5th August 2026

Part 1 of the Azkin series

Part of the arc: The Making of Unclegrumble

Before any of this, Azkin had a rank. Not a good one — nobody hands a good rank to an imp, the Nether doesn’t work that way — but a rank, filed somewhere in the endless demonic paperwork the Burning Legion insists on keeping despite being an army whose actual strategy has never required so much as a single accurate headcount. He was a Third Kindler, Provisional, attached to a felguard company on permanent standby outside a staging ground on Mardum that saw no combat at all in his recorded tenure there. His job was to keep the ritual braziers lit during muster. That was the whole job. Keep them lit, don’t ask questions, don’t make eye contact with anything nathrezim-shaped, and wait for an invasion that the eredar high command kept postponing for reasons nobody ever explained to anyone below the rank of Pit Lord.

He was, by his own account, extremely good at this job. Nobody has ever asked him to prove it.

The higher ranks did not think much of imps, as a category, and Azkin did not think much of the higher ranks either, though only one side of that arrangement got to say so out loud. Dreadlords floated past the staging ground on their little errands looking exactly as pleased with themselves as you’d expect from something that used to be a bat and decided it liked the smugness so much it kept the wings. Eredar commanders never looked at anything below their own eyeline unless it had personally inconvenienced them. Sargeras himself, as far as Azkin was aware, had never so much as glanced in the direction of Mardum, which suited Azkin fine, because he had heard what happened to things Sargeras glanced at, and none of it involved a promotion.

So he kept the braziers lit. He got very good at looking busy. He developed, over what he estimates was several centuries of Nether-time — time moves strangely enough out there that “several centuries” is the honest best guess and nobody’s checking — an impressive talent for being exactly the amount of useless that avoids getting noticed, which is a harder skill than it sounds and one he still rates as his finest professional achievement.

Then, on an ordinary muster night, mid-brazier, something reached through the Twisting Nether, grabbed him by whatever an imp has instead of a collar, and yanked.

It did not feel like being summoned by someone who knew what they were doing. Azkin has felt that, secondhand, from other imps who’d been called up properly, with the right words in the right order and a circle drawn by someone who’d actually read the instructions. This felt like being fished out of a pond by someone using the wrong end of the net. There was a lot of unnecessary tugging. There was a moment, right at the end, where he was fairly sure the whole binding nearly failed out of sheer incompetence and he’d have snapped straight back to Mardum, brazier duty and all — which, if he’s honest, might have been the better outcome for everybody, but nobody asked him.

What he landed in instead was a workshop. A gnomish one, cluttered, smelling of solder and something scorched, lit by candles instead of anything sensible, and standing in the middle of it was the single least intimidating summoner Azkin had encountered in several centuries of adjacent-to-warfare experience — Unclegrumble, delighted, grinning the way you grin when something’s gone right and you don’t yet understand why, staring at Azkin like he’d won something.

“It worked!” the gnome said, to nobody, since Azkin certainly hadn’t confirmed anything.

Azkin’s professional opinion, delivered internally and at some length, was that this gnome had no business summoning anything more dangerous than a mild inconvenience, had clearly followed a ritual text with several pages missing, and was going to get them both killed within the week.

He was wrong about the week. He’ll allow that much, twenty-one years on. He was not wrong about the ritual text.

Things moved fast after that, the way things do when you’ve been reassigned by someone who doesn’t know reassignment is what just happened. There wasn’t time to feel annoyed about it before the ceiling started shaking and everyone in Gnomeregan started running in the same direction at once, and Azkin — technically still processing the fact that he now belonged, in whatever sense binding counts as belonging, to a gnome he’d known for less than an hour — found himself walking out of a collapsing city at this gnome’s heel, because apparently that was the arrangement now.

He did not think much of the walk. Cold, featureless, and long, populated mostly by dwarves who kept staring at the small green thing following the small grinning thing and not saying anything about it, which Azkin respected, distantly, as the correct response to a situation nobody had briefed them on. The gnome, for his part, seemed to find the whole experience — the collapsing city behind them, the demon now technically bound to his service, the cold, the dwarves, all of it — somewhere between mildly interesting and actively enjoyable, which Azkin found, and still finds, deeply strange in a person.

Then the gates of Ironforge came into view, and Azkin will admit, grudgingly, that they were something. Dwarven stonework carved straight into the mountain on a scale that would have taken a full eredar labor detail the better part of a decade back on Mardum, and these people had apparently just — built it. No Legion. No invasion timeline held up by committee. Just dwarves, deciding to carve a city into a mountain, and doing it. He didn’t say any of this out loud. An imp maintains standards.

Inside was worse, in the sense that it was more impressive, which for Azkin has never been a comfortable feeling. The Great Forge threw orange light up every wall the way a proper hellscape should have and generally didn’t manage half as well, and several hundred dwarves were shouting at each other in a way that sounded, to Azkin’s professionally trained ear, exactly like the muster ground on a bad day, except everyone here seemed to be enjoying it.

The gnomes got a district. Azkin got dragged through most of it before anyone official worked out there was a demon in the refugee column, and by the time anyone thought to ask questions, questions had stopped seeming urgent compared to the general scale of the disaster, which Azkin has always considered the single luckiest piece of bureaucratic timing in his very long professional history.

It was in that district that Nobbybanks turned up — a gnome even smaller in temperament than the one Azkin was now stuck with, tidy in a way that made the workshop look like a crime scene by comparison, and possessed of the same watchful attentiveness Azkin recognized immediately from every quartermaster he’d ever had the misfortune of owing something to. Azkin’s professional opinion, formed within the first thirty seconds and never revised since, was that Nobbybanks was the only person in the whole arrangement who actually understood what was happening around him, which made him, by Azkin’s standards, considerably more dangerous than either the gnome he was bound to or anything Azkin had left behind on Mardum.

Nobbybanks looked at Azkin exactly once, filed whatever conclusion he reached without comment, and started calling the gnome Uncle. He has never addressed Azkin directly by any name at all, in twenty-one years, which Azkin has decided to interpret as professional respect rather than the alternative, mostly because the alternative is insulting and Azkin would rather not think about it.

He never made it back to Mardum. He’s not sure the braziers are still lit. He tells himself, some centuries-adjacent nights, that he doesn’t especially care either way, and he has gotten reasonably convincing at saying it like he means it.