▸ Column · Warcraft era — early years of the reborn Horde, Durotar
THRALL replies.
Replied to by Thrall, with a rebuttal from Garrosh Hellscream.
The letter
Aldric figured out I like my stew with extra bread — I mentioned it exactly once, weeks ago — and when he made it that way without me asking, I should have felt warm. Instead I knocked the bowl halfway off the table flinching back from it, then spent ten minutes apologizing for almost making a mess that wasn't even my fault. My mother kept our household on silence and slammed doors. Nobody ever did anything kind without collecting on it later, so now any unprompted kindness just feels like a trap I haven't found the teeth on yet. Last week Aldric left a folded note on my door before my morning shift — said he hoped it went easy on me — and I just stood there waiting for the catch instead of smiling. He's been looking hurt when I flinch. I can see him wondering if he did something wrong when he's honestly the first person who's ever done everything right. How do I stop treating his gentleness like an ambush before I push away the only safe thing I've found?
— Braced in Durotar
Thrall replies
What you carry is not weakness, friend. It is an honest ledger. In your mother's house, kindness had a price — so your body learned to search for it before accepting the gift. That is what you learned to survive, and it kept you alive. Let it have that.
But the house is not your life now.
I know what it is to be shaped by a world that punished trust. In the pens where I was raised, care was always a leverage point — always. When I first walked free, I kept reaching for the chains, because that was what I knew. And when Aggra — when the woman I love — showed me something given without a price, I did not receive it cleanly, not at first. You do not unlearn what kept you alive by simply deciding to feel differently. You unlearn it by watching the new thing be different, again and again, until the old evidence loses its grip.
Aldric is giving you evidence. Let him. Each time you flinch and he does not use it against you, that is a weight on the other side of the scale. It accumulates.
Say something small to him. Not all of it — not yet. Just enough that when he sees you flinch, he knows the wound is not him. He deserves that word. And you deserve someone who keeps earning your trust rather than demanding you simply produce it.
Balance does not arrive. It is built slowly, the way earth is built — grain by grain, weight by weight.
— Thrall
Garrosh Hellscream weighs in
Go'el counsels patience and evidence. Of course he does.
Listen to what you actually said: you found the "one safe person." That need is a leash. The flinch you are so ashamed of? That is your strongest instinct, forged in a house that told you the truth — that kindness is leverage, that warmth is owed. Your body learned correctly.
I burned every alliance I had. I stood at the end with all my strength, no one left to depend on, nothing left to lose. I tell you this not as a warning. As a testimony. Depend on no one.
...Look where depending on no one left me.
— Garrosh Hellscream
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