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

Told by Percy Spamchop · 7th October 2026

Wednesday 7 October, 23:33. The Rogues’ Quarter

The Undercity is built in rings, and I have been walking the wrong one all evening.

The lamps are green and hung too far apart. The walls sweat. Sludge runs down the middle of every avenue and bubbles where it pools. The air tastes of rot, and I do not breathe, as far as I can tell. It finds me anyway.

The Undercity lies under the ruins of Lordaeron. Poisonous sludge runs through its avenues, and the fumes make it nearly unbearable for the living of the Horde. It is built as a ring of quarters around a central plaza, with canals between them. The Forsaken do not seem to mind.

Every passage in the Rogues’ Quarter is the same. I have passed the same lamp twice.

We have passed that lamp twice, said Mezzlos. I have counted.

I did not tell him I had counted too. I do not tire, which is the worst of it. A living man would have sat down by now and been found.

I smelled the guard before I saw it. A butcher’s yard in summer.

It stood against the wall as if it had been leaned there. It was enormous. Its belly had been stitched shut and had come open again, and what was inside hung out and moved when it breathed. Blood ran off its hooks and its ribs and had made a floor of the stone beneath it. Flies walked on the sores on its arms.

It smells, said Mezzlos, from ten paces back. I did not know that I could mind.

I held a sleeve to a face that did not need one.

It is a thing I know without having been told, that one asks the way of a Guardian. It turned its head. The question it puts is the only one it has. What are you looking for? A list opened. The bank, the bat handler, the mailbox, the inn. Nobody had put out on it. A drop fell from its chin and struck the floor. I took the inn.

It pointed with one hook toward the tunnel I had already rejected. It never looked at me again. I thanked it anyway. It is polite to thank the dead, and I was not sure which kind it was.

The Guardians are abominations, and the Forsaken make them in the Apothecarium. Many corpses are stitched into one body and kept whole with blood and embalming fluid, which is why they drip. The builders choose the brain with care and cut away the parts that think, so that nothing in it can grow a conscience. What is left is slow and loyal, with a vacant, smiling face. It craves flesh, the living and the dead alike. The smell is disease, and in the old accounts the sickness hangs about it in a cloud.

I walked the tunnel. It was the right one, and I resented that. The smell came with me the whole way. Somewhere in the second turning I noticed that the Forsaken I passed were not wrinkling their faces at me, and I did not like what that meant.

I have been lost among the living, and I have been lost among the dead, and tonight I found a third kind, which is to be lost among those who were made. In the book I wrote left, and underlined it. Below it, smaller, Do not stand downwind.

Percy has stood under the hooks of the Apothecarium and has not asked what they are for. It is a short walk from his question to this answer, and nobody has yet offered to take it with him.

Set down in the Undercity, Wednesday 7 October 2026, 23:33.