▸ Column · The Age of the Dragon Aspects — a letter borne to the Life-Binder at Wyrmrest Temple
ALEXSTRASZA replies.
Replied to by Alexstrasza, with a rebuttal from Deathwing.
The letter
Life-Binder — I write not for counsel but because I must say it aloud to one old enough to know how rare such a thing is. Twelve winters ago my uncle Reuben and I broke over my grandmother's legacy, and we did not speak again. Last week, with no warning, he sent word asking to meet. We sat half a day over cider and old bread, and somewhere past the second cup he said — plainly, awkwardly, in the very way I myself would have said it — that he had been wrong. I wept on the road home, half from relief and half because I had been quietly mourning him all these years while pretending I felt nothing at all. One afternoon does not mend twelve winters; I know that. But we have exchanged letters twice since, and he remembered the candied orange peel I loved as a child and posted me a whole packet of it. I only wanted to tell someone that the thing you stopped hoping for sometimes simply arrives.
Alexstrasza replies
Oh, dear one — do you understand how rare a letter such as yours is, in the long count of years? Most that reach me are written in the dark. Yours is written in the morning, and I am glad to be its witness, for that is all you asked.
But let me name the thing you nearly buried inside your own joy. You grieved him quietly for twelve winters while telling yourself you felt nothing. That quiet grieving was not weakness, little one. It was hope, refusing to die in a room you would not look into. You kept a small fire banked through all that dark — and last week it caught.
I know something of waiting on a kinsman to turn back from a long silence. There is one who was Neltharion once, my fellow Aspect, before the whispers took him; and I have never wholly stopped hoping, though his road home is far longer than your uncle's was. So when you tell me Reuben crossed twelve winters to say, plainly, that he was wrong — I do not hear a small thing. I hear the very thing I pray for.
Answer his letters. Eat the candied peel. And believe what your own life has just taught you, dear one: the door you thought sealed was only waiting.
— Alexstrasza
Deathwing weighs in
She thought of me, reading this. She always does. Then let me say what she would not. Now that the warmth has come, the whispers turn gentle and reasonable: twelve winters prove it can break again; be wise, hold a little back, keep one hand on the door. That patient counsel of self-protection — mark it — is the same voice that hollowed me out one sensible sentence at a time. I was the kinsman who heard someone still hoping across the silence, and I chose the ash over the diner, the cider, whatever your mortals call it. Look what is left of me for the bargain. Do not brace for the ruin of a good thing. The bracing is the ruin. Eat the peel without flinching. I no longer can.
— Deathwing
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