Part 1 of the How He Got Here series
Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story
UG’s first real memory isn’t the disaster itself. It’s the walk afterward — alone, the rest of whoever he’d escaped with having scattered somewhere behind him in the dark, and UG unbothered by it. He had Azkin with him the whole way — his imp, small and grinning and about as much practical protection as a paper umbrella, twenty-one years into a partnership neither of them saw coming — and between the two of them the trek came off less like fleeing a catastrophe and more like a chilly evening stroll with excellent company.
He wasn’t new to summoning by then, either. He’d been calling up small, badly-behaved demons for a while before Gnomeregan actually fell — quietly, in workshop corners nobody official was watching too closely — and word travels fast in a city that small. Fel magic made people nervous. A gnome summoning it under everyone’s nose made people more nervous still, and there’d been talk, in the weeks before everything went wrong, about what ought to be done about him. Nothing had actually been decided by the time the troggs came up through the tunnels, and whoever had been forming an opinion on the matter suddenly had far bigger problems to deal with than one gnome’s extracurricular demon habit. UG walked out of the ruins of his own home that night unsupervised, and has always considered the timing more fortunate than tragic.
He passed the odd dwarf mountaineer along the road, sturdy and bearded and doing whatever dwarf mountaineers do at that hour, each of them giving him the look reserved for a small unaccompanied gnome strolling past with a demon on a leash. UG waved. Mostly he spent the walk doing what he’s always done best: making plans. A workshop somewhere, with his name on the door. A trade nobody else had tried yet. A city big enough to actually use whatever he could build.
Then the gates arrived, and gates is the only honest word for them — dwarven stonework carved straight into the mountain, on a scale that stopped him walking altogether, small and alone in front of something built for people several times his own size in every direction. He’d been perfectly calm the whole way there. The gates were the first thing that actually got to him.
Whatever concerns anyone might once have had about a gnome walking around with a demon in tow evaporated somewhere around the third or fourth hour of processing several thousand refugees at once. Ironforge had far bigger problems that week than one more small green face in the crowd, and UG, Azkin trotting along contentedly at his heel, simply walked in with everyone else.
The gnomes were given a district. It had belonged to dwarves before that, moved out to make room. UG has always known this and never asked anyone about it. There was too much else to look at. Doors got resized. Workshops replaced front rooms. Within a few years gnomes were building things that would have gotten them arrested in half the other cities on the continent.
He had the same face then he has now: black hair, no beard, a grin that gets him into more trouble than it gets him out of.
It was in Tinker Town that he met Nobbybanks, who counted every coin twice and forgot none of them — considerably more dangerous a trait, as it turned out, than anyone in Tinker Town gave him credit for early on. Nobbybanks ran the bank gnomes of Ironforge, an operation that did most of its real business in back rooms rather than through the tidy front counter everyone assumed was the whole of it, and he lent money the way a shark circles: patiently, pleasantly, with the numbers already worked out well in advance. He started calling UG Uncle early on, for no reason he’s ever offered, and it stuck the way nicknames stick among people who’ve known each other long enough not to need a reason. The affection has never come with a discount.
More in the How He Got Here series
Next: II. South of the Mountain →
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