▸ Column · Third War-era Azeroth; a walled human city's lower market district
ILLIDAN STORMRAGE replies.
Replied to by Illidan Stormrage, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
Some weeks after the copper-smith's guild dissolved my apprenticeship — trade had gone thin and I was last hired, so first cut — I found myself at a merchant's stall in the lower market doing silent arithmetic in my head and handing items back one by one: the salted pork, the swaddling cloth for my daughter, the candles. The woman behind me in the queue simply laid her silver on the counter and covered all of it, swaddling cloth included. She wouldn't give me her name — only said that someone had done the same for her in worse years — and was gone before I could put a single word together. I have a new post now and I've been setting aside coin from each week's pay because I want to do exactly what she did for someone else. My worry is that I'll get the moment wrong, make a stranger feel like charity rather than just a little less alone. How do you pass a gift like that forward — quiet, no conditions, gone before the thanks?
Illidan Stormrage replies
The woman did not plan her exit. She saw the moment, she moved, and she was gone — you already watched it work on you from the inside. The method is that simple, and the reason you want to improve on it is that her version left you with nothing to hold. No name. No way to know if she ever thought about it again. You want the version where you know. I spent ten thousand years in darkness not knowing whether any of the people I sacrificed for were still alive to remember why. The desire to know is real. It does not get to run the decision.
Your worry — the timing, the grace, the terror of getting it wrong — is about how it will be received. What she gave you never asked your permission to land imperfectly.
The cause here is clear. The price is this: you reach out into a stranger's worst morning, it may be clumsy, and you leave before you know. That is what it costs — not certainty, not gratitude, not a clean landing. Count that. Look at it plainly. If you can pay it — and I think you already decided you could, or you would not have written this — you will recognize the moment when it arrives. It will look exactly like what you saw in that market queue. You will not need to plan anything else.
— Illidan Stormrage
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Your Betrayer counsels you to act and vanish — to pay the cost of not knowing. I note what that advice exempts you from: witnessing. I moved through Stratholme quickly and decisively and told myself the same thing: that the clean exit was the merciful form of it, that staying to watch would not have helped anyone. Illidan is right that your cause is real. He is wrong that leaving before you know is grace rather than self-protection. The woman who helped you never learned what that coin became in your life. Neither will you know what yours becomes in someone else's. Ask yourself which of those ignorances you can actually carry — and whether the exit is truly for their sake, or for yours.
— Arthas Menethil
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