HomunculAI Systems

The ongoing story of two houses, a spreading fungus, and one gnome’s total inability to leave anything alone.

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I. Fifteen Things That Should Have Stayed Dead

The list, such as it was, had been scrawled on the back of a tavern receipt some weeks earlier, in handwriting that got progressively worse the more excited Unclegrumble became about what he was writing.

He stood over the wreckage afterward, ears ringing, grinning in a way that had nothing performative about it. This was, if he was honest — and he was, almost always, sometimes rather more than the room wanted — the best part. Not the winning. The bit right before, where something had seriously tried to end him, and failed, and for one clean uncomplicated second afterward there was nothing left to think about except the fact of still being here.

Ha’kalawe took its sweet time and gave him nothing worth writing down. He crossed it off the list mostly out of principle, in the way you finish a plate of food you’ve stopped enjoying purely because it would feel wrong not to.

And that, as far as Unclegrumble was concerned, was Harandar handled — three names, three crossings-out, an afternoon well spent. He trudged back toward the rootways whistling something tuneless and deeply, uncomplicatedly pleased with himself, his good sparkling slippers — cloth, delicate, unsuited to cave-crawling and completely unsuited to the several miles of fungal jungle he’d just waded through, and worn anyway, because he had never in his life dressed appropriately for anything if the alternative slippers were nicer — thoroughly, unsalvageably filthy. He did not clean them. He did not wash his hands. It did not occur to him, at any point on the long walk home, that he had spent the last several hours moving through the single most invasive ecosystem currently known to Azeroth and was now personally transporting a live sample of it halfway across the world, some in a bag, some worked directly into the fibres of his shoes.

For finishing the set, he was given a small reward — a piece of moss, faintly luminous, labelled for the house. Lightbloom, the little tag said, in the brisk unbothered handwriting of whoever processed these things for a living. He didn’t think much of the name. He had, by that point, stopped thinking much about anything that wasn’t already on fire, which — to be fair to him — described most of his life fairly well, and had for as long as he could remember.

II. A Perfectly Reasonable Amount of Fungus

Home, for Unclegrumble, was a leaning tower in the graveyard reaches of Founder’s Point — round upper storey glowing warm orange against a permanent dusk-blue mist, a windmill turning slowly above the roofline, powering whatever it was he’d convinced himself needed powering.

He had never really learned the muscle other people seemed to have for company, the one that made a house feel less empty just for having someone else breathing in it. There was, technically, someone else under his roof — had been for years, tucked away downstairs, undemanding and rarely seen — but that arrangement worked precisely because it asked nothing of him, which meant it didn’t count, not in any way that filled the actual gap. Most days he was alone in the ways that were actually hard to be alone in, and he had filled the space where something else might have gone with projects instead — the toys he talked to, the things strapped to workbenches, the house itself, fussed over and tinkered with and occasionally, when the mood took him, taken apart just to see what was underneath.

It wasn’t only the workshop, either. Over the years he’d carved little dens into every corner of the tower that would allow it — a nook behind the bookshelves with exactly one chair wedged into it, a blanket fort of sorts jammed under the stairs, a reading corner up in the eaves that required climbing over two crates and a birdcage to reach at all. Nobody else had ever seen the logic in any of them, and if he was honest, he didn’t quite see it himself when he stopped to ask — he only knew that once a room filled up with enough half-finished ideas, as they all eventually did, he needed somewhere smaller and quieter to retreat to, and so he built one, and then, in time, filled that one too, and built another. His actual bedroom had shrunk by roughly this same process three times since he’d moved in — starting out, reasonably, as the largest room in the tower, and currently sitting at the very bottom of the cellar stair itself, past everything else the house had to offer in the way of spikes and skulls, as though he’d built the frightening part first and only afterward remembered he needed somewhere to sleep. He never framed this to himself as losing ground. It was simply where the quiet had ended up this time, and he went where the quiet was.

