Percy’s journal, Sunday 4 to Wednesday 7 October 2026, with the narrator’s notes

Told by Percy Spamchop · 7th October 2026

Sunday 4 October, 22:24. The Sepulcher

I returned to The Sepulcher at the end of Sunday with a boat on my mind.

It is a graveyard that has been given a purpose, which is more than most of us can say: a crypt, a forge, stables for the bats, and an inn where the Forsaken sit and are spared the pretence of eating. A gibbet stands over the path. I feel at home in it in the way a coffin might.

The Sepulcher began as a graveyard beside the road through Silverpine Forest. After the Third War the Forsaken took the old crypt as their keep in the region, and it remains one of the only places of safety for Horde travellers in the zone.

High Executor Hadrec stands in the middle of it and gives the impression that it was built around him. He is the first of the Forsaken to address me as though I were already a soldier, and I do not object, being unsure what else I am. He remarks that Silverpine is saturated with our enemies as another man might remark upon the rain, and I have noticed that he never says what is to happen once the enemies have been driven out. I find I do not mind the saturation. The living perspire at one another and call it conversation, and I should be glad to see the forest drained of them. I do not dislike Hadrec. I do not think he would notice if I did.

He had sent me that evening to The Decrepit Ferry. A boat lay there, low in the water, and the boat was full of the dead. They lay in rows, and someone had been patient with them. I have stood among the dead before; I am one. This was different, because nobody had asked these anything.

One was a woman with a ring on her hand, and inside the band someone had cut For Deliah. I took it. Afterwards I looked at my own hand to see whether I had ever worn one, and it told me nothing.

Hadrec turned the ring over and said where he supposed the dead had come from, and that the Rot Hide must be ferrying them across the water to Fenris Isle. He said very probably in the voice the Forsaken keep for certainly, and please do not ask. Then he sent me to Brill with the ring, to Magistrate Sevren, who keeps the records of the recently dead and might say who she had been. It was implied that whoever had given her the ring was most likely dead as well, and that if not, he most likely no longer cared.

Hadrec’s guess was that the bodies came from the mass graves in Tirisfal. The Rot Hide are undead gnolls. Fenris Isle lies in the middle of Lordamere Lake, and after the Scourging of Lordaeron the necromancer Thule Ravenclaw settled in the old keep there among them, and made the ichor that gives them life.

The ring is in my bag beside two catfish. I have not gone to Brill. If I take it there the ring acquires a name, and the name acquires a life, and somebody must then be told what became of the body. At present I have a ring, which is a manageable quantity.

Dalar Dawnweaver was at the wall of the Sepulcher with the look of someone who has been right too often to be liked. He wears the robes of a mage and the face of one who has been dead a long time and resents the delay. He says the tower is named for him. I did not argue; mages have a way of speaking that makes argument feel like a lapse in manners. What he does not trouble to hide is his temper about Arugal, who was admitted to the Kirin Tor, and whose casting, Dalar says, was as transparent as a blown glass bauble. The Kirin Tor did not heed my warnings, he told me. Arugal is a reckless fool. So the thin spire of Dalaran that I keep seeing between the pines is the place that made Dalar, and made Arugal, and he will not discuss which was the mistake.

Monday 5 October, 12:14. Fenris Isle

On Monday Apothecary Renferrel wanted ichor, the black stuff that runs in the Rot Hide, by the vial, and the brutes surrender it one at a time, which is the only way they do anything.

They put me down at fourteen minutes past twelve. I do not feel pain as I am told I once did. It is a dimming, as of a lamp being turned low, and then I am standing on the wrong side of my own body with the water of Lordamere Lake cold about my knees. The cold I feel. I am not certain what that says about me.

those rothides got me on fenris isle

I had reached for shadow first, since shadow has never asked me to be better than I am, and I reached for fel only the second time, with the door shut. Mezzlos did not comment. He does not. There is a spell of mine, Drain Life, by which I borrow a little of what another creature has left, and I am fond of it as one is fond of a good knife. I will leave the rest of that sentence where it is.

At 12:21 something spoke to me from the undergrowth. It was a head. You don’t look like a rot hide. Good. I had lost hope, it said. Its name was Alaric, and it asked me to take it to its grave, which it believes the gnolls dug by the stable at the keep, and dug badly. I put it in my bag with the ring and the fish. It has not spoken since. I find that I listen for it.

Alaric was Thule Ravenclaw’s chief attendant and protector. Thule cast a spell to shield him from the Plague of Undeath, and it left him in an unlife he could not escape. When Thule had made the Rot Hide, he beheaded Alaric and gave the head to the gnolls as a plaything. The body lies in an unmarked grave near the stable at Fenris Keep.

They put me down again at twenty-eight minutes past, and after that I had my eighth vial, and at twenty-three minutes to one I carried the lot to Renferrel at the Sepulcher. He is a pale and careful member of the Royal Apothecary Society who says Now it is up to the Society to develop a new plague the way other men say grace. He tipped the ichor into something and studied it for a long while, and his findings, he said, were not conclusive, which in an apothecary means the opposite. He thought it had been made with warlock work and necromancy. He said warlock twice and did not look at me on either occasion. I have learned what a pause is for.

Monday 5 October, 12:49. The Temple of the Damned

Renferrel is no mage, so he sent a sample to the Undercity, to the Temple of the Damned in the Magic Quarter, where my own trainer, Richard Kerwin, teaches me what I am permitted to cast. Bethor Iceshard is said to rule the mages and warlocks there. I had passed him twice and never spoken to him.

