▸ Column · Human Eastern Kingdoms, mortal-grounded Warcraft setting (Lordaeron)
SYLVANAS WINDRUNNER replies.
Replied to by Sylvanas Windrunner, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
I'm 32 and I've been seeing Edwin — he's 42 — for about eight months now. I genuinely care for him, but every time we're around his friends, I feel the decade between us like a draft under a door. Last week at Geoffrey's harvest gathering, the other couples were talking about land claims and when to send their children to the academy. I was the only one who'd never owned anything bigger than a good horse (which, fine, maybe that's beside the point). Edwin keeps gently floating the idea of buying a plot together and "not waiting forever" on starting a family. I love that he knows what he wants. But I'm still figuring out whether I even want to leave my current life, let alone the version of myself who's still deciding all of this. When I told my friend Thora I felt rushed, she said maybe I'm just looking at my own future and panicking. Is a ten-year gap a real problem, or am I making one up because his life looks like a finish line I haven't decided to run toward?
— Adrift in Hillsbrad
Sylvanas Windrunner replies
The question you're actually asking is whether I'll tell you the gap is a real problem so you have permission to feel what you already feel, or tell you it's nothing so you can set it aside. You want an answer from outside yourself because the one inside you is still forming, and Edwin's has been finished for a decade.
That is not a flaw in him. Men who know what they want are not villains. But notice what is happening: he is certain, you are not, and in that asymmetry someone's certainty will govern. Right now, it is his. You are being slowly annexed into his timeline, his land plots, his arithmetic about family. And you are asking me whether the arithmetic is fair rather than asking what you want when he is not in the room to want it for you.
I was made to serve a will that was not my own. I clawed free of it. I am not comparing Edwin to the Lich King — I am telling you that the loss of your own agency begins quietly, as a gentle suggestion, and by the time you name it you are already deep inside it.
Stop asking whether the gap is real. Ask what you would choose if he were not choosing first.
— Sylvanas Windrunner
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Every step that damned me began with admiring someone's certainty — the elder, the institution, the cause that already knew the answer. Edwin "knows what he wants." Notice how that quality drew you. I knew what I wanted at Stratholme, too. My certainty was the precise thing I should have doubted most.
Your hesitation is not panic. It is the warning voice. She will tell you to seize the reins before he takes them. That is what my chains made of her. But if you silence the doubt because someone — anyone — is certain enough, you will have followed me, not her. And you have seen where I went.
— Arthas Menethil
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