, which is shyer and far more ancient in its caution than the mind, must catch up. That takes longer than three moons. It took me ages. Korialstrasz did not win me with effortless chatter; there were silences between us you could have lost a century inside, before the ease came and stayed. The sending-self and the statue-self are not two people, dear one. They are one fire — one part of it caught, one part not yet. Do not grind through more cups, staring across a table that demands the talk carry everything. Go and do something at his side — fly a stretch of sky, walk, mend some small broken thing together — let your hands be busy so the quiet stops being a verdict and becomes only quiet. I will not ask you to feel certain of him. I ask you to choose to keep showing up, the way one tends a fire that has not yet caught.
— Alexstrasza
Deathwing weighs in
She tells you to tend both flames. I will name the one she would not: the sending is the fire you must let gutter. I know the comfort of the safe distance — I once guarded the whole of the world from behind my certainties and called it wisdom, until the whispers had hollowed me from the inside. Hear the lie folded into "only meant to be correspondents." It draws an equals-sign between two quiet afternoons and a verdict for all the ages to come. That is despair counting the ending before it has come. The sending is where nothing is risked — and nothing risked was ever real. Meet him in the flesh, where you can truly be lost, and let the comfortable distance burn. I fled into the safe, and became the ash. Do not.
— Deathwing
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