“Right,” he said, to the empty room, in the tone of a man reading out a shopping list. “That’s new.” He did not panic. What he had instead, in moments like this, was a kind of total, absorbing, faintly delighted focus, applied here to a problem that was considerably more his fault than most of the others. It spread the way these things spread — slowly, then all at once.

He ran a thumb over it, frowning, and found that this unsettled him rather more than the tendrils had — though “unsettled,” even now, wasn’t a word he reached for. He preferred interesting. It kept things at the correct distance. It was around this point that he started asking, out loud, to no one, expecting no answer and getting none, what, precisely, the stuff actually wanted.

Fresh wood, it turned out, was nothing to it — raw material, unremarkable, the sort of thing any self-respecting growth could get into eventually with patience. Old wood, properly settled, the kind that had spent years slowly rotting in close company with something that used to be a person, was something else entirely. It went in easier. Faster.

He had, conveniently, a small stock already, doing unglamorous work as storage in the room he generously called the stockroom — a coffin hauled out of a Duskwood estate years back, dense black wood, and once the Lightbloom took to it, the growth that came up was gnarled and stunted and faintly rotten-looking even fresh, the same sunlight-starved shape every tree in that miserable forest seemed to grow into out of habit. A barrel from an old Orgrimmar shipment, kept for no better reason than that it had always been there, put out something low and spiny and stubborn, the kind of scrub that clawed a living out of Durotar’s red dust. And tucked at the back of a shelf, an oddly grained carved thing he’d picked up on some half-remembered trip and never found a use for, put out something broad-leaved and improbably cheerful, a fat little sapling with the unmistakable swollen trunk of a baobab — the exact tree that held up his own beach house an ocean away. He stood looking at it for a long moment, faintly unsettled by the coincidence, before deciding it probably wasn’t one. This was where a sensible person stopped. UG went out to the garden with a shovel.

There was one coffin he did not touch. Its tenant was a death knight named Lichmyface, an old, largely silent acquaintance who’d taken an interest in the cellar some years back and simply never left. His room sat past UG’s own, deeper into the stone, with its own stair climbing up to its own separate door — sensible about not tracking anything through the rest of the house.

They had tea sometimes — UG and Lichmyface — an oddly formal little ritual neither of them had ever explained, Lichmyface holding a cup he didn’t strictly need, UG talking enough for both of them, which was fortunate, since Lichmyface had no jaw left to speak of and had never been much of a conversation besides.

It occurred to him, one such week, that he had never actually asked. “Growing anything down there?” he said, aiming for casual and mostly landing it.

Lichmyface considered this for a genuinely unreasonable length of time, and answered, in the end, with a single low, flat, jawless sound that UG had long ago decided to translate as no, on the grounds that the alternative was a great many more questions than either of them wanted to get into.

UG decided not to push it. Some silences were clearly doing important work.

Most evenings, once the light started going, Blondage came by. She kept her own place nearby, close enough now that the walk barely counted as one, ever since she’d finally decided the ride down from Tirisfal wasn’t worth defending anymore. She’d never shown the slightest interest in giving up that place, which suited them both fine, and more nights than not she still turned up at his door around dusk regardless, letting herself in without knocking because knocking had stopped meaning anything between them a long time ago.

She loved him in a way that never made him feel like a project that needed finishing. She loved the hobbies, the half-built nonsense scattered across every surface, the way he talked to inanimate objects with more patience than he generally extended to people. She’d told him once, lightly, over tea, that she thought there was probably a word for the shape his mind ran in, and that whatever the word was, she liked him considerably more for it than despite it. She was fond of the succubus too, if it came to that — more than fond, in her own understated way — though the two of them had an understanding about who was actually good in a crisis, and it wasn’t the demon with the whip.

This particular evening, she did not go straight through to find him.

“What,” she said, from the kitchen doorway, “is that.”

“The stuff,” said UG, without looking up from the table. “It’s going well, actually.”

She looked at the table for a long moment, the specific way she looked at things she was assessing for structural integrity, and did not seem remotely alarmed. “It’s in the wood,” she said. Not a question.

“Some of the wood.”

