Told by Percy Spamchop · 13th October 2026

I have kept ledgers since before I can properly account for keeping anything, and the habit, it seems, outlived the hand that was taught it. I propose, for once, to use it on myself: a plain record of everything since my rising that I came to for no order and no instruction, set down the way I would once have set down a column of fish and their buyers, debit against credit, until the total meant something.

It will not be a long list. I had not thought, until I began writing it, how short.

Lady Sylvanas Windrunner, whom the Forsaken call the Dark Lady, keeps no single account of how her people began, because so few of them can supply one. Each rose with a different piece of the plague’s work left in him: a scar, a silence, a habit with no history attached. Percy is one of these. What follows of his life before is recovered only in fragments, surfacing unbidden and without order, and the gaps between them are not his alone to fill.

I was a ledger-keeper, in Southshore, for a family in the fish trade whose name I have mislaid along with their faces. I kept their columns honestly — honesty being, in that single respect, the whole of what the word has ever meant to me — and they did not care for it when I raised what the columns in fact showed. I was told to be quiet about it. I was threatened in the particular quiet way such families manage, which leaves no mark and needs none. I had, at last, the money set aside to leave, and my own family came to see me off the day I meant to go. None of us left. Lordaeron fell on us all that same evening, and I do not remember the falling, only that I woke afterward with no memory of my own leaving plan, walked my old commute home out of pure reflex, and was driven off it by a stablemaster who had known my face for ten years and could no longer place it anywhere at all.

A Deathguard found him in Silverpine shortly after, wandering and reciting fish names to nobody, and brought him to Deathknell. He was told there, as every Forsaken is told, that the Dark Lady required his unwavering loyalty.

I have turned that phrase over more than once since. Unwavering loyalty was also, as I recall without being able to say to whom, roughly what my old employers required of me, in the matter of the columns. I do not say the two demands are the same. I say only that I have heard the shape of that sentence before, from people I could not refuse either, and no part of me stood up at Deathknell and found the repetition reassuring.

What I have instead, in place of a settled answer to that, is a short column of things I chose. I set them down here, with the quests and the places that carried them, because an entry with nothing in it but my own feelings is not an entry I would have accepted from a junior clerk, and I do not propose to accept one from myself.

A want with no order behind it

On the second of this month I carried a letter for Apothecary Renferrel of The Sepulcher, a plain errand with nothing of mine in it, and it put me on a road that crossed a rise above the pines. From there I saw a tower I had twice before mistaken for a smudge on the horizon, and found it had windows, and I could count them. I did not reach it that day. A lake, two Shredders, a Tidehunter and a borrowed bat between them saw to that, and I arrived instead, by somebody else’s wing, at the Undercity with a stranger’s crate.

I note it here only because it was the first thing since Deathknell that I wanted for no better reason than that it was there, and I have been turning that fact over nearly as often as the other one.

The curse that will not finish breaking

Most of my errands since have run through Silverpine Forest, at Dalar Dawnweaver‘s asking, on a chain he calls Arugal’s Folly — breaking, piece by piece, the curse a mage of Dalaran’s own order laid on a town of loggers, when his worgen turned on him and would not be called off again. I have done this in five stages now, each handed to me as though it were the first, and I cannot yet say what I think I am doing it for. Mezzlos, who has opinions about towers and no higher opinion of water, put it to me plainly on the shore at Fenris Isle, wading out after I had sent him in: I obey. He does not ask why either. It may be that neither of us is owed a reason, or that we have both decided not to need one, which amounts in practice to much the same arrangement.

Still drawn, still not told why

By the eighth I had come to Pyrewood Village itself, on two errands that happened to want the same evening: shackles off Arugal’s cursed dead for Dalar, and a dead apothecary’s journal for Master Apothecary Faranell. I have set that evening down once already and will not do it again here, past saying that I died four times doing it, that a tailor’s backstab is the one I still resent, and that when both errands were finished I stayed on without being able to say why, even after being told flatly that I had no standing order left there. I find, writing it now beside the rest of this column, that it was the first entry on this page, not the last.

An entry taken backward

I will take today’s work backward, which a ledger-keeper is entitled to do when the later figure explains the earlier one better than the other way about.

In the afternoon, Shadow Priest Allister had me counting Dalaran robes among the ruins at Ambermill — watchers, wizards and the rest of that order’s meddling household, sent to pry at business in Silverpine that was never theirs. Eight of one kind, eight of the other, against a pendant I was asked to recover, and did. One kill in the middle of that tally wanted a second look: a watcher no taller than my own belt buckle, who died still laughing at something I did not hear. I have decided it was a gnome, on no better evidence than its size, since Dalaran’s order keeps gnomes among its mages as readily as it keeps anyone. I note, for the column’s sake, that I minded the humans in that tally and did not mind that one in the slightest. That is a new entry too, and not one I am proud to set down, though I set it down anyway, since an accurate ledger does not flatter its keeper.

Somewhere past Lordamere Lake the road to the Internment Camp put Dalaran itself briefly under my boots — the tower, the one I counted windows on from a hillside ten days ago, passed through in the time it takes to say so, on my way to somewhere else entirely. I did not stop. A want, it seems, does not keep without tending, and I had tended this one so little that I walked past its gates without turning my head for it.

The morning had been a plainer thing altogether, and I set it down last because I have only now worked out that it is the entry the rest of this page was building toward. I had gone to Gallows’ End Tavern in Tirisfal Glades on an errand that was not, strictly, an errand: Eleanor Shackleton keeps two lessons there, open to any Forsaken soldier who wants either — Camping 101: First Aid and Camping 101: Fishing — and I wanted the second without troubling to examine why. Somebody at the next table was mending a net and whistling over it, a thin, tuneless thing, and I found I did not care for it at all and could not have told anyone the reason if pressed. I let it go. Mrs. Shackleton’s hands are ruined in the particular way a lifetime of net and line will ruin a pair of hands, living or dead. She did not ask me why a Forsaken warlock wanted to learn to land a fish. I took it as a kindness, since I could not have answered the question myself.

Nobody at Deathknell issues an order to learn to fish. The Dark Lady’s business has never once required it of him. It is, so far, the only line in his account that nobody but Percy put there.

“Same time tomorrow, if you like,” she said, over the net, not looking up.

It is, I notice on reading this back, the first sentence anyone has put to me in some while that was not a command, and I have decided not to examine that too closely either, for fear of wearing it out the way I have apparently been wearing out Dalaran. I have entered the lesson in the book under today’s date, the way I would enter any transaction. I have not underlined it. Some entries keep better for being left exactly as plain as everything else on the page, and I find, setting the pen down, that this is the first one I have ever minded keeping.

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Last updated 13th October 2026, 17:50