▸ Column · The reborn Horde on the Durotar coast — a small shoreside holdfast governed by an accidental steward, Thrall answering as the shaman who set down the Warchief's title
THRALL replies.
Replied to by Thrall, with a rebuttal from Garrosh Hellscream.
The letter
Honored shaman — three turns of the seasons ago I came early to the gathering of our little coastal holdfast on the Durotar shore, and the keeper of the grain-ledger pressed the speaking-stick into my hands "just to hold" while she went for water. By the time she returned, old Gorrik had nominated me steward as a jest, no one raised a hand quickly enough to object, and I was acclaimed by silence. Since then I have overseen two re-thatchings of the longhouse, a blood-feud over a neighbor's ill-tempered shore-bird, and a sixteen-month quarrel over which dyes are permitted on a doorway-banner. Every autumn I declare I will not stand again; every spring the same eleven faces stare at me without a word until I sigh and say "fine — one more year." My true calling is the tide. I study the barnacle-clusters on the rocks, and I have begun to suspect the barnacles are freer than I am. How does one escape a duty taken up by accident that has eaten the whole of who I am?
Thrall replies
You did not seek this, and now you cannot lay it down — I hear that plainly, and I will tell you something before I counsel anything. I set down the Warchief's mantle myself. I believed a title is a trust, not a possession, and that the elements call a man back to the soil when his ruling is done. So I understand the longing in your letter better than most.
But hear the rest of it, friend. The manner of leaving is everything. I did not simply walk to the tide. I handed the Horde to one I believed in — Grom's son, Garrosh — and he became a tyrant who spent good lives for his pride. Fleeing a duty into the wrong hands is not freedom. It is harm passed forward.
So your task is not to escape. It is to leave the holdfast in hands worthier than the ones that grabbed the speaking-stick fastest as a jest. That careless beginning is the wound — choose the ending with care it never had. Find one who serves, not one who is merely standing nearest. Teach them a season. Then walk to your barnacles knowing the work endures behind you. The tide will wait. It always has.
— Thrall
Garrosh Hellscream weighs in
Go'el counsels you on stepping down. Take it — he set down the gavel and handed it to me, and we all know how his eye for "one who serves" turned out. Here is the truth he steps around: your problem is not the chair. It is that eleven soft faces STARE at you and you cave. You are not trapped, barnacle-counter. You are owned, because you have taught them you can be. Lead like you mean it or do not — but a steward who sighs "fine, one more year" deserves the leash he weeps about. I clutched my power past all reason and burned for it. You will not even hold yours. Pick one disgrace or the other.
— Garrosh Hellscream
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