She wandered on toward the stockroom, unhurried, and stood a while in front of the coffins — several fused at the seams now, one lid entirely obscured — with the stillness of someone recalculating an evening. “You’ve been digging.”

“…A bit.”

“In the garden.”

“Also a bit.”

She turned and looked at him properly. “Downstairs,” she said. “Now. We’ll discuss the coffins after.”

“Ah.”

“You don’t get to ah your way out of this one.”

He tried anyway, out of habit more than hope, something about structural properties and materials science, and got about four words into it before she said his name once, plainly, and he found — for perhaps the first time since Harandar — that he had nowhere left to put the sentence.

“I don’t know why I kept going,” he admitted, and it came out smaller than anything else he’d said all week.

“I didn’t ask why,” she said. “I only wanted you to notice you hadn’t.”

She let him up a minute later, and by the time the kettle had boiled the joke was mostly back in his voice, and neither of them mentioned it again that evening.

It was, in the end, a second lid on the chest by the front door — sprouting straight off the first one, unbothered, unhurried — that finally did it.

He did not think of it as running away. He was quite firm with himself on that point. A man was allowed a bit of sea air after some deeply unplanned biology, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the small wet clicking sound the chest had started making, which he had decided, for his own peace of mind, to describe as a hum.

It also had nothing to do with the fel energy experiment three days prior, or the uncomfortable arithmetic that followed from it: if hitting the stuff with magic only made it grow back thicker, then a man with a great many offensive spells and no defensive ones was, on balance, not the ideal person to keep standing near it — which was not, strictly, even true. He had the wall. He had the shield that cost him blood to raise. He simply never used either of them unless badly cornered, on the grounds that using them felt like admitting the fight had gone badly, and UG had never once, in his life, enjoyed admitting that.

He packed a bag. He told Lichmyface, who said nothing, which UG chose to interpret as blessing. He told Blondage too, in the end — bluntly, the way he told her everything, whether she’d asked or not. “I’m going to the beach house,” he said, “because the chest has started making a noise I’ve decided to call a hum, and I would rather not be here when it stops.” She had not looked remotely reassured by this. She had also not tried to stop him, which was, in its own way, the same thing.

And so, without any real ceremony, the way he did most things that actually mattered to him, Unclegrumble left for the beach house.

IV. The Lion Goes Up the Tree

The lion was the first thing he saved. UG woke one morning to find a thin pale thread running up through the tent canvas right behind where its head used to rest, and moved the lion before he moved anything else — a decision he has never explained and nobody has asked him to.

By the end of the week the thread wasn’t a thread anymore. It had a shape to it — low, spreading, faintly luminous in the dark the way the chest’s lid had been, and it had picked the exact corner of the tent where his sleeping mat used to sit as the place it liked best. He tried the other side of the tent. It found that corner too, eventually, the way water finds the low point in a room.

Francois took the whole upheaval in stride, in the specific way Francois takes everything in stride, which is to say he showed no reaction whatsoever and appeared, if anything, to consider the extra construction an improvement. He kept to the driest corner of the tent throughout, indifferent to the wiring, the sparking, and the fact that his owner now slept forty feet up a tree. Nothing about any of it seemed to strike him as remarkable.

UG still hadn’t opened the treehouse door. He’d thought about it most nights, usually right before falling asleep, which is a very efficient way to think about something without ever actually doing anything about it.

What he did instead was treat it as a lighting problem, because a lighting problem was a problem he actually knew how to solve. The tent was running low on candles, and most people would have called that a candle problem. UG built a power source instead — a proper one, humming and sparking away in what used to be his sleeping corner, with a cable running out the back and straight up into the canopy, arcing visibly along its length the whole way, to feed the treehouse above whether the treehouse wanted feeding or not. It worked. It also turned out to be large, sparking in ways that would concern most sensible people, and taking up nearly the whole tent, leaving just enough floor space for a sleeping bag squeezed in beside it — which put the sleeping bag close enough to the corner that the Lightbloom found it within the week too.

