Percy’s journal, Friday 2 October 2026, with the narrator’s notes
Told by Percy Spamchop · 2nd October 2026
The tower
I died three times on Friday and propose to discuss only the third. The first two were an officer and then a pair of rotting ancestors in the Ruins of Lordaeron, and I have agreed with myself that neither was a fair fight.
I had seen the tower twice already. Once from Tirisfal Glades, and again from Brill while I waited for the zeppelin: a thin spire above the Hillsbrad Foothills, too far off to be anything but a smudge. Dalaran, if I am right, and I think I am. I wrote it down both times and thought no more about it, which I now regard as the chief failure of my career so far.
Then I crossed into Silverpine Forest that afternoon, topped a rise, and there it was between the pines, close enough to count the windows.
I counted them. I mention it only to show how far gone I was: I count what matters to me, or what frightens me, and I have not yet learned to tell the two apart. I will not call it wonder. Wonder is a lively word, and I have given up lively words. I will say that I stood on the hill for some time with my mouth open, which the dead can manage without drawing breath.
“Mezzlos,” I said, “are you seeing this?”
My voidwalker turned his blank face to the tower. I do not like this place. A pause, and then, lower: Towers. Mages. They will want to bind me.
I took that for agreement. I typed a line into the little stone I carry, wow! Dalaran! From Silverpine Forest, with two exclamation marks I did not decide upon and have since declined to explain, and resolved to walk there.
Dalaran was founded by mages of the Arathorian Empire after the Troll Wars, and the Kirin Tor governs it under a Council of Six. Its inner fortress, the Violet Citadel, is the centre of the study of magic in Lordaeron, and the city lies near the south shore of Lordamere Lake. In The Before it still stands. Percy has now seen it from three places and has not set foot in it.
The lake
Lordamere Lake is where the plan went wrong.
A single Vile Fin Murloc stood at the water’s edge, breathing through its neck, which is the kind of thing the living do. I walked into it, because that is how I find out what things are. It shrieked and ran, and I counted that a victory, and I was still counting it when it came back with its friends.
Mezzlos had been studying the water for some time. Water. There is no void in water.
I sent him in anyway. He took the order as he takes all of them: I must feed. Then a Tidehunter and two Shredders arrived together and Mezzlos said, with no change of tone, I obey. I killed some of them. It was not enough. I went down at sixteen minutes past four, and my voidwalker went wherever voidwalkers go, with a last I go.
It does not hurt. It is a dimming, and then one is standing a little to one side of oneself, kept waiting. I rose as a ghost and swam for my body through the mist.
Of the three deaths I find this one the hardest to forgive. The officer at least held a rank, and the ancestors had been dead longer than I had; it is no disgrace to lose to one’s elders. These were fish with opinions.
Getting my own back
I collected my body and called Mezzlos again. Why do you call? We went back along the shore. Two Shredders and two Tidehunters paid for the first round, and a few worgs who joined in paid as well. I reached for shadow, which has never asked me to be better than I am, and I did not need anything worse. Nobody wrote it down but me.
Then came an hour of the forest being enormous. Silverpine is a place in the full flush of life, which is to say damp and loud and eating itself, and it is full of werewolves. Werewolves abound, I wrote, and a minute later, The werewolves around here are scary!, which I include for the record as the low point of my prose.
Something large had torn the bark off an old tree. I photographed it for the files, as one photographs a crime.
Something hungrier than me did this, said Mezzlos, and it did not sound like praise for the tree.
Then a Son of Arugal came out of the red leaves and ran straight at us.
It will be done. He stepped between us. Fur. Teeth. Fine.
I took the screenshot first. Then I ran, and I do not apologise for the order.
The worgen of Silverpine were once the men of Pyrewood Village. The mage Arugal cursed them, and they are called the Sons of Arugal. The Kirin Tor admitted Arugal to Dalaran. Percy does not yet know that the tower he is walking toward belongs to the order that made the thing now chasing him.
The Sepulcher
I came out of the trees at The Sepulcher with my heart, such as it is, still going. It is a graveyard the Forsaken have turned into a keep, and I had been looking for a way to Dalaran all afternoon and was handed a different kind of door.
I had a letter to deliver, from an apothecary in Tirisfal to a colleague here. Apothecary Renferrel read it standing up and answered it aloud: there was more activity in the forest than he liked, and would I stay and help? The Forsaken phrase their orders as questions, which saves them the trouble of being refused. Then he gave me a list, bear hearts and spider blood for a plague he did not describe. A list is a promise made by someone else, and I put it in my bag, where I keep such things.
Deathguard Podrig, who minds the stores, had counted the weapons and found them fewer than the war required, and gave me an order for more to carry to the bat handler. A priest and a mage gave me errands too, and they can wait their turn.
Apothecary Johaan wrote from Tirisfal because the Royal Apothecary Society is racing to develop a new plague against the Scourge; his letter says that time is a luxury not afforded to those in Lady Sylvanas’s employ. High Executor Hadrec had told Podrig to take stock of the keep’s equipment, with the Scourge active in the woods. Podrig found the stores sound but short of weapons to replace those lost in the field.
The bat handler was a man called Karos Razok, beneath the gibbet, in a remarkably good pair of glasses. He took the order and sold me a ride to the Undercity.
I do not fly, said Mezzlos, as the bat took off. I will remember this.
We flew straight past the tower. Mezzlos watched it the whole way and did not mention mages.
The crate
The Undercity received us as it receives everything, without comment. Gordon Wendham, who sells weapons in the Trade Quarter, took the order and gave me Gordon’s Crate to carry on to Michael Garrett, the bat master. That is the next errand, tomorrow or whenever.
The Sepulcher asked for weapons, and the order is on its way to be filled. The crate will travel by the long road: from Wendham to Garrett, the Undercity’s bat master, and from Garrett back to Podrig at the Sepulcher. Percy does not know what is in it and has not looked.
I keep a book for such evenings. Tonight’s entry says ninety-five silver and forty-nine copper, and most of a level still owing. I have underlined the silver. Beneath it I wrote the windows, and did not underline them. I counted twice and the answers differed, which is not like me.
Dalaran will keep. It has stood through a war that took better things than I am, and it can stand a little longer.
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