5th August 2026

Part 3 of the Lightbloom series

Part of the arc: The Houses that UG Built

He had always wanted a treehouse. It went back further than the tower, further than the graveyard, back to whatever thin surviving thread of childhood he still had access to. He had tried it once, on his own grounds.

So he’d gone looking properly, out past the edge of anywhere he had any real business being, and found the baobab on its spit of white sand in Razorwind Shores — already enormous, already perfect. He built the treehouse proper there instead, and had spent every visit since nudging it a little further toward something recognisably his. It was, technically, deep in Horde water. He had decided, some time ago, that this was a problem for later.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” said Unclegrumble, to the pig, which did not answer, being a pig, and also on fire.

He sat with that for a good while afterward, poking the flames, watching the little cap pulse gently in the dark. Two houses now. Two separate, hard-won monuments, his own to a life spent alone with his projects, both slowly being reclaimed by something he’d personally carried across half a continent stuck to the bottom of his shoes.

Somewhere underneath the mounting alarm, Unclegrumble felt something that looked, if you squinted, an awful lot like opportunity. He always did. It was, if he ever bothered to look at the pattern, more or less the only feeling he fully trusted: not joy, not fear, but that hum of something new is happening and I get to find out what it is, arriving right on schedule to drown out anything else that might have been trying to get a word in.

He said it the way you’d say the kettle’s boiled — informational, mildly put-upon, not remotely panicked. Because here is the thing about Unclegrumble: disaster was never an ending. Disaster was a starting position. His tower was being slowly consumed by an invasive, opinionated growth with a taste for graveyard timber, his beach house had somehow caught the same thing without his ever noticing the crossing, and his very next thought was:

“…I wonder if it’d survive a hex.”

He reached for another log for the fire, and settled in, and started — despite himself — to wonder what exactly he was going to find when he finally opened that door.

Somewhere back in Founder’s Point, in a drawer he hadn’t opened in a while, the little ring from Chlorokyll sat exactly where he’d left it — unremarked, forgotten, no reason at all to think about it now, sitting here by a fire on the other side of the world. Which is probably why he didn’t notice that, in that drawer, in the dark, it had started, very faintly, to glow.

☠

To Be Continued

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More in the Lightbloom series

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