5th August 2026

Part 2 of the Lightbloom series

Part of the arc: The Houses that UG Built

Home, for Unclegrumble, was a leaning tower in the graveyard reaches of Founder’s Point — round upper storey glowing warm orange against a permanent dusk-blue mist, a windmill turning slowly above the roofline, powering whatever it was he’d convinced himself needed powering.

He had never really learned the muscle other people seemed to have for company, the one that made a house feel less empty just for having someone else breathing in it. There was, technically, someone else under his roof — had been for years, tucked away downstairs, undemanding and rarely seen — but that arrangement worked precisely because it asked nothing of him, which meant it didn’t count, not in any way that filled the actual gap. Most days he was alone in the ways that were actually hard to be alone in, and he had filled the space where something else might have gone with projects instead — the toys he talked to, the things strapped to workbenches, the house itself, fussed over and tinkered with and occasionally, when the mood took him, taken apart just to see what was underneath.

It wasn’t only the workshop, either. Over the years he’d carved little dens into every corner of the tower that would allow it — a nook behind the bookshelves with exactly one chair wedged into it, a blanket fort of sorts jammed under the stairs, a reading corner up in the eaves that required climbing over two crates and a birdcage to reach at all. Nobody else had ever seen the logic in any of them, and if he was honest, he didn’t quite see it himself when he stopped to ask — he only knew that once a room filled up with enough half-finished ideas, as they all eventually did, he needed somewhere smaller and quieter to retreat to, and so he built one, and then, in time, filled that one too, and built another. His actual bedroom had shrunk by roughly this same process three times since he’d moved in — starting out, reasonably, as the largest room in the tower, and currently sitting at the very bottom of the cellar stair itself, past everything else the house had to offer in the way of spikes and skulls, as though he’d built the frightening part first and only afterward remembered he needed somewhere to sleep. He never framed this to himself as losing ground. It was simply where the quiet had ended up this time, and he went where the quiet was.

“Right,” he said, to the empty room, in the tone of a man reading out a shopping list. “That’s new.” He did not panic. What he had instead, in moments like this, was a kind of total, absorbing, faintly delighted focus, applied here to a problem that was considerably more his fault than most of the others. It spread the way these things spread — slowly, then all at once.

He ran a thumb over it, frowning, and found that this unsettled him rather more than the tendrils had — though “unsettled,” even now, wasn’t a word he reached for. He preferred interesting. It kept things at the correct distance. It was around this point that he started asking, out loud, to no one, expecting no answer and getting none, what, precisely, the stuff actually wanted.

Fresh wood, it turned out, was nothing to it — raw material, unremarkable, the sort of thing any self-respecting growth could get into eventually with patience. Old wood, properly settled, the kind that had spent years slowly rotting in close company with something that used to be a person, was something else entirely. It went in easier. Faster.

He had, conveniently, a small stock already, doing unglamorous work as storage in the room he generously called the stockroom — a coffin hauled out of a Duskwood estate years back, dense black wood, and once the Lightbloom took to it, the growth that came up was gnarled and stunted and faintly rotten-looking even fresh, the same sunlight-starved shape every tree in that miserable forest seemed to grow into out of habit. A barrel from an old Orgrimmar shipment, kept for no better reason than that it had always been there, put out something low and spiny and stubborn, the kind of scrub that clawed a living out of Durotar’s red dust. And tucked at the back of a shelf, an oddly grained carved thing he’d picked up on some half-remembered trip and never found a use for, put out something broad-leaved and improbably cheerful, a fat little sapling with the unmistakable swollen trunk of a baobab — the exact tree that held up his own beach house an ocean away. He stood looking at it for a long moment, faintly unsettled by the coincidence, before deciding it probably wasn’t one. This was where a sensible person stopped. UG went out to the garden with a shovel.

There was one coffin he did not touch. Its tenant was a death knight named Lichmyface, an old, largely silent acquaintance who’d taken an interest in the cellar some years back and simply never left. His room sat past UG’s own, deeper into the stone, with its own stair climbing up to its own separate door — sensible about not tracking anything through the rest of the house.

