Part 4 of the How He Got Here series

Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story

The Greener Pastures showed him his own life — the branch where he’d ended up an orc in Orgrimmar instead of a gnome in Stormwind. It was freshly his from the first moment, memories and all, the way that version of him would have lived it if his life had actually gone that way. UG woke up inside it, whole and new.

The body took some getting used to — too broad, too tall, hands built for a different scale of the world, and a stoop to the shoulders he never got comfortable with, whatever the orcs around him seemed to think it did for their silhouette. Everything else came easily.

The shoulder armor took longer than the body did. Every orc warlock he met seemed to be dressing for Gul’dan’s old silhouette — spikes the size of his own torso, fel-green glow pouring off pauldrons built for a man twice his width — and UG, coming from a tradition of considerably more sensible gnomish shoulder gear, found the whole look faintly ridiculous even while wearing it. He wore it anyway. It felt, the whole time, like borrowing somebody else’s uniform.

Orgrimmar was built straight into a canyon of red rock, war-drums going somewhere in the Valley of Strength most hours of the day, banners everywhere, orcs who said exactly what they meant and expected the same back. UG, who has never in his life said less than exactly what he meant, fit that directness like a glove. He fell in with company fast, the way he’s always fallen in with company, and that company eventually pulled him through an old tower out past Deadwind Pass — real nerves, real trust, a room full of people holding a line against a curator who didn’t want visitors and a prince who wanted nothing else, all of it earned firsthand. It’s still the fondest thing he owns from that whole stretch: the same instincts that had once carried him through Zul’Gurub were doing the same work, whatever shape he happened to be wearing.

The trouble started slowly, well after the novelty wore off. He missed things: a body that fit, a city that felt like his own, a version of himself he recognized on sight. The gap grew steadily, worse some weeks than others, until it was costing him real effort just to get through an ordinary day. He wanted his own body back. He wanted his own life back. The debtors who’d been shown their alternatives got sent straight home grateful, switched off the moment the lesson landed. This one just kept running.

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More in the How He Got Here series

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