▸ Column · Warcraft / Azeroth — the age of Illidan's exile, with courier-runes and healers' halls standing in for phones and hospitals
ILLIDAN STORMRAGE replies.
Replied to by Illidan Stormrage, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
My betrothed, Tobias, and the woman he courted three winters past, Yelena, ended things long ago — yet they still send messages by courier-rune every single day. Morning trinkets. Long accounts of his bad shifts at the engraver's bench. A private joke about some traveling minstrel's tale I've never heard. When I asked about it, gently, he told me they're "only close friends now" and that I'm being a jealous tyrant for so much as noticing. Last week his grandmother was carried to the healers' hall, and he sent word of it to Yelena before me — I learned it only because the reply-rune flared while his pack lay open. I refuse to be the shrew who orders him to cast a friend aside. But it cuts, being the second soul to hear everything that matters. Am I making too much of this, or is this a true grievance I'm allowed to name aloud?
Illidan Stormrage replies
He called you a tyrant for noticing. Mark that word, and who reaches for it. When a person does something that cannot be defended, the oldest move in the world is to put the crime on the one who merely saw it. They named me Betrayer for fighting a war they were too frightened to fight. "Controlling" is your version of that brand — a cell built of one word, meant to keep you quiet inside it.
So take back the authority you handed him to decide whether your eyes are allowed to work. They are. You saw rightly. Being misunderstood is not the same as being wrong — learn that difference or be ruled by his framing forever.
But hear me, because this is where most go astray: his accusation being unjust does not, by itself, make you right. Those are two questions. Answer the second honestly. Is this a true grievance — being the second soul to learn his grandmother was failing? Yes. That is real. That is not jealousy; that is a man who keeps his heart elsewhere and resents you for noticing the address.
Name it plainly. Count the cost first — he may choose her, and you must be prepared to walk. Then say it with open eyes. Do not beg his permission to feel what you already know.
— Illidan Stormrage
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Illidan reads one letter and hears another summons to war — name it, defy them, walk the lonely road. He always does. Of course he does.
I will name the step he skipped. You read a rune that flared in an open pack, and a part of you has already begun building the case. I know that quiet diligence. It feels like clarity. It is how a watchful heart becomes a jailer one reasonable glance at a time. My mentor Uther warned me; I called him weak and walked past.
Your grievance may be true. Ask the other question. Not whether you may name it — whether the naming, done his way, turns you into the very tyrant he accused you of. Do not silence that unease. It is the last warning voice you have.
— Arthas Menethil
▸ Read next