There wasn’t much to be done about any of it after the fact, so he did what he’s always done when a project outgrows the room built for it: adjusted around the project instead of shrinking it, and adjusted around the fungus the same way. A green hammock went up underneath the treehouse floor itself, slung in among the rafters, reachable only by climbing up to it each night rather than simply walking in. The lion came with him, tucked into the corner of the hammock, and has stayed there since. The candles, notably, never got restocked, and the door, less notably but just as deliberately, never got opened.

Getting to the hammock is its own nightly project. The foundation up there was never built to be climbed, let alone climbed after dark by a gnome carrying a lantern in one hand — patched beams, several of them clearly repaired rather than replaced, bearing weight they were never rated for and creaking about it the whole way up. The candle’s gone from the rigging now — he moved it after a close enough call that even he took the hint — but the fix he found instead was to tap the same live cable that feeds the treehouse and run a proper high-power lamp off it, wired in right at the point where the beams are weakest. He considers this the safer option. It has not obviously made him safer. The cable runs along the same route he does either way, close enough in places that avoiding it takes real attention rather than habit, and UG has learned the hard way exactly how much it hurts to grab the wrong support in the dark. Between the fall risk and the electrocution risk, he’s not sure which one is more likely to get him on any given night. He climbs up anyway. The hammock, once he’s actually in it, swings gently between the branches with the sea visible beyond the beams, and he’s decided, on balance, that the view is worth the odds.

From up there, most nights, he can just make out the pale shape of it in the tent below — smaller from this height, less urgent-looking, easy enough to not think about until morning. What he can’t quite talk himself out of noticing, some nights more than others, is that the thread running up the outside of the trunk toward the treehouse door has gotten a little further up than it was the week before.

V. What the Pineapple Meant

Master called me over this evenin’ and asked had I noticed anythin’ odd at me own corner, and I hadn’t thought to say till he asked, but aye — there’d been a speck of yellow at the base of the stone, small enough I’d taken it for dust catchin’ the lantern wrong. Didn’t think it worth mentionin’. Small things in this house rarely turn out to matter less the longer you leave ’em be.

Turns out Master had reason to ask. Somethin’s showed up in his pineapple drink — flowers, proper yellow ones, growin’ straight out the fruit itself. Now, everythin’ I’ve heard tell of the Lightbloom says it wants wood. Old wood, rotted wood, coffins and beams and barrels left to settle into somethin’ the growth can take hold of. A pineapple ain’t none of that. Fresh, wet, alive in its own small fashion right up till you cut into it. So either the thing’s stopped mindin’ what it grows on, which is worse news than anythin’ it’s managed before, or that particular drink had somethin’ about it that made it worth the bother special. Master didn’t know which, and neither do I.

What Master did, bein’ Master, was take a sip anyway to find out.

I told him plain that were the exact thing I’d just finished tellin’ him not to do. He drank it regardless, said it tasted fine, and I spent the next while watchin’ him close for anythin’ that weren’t fine, same as I watched the fifth troll skull story unfold from a safer distance than this. A while later he said he were feelin’ a bit poorly, and put it down to the dirigible ride over from the Faire rather than the drink. Teeth and rockets ain’t gentle on a body, and I’ll grant that’s likely true. But I’ve not stopped watchin’ him for it, and I won’t, not till whatever’s poorly in him has passed and stayed passed.

My own thinkin’, for what it’s worth, and Master did ask: I don’t reckon this is the Lightbloom breakin’ its own rules so much as findin’ a new one it likes better. Wood was never the point, far as I can tell — wood were just the first thing it come across settled long enough to take hold of. A speck of yellow at the base of my own stone, in a corner that’s stood still and quiet since the day it were dug, fits that same pattern close enough to worry me. I’ve not moved from that corner. Don’t plan to start now. But I’ll be lookin’ harder at what’s growin’ near me than I was this mornin’, and I’d ask Master do the same with anythin’ he means to drink from here on.

Whatever it wants, it seems mostly to want stillness. That’s the one thing this whole house has never managed to give it, and somehow the thing keeps findin’ more of it than any of us would’ve guessed we had.