5th August 2026

Part 1 of the The Crematorium series

Part of the arc: The Houses that UG Built

It started with the coffin wood, and the coffin wood started with the Lightbloom. He’d already worked out, back when the stockroom coffin was still his only sample, that fresh wood did nothing much for the growth and old wood — aged, rotted, settled in close company with whatever had been buried in it — did something else. Faster. Stranger. Worth understanding, if he could ever work out what it actually wanted. One coffin’s worth of old wood only gets a gnome so far into an experiment like that, and by the time his own stockroom was fused shut at every seam and giving him nothing new to work with, Founder’s Point had a whole graveyard full of exactly the material he needed, sitting there unused, six feet down.

He should have asked Nobbybanks about the permits. Nobbybanks is, at heart, a permits sort of gnome — the same instinct that had him pick the legal Auction House over anything more interesting runs straight through everything he touches, and he would have had opinions, forms, and probably a second opinion on the forms, about a gnome digging up a whole neighbourhood’s worth of graves for research material. Unclegrumble did not ask him. He has since decided this was less an oversight than a mercy, on the grounds that Nobbybanks worries enough already without adding grave-robbing to the list.

Lichmyface had nothing to say about any of it, which was never really in doubt, since he has no jaw to say it with. He watched the first cartload of reclaimed coffin wood go past the cellar stair, and the second, and the third, contributing exactly as much commentary as he always does. UG poured the tea that evening the same as every evening. Lichmyface drank none of it, also the same as every evening.

Blondage did not stay quiet about it, which was somehow worse. She has strong opinions about what gets done to the dead and by whom, opinions that predate UG by longer than he’s been alive, and she made it clear — calmly, at length, more than once — that raiding graves for research material was not, in her professional estimation, a respectful use of anyone’s coffin. UG agreed with her, sincerely, while continuing to do it anyway, which is roughly the arrangement they’ve settled into about most of his worse ideas.

What the coffins had in them, once emptied out, was mostly ordinary — except for the four he found near the bottom of the older row, which weren’t ordinary at all. The skulls were wrong. Too long in the jaw, too heavy at the brow, with a curve to the tusks that UG has only ever seen on trolls, and he has no idea what four apparent trolls were doing buried in that stretch of ground, in coffins built to no troll’s measurements. He has not solved this. He has not solved the Lightbloom either, if he’s honest about it, and hasn’t opened the treehouse door in longer than he’d like to admit. But four unexplained troll skulls is exactly the kind of problem UG can throw himself at completely, and for the first time in weeks he has something to do that isn’t simply waiting for the pale thing on the trunk to finish climbing.

What he found alongside the fourth skull is something worth saving for the next letter. A hoard, small and dark with age, coins and a few settings that might once have held something worth more than the metal around them — or might not. UG has never claimed to know real gold from a very convincing tin can, and given his own record with valuables of any kind, the honest odds favour the tin can. He hasn’t tested it. He’s rather enjoying not testing it. Testing it would mean sorting through everything else he’s accumulated over twenty-one years of bags and a personal bank that has not been organised once, most of it worthless, some of it unidentifiable, and at least one item — a sword he’s fairly sure was worth real money — lost somewhere between listing it on the Auction House and it actually arriving anywhere. He assumes the post. He blames the post, and only the post. Nobbybanks doesn’t know about the wood, or the skulls, or the reason the crematorium exists in the first place. He does, as of this week, know there might be gold, because UG mentioned it in passing the way he mentions most things that are about to become somebody else’s problem, and for once in this whole arrangement, Nobbybanks has stopped asking about the money he’s already spent and started asking, with real and uncharacteristic interest, when exactly he can come and see it for himself.

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More in the The Crematorium series

Next: II. Underpowered →