They had tea sometimes — UG and Lichmyface — an oddly formal little ritual neither of them had ever explained, Lichmyface holding a cup he didn’t strictly need, UG talking enough for both of them, which was fortunate, since Lichmyface had no jaw left to speak of and had never been much of a conversation besides.

It occurred to him, one such week, that he had never actually asked. “Growing anything down there?” he said, aiming for casual and mostly landing it.

Lichmyface considered this for a genuinely unreasonable length of time, and answered, in the end, with a single low, flat, jawless sound that UG had long ago decided to translate as no, on the grounds that the alternative was a great many more questions than either of them wanted to get into.

UG decided not to push it. Some silences were clearly doing important work.

Most evenings, once the light started going, Blondage came by. She kept her own place nearby, close enough now that the walk barely counted as one, ever since she’d finally decided the ride down from Tirisfal wasn’t worth defending anymore. She’d never shown the slightest interest in giving up that place, which suited them both fine, and more nights than not she still turned up at his door around dusk regardless, letting herself in without knocking because knocking had stopped meaning anything between them a long time ago.

She loved him in a way that never made him feel like a project that needed finishing. She loved the hobbies, the half-built nonsense scattered across every surface, the way he talked to inanimate objects with more patience than he generally extended to people. She’d told him once, lightly, over tea, that she thought there was probably a word for the shape his mind ran in, and that whatever the word was, she liked him considerably more for it than despite it. She was fond of the succubus too, if it came to that — more than fond, in her own understated way — though the two of them had an understanding about who was actually good in a crisis, and it wasn’t the demon with the whip.

This particular evening, she did not go straight through to find him.

“What,” she said, from the kitchen doorway, “is that.”

“The stuff,” said UG, without looking up from the table. “It’s going well, actually.”

She looked at the table for a long moment, the specific way she looked at things she was assessing for structural integrity, and did not seem remotely alarmed. “It’s in the wood,” she said. Not a question.

“Some of the wood.”

She wandered on toward the stockroom, unhurried, and stood a while in front of the coffins — several fused at the seams now, one lid entirely obscured — with the stillness of someone recalculating an evening. “You’ve been digging.”

“…A bit.”

“In the garden.”

“Also a bit.”

She turned and looked at him properly. “Downstairs,” she said. “Now. We’ll discuss the coffins after.”

“Ah.”

“You don’t get to ah your way out of this one.”

He tried anyway, out of habit more than hope, something about structural properties and materials science, and got about four words into it before she said his name once, plainly, and he found — for perhaps the first time since Harandar — that he had nowhere left to put the sentence.

“I don’t know why I kept going,” he admitted, and it came out smaller than anything else he’d said all week.

“I didn’t ask why,” she said. “I only wanted you to notice you hadn’t.”

She let him up a minute later, and by the time the kettle had boiled the joke was mostly back in his voice, and neither of them mentioned it again that evening.

It was, in the end, a second lid on the chest by the front door — sprouting straight off the first one, unbothered, unhurried — that finally did it.

He did not think of it as running away. He was quite firm with himself on that point. A man was allowed a bit of sea air after some deeply unplanned biology, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the small wet clicking sound the chest had started making, which he had decided, for his own peace of mind, to describe as a hum.

It also had nothing to do with the fel energy experiment three days prior, or the uncomfortable arithmetic that followed from it: if hitting the stuff with magic only made it grow back thicker, then a man with a great many offensive spells and no defensive ones was, on balance, not the ideal person to keep standing near it — which was not, strictly, even true. He had the wall. He had the shield that cost him blood to raise. He simply never used either of them unless badly cornered, on the grounds that using them felt like admitting the fight had gone badly, and UG had never once, in his life, enjoyed admitting that.

He packed a bag. He told Lichmyface, who said nothing, which UG chose to interpret as blessing. He told Blondage too, in the end — bluntly, the way he told her everything, whether she’d asked or not. “I’m going to the beach house,” he said, “because the chest has started making a noise I’ve decided to call a hum, and I would rather not be here when it stops.” She had not looked remotely reassured by this. She had also not tried to stop him, which was, in its own way, the same thing.

And so, without any real ceremony, the way he did most things that actually mattered to him, Unclegrumble left for the beach house.

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More in the Lightbloom series

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