Part 2 of the How He Got Here series

Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story

The tram was simply there, gnomish-built, running off toward somewhere nobody he knew had actually been, and that was reason enough to leave Tinker Town. He got on it the way he got on with most things: because it looked interesting, and because nobody had specifically told him not to.

He came up into the Dwarven District first, and for a minute it barely felt like arriving anywhere — same stone, same dwarves, same smell of ale and hot metal. He kept expecting to turn a corner and find the Great Forge again. The Trade District changed that. The air was warm. The sky was a softer blue than anything Dun Morogh had ever shown him. Criers were shouting prices, cheese-sellers and cloth merchants working within arm’s reach of the bank and the Auction House. He found the Gilded Rose, run by an innkeeper called Allison who fed him better than his coin purse strictly justified, and stayed a good while — a season, maybe two, which was about as long as staying still had ever suited him. He went looking for the rest of the city the same way he’d gone looking for the tram.

The Mage Quarter was quieter, older, robed figures moving without hurry. It was the Slaughtered Lamb he wanted, tucked down a side street there — a run-down pub with an empty top floor and a bartender, Jarel Moor, who told every customer to stay away from the shadows. That turned out to be a warning, not a mood. What the Lamb didn’t have was a single spare room, and hadn’t for years, so UG found the Blue Recluse instead, a few streets over — respectable, popular with mages, everything the Lamb wasn’t. He kept drinking at the Lamb regardless, most nights, and simply walked home afterward.

It was in that same stretch that he tried to become what he actually wanted to be. Engineering training in Stormwind ran through a small handful of trainers with more applicants than slots, and none of them were taking on a gnome with Tinker Town’s less flattering rumors attached to his name. Mining never stood a chance either — there’s no practical way to swing a pick and hold a grimoire steady at the same time. What Stormwind offered instead was tailoring and enchanting, and he took both up the way you take up a job you didn’t actually want: competently enough to get certified, and not one inch further. He has made his living by them ever since, without much enthusiasm and without ever threatening to get good at either.

Fishing, oddly, is where the real patience showed up — hours at a time down by the canals with a line in the water, no urgency to it, no deadline, which suited him in a way tailoring never has. He picked up a bit of cooking alongside it, mostly out of necessity, mostly what he’d caught that morning, and never took it further than “edible” on his more optimistic days.

Eventually he found the stairs down at the Lamb, into the working sanctum of Stormwind’s warlock coven, run by a trainer called Gakin the Darkbinder. Gnomes got sent there specifically once Gnomeregan’s own masters were gone. UG trained there too, with real paperwork, filed somewhere he’s never gone back to check.

Once Gakin judged him more use than danger, he went after the Dreadsteed — the materials, the Circle of Greater Summoning in Dire Maul, holding the ritual open while imps and felguards came at him out of the dark, and finally tearing the horse itself out of Xoroth along with the dreadlord who wanted it back. Lord Hel’nurath fought like a man who’d lost an argument in public, not just a mount. UG still rides the horse, when the occasion calls for a bit of theatre.

He kept returning to Stormwind more than he ever properly stayed in it. Somewhere in those years the drinking and the coven work stopped being enough on their own, and the same restlessness that had put him on the Deeprun Tram in the first place started pulling him further out again — south, into Stranglethorn, down into Zul’Gurub, working through Hakkar’s lieutenants one pull at a time and finally the Soulflayer itself. It took real effort. Clearing it, after weeks of failing to, is one of the better memories he owns from that stretch — not for who he did it with, but for what it told him: Stormwind was never the edge of his map. Just the middle of it.

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More in the How He Got Here series

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