5th August 2026

Part 1 of the Lightbloom series

Part of the arc: The Houses that UG Built

The list, such as it was, had been scrawled on the back of a tavern receipt some weeks earlier, in handwriting that got progressively worse the more excited Unclegrumble became about what he was writing.

He stood over the wreckage afterward, ears ringing, grinning in a way that had nothing performative about it. This was, if he was honest — and he was, almost always, sometimes rather more than the room wanted — the best part. Not the winning. The bit right before, where something had seriously tried to end him, and failed, and for one clean uncomplicated second afterward there was nothing left to think about except the fact of still being here.

Ha’kalawe took its sweet time and gave him nothing worth writing down. He crossed it off the list mostly out of principle, in the way you finish a plate of food you’ve stopped enjoying purely because it would feel wrong not to.

And that, as far as Unclegrumble was concerned, was Harandar handled — three names, three crossings-out, an afternoon well spent. He trudged back toward the rootways whistling something tuneless and deeply, uncomplicatedly pleased with himself, his good sparkling slippers — cloth, delicate, unsuited to cave-crawling and completely unsuited to the several miles of fungal jungle he’d just waded through, and worn anyway, because he had never in his life dressed appropriately for anything if the alternative slippers were nicer — thoroughly, unsalvageably filthy. He did not clean them. He did not wash his hands. It did not occur to him, at any point on the long walk home, that he had spent the last several hours moving through the single most invasive ecosystem currently known to Azeroth and was now personally transporting a live sample of it halfway across the world, some in a bag, some worked directly into the fibres of his shoes.

For finishing the set, he was given a small reward — a piece of moss, faintly luminous, labelled for the house. Lightbloom, the little tag said, in the brisk unbothered handwriting of whoever processed these things for a living. He didn’t think much of the name. He had, by that point, stopped thinking much about anything that wasn’t already on fire, which — to be fair to him — described most of his life fairly well, and had for as long as he could remember.

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More in the Lightbloom series

Next: II. A Perfectly Reasonable Amount of Fungus →