“This is where the mages are,” said Mezzlos. He kept a pillar between himself and the whole temple. “I will wait here.”

Bethor held the vial to the light and said that some of the spells in it he had not seen for a long, long time. Then he cast something over it, and a name came out: Thule Ravenclaw. A man who had once worked beside Bethor had gone over to the Scourge, and made the ichor, and made the gnolls with it. Bethor said colleague with no heat in it at all; the Forsaken are good at that. I practised it on the way up, Thule Ravenclaw, and it came out sounding like a man ordering bread.

He gave me a scroll to carry back, so that Renferrel might brew something against Thule’s stronger spells. When I had delivered it I went to Hadrec, who agreed that Thule must be stopped, fitted me from the arsenal, and sent me for Thule’s head. The potion is in my bag. So is the head of Alaric. Thule’s is the only line in the book that I cannot yet cross out.

Bethor Iceshard, Thule Ravenclaw and a man named Gunther Arcanus were apprentices together in Dalaran, and made a single wand from their three apprentice wands as a symbol of their friendship. When the Scourge came, Thule gave his soul to the Lich King, stole the wand and hid it in Fenris Keep. Bethor does not speak of this to Percy.

That afternoon I finished the spiders: six samples of Skittering Blood for a recipe I had carried since Friday. At 13:21, in the Skittering Dark, a Son of Arugal came out of the gloom and held me at a fifth of my health for forty-seven seconds. I counted. A body should not mind losing a fifth of itself when it cannot feel the other four, and I minded, which I took as news.

Wednesday 7 October, 17:37. The Royal Quarter

On Wednesday I went to see the queen. I told the little stone so: off to meet the queen

I had expected to feel something. Lady Sylvanas Windrunner, whom the Forsaken call the Dark Lady, gathered us when the Lich King let go. She stood near enough to be spoken to, and I felt what I feel for most things, which is a small, courteous distance. I noticed that, and I noticed that I had expected otherwise.

At 17:38 Morbin Lightbane asked me for twenty-five limbs, and was particular that they be intact. I am to find them in the Ruins of Lordaeron, among the fallen; he did not say whose. I looked at my hands again. They were intact. I thought about that for longer than I had intended, and about the left one in particular.

Morbin Lightbane gives his reason in his own words: decaying flesh cannot be reknit, not without replacements. The Scourge still roam above the Undercity in great numbers, and the Forsaken are few. The limbs are meant to mend their own kin.

Wednesday 7 October, 17:41. The Apothecarium

Then I went down to The Apothecarium. gruesome part of undercity, my favourite place

It is not quite a joke. It is the one room in the city where nobody looks away from what we are.

“I do not like the hooks,” said Mezzlos. “There are more hooks than bodies.”

I counted the hooks, as I count everything, and then I stopped, because the number was not the interesting part. The interesting part was Mezzlos’s, and he had given it to me for nothing. A hall is not hung with spare hooks unless it is expecting something.

Master Apothecary Faranell took six bear hearts and six samples of spider blood from me, which was what he had been waiting on, and paid me modestly and with a good deal of conversation. He receives one as a host receives a late guest, with great warmth and a pointed look at the clock, and he has a taste for the long word. The recipe, he said, was for a plague that would take the Scourge and the living alike, and the paper said so with the brisk cheer of a seating plan. I weighed the second half for longer than I should have, and found that I could bear it. Then he gave me the rest of the errand: the journal of an apothecary named Berard, who was cursed by Arugal’s magic and now stands, mindless, in the inn at Pyrewood Village, guarding the study where he left his notes.

At 17:42 I met Theodore Griffs at the end of the bench, in the inner room. He wants a sample of something called a Highly Toxic Strain from a beast named Witherfang in the Ruins of Lordaeron, because its toxins are said to eat through even undead flesh. I wish, he said, to validate these claims. I have been sent to fetch a poison for a man who wishes to learn what it does to the likes of me, and I find that I do not resent it. It is the most respectful interest anyone has taken in my condition.

The Apothecarium stands in the south-west corner of the Undercity, the home of the Royal Apothecary Society. Plagues and poisons are brewed there, stronger abominations are made for the armies, and it is the main school of Forsaken alchemy. The records say what it is for. They do not mention hooks.

Wednesday 7 October, 19:27. The book

A boat of the dead goes to an isle where a man makes ichor of them. A hall of hooks hangs under a city where a man mixes bear heart with spider blood, and it has more hooks than it has bodies. I have a theory that this is one business with two ends. I wrote it in the book and underlined it, and have so far found nothing to prevent my believing it.

Nobody has told Percy that his two businesses are one. Nobody has told him that they are not. He has not noticed what else they share. Bethor and Thule learned their craft in Dalaran, and Dalar and Arugal were both of the Kirin Tor, which keeps it. Dalaran is in the history of every one of them, and it is the tower that Percy wants to see. In The Before it stands in the Hillsbrad foothills, and it is still there.

I notice, reading the page back, that I have ruled the columns. I do not remember learning to. Somebody kept a ledger once, and he had a very steady hand. I should like to know what he was counting.

The ring is in the bag, and the head of Alaric, and the potion. Thule’s head is on the list, and I underlined it. Below it, smaller, I wrote Deliah, and did not underline that.

Set down in the Undercity, Wednesday 7 October 2026, 19:27.

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