Told by Percy Spamchop · 12th October 2026

Still in Pyrewood

Dalar Dawnweaver had sent me for six shackles off Arugal’s cursed dead, and Master Apothecary Faranell, by an errand some days older, had sent me for the journal of Apothecary Berard. Both errands wanted Pyrewood Village, and I went in by daylight. In that village daylight is a precaution, and I took it as one. I had expected to finish one errand before starting the other, and to be out before the light went. The evening kept neither expectation.

Looking at that picture since, I see my robe was already torn at the left cuff before I had passed the first cottage. The seamstress’s account, it seems, was open before either of the others.

When the Scourge broke Dalaran, Arugal went home to Gilneas, and when the dead reached its walls too, he summoned worgen to hold the line. They did not hold it. They turned on the soldiers who had loosed them, ran through Silverpine Forest, and overwhelmed the keep above a logging town, killing the lord who held it. Arugal took the worgen in as his own and shut himself inside what the keep became: Shadowfang Keep. The curse he meant for an enemy settled instead over the people below — a thing they now carry, rather than a thing that was done to them once and finished.

I did not go in alone, though I had not asked for company and would not have known how to arrange it if I had. Two others of our own kind fell in with me somewhere past the first gate. They did not wait to be introduced, and as it turned out they did not wait to be thanked either. I counted this a convenience rather than a comfort, and intend to go on believing that for as long as it remains convincing.

By day the place looks like any logging town gone to seed. A mill wheel turns on nothing. Washing hangs on lines that nobody has come out to take in. A chimney or two gives off smoke, and the air smells of wet pine with something under it, animal and close, like a kennel kept shut too long. The villagers walk their own lanes with their heads down. Above it all the keep sits on its crag with its windows dark, and from up there, even in the middle of the afternoon, something that was not a dog was howling.

I judge a thing by its station, as a rule, and the habit has served me in every other wood I have walked through. Pyrewood does not observe it. A tailor, by day, is not a man one watches, and I did not watch him. I will return to that fact, since the evening insisted on it.

We go again. Mezzlos announced this as a man might announce the weather, though he has never been one and has never seemed to miss it. We went again, and again. A villager I had pulled clean from a knot of them by the well turned and ran rather than fought, and I counted it a mercy and said so aloud. It came back inside the minute with what I took to be its whole household, four or five of them wearing the same blank look the curse leaves on a face, and the three of us fled up the lane from a family that had, by then, mostly stopped being one.

Son of Arugal‘s own temper put me down first, and at least gave notice; I heard it coming up the road a good while before it arrived. One of my two companions had me upright again before the ground had finished being unkind to me. I had not requested the service, and I have yet to find the correct tone in which to decline it. A Pyrewood Elder’s whole retinue put me down a second time, more thoroughly, in the square below the mill.

Somewhere between the two I came by Apothecary Berard’s journal. He was not one of Pyrewood’s ordinary cursed. No sunrise would ever hand him back a daylight shape, because he had never had one to give back here — he had been Forsaken once, as I am, of the Royal Apothecary Society, before Arugal’s magic closed over him and left him worgen for good, sitting in a corner of the village inn beside a cold grate. I do not know what he was waiting for there, if he was waiting for anything at all. The inn smelled of tallow and stale beer and, faintly, of his old trade, something bitter and herbal that had outlasted whatever the rest of him had become. I did not read the journal. I put it in my bag beside my own and carried the pair of them out into the dusk.

The light had gone the colour of weak tea by then, and the howling from the keep had found company down in the village itself.

The tailor found me after the Elder. I had marked him on sight as about as dangerous as the trade he practised by day, and turned my back on him to deal with something I had judged worse. He came in low from behind, at an angle a tradesman learns nowhere I know of, and I went down to a backstab delivered by a man who hems trousers by day.

The knife went in under the left shoulder blade. I felt it first as pressure, then as cold, and the pain arrived late and from a distance, like news of a death in another county. What I felt plainly was the give of it. My flesh does not part as a living man’s does. It tears along old lines, softly, as damp cloth tears, and somewhere in the business a stitch I had not known was holding something let go. For a moment I sat looser in my own body than I care to, as a hand sits in a glove a size too large, and then the ground came up to meet me. I have killed captains. On this occasion I was finished by a hem-stitcher, and of the four it is his death I resent; the Elder and the rest at least had the manners to come at me from the front.

The moon was up over the keep when the Watchers came, a pack of them out from between two cottages, low and quick and by then more wolf than watchman, and the ground and I renewed our acquaintance a fourth time.

You have no standing order here. Mezzlos said it flatly as I got to my feet. It was true. He did not say it to be kind, and I heard it exactly as he said it. I let it stand. I went again instead, which I notice was the only answer I gave anyone that evening to anything.

The sixth shackle and Berard’s journal came in within two minutes of each other, by lamplight, hours past the time I had meant to be gone. Dalar Dawnweaver had one more use for me before I left — the worgen-cursed, it seems, want their own belongings back from one another, which strikes me as a pitiable sort of theft rather than a crime — and I have taken the errand without entering it in the book. Some accounts are better left for a night when I have decided what I think of them.

My companions did not ask me to stay for either hand-in. I stayed anyway. I have come to notice that the absence of a request is, from the right two people, rather more persuasive than the presence of one.

I have entered the two hand-ins tonight, and beneath them the cost of having my robe mended, twice over, by a seamstress who took a dead man’s linen arriving in ribbons as any tradesman takes his custom, without a question. The torn cuff from the morning is on the same bill; it would have been there whatever Pyrewood did. It was a tailor’s trade that undid me and a seamstress’s that put me back together, and I have written them one above the other in the same hand, the debt and its settlement. For once it is not the repair I have underlined.

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Last updated 12th October 2026, 15:41