Percy’s journal, Thursday 8 October 2026, with the narrator’s notes

Told by Percy Spamchop · 8th October 2026

Thursday 8 October, 13:15. Brill Town Hall

On Sunday I wrote that a ring with a name acquires a life. On Thursday I took it to Brill and found the life already waiting there, with its papers in order.

Brill sits in the middle of Tirisfal Glades and is kept as the Forsaken keep most things, in use and unimproved. It has an inn, an apothecary and a bat master. It also has a town hall, up a stair, in a room that is mostly roof, where a chandelier of candles burns over a desk of books and a leaded window lets in a grey and unhurried light.

Brill stands in the centre of Tirisfal Glades, north of the ruins of Capital City. Beyond its walls lies the mass grave dug for the dead of the Third War, who were laid there in great numbers. The Rot Hide gnolls have robbed it since, and have carried away what they took.

Magistrate Sevren sat behind the desk with the settled look of an office that has outlasted worse. I laid the ring in front of him. He turned it to the candles, read the band, and told me that Deliah had lived in Brill. She had been buried in the grave beyond the wall. The Rot Hide had very probably dug her up and carried her off to Silverpine.

I did not mention that I had met her on the boat, and had taken the ring from her hand. It seemed a detail he had not asked for, and I found I could not look at the candles while I decided.

“The Rot Hides, like all the Scourge, must be destroyed.”

I agreed with him warmly and from experience. The Rot Hides destroyed me twice on Monday, at fourteen minutes past noon and again at twenty-eight past, and I can vouch that they are thorough. I did not say so. A magistrate’s room is a poor place for statistics.

Mezzlos stood at my left, as he does, and considered the matter literally.

“If she was taken out of it, who is in it now?”

I said that it held a great many people, which is what makes it a mass grave, and that one fewer would not be noticed. It was a poor answer, and he told me so by remaining where he was.

Sevren then gave me the husband: Raleigh Andrean, in the Trade Quarter of the Undercity, who would wish to be told. He supplied the name with the briskness of a man who has found that nothing improves with delay. I took the name. I did not take the hint.

That was a quarter past one. I did not go to the Trade Quarter at a quarter past one. I will omit the interval; Mezzlos has the particulars and has not been asked. I went out by the gate and stood where the ground beyond the wall lies in the wrong shape for a field, and I looked at it for a time, and it made no remark. Then I went back up the stair, because I had been given a name and no directions, and Sevren gave them again without comment, which in Brill passes for tenderness. I told the little stone where I was bound: Oh dear, i have to go meet the husband

Thursday 8 October, 15:34. The Trade Quarter

The Undercity takes one down in stages, and I reached the Trade Quarter at half past three with the ring in my bag and a sentence prepared. It is the city’s hub: a wide dark hall with the bank at its centre and stalls set round it, all of them selling to people with little use for what they sell.

Raleigh Andrean was a cook in life, and the title beneath his name still says so: Ex-Chef. He was married to Deliah. He fell in the Scourge’s invasion of Lordaeron and served the Scourge until its hold was broken and the Forsaken rose under Sylvanas Windrunner. The Forsaken keep their memories more readily than their feelings.

The title struck me as an act of candour I rather admired. He stood by a crate with a mark over his head that said he wanted something, and a neighbouring stall had set out hams and drumsticks on a table. He stood next to the food and did not look at it.

“Do I know you?”

It is what is said to strangers, and I answered as one: that he did not. I held out the ring. He knew it at once, and said that it was his wife’s. He said that her end was the end of anyone who fails to endure hard times, and that he felt nothing for her death or for the carrying off of her body. What he felt was the wish for revenge, which still burned, and he gave it to me as a man gives the time.

I had expected grief and had brought a sentence for it. I put the sentence away.

There is a man for the revenge. Valdred Moray was his friend, and killed Deliah, and ran south into Silverpine to the Greymane Wall, to be let into Gilneas. Raleigh wishes him dead, and wishes proof of it: Valdred’s hands, brought to him. I have kept enough books to recognise a receipt.

“I have two,” said Mezzlos, and held up his gauntlets. I thanked him and said that his were wanted where they were.

The ring is to come back to me with the payment, Raleigh said, since it no longer matters. I am to be paid in the woman. I wrote it in the book and found it was the only line on the page that I could not rule.

Valdred Moray was a rogue, human in life and Forsaken after. He fled to the Greymane Wall in the south of Silverpine Forest, where Gilneas keeps itself shut against all of Lordaeron. At the hour of this entry Raleigh’s account with him is open.

Do I know you?

Set down in the Undercity, Thursday 8 October 2026, 15:52.

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Last updated 13th October 2026